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celebrating summer vacation, freedom, life.
    Envious, Madeleine wondered what it was like to be as carefree as the kite fliers were, as the sailors must be. What was it like to simply enjoy the moment without always having a sad tug of memory?
    Steering the car around the bend, the wind whipping through her short, sun-streaked blond hair, Madeleine tried to remember a time when she hadn’t felt torn. Vaguely, she could recall going to kindergarten, her pretty mother holding her firmly by the hand, both of her parents smiling and making a fuss as their little girl went off to school. She could remember them picking her up at the end of that first session and taking her for a banana split at La Forge, Charlotte and Oliver Sloane praising their daughter for her important accomplishment. She had felt very special, very secure, very loved.
    But by the time she went to first grade, things were different. Madeleine would often hear her mother and father’s fights, ending with maternal tears and paternal trips to the study and the solace of the amber liquid that filled the crystal decanters on the butler’s table.
    And then, just after school got out for the summer, Mommywas gone. Just like that. After another day of Mommy and Daddy fighting.
    Fourteen years. Through most of grammar school, all of high school, and now her first two years at Salve Regina. Madeleine had ached for her mother, telling herself that her mother would never have left her if she could have helped it. Madeleine would never allow herself to think that her mother would have gone away willingly. Something or someone had taken her mother from her.
    But, even more than not entertaining the notion that her mother could have abandoned her, Madeleine could not for a minute let herself think that her father had anything to do with her mother’s disappearance. Madeleine knew she was in a minority. Most Newporters thought Oliver Sloane had killed his wife.
    In the fall, when it was time to go back to class, the second-graders in the school yard had been eager to repeat for Madeleine’s benefit the conversations they had heard at family dinner tables all over town.
    “Your father never really loved your mother.”
    “Your father drinks too much.”
    “Your father killed your mother.”
    At first she had been wounded and embarrassed, then she became defiant, finally she pushed everyone away. Except for her father and Aunt Agatha. They both needed her.
    But those relationships were problematic as well. After Charlotte disappeared, neither of her closest relatives liked or trusted the other.

    The convertible turned into the entrance and rode straight through the peeling gates. Massive rhododendrons and topiary bushes which had long ago lost their expertly carved animal shapes lined the long gravel road that led to Aunt Agatha’s rambling, twenty-eight-room Victorian “cottage.” Madeleine counted eleven cats sunning themselves on the overgrown lawn.
    Parking her car beneath the porte cochere, Madeleine saw Finola standing at the front doorway.
    “Who’s that?” Finola called, squinting to see.
    “It’s me, Finola. Madeleine. What are you doing there, waiting like a spider?”
    “I’m guarding your aunt. There are reporters and such trying to muscle their way in here.”
    Madeleine knew that the housekeeper had to be exaggerating about the “muscling,” but she was relieved that Aunt Agatha had Finola to run interference for her. The local newspaper and television people had been trying to get to Madeleine and her father, too.
    Finola stood aside as Madeleine climbed the steps that led to the grand entry foyer. The young woman’s nostrils flared at the smell of cat urine wafting from the once plush, royal red carpeting.
    “Your aunt is in the deck room.”
    The frayed shades were pulled down tight, forbidding any of the glorious sun to come streaming through the many glass doors and windows designed for enjoying the sweeping views of the water. The heat