The Gazebo: A Novel Read Free Page A

writing on thefirst tape. In an elegant script were the words,
Abby Reston—please listen to these first
.
    It startled her to see her own name here. It was as if someone had suddenly whispered her name from out of the half darkness surrounding the gazebo, and for a moment she considered slamming the briefcase shut and shoving it back under the bench, as if she’d never been here, as if she’d never seen this. But she
had
seen it. She held the tapes in the palm of her hand, hefting them lightly, as if weighing her options. So she was right; he’d left the briefcase in the gazebo for her to find—or at least for whoever did find it to deliver to her. But did she really want to get involved? If she were to take these cassettes back to the office and pop them in the tape deck that sat on her desk, the one on which she often listened to Chet Baker or old Beatles songs or Chopin études, she would be in the thick of it—whatever
it
was. She wanted to know who Claire and Martin were, and why they hadn’t come to the gazebo today. But how much did she want to know it?
Don’t ask the question unless you want to know the answer
.
    Abby picked up the briefcase as though itwere hers and carried it back across the green. When she reached her office at the now–empty newspaper—her coworkers having all sensibly gone home to families and warm dinners and easy chairs and time away from their jobs—she tugged on the chain hanging from her gooseneck lamp, throwing a circle of light onto the chaotic surface of her desk. She cleared away the layout sheets and placed the briefcase down, then went to the refrigerator in the hallway and pulled out a bottle of Gewürztraminer wine that had been cooling there horizontally for several weeks, a present, she seemed to recall, from a satisfied advertiser—the owner of Shur–Foot Shoes for Big and Tall Men (“Widths to EEEE!”). She took a corkscrew from the drawer in the kitchenette, grabbed a mug from the dish drain, and brought it all back to her office. There, in the lamplight, Abby opened the bottle, poured a glass, and popped the first tape in her cassette deck.
    “Hello,” said the recorded voice of Martin Rayfiel. “If I’m right, you’re probably listening to this tape in the evening, sometime after dusk, after you’ve realized that Claire and Iaren’t coming to the gazebo. I’m sorry to have disappointed you,” Martin went on, “but the circumstances are very complicated, and can hardly be explained in any superficial way. So if you care to, I thought you might like to listen to the story that I have to tell about Claire and myself. I hope the items in the briefcase will help illustrate what I have to say, although some of them may strike you as absurdly sentimental, and you’ll wonder why I’ve saved them all these years.”
    Abby reached under the desk to remove her shoes, letting them drop to the floor, and then put her feet up on the desk. The sound of the voice in the calm of an office after hours was oddly soothing, and as Abby took a first cold swallow of wine and leaned back in her chair, she felt it was a voice she could have listened to all night. And so she did.

Chapter Two
    C LAIRE S WIFT NEVER wore a hat. In winter when she was a girl, her mother would come chasing after her with a woollen cap in hand, frantically waving it in the air, but Claire would already be gone. Throughout her entire life, whenever Martin thought of her, he would always see her hatless head, hair swinging. When they first met, though, he did not see her at all.
    It was Friday, May 27, 1949, Martin recalled on the tape, and he and Claire were both seventeen years old. They had grown up in the same small town of Longwood Falls, but their lives within the town were so different that they had never spoken. As Martin explained it, the division was simple: his family was rich; Claire’s was not. She lived on a downtown cul–de–sac cluttered with small cottages andattended the local