On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery Read Online Free Page A

somewhat constrained by Lincoln’s attention to good manners.”
    “As did you,” Willa reminded her. “Dancing lessons, drawing lessons, piano lessons,” Willa shifted to an exaggerated drawl, “and club meetings, club meetings, club meetings.”
    Sabra Jane giggled, “Ogdensburg, too. Didn’t matter that we lived on a farm. It took ten years in Greenwich Village to unlearn those lessons and get on with the real ones.” Sabra Jane retrieved two oatmeal cookies from the plate Edith passed and placed them on the napkin in her lap. Then ignoring the cookies, she began an elaborate flourish. “Living on Grand Manan,” Sabra Jane’s hand swept from the woods behind their white trimmed cottage, to the terraced lawn where they sat, to the open sea beyond, “living on Grand Manan means I take only what I want from those lessons.” She leaned back and added her feet to the wicker, crossing one booted ankle over the other, “The rest I ignore.”
    “And here I had been thinking you were just young enough to have missed the white gloves and drawing rooms altogether,” Edith plucked at a raisin on the edge of a cookie. “I lived through those lessons,” she glanced at Willa, “but apparently I haven’t yet managed to live them down.”
    Willa grinned in reply.
    “Nonetheless, those were heady times for the New Woman, and my Aunt Mary was an important personage,” Edith hesitated, glancing again at Willa, then chose to go on, “important to me and to Lincoln. She started the art league and was very active in founding the General Federation …”
    “Your aunt, my hat,” Willa emptied her cup.
    Edith half rose to flick away a bee, sending it back to the purple foxgloves near the cottage. When she sank back into her chair, Willa was well into her argument.
    “Admit it, Edith, it wasn’t just your aunt.” Settling her cup in her lap, Willa began ticking her right index finger against the fingers on her left hand, “It was your cousins, your brother, your sisters, your mother, your father.” She ran out of fingers and pointed directly at Edith, “And you.” Then she spread both hands in the air and stiffened her arms as though she were holding a banner to exclaim, “The Civic-Minded Lewises.”
    They all laughed.
    “You can’t deny it,” Willa shook her head at Edith and helped herself to a cookie. “One of Lincoln’s most promising and prominent men, her father was,” Willa turned back to Sabra Jane, “He was a banker. Her cousin, too. Good friends with Charlie Dawes. Helped him win the Vice Presidency. He’s a bank president in Boston now,” Willa took a firm bite of the cookie. “Her cousin Dan,” she crunched, “not Dawes, of course.”
    “I had heard you were both from the Plains, but I didn’t realize you grew up in the same town.”
    “We didn’t,” Edith assured Sabra Jane. “We didn’t even know each other. Willa’s a little older and grew up about a hundred miles west, in a small town called Red Cloud, but she came to Lincoln for the university.” Explanation over, Edith reverted to teasing. “Willa went to parties with my cousins and knew everyone my parents did, but she always insists she wasn’t part of that crowd.”
    “I wasn’t. And you left before you were old enough to feel the politics of that place.” Willa took a deep breath and turned to Sabra Jane, “Edith graduated from Smith,” then back at Edith, softening her tone, “but you were just a starry-eyed youngster back then, gazing off into the firmament,” she paused, “and into the eyes of others.”
    “Now, now, now, remember who it was who was bewitched in those days,” Edith chided, grinning back at the twinkle in Willa’s eyes, slate blue today like her blouse. “Willa caused a bit of a scandal at the university because of the way she chose to wear her hair. Short,” Edith raised her hand and separated her fingers less than an inch, making it clear by contrast that her own bobbed and graying locks