“I imagine it is. You seem tired.”
“Late nights and sleepless hours,” she said, and raised her teacup to her lips. “I wanted to ask if you noticed anything strange back when Ginny disappeared.”
“Strange? How so?”
“There are plenty of strange things that Beatrice talks about in her manuscript and in her journals. Ginny feeling someone was watching her, that she was being followed. I’m wondering if you ever saw someone around the dorm, or perhaps on campus—”
“A prowler? No. I didn’t see any ghosts, either,” Carolyn said. “I know what happened to Ginny and it’s no great mystery: she ran away with the Portuguese boy.”
“But no one saw her with him.”
“Our good friend Mary Ann saw them together.”
“It couldn’t have been her. In her manuscript Beatrice makes it clear that she was with Ginny the day Mary Ann thought she sawSantiago with a woman. Plus, Mary Ann never got a look at the woman’s face.”
“Don’t start going down the route of horror stories like Edgar and Beatrice used to do, Miss Contreras. You’ll waste your life chasing phantoms. There are other possibilities, but the odds are slim.”
Minerva guessed it was sound advice. After all, her increasingly strange, paranoid ruminations were not exactly assisting her research. What had happened the other night, when she’d bumped into Conrad, for example?
She felt deflated and squirmed in her chair. Carolyn adjusted the turban around her head, the rings on her fingers sparkling inthe bright sunlight. “I was looking at your file, the one we get forthe scholarship recipients. You’re an only child, aren’t you?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Your mother can’t help much with your expenses, can she? That’s why you work on campus.”
“No, she can’t,” Minerva said simply.
“I suppose your situation is very much like Betty’s. Poor thing, they used to work her raw on campus, teaching French.”
Carolyn looked her up and down, her sharp eyes cool and steady. Minerva had the uncomfortable sensation that she was being dissected like a frog, her innards carefully exposed with a scalpel.
The old woman shrugged. “Then again, money is not always the solution. Look at Noah, for example.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“He’s lazy, like his father. Like my other children. There’s a certain ambition that runs in the blood, but it can easily skip a generation or two. Take my father and me: both of us determined, vigorous specimens.” Carolyn set her cup down firmly. A little tea spilled over the rim and pooled in the saucer. “Then look at my Noah. The best tutors, the best opportunities, and the boy can’t graduate from college or even set a wedding date. He’s twenty-four, can you believe it?”
Minerva set her own cup down with careful fingers. “Peopledon’t get married as young as they used to,” she said, and thought about Jonás’s accusation that she lacked the capacity for intimacy, for commitment.
“Marriage is a crucial step to ensure our legacy, yet he can’t manage one easy task. It brings me to despair!” Carolyn said, throwing her hands in the air dramatically. She smiled. “You, on the other hand, maintain perfect grades despite competing deadlines and responsibilities. A model of maturity.”
“I’m not sure how well I’m juggling my responsibilities these days, Mrs. Yates. But I keep trying,” she said.
Her mother hadn’t wanted her to study in the United States. Because it would be too onerous, too demanding. Even now there were recriminations in her emails. Minerva was too far away, Minerva wouldn’t visit during the summer break. But Minerva had desired New England very badly, even if she had been warned time and time again how stressful her studies might be.
“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll pay for your room and board in the fall, plus living expenses. That way you don’t have to be working two jobs and can focus on your thesis,” Carolyn said breezily.
Too shocked at first to say a word, Minerva simply stared at the woman.
“Well? What do you say?”
“I couldn’t…that would be very generous,” she managed to say, and she remembered what Betty had written about Carolyn waving a wand, like a fairy godmother.
“It’s nothing. I’ve done it before, for other young people of limited means. But you must promise to focus on your work. I know how difficult it can be to bring a project to fruition. All the long months and uncertainties piling up around you. My paintings, have you ever paused to look at them? How many months do you think it takes to perfect the brushstrokes, to capture someone’s smile, the curl of their hair?
“I was painting since I was a young girl, and by the time I started school at Stoneridge, I still didn’t know enough. It’s more than holding a brush that makes the artist, and more than typingwords that makes the scholar. You have something, I can see it. You must not give up.”
“Thank you.”
