Chapter 7

They did not announce the bequest that evening at six. They announced it at nine-forty, under the tent with the lights on, because Nadine Boykin said, in front of everyone, that the museum would wait for the painting.

Trip drove to Savannah at four-thirty that afternoon with Curtis Amaker's paperwork in the passenger seat and a sheriff's deputy following him in a county car. Ezra Moultrie, who had been holding a painting he could not lawfully sell, was extremely cooperative. Trip carried the frame up the stairs of the Church Street house at twenty past nine and hung it himself on the brass hook over the stairs, and then he stood in the hall and cried, briefly, with his cap in his hands, while his daughter watched him from the doorway with her crayon.

At nine-forty, under the tent, the museum announced the Adeline Prescott bequest to the Gibbes, with the landscape included, exactly as Adeline had written it.

Cordelia Prescott was charged within the week with obstruction and with tampering with evidence - the garnets, the apron, the statement she had tried to buy. She was booked, released on bond, and removed from the acquisitions committee by a vote the museum did not describe as unanimous, though everyone in Charleston knew it was. She has not been to the island since. Her attorney has said, twice, that she was protecting her son; the solicitor's office has said, twice, that the law does not care why a woman plants evidence, only that she did.

Trip was not charged with felony theft. His grandmother's estate, through the museum's counsel, declined to pursue it on the condition that he testify, make full restitution from his wages, and spend a year working off the debt to the family rather than to a man in Savannah. He works the dock now, six days a week, and he brings June out to the island on Sundays.

Rolly Tift was paid in full by the estate, which annoyed Cordelia more than the charges did.

And in November, on the day the deed was recorded at the Charleston County courthouse, Willa Gadsden became the owner of the cottage on the marsh road, with the land under it - the same two rooms she had rented for forty-one years, now hers down to the dirt.

They had the table set that Sunday. Oysters, because June asked for them. Loretta Pinckney cooked, and refused to sit down until Willa told her twice.

Willa came in from the kitchen with the last platter. There was an empty chair at the head of the table, and the family was standing behind their chairs, waiting, which was not a thing that had ever happened in that house.

She set the platter down. She untied her apron, folded it once, and laid it over the back of the chair.

Then Willa Gadsden sat down at the head of the table.

For forty-one years she had never spoken in that room. She looked down the length of it - Trip at the far end with his cap off, June beside him with a crayon in her fist in case something needed drawing, Loretta with her arms crossed and her chin up, the pale rectangle over the stairs filled in again with gold.

"All right," Willa said. "Now we eat."