“Listen, Marcus,” he said later, when we had joined him round his bed. “Show Drew that photo you were telling me about. He’s so much older he might recognize the face.”
I went upstairs, returned with the wallet, and handed the picture over to Drew, who took one look and raised his eyebrows.
“I think I do know this person, but I want to be sure. May I borrow this for a minute, Marcus?”
We heard him rustling around in the formal living room nobody used. A book dropped. Drew cursed and sneezed three times in succession.
“Someone needs to dust those shelves once in a blue moon,” he said, returning with a book under his arm. “Okay, I’ve checked it out. This is the picture of Uncle Henry in the 1976 Harvard yearbook. That was his sophomore year, the year he dropped out. Only someone cut it out of the yearbook.”
He opened to the page.
Under the cutout space was the name Henry Arthur Forster, Jr.
“And look,” said Drew, “Marcus’s photo fits right in the space. Now, would someone please tell me what this is all about?”
“Marcus will have to tell you,” said Wheezer in a near-whisper, his eyes excited, feverish, “and it’s going to be an interesting ride. Look, guys, I need to snooze for a while and when I wake up I’ll be good as new. Then I expect to hear everything everybody said, and I mean everything.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grief Cottage has been enriched significantly by the close readings and rereadings of my editor, Nancy Miller, who has now seen me through six books, and my agent, Moses Cardona, who is all a literary agent should be—and more. Nancy is a master of her craft who has a sharp eye for what is not there yet. Moses, besides being my champion, possesses the rare gift of seeing right into the heart of a story and helping me see it, too.
Thanks to Katya Mezhibovskaya for creating a jacket design that expresses the mood and story of Grief Cottage so perfectly.
Thanks to Evie Preston for her guidance and encouragement.
Thanks to my astute “tough reader” of many years, Robb Forman Dew, and to her son Jack Dew, who offered an invaluable suggestion concerning the ghost.
Thanks to Lynn Goldberg, who asked the right question at the right time.
Thanks to Ehren Foley at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History for providing details about two-hundred-year-old beach cottages and their floor plans, and for his enthusiasm and cordiality.
Thanks to Lee Brockington of Hobcaw Barony for putting me in touch with the right sources. I kept her sumptuous volume, Pawleys Island, a Century of History and Photographs, with Photo Editor Linwood Attman, near to me throughout the writing of Grief Cottage.
Professor James R. Spotila’s passionate guide, Saving Sea Turtles, introduced me and Marcus to the fascinating journey of the loggerhead turtle.
And thanks to my sister, Franchelle Millender, who invited me to share a beach cottage with her on the Isle of Palms in South Carolina, where Grief Cottage was first conceived.
Aunt Charlotte’s island is drawn from both Pawleys Island and the Isle of Palms.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Gail Godwin is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed novels, including Flora, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, and Evensong. She is also the author of Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir, and The Making of a Writer: Journals, Vols. I and II, edited by Rob Neufeld. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Woodstock, New York. Visit her website at www.gailgodwin.com.