Chapter 4

Candles

Sunday, October 22, 1995

Vin examined the bottles on the medicine rack in the pantry. “Doxycycline. Ivermectin. Diazepam.” Then “Gentamicin. Nicky Hayes, DVM. Spray affected area twice per day for 7-10 days. 04/19/96.” He shook the bottle to feel its contents slosh around – over half full. Must be part of Nicky’s stash from her residency at Tufts. He took the bottle back to the foyer.

Kelsey had stepped further into the room during his absence, and she smiled weakly at his approach. From a discreet distance she’d been studying the photo of Lee and K. Elgin on the table top. “That looks like an old shot of Great Falls,” she said. “Could I take a closer look?”

Her voice sounded thinner, almost strained. “Sure,” Vin said, handing it to her. “I found it behind some planks in an old wall.” He felt a transient annoyance that he’d left it lying face up on the table. Why does that bother me, he wondered. Was he already feeling attached to Lee and the girl? Or was it because he knew nothing about this woman standing in his house?

“This is interesting,” Kelsey said, her normal voice returning. “I’m a photographer and I’ve taken lots of pictures of the Falls. You can tell that this wasn’t shot from the observation deck on the Maryland side. It has a slightly different vantage point.” Vin stepped around to her shoulder as she centered the photograph and focused intently. “This must have been taken from the end of the old path across Olmsted Island.”

“We just moved here, and we haven’t been out to Great Falls yet,” he admitted. “We’ve started biking the towpath on Saturday afternoons, so maybe next weekend...” He gently took the photo from her and returned it to the table, feeling strangely relieved that she hadn’t flipped it over to read the names on the back.

“You should take the walkway out to the observation deck,” she said. “It’s spectacular.”

Trying to redirect the conversation, he held out the Gentamicin. “I think this is what Nicky wanted me to give you.” As she scanned the label, he processed her previous words. “Are you a professional photographer?”

She glanced up and nodded, then told him that most of her work involved events like weddings, graduations, and Bar Mitzvahs. When Vin said he and Nicky were getting married in the D.C. area next fall and needed a photographer, she asked if they’d chosen a date. He shook his head; both the date and place were still up in the air. But they wanted to be married outdoors, at a venue where they could hold both the wedding and the reception. Kelsey told him popular venues were booked a year in advance, and photographers were quickly slotted into those dates. She already had a few weddings booked for next fall.

“Right,” he said glumly, realizing how much remained unplanned. “Do you have a card?” She had one in the car, so he walked her out to the driveway and watched her retrieve her purse from a charcoal-gray Audi with dark tinted glass. She fished out a business-card holder and handed him a card, telling him to schedule a visit to her studio. He waved as she drove off, then looked at the card in his hand. The address was a listing on River Road, like practically every other business in the small suburb of Potomac… maybe in the same strip mall as the hardware store he’d visited today. In the corner, he read “Kelsey Ainge, Partner.” The studio name was printed in white reversed on forest green. “Thomas, Ainge Photography.” He read the tagline below it twice to make sure he’d read it correctly. It said “Today Made Timeless.”

***

By the time Nicky’s car pulled into the driveway a little after four, Vin had drilled the required holes and connected the limbs of the driftwood letters with bolts.

“Gimme an N!”, he said, holding up the N with both hands as she emerged from the car.

Nicky laughed. “Looks like you already got one.” He could hear the fatigue in her voice as she approached.

“Welcome home,” he said, kissing her lightly on the lips. “Long day, considering you were expecting a day off.”

She exhaled and told him that her day had started off with a cat with a compound fracture, and the pace had accelerated from there. She felt lucky to escape by four. How was his day? “Kind of interesting.” He told her about his visit to the old shed on the hillside and his discovery of the drill and photograph behind the planks. They walked inside and headed for the living-room couch. Vin let Randy in from the deck as Nicky read Lee Fisher’s note.

“Swains Lock. We were there yesterday,” she said. “And ‘I may be buried along with the others’? What a creepy thought.” She examined the photo, turning it over to read the notation on the back. “K. Elgin is the girl?”

“That’s my guess. Assuming the guy is Lee Fisher.”

“She reminds me of someone, but I can’t think who.”

“I forgot to mention…the dog-fight lady came by this afternoon to pick up the meds. Turns out she’s a professional photographer. Kelsey Ainge. She handles weddings and events. I got her card, for what it’s worth.”

“Hmm,” Nicky said. “You never know.”

Vin put his legs up on the table and asked when they were due at the Tuckermans. “Seven,” Nicky said, rocking back into the cushion beside him, “but first we can open your presents and nap for a bit. Then you get to meet the natives.”

***

Sitting on a bone-colored leather couch, Vin watched Doug Tuckerman lean forward in his armchair to carefully balance a slab of soft cheese on an overmatched cracker. Doug interrupted his sermon to wash the cracker down with scotch on the rocks. He’d been expounding on the obstacles his firm faced in its efforts to convert idled farmland on the periphery of the city into condominiums and office parks. Doug’s wife Abby said something about schools and Nicky asked what she thought. No one wanted to send their kids to public schools in D.C., Abby said. Only the lobbyists and the lawyers needed to work downtown, and they could afford to live in Georgetown and underwrite the city’s blue-blood private schools.

Vin liked Abby right away. She had an open, earnest manner and an animated mien. Brown eyes and light brown hair that swayed and caught the light and made him think of horses. Her husband was representative of the forty-something parents Vin saw prowling around Potomac – large-boned and a bit jowly, with a helmet of dark hair turning gray at the temples. His sprawling belly was held in check by a blue oxford shirt tucked into pleated linen pants. Doug swirled the cubes in his scotch glass with stubby fingers while Abby tried to draw Vin into the conversation by asking how he and Nicky had met.

“It was at the end of last summer, on Cape Cod,” he said. “Some mutual friends of ours were having a party at their summer house in West Falmouth over Labor Day weekend.” It had been foggy on Sunday morning, Vin remembered, and he and Randy had caught up to a group of friends heading out along the beach to go clamming in the marsh. Nicky was with them, wearing a cotton sweater and shorts. She had long legs and a quick smile, and her eyes were bluer than the slate-blue water.

Nicky picked up the thread. “I was just starting the last year of my residency at Tufts, so I didn’t have much free time, but he was persistent.” She smirked at Vin, who deflected the expression with open palms and addressed Abby.

“I was smitten. We dated while Nicky took her exams and finished up her residency, and then we spent six weeks in late summer hiking in Wyoming and Montana.” Nicky mentioned that they’d gotten engaged on a hike in Glacier National Park. “Sitting on a rock outcropping with our feet dangling over a six-hundred-foot drop,” Vin added. “I told her I would jump if she said no.”

“You did not.”

“When’s the wedding?” Doug asked.

Vin looked at Nicky and she raised her eyebrows, allowing him to answer. “Sometime next fall,” he said. “We still need to pick a date and a place, but we’ll get married here. My parents are in Maine, Nicky’s folks live in Arizona now, and our friends and siblings are scattered around, so the D.C. area seems like as good a place as anywhere.”