Summer on Mirror Lake

by JoAnn Ross

  Crickets. Actual, real ones from somewhere out in the woods.

  “Is that Mars?” He pointed toward a bright light in the deepening sky.

  “That’s the North Star. Which you undoubtedly already know since you and your brothers supposedly spent a lot of time sailing.” If her voice held any more disinterest, he’d have thought he was talking with Hannah, her first couple days at the house. Although he could still sense the older girl’s wariness about her situation, she’d begun to remind him of a flower after a drought, blooming in a way Mrs. Douglas, when she came for their home visit, couldn’t help but see.

  “Mars is the red one.”

  “Now I remember.”

  She didn’t even bother to acknowledge that conversational ploy with a response.

  The silence settled over them again, broken only by those crickets, the croak of frogs in a nearby marsh and the splash of a jumping fish breaking the night-still water.

  “Do you like your work?” The change in subject surprised him. Yet, on some level it didn’t, given that they’d been talking around the edges of how he’d made what could, admittedly, been seen as an obscene amount of money.

  “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t.” Who didn’t like something they did well? Some people created symphonies. Others wrote novels. Then there were those who could build a skyline that defined a city, or take a broken-down heart out of a chest and replace it with a new one. Gabe made money. Lots of it. Not just for himself, but others.

  “I suppose being able to help people must be a wonderful thing.” She was looking out over the water, which was beginning to deepen to indigo. “I try to make a difference, but there are so many times when it would feel so lovely to simply write a check to make the problems go away.”

  “Money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness.” Great. Now he was sounding like an internet meme.

  “No, it can make lives easier.”

  Gabe felt uncomfortable whenever anyone outside his field brought up the topic of money. He felt even more so hearing it from this woman who, from what he’d seen, lived a life of service every day. He also knew what she clearly wasn’t saying: that she couldn’t approve of his plan to buy this house only to have it sit empty when so many others were homeless.

  “I went to a party last summer,” he said. “At this beachfront mansion in the Hamptons.”

  “As one does,” she murmured, the smile she slanted him taking any censure from her words.

  “It would make this place look like a cottage. It had two swimming pools, one for kids, the other for adults, tennis courts—plural—a lawn that an entire crew of gardeners kept as perfect as a putting green, and gardens where I doubt a single weed was allowed to sprout. The furniture had been made especially for the house in Italy. It had taken two years. The double front doors had come from a thirteenth-century French abbey, the arched ones to the stables from an Italian winery.”

  “They allow horses in the Hamptons?”

  “East Hampton, I’m told, has always had a history of horses. They have a lot of horse shows.”

  “We have barrel racing and draft horse pulls at the county fair, but I suppose that’s not quite the same thing.”

  “You’d suppose right.”

  “I’ll bet we have as much fun. The peewee sheep riders are absolutely darling.”

  “I remember those.” He also had fond memories of sharing kisses with girls on top of the fair’s Ferris wheel during high school. Maybe he could relive the experience with Chelsea.

  “Why did you go to the party?”

  “Because it was an annual event hosted by my best friend. Most of the year he lived an hour north of Manhattan, but summers were spent on Long Island.”

  “Sounds as if he’s a lucky man,” she murmured.

  “Not so lucky. He was the mentor I told you about.”

  “The one who died?”

  “Yeah. I was a pallbearer at his funeral.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She put her hand on his, the gesture meant to comfort stirring entirely different emotions. He knew, if not now, then later, she’d figure out the dates and suspect Carter’s death had something to do with his return to Honeymoon Harbor.

  “Yeah. I was, too.” Because she hadn’t taken her hand away, he turned his and linked their fingers together, the gesture feeling as natural as breathing. “He was forty-six.”

  “Oh, my. That’s young.”

  “Yeah. But there’s a saying that Wall Street years are like dog years, so maybe he wasn’t so young.”

  “Did he have children?”

  “Four. Ranging in age from three to eighteen.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  “Here’s the thing.” Once again he was going to tell her something he hadn’t told anyone else. Something he hadn’t even entirely admitted to himself. “I looked around this spectacular thirty-five-million-dollar estate—”

  “Thirty-five million? For a house?”

  “For a ten-acre estate,” he corrected dryly. “The house was eighteen thousand square feet, with twelve bedrooms and a professional spa. There was also a six-bedroom former carriage guesthouse with its own pool, and a caretaker’s cottage at least three times the size of the one I’m staying in.”

  “You were definitely in Great Gatsbyland.”

  “I was.” He decided that it wouldn’t add anything to the conversation to reveal that despite all that money, Carter had turned out to be underwater on both houses and, even with secret bank accounts scattered all over the Caribbean, had left debts that would probably take months, if not years, to unravel.

  “But I kept looking around, knowing that my friend had incredible skill and expertise at what he did. He was a true Master of the Universe. And not the comic book kind.”

  “He sounds as if he could have been a character in The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

  “He would’ve fit right in. I read the book while I was at Columbia.”

  “You told me you don’t read much fiction.”

