The Children Read Free

Marissa had taken to calling him) was a little eccentric. But he wasn’t really idle at all; he just stopped earning his own money after he met Joan. He had to leave his job at his former father-in-law’s firm, but instead of starting his own practice or joining another, he retired and lived on the interest of an enormous trust that had been left to him after the deaths of his parents in the 1960s. Whit wanted to devote the rest of his life to the pursuit of things that really interested him. He was really interested in American history. To be more specific, he was interested in the history of American bluegrass music.
    To be most specific, Whit was interested in banjos.
    You could call it an obsession—most people did. He played the banjo. He collected rare banjos. Eventually, he built banjos—beautiful five-string banjos that he carved by hand in a workshop he had set up in a shed behind the old boathouse. Until he became very sick, until those last few months, you could find him working in that shed almost every day except Sunday. Whit sold many of the banjos he made. He had a little mail-order business, and eventually enthusiasts from all over the United States sought his instruments. He was a bit of a legend in the banjo community, but, well, it was the banjo community. It barely existed in the Northeast. In the grand scheme of things, I guess, it barely existed at all.
    The Whitman money is old family money, mostly steel money. Whit’s uncle Leander Whitman was the ambassador to Sweden during the Eisenhower administration. A John Singer Sargent portrait of Whit’s grandmother used to hang over our living room mantel. Perry took it after Whit died because (he said) we never lock our doors. We don’t lock the doors because we don’t have much crime here, and even if we had, nobody would have known it was an important painting, because you could barely see the thing. On the mantel below it were always stacks of books, gloves, old dog collars, banjo strings, and guitar picks. Whit hated throwing anything away. He hated new things. He always drove the most beat-up car in this town—a rusty old Volvo. He was very thrifty, and so was Spin, at least before he met Laurel.
    Laurel, we learned from Spin, was also a member of an important American family. Her great-great-uncle was Ernest Hemingway. Laurel grew up in Idaho. That’s where her family is from—Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway lived at the end of his life.
    In fact, Idaho is where Spin first met Laurel. Spin taught science and music at Holden Academy, the boarding school here in Harwich, and it was during Christmas break of last year that he was skiing at Sun Valley. He and Laurel first met at a lodge at the top of the mountain. She was with some old friends of his from Dartmouth. I don’t know how she knew the Dartmouth group; I don’t know how Laurel manages to insinuate herself into everything, she just does. Apparently, the friends wanted to hang out in the lodge and have another beer. Laurel and Spin decided to get in a little more skiing before the lifts closed. Spin had just bought one of those helmet cams, and he turned it on for their first run together. I’ve watched this video so many times that I have almost every second of it memorized. I keep looking for clues. Sometimes I find them.
    For example, the other day I realized Spin says something right after the two-minute mark. I called Sally immediately. It was several hours before she called me back.
    â€œLook at two-oh-four,” I said.
    â€œI can’t,” Sally said. “I’m at work.”
    â€œWrite it down. Two minutes and four seconds. It’s right after she comes flying out from behind the trees and almost collides with him. He says something.”
    â€œI’m not watching it anymore.”
    â€œI thought it was just a sort of grunt. For the longest time, I thought he was just grunting, but he says something. He says a