Newport: A Novel Read Free Page B

had begun as a favor—compensation for a debt that Adrian had known he could never fully repay—had reaped so much more than expected. Years of shepherding Jim Reid through the halls of academia had provided Adrian with not only a law associate, but a friend.
    Jim tugged at his too-short jacket sleeve in a futile attempt to cover his knobby wrist. It was well past time for a trip to a tailor. No man—especially one of Jim’s imposing height—could expect to find well-fitted perfection hanging ready-made on a rack at Filene’s. Adrian filed away a mental note to make arrangements with his own tailor once they returned to Boston.
    “This is the place,” Jim said, staring through his spectacles at a circular driveway to their left.
    A large white mansion sat planted at the apex of the drive, a northern paean to southern antebellum architecture. Adrian took in the graceful white columns that guided the eye from porch floorboards to ceiling, the well-manicured lawn with its early summer flowers in riotous bloom, and the expanse of ocean rolling behind the house in an endless carpet of motion. He’d never set foot in this house before, couldn’t even recall what had once occupied this prime ocean-view site. But that didn’t matter. The indulgent opulence of Liriodendron transported him back more than twenty years in time, back to a place where he’d never wanted to find himself again.
    “You’ve stopped in the middle of the road,” Jim said.
    Adrian thought of Constance, of the solid dining room table where he, Grace, and Ted enjoyed their breakfasts before departing each morning for the office and school. He thought of the soft quilts on their beds, the worn leather chair just waiting for him by thefireplace in his study. He had a place there, a family eagerly awaiting his return.
    “Just getting my bearings, Mr. Reid.” Eyes steady on the horizon, Adrian gave the Pierce-Arrow’s steering wheel a firm spin to the left.
    Newport hadn’t changed nearly enough.
    Fortunately, he had.

CHAPTER
3
    C atharine Walsh reached for her hairbrush, whacking her hand against a heavy glass bowl of rose petal potpourri on the way. Swallowing back a mild expletive, she flexed her fingers then grasped the handle. The rough tug of the bristles through her dark, bobbed curls felt good. At least it reflected action. The pervasive air of lethargy in the guest room left her cranky and on edge, and she knew from experience that neither state of mind allowed for clarity of thought.
    She was staying in Liriodendron’s Flower Room, a bucolic guest bedroom so festooned with floral imagery that staring at the walls too long made her eyes water and her nose itch. She was not given to sentimentality, so the delicate blossoms everywhere oozed more romanticism than she cared to handle at one time. The room faced the sea, which should have offered nothing more than soft breezes and the gentle whisper of surf. Instead, voices floated through theopen window—the same quarrelsome voices that had encouraged Catharine to feign a headache that morning instead of joining Bennett Chapman at the dining room table for breakfast. The Chapman heirs had arrived in a flurry of self-importance last night, the plastered Lady Dinwoodie relying upon her chauffeur to keep her upright, her older brother, Nicholas, striding stiffly through the front door nearly an hour later. Catharine had fled to her room before coming face-to-face with either. The meeting she dreaded was unavoidable, but she still had the right to put it off for as long as she could.
    She drifted toward the bedroom window to take a peek. Just as she’d suspected, these two neither looked nor sounded better in the morning sun.
    “I can’t help it if I’ve a delicate constitution!” Chloe Chapman Dinwoodie’s high-pitched voice made one ponder the relative benefits of deafness. Her white chiffon frock danced in the breeze as if searching for the adolescent girl it was meant to adorn. Catharine