“This is it?” Alix whispered from behind Izzy. “Where I’m to live for a whole year?”
“I think so,” Izzy said. “It’s the right number.”
“Remind me to send my mother orchids.”
Alix fumbled in her big Fendi bag in search of the keys her mother had sent. She found them and made it to the door, but her hands were shaking so much she couldn’t get the key into the lock.
Izzy took the key and unlocked the door. They walked into a big hallway with a staircase going up on the left. To the right was a living room, to the left a dining room.
“I think …” Izzy began.
“That we just traveled even further back into time,” Alix finished for her. She hadn’t given much thought to how such an old house would be furnished, but she’d assumed it would be rather formal, done by some decorator’s idea of how the house should look. But this house had been occupied by the same family for centuries. Everything was a mixture of old and new—and new meant no later than about the 1930s.
The hallway had a tall secretary desk and a trunk inlaid with what looked to be ivory. In the corner was a big Chinese porcelain umbrella stand painted with branches of cherry blossoms.
They peeked into the living room to see furniture upholstered in striped silk, the arms showing wear. The rug was a pink Aubusson with walking patterns worn into it. There were tables, ornaments, and portraits of distinguished-looking people.
The two young women looked at each other and started laughing.
“It’s a museum!” Izzy said.
“A living museum.”
“And it’s yours,” Izzy said.
In the next second they started running from one room to another, exploring and yelling comments.
There was a small room behind the living area, which held a television.
“What do you think of that TV?” Alix asked. “Circa 1964?”
“Send that one to the Smithsonian and get your mom to buy you a flat screen.”
“Top of my list.”
All the way to the back was a large, light, airy room with bookshelves on two walls. Two chintz-covered couches flanked a huge fireplace; a wing chair and a club completed the picture.
“This is where she lived,” Alix whispered. “Tea was served to the ladies in the more formal front parlor. But family stayed in here.”
“You want to stop that?” Izzy said. “It was fun at first but now you’re beginning to creep me out.”
“Just memories,” Alix said. “I wonder why Mom never brought me back here?”
“Miss Kingsley’s gorgeous nephew probably had the hots for your gorgeous mother. That would have been awkward.”
“If I was four, then that nephew was just a teenager.”
“My point exactly,” Izzy said. “Race you upstairs!”
Izzy beat her, but that was because Alix slowed down to look at the framed cutout silhouettes hung on the wall. There was one of a lady wearing a big hat with feathers in it. “I remember you,” she whispered so Izzy couldn’t hear. “You look like my mother.”
“I found him!” Izzy yelled over the railing. “And I’m going to get into bed with him.”
There was no need to ask who “he” was.
Alix ran up the stairs and looked for Izzy in the bedroom on her left. It was a pretty room, all chintz and gauzy muslin—but no Izzy.
Across the hall was a truly beautiful room, quite large, and done all in blue, from a pale creamy shade to deep and dark. In the middle was a four-poster bed with damask hangings. To the left was a big fireplace and beside it was a portrait, but she couldn’t see all of the picture for the draperies on the bed.
“Here,” Izzy said as she crawled to the end of the bed. “Get in and look at his royal highness, Jared Montgomery. Or Kingsley, as he’s known here in the country of Nantucket.”
Alix climbed onto the bed, which was rather high off the floor, and looked where Izzy was pointing. There on the wall to the right of the fireplace was a life-sized portrait of what looked to be Jared Montgomery. Maybe the man was a few inches shorter and he was dressed like some sea captain in a period drama, but it was him—or more precisely, his ancestor. The face was clean shaven, the way Jared Montgomery’s had been when she and Izzy had seen him years ago at one of his rare lectures. The hair was shorter and curled a bit by his ears. The strong jaw and those eyes that seemed to look through a person were there.
Alix turned onto her back and flung her arms out. “Dibs.”
“Only because you live here,” Izzy said as she put her hands behind her head and looked up. The underside of the big canopy had pale blue silk pleated into a sunburst pattern with a rose in the middle. “Do you think Miss Kingsley lay here when she was in her nineties and drooled over that man’s picture?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“If I wasn’t about to get married …” Izzy began but didn’t finish because she knew it wasn’t true. She wouldn’t trade Glenn for any man, famous or not.
Izzy rolled off the bed and went to do more exploring, but Alix turned over to look at the portrait. The man in the picture intrigued her. When she was four had she snuggled on this bed and looked at that portrait while Aunt Addy—as she was beginning to call her in her mind—read her a story? Had she made up her own stories about him? Or did Aunt Addy tell her about this man?
Whatever happened back then, Alix could almost imagine him moving about, almost hear him talking. And his laugh! Loud and deep, a roar, really. Like the sea.
There was a little plaque at the bottom of the picture and she got off the bed to look at it. CAPTAIN CALEB JARED KINGSLEY 1776 TO 1809, it said. Only thirty-three years old when he died.
She straightened to look up at his face. Yes, it looked like the man she’d seen years ago and again today on the wharf, but something else about the picture stirred a memory deep within her. It was there but she couldn’t quite get hold of it.
