Текст книги "Swains Lock"

Автор книги: Edward A. Stabler

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

Chapter 3

Whites Ferry

Tuesday, June 20, 1972

Destiny Gowan, née Melissa, pushed the twelfth and final four-by-four until its opposite end nudged the windshield just above the dash. She swept tiny beads of sweat from her forehead, then looked up at her boyfriend and smiled. “That’s the last one,” she said, slamming the tailgate shut. The yellow Ford station wagon squatted cautiously in the heat, unused to its burden of two hundred paving stones and a dozen beams of varying lengths.

Miles Garrett checked his watch and brushed the dirt from his hands. “Damn, I hope so,” he said. “Since we still need to take all of this shit back out.” He pulled on the tailgate to make sure it was fully closed. “I thought artists were supposed to use art supplies. Like paint…or chalk...or clay.”

“It’s architectural sculpture, Miles,” Des said. “Tell him, Kelsey.”

“It’s architectural sculpture, Miles,” Kelsey said. “And thanks for taking the morning off to help. Teresa is a talented artist – even when we were in high school she was talented – ask Des. And you can come to the open house at the Collaborative next week to see what she can do with this stuff.” Kelsey ducked and shaded her eyes to peer in through the open tailgate window. The back seat was folded over, buried beneath the stones and beams. “Des, do you think all three of us can fit in the front seat?”

“Sure. If Miles sits in the middle and keeps the beams from swinging into me, and you can scrunch against the door on the passenger side…”

Miles was happy with this arrangement for the short ride to the ferry. It meant that his back would be pressed against Kelsey’s hips and torso while he twisted to keep both arms on the beams. And his eyes could rest on the swell of Des’s breasts beneath her peasant blouse. The blouse’s ties hung lightly against her chest, framed by the emerging curves. To avoid staring, he shifted his attention to the barely-visible blond hairs on her tanned forearms as she turned the wheel. Then to the purple-tinted granny glasses he’d grown attached to last semester, and her streaked auburn hair, pulled back into a loose single braid.

He held the beams away from the steering column so Des could shift into gear. Gravel crunched beneath the tires and small plumes of dust flared in their wake as the station wagon pulled away from the Leesburg nursery lot and turned toward Whites Ferry. The wagon accelerated slowly, undulating a little under the load. Des clicked on the radio and a gentle reggae rhythm filled the air.

and I will find you

across a river of time,

and I will hold you

until you know you are mine.

The morning sun was already high overhead, and Miles felt his back grow warm pressing Kelsey’s bare left arm. Prickles of sweat formed beneath the curls of dark brown hair hanging against his neck and his t-shirt stuck to the skin between his shoulder blades. He slid the air-conditioning knob to the right and felt the hot air from the vents turn cool. The open windows funneled a crosswind into the car. Strands of Kelsey’s hair flicked against his ear and shoulders.

“Hey, Des,” Kelsey said. “Do you remember that guy we met at the Taj Mahal show last month? Dave? The weather guy?”

“Yeah. Hmmm. Maybe.”

“He called me a couple of nights ago. I guess he has tickets for the Stones at RFK Stadium and can score a few more, but he and two friends need a place to crash that night. He seems cool enough, but I’ll be gone for the 4th. You interested?”

Des squinted behind her purple shades. “Let’s see. My folks will be at the beach. We could stay at their place and throw sleeping bags on the deck. Dave’s a weather guy, so he should be smart enough to come inside if it rains. Are we in, Miles?”

Miles remembered a speech from his foreman about getting to the job site on time. “I need to be in Rockville by seven-thirty the next morning,” he said, “but it’s the Stones. Let’s tumble some dice, baby.”

“Kelsey, I guess we’re in. Tell him we want field tickets.”

“Sure,” Kelsey said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll tell him you need to see every tongue thrust.”

Des extended her tongue, curled it toward her chin, then pulled it in and pouted. Miles smirked but couldn’t suppress a smile – the gesture was so typical of Des. The tide of reggae ebbed and a DJ began blabbering, so Des twisted the volume down. When the forecast came on she turned it back up.

“After making landfall in the Florida panhandle yesterday as a category-one hurricane, Agnes has now been downgraded to a tropical depression and is centered over Georgia. Meteorologists expect the storm to continue tracking to the northeast through the Carolinas today and tomorrow, possibly regaining hurricane strength if it moves back over water off North Carolina and turns northward again. Even if Agnes doesn’t regain hurricane strength, we can expect heavy rain in the D.C. area, beginning mid-day tomorrow, through tomorrow night, and into Thursday. Depending on the path Agnes takes, areas to the north and west of Washington, D.C. could see up to 12 inches of rain.”

