Bellewether

  “Every woman,” Lara told him, “needs a pair of power shoes.”

  “Is that what those are?”

  “Yes,” I told him, smiling back.

  A bit of borrowed courage. And not only for the meeting with my grandmother.

  • • •

  My office looked innocent. Empty.

  I switched on the fan, which was still plugged in right where I’d left it plugged in. Cast a carefully nonchalant glance at the outlet across from my desk, to make certain the lamp had stayed plugged in, too. So I could safely assume that whatever had pulled those plugs out of the wall before, when they had been in the socket behind my chair, just had a problem with that one particular socket, and not with my lamp or my fan.

  Good to know, then, I thought as I sat in the awkward, self-conscious way I did all things when I thought I was being watched.

  Rachel would have told me I was being over-sensitive. She would have looked around my office and assured me there was nothing there.

  That’s what she’d said to me this morning, before breakfast, when I’d come down after showering to find her sitting wrapped up in a blanket on the sofa, with the television on.

  “How was the ghost hunting?” I’d asked her, trying not to sound too curious, and she had shrugged and told me, “There was nothing there.”

  I hadn’t argued with her. Hadn’t shared the fact that I had seen the phantom light shine in the Wilde House woods myself at night. Her life was mixed up enough at the moment, and right now she needed to go on believing that I was the steady, more practical one.

  “You were out a long time,” I’d said, “looking at nothing.”

  “Yes, well, Gianni’s really stubborn.”

  She hadn’t gone further with that, so I’d left it alone. And I hadn’t asked how late she’d stayed out, because I had already known. I’d been sitting upstairs in my bedroom and reading, one eye on the clock, until I’d heard her come in at twenty-two minutes past one. Then I’d put down my book. Gone to sleep. I’d assumed she had, too.

  Only seeing her sitting there wrapped in her blanket this morning had made me less sure. It was how she had sat as a little girl when we’d watched movies that scared her or made her cry. And while the blanket this morning had not been the same one she’d had in her childhood, she’d still worn it in the same way, like her personal armour—a signal for me to tread carefully.

  Rachel was one of those people who didn’t like being approached when they felt upset. True to our family, she held things inside, so if she was bothered by something that Gianni had done or concerned about school starting or simply missing her dad, I’d have no way of knowing until she decided to tell me.

  It might have been none of those things, I’d acknowledged as I’d glanced towards the TV. She had just started watching a movie that would, on its own, have been cause for the blanket—an old haunted house thriller, older than me. We had watched it together a couple of times, but this morning while eating my breakfast I hadn’t been in the right mood.

  “It’s too creepy,” had been my excuse.

  “But the ghost isn’t trying to hurt anyone, he’s just trying to right an old wrong.”

  “It isn’t what he does. It’s the idea that he’s there.”

  She’d shrugged again, the way she always did when she’d decided that I wasn’t making sense. On-screen, the hero of the film, having just lost his wife and daughter in a car crash, was returning to his now-empty apartment, standing lonely at a window, looking out while distant echoes of their voices and their laughter tugged his memory.

  Rachel had retreated in her blanket; drawn it up and close around her head and shoulders like a winter shawl. “Sometimes,” she’d told me suddenly, “I wish there really were such things as ghosts.”

  And then I’d understood.

  I’d understood the blanket, and the movies, and I’d known whose ghost she wanted to be there with us. I’d wanted him there, too.

  But it was one thing to think about ghosts in the abstract. It was another to be sitting here now in my office, on my own, and feel the crawling sense of certainty that I was not alone.

  To distract myself, I picked up the notepad where I had been jotting down prompts for my speech, but the feeling grew so strong that I couldn’t bring myself to look up from the paper. With the notepad clenched within my hands, I kept my focus fiercely on the few lines I had written until all the words were blurred, because I knew—I knew—that if I dared to lift my gaze above the notepad’s edge there would be something there to see.

  It was a sudden, all-consuming dread.

  I felt the thudding of my heart inside my ribcage; felt it pressing upward until it was hard to breathe, and so I caught my breath and held it.

  Go away, I told the thing that stood in front of me, in silence. Please, just go away.

