Age of Consent Read Online Free PDF Page A

the shadows move. Handing her a suitcase, the driver says, “So you grew up here. What made you want to leave?”
    She laughs, squinting out into the horizon. A breeze brings the swampy scent of frog spawn. “The answer to that question is exactly what I’m going to explain in court tomorrow,” she says. She smiles, then gives the driver some money.
    “Court! You don’t look like the sort of lady that ends up in trouble with the law.”
    “I’m not in trouble with the law,” she says. She thinks to herself, however, that she might be in for some kind of trouble.
    —
    THE ROOM IS a tidy square around an antique bed. On the table beside the bed are a pewter lamp and a mahogany stand that holds a handwritten menu for the day. For breakfast she can have “colonial style” eggs that come on a slab of brown bread made from a recipe traced back to the days of Jamestown settlers. For supper she can have peanut soup and shepherd’s pie and chilled salad. There is wine and cocktails and various craft beers. It says on the menu that Maryland’s state drink is milk. Plain milk, though the inn has a special cocoa they make with this milk. Bobbie finds the innkeeper in the hallway and requests supper in her room.
    “The pie?” says the innkeeper brightly. Her name is Mrs. Campbell. She wears an apricot dress and a blousy apron and seems far too well turned out to be doing any actual work. But Bobbie can smell cooking downstairs and the hallway is spotless, with gleaming cherrywood floors and a brass candelabra filled with fat cranberry candles, all with fresh wicks. Every piece of furniture is polished. Even the fronds on the houseplants and the waxy tulips that fill a bowl by the front door are immaculate, shining. She hasn’t seen a housekeeper and she wonders if Mrs. Campbell spends all day cleaning, and how she seems to have the only house in all of rural Maryland without a single housefly.
    “There’s a gazebo out back if you want to have your supper there,” Mrs. Campbell says. She has a breathless, nervous way of speaking to Bobbie, the curls on her butter-blond hair rattling with her words. “We can turn on the lights. It’s really quite nice—”
    But Bobbie prefers to take dinner in her room. From her table by the window, her chair angled to overlook the valley, she sits, eating her dinner quietly. She detects the moon in the darkening sky. She watches the stars slip into focus. Years back, beneath this same sky, she’d lie on grass still warm from the heat of the day and watch the stars with a boy named Dan. Now Dan lives in a house with his own family, probably not far away, and she knows that had she rented a car she would find it impossible not to drive over to him, which is the one thing she must not do. Also, the only thing she wants to do.
    —
    SHE IS THE first witness tomorrow at nine in the morning. She has reviewed every aspect of her statement so it is fresh. This afternoon, on the train from New York, she had a long talk with the prosecuting attorney. The details of that conversation still swim in her mind, as does the knowledge she will see the people involved in the case over the next several days. Every single one of them.
    Decades ago she told herself she would never come back, never even look back. Now here she is.
    She unpacks her pumps, smeared with polish and wrapped in plastic to keep them from staining her clothes. She arranges her dress on one of the padded hangers in the antique wardrobe, a giant walnut structure with an imbedded mirror surrounded by carved leaves, inside of which is a striped Hudson’s Bay blanket and a small lacy pillow stuffed with potpourri. She puts a few things into the Queen Anne–style chest of drawers, noticing they are lined with fresh paper and yet more potpourri, tiny bundles of scent sewn into silk sachets and tucked into corners.
    Everywhere in the inn are sprigs of dried roses, little bonnets of flowers in vases, framed Civil War prints. The place