"Your father loved them, too."
Joe prowled around the bookshelves and found an Arthur W. Upfield mystery that he hadn't read. "Great stuff," he said later, as they ate a light dinner of soup and salad. "Off to yet another corner of Australia while Napoleon Bonaparte gets his man."
"The keen senses of the aboriginal combined with the rational faculties of the white man," Brendan said.
Death of a Lake is the one I remember," Ann said. "Year after year, the lake shrinking, the birds, the fish . . . " She shuddered.
"More wine, mother?"
"Yes, a little."
The next day passed quietly. Brendan split and Joe stacked a large pile of firewood. Ann went shopping. They took naps. Brendan and Joe went out for dinner to the "Fisherman's Friend."
"Now that's a haddock plate!" Joe said.
"Finest kind," Brendan agreed. "La Nouvelle Cuisine has not reached
Stonington." They had coffee and mammoth pieces of pie.
"Ann seems to be taking it pretty well," Joe said.