The image of ladylike Pam banging her head against the wall made Hillary smile.“It’s been a while since the kicking and screaming.I remember the first time I saw it, though.You couldn’t have been more than eight.You were in Timiny Cove over school vacation.John was having a go of it with your dad, and because of that, what was supposed to be a special time between you and Eugene was ruined.”
Pam remembered well, if not the specific incident thendozens just like it.“Those two were like oil and water.Ten minutes in the same room with each other and there was trouble.If I was eight, John would have been twenty-four, so he’d have already been involved in the company.He thought he knew how to handle things, but his way was the antithesis of my dad’s.He was arrogant even way back then.Twenty-four and wanting to run the ship.He was born arrogant.”
“So were you, I thought.You looked like a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum.”
“Frustration.It was frustration.”
“You were furious that anything or anyone should upset your plans.”
“My relationship with Daddy was special,” Pam argued in indulgent self-defense.“When school was in session, I was in Boston.He split his time between us and Maine, so I didn’t see him much.But every vacation I went to Timiny Cove.Mom stayed behind in Boston, so it was just Eugene and me.He had John cover for him at the mines.It used to drive John nuts.”
Hillary could understand that.“He didn’t like Timiny Cove any more than your mom did.”
“No.He wanted to be in the city.That’s where everything was happening, he said.Nothing happened in the sticks.”
Hillary reminisced with a chuckle.“The sticks.”
“You hated it there too.You used to ask me all kinds of questions about life in the city.Remember?”
“Uh-huh.It must have seemed bizarre.I was ten years older than you were.But I was starving for information.John gave me some, but never enough.He always heldback a little to keep me curious.You told me everything you knew.”
“Which wasn’t an awful lot.”
“To me it was.Besides, I liked you.”
“Because I was John’s sister?”
“No.Well, yes, maybe at first, but I really did like you.You had a spark.You were fun.Happy.”
“Except when I was throwing temper tantrums,” Pam said with a droll look.Then the look grew pensive.“I loved the time I spent in Timiny Cove.The house was big and airy, the people friendly and interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“They were colorful.”
“Colorful.”
“They were, Hillary.How else would you describe Phoebe Hanks or Rufus Hackett or Dwayne Wardwell?God,” she sighed through a smile, “they were great.Phoebe with her crochet hook making those hideous slippers, one after another after another, Rufus with his chipmunk cheeks and his toothless grins and the jokes whose punchlines he always messed up, Dwayne looking so stern under his butch haircut—all of them with hearts of gold.Daddy and I used to play poker with Rufus and Dwayne.I remember it so clearly….”
And so it began.Hillary hadn’t asked for it, but it was easy to keep Pam going.A question here, a disbelieving look there, a teasing prod drew forth Pam’s unique impressions of Timiny Cove.She accepted Hillary’s curiosity about those impressions.Likewise, the questions Hillary asked about Eugene St.George and, of course, John seemed perfectly natural.
As Hillary listened closely, her interviewer’s mind filing every detail, a distant part of her brain foresaw other lunches, other mornings, afternoons, or evenings spent with Pam or Patricia or Cutter.She would tell them what she was doing, because they meant the world to her, and if they had qualms, she would soft-pedal one private chapter or another.She would be compassionate, where they were concerned.
Where John was concerned, she would be merciless.
Chapter 3
Timiny Cove, 1964
Pam learned to bluff when she was eight years old playing poker in the back room of Leroy Robichaud’s general store.She didn’t do it deliberately, at first.She was innocent and enthusiastic, and she dared risk her pennies on a hand that none of the others would have, because she had never known what it was like to have to count her pennies to survive.
The other men had.Rufus Hackett and Dwayne Wardwell still did, though nowhere near as much as before the big gem finds; and Eugene, well, Eugene remembered.He told Pam stories of the days when he had lived hand to mouth.She listened to those stories with a child’s round eyes, but they were unreal to her.Nothing in her existence remotely resembled those hard times in the 1920s and ’30s.By the 1940s, Eugene had already turned tourmalinemining into a lucrative venture, and by the ’50s, when she was born, he owned the townhouse on Boston’s Beacon Hill, the stately brick home in Timiny Cove, and the Cadillac.But she listened to the stories for hours, because her father was the teller, and she adored him.
“Raise ya, missy,” Dwayne said, tossing two pennies into the pot after a somber study of the cards in his hand.
Pam studied hers.It wasn’t a particularly good hand, had none of the picture cards that she liked, but she did have a pair of fours, and a pair of anything was better than nothing.“I’ll call,” she decided.She pushed another penny toward the center of the table and grinned at Dwayne.
“You was s’posed to fold like your daddy and Rufus,” he informed her.
