The Last Summer of the Camperdowns by Elizabeth Kelly Read Free Book Online

dread is a world devoid of the creative arts and culture. I would happily donate my body in the service of art.”
    “If only you could be disposed of that easily. I’m trying to imagine the kind of artist interested in working with you in life or death,” my mother said, calling after Gin as he disappeared into the kitchen. “Someone who enjoys the idea of dogs playing poker, no doubt.”
    Gin emerged carrying a tray with a ceramic pitcher filled with some kind of sparkling fruit punch and three tall glasses. He offered my mother a drink. She reached for it, then hesitated. “I trust this isn’t formaldehyde,” she said as I hastily gulped down my juice.
    “Let’s get going,” I urged, frustrated by their relentless sparring. “What about Vera?”
    I spent the next hour calling for little Vera as Gin and my mother searched together. They combed the area at the back of the property, bordering a large tract of forested land navigable by a man-made trail that wound through the woods from one end to the other. It was covered over by cedar chips. Alone, and grateful for the reprieve, I wandered through the early summer gardens, diminished tulips and narcissus, brilliantly colored poppies and fragrant orange and pink honeysuckle robustly clinging to ancient wood.
    “Puppy! Puppy! Vera!” I called out as, in the background, Gin and my mother did the same.
    “M AYBE SHE’S SHOWN UP at home,” I said wanly as the three of us met in the pasture, surrounded by curious horses, my distress growing in direct proportion to the level of guilt I was feeling over having lost Vera.
    “Oh, I hope so,” my mother said. “I can’t stand to think of that little thing being on her own. When you think of the awful things that could happen to her.” It wasn’t unusual for my mother to become emotional about one of the dogs, though she rarely extended the same feeling to the people in her life. Gin read my mind. “Too bad we walk on two legs instead of four, isn’t it, Jimmy?” he said in rueful aside.
    She smiled defiantly and lit a cigarette as Gin recoiled and fumed. He had a stable owner’s instinctive dread of fire. “Greer, you are wicked with those stinking things. I swear you do it just to be, well . . .” He looked around, searching the summer faces of a separate clump of horses as they stood next to one another beneath a trio of apple trees, his arms waving so wildly that a bay filly shied sideways and kicked the air with her rear hooves. “Jimmy, what word am I looking for?”
    “Inflammatory,” I supplied. “Incendiary.”
    “Exactly.” Gin snapped his fingers and laughed. “Someone’s been hitting the books. Inflammatory. Incendiary. She sure has your number, Greer.”
    My mother, irritability levels percolating to the point of steamy overflow, brought the flattened palm of her hand down on the show jumper Delano’s rump, the loud plain slap scattering the small herd that had settled around us. “Gin, it’s a cigarette. It’s not nitroglycerine. Not another word, please.” She reigned over the compliant silence until she decided we had been sufficiently subdued. “Anyway, on to more interesting matters. Where’s the poor woman’s Heathcliff?” Specializing in getting to the wicked point of it all, she grinned and glancing downward, used the toe of her boot to dig a hole in the clay.
    “You tell me where he is,” Gin said, staring at the delinquent cigarette. “I haven’t seen him for the last couple of days. Gula is a regular phantom. Here one moment, gone the next.”
    “I’m confused. I understood that he was working for you, not the other way around.”
    “He is my employee, Greer, not my slave. He asked for a few days off. He never takes a holiday. I could hardly say no under the circumstances.”
    “Getting any closer to revealing the glorious secret?” My mother had such an arch delivery that someone once asked her at a funeral if she was being sarcastic when she expressed her