Free New England White by Stephen L. Carter Page A

a photo in a plastic frame atop the dresser. Julia had noticed it when she walked in, and ignored it. Now she walked over and, sure enough, there she was, arm in arm with Kellen, strolling along Broadway, which Kellen, like most black men, despised on principle. But he went from time to time for her sake, as, now, Lemaster did. She was wearing a halter top, and high platforms, and absurd little shorts. Had she really dressed that way? She lifted the William Comyns mirror, looked at herself at forty-three, tried to remember what twenty-three had been like.
    “No, I mean, sure, okay, you’re gorgeous now, but wow.” Fully in the room now, leaning over to study the image. “This is seriously cool. I love that outfit. I want five just like it.” Chuckling because she was one up. “So, were the two of you like an item or something?”
    “Vanessa, honey, I’m not really comfortable talking about—”
    “Your mother was the great love of my nephew’s life,” Seth confirmed, unhelpfully. “Always called her the one that got away.”
    “That sounds really romantic,” said Vanessa, now at the shelves, pawing through the books as if the bedroom were a library rather than a carefully tended shrine. Outside, a breeze stirred the darkening trees. Winter might be less severe down here, but it was coming. “And so totally cool.”
    “It was a…a long time ago.”
    “You can have the photo too if you want,” said Seth.
    Vanessa said, “Does Daddy know?”
    “Of course your father knows,” Julia said, slowly sinking. Whose idea had it been for Vanessa to tag along? Who had invented children anyway?
    “I guess you always had a thing for older men, huh?” Vanessa had taken down a calculus text, riffling the pages as if hoping money would fall out.
    “Ah, Vanessa, that’s not…uh, an appropriate thing to say.”
    “Not that Kellen wasn’t seriously hot. So I can understand it.”
    “Vanessa!”
    Her daughter was not listening. She had started turning the pages faster, glaring at her own hands because they refused to stop, as would sometimes happen, said Dr. Brady, when she struggled to choke off the trauma within—a trauma that remained unidentified, and whose existence Vanessa denied, although Brady assured them it was there. Julia, the mother in her aroused, forgot her embarrassment and, following the psychiatrist’s instructions, touched Vanessa on the shoulder and told her gently to put the book back on the shelf.
    “Let her be,” said Seth Zant. “There’s nothing valuable up here.” Julia started to explain, but he rode right over her. “I mean, the books and the pictures and the mirror are about all they left.”
    “They?”
    Seth tapped the desk with a fingernail. “Kellen used to come down for a week or two at a time to work. Get away from it all. Had his computer right here, printer, notebooks, I don’t know what all. Anyway, that’s what they took.”
    “Who did?”
    “Had a little break-in while I was up north claiming the body. Funny, though. Got a fair-sized television downstairs, Sylvia’s jewels, and whatnot. But I guess the dog musta spooked them or something, because they only did this one room, and all they took was Kellen’s work.”

CHAPTER 6
    INVENTORY RISK
    (I)
    L ITTLE J EREMY F LEW MET THEM at the airport, because Lemaster, who was supposed to have picked them up, was in New York for a meeting of Empyreals, a minor black social club of which he was a dedicated member. He had called Julia to say that afterward he would probably just take the train to Washington rather than come back, because a friend who held Redskins season tickets had invited him to tomorrow’s game. Julia scarcely bothered to mask her fury and, in her pique, commanded Flew to carry their bags, which, uncomplaining, he did. He chattered all the way to the parking lot, mostly about the weather, but also about how that awful Kwame Kennerly had been on the radio again, bad-mouthing the university, its new