“Yecch,” Des said. “I’m glad we’re doing this today, since tomorrow looks ugly.”

“We can stash the beams in Teresa’s shed. It’s OK if the stones get wet,” Kelsey said.

“Hey, if it rains hard enough, I get the day off,” Miles said. His smile melted away. “But that means work on Saturday.”

“Bummer, man,” Des said.

She swung the station wagon into a right turn from Route 15 onto Whites Ferry Road. Miles tightened his arms around the beams to keep them from sliding toward Des, and he felt the loaded chassis sway as the car completed its turn.

Aside from its paved surface, Whites Ferry Road hadn’t changed much since its construction in the aftermath of the Civil War. It ran straight for a half-mile between a copse on the left and unplowed fields on the right, then turned into the woods along a hillside and descended to the Potomac River. Des guided the wagon along the old road, then eased it to a stop behind the last car in line.

The smell of green leaves and vines filled the air and Miles inhaled deeply. This was his first trip to Whites Ferry, so he turned to look out Kelsey’s window at the brown flowing water of the Potomac. Five hundred yards away, on the cleared bank across the river, stood the small store and the ferry operator’s house that comprised Whites Ferry, Maryland. A taut loop of steel cable was stretched across the river at the waterline and anchored by concrete counterweights at each shore. Steel wheels attached to the upstream side of the ferry traveled inside this cable loop as the ferry trudged back and forth across the river. The cable kept the boat from being pushed downstream by the current during its traverse.

The ferry was churning toward them, a featureless gray barge with chipped and rusted metal railings on the sides and swinging gates at each end. The pilothouse and engines looked like a little tugboat grafted onto the middle of the ferry’s downstream side. Miles counted eleven cars in rows three-wide, all pointed toward the concrete boat ramp that formed the dock on the Virginia shore. “Hey, we lucked out,” Des said. “We’ll make it on the next trip.”

Miles surveyed the cars in front of them that formed an arc down to the boat ramp; they were tenth in line. The ferry pilot eased the throttle and the boat decelerated. He stubbed out a cigarette and threw the throttle into reverse, then neutral, and the ferry stopped as its bow nudged the boat ramp. The pilot threaded through cars to the bow, flipped a metal loading ramp down onto the concrete with a bang, swung the gate open, and shuffled down the metal ramp. He pointed to the cars in an ordered sequence and they filed off, heading up the boat ramp and past the waiting cars on Whites Ferry Road.

Des joined the procession of cars driving down the hill and onto the ferry, which departed for Maryland less than a minute after the gate closed behind them. With the car’s engine still running and its air-conditioner blowing, Miles didn’t immediately realize that they’d begun moving. It was only when the view through the windshield evolved that he looked out Des’s window and saw the folds and eddies in the brown water and the scattered armada of sticks and debris pushing downstream with the current.

“River law!” Des sang out, eyebrows rising behind her purple shades.

“What is river law?” Miles said, drawing his focus back inside the car.

Kelsey smiled resignedly. “There is none. River law is no law. We’re not in Virginia or Maryland, so the rules don’t apply. That’s always been our theory, anyway.”

“Kelsey, can you find my pipe under your seat? It’s in a shoebox.”

Miles slid his legs aside while Kelsey bent at the waist and foraged under the front seat. Reaching deeper she touched cardboard and pulled the box forward. It snagged on a tangle of unused seat belts. “Jeez, Des. Hang on a second,” she said, unsnarling the belts.

Miles admired the taut curve of Kelsey’s back beneath the wrinkles of her lavender linen shirt as she twisted the shoebox out. She flipped the top off the box and rummaged around, then pulled out a plastic disposable lighter and a wooden box. It was smaller than a pack of cigarettes and the color of ash wood, smooth and polished from handling, with a symbol that looked something like the combination of a scythe and an arrow etched on its face. A retractable lid on one of the shorter ends gave access to the contents of the box.

“Hey, a dugout! Very elegant.”

“Thanks,” Des said. “I found it at a flea market in Arlington a few weeks ago.”

Kelsey slid the wooden lid partly off one end of the dugout, and the tail end of a small ceramic pipe popped out. She retracted the lid further to reveal a second compartment. The smaller shaft held the pipe and the larger compartment the marijuana. “Where from?” she said.

