Catching Genius (3 page)

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PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Estella didn't have a disease. Not one you could treat anyway. Estella was a genius. She had an IQ of over 140, though I was never told the exact number. It has not given her a happy life, being a genius. In fact, of both our lives, mine is certainly the one most people would prefer to have.

Except perhaps right now. While Estella, now forty-three, was living her strange, secluded life in Atlanta, I was still in Florida, though far south of Big Dune Island, and on my way to our mother's condo just across town. It was the last thing I felt like doing. What I really felt like doing was working myself into a good lather over Gib's report card, which had arrived in the mail that morning. My oldest son was failing math. Obviously the number gene completely skipped my little branch of the family.

I checked the time as I turned into the condominium's impressive entrance, determined to be back home before Gib returned from school.

“Afternoon, Mrs. Wilder,” Otto said, leaning down to peer in my car window. His little security guard hat was tipped back on his head, offering a view of a mile-long forehead speckled with age spots.

“Hi, Otto, how's it going today,” I said with a smile—a greeting, not an inquiry. Last year, when nobody pulled in behind me for almost twenty minutes, Otto had given me a vivid account of his emergency appendectomy before he finally raised the gate.

But today he just waved me through, and I parked in the visitors' lot of my mother's building, carefully reapplying my lipstick before heaving a sigh of self-pity and getting out of the car.

The Gulf of Mexico was quiet. Little waves, barely large enough to break, piddled their way onto the sand, scattering the pipers searching for coquinas. The sun glinted off the windows of the building, and I wondered if my mother was watching. She had a perfect view of the parking lot and the Gulf from her fifteenth-floor condo, but spent more time gazing down to see who was coming and going than she did looking out at the water.

I came two days a week, but this had been a special summons, another
putting my affairs in order
meeting. My stomach always clenched in apprehension when she told me she'd been talking to Bob McNarey, her lawyer, financial advisor, and steady escort. And it irritated my husband, Luke, to no end that she chose to stick with Bob rather than placing her financial decisions in his capable hands, though she was never above scooping a juicy stock tip from him.

She opened the door dressed in a pink suit, her glasses perched on the end of her nose and a pen clutched in her hand. She pecked me once on the cheek before making her way to the office, with me trailing behind her.

“I've just gotten off the phone with Bob, and we've decided it's time to sell the beach house,” she said. I stopped walking, my muscles forgetting how to move as I tried to process this bomb, dropped as casually as she might mention a new purse, or a change in manicurists. Her back was to me, as if my reaction did not matter. And why should it? The beach house on Big Dune Island was hers, though the move had been Daddy's idea.

His intent had been noble enough. Estella's tutors agreed, when she swallowed their knowledge whole and looked for more, that she should transfer to the college in Grantsville to study with Dr. Roy C. Pretus, the eminent mathematician. Big Dune, just an hour away, satisfied our father's need for privacy, for the wild Florida he'd grown up with. It was a different sort of wild, but wild nonetheless, with salt-stunted scrub and massive dunes as far as his Sykes eyes could see.

Luke and I had honeymooned and vacationed there, but we hadn't been back for more than four years. I had to do the math twice to make myself believe it had been that long. How had I let that happen? How had four years passed by without that beach, without that stretch of Gulf, without the escape from the moneyed heat of Verona?

My mother shuffled papers on her desk while I stood at the door, despair flowering inside me. I thought it would always be there. When I needed a fantasy, when I built a secret future in my mind where everything was exactly as I wanted it, I pictured myself there.

“But why?” I asked. I knew the answer. It was always the same answer. The money—the
real
money—was gone, the victim of several drawn-out lawsuits brought by distant Sykes relatives and the State of Florida. I'd had a small piece, my trust fund, which I'd used to buy and furnish our home and set up college funds for the boys. Mother was still wealthy by anyone's standards, but it was not the kind of wealth that could ignore a home nobody used and could be sold for a hefty profit.

“Because I'm tired of paying the property taxes, the insurance, the caretaker. It just sits there, nobody uses it.” She turned her chair to face me, her beautifully preserved cheekbones in high color. “Do you have any idea how much the electric bill is? Your sister won't get those damn books out of there, so the humidistat has to run all the time, and Tate's fee is double what Len's was and I don't have any idea what he does for it. For all I know he's living there.”

Her irritation at Tate, son of the home's original caretaker and the first friend I'd made on the island, was false. She loved him like one of her own and kept in touch with him often enough to make me slightly, and silently, jealous. Tate had been scarce during my family's visits to the island, for which I'd always been grateful. I didn't want to relive teenage crushes with my husband and sons there, but I kept in touch through Mother and felt closer to him than I felt to Estella, so he was the nearest thing I had to a sibling now.

“Why don't you rent it out?” I asked, beginning to feel panicky.

Mother waved her hand in dismissal. “I'm not going to get into that. Renters will ruin the place. It's time to sell. That area has jumped in value over the past few years.”

“Sell it to us,” I said. “It will be an investment for us. Luke would love it.”

“Sweetheart, Bob's looked into it and he thinks we can get over two. I'm not sure you're in a position to take that on.”

“Two million?” I asked incredulously.

She shot me a wry smile. “Well, I wouldn't be doing it for two hundred, and frankly, that's not much for beachfront property these days.”

Defeated, I turned toward the windows. The dazzlingly bright sun was diffused through the thick tinted glass, and I could gaze out at the water without having to shield my eyes. The sound of the waves was diffused too, muffled by the hurricane-strength concrete and steel of the building.

