The Color of Water in July Read Free Page A

to him—to catalog, describe, photograph, and eventually sell. For herself, they were dusty relics of a past that seemed frozen in time—it was hard to know what value to assign to things like that.

    Russ lost no time getting acquainted with the layout of the rambling cottage. He was upstairs in the alcove now, muttering into his voice recorder. Behind him, the high alcove windows were thrown open, and a fresh breeze from the lake was making the faded curtains flutter.
    “Wow, Jess, this picture of your grandmother,” Russ called over the balcony. “I never knew you looked so much like her. It’s the spitting image of you.”
    “Is that the picture that was up there in the alcove?”
    “Yeah.”
    “That’s not Miss Mamie. That’s my great-aunt Lila—Mamie’s sister.”
    “What was she like?”
    “I don’t know. I never knew her. She drowned in the lake years ago. Before I was born.”
    “That’s sad.”
    “Actually, it was kind of creepy. Miss Mamie almost never talked about her. Just left her picture there, staring out over the lake. Kids used to say that late at night you could hear footsteps on the balcony and the sound of water dripping—the ghost of old Aunt Lila.”
    Russ came down the stairs holding the picture.
    “It is an amazing likeness though, isn’t it?”
    Jess looked at the faded image, the face of a pretty young girl, in the old sepia-toned photograph. She looked to be about seventeen, with fair hair and wide-set eyes in a narrow face. There was a faint likeness, she supposed.
    Jess had never liked the way she looked that much, blond and ordinary, not at all like her mother, Margaret, who was a black-eyed beauty, with dark hair, prominent cheekbones, and almond-shaped eyes. Margaret used to stand in front of the mirror, combing her thick, dark hair, making Jess feel like a pale wraith beside her. Jess imagined that she looked more like her father—even though she had no idea what her father actually looked like. She didn’t even know his name. All her mother had told her was that she was the result of a one-night stand with an Irishman when Margaret was in Belfast reporting on the Troubles. At cocktail parties, Margaret loved to retell the story of Jess’s conception, always with the utmost hilarity, including lines about seeing bombs exploding in the sky. Try as she might, Jess could learn nothing about him. Margaret steadfastly stuck to the story that she never even knew his name. Jess’s own name, Carpenter , was Margaret’s invention—she had picked it, she said, because it was easy to pronounce.
     
    For the rest of the afternoon, Russ was on and off the phone. Jess went out onto the wide front porch. She tested each of the porch swings and finally came to rest in the hammock. From there, she could see through the birches and out over the lake toward the beach and sailboat moorings.
    The Wequetona Club was set on a sheltered cove where for thousands of years the Woodland Indians had made their summer camps, fashioning arrowheads from the tough, flinty stone and fishing for trout in the clear water surrounded by an unbroken expanse of dense woods. In those woods, there was a grove of the giant white pine that had surrounded the lake. These trees once drove the economy of the region, drawing first lumbermen, then white settlers, and, eventually, summer people to the shores of Pine Lake.
    By now, all the giant trees were gone—shipped out to build the great cities of the Midwest. Only one small stand remained, on the plot of land adjoining Journey’s End. From the cottage, there was nothing distinctive about them; it was from across the cove, at Hemingway Point, that their majesty could be seen: dark-green towering spires pointing sharply up into the sky.
    Lying in the hammock, staring out at the sun-dappled expanse of lake, Jess felt as if she had momentarily stopped time. The hammock was rocking slightly in the gentle breeze. Then, she heard a frail voice calling her