“Jamaican,” Des said. “Timmy gave me an ounce last week. Let’s spark one up.”

Kelsey removed the pipe, tilted and tapped the dugout, and pressed the shallow pipe bowl into the side of the stash compartment to fill it. She withdrew the loaded pipe and closed the lid over both compartments with her thumb. Des looked to the right, where a pickup truck and another car had followed them on board to complete their row, screening them from the pilothouse. The driver of the pickup truck had tilted his seat back and closed his eyes. There were no cars in the final row behind them. “Better roll up your window a bit,” she said, rolling her own window to an inch or two from the top. “We don’t want to look like a chimney.”

Kelsey leaned forward to drop below the windows, then flicked the lighter and played it over the pipe bowl, drawing steadily. The flame drew down toward the bottom of the bowl as an encircling orange glow rose toward the surface. When the glow subsided, she exhaled and passed the ensemble to Miles.

He tapped the pipe against his boot to empty it, then ducked down to refill it for a long hit. A bud caught fire and he nodded in approval, exhaling with a cough as he passed the pipe to Des. “That’s good shit,” he croaked. Des dropped down and Miles popped up, eyeing their perimeter. No one was watching. A small cloud of smoke was forming in the car and drifting toward the tops of the windows and the open tailgate window. He looked out over the water upstream. They were halfway across the river.

Des surfaced, gave him a conspiratorial look, and handed him the dugout, pipe, and lighter again. He forwarded them to Kelsey but she pressed them back, and in the exchange the pipe fell to the floor and skidded under the seat. Miles rocked forward into a crouch and twisted to reach for it, and his back pushed the beams closer to the steering column. “Got it,” he said, thrusting his arm further under the seat and grasping the pipe. And instantly the car lurched, then started rolling backward.

“Shit, we’re in reverse!” Des said.

“Shift back!” Miles said, but the gearshift arm was pinned against the beams. He reached around them and tried to pull them away from the steering column as Des leaned into them from the driver’s side.

“Hit the brakes!” Kelsey said.

Des stomped her foot onto the pedal and the car accelerated backward. “Shit!” she yelled. She shifted her foot, stomped again, and missed both pedals as the wagon crashed into the gate behind them. The gate held for a split-second before the gate-post sheared in two at a rusty spot near its base. Carrying the snapped-off post with it, the gate swung wide over the water. The wagon’s rear wheels powered clear of the ferry and its undercarriage dropped quickly to the deck. Momentum kept the front wheels turning for another foot before the wagon stopped for an instant, its fulcrum defined. The paving stones prevailed, and the wagon’s tail fell with a powerful splash into the churning water behind the ferry. A wave coursed over the tailgate and into the car. The ferry’s transom scraped forward along the wagon’s undercarriage, hit and spun the front tires, gave a parting smack to the underside of the front bumper, and then left the wagon half-submerged in its swirling wake. The car’s front end tilted skyward as its tail sunk quickly under the weight of the stones. Water surged up to and over the dashboard.

“Windows!” Miles yelled, reaching past Kelsey to claw at the passenger door. Kelsey groped through the chest-high water until she found the handle, then spun the window open. The river poured in, knocking her back toward Miles. Her left temple struck the edge of a floating beam, and Miles saw a stream of blood flow across her cheekbone. Only a sliver of air remained between the car’s ceiling and the rising tide. Heart pounding, Miles tilted his head to capture a breath from the vanishing air pocket as water shot to the ceiling. It tasted like smoke. A counter-wave from his left pushed the beams into his ribs and he felt an arm against his lower leg, then a biting pain in his ankle. Underwater now, he twisted blindly toward the window and spread his arms. His right hand brushed Kelsey and found the frame of the submerged window. He opened his eyes and saw brown water, his own pale arm, the window frame, and Kelsey’s legs receding. Past the windshield, he saw the front end of the wagon drop below the surface.

He gripped the edges of the frame with both hands and pulled his head through the window. When his shoulders reached the opening he looked up to see light refracting through water, and he realized the wagon was sinking tail-first toward the bottom of the river. Fuck! He tried to pull himself past the frame but something held his ankle. He kicked with both legs and his chest began to burn. He could move his left foot a few inches, but whatever held his ankle would not let go. The water grew colder and darker.

