Eagle Eye Read Online Free

straight north, through the blue gap in the mountains, to a Treadway Inn where they stopped for the night, and he saw his parents drunk for the only time. They were drunk at each other. “Don’t you dare send her money, Buddy,” Maeve had said. “To have it thrown back to you. That I’m living like she wanted me to, with you. Don’t you ever dare.”
    Sometimes he had a fantasy of summer there, the blackberry brambles fruited now, and the warm, consoling flanks of cows.
    “You could send her the calamari,” he said now. “Your whole gormay shelf.” Which Maeve catalogued carefully, studying the labels, then left.
    Maeve choked. Buddy’s face, never too small for affection, smiled lopsided. Like the cow, against whose side Bunty had put his own shamed head, he had consoled.
    Though Buddy’s parents were dead, and a successful brother and sister lived in California—visits mutually planned but never yet made—he still scattered money constantly through remnant Brooklyn cousins, and was always invited to all weddings and bar mitzvahs, buying Bunty a yarmulka for the first of those, and touting the warm family life they would find there. Now and then a cousin dropped by apologetically; Manhattan did not appeal to them. “‘With a store like A&S,’” Buddy quoted, “‘who needs a Korvette’s? Waddya need all the push?’ They must be the last hold-outs in Flatbush. And now maybe they have the Korvette’s.”
    In Charles’s that afternoon, a woman standing near smiled at Maeve. “Scrimshaw. Your bag.” She had short white hair, blue-chip eyes, and a tweedy air of well-being. “Nantucket?”
    Maeve nodded down at the small straw bag with the bone plaque on its lid, scratched with a picture of a whale. Easter before last, when they had been up there for a couple of weeks, Maeve had spied certain women carrying them like badges—permanent residents, she said, not tourists like them. When the shop-owner, pleading a long waiting list, had refused them, Buddy had ferreted out the carver, who had some old work—not for sale. There had been correspondence. The carver’s name became a household one. “Eighteen months and three hundred smackers,” Buddy had said, opening the package. “But here you are, Maeve, here’s your fishingcreel.”
    “I have one, of course, but nothing so fine … Wherever? … Excuse me, I’m Elinor Reeves, we live in the old Berry house … Don’t think we’ve met up there.”
    “No, we haven’t been for some years,” Maeve said. “We go to Italy now.”
    They had gone to an Italian spa for Buddy’s relaxation—“Wuddya know, I have a liver now,” his father said joking—for three weeks last spring.
    “I wanted to order one for mother. Hers fell overboard. Our sloop. But the ones the shop gets are nothing like hers was. Or like this.”
    “If you know the carver,” Maeve said. “Sometimes he’ll do a little better for you. I’m afraid I can’t think of the name just now. But I have it at home.”
    Buddy gave a snuffle, covered by the handkerchief he took without hurry from his breastpocket. He got away with a lot of such hamming, Bunty now observed, because of his gestures being in a small radius.
    “Oh, would you? May I call? Or my secretary. I’m just catching a plane.”
    “I’ll phone you, Mrs. Reeves.” Maeve had on the mick charm-smile Bunty formally denied himself if he thought of it. “I know who you are.”
    “Oh … thank you very much.”
    “I heard you at the club. Quite a few of our friends are your wellwishers.” She introduced Buddy. “Maybe you’d like to join us to meet them some Wednesday afternoon at our home. Maybe a week from next.”
    “Wednesday … now let’s see—”
    “Any Wednesday,” Maeve said. “It’s my afternoon.”
    When the woman left, Buddy said, “Since when?”
    “Since now.” Maeve giggled.
    “ What club?”
    “The precinct one. A girl I met at the PTA goes to it. I meant to.”
    “Aha. That Mrs.