When I was younger, Mother would periodically leave Big Dune to travel to New York. She said there was no decent shopping in Florida, but she always had the same pained look for days before she left, and I knew it was because of the pounding of the waves, the relentless
whoosh
and
crash
that got into her head. Here she could have the cachet of beachfront property without the invasive voice of nature.

“What's the problem, Constance?” The resignation in her voice was heavy, more pronounced than it needed to be.

“I just . . . I guess I'd always thought about being there with the boys. It's a surprise, that's all.”

“You haven't been there with the boys for years.”

“So your mind is made up? I have no say?”

She looked surprised. “It's
my
house, Connie. I wouldn't expect to have a say if you chose to sell your home. Now, if you want the boys to see it one last time, you can bring them along when we go to close it up.”

“When
we
go?”

“Well, we certainly can't allow anyone to go through the house for us, and I can't do it all by myself. I assumed you would want the rugs and your violins. And of course Estella will come for the books.”

I snorted and she looked at me sharply. “If you get Estella to come I'll be there with bells on,” I said. Unfair maybe, bitchy definitely, but undeniably supported by past behavior. Estella didn't drive, had never gotten her license, in fact. Her boyfriend, live-in life partner, whatever she called him, didn't own a car either.

Estella had received the same funds I had when she turned thirty. She could certainly afford to buy a car. It was an affectation, or perhaps simply an easy way to avoid driving to visit her family. Even when a ride was offered she said she couldn't drive over bridges. She said she couldn't fly. She said she had an inner ear disorder and it was too painful.

And she said all those things to my mother, because we hadn't spoken for almost eight years. No one event, no big fight had caused our break. Rather, the years had simply eroded our already tenuous relationship. And after Daddy died there was nobody to fight over anymore, so even that died away until there was nothing to keep us together at all.

I didn't believe for a second that Estella would go. In fact, I didn't know if I was going to go. But I did want those violins, and the rugs, and if Estella didn't take her books then I would damn well take those too, despite what my father's will said. They should have been mine to begin with.

At least my father left me the rugs, proving he did still occasionally think about me: a kilim and two Bokharas taken—along with the piano—against his lawyer's advice from the family home before its contents had been categorized for auction. I should have rolled them up and brought them home when he died, but they seemed to belong to the beach house.

My violins, the tiny Mittenwald and a full-sized Vuillaume, were safely tucked away in the library at the top of the house, shabbily preserved alongside the books and the piano in their controlled environment. The violins had been beautiful at one time, long before my father bought them. Neither my mother nor I had ever been able to convince him to have them restored.

He hadn't wanted me to play them, he'd wanted me to appreciate them. He liked the names and histories, he liked the expense, and he couldn't help himself at auctions.

And so the bows and fiddles remained in terrible condition to ensure that I wouldn't actually play them. My high school graduation present had been a beautiful Stainer chosen by my mother, the same violin I play today. I hadn't bothered taking the other decrepit violins with me when I'd left for college.

“I've already spoken to Estella,” Mother said. “She'll be ready to go next month. We'll drive to Atlanta, pick her up, and then go to the island.”

“She won't come,” I said. “She'll drop out at the last minute, you know she will. And then I'll be stuck doing everything again.”

“I really can't take the martyr routine today, Constance. She promised she would come. She wants the books. I told her that I would give them to the college if she didn't take them herself.”

I felt a little smirk twitch my lips, as much in glee at the thought of my mother threatening Estella as in irritation that she didn't even think to offer the books to me. “What did she say?”

“I won't gossip about your sister with you. The important thing is that she'll be coming with us. And I'd like you to be civil. I would like to have good memories of our last visit to the island. Now, when will you be able to get away?”

“I don't know.” Luke would be busy with work, Carson was leaving for music camp in a few weeks, and that left Gib. “We're having a problem with Gib,” I admitted. It was always Gib. I felt my stomach tense again when I realized that I didn't want him to come to Big Dune. The thought of an eight-hour car ride to Atlanta, then four more back to the island with his sullen silence was enough to make me clench my teeth. But I couldn't let him stay home alone either.

“What did Gib do this time?” my mother asked, but she was distracted, already turned back to her desk. She didn't notice when I didn't answer.

“And I've got my students,” I said instead, “and the trio.”

She rolled her head across her shoulders as though her neck pained her. “Connie, I think the bambinos can do without you for a few weeks.”

“They're not Italian, Mom. And that was a donation-worthy comment if ever I heard one.” I volunteered once a week at the Cowachobee Community Center, ostensibly teaching music to the children of mostly Haitian and Mexican immigrants, but I was little more than a glorified baby-sitter. I hit up everyone I knew for donations, especially my mother. Especially when she made comments about bambinos.

She sighed and swung back around to her desk, opening her checkbook to atone. “Five hundred,” she said firmly as she signed her name. “Don't ask again until we get back from Big Dune.”

I smiled and plucked the check from her fingers. “Thank you. I'll see what I can do. All we have on the schedule is the library series, and Alexander was talking about going on vacation too, so maybe we can coordinate it.”

“You know he never called Cecilia,” my mother said with a frown.

“Cecilia is thirty-five years older than he is, she's going deaf, and she's a woman.”

“Yes, but she's rich as can be.”

“It's not 1850, Mother, he doesn't need a patron. Besides, he's not struggling, he's fine.”

Alex, the cello player in the trio I played with twice a month, was, in fact, struggling quite a bit. He and my mother got along famously, but she never stopped trying to pair him up with her widowed friends, despite the fact that she knew he was gay. Alex had been my best friend since my freshman year of college when we met in the string ensemble, and I was fiercely protective of him. Mother always put me on edge when she insisted on discussing him as though he were a project.

She arched her eyebrows and leaned back in her chair, studying me, but said nothing except, “So when can you go?”