The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter

inappropriate for her to talk about Kimmer in those terms—very well, I put it a bit more strongly than that—Mariah asked angrily whether I ever raised the same objection to the things she knew my wife said about her. As I floundered in search of an answer, she added that blood was thicker than water, that this was something I owed to the family. And when I tried to climb up on my pedagogical high horse, proposing that my higher duty was to truth, she asked me why in that case I didn’t just take out a full-page ad in the paper: MY FATHER IS GUILTY AND MY WIFE IS UNFAITHFUL. But that is how badly we always get along. So, when Mariah pulls me aside in the grim family-filled foyer at Shepard Street and whispers that she has to talk to me later on in private, I assume she wants to discuss the remaining details of the funeral, for what else have we two lifelong enemiesleft to talk about? But I am wrong: what my sister wants to tell me is the name of the man who murdered our father.
    (II)
    I LAUGH when Mariah tells me. I confess it freely, if guiltily. It is terrible of me, but I do it anyway. Perhaps it is a matter of exhaustion. We have no time together until after midnight, when we at last sit down at the kitchen table drinking hot cocoa, me still in my tie, my sister, fresh from the shower, in a fluffy blue robe. Howard and the children and some subset of the numberless cousins are asleep, crammed into various corners of the grand old house. The kitchen, which my father recently had redone, is sparkling white; the counters, the appliances, the walls, the curtains, the table, everything the same sheeny white. At night, with all the lights on, the reflections hurt my eyes, lending an air of insanity to what is already surreal.
    “What exactly are you laughing at?” Mariah demands, rearing back from the table. “What’s the matter with you?”
    “You think Jack Ziegler killed Dad?” I splutter, still not quite able to get my mind around it. “Uncle Jack? What for?”
    “You know what for! And don’t call him Uncle Jack!”
    I shake my head, trying to be gentle, wishing Addison would arrive after all, because he is far more patient with Mariah than I will ever be. A moment ago, before uttering the name, my sister was nervous, maybe even frightened. Now she is furious. So I guess you could say I have at least improved her mood.
    “No, I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t even know what makes you think somebody killed him. He had a heart attack, remember?”
    “Why would he suddenly have a heart attack now?”
    “That’s how they are. They’re sudden.” My impatience is making me cruel, and I try to force myself to slow down. My sister is no fool, often discerning things that others miss. Mariah was the subject of a small piece in Ebony magazine back in the mid-1980s, when, as a twenty-six-year-old reporter at the New York Times, she achieved a Pulitzer nomination for a series of stories about the diverse lives of children who eat in soup kitchens. But she suddenly quit her job not long after, when the paper began investigating my father in earnest. Although Mariah called it a protest, the truth is that she left the workforce entirely and,together with her very new husband, moved to a lovely old colonial in Darien—the first of three, each larger than the last—promising to devote all her time to her children, and in this way endeared herself to our mother, who believed to the day she died that women belong in the home. Darien is not that far from Elm Harbor, but these days Mariah and I see each other twice a year, if unlucky. It is not so much that we do not love each other, I think, as that we do not quite like each other. I resolve, for perhaps the hundredth time, to do better by my sister. “Besides,” I add, softly, “he wasn’t exactly young.”
    “Seventy isn’t old. Not any more.”
    “Still, he did have a heart attack. The hospital said so.”
    “Oh, Tal,” she sighs, flapping a hand at me and