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over to him and took a swig from the bottle. Joel, sitting next to Vince, stared at his feet.
    “We heard some terrible news,” Jen piped up. “The Nashes aren’t coming down this year. Mrs. Nash has had a stroke.”
    “The last of the Old Guard,” Adam commented quietly.
    The Nashes were our oldest residents, contemporaries of Drake Trent. Their passing would indeed signal the end of a chapter.
    Micky said, “It’s the only summer I can remember that they haven’t come down. Not since…”
    Not since Cosmo walked off into the sunset.
    “So this is everybody who was there that summer?” Brett inquired. He planted himself between Joel and Vince on the fallen log. Joel rose and came over to join Adam and me. Again Brett took Vince’s beer bottle, this time draining it.
    “When are you flying to Massachusetts?” I questioned Joel. “When is the exhibit?”
    “What exhibit?” Adam inquired.
    Joel replied, “The Addison is showing Cosmo’s work next month. I’m supposed to make a speech.” He shrugged as though this weren’t the kind of thing he lived for.
    It was odd how everyone referred to Cosmo formally, impersonally. Even to me. Almost no one ever said “your father.” It was always “Cosmo.”
    “Have you changed your mind about going?” Joel pressed me.
    “I’m considering it.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I was increasingly aware that I could do with time away from our soap opera by the sea.
    “Let me know what you decide,” Joel said. “We could travel together. I can make all the arrangements.”
    I nodded noncommittally.
    Adam rummaged in the metal tub of ice, uncapped a beer and handed it to me. Our fingers brushed. Yeah, I could definitely use time away when the touch of Adam’s hand had my nerves twitching as though magnetized.
    “Hey, Kyle, what do you think about this rumor that Aaron Lipez is hiding a bunch of Cosmo’s paintings?” Jen inquired, apparently continuing an on-going discussion. “Could he have Virgin in Pastel ?”
    “Not much,” I answered. Not that I had any more insight into my grandfather’s actions than anyone else. “I don’t think he put a lot of value on Cosmo’s work.”
    “Philistine,” Vince muttered. “They’re all philistines around here. The only good thing about the local yokels is they’re too cheap to toss anything. Look at old man Cruz finding that painting at the bottom of his chicken coop.”
    Cruz’s chicken-coop coup was a local legend. Before my father had gone off to set the world on fire, he had spent years filling canvases with pictures nobody thought were suitable for anything but chicken coop flooring or white elephant sales. After he became famous, and art collectors started showing up, my father’s former neighbors started pillaging local thrift stores and attics in hopes of discovering a cache. Several found original Cosmos, which had immediately been snapped up for mucho bucks by East Coast buyers.
    “What a find,” Micky agreed. “What did he get for it? A cool ten grand? And that was way back then.”
    In the envious silence that followed, Jen said, “Suppose Virgin in Pastel is lying at the bottom of somebody’s chicken coop?”
    “Why not?” said Brett. “It’s never turned up, has it?”
    “There’s no proof it still existed at the time Cosmo disappeared,” Joel said. “Cos could have painted over it.”
    “No way!” exclaimed Vince.
    Joel laughed. “Oh, it’s possible all right. It’s just the kind of self-destructive thing Cosmo would do.”
    I shivered. Adam glanced at me and put a companionable arm about my shoulders. “Warm enough?”
    “Yep, fine,” I replied and moved away, hard though it was. I took a place on the log and said to Joel, “The Virgin is still around somewhere. I remember seeing it a few days before Cosmo disappeared.”
    There was an astounded silence.
    “You never said so before,” Joel said.
    “You never questioned the painting’s existence before.” I glanced