The Speed of Mercy by Christy Conlin (good books for high schoolers txt) 📕

scrapbook, he proclaimed, but a working research book, in the grand scholarly tradition of the commonplace book, which dated back to ancient times and continued right to present day. He was a modern practitioner. Her father had said his commonplace book was a historical receptacle for knowledge gathered by an expert. Her mother said a scrapbook was the exact same thing. Stella can’t remember how the fight ended. But this Commonplace Book of the Offing Society is a collection of nothing but empty pages.

Her father is reading for his classes. His prep, he calls it. Stella doesn’t understand his work any more than she understands Frank’s. Her father spends his prep time mostly flipping through books, making notes, typing and typing and typing. He’s preparing his lectures, he says. Finishing up his paper for the conference. He’s also preparing slides, and at night projects images on the wall in the living room, images of the postcards he has of old buildings and people in old-fashioned clothes and uniforms, patients in lawn chairs that remind Stella of deck chairs from the Titanic.

After lunch, the rain stops and the sun comes out, transforming the world into glimmering brightness. A thick rainbow stretches over Seabury like a handle, the village a miniature world in a basket. Frank calls and invites them up for an early supper. Stella hears her father offer to pick up Cynthia and Granny. But Granny isn’t up for it, Stella gathers, and Frank has already arranged for Tommy to bring Cynthia.

The meadows are full of orange, yellow and purple flowers as Stella and her father drive up the Mountain to Frank’s grand country home.

“It isn’t really a mountain,” Stella’s father says, “but the tail end of the Appalachian range. The Seaburys live just beyond the highest elevation on a sprawling property of five hundred acres that includes the dramatic Seabury Gorge. I guess Frank needs his privacy when he’s not working, which is not very often.”

He waits for Stella to reply from the passenger seat, as he would with an adult companion. Stella resents this adult role he wishes to cast her in. Stella doesn’t answer. She rolls the window all the way down and looks at the scenery. She imagines them in a postcard, the red car on a bumpy old road, an older man wearing thick glasses gripping the steering wheel, his mouth open, a girl looking out the window, serious, her short hair undulating around her face, no smile, just a direct gaze at the photographer.

The view is everything to Stella.

“Eastward down the bay, about a three-hour drive from here, you can see Parker Island, dear, where your grandmother was from, where the Llewellyns kept the light. It is abandoned now, uninhabited, with swirling mists and rugged barrier beaches, dangerous cliffs, riptides.”

The ride becomes instantly smooth as they turn onto a newly paved black driveway with a grand gate, open, security cameras on either side. It’s more a road wending through the trees. The house appears. Stella’s father lets up on the gas and the car slows almost to a stop as they gawk at the massive modern home. He whistles and puts his head back. The car isn’t moving but it seems to Stella that the concrete house looms closer, black columns on either side of the front door. She rubs her eyes, which have begun to prickle. This structure at first seems a fortress, but the more she looks at it, the more it is a castle, from the old times when a castle was a fortress. This is Frank’s domain, his summer palace, where he conducts his business, grants favours and extols payment, delivers punishments and rewards. The house presses in upon her. Stella shakes her head and looks down at her fingernails. When did she start biting them? She looks up at the waiting house.

Cynthia is to be the official tour guide while the men have drinks on the front deck. Stella listens as Cynthia sucks in a deep breath:

“It-was-built-by-some-rich-guy-from-Europe-who-lived-in-a-castle.He-died-in-a-mysterious-plane-crash.”

She takes another breath and lets it out, and then another, and paces herself. “May I present the door to Daddy’s office — off limits. And the dining room, all set for dinner; the den with the creepy black leather furniture — imported from Italy; and a wing of guest bedrooms — off limits, to keep them guest-ready. Here’s the hallway lined with paintings, none by my mother because my father can’t stand paintings of flowers and disturbing children. You can see why I prefer my Granny Scotia’s house.”

Down another hallway lined with photographs and paintings of beaches and lakes and forests in modern frames and leading back to a sweeping circular staircase with one picture at the top of the stairs watching over all, a long-time-ago man with thin severe lips and thin dark brows and strange blue eyes.

“That’s another of the original Seaburys. Friendly looking, don’t you think?” Cynthia claps her hands together and bends over laughing at her own joke. Stella laughs too and follows Cynthia down yet another hall. “Granny says she had to marry to keep the Cedar Grove in the family. She wasn’t sad when her husband died. She only told me that this spring. Granny says that a storm is coming. She can feel it inside, that her blood is rising, her muscles are quivering. I know . . . like, totally strange.”

Cynthia again speaks, in brochure talk. “Please note the special glass ceiling in this area and the eighteenth-century chairs, imported from England. A gift from a friend of Mr. Seabury who lives in New York. He’s rich as shit. They knew each other at Columbia. Note the identical chair in the opposing alcove. And note the original Maud Lewis painting. See the blooming trees in the winter? Who is Maud Lewis, you might be wondering, seeing as you’re from away. Well, she was a folk artist who painted with house paint, on every frigging thing in her tiny house and on boards and tins and