Either Lem had second sight or he’d met every boat until Ida walked off one of them; there he was at the dock with the wagon. He peered at her harder than she liked, but no wonder—she was so knotted up that her knees didn’t bend and her jaw didn’t work. He handed her into the wagon and waited patiently through her yes and no answers to his questions: Yes, she found the property; no, she hadn’t yet made arrangements for sale; yes, she was tired from the traveling. Ida knew she should tell Lem about Ezra, but she couldn’t, not yet; she needed to calm herself, to think it through. So far she’d managed to think through one thought only: the need to get as far away from Ezra as possible. So Ida asked Lem about the farm and that carried them to the house.
Lem helped her down from the wagon and followed her in with her bag. He dropped it on the table and looked at her one more time. “You all right, Ida?”
“Yes. Tired. As you said. Thank you for minding the farm. Thank you for meeting me.”
Lem brushed her thanks away. “Figured you’d either be on that boat or the next one.” He turned for the door, turned back. “You had a visitor while you were gone.”
Ezra. That was Ida’s first irrational thought. Her second more rational one was Hale. But once Lem got through looking at her too hard again he said, “That Barstow.”
Ida sat down in the kitchen chair.
“He seemed pretty disappointed at missing you. He said if I saw you to tell you he’s back, which I figured was just about the worst thing I could do, but I’m doing it anyway.”
“Thank you.”
“You say that today. I could say you won’t be thanking me later on, but why trouble myself? You’ll do what you want to do, whatever that is. If you even know what that is.”
Oh, Ida knew what that was. She wanted to see Henry.
Ida’s knees unlocked with the first full rotation of the pedals. Her jaw loosened. She coasted down the hill, taking her usual joy in that flying freedom that even Ezra couldn’t diminish. She breezed onto Main Street and thought how like Block Island it was, the summer folk beginning to pour off the steamer in the usual conglomeration of trunks, hats, parasols, and gay, proprietary voices. These were people with no cares, Ida thought; these were people without phantom husbands or disappointing lamb counts or recalcitrant paintbrushes. She wove her way through them, not quite believing she’d find Henry in town until she saw his bicycle leaning beside the office door. Ida propped her bicycle beside it, pushed open the door, and was crushed into his arms.
“Oh, Ida.” He drew back, smoothed away her hair to look harder at her. “What’s wrong?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d be back.”
Henry laughed. “Neither was I. I sent a letter you probably won’t get till tomorrow—”
“I mean ever.”
“What? Why? I told you there were complications—”
“She came and took your things.”
“What? Who?”
“Your wife.”
“My wife? Here?” Henry blinked. “Well, of course. I see now. That explains things.”
Henry tried to pull Ida close again but this time she was the one who held him away.
“Henry. Listen to me. Ezra’s alive.” She began to tell her tale, at first stuttering, then lashing the air with her words, but when she’d reached the part about opening her eyes to see Ezra standing over her, she could feel the trembling begin again; she crossed behind the desk and dropped into the chair. “To open my eyes and to see him, the shock of it—”
But something was wrong. The room. The air. She twisted around and saw Henry pacing back and forth behind her, silent. Very well, he would be experiencing his own shock, but Ida needed something more from him than silence. She stood to intercept his track, and at first his eyes were full of all that she needed to see in them: an acknowledgment of her anguish, followed by his own anguish, and last, the full weight of the shock of what Ida was telling him.
Only somehow it didn’t look like such a great weight.
“Henry?”
Henry looked at her. Looked away. He began to pace again.
Ida reached out and caught his arm. “Why doesn’t this shock you the way it shocked me?”
“It does. Of course it does. It’s only—”
“Only what?”
Again Henry looked away.
Ida pulled at his arm, drew him around again. And saw.
“You knew.”
“No. Not knew. Not with complete certainty.”
“You knew.”
“I suspected, Ida. A whiff of suspicion only.”
“How? When?”
Henry sat on the corner of the desk, but when Ida didn’t reclaim the chair he stood again. “I found a large withdrawal from Ezra’s Boston account after the Portland went down. At first I attributed it to an accounting error, a delayed transmission due to the storm, much as I attributed Mose’s delayed letter to the storm. But when I saw your letter from Ezra, a letter so similarly worded, so exactly timed—”
“When you saw my letter? Last winter?”
“I didn’t know for a fact. It was a suspicion only. I only grew surer when I discovered some evidence that he might be in trouble, that there were reasons he might have wanted to disappear with no—”
“You grew surer. And still you said nothing to me.”
“Ida, please. It was piece by piece. Your letter. A pamphlet in the office file about mining gold from sea water. Those zinc-lined kettles. Then you showing me the gold, and the discovery of an essentially empty office in Boston when it should have been in full operation after such a sudden death—”
When Ida showed him the gold in Boston. In Boston. “And the fact that I might not be a widow after all didn’t strike you as information of interest to me? It didn’t occur to you that I might have some thoughts on what we should do about this?”
Looking at Henry’s face, Ida saw that it had not. She whirled for the door. Henry followed.
