New England White Read Free Page B

did she stop.
    Deer, she reminded herself, rarely wear shoes.
    She swallowed an unexpected lump in her throat. “Lemmie.”
    But her determined husband was up in the road, waiting calmly to flag down the next car, even if it took till spring.
    “Lemmie!”
    He was at her side in an instant. He could do that. Lemaster was madly in love, her friend Tessa Kenner used to say, with his own reliability. He forced me to fall in love with him, Julia had explained to her disapproving mother, who wanted a man from one of the old families, not a man from one of the islands. I didn’t have a choice.
    “What’s wrong, Jules?”
    “I thought it was a deer, but…well, there’s a body over there.”
    She pointed. He followed her finger, then strolled through the ditch to take a look.
    “Don’t touch it!” she said, because he was already kneeling, brushing snow from the face, probably ruining the crime scene, at least from what she heard on
CSI,
to which she was addicted. She waited, sitting half in the car with the door open, the air bag blocking her access to the radio, which she really wanted to shut off.
    Lemaster returned, narrow face grim.
    “It’s not a deer,” he said, almost consolingly, small, strong hand on her shoulder. “It’s a man. And the animals have been…well, you know.” Julia waited, reading in his face that this was not the real point her husband wanted to make. At last he sagged. “Jules, we know him.”

CHAPTER 2
    THE TERRIERS
    (I)
    T HE DETECTIVES WERE SLEEK AND WHITE and very polite, either because that was their nature or out of deference to Lemaster, president of the university, for him just a stepping-stone, as he and his wife discussed but only with each other, and everyone else assumed, to a more impressive sinecure. They arrived at the house on the crest of Hunter’s Meadow Road just before ten on Saturday, escorted by a fidgety officer from the minuscule Tyler’s Landing force, a doughy man named Nilsson, whose doughy son had been in Julia’s basic-science class four years ago—the same year she was fired, or quit, depending on how you looked at it—two eager terriers from the state police, their quiet voices and brush-cut brown hair so well matched that they might have been twins. They reminded her, in their grim and mannerly professionalism, of the Naval officers who came to the house on North Balch Street in Hanover, New Hampshire, in a Reagan-era October to inform her mother and latest temporary stepfather that her twin brother, Jay, a Marine, had died in Grenada. Julia, newly wed as well as newly a mother, had been home by painful coincidence, for Mona Veazie had celebrated her fifty-third birthday the day before, and had spent it dandling her grandson, Preston, named for Mona’s father, the architect. So the daughter had the opportunity to sit in the living room and watch her mother die a little, too.
    By the time the detectives rang the bell of the house called Hunter’s Heights—up here every dwelling had a name—the unpredicted snow was over, and Mr. Huebner from town had plowed the long, snaking driveway not once but twice. Bright morning sunshine exploded from the shimmering whiteness hard enough to make her eyeballs ache. Or maybe the ache had a more fundamental source: although Julia had finished crying for a while, little Jeannie, sniffling from her cold, had caught Mommy raging at herself in the bathroom mirror, where an earlier, happier self smiled sadly back at her. This could not, Julia told herself, be happening. But it could. The detectives were a gray-visaged reminder of the hard truth that death stalks every life. So, when Lemaster summoned her, she washed her face and fixed her makeup and went down to see what they wanted. Over the handful of hours since the discovery of the body, they had done a lot of homework. Just a few details, they said. A couple of questions, folks, sorry to bother you so early, but this is a murder investigation. You understand.
    The