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the once luxurious love chamber deteriorated as if love itself was forgotten, and only sadness remained.
    Wilma said Lucinda had been a late bride, that she had met Shamas Greenlaw when she was working in Seattle as a doctor’s receptionist. They had married there, where Shamas owned a machine-tool company. Soon after the wedding he sold his Seattle apartment and they moved to Molena Point, to his old family home. Wilma said the handsome, charming couple had launched immediately into a busy social life, that for nearly five years they had circled brightly among Molena Point’s parties and social gatherings, its gallery openings and benefits and small concerts. But then Shamas grew restless; the limited society of the small village began to bore him.
    He bought a yacht, a sixty-foot catamaran in which they could take their friends on interesting junkets. Money seemed in ample supply—both Lucinda and Shamas had new cars every year. Surely the clothes in the photographs on the mantel looked expensive. The yacht parties, Dulcie thought, must have been happy times—until Shamas’s shipboard affairs became apparent.
    Lucinda shared her uncomfortable memories with few people, but she trusted Wilma. Dulcie’s housemate and Lucinda saw a good deal of each other, particularly since Shamas’s death. The last two weeks Wilma had made every effort to be supportive, to help Lucinda through this hard time. During their quiet meals together, Lucinda had opened up to Wilma, expressing her pain at the unhappy marriage, describing how, on the yacht, Shamas would slip out of their cabin in the small hours, returning just before dawn, imagining that she slept.
    Lucinda had never confronted Shamas, had never protested his affairs. She simply quit going with him, choosing to stay home alone.
    â€œGiving up,” Dulcie told Wilma. Wilma agreed. That was what made Dulcie sad. “Why didn’t she fight back? Why didn’t she leave him, change her life, make a new life?” Dulcie had hissed. “She just gave in—to exactly what Shamas handed her.”
    Dulcie didn’t understand why Shamas hadn’t loved Lucinda,had treated her so shabbily when she had been so beautiful, when she had such a gentle warmth. Lucinda was still beautiful to Dulcie, like an aged porcelain doll, so frail one would not want to press a paw hard against the old lady’s cheek for fear of tearing her fine, powdery skin, so delicate that Dulcie would hesitate to leap hard into Lucinda’s lap, for fear she might fracture a bone.
    Yet Lucinda was not too frail to walk miles along the shore each morning or to climb the steep slope of Hellhag Hill. Sometimes Dulcie followed her on those lonely predawn jaunts, trotting well behind her, staying, for some reason she could not explain, warily out of sight.
    Lucinda must have been miserable all those years while Shamas played fast and loose. She told Wilma she had almost left him a year ago, when he first turned down a rich offer on the old house. But she hadn’t left, hadn’t found the courage.
    Brock, Lavell & Hicks, a local developer, had begun buying up the property on the Greenlaws’ block. By the time they approached Shamas, they had purchased all the houses across the street, planning a small, exclusive shopping paseo. Eager to acquire the Greenlaws’ two lots, they made Shamas a generous offer. Lucinda had wanted badly to sell, to go into an easily maintained condo, but Shamas refused, perhaps out of family sentiment, perhaps simply to thwart Lucinda. He reminded her frequently that the old house was his family home, though before they moved to Molena Point from Seattle he had rented it out for many years; there was no family nearby to use it—Shamas’s cousins had long ago moved across the country to North Carolina.
    The relatives were all returning now, flocking to Molena Point to quarrel over Shamas’s leavings—while Shamas himself