“I found your mother’s room,” Izzy shouted down the hall.
Alix turned to leave but then stopped and looked back at the portrait. “You were a beautiful man, Caleb Kingsley,” she said, then on impulse, she kissed her fingertips and put them on his lips.
For a second, less than a second, she thought she felt breath on her cheek, then a touch. Very soft, very quick, then gone.
“Come on!” Izzy said from the doorway. “You have a whole year to lust after that man and the one in the guesthouse. Come see the room your mother’s done.”
Alix thought about saying that maybe the man in the picture had kissed her, but she didn’t. She took her hand from her cheek and went to the door. “How can my mother have a room here? And how do you know for sure it’s hers?” she asked, following Izzy down the hall, past the stairs, to another bedroom.
But the instant Alix saw it, she knew her mother had decorated it. It was done in shades of green, ranging from a dark forest color to a pale yellowish shade. One of her mother’s vanities was her green eyes; she often dressed to match them and nearly always chose colors for her house to complement her eyes.
The bed was covered in a dark green silk with tiny honeybees woven into it. The pillows, a full dozen of them, were subtlety monogrammed with her distinctive, intertwined VM.
“Think it’s hers?” Izzy asked sarcastically.
“Could be,” Alix said. “Or maybe Miss Kingsley was a great fan of Mom’s books.”
“Could I …? You know … tonight?”
Alix had teased Izzy that she was her mom’s biggest fan, and with every book, one of the first copies off the presses was given to Izzy. “Sure. Just as long as you also don’t sleep in the nude.” Alix left to explore the other rooms.
“What?” Izzy asked, following her. “Your mother sleeps naked?”
“Shouldn’t have said that,” Alix muttered as she looked in the fourth bedroom. It was pretty but didn’t look as though anything new had been put in it for about fifty years. “It wasn’t me who told you,” Alix said.
Izzy crossed her heart and made a motion of zipping her lips and throwing away the key.
“It’s just one of my mother’s many peccadillos. Extremely expensive sheets and her bare skin together. A true love match.”
“Wow,” Izzy said. “Your mother …”
“Yeah, I know.” Alix opened a narrow door at the back of the house and entered what had obviously once been the maid’s quarters. A sitting room, two bedrooms, and a bath.
As clearly as though she were seeing a movie, she knew that she and her mother had stayed in these rooms. She looked in the doorway to her right and saw a pretty little room done in pink and green, and she knew that as a child she had chosen the fabric for that bedspread and those curtains. On the floor was a needlepoint rug with a mermaid swimming about in coral. She’d always loved mermaids. Was that rug the source of her fascination with them?
A white desk had a bowl of shells that Alix knew she had collected off the beach. And she also knew that the hand she’d been holding while walking through the sand had been old. Certainly not her mother’s hand.
When she heard Izzy in the sitting room, Alix left the little bedroom and closed the door.
“Anything interesting?” Izzy asked.
“Nothing,” Alix said, knowing she was lying. She looked in the other bedroom. It was larger but impersonal; everything was of the most utilitarian nature. The bath was all white, with a pedestal sink and a big enameled tub. She could remember how cold the tub could be and how she’d had to stand on a box to reach the sink.
“You okay?” Izzy asked.
“Great. In awe, I guess. Shall we open the bottles and toast the Kingsley family?”
“Now you’re talking.”
Chapter Two
An hour later they were sitting on the floor of the little TV room eating tuna sandwiches and a pizza they’d found in the freezer.
“Wonder what the grocery stores on Nantucket are like?” Izzy asked. They’d found some beautiful crystal glasses and she was using one. “Maybe Ben Franklin drank out of it,” she said, knowing his mother was from Nantucket.
As for Alix, the only thing she wanted to drink was rum.
On their first survey of the house they’d missed the kitchen. They found it hidden away at the back of the house, behind the dining room. Compared to the kitchen, the rest of the house was downright modern. Nearly everything was exactly as it had been in about 1936. The stove was green and white enamel with a lid over the burners. The big sink had drainboards on both sides and all the cabinets were metal. The fridge was new but quite small, as it had to fit into a space that had been made for a thirties-era refrigerator. On the far wall under the window was a seat and a little table with a well-worn top of wood that she’d be willing to bet was once decking on a ship. Alix knew that she used to sit there and color while someone made her a sandwich. Again she had a vision of an older woman. If that was Aunt Addy, the owner of the house, where was her mother? And if they were guests of Aunt Addy, why had they stayed in the maid’s quarters? None of it made any sense.
“Doesn’t this make you itch to tear it out?” Izzy asked as she looked around the kitchen. “I think there should be granite countertops and maple cabinets. And I’d take down that wall into the dining room.”
“No!” Alix said with too much force, then calmed herself. “I’d leave it just as it is.”
“I think this place is taking you over,” Izzy said, then exclaimed over finding a frozen pizza. “We’ll feast tonight! Think this thing works?” She was referring to the oven in the old range.
To the amazement of both of them, Alix knew how to ignite the pilot light in the oven, knew that the knobs were quirky and just how to jiggle each one.
Izzy stood back, watching her, but refused to comment.
