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

were much longer than Willa’s auburn hair had been. “I mean really short,” she restated, “and often as not, she called herself William.”
    “Ha! My family always called me Willie,” Willa squared her shoulders to sit taller in the Adirondack, but her eyes still laughed and the dimples in her cheeks deepened.
    “And she had a smash, that’s what we used to call it, on a brilliant young classmate and tennis champion,” Edith lowered her lids, sliding her eyes sideways toward Willa, “by the name of Louise Pound.” Edith’s voice eased down and held the last consonant with a hint of breathiness.
    “Who now teaches literature at the university and whose brother is head of Harvard Law School,” Willa cut in, “and a member of President Hoover’s newly appointed Commission on Law Enforcement.”
    “Red hair and high jinks, that’s what Louise was. But now you are name-dropping. First my cousin and now Roscoe Pound.”
    Willa laughed, “Roscoe the Ridiculous, he was. Pompous prig. He took offense when he realized I was more interested in his sister than I was in him. I retaliated by lampooning him in the university magazine. That was the end of that. But it was also the end of Louise,” Willa adopted a rueful tone, “and of the world, as far as I was concerned then.”
    “The end,” Edith dead-panned.
    “Ah, youth! Ah, propriety!” Willa refused to be finished. Her hand fluttered to her forehead. Finally, she added, “How silly we all were.”
    Sabra Jane was laughing so hard her tea cup rattled in its saucer. Her face had turned a lighter shade of the reds in her shirt and hair. “I know the man,” she finally wheezed out. “Met him in New York. He was buying antiques. I’m an interior decorator. Specialize in antiques,” she caught her breath and began to speak more fluidly. “He never stopped being a prig, you know. Wears bow ties,” she giggled, “but then, what do you expect from Harvard Law.”
    “Exactly,” Willa punctuated the point and rose to offer more tea.
    “Those years in Lincoln were wonderful times,” Edith heard her own voice turn wistful. “So full of the future, of looking forward to great things. Especially for women,” Edith raised her cup toward Willa, “and, I suppose, especially for women from Nebraska. We could go to college. We could have careers. We could live in Greenwich Village. We could do anything, we thought.”
    “And we did. We did all of it,” Willa sat down again and reached over to pat Edith’s hand. “It just wasn’t as easy as we expected. Or as well appreciated.”
    “The Great War changed everything,” Edith nodded but found her glance resting on the steamer, the S. S. Grand Manan, crossing just beyond the entrance to Whale Cove at the start of its return voyage to the mainland. It was somehow soothing to have one’s eye surprised by the familiar passage. With Whale Cove fogged in that morning, Edith had missed its arrival. She paused now to follow its progress before picking up the strand of their conversation again.
    “The Great War, yes,” Willa repeated, her voice dropping. “It certainly changed our lives …”
    “Our expectations, our sense of ourselves,” Edith returned her attention to the women before her and picked up Willa’s thoughts, “our sense of each other …”
    “Our freedom,” Willa joined in, “to live as we chose … and with whom. But it was hard on men. It remapped their world,” she paused, “and ours, too.”
    “It still dominates the world,” Sabra Jane’s voice was firm, her nod grave. “Heroes, debts, reparations. That’s about all there is in the news these days.”
    “Along with rum runners, sensuality, and every imaginable machine. Radios, motor boats, airplanes, Zeppelins,” Edith agreed, “but the war years must have been difficult for you, too,” she turned to Sabra Jane.
    “They were and being on the farm didn’t help. I was already living in New York by then, but I went home