Free Compass Rose by John Casey

off.”
    “You’re a Natural Resources officer, right? Jack calls you the warden of the Great Swamp, but that’s not the official …” He stopped, probably because she was staring at him so intently. The Queens River. He was the man who’d caught the trout, made the fire, and drunk the wine—the man she didn’t arrest. She tucked her hair back and blushed. And then, thinking that she’d thought of him from time to time, when she pedaled her Exercycle or when she fit back into her uniform, she blushed again. “Yes. I mean, no. Warden of the Great Swamp is what the guys at work say. Kind of a joke.” And then more coolly—after all, she’d seen him, he hadn’t seen her—“But I get around other places. The salt marshes. The Queens River.”
    But he’d put on reading glasses and started to look over the papers on the desk. He said, “Jack says Miss Perry is recovering. Do you think she’ll be able to manage her affairs on her own?” When Elsie didn’t answer right away, he looked up. He said, “I know. It’s hard to say. Does she strike you as knowing what’s going on?”
    “Yes.”
    “Does she understand numbers?”
    “I don’t know. We talk, but numbers haven’t come up.”
    “On this list of books here—gifts to Charles and Thomas Pierce—where do these figures come from?”
    “I found the receipts. The first figure is what Miss Perry paid for each book. I called a rare-book dealer and he gave me a rough idea of what they’re worth now—that’s the second figure. The dates I got from her appointment books—Charlie and Tom’s birthdays.”
    “But I understand these books are still here.”
    “Yes.” Elsie pointed to the glass-paned bookcase. “She gave them reader’s copies. She always said the same thing—it was sort of a joke after a while. ‘If you don’t scribble in this book or tear the paper I’ll give you a new one when you’re grown up.’ What’s in the bookcase are first editions of the same books. Some of them are worth two or three thousand. But Jack told me there’s no problem if the gifts are under ten thousand in any one year.”
    “That’s right. But the donor—Miss Perry—said,
‘If
you don’t scribble in them.’ An outright gift has to be unconditional. This wouldn’t be a problem if the total was under ten thousand. But each boy’s collection is worth …” He scribbled on a notepad. “Roughly twenty-five thousand.”
    “It was a joke! Maybe when she started saying it, when Charlie was six or seven, maybe she meant it then. I was there for their birthday—not this year but before—and Miss Perry laughed and the boys laughed. The reason she was giving books this way was that if she’d said to the boys’ father that she was going to pay for them to go to college, he’d have said no. He’s very …” Elsie saw them, saw the day, Miss Perry catching a flounder, reciting a bit of Beatrix Potter. Dick and the boys, not May, May was fixing the cake, Miss Perry and Dick and the boys in the skiff. The late-afternoon light on the water, the summer-green spartina. A year later, the boys’ next birthday, they were at Charlie’s baseball game, Miss Perry innocently attentive, May rigid with pain.
    Elsie sat down, closed her eyes. She saw May. She saw May looking at her. She felt May. She felt a space in herself fill up with cold astonishment. And then a sense of desolation—as if she were May looking at her house after the hurricane, the broken corner posts, the roof sagging, the wall gaping open, the things inside strange, hers but not hers.
    “Are you okay?”
    Elsie said, “Just a minute.”
    “We can do this another time.”
    “No. Let’s go on.”
    Elsie looked at one of Miss Perry’s appointment books, found the dates of Charlie’s and Tom’s birthday party. “There. Look at that one. ‘Gave Charlie Pierce
Sailing Alone Around the World
by Joshua Slocum. First edition, mint. Gave Tom Pierce
Two Years Before the Mast
by Richard Henry