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from the local high school, “Seriously Troubled.” She should have been graduating this year but, at eighteen, had been so truant and inattentive that she was now flunking out of junior-year courses. Five feet nine, thirty pounds overweight with scraggly burgundy-dyed hair and a pasty, uneven complexion, Lucinda had been nicknamed “Bozo” by the local tightly knit teenage crowd.
    She’d reentered Ethan’s life—and invaded Lark’s—a little over a year ago when the state of Pennsylvania notified Ethan that Lucinda’s mother was to be institutionalized. Mimi’s alcohol and drug abuse had reached life-threatening proportions, her real father had deserted the family years before, and Lucinda would have gone into foster care if Ethan and Lark hadn’t taken her in. It had been a disaster from the moment the foul-mouthed, hostile, beer-drinking Lucinda belligerently unpacked her dirty duffel bag.
    Over the course of the last twelve months Meg received Lark’s regular reports on the teenager’s progress. The bottom line: There wasn’t any. Her room was always a mess. She sneaked out at night. She skipped school. She was nasty to the little kids. Talked back to Lark. Hung out with a bad crowd from Montville, the neighboring town that was big enough to have two movie theaters and a mall—a magnet for teenagers all over the mostly rural county. Lucinda had been picked up late one night by Tom Huddleson, Red River’s police chief, for peeing at the base of the VFW monument in the center of town. But the worst of her behavior, the distilled potent essence of her anger, was directed at Ethan.
    “It’s horrifying,” Lark confided to Meg after one particularly bad fight between father and daughter. “It’s like she’s possessed or something. She’s totally irrational when it comes to Ethan—screaming out the most vile things. And poor Ethan, he tries to reason with her. He’s so patient. I know he feels guilty, guilty for leaving her with Mimi all those years, but what else could he have done? Mimi won custody and, in the beginning at least, she made a stab at being a decent mother. It went downhill after Brook was born and we moved to Red River. I think, until then, Mimi believed she could somehow win him back.”
    Meg remembered all too vividly what it was like to be raised by irresponsible parents. She could imagine the pain and confusion of a childhood marred by a single mother’s downward slide into addiction. Perhaps it was this innate empathy that Lucinda sensed. Whatever the reason, where Ethan and Lark had failed to make the least impression on Lucinda when it came to discipline, the troubled girl would—and often did—listen to Meg. Six weeks ago when Meg had been visiting, she thought she’d persuaded Lucinda to stop drinking, promising to
have
her down to visit in Manhattan over the Christmas holidays if she could stay the course. Since then, though the teenager remained impossible on every other front, Lark had been giving Lucinda good marks for sobriety. But now Meg was detecting the unmistakable odor of beer on Lucinda’s breath.
    “You’ve been drinking, Luce. I’m really disappointed.”
    “No, I haven’t.”
    “Yes, you have.” Meg tried to avoid losing her temper with Lucinda. “You’re fucking wrong.”
    “You reek of beer,” Meg said. She slung her overnight bag over her shoulder and started back up the drive. Off to the right she could see a glimmer of lights through the trees from Clint and Janine Lindbergh’s small, shingled Cape house. Years ago, when the property operated as a mill and large, prosperous farm, their home had served as the hired hand’s cottage. For the last decade, the Lindberghs had lived there and helped Ethan in the studio, doing the dirty work while Ethan turned out his award-winning stemware and paperweights. In the afternoons, while Ethan concentrated on his sculptures, Clint handled the studio’s paperwork and shipping and Janine helped Lark at