Nancy Culpepper Read Online Free Page A

always stopped at some quaint wayside inn for tea, and there would be a mystery to solve. The inns were just like this. I feel I’ve been here before.”
    Nancy and Jack were at the Blue Lantern Inn on the coast above Boston. They had come for the weekend to attend the wedding of a friend from graduate school who was finally getting married to the man she had lived with for five years. Nancy and Jack had driven for six hours from Pennsylvania. On the way Jack had said, “Why couldn’t the wedding be two weeks from now, when the autumn leaves are just right?” They used to live in New England, and Jack was crazy about the fall foliage. He was always critical of autumn in Pennsylvania. He would complain about the brown-and-gold splendor on the mountain ridge near their home. Not a single flaming red sugar maple on the whole mountain, he would point out, like someone judging a parade.
    That evening, in a seafood house on a wharf, Jack and Nancy ripped apart bright lobsters and laughed. They drank a bottle of rosé— to match the lobster, Jack said. But the colors didn’t match at all. Jack acted silly, calling her “Toots,” the way he did to tease her when they were first married. Nancy called him “Mr. Toots” in return and giggled. Jack had been teasing her all day. Going to a wedding made them happy. Water leaked from the boiled lobster into Nancy’s lap. Jack splintered a claw and a tender orange hand slithered out.
    Afterwards, they walked in the dark on the beach in front of the Blue Lantern Inn. The tide had gone so far out they had to hike to meet it. The sand was wet and marshy in places, and it was too dark to see the water. Some birds skittered by quietly.
    “I had forgotten how much I love the ocean,” Jack said. “I can’t wait till Sunday.”
    “I’m not sure I want to go out there in a little boat to watch whales,” Nancy said. “The idea is terrifying.”
    “It won’t be terrifying in the daytime,” Jack said. “Whales are friendly.”
    “But they’re so big.”
    “They’re like horses. Horses are very careful not to step on cats and chickens.”
    “Tell that to Ahab,” said Nancy, squeezing his hand.
    In the inn during the night, she heard the sea whispering, and toward morning she heard a gurgling sound—rain falling from the drain spouts. Suddenly, there was a sharp tapping on the door and an urgent voice: “Phone call. Phone call.” Nancy was in her jeans and sweat shirt and downstairs in the lobby before she could realize what she had heard. She was afraid something had happened to their child, Robert, who was staying with friends at home.
    It was Nancy’s mother, in Kentucky. “Nancy? Did I get you up? Granny passed away last night, about eleven o’clock.”
    Nancy had expected this phone call for years. But now she was stunned and her mother sounded bewildered. Nancy’s grandmother was ninety-four and had been arthritic and senile for several years. During the past summer her health had deteriorated, and for many months Nancy had not traveled without notifying her parents where to reach her.
    Nancy’s mother said, “She had mass-matter on the brain.”
    “What in the world is mass-matter on the brain?” Nancy cried. A tall man in a blue blazer turned his head in her direction.
    Mom said, “Sometimes the blood vessels running to your brain mat together in a pocket? They call it mass-matter.”
    “You mean she had a stroke.”
    “She was acting wild on us all day,” Mom went on. “Hollering and carrying on. Trying to walk for the first time in a year. I went in about ten-thirty to give her a pill and I thought she was dead. But she wasn’t completely dead yet.”
    While her mother described the funeral plans, Nancy looked out the front window and saw that the ocean was still far away. The tide had come in and gone out again. She should leave for Kentucky immediately, for the funeral was the next day.
    “I don’t know how soon I can get there,” she said.