18

Ashley tucked her feet under her on the bright pink-and-yellow striped cushion of the wicker couch. She was on the sun porch drinking a tall glass of “sun” tea under Nelle Milligan’s watchful eye.

Nelle was a slim woman in her late thirties with bouncy ash-blond curls and a mischievous glint in her emerald eyes. Her husband was from one of Tennessee’s oldest, proudest and richest families. Oliver Milligan, Jr., was widely rumored to be considering his first bid for state office—a rumor Nelle had already confirmed privately to Ashley. He was handsome, charming, industrious and he adored his wife—as long as she understood her role in his world.

Ashley had met Nelle nearly three years ago, at a charity ball in New York. To Ashley’s delighted surprise, she discovered the Tennessee homemaker, mother of two and honors graduate of Vanderbilt University, had a secret passion for oceanography. “I’ve always fancied myself as a frustrated marine archaeologist,” she’d confided in her cultured drawl. “Perhaps that’s what I’ll be in my next life.”

Ashley had promptly invited Nelle and her family up to the New England Oceanographic Institute for a tour and a “whale watch” trip. But Nelle had come alone. “Oliver thinks his constituents might not approve his patronizing a Yankee institution—especially when Tennessee is a landlocked state.”

She spoke with a smile, but Ashley had wondered. Nelle Milligan was not a naive woman, but she faced the daily and often conflicting pressures of what people around her expected her to do and be. Husband, children, in-laws, constituents, friends, parents—they all had their expectations. And Nelle tried very hard to please them. But sometimes what Nelle thought was proper and expected behavior on her part and what they thought was proper and expected behavior on her part didn’t coordinate, and she slipped painfully, unwillingly, into the unacceptable.

Such as when her visit to the institute had sparked more than just a passing interest. She’d thought she was promoting interstate and interregional goodwill, but Oliver insisted that the wife of a prospective Tennessee senator should focus her charity efforts on local institutions, or those few national institutions dealing with dreaded diseases and such that would improve his visibility and image at home.

In short, Nelle Milligan had no business supporting anything to do with saltwater.

If it had been her, Ashley would have told the SOB to go straight to hell. But Nelle dutifully dropped out of a month-long summer program for laypeople interested in oceanography that the institute was sponsoring on Cape Cod. Ashley assumed that would spell the end to their friendship, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. Dipping into her personal trust fund— willfully—Nelle Milligan sent hefty annual donations to the institute. She was a major funder of its marine archaeological research. In the annual report, she was listed as “anonymous.” Every year, just for a few days, she visited Ashley, telling her husband they were just going shopping. Instead they went on whale watches together and pored over charts of sunken ships, and once Nelle had joined a group of institute volunteers on a Maine beach during a stranding of pilot whales.