Purgatory Ridge

Downstairs, Grace went to the kitchen. Jo made herself at home in the living room, an expansive room dominated by a great fieldstone fireplace. The floor was dark polished oak. The walls were dark oak paneling. Dark beams ran across the ceiling and reminded Jo of the veins on a powerful animal. It was not, she thought, the home a woman would have designed for herself. She wondered if perhaps it had been created by Karl Lindstrom to pay homage to his family’s source of wealth-timber. The heavy wood feel of it was lightened somewhat by huge windows that let in air and sunlight, and by light-colored area rugs laid on the floor like sun-struck clouds against a darker sky. To Jo, who was used to the chaotic comings and goings of the O’Connor household, the big place on Grace Cove felt heavy and quiet and too far removed. But maybe for a poet and novelist it was the perfect place.

Grace brought in the tea and a plate of lemon bars. “I’ll offer the boys something in a while,” she said. She sat on the sofa with Jo. “I have to tell you, until I met you I was afraid everyone in Aurora talked in monosyllables.”

Jo laughed. “It’s because you’re a celebrity, a writer with a capital W. They’re a bit afraid of you.”

“If you prick me, I bleed.”

Grace sipped her tea, then was quiet. The silence began to feel weighty and awkward to Jo, but because she’d come to listen, she waited.

“Thanks for coming out,” Grace finally said. “I know it’s pretty far.”

“Not so far for these parts. And it sounded important.”

“It is. To me.” She looked at Jo, and seemed to decide it was time to take the plunge. “I’m leaving Aurora.”

“So soon? You haven’t really given it a chance.”

“It’s a lovely place, I’m sure. But it’s not really the place I’m leaving. It’s Karl.”

Jo was caught by surprise. Although she hadn’t known what to expect when Grace asked to speak to her, she hadn’t considered it would be this. The sun had dropped behind the pines and spruce that curtained Grace Cove. The room seemed to have filled with a melancholy light. Grace leaned forward and set her glass on the coffee table.

“What do you think of my husband?”

Jo set her own tea glass on a coaster made of a varnished slice of some sapling, the few rings that marked its brief life hardened into a lovely, useless pattern. “I’ve dealt with Karl only professionally.”

“You sidestepped my question, counselor.”

“Sorry. I’ve found him in all our dealings to be smart, prepared, and-except for a brief period after the bombing at the mill-quite civil, despite our differences.”

“Bright. Prepared. Civil. Not warm, personable, funny?”

“Grace, I haven’t dealt with him in any but a professional way.”

“Are there other people you deal with on a professional basis to whom you would ascribe the traits warm, personable, funny?”

“Of course.”

“I rest my case.”

“You can’t. You haven’t even presented it. Look, why don’t you just tell me about it. All about it.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’m here to listen.”

Grace looked around. “A little dark in here, don’t you think?” She stood and turned on a lamp, crossed the polished floor to another lamp, and turned that on as well. She paused, staring out the window toward the dark wall of pines at the edge of her lawn. “It’s lonely out here. My family house is near Chicago, right on Lake Michigan in a row of great houses. Karl grew up in one just down the shoreline. The Lindstroms called it Valhalla.”

“You’ve known him for a long time, then.”

“All my life. Our families belonged to the same clubs. Karl and I were always paired for social functions. The expectation, at least on our parents’ part, was that we’d get married someday. Karl always thought so, too.”

“But not you?”

She shook her head, walked to the coffee table, took up her tea, idly sipped.

“Karl had a tough childhood. His father had his mother committed when Karl was seven years old, and not long after that he divorced her. His father married four more times, all women of looks and little substance. He paid no attention to his son. Poor Karl practically lived at my house. My parents, at least, treated him kindly. I always knew Karl felt a way about me that I didn’t about him, but I was able to maneuver around that. Our senior year in high school, he proposed to me. I turned him down, of course. He made threats.”

“What kind of threats?” Jo asked.

“Oh, nothing dangerous. The ‘I’ll join the foreign legion and you’ll be sorry’ kind of thing. Well, he did. Or his version of the foreign legion. He applied to the naval academy and was accepted. He went off to Annapolis, and I went to Stanford. We saw one another occasionally when we were home for the holidays. I have to admit, Karl in his uniform was quite impressive. Then the summer between my junior and senior year, my father hired a young man on the crew of his yacht.”

“You fell in love, your father objected, you married anyway, and the young man proved in the end to be more than worthy. Superior Blue.”

“What I didn’t put in the book was how Karl came back into my life.”