The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [20]
For years, Kathryn tried to find the place where the sisters had kept their chapel. She had searched the lawn and the adjacent orchard, but had never located a foundation. Had the chapel been inside the house, she wondered, in the room they used as a dining room? Did the sisters dismantle a homespun altar before they left, taking with them a statue of the Virgin Mary and a cross? Or did they travel across the large expanse of salt marsh between Fortune’s Rocks and the mill town of Ely Falls so that they could attend services at Saint Joseph’s Church with the French-Canadian immigrants?
“You’ve been here eleven years?” Robert asked.
“Yes.”
The phone rang then and startled them both. It seemed that it had been twenty minutes, perhaps thirty, since the phone had last rung, the longest break since the first summons in the morning. She watched Robert answer it.
She had been only twenty-three when she and Jack had moved back to the Ely area. Kathryn had worried about resentment from the people of the town. She would have a house on the water and a husband who was a pilot for Vision. She would no longer be living in Ely proper, but rather at Fortune’s Rocks, an ephemeral, transient world of summer people who, for all their patronizing of her grandmother’s shop and all their inevitably condescending curiosity about the small town with its quirky charm, remained essentially anonymous. Sleek, tanned bodies with seemingly inexhaustible reserves of ready cash. Although Martha, who owned Ingerbretson’s, the only grocery store at Fortune’s Rocks, could tell more than a few cautionary tales of men in khaki shorts and white T-shirts who charged up enormous sums — for vodka, lobsters, potato sticks, and Martha’s homemade chocolate konfetkakke — and then vanished into bankruptcy proceedings, their only legacy a For Sale sign stuck in the sand in front of a $400,000 beach house.
But the local reserves of goodwill toward Julia Hull had been deep and had spilled over onto Jack and Kathryn. She thought about the way Jack and she had merged into the life of Ely, had shepherded Mattie through the schools. Jack’s job had taken him away from the town, but still he had managed to play tennis in a town league with Hugh Reney, the vice-principal of the middle school, and Arthur Kahler, who ran the Mobil station at the end of the village. Surprisingly, considering how easily Mattie had been conceived, Jack and Kathryn seemed not to be able to have other children. They had told themselves that they were happy enough with Mattie to forgo the extraordinary measures it might take to conceive again.
Kathryn watched Robert at the phone. He turned once quickly and glanced at her, then turned back again.
“No comment,” he said.
“I don’t think so.
“No comment.
“No comment.”
He hung up the phone and stood looking at the cabinet above it. He picked up a pen from the counter and began to flip it back and forth.
“What?” she asked.
He turned.
“Well, we knew this was going to happen,” he said.
“What?”
“This will have a shelf life of twenty-four hours max. Then it will be history.”
“What?”
He looked at her hard and took a deep breath.
“They’re saying pilot error,” he said.
She shut her eyes.
“It’s just speculation,” he said quickly. “They think they’ve found some flight data that doesn’t make sense. But, trust me, they couldn’t know for sure.”
“Oh.”
“Also,” he said quietly, “they’ve found some bodies.”
She thought that if she just kept breathing in and out slowly, she would be all right.
“No identification yet,” he said.
“How many?”
“Eight.”
She tried to imagine. Eight bodies. Whole? In pieces? She wanted to ask but didn’t.
“There’ll be more,” he said. “They’re bringing up more.” British? she wondered. Or American? Women or men? “Who was it? On the phone?”
“Reuters.”
She got up from the table and walked through the hallway to the bathroom. For a moment, she was afraid she might be sick.