Page 104 of The Summer Guests

“When Susan’s better, when she’s out of the hospital, she’d like to come over and thank you in person,” said Ethan. “If that would be all right with you, Mr. Tarkin?”

Reuben looked at Jo, who cocked her head, waiting for his answer. “I suppose,” he finally said.

“And if you ever come to Boston, you’re always welcome in our home. I’m not just saying this. Please, come visit us.”

Although Reuben nodded, he knew this would never happen. They were summer people, and he was a local, and some chasms were too wide to reach across, no matter how well intentioned the invitation might be.

As Ethan walked away, Jo said to Reuben: “Maybe your feud with the Conovers is finally over?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“At least you’re talking. That’s a start.”

But the start of what? He didn’t know. He was glad that Susan would recover, and he’d decided that Ethan seemed a decent man. Maybe he should give these two a chance. Everyone, after all, deserved a second chance.

Even a Conover.

Chapter 48

Maggie

“It’s embarrassing to admit,” said Lloyd, “but we couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Or in this case, we let the forest get in the way of seeing the all-important tree.”

“Any way you put it, dear, itisembarrassing,” said Ingrid. “We should have done better.”

The five of them had assembled at Maggie’s house for a postmission debriefing and a potluck dinner of Ben’s paella, Lloyd’s ratatouille, and the Stouffer’s Spinach Soufflé that Maggie had hastily pulled out of her freezer. Frozen food was a lazy shortcut, and she wasn’t proud of it, but she’d spent the afternoon mowing her fields, moving the mobile chicken coop, and reassembling the electric fencing. While a spy might be able to take a day off, a farmer could not. Declan, with his broken ankle, had been excused from contributing a dish to their potluck, but tonight he’d produced the real treat: a bottle of thirty-year-old Lowland single malt, which helped take the sting out of their communal sense of failure. They’d already passed the bottle once around the farm table, and when it came her way again, Maggie splashed a refill into her glass and passed the bottle to Declan. He was looking particularly dashing tonight, a silver-streaked forelock drooping rakishly over his eyebrow. He’d becomeso adept at navigating on crutches that he could easily return home to his own bed, but Maggie rather liked having him around to spar with.

Among other things.

“It’s not as if we were entirely off base,” said Ben. “We did conclude, correctly as it turns out, that Zoe’s backpack was deliberately left on the roadside. That it was planted there to make the police think she’d been abducted and carried south. All to keep them from searching the pond.”

“All right, so we were right about that detail,” said Ingrid. “But after they found the skeleton in the pond, that’s when we let ourselves be lured into the weeds. We overthought it. We started chasing conspiracy theories.”

Lloyd patted his wife on the knee. “Because that’s what you do, dear. And you do it so well.”

“It’s no wonder, though,” Maggie pointed out, “that our minds did go straight to conspiracies, once we realized the Conovers were part of MKUltra. When you turn over a rock and find a nest of spies, it’s natural to think they’re up to no good.”

Declan laughed. “Now why would we thinkthat?”

“We should take this as a cautionary tale,” said Ingrid. “Yes, conspiracies exist. Yes, we’ve been trained to always look for the bigger picture, to assume there’s a larger organism with tentacles reaching in multiple directions. Governments, crime syndicates. But this time it wasn’t a big picture. It was a small one, a very human one. A marriage. An affair.”

“Thiswasa conspiracy, in a way, though,” Maggie said.

“Between Brooke and her son, you mean?”

“And between Brooke and her father-in-law, George Conover. As Elizabeth said, her late husband’s superpower was cleanup. Whenever things went wrong, he was adept at mopping up the mess, whether it was covering up MKUltra’s role in the Main Street massacre, or silencing Vivian Stillwater. He helped cover up Anna’s death as well, because Brooke couldn’t have managed that on her own. There he was, faced with a scandal in his own family: A pregnant nanny, pushed downthe stairs by his son’s enraged wife. Brooke, dragged off to prison for murder. The publicity could have blown open all the family secrets, including their work with the Agency and MKUltra. I think he decided the best course of action was just to cover up the murder and dispose of Anna’s body in the pond. It would protect Brooke. It would keep the family together. And it would protect all their secrets.” Maggie looked around at her friends. “People like us, we’re good at burying secrets. Too good, sometimes.”

“And it almost worked,” said Ben. “For sixteen years, anyway.”

Ingrid shook her head. “That poor girl, Anna. All these years, her family never knew what happened to her.”

“In George Conover’s mind, Anna was probably expendable,” said Maggie. “Just a girl from Mexico, whose family had no idea how to find her in this country.” She shook her head. “Yes, George Conoverwasan expert at cleanup.”

They fell silent for a moment, and Maggie thought of Anna, doubly a victim. First, she’d been seduced by her married employer, and then she’d been punished for that affair by the berserk wife, who’d shoved her down the same stairs where Susan Conover fell, fracturing Anna’s skull. Perhaps Brooke hadn’tintendedto kill her. Perhaps it was just a split second’s fury, an uncontrollable impulse that drove Brooke’s attack, but the result was a dead body and a crisis that had to be reckoned with.

Enter George Conover, who took care of the problem. Both Elizabeth and Colin were out of town that night, so no one else in the family needed to know what had happened. With his usual efficiency, George set about protecting his daughter-in-law, his family, and his own secrets.

For sixteen years, those secrets stayed buried. Until the day Zoe dove into the water and spotted what lay at the bottom of the pond. Maggie imagined the girl frantically swimming to shore, climbing out of the water. She pictured her scrambling up the lawn and blurting outThere’s a skeleton in the pond!to the first person she encountered.

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