Free Cheating at Solitaire by Jane Haddam

it. But it was so cold I pumped it up anyway, and then it took forever to get my work done, because it was so hard to type.”
    â€œAnd your husband? What did he do?”
    â€œOh, he was dead by then. He died when the boys were small. Three and seven, I think they were. He—my husband, I mean—he worked with computers and things.”
    â€œAnd your sons are now grown up and they’re, what—a doctor and a lawyer?”
    â€œA cardiologist and a litigator, yes.”
    â€œAnd they like you enough to buy you a house on Margaret’s Harbor just because you wanted to spend a year to read?”
    â€œI should have thought of going to Italy. I like Italy. I’ve been thinking of writing a book about Italy. About LucreziaBorgia, maybe. At least there wouldn’t be this kind of snow.”
    â€œThat’s very impressive.”
    â€œA book about Lucrezia Borgia?”
    â€œNo. The fact that your sons like you enough to set you up this way after you did whatever it was you had to do to get them where they are. I’ve seen women like that. Most of them survive by getting hard. You didn’t.”
    â€œHow do you know I wasn’t set up with enough life insurance to choke a horse?”
    â€œThe fact that you were afraid of paying the heating bills.”
    â€œFair enough,” Annabeth said. “I was thinking of something else, though. While we were coming down. There’s a poem by Matthew Arnold, called ‘Dover Beach.’ ”
    â€œâ€˜â€¦ for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.’”
    Annabeth stopped still. “Exactly,” she said. “That’s amazing. Very few people know that poem. Even English majors of my generation—our generation, really, I’m fifty-five and I seem to remember—”
    â€œSixty-two.”
    â€œYes, well, even English majors of our generation weren’t asked to read that, and nobody else ever does except in graduate school. Maybe it was different in England—”
    â€œScotland,” Stewart Gordon said. “I’m Scots. You’ve got to keep that straight, or men in kilts will storm your door and beat on it with large swords.”
    â€œRight,” Annabeth said.
    â€œBut you didn’t go to graduate school in English literature, did you? It must have been history.”
    â€œOh, it was. But then I taught as an adjunct for a while in a small place and they had me teaching everything. They put it in textbooks for undergraduates now. ‘Dover Beach,’ I mean. And, you know, I know that the night of the poem isn’t supposed to be a storm. The moon is out. But then there’s all that at the end, and it just feels more like a night like tonight. I’m babbling.”
    â€œNo. You’re doing what I’m doing. You’re slowing down as we approach the goal.”
    â€œHe’s going to be dead in there, isn’t he?”
    â€œProbably. There’s no telling how long he’s been in the cold. If we could have gotten some sense out of Arrow, we might have a rough idea when it was the accident happened, but as it is, as far as we know, it could have been hours. It could have been any time since about eleven this morning.”
    â€œWhy eleven this morning?”
    â€œThat’s when they threw Arrow off the set and she took off with Mark. Both of them, by the way, already fairly out of it. Not to say she was as out of it as she pretended to be at your place.”
    â€œDid you think she was faking? I thought she was faking. I just couldn’t figure out why I thought that.”
    â€œYou thought it because she’s a damned piss-poor actress,”