The House Opens Its Mouth

By four o’clock the road to Bellwether House had narrowed to two ruts between blackberry canes, and the lake appeared and disappeared through the trees like something undecided about being seen. Nell Whitcomb drove slowly, though there was no one ahead of her and no reason to be careful except the old habit of arriving composed.

The house stood at the end of the road on a rise above the water. Its white paint had gone gray, and one green shutter hung by a single hinge. A paper notice had been nailed to the front door: DEMOLITION AUTHORIZED, SEPTEMBER 14, 1987. Beneath it, in smaller print, someone had written with a felt-tip pen, Not yet.

Nell parked beside the stone wall and took her suitcase from the trunk. She had dressed for the heat in a linen jacket, which was already a mistake. Before she reached the porch, a Buick came up behind her, honking twice.

“Still the same,” Tom Harrington called through the open window. “You arrive first and claim the moral high ground.”

He stepped out in a pale suit that seemed designed to survive both a funeral and a fundraiser. His hair, once black, had silvered elegantly at the temples. He embraced Nell with the careful pressure of a man greeting someone whose value he had not yet calculated.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I wanted to make an entrance.” He glanced toward the house. “It’s a little difficult to know whether this counts as one.”

The other cars arrived in quick succession. Mara Bell came in a rust-colored station wagon packed with canvases and cardboard boxes. She had cut her hair short, though strands escaped around her face, and she wore paint on the back of one hand. Suzie Alden brought a wicker basket of food and apologized for it before anyone had spoken. Art Mercer arrived last, driving a dented Volvo with a typewriter visible through the rear window.

They stood together on the lawn, five adults arranged beneath the dead elms where, at sixteen, they had once posed for a photograph in bathing suits. For a moment none of them seemed to know what to do with their arms.

“Thirty years,” Art said. “And no one has improved.”

Suzie laughed because she always had, in the old days, when Art offered pain disguised as wit. Nell saw Mara watching the house rather than any of them.

The front door opened before they could knock.

Lydia Whitcomb had become smaller since Nell had last seen her, but not softer. She wore a navy dress buttoned to the throat and held herself upright with one hand on a silver-headed cane. The family resemblance between her and Nell had always seemed to Nell an accusation: the same narrow face, the same pale eyes, the same refusal to show surprise.