He let himself float for a second and felt the chilled water flow past his chest and forehead as he stared upward at the receding light and the pressure mounted in his ears. His upper arms flexed violently against the window frame as his legs flailed. Three seconds. Four. Five. Rest. Can’t rest. Lungs burning. Motherfucker! He pulled his head back into the car and twisted toward his ankle, which felt like it was trapped somewhere under the front seat. All of the beams were askew now, floating randomly inside the falling wagon. Two of them were wedged against the underside of the dash, and he drove his shoulder into them as he groped downward to find what was holding his leg. Rest for an instant. Reach around the beams! No use. He twisted back to grab the window frame, then yanked fiercely against the vise that gripped his leg. Once. Again. Again! Goddammit! Lungs on fire. Exploding now. Hold. One. Two… release. The fire subsided as he exhaled a shower of bubbles. Don’t blow through your straw, Miles. He almost giggled when he realized he’d accidentally drawn a small stream of water into his mouth. He swallowed it, then instinctively took a full breath, and the river filled his lungs. I’m dying. The dugout floated across his field of vision, a strange symbol on its face. One last trickle of bubbles, then a crushing pain he could not expel. Waiting for the bus and Carlin said cry me a river. The tension on his ankle slackened momentarily as the wagon’s tail found the ancient riverbed. I said unchain my heart. His irises relaxed and his fingers unfolded toward the fading light.

Chapter 4

Candles

Sunday, October 22, 1995

Vin examined the bottles on the medicine rack in the pantry. “Doxycycline. Ivermectin. Diazepam.” Then “Gentamicin. Nicky Hayes, DVM. Spray affected area twice per day for 7-10 days. 04/19/96.” He shook the bottle to feel its contents slosh around – over half full. Must be part of Nicky’s stash from her residency at Tufts. He took the bottle back to the foyer.

Kelsey had stepped further into the room during his absence, and she smiled weakly at his approach. From a discreet distance she’d been studying the photo of Lee and K. Elgin on the table top. “That looks like an old shot of Great Falls,” she said. “Could I take a closer look?”

Her voice sounded thinner, almost strained. “Sure,” Vin said, handing it to her. “I found it behind some planks in an old wall.” He felt a transient annoyance that he’d left it lying face up on the table. Why does that bother me, he wondered. Was he already feeling attached to Lee and the girl? Or was it because he knew nothing about this woman standing in his house?

“This is interesting,” Kelsey said, her normal voice returning. “I’m a photographer and I’ve taken lots of pictures of the Falls. You can tell that this wasn’t shot from the observation deck on the Maryland side. It has a slightly different vantage point.” Vin stepped around to her shoulder as she centered the photograph and focused intently. “This must have been taken from the end of the old path across Olmsted Island.”

“We just moved here, and we haven’t been out to Great Falls yet,” he admitted. “We’ve started biking the towpath on Saturday afternoons, so maybe next weekend...” He gently took the photo from her and returned it to the table, feeling strangely relieved that she hadn’t flipped it over to read the names on the back.

“You should take the walkway out to the observation deck,” she said. “It’s spectacular.”

Trying to redirect the conversation, he held out the Gentamicin. “I think this is what Nicky wanted me to give you.” As she scanned the label, he processed her previous words. “Are you a professional photographer?”

She glanced up and nodded, then told him that most of her work involved events like weddings, graduations, and Bar Mitzvahs. When Vin said he and Nicky were getting married in the D.C. area next fall and needed a photographer, she asked if they’d chosen a date. He shook his head; both the date and place were still up in the air. But they wanted to be married outdoors, at a venue where they could hold both the wedding and the reception. Kelsey told him popular venues were booked a year in advance, and photographers were quickly slotted into those dates. She already had a few weddings booked for next fall.

“Right,” he said glumly, realizing how much remained unplanned. “Do you have a card?” She had one in the car, so he walked her out to the driveway and watched her retrieve her purse from a charcoal-gray Audi with dark tinted glass. She fished out a business-card holder and handed him a card, telling him to schedule a visit to her studio. He waved as she drove off, then looked at the card in his hand. The address was a listing on River Road, like practically every other business in the small suburb of Potomac… maybe in the same strip mall as the hardware store he’d visited today. In the corner, he read “Kelsey Ainge, Partner.” The studio name was printed in white reversed on forest green. “Thomas, Ainge Photography.” He read the tagline below it twice to make sure he’d read it correctly. It said “Today Made Timeless.”