  “I don’t. But that wasn’t really fiction.”

  “You read it as a primer,” she guessed. “An instruction manual.”

  “Yeah. I did.” And how crass did that sound?

  “To decode, understand and hopefully fit into the world you were planning to enter.”

  “Exactly.” She got him. Maybe it was because, coming from the same small town, she could imagine the culture shock he’d experienced. And how he’d always felt as if he had to work harder, faster, longer. “So, getting back to the party, I couldn’t help wondering if the world would be all that much better, or worse, if Carter Kensington, that was his name, hadn’t been born. Had he really made any difference? Driving back to the city the next morning, I thought how great it would be if we could live in a culture where the people who got to live in those houses, or even my apartment, used all their knowledge, skill and experience coming up with ways to help others. And not just those who need it the most, but also ordinary, everyday people who, if they just had a hand up, could reach their full potential.”

  “Thus the student computers,” she said quietly.

  He wasn’t that surprised she’d learned about that. She was a librarian. She could probably find anything online.

  “I wasn’t snooping into your business,” she assured him. “Lily thought I already knew about the scholarships, and accidentally mentioned them at lunch. Then, well, the conversation moved on to the hospital and the computers.”

  Gabe wasn’t annoyed by Lily Carpenter’s slip. Honeymoon Harborites didn’t live their lives as guarded here as they did in New York. Probably because so much of what you did was already out in the open. Not wanting to embarrass her, he hadn’t told Chelsea that Quinn had spotted Bert and his grandson delivering her car to her house after her first visit to the lake. The night of the door sex, which could st
ill make him hard just thinking about it. And had him deciding the motorhome would be worth the cost. Hell, they could even take the kids to the coast in it. If Chelsea didn’t want it after he left, he could possibly donate it to Welcome Home.

  “It’s not any big deal,” he said. “A few computers aren’t going to change the world.”

  “But they’re going to change lives. Maybe one of those lives they change will be that of someone who goes on to change others’ lives, and even the world.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” He was getting uncomfortable again. Outside the office and those finance bars, where competition reigned supreme, Quinn didn’t talk about money. It was, after all, only a way of keeping score. And yes, trying to make a difference. Perhaps now that she knew about his donations, she wouldn’t view him as a Carter clone.

  Although Gabe was still pissed at Dr. Doogie’s attitude, there was ultimately a chance The Street perhaps had contributed to Carter’s death. Would he have lived to see all his children grown if he hadn’t become addicted to the rush?

  “I’ve come to the conclusion that the old system of for-profit businesses being driven by the need to make money, while leaving nonprofits to focus solely on good works, creates a false disparity. Even nonprofits have to make money to stay active, which is why I’ve become interested in impact investing.”

  “Which is?”

  Gabe’s first thought was that this was a lousy conversation to be having beneath a starry sky while the girls were upstairs sleeping. But he knew she’d keep turning it around and around in her busy mind and he wanted to show her that he wasn’t one of those modern-day robber barons who kept making the news. Many of whom people outside their privileged world only heard about when they were headed off to prison.

  “It’s an out-of-the-box form of crowdsourcing. While angel investing, which is what I’ve been doing, tends to be focused on startups—”

  “Like Jolene’s skin care business.”

  “Exactly. Impact investing is social venture capitalism, where investors allocate a portion of their portfolio to investments providing social or environmental benefits. Instead of the old model of philanthropy, where donations go directly to nonprofits, investors can receive a return on their investment and socially conscious groups receive funding to grow and do more good, which in turn makes them an attractive investment. So, then you’ve got a situation of circular cumulative causation.”

  “But won’t you be drawing contributions away from nonprofits, making it more difficult for them?”

  “Nonprofits are already finding it more and more difficult to raise the money to stay afloat. Instead of having to scramble for competing dollars for some project that will help people from individual sources, struggling to create the program piecemeal as small amounts of funds trickle in, or putting it off entirely until they’ve collected enough, which could take years, they receive a large-enough influx of money from a philanthropic equity campaign to fund the project’s success.”

  “How do the investors get paid back?”

  “As an example, take a project that builds housing and a support network for recovering addicts being released from prison. Unsurprisingly, there’s a high recidivism rate in that population. If there’s a measurable decrease in the number of beds needed for returning inmates, the state pays part of the money it’s saving. Not all plans work that way, but most investors aren’t doing it so much for profits, but because it addresses their belief system. They typically tend to reinvest any profits earned.”

  “That’s what I do with Kiva. I love the ability to invest online in entrepreneurs and students around the world. Over the years I’ve tended to invest in a lot of cows and hair salons. Not that they have anything in common, but they’re usually successful and it makes the recipients, their customers, clients and me happy.”

  “That’s an important aspect of charitable giving. Millennials, especially, want to make a difference in the world. But well-meaning investment boycotts of ‘bad’ companies only represent a drop in the bucket of the world’s financial system. Thinking of for-profit businesses as bad and nonprofits as good creates a false disparity. Instead of holding dollars out of the market with boycotts, by investing in philanthropic equity programs, you can address the human need to do good in the world, but also make money for those organizations and companies so they’ll continue to exist.”

