West Shore

Chapter 10: Recoil Spring

"You knew he'd choke," Lance said.

Lance Ellery was sitting cross-legged on the floorboards of the gazebo at the river, with a plate of cold cantaloupe balanced on one knee. Eight sides, stained glass in the windows, the breeze coming through off the water and out the far side.

The sun had come down far enough to go gold. Out over the far bank the egrets were coming in to roost. The party was still running, somewhere behind the trees; the music and the laughing made it this far with most of themselves worn off by everything in between.

The unpleasantness was over. Will Thorne had been sent off the property.

Jason sat on the bench at the far side of the gazebo, and from there he had the best of it: the long stretch of lawn down to the water's edge.

Past the house and its gardens, the property kept going — a private course, a stable block, a training ground the family used, an aviary, two ponds the river ran into and out of, and a wood at the north end that nobody walked in but them. It had its own roads and its own water and its own boundary stones, and no history of asking the county for anything. Not a house with land around it: a jurisdiction with better roads than the county's.

Jason Vance would come into all of it. He didn't look like a man who had won anything that afternoon.

He had a brass casing in one hand, and he walked it back and forth across his knuckles.

"Will puts the spring in ahead of the guide rod whenever he reassembles a pistol," he said. "I noticed it a couple of years ago. He hasn't changed it. It's an old habit by now."

It was a small thing to be careless about, unless somebody was timing you.

Lance laughed. "That's why you stood out there the whole time like you were waiting on a bus." He chewed, and swallowed. "How were you that sure, though? What if he'd put it together right?"

Jason set the casing down on the boards beside his knee and turned his head, looking off down the path that ran under the trees toward the house. He didn't answer.

Lance waited him out. Then he went back to the melon.

Where the path came out of the shade, a boy in a white shirt had stopped walking.

A girl came up the path behind him — sundress, both hands flat against the skirt to keep it clear of the weeds — talking before she reached him and still talking when she did. The boy stood and listened. Whatever he gave back was short.

Then she looked up toward the gazebo, and her face changed. She took a step back, and then another.

She said one more thing to the boy, short, and started away with her head down, and nobody hurried her.

Jason came off the boards and crossed the grass. He hadn't put on socks.

"Mr. Vance—" she got out.

It went no further than that. She was already ten feet further along with her head down, and she kept going until the trees had her.

Evan Mercer turned and inclined his head, the same as always. "Ted sent me up about dinner," he said. "In the house or out here — either one's easy, and the terrace is already laid if you'd rather be outside."

Jason didn't answer him. He reached up and put one fingertip on the scratch above Evan's left eyebrow, at the hairline, one of the marks the wall had put on him when Will's round came apart on the brick. It was shallow. It had closed to a scab already.

Evan's eyes went past him, over his shoulder, to the path. The shade under the trees was empty.

"Were you scared?" Jason said.

Evan shook his head. "I wasn't worried, sir. You'd have handled it."

The corner of his mouth moved, not by enough to be read. He put his hands back in his pockets and started for the house at the pace of a man with nowhere to be.

"Come on," he said. "I'm hungry."