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"Are you out of your mind?" Theo paced with such agitation he outdistanced his cane. It wavered, nearly slipping from under him on the carpet of the back parlor. "Smuggling? You could go to jail!"
"I won't go to jail." Kate folded her arms, gently nudging her stitches, which were starting to draw and itch as they healed. "If I should get arrested, a payoff would get me out within hours. Pa said the corruption makes an absolute mockery of Prohibition."
Theo shook his head, more determined than she'd seen him since he came back from the war.
"Well, I'll not be a part of it. I'll cheer if Aunt Ginny sells the boat."
"Theo! You don't mean it. Not after all the good times we've had." Aggie turned from the door to the hall, where she was keeping watch, and faced him with a look of shattered trust. Kate saw their cousin falter, and wondered uneasily if Aggie was manipulating him as she did the swains who flocked around her.
Lunch with Aunt Helène and their cousins had been well-deserved penance for Kate and Aggie, from Mama's viewpoint. Kate wondered if anyone gave any thought at all to how being left constantly in women's company must affect Theo's spirits. After coffee was served in the parlor, she and Aggie had proposed a domino game, knowing Theo's sisters would refuse. Clarissa would think it childish and Ivy wouldn't like the arithmetic involved. Kate, Aggie and Theo had adjourned to this room, where Aggie had dumped out dominoes and shoved them quickly together to look like a game in progress while Kate described their predicament, to Theo's growing disbelief.
"All right. I'd hate to see the Folly lost," he amended grudgingly. "But this is madness, Kate. I can't believe the risk you've taken." He drew a breath and walked to a window. It looked out on the lilac bushes, which now were bare. He folded both hands on his cane, his hair made golden and his features gently handsome by a shaft of sunlight. "Listen. I have some money. My trust. Let me make you a loan. You can pay off the house and we'll settle whenever. We'll tell everyone... that I'd invested some money for you. How's that?"
Kate's arms tightened. "We don't want your charity, Theo."
"It's hardly charity when it's my father who's caused —"
"I don't want to be beholden to you! I can get us out of this jam. I just need the damned boat!"
Frustration drove her hands against the table where the dominoes sat, rocking it and sending them tumbling. Aggie turned to stare at her outburst.
"Kate...." Theo couldn't get beyond her name. Feelings he hadn't voiced since the day of her father's funeral shone on his face, and Kate realized in dismay that Aggie must see them.
"They're coming," Aggie warned suddenly in a low tone. While Kate stood immobilized by hopelessness, her sister slid to the table and into a chair. "You're such a rotten loser, Kate," she said as their mother and Aunt Helène came in.
Theo bent with effort, retrieving a handful of dominoes. "It's your fault for teasing," he chided.
Their words sounded exactly like the quibbling of their early years. But Theo would never stand again without his cane, and Aggie could race hell bent toward her own destruction as carelessly as she had raced to help just now, and all that remained of the childhood the three of them had shared was echoes.
Theo returned his handful of dominoes to the table, no longer the compliant cousin whose level head could always be depended on to extract them from scrapes. Aggie's expression mirrored Kate's disappointment.
Theo gave a sunny smile in which there was a hint of weariness, avoiding her eyes.
"Now then, Aunt Ginny, what's this about you wanting to sell the Folly when Kate's nearly got a buyer lined up herself?"
Kate heard her own indrawn breath. She sought Theo's gaze and met in it total caring. Her mother was looking at her in surprise.
"Or didn't she tell you the people she took out last week want sailing lessons from her with an eye to buying it?" Theo pursued smoothly.
"Oh!" Her mother sounded faintly apologetic.
"I didn't have a chance to tell you," Kate murmured.
"Who are these people, dear?" inquired Aunt Helène. "Would I know them?"
"Putnam. From up near Rockland." Kate hoped fervently she'd chosen a spot enough removed that her aunt had no acquaintances there. "They... they want a schooner, but they want to make sure they can handle it first. They're keen on lessons yet this season, if the weather holds. And they've put down five hundred dollars in earnest money."
"That part of Maine's quite well-to-do. I hope you'll humor them." Aunt Helène rationed a smile. She had never been fond of Kate.
Mrs. Hinshaw looked at her hands. "Of course if you can sell it, that's wonderful, Kate. It's one less thing your uncle will need to do for us."
***
"Not going out?" Sebastian preened in front of the mirror.
Joe shook his head, stretched comfortably on top of his bed in the attic room which they shared with Drake.
"Cora's got a cousin who's a real knockout. If Rita's busy."
"Don't know about Rita." Joe turned a page of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The book was balanced on his waist at a perfect distance for reading. "Just felt like staying in tonight."
"To read?" Sebastian made a face.
"It's a good book."
"It's one thing, reading when you're in school. Isn't natural when you're grown and could be out with girls." Sebastian smacked him playfully with his cap. "And a book on engines?" His cousin pointed to another book on Joe's dresser. "What's to say about engines that could fill a whole book?"
"Lots of pictures," Joe said. He grinned. "Just your kind. No clothes."
Sebastian snorted. "I'd be turning handsprings if Rita took an interest in me. You've got a screw loose."
Joe read until he had to go two flights down to the bathroom, then returned to sit on the edge of his bed and confront his thoughts. He had stayed in not only to finish Conrad's novel, but because he wasn't in a mood for laughing and flirting. Kate's injury had shaken him. Something he was mixed up in could have ended in tragedy. Billy said she was doing okay, had even walked outside today, but the plain fact was, she could just as easily be dead.
Nearly as sobering to him, though, was the dawning realization of his own changed status. His bank account now held just over three thousand dollars. By the standards of almost anyone he knew, he was wealthy. It meant he could do things. For himself. For his close-knit family.
The problem was, he'd never expected to be or do anything beyond what he'd been and done all his life. Even when he was at Boston College he hadn't seriously expected it to change his life in any way.
Or had he?
Joe blew between his hands. Was that, as much as the war, the reason why, after only a year, he'd left a way of life that was strange to him? Maybe he'd been afraid, deep down, that finishing college would lead to too many choices.
None of the Santaynas had been anything but fishermen. Pete, his cousin, worked the docks, but that was almost the same. If Joe became anything else, he'd be distanced from them. They'd tolerated his studies because he was one of them and because they supported each other. But they were proud, and overly suspicious that those with more than they had looked down on them. They accepted Joe’s dressing up and doing things with his Irish aunties because that, too, was family. They wanted him and his cousins to get ahead. Yet Joe was painfully sure that venturing outside the narrow world of his family and their friends risked alienation.
***
Mama's face was ashen when she came in with the letter.
"The bank has foreclosed," she said tonelessly. "A messenger brought it."
Rosalie sprang to her feet and put an arm around her. Kate had just come in from tutoring and was slumped in a chair drinking tea. She set it down. She had heard the words, yet she couldn't believe them.
That morning Rosalie had boiled tweezers and her best embroidery scissors and used them to remove Kate's stitches. Aggie had used the occasion to try and get five dollars of their rum-running proceeds for a new dress to wear when she went out with Felix. She'd flounced out in a huff when Kate told her to get a job if she wanted spending money. Now their efforts, their arguments, particularly the stinging in her side, seemed to mock her. It had all been useless.
But it couldn't be. This couldn't be happening. She'd been making payments. The last one with a bit more than necessary, to make up for the small one in August.
She didn't even realize that she had started toward the door.
"Kate?" her mother called weakly. "Kate! Where are you going?"