Alix was looking around the kitchen and again she had the idea that she knew something but couldn’t remember what it was. When she saw the doorknob of a pirate’s head next to the fridge, she said, “Ah-ha!” and gave a pull.
Izzy went to see what she’d found.
“This cabinet was always locked and I was fascinated by it. I even tried to steal the key but I couldn’t find it.” She had a vague memory of a man with a deep voice telling her that she couldn’t have the key, but Alix didn’t tell Izzy that.
For a moment the two women stood there staring in disbelief. The cabinet held bottles of booze and mixers. What was unusual was that nearly all the bottles were rum: dark, light, gold, white, and at least a dozen flavored varieties. In the middle of the cabinet was a marble-topped surface, and below it was a single-drawer refrigerator full of fresh citrus fruits. The kitchen may not have been modernized in nearly a century, but the bar was straight out of a decorating magazine.
“We can see where Miss Kingsley set her priorities,” Izzy said.
Alix wondered if the reason she’d associated rum with Nantucket was from having seen people drinking it in this room. Whatever the logic behind the cabinet, there were drink recipes taped to the back of the doors and she wanted to experiment. “How about a Zombie?” she asked Izzy. “It takes three kinds of rum. Or maybe a Planter’s Punch?”
“No, thanks,” Izzy said. “I’ll stick to champagne.”
It didn’t take them long to get their food and drinks into the TV room. For tonight the other rooms were too big, too intimidating for them to use.
“You have three days,” Izzy said and they both knew what she meant. “He” would return in three days. “I wonder if today is one of the three? Which means that you only have two left. I’ll have to do a lot of shopping quickly.”
“The luggage should be here tomorrow and I have plenty of clothes.”
“I saw what you packed. All you have are sweats and jeans.”
“Which is what I’ll need,” Alix said. “I plan to work while I’m here. I thought about asking my dad if he knows anyone who summers here and if I can get a job. It would have to be under his license, and his approval, but maybe it could work out.”
“I’m not talking about your father,” Izzy said.
Alix took a deep drink of her Planter’s Punch. Usually she got drunk easily but she was on her second rum drink and wasn’t even feeling a buzz. “I want to learn from Jared Montgomery. If I show up in shorts and a halter or some designer concoction, he’s going to look at me like he did at that girl today.”
“So where’s the problem with that?” Izzy asked.
“I don’t think he took her seriously as an intelligent being, do you?”
Izzy sipped her champagne. “You and work! Don’t you ever think of anything else?”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong with you thinking only about work?” Izzy was incredulous. “Jared Montgomery is over six feet of muscle! He walks into a room and every female in there goes limp. Her forehead lights up with a sign that says TAKE ME. PLEASE. There’s never been a woman who has turned him down, but you … All you can think about is his mind. I didn’t know he had one. Alixandra, you’re getting old.”
Alix took another long drink, then set her glass on the rug. “You think so? You think I don’t see him as a man? Stay here and I’ll show you something.”
She ran up the stairs to get her laptop and turned it on so that by the time she got back down to Izzy the screen was on. She had to go through about eight levels of files before the document she’d always hidden came up.
Jared’s Lower Lip
Soft and succulent, luscious and firm
Beguiling, enticing, calling to me
A Siren’s song, Pied Piper’s flute
I dream of it asleep, awake
To touch it, caress it, kiss it
The tip of my tongue, breaths mingling
To draw it in, to caress it
To feel it against my own
Ah, Jared’s lower lip.
Izzy read it three times before she looked up. “You do think of him as a man. Wow! Do you ever!”
“It was a few ye
ars ago—after we’d heard him speak, and you and I’d spent hours talking about him. Remember how he built his final project for school? No drawings or model for him. He built it with hammer and nails. My dad says that it should be mandatory that one year of architecture school be spent doing construction. He said—” She broke off because Izzy had stood up.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“We’re going to look inside his guesthouse.”
“We can’t do that,” Alix said as she stood up.
“I saw you looking out the windows, just as I was, and you saw the place in the back. Two stories, big window in front.”
“We can’t—”
“This may be our only chance. He’s away on his fishing boat and you know that we came early. He doesn’t know we’re here.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Izzy said. “But maybe when he knows a fanatical architecture student is here in this house he’ll put bars on his windows and doors.”
Alix hadn’t thought of that. “I’ll be subtle. I’ll tell him how much I admire his work and—”
“And his lower lip? Did you ever consider that he might have a girlfriend? Just because he isn’t married—or wasn’t the last time either of us searched the Internet—and because he was alone on a fishing boat doesn’t mean he’s celibate. Do you think she is going to let you in the house?”
Alix knew that what Izzy was suggesting was wrong, but on the other hand maybe he had drawings here. Maybe this was her one and only chance to have a private viewing of a Montgomery design before the world saw it.
Izzy could see that Alix was wavering and she half pushed, half pulled her out the side door and down the garden path to the guesthouse. It was tall and had heavy curtains over the windows; it looked almost forbidding.
Izzy took a breath and tried the front door. Locked.
“We can’t do this,” Alix said as she turned back toward the house.