when Tracy and her friends laughed at her. Just because Tracy was almost thirteen, and went to private school, didn’t make her any better than Beth. After all, she was almost twelve herself. “How come they call it that? An … interment?”
“Because that’s what it is,” Carolyn explained. “Anyway, that’s what Abigail calls it, so that’s what we must call it, too. After all, we’re Sturgesses now, aren’t we?”
“I’m not,” Beth said, her brown eyes darkening in exactly the same way her father’s did when he got angry. “I’m still Beth Rogers, and I always will be. I don’t want to be a Sturgess!”
Oh, Lord, Carolyn thought. Here we go again. When would she learn to stop trying to convince her daughter to accept Phillip Sturgess as her father? And why, really, should Beth transfer her affection to her stepfather, when her real father still lived right here in Westover, and she saw him every day? She wished, though she’d never say it, that Alan Rogers would simply disappear from the face of the earth. Or at least from Westover, Massachusetts. “Of course you are,” she said aloud. “Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what you call it, because an interment and a burial are the same thing. Okay?”
“Well, are the other people from the church coming?”
Carolyn shook her head. “The service at Hilltop is only for family and our closest friends.”
“But we know everybody who was there,” Beth replied, her voice reflecting her puzzlement. “Why can’t they all come?”
“Because—” Carolyn floundered for a moment, knowing that whatever she said, Beth would immediately see through her words and grasp the truth of the matter. “Because they aren’t all friends of the Sturgesses,” she ventured.
“You mean they aren’t all rich,” Beth replied.
Bingo! Carolyn thought. And there was no point in trying to deny it, at least not to Beth.
The car turned again, and Carolyn glanced out the window to see the bleak form of the old shoe factory—the building everyone in Westover referred to as “the mill”—looming above Prospect Street, its soot-covered red bricks giving it an even more forbidding appearance than its bleak nineteenth-century architecture had intended.
Carolyn, as always, felt a slight shudder pass through her body at the sight of the mill, and quickly looked away. Then it was gone, and the village was left behind as the cortege moved out River Road to begin winding its way up the long narrow lane that led to Hilltop.
“Mom?” Beth suddenly asked, interrupting the silence that had fallen over the big car. “What’s going to happen, now that—” She hesitated for a moment, then used the term her mother had asked her to use. Until today she had refused to utter it. “—now that Uncle Conrad’s dead?”
“I don’t know,” Carolyn replied. “I suppose everything will go on just as it always has.”
But of course she knew it wasn’t true. She knew that without Conrad Sturgess silently controlling his family’s interests from the privacy of his den, everything in Westover was going to change.
And she knew that she, at least, wasn’t going to like the changes. As the limousine pulled through the gates of Hilltop, she remembered the old adage about sleeping dogs.
Her husband, she knew, had no intention of letting them lie.
The six pallbearers carried the casket containing Conrad Sturgess’s body slowly up a narrow path through the forest. Behind the casket, Abigail Sturgess walked alone, head held high, unmindful of the rain that still fell in a dense drizzle. Though she leaned heavily on a cane, her back was as stiffly erect as ever. Behind her walked her son, Phillip, with Carolyn on his arm. Following the couple were their two children, Beth Rogers and Tracy Sturgess. Then, bringing up the rear of the short procession, came the mourners: the Kilpatricks and the Baileys, the Babcocks and the Adamses—the old families whose ties to the Sturgesses went back through the generations.
The cortege rounded a bend in the trail, and came to a sudden stop as Abigail Sturgess paused for a moment to gaze at the wrought-iron grillwork that arched over the path.
Two words were worked into the pattern:
ETERNAL VIGILANCE
She seemed to consider the words for a few moments, then walked on. A few minutes later, Conrad Sturgess, followed by his family and friends, arrived at the spot he had always known would be his final resting place.
Worked carefully into the earth, and covered with moss, there was a short flight of stone steps. At the top of the steps, looming out