  “It is getting more and more difficult for everyone to find funding,” Chelsea agreed. “At almost every monthly public town council meeting, someone will stand up and insist that libraries are outdated now that everyone has Google and Wikipedia.”

  “Because everything you read on the internet has to be true.”

  “Thank you.” Her pique apparently gone, she leaned over and kissed him.

  “Honeymoon Harbor is a good town, populated by generous people. Yet, not a month goes by that I don’t have to defend the library’s budget from draconian cuts, never mind the fact that our founding fathers established America’s first lending library. Can you believe even comparing libraries to the buggy whip industry has been brought up?”

  “I’d like to say I’m surprised. But I’m not.”

  “Did you know that public and academic librarians answer nearly six-point-six million questions every week? And if everyone who asked a question formed a line, it would span all the way from Miami to Juneau?”

  “No, I wouldn’t have guessed that, in this computer age.”

  “That’s exactly how people usually respond! But it’s a statistic. Librarians were the original Google before anyone had thought to invent the internet.

  “And don’t get me started about them being funded by taxpayers’ dollars, because I hear that every damn month. Taxpayers get so much more than they give. At a library, it doesn’t matter if you’re an out-of-work fisherman looking for job-training information, or Bill Gates. Every resource in every library is free. Not just books, but internet access and educational training programs, along with help filling out résumés, job applications and government forms. Everyone in a community can count on their library to provide them with the resources needed to succeed. We also provide a safe shelter for the homeless and others in need.”

  “Like two little foster girls who don’t have a home to go to after school.”

  “Exactly.” She was on her feet, beginning to pace, energy radiating from her like crackling electricity. “We’re a gathering place for the community and so many don’t realize how much we do, because libraries have always been part of their lives, so they take them for granted. Although I understand that feeling, and try not to take it personally, they have no idea what the world would be without libraries, because along with everything else the most important thing they do is preserve history. And in turn, truth.” She blew out a breath as she wound down.

  “You didn’t have to convince me,” Gabriel said mildly.

  “Sorry.” Color rose in her cheeks. “It’s admittedly a hot button. Sometimes I tend to get carried away.”

  “I like it. It shows passion. Which brings up another question... What would you say about checking the pool sex off our list?”

  She glanced up at the darkened bedroom windows. “It’d have to be quick.”

  Gabe stood up, grabbed the back of his T-shirt neck, pulled it over his head and tossed it onto the deck chair. “That works for me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “GUESS WHAT, CHELSEA,” Hailey said after coming back from a Sunday at the Mannion farm. “I get to ride in the Fourth of July parade on the Christmas tree float tomorrow!”

  “My mom said if Chelsea agreed,” Gabe reminded her.

  “Oh. That’s right. I forgot.” Chelsea did not believe that for a moment, but having researched typical behaviors for both girls’ ages, she’d learned that children tended to tell the most lies between five and eight years old, mostly to test what they can
get away with.

  “Next time try to remember invitations,” she said. “It’s easier for adults to make decisions about whether or not to grant permission.”

  Blue eyes widened. “Are you going to say no? I’m sorry I forgot.”

  “Thank you for the apology,” Chelsea said. “Now, maybe Gabriel can fill me in on the details.”

  It was exactly as Chelsea remembered. John and Sarah Mannion always had a float in the parade with a Christmas in July theme. When she’d been younger, the Mannion kids had dressed up in what had to have been sweltering winter outfits, throwing fake snowballs at each other while Christmas music played from hidden speakers. As each of the boys, then Brianna, dropped out of the annual event, they’d been replaced with children from the community.

  “Tell her about the snow!” Hailey insisted, tugging on his shirt.

  “Oh, yeah. Dad got together with a tech kid at the college and they invented a portable snow machine that uses water and shoots snow into the air. They never used fake snow in the past because it’d make a mess, but this stuff is made from water and melts when it hits the ground. I saw it work today. It’s pretty cool.”

  “It’s cold!” Hailey corrected.

  “That, too,” Gabriel agreed.

  “That’s why I have to wear a parka and a knit cap. And you’re invited, too, Hannah.”

  “That’s really nice,” she said. Chelsea guessed that she’d rather jump naked into the harbor on the New Year’s Polar Bear Plunge than have any peers from school see her tossing fake snowballs with her little sister. “But I’ll stay on the sidewalk and cheer as you go by. And take lots of pictures, which I couldn’t do if I was on the float.”

  “Oh. That makes sense,” Hailey decided. And the topic was dropped.

  * * *

  SOME TRADITIONS NEVER CHANGED, not that anyone in Honeymoon Harbor would want them to. That was what traditions were all about, residents would tell you. As Chelsea watched the Shelter Bay High School band march down the street, proceeded by teenage girls in sparkly outfits twirling batons, she could see Hannah watching them carefully.