(This couple is definitely swathed in a green cloud.) Since Box is teaching in Cambridge during the week, the opportunity to resume an affair with Clen proves irresistible to Dabney. Agnes is engaged to the uber-rich, controlling and decidedly unclassy sports agent CJ. Now Clen is back on Nantucket-minus an arm. Nearly three decades before, unable to follow in Clen’s globe-trotting footsteps, Dabney banished him from her life and from the life of their daughter, Agnes, who's never met her father, though she knows who he is. Due to a childhood trauma involving a runaway mother, Dabney has been too phobic to leave Nantucket (except for four years at Harvard). As the wife of John Boxmiller Beech, aka Box, a Harvard economics professor who's frequently summoned to the Oval Office and whose benchmark textbook nets about $3 million a year, Dabney’s domestic life is serene-except that she's never gotten over her high school sweetheart, Clendenin 'Clen' Hughes, a Pulitzer-winning journalist whose beat has been, until recently, Southeast Asia. So far, her unerring intuition, augmented by artful introductions, has resulted in more than 40 long-term Nantucket marriages.

Then there's her track record of spotting perfect matches: If a couple is suited, she sees pink around them if not, green. Hilderbrand’s latest Nantucket heroine has a very particular kind of clairvoyance: She can always tell whether a couple is compatible or not.ĭabney Kimball Beech, 49, who heads up Nantucket’s Chamber of Commerce, is known for her headband, pearls, penny loafers and other preppy accoutrements, as well as her fabulous menus for tailgates and picnics.

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