***

By the time Nicky’s car pulled into the driveway a little after four, Vin had drilled the required holes and connected the limbs of the driftwood letters with bolts.

“Gimme an N!”, he said, holding up the N with both hands as she emerged from the car.

Nicky laughed. “Looks like you already got one.” He could hear the fatigue in her voice as she approached.

“Welcome home,” he said, kissing her lightly on the lips. “Long day, considering you were expecting a day off.”

She exhaled and told him that her day had started off with a cat with a compound fracture, and the pace had accelerated from there. She felt lucky to escape by four. How was his day? “Kind of interesting.” He told her about his visit to the old shed on the hillside and his discovery of the drill and photograph behind the planks. They walked inside and headed for the living-room couch. Vin let Randy in from the deck as Nicky read Lee Fisher’s note.

“Swains Lock. We were there yesterday,” she said. “And ‘I may be buried along with the others’? What a creepy thought.” She examined the photo, turning it over to read the notation on the back. “K. Elgin is the girl?”

“That’s my guess. Assuming the guy is Lee Fisher.”

“She reminds me of someone, but I can’t think who.”

“I forgot to mention…the dog-fight lady came by this afternoon to pick up the meds. Turns out she’s a professional photographer. Kelsey Ainge. She handles weddings and events. I got her card, for what it’s worth.”

“Hmm,” Nicky said. “You never know.”

Vin put his legs up on the table and asked when they were due at the Tuckermans. “Seven,” Nicky said, rocking back into the cushion beside him, “but first we can open your presents and nap for a bit. Then you get to meet the natives.”

***

Sitting on a bone-colored leather couch, Vin watched Doug Tuckerman lean forward in his armchair to carefully balance a slab of soft cheese on an overmatched cracker. Doug interrupted his sermon to wash the cracker down with scotch on the rocks. He’d been expounding on the obstacles his firm faced in its efforts to convert idled farmland on the periphery of the city into condominiums and office parks. Doug’s wife Abby said something about schools and Nicky asked what she thought. No one wanted to send their kids to public schools in D.C., Abby said. Only the lobbyists and the lawyers needed to work downtown, and they could afford to live in Georgetown and underwrite the city’s blue-blood private schools.

Vin liked Abby right away. She had an open, earnest manner and an animated mien. Brown eyes and light brown hair that swayed and caught the light and made him think of horses. Her husband was representative of the forty-something parents Vin saw prowling around Potomac – large-boned and a bit jowly, with a helmet of dark hair turning gray at the temples. His sprawling belly was held in check by a blue oxford shirt tucked into pleated linen pants. Doug swirled the cubes in his scotch glass with stubby fingers while Abby tried to draw Vin into the conversation by asking how he and Nicky had met.

“It was at the end of last summer, on Cape Cod,” he said. “Some mutual friends of ours were having a party at their summer house in West Falmouth over Labor Day weekend.” It had been foggy on Sunday morning, Vin remembered, and he and Randy had caught up to a group of friends heading out along the beach to go clamming in the marsh. Nicky was with them, wearing a cotton sweater and shorts. She had long legs and a quick smile, and her eyes were bluer than the slate-blue water.

Nicky picked up the thread. “I was just starting the last year of my residency at Tufts, so I didn’t have much free time, but he was persistent.” She smirked at Vin, who deflected the expression with open palms and addressed Abby.

“I was smitten. We dated while Nicky took her exams and finished up her residency, and then we spent six weeks in late summer hiking in Wyoming and Montana.” Nicky mentioned that they’d gotten engaged on a hike in Glacier National Park. “Sitting on a rock outcropping with our feet dangling over a six-hundred-foot drop,” Vin added. “I told her I would jump if she said no.”

“You did not.”

“When’s the wedding?” Doug asked.

Vin looked at Nicky and she raised her eyebrows, allowing him to answer. “Sometime next fall,” he said. “We still need to pick a date and a place, but we’ll get married here. My parents are in Maine, Nicky’s folks live in Arizona now, and our friends and siblings are scattered around, so the D.C. area seems like as good a place as anywhere.”

“Makes sense, if you’re doing all the planning,” Doug said.

Nicky elbowed Vin. “Hear that, honey? You can do all the planning!”

“Rejoining the work force suddenly seems a lot more alluring,” he said, fending off her elbow as Abby laughed.

