Only the row of pill bottles on his desk—isosorbide, 10 mg., propranolol, 20 mg., dipyridamole, 50 mg.—acknowledged the heart attack. He leaned on his elbows and looked at Janice. “Honey, you know how happy 1 am that you’ve decided to move back so Geoff can make a go of his own firm.”

“Geoff decided. I’m going along with it.”

“Whatever… We’re happy. We want you to be happy, too.”

Geoff felt the backs of Dickerson Bigelow’s unread books closing in around him. “The suspense is killing us. What is it that will make us happy forever, and what do I have to give up to get it?”

Dickerson looked at his son. “In the family for seventeen years and still he doesn’t trust us.”

“He knows that if we let him in on this deal, we’re not doing it because he’s the brother-in-law.” Douglas slipped a golf ball from his pocket and began to roll it between his fingers.

“It’s because he’s the best architect in New England, right?” cracked Janice.

“It’s because I’m Rake Hilyard’s nephew.”

“Cynic!” Dickerson Bigelow pushed himself away from his desk and went to the window. Outside, his ancient mother was carrying a tray of hors d’oeuvres toward the back lawn. “I raised a generation of cynics, Ma!”

“Because they grew up around men like you, Dick.”

“Never misses a beat,” said Janice.

“Neither does her granddaughter,” added Geoff.

“And we both love them both,” said Dickerson, “just like we both love Jack’s Island.”

“There’s a difference between love and lust.”

Dickerson looked at Janice. “Why did you have to go and marry such a smartass?”

“Because I knew that some day, you’d want to do business with him. So stop insulting each other and talk like grown men.”

Love and lust had been known to serve each other well, Geoff knew, and if this offer meant a good commission, which would mean a little freedom, Geoff could stand a little of Dickerson’s lust.

While the party went on outside, Dickerson talked. Douglas rolled the golf ball between his fingers and clarified. Geoff sipped his beer and acted impassive, as he would in any negotiation. Janice listened, and when she thought her husband too impassive, she asked questions.

The Bigelows wanted to develop Jack’s Island. The Hilyards resisted. That much had been known for years. During the mid-eighties boom, the Bigelows didn’t even bother to try to develop their side of their island. It wasn’t worth the fight with the town and the abutters when there was so much money to be made on the rest of the Cape.

But the boom was over. Real estate prices had turned in a big way. No one was buying middle-priced homes in subdivisions hacked from the scrub pine. Planning boards and conservation commissions were getting tough. And the people of Cape Cod, who shared watershed and coastline but who had always acted as fifteen towns going in fifteen directions, had voted a County Commission to contend with development.

The only land certain to sell—or worth the fight—was waterfront. In a bad market, scarce things kept their value. Douglas said they could squeeze thirty to thirty-five premium-priced one-acre lots out of the island, each one worth three to five hundred thousand once it was perked and permitted. And once they put houses on the land, the profits would double.

“Geoff, sell us your land, convince Rake to sell,” said Dickerson, “and you’ll design the development we want to call Pilgrims’ Rest.”

“Modern luxury inside, Pilgrim ambience outside,” added Douglas. “Like… Star Wars meets the seventeenth century.”

“What about the permits?” asked Geoff. “The town and county will put you through hell to develop that island.”

“We’re grandfathered.”

“Grandfathered?” said Janice. “How?”

Douglas unrolled a map of Jack’s Island, subdivided into scores of 5000-square-foot lots. In the corner was a legend, in the fountain-pen script of someone who had learned handwriting in the old school: “Plan of Land for Pilgrim’s Rest at Jack’s Island, Brewster, Mass., owned by Elwood Hilyard, Zachary Hilyard, and Heman Bigelow, January 9, 1904, Scale 1″ to 100′, Charles Berry, C.E., Orleans, Mass.”

“I dug this up at the Barnstable County Courthouse,” explained Douglas.