Stuart Woods_Stone Barrington 12

approaching.
    â€œMay we join you?” Lance asked.
    â€œSure.” Stone waved them to chairs. Lance was in charge of some sort of New York CIA unit that Stone didn’t really understand, and Holly had left her job as a chief of police in a small Florida town to work for him. Both Stone and Dino were contract “consultants,” and Stone didn’t really understand that, either, except that Lance sometimes asked him to do legal stuff. Stone and Holly were, occasionally, an item.
    Lance ordered drinks.
    â€œWhy do I perceive that this isn’t a social visit?” Stone asked.
    â€œBecause your perceptions are very keen,” Lance replied.
    â€œWhat’s up?”
    â€œTell me everything you know about Richard Stone.”
    Stone blinked. It was the second time that day that Dick Stone’s name had come up. “He’s my first cousin,” Stone replied.
    â€œI said everything you know,” Lance pointed out.
    â€œOkay, he’s the son of my mother’s older brother, now deceased; he grew up in Boston, went to Harvard and Harvard Law. I think he’s something at the State Department.”
    â€œHow long since you’ve seen him?”
    Stone thought about it. “We had dinner eight, nine years ago, when I was still a cop. Last time before that was a little more than twenty years ago.”
    â€œDid you know him as a boy?”
    â€œOkay, let me tell you about it. The summer after I graduated from high school my parents sat me down and told me I was going to spend the summer in Maine with some relatives of hers. This came as a surprise, because my mother’s relatives had stopped speaking to her years before I was born, because she had married my father, who had been disowned by his family, because he was a Communist. He didn’t seem too happy about my spending the summer with a bunch of Stones.”
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    MALON BARRINGTON WAS, indeed, unhappy. “Why would you want your son to spend ten minutes with those plutocratic sons of bitches, let alone a whole summer?” he asked his wife.
    â€œBecause Richard was my brother, and Caleb and Dick Jr. are Stone’s cousins, and he ought to take advantage of the opportunity to get to know them,” Matilda Stone replied. “They have that very nice place on Islesboro, in Penobscot Bay, and it’s a wonderful place to spend a summer.”
    â€œStone was going to work for me in the shop,” Malon said. Malon was a maker of fine furniture and cabinets.
    â€œYou’re going to have to hire somebody when Stone goes to NYU in the fall anyway,” Matilda said, “so it might as well be now as then.”
    Malon made a disgruntled noise.
    Matilda got down an atlas and found Maine. “Here,” she said, tapping her finger on a large body of water. “This is Penobscot Bay, the largest bay in Maine, and this long, skinny island is Islesboro. The Stones live here, in the village of Dark Harbor. I spent a couple of summers there in their big, drafty old house, which isn’t insulated. It’s one of those rambling summer ‘cottages’ that’s unusable before June or after Labor Day.”
    â€œSounds swell,” Stone said dryly.
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    â€œAND THAT WAS IT,” Stone said to Lance. “I took a train to Bangor, where I was met by a retainer in a 1938 Ford station wagon. We drove to Lincolnville, then took a twenty-minute ferry ride to Islesboro.”
    â€œDick had a brother named Caleb?”
    â€œYes. He was two years older than Dick, who was my age, and Caleb was a pain in the ass; he was a bully and a general all-round shit. Dick was a nice guy: smart, good in school, good athlete. All Caleb ever did in school was wrestle, and he liked nothing better than to grab Dick or me and get us in some sort of stranglehold. This went on until the day I kicked him in the balls and broke his nose with an uppercut. His mother almost sent me back to New York. When I left after Labor Day, she made it pretty clear that I wouldn’t be invited back, and I wasn’t.”
    â€œWhat did you do that summer?” Lance asked.
    â€œWe sailed and played golf and tennis. The Stones lived near the yacht club, and there was a nine-hole golf course and a tennis club. We didn’t lack for activity.”
    â€œDid you and Dick keep in touch?”
    â€œWe exchanged a few letters over the next year or two, but that petered out. I didn’t hear from