After refilling drinks, Doug steered Vin out to the deck, where he laid pork tenderloins on a flaming grill and asked about Vin’s career in Boston. Vin listened to the chortle of water flowing in a fountain beyond the backyard pool, the perimeter of which was illuminated by landscaping lights. He sipped his beer and gave Doug the basics: he’d been employee number fourteen at a software startup that developed and sold network-traffic analysis tools. Their products helped maintain the computer networks that had become ubiquitous in large organizations during the previous decade. The company was approaching breakeven when Weiler Networks offered to buy them out and the Board decided to sell. So now Weiler was digesting the company and the shots were being called from Silicon Valley.

Had Vin been laid off?

“No, I could have stayed – I just didn’t want to work for those guys. We used to call them Rottweiler.” He explained that Rottweiler wanted to retain engineering and sales, and since his little group wrote QA software and test scripts, it was considered part of engineering. But he was ready to move on and he knew that one of his employees could handle his job.

“I thought you techy guys got hooked on that startup culture,” Doug said, wrestling the sizzling tenderloins. “You know, building gizmos, working weird hours, playing ping-pong while you strategize…”

“I don’t know,” Vin said. “It all sounds good… building a product that makes it easier for our users to get stuff done.” The crackle of the fire and the smell of grilled pork were creating a soothing ambience. He took another sip and felt his shoulders relax. “But then I would think about what my job actually was,” he said. “Manage the process of writing software that tries to find flaws in a product whose purpose is to find problems with computer networks. It all seems second or third-order, relative to other issues in the world.”

Doug asked if that meant he was changing careers and Vin said he didn’t know. He’d convinced his old boss to put his name on the downsizing list so he got the same severance package that Rottweiler was offering the employees they axed. And he’d been able to exchange some of his stock options for Rottweiler stock, which he immediately sold. Together that amounted to a few months worth of salary. If he couldn’t find something else, he had a standing offer from Rottweiler. They wanted to start using the Web for customer support, so they needed someone to build a database that would track customer questions and problems, and then they needed some code written to glue the database to their website.

“It doesn’t sound like you’re too thrilled about it.”

Vin leaned his elbows on the deck railing and gazed at the tree silhouettes beyond the pool and the fountain. The world extended tens of thousands of miles beyond the dark horizon of Doug’s backyard and his fingers had scarcely touched it. Maybe he could help people in Africa get connected to the Internet, he said. Or build a website for online journalists. There had to be something more meaningful, he thought, than what he’d seen and done so far.

“Maybe you could save the whales,” Doug said, draining his scotch. He started to laugh while swallowing, triggering a spasm of coughs, so he bent at the waist and pounded his chest. Vin turned to watch him cough and sputter.

“Or maybe I could look for Emmert Reed’s albino mule.”

“How’s that?” Doug said after regaining his breath.

“Just an expression.”

“I think the pork is ready to go.” Doug twisted the tenderloins off the grill and led Vin back inside.

Abby and Nicky were laying out grilled asparagus and roasted new potatoes with dill in a kitchen studded with granite counters, cherry cabinets, and brushed-metal appliances that went on forever. Vin was asked to open two bottles of wine and take them to the dining room, which crouched nearby with low-lit amber walls, pleated paper shades, and a cherry table and chairs. How the other half lives, he thought with a sigh.

“Cheers,” Doug said when they were all seated, raising his glass. “To new friends.” Their glasses clinked. During dinner Nicky asked the Tuckermans about their children. Marshall was nine and Whitney eleven. Vin feigned interest in their precocious talents in soccer, piano, and chess. When the conversation ebbed, Nicky excused herself and retreated to the kitchen. The lights dimmed and she reappeared, carrying Vin’s candle-lit birthday cake toward the table. They all sang happy birthday, and Vin obediently blew out the candles.

“Coconut,” he said. “My favorite. The last half of my thirties is off to a decadent start.” He cut slices and passed the plates around. As Abby poured coffee, he turned toward Doug. “I just remembered something I meant to ask when we were talking about the wedding.”

“Shoot,” Doug said through a mouthful of cake.

“Exactly,” Vin said, smiling. “We need someone to do some shooting for us at the wedding. I ran into a photographer on the towpath yesterday…”

“You mean your dog ran into her dog,” Nicky interjected.

“Right. That’s how I meet a lot of people. Anyway, she mentioned that she does weddings and other events, and that she has a studio in Potomac. I was wondering if you had an opinion or had heard anything about her work.”

“What’s the name of the studio?” Abby said, retaking her seat.