“Ida. I knew how you felt about Ezra. I knew what you’d gone through with your family. I decided it would only torment you further—”
“You decided. You! I’ll decide my own torment. Oh, I knew this. I knew there was something not right, and it wasn’t all your wife. I wanted so badly to trust you and I never could, I never felt I was seeing to the bottom of you. And now I know why.” Ida banged out the door. Outside, she spied Perry’s bicycle leaning against the building. She wrenched it away and shoved it through the door at Henry. “Give your wife back her bicycle. And her husband.”
Ida climbed the hill without a hint of a tremble in her now, her rage powering her and clearing her mind. She knew what to do: She would collect her evidence and go to the constable, tell them where Ezra was, what he had done, what he’d confessed to doing. She formed the list as she walked: the pamphlet; the card for the assayer who was clearly implicated in some way, judging by his reaction to Ida’s name when she’d visited him in Boston. Yes, there Henry had helped her—she must remember to talk of the empty office, the withdrawal of funds; they would call on Henry to confirm, but whether he would do so or not would be his decision to make. He might prefer to protect Mose; in fact, perhaps that accounted for Henry’s unwillingness to talk of Mose, for his lack of visible grief for his brother. But what did it matter? According to Ezra, Mose was long gone, while Ezra planned to remain on Block Island until mid-August. Ezra was her concern, not Mose.
And not Henry Barstow.
When Ida topped the rise she saw Hattie and Oliver in her garden, pulling radishes out of the ground. Oliver’s joy was like a liniment smoothed over sore muscles, so much so that Ida didn’t trouble to look at Hattie’s face for some time. When Hattie finally caught her eye, she motioned to Ida to follow her a distance away.
“It’s Ruth. That detective finally came. Apparently Ezra was involved in a scheme to cheat investors in some sort of scam to mine gold, and they found Ruth’s name on the investor list. She’s devastated. I tried to calm her but got nowhere—the usual chant—what does some old spinster know about anything?”
Ida peered at Hattie, seeing for the first time the depth of the bitterness in her.
Hattie kept on. “As difficult as she’s been with you, she does believe you know things. Would you talk to her?”
“No.”
“Please, Ida. She thought the world of that man. That he attempted to cheat her—”
“She made out all right. She got the farm.”
“The farm doesn’t matter! It’s the fact that he tried! Her darling Ezra had tried to cheat her. If she hadn’t insisted on his handing over the deed, she’d be a pauper right now.”
Ida doubted pauper was the accurate word, but Hattie had said other words that struck Ida like darts. Ezra had tried. How could he try to cheat his own aunt? How could he try to convince Ida, with three victims of the sea in her family already, that he’d drowned?
And then there was the matter of the larger deception that Ruth—and Hattie—didn’t yet know.
“Keep Oliver away,” Ida said and set off up the hill.
The Ruth that Ida found was a Ruth Ida had never seen before. She sat at the kitchen table, whitened hands gripping a cup of tea still full to the brim, the flesh on her face sagging against her bones, her eyes red and dull.
Ida sat down. “I saw Hattie down at the—”
“How could he?”
“I don’t know, Ruth. I really don’t. I didn’t know him; I see that now.”
Ruth lifted her eyes. “Did he take from you too?”
Ida thought of the disappearance of her family fortune, such as it was. “He didn’t need my permission to use my money. That’s the way the law goes. But yes, he took from me too.”
“He was a lovely boy. Like Oliver. I didn’t like Oliver. He was too like Ezra. He made it too hard to excuse Ezra and I always excused Ezra. Every time.”
“Until now. So that’s a good thing, Ruth. You can stop struggling to excuse him. You can take Oliver into your heart for his own self. You’re exactly right—he’s a lovely boy.”
“He lies.”
“Not so much now he knows his father’s—” Ida had been about to say dead. Dear God, what to tell the boy now? What to tell Ruth? Ida took another look at the old woman, at the reddened veins in her eyes, at the death grip on the mug of tea, surely cold by now. Ruth tried to say something, but her mouth trembled so badly she couldn’t speak. Tears welled and leaked. There was nothing Ida could think of that was uglier, more painful to the observer, than an old woman’s tears.
Ida couldn’t tell her. What purpose would it serve? If the law caught up with Ezra before he left the country, Ruth would have to know, but she didn’t need a second shock just now. And Oliver? Someday, it might happen that Oliver too would need to know, but not now, not from Ida’s tongue, not when he’d just grown accustomed to the idea of his father being dead; there were only so many twists and turns a five-year-old mind could execute and still keep to the road. Ida got up, collected a clean dish towel, and handed it to Ruth to dry her eyes, but Ruth snatched it and blew her nose instead. She pushed away her tea.
“You’ve a right to your tears,” Ida said. “I’ve a right to mine. But let’s see if we can’t get them over with before Hattie brings Oliver home. He doesn’t need to know what his father’s done.”
That brought Ruth’s head up. “No.” She peered at Ida. “I never once saw you cry. I never once saw you look like you even cared.”
“I like to do my crying in private.”
Ruth studied Ida some more. “Yes, you would, wouldn’t you?” She splayed her hands flat on the table and pushed down; she seemed to struggle to rise but Ida knew better than to lend a hand. “I’m going to wash my face,” Ruth said. “If you wouldn’t mind staying until Oliver returns, in case I’m unable—”
“Wash your face. I’ll be here.”