The Final Judgment Read Online Free PDF Page A

in Tucson’s Latino community, who is also very qualified, and the senator who recommended him is quite senior on the Senate Finance
    Committee. If one of you has some problem, it will save the President from having to choose .... “ No, Caroline had answered them both, there was nothing. She checked her watch. Three forty-five. In a little more than an hour, Fards would call. She gazed up at the house. No, she decided, she was not quite ready to go inside. Jutting from the beach was a narrow wooden dock, stretching out into the ocean until it was deep enough for docking. Caroline walked barefoot across the wooden planks to where she had tied her rented sailboat, pulled a bottled beer from an ice chest in the hull, and sat with her legs dangling over the bow. She sipped the beer—tart on her tongue, cool in her hand—and idly watched the beads of condensation skitter down the sides of the bottle. The beer was left over from yesterday, when she had packed the ice chest with bread and cheese, beer and mineral water, and set sail in the cat-boat for Tarpaulin Cove in the Elizabeths, as she once had when she was fourteen. Though Caroline had not sailed the sound for years, she did not need a nautical chart: she remembered each bell and buoy precisely. The morning of her sail had been clear; the day—water and sky—was vivid shades of blue. Caroline had grinned into the wind. She was a nature sensualist, she knew—sun and sea exhilarated her, rain depressed her. In this, she was like her mother had been. She sailed for the lighthouse where Tarpaulin Cove lay. Docking the boat, Caroline swam to the beach, where she fell asleep in the sun. Only the lapping of the tide at her feet had awakened her. As she sailed back, a light skein of fog scudded along the water, and the wind shifted in the Middle Ground. Caroline had fought it a little through the choppy waters, edgy. There had been no real danger. But the pull of memory was strong .... Caroline turned to the house again. It sat near the bluff, a sprawling clapboard dwelling with
    views on all sides, an amalgam of Cape architecture and gables, surrounded by roses and a white picket ‘fence. The earliest section had been built in the late 1600s, then hauled by oxen two centuries later from the middle of Edgartown to Eel Pond. Her father had added the rest of the house and, somewhat later, the roses. “They grow well near the water,” he had said to the child Caroline. “Like you.” And yet, when she had rented the house from its owners, they had associated the name Masters only with Caroline herself. They did not know her family; Caroline had said simply that she was “familiar with the house.” And every room in it, she did not say, has memories for me. When she climbed the steps to the bluff, entering the house, the grandfather clock read four-twenty. Forty minutes. She walked through the alcove past the bedroom where Betty and Larry had stayed that last summer; through the beamed dining room, where their family had dined by candlelight, her father at the head of the table; and then into the sunny bedroom she could only think of as her mother’s. Entering the master bath, she imagined a makeup mirror that was no longer there, saw once more her last, enduring image of her mother in life—striking and petite, peering intently at her reflection as she applied mascara with her left hand and imagined the evening ahead .... But the bathroom mirror reflected only Caroline, a woman six years older than the woman in the makeup mirror would ever become. A lawyer, perhaps soon a judge, who looked little like her mother. Except, Caroline allowed with a slight smile, that she had her mother’s vanity. The rest, to Caroline’s regret, seemed to come from her father. The height—at five eight, Caroline was five inches taller than her mother. The auburn-tinted’black hair, usually subdued into straightness by brush and dryer. An aquiline face that her Yankee forebears might have described as