The Last Summer of the Camperdowns Read Online Free PDF Page B

realized the puppy was missing.
    “Honestly, Riddle, one thing I asked of you. All you had to do was watch the puppy. Where could she be?” My mother couldn’t conceal her annoyance with me as we searched for Vera, conducting a thorough sweep of the inside and the outside of the house, guests be damned. From the foyer my father started to speak before stopping himself. He knew better than to interfere with my mother’s relationship with her dogs, watching in silence as we headed back outside.
    From where I crawled among the dense undergrowth in the wet wilderness outcropping at the outer limits of our property, I could see my mother standing at the top of the dune overlooking the ocean. She had her hand to her forehead, an awning for her eyes as she surveyed the empty beach below for any sign of the missing Vera.
    I stood up, my palm gripping a fallen log for support. “Shit!” I said, as the top of my head skimmed along the surface of an encroaching bush and I realized that my hair was congested with nettles. I was officially at the end of my ability to absorb setbacks. That’s when I walked into a sticky web roughly the size of Tanzania. In its center, a monstrous black and yellow spider indicated its intention to bind, torture and kill me.
    “Vera, where are you?” Darting into the relative safety of a tiny clearing, I tried to banish my growing suspicion that I was a complete and utter fraud, a hopeless girly-girl in combatant’s gear. I searched my immediate surroundings in a mindless effort to somehow prove my manhood. Pissing seemed out of the question—I lacked the equipment. In desperation, I spit on the ground. A grasshopper sprang from the long grass and landed on my shoulder. I sprinted toward my mother, who was already walking in my direction.
    “This is terrible,” she lamented. “Awful! Where is she? Could she have wandered across the road and over to Gin’s?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe.” Gin Whiffet owned the former Devlin estate, vast lush acres of woodland trail, open pasture, wet marshland and dense forest. The Devlins had bred some of the finest thoroughbred horses in the country on that land. Part of what was now Gin’s property extended to the point at the end of the road where the beachfront met “civilian” ground. He operated a private riding stable for elite equestrian students who came from around the world for advanced instruction in eventing, dressage, jumping and steeplechase.
    Gin and my mother had been friends since childhood. She treated his land as if it was her own, and for his part, he seemed to enjoy her abuse and her trespass as well as her cultish celebrity. Gin taught me early the true meaning of reflected glory.
    When I was growing up, people said that along with being one of the country’s great celluloid beauties, my mother was the finest horsewoman in New England. It was a clear case of form triumphing over function—an aesthetic victory for Greer, who longed to be taken seriously as an equestrian without doing any of the work. She never competed in a show ring but created the impression that she did. Her real achievement lay in her talent for looking good on a horse, glamorous for sure, and sophisticated. Remote, detached, stylish—she made Audrey Hepburn seem like Minnie Pearl. How she detested naïveté! If Cole Porter’s music could be taught to ride a horse, it would capture some of what my mother evinced in the saddle.
    W E WALKED BACK TO the house together, not talking, sand filling up my running shoes, the specter of Vera’s disappearance becoming a sadder reality as I tried unsuccessfully to banish thoughts of whatever hideous fate she might have met as a result of my negligence.
    “Camp!” my mother called to my father through the screen door at the front of the house. “Riddle and I are going to Gin’s to see if Vera found her way across the road.”
    “If you’re not home in an hour I’ll alert the Coast Guard,” my father said, aides at