  The oscillating fan swung back and swept a puff of cooling air across my desk that ruffled the loose pages of my notebook and the damply curling strands of hair that clung against my neck. And then it passed me by.

  My office door, which had been standing fully open, creaked a little on its hinges. Paused. Then creaked again, and in a slow arc so deliberate that it seemed controlled by someone’s hand, it swung and closed itself.

  And gently, very quietly, the knob clicked shut.

  • • •

  The Privateer Club didn’t strike me as the kind of place that any self-respecting privateer would ever frequent. It was bright and airy, all light wood and windows, with white curtains and white tablecloths and views of the white sailboats moored along the slips of the marina.

  Here and there were accents of bright brass and summer blue, and Lara had made sure I’d fit in perfectly by dressing me in patriotic tones—the cool white blouse that flared above the blue-striped skirt, and those red high-heeled “power shoes” that clicked across the polished floor as I walked to the lectern.

  I hadn’t needed to rely on them for confidence, so far. The Sisters of Liberty, as Sam had promised, had turned out to be a remarkably welcoming group. They had greeted me warmly and given me lunch and had put me at ease. And for all that I’d worried, my grandmother wasn’t among them.

  I didn’t know why, and I hadn’t asked. All I was sure of was that there was nobody here who resembled the photographs I had looked up on the Internet over the years. My relief had been blunted by faint irritation she hadn’t been even a little bit curious to come and see what I looked like. She was this group’s president, so there was no way she wouldn’t have known I was coming to speak today. Whether her absence was meant as a snub or was simply her way of avoiding me, I didn’t care.

  Really. I didn’t care.

  I reminded myself of that as I smiled out at the roomful of faces and started my talk.

  That was easier, too, than I’d thought it would be. I had a projector, a screen, and a slideshow, and organized notes. By the time I had outlined the Wilde House’s history and started explaining how Benjamin Wilde’s wife had written a full room-by-room list of all the home’s contents to keep them from being destroyed or removed while the house had been occupied by British officers, I’d hit my stride and felt fully relaxed.

  “It’s so rare. We’re so lucky to have this,” I said as I clicked to the next slide to show them an image of one of the document’s pages. “Most inventories were taken after someone died, so they don’t necessarily tell us where things were when they were in actual use. We don’t know, for example, if a painting or table that’s listed as being in an upstairs room was being used in that room or had been moved there for storage. And in many cases there are no inventories at all, so when a family gets divided—”

  Here I stopped, and paused a moment because something was occurring at the centre of the room. People were rising, moving, murmuring, and shifting to make space for someone new to take a seat. A late arrival, with distinctive short white hair, a flash of jewellery, and a stylish lilac pantsuit.

  There was no mistakin
g who it was. Even without the fuss everyone made and the way they all parted for her with such deference, Elisabeth Van Hoek just had the kind of face you recognized.

  I met her cool eyes levelly a moment and then let my gaze move on. My hands were shaking slightly but I knew that was adrenaline—the classic “fight or flight” response. I wasn’t going to give this woman who’d disowned my dad the satisfaction now of seeing me do either. Resting my hands on the top of the lectern, I picked up as smoothly as possible where I had paused.

  “So when a family gets divided, their possessions get divided, too, and we don’t have a record left of what was lost, or where it was originally in the house. That’s why, when Captain Wilde’s wife made this inventory, she was giving us the most amazing gift—a snapshot, in a way, of what the whole house looked like on that day. And we can try to re-create it.”

  There, I thought. I had my balance back. I carried on through the remaining slides, explaining how we meant to go about refurnishing the house, retrieving some items from where we knew they’d ended up, and buying others where we could, and filling in the gaps with custom replicas and reproductions.

  “We’ll be appealing to the public and inviting them to sponsor or donate the things we need, and we’re looking at getting some inter-museum loans, but that still leaves us with this amount we’ll need to raise for the purchases.” Showing the next slide, the breakdown of finances Dave had projected, I said, “I do realize you’ve been very generous already in giving to our restoration fund, and I’m aware that your bylaws set limits on what you can give for that purpose. We really appreciate all that you’ve done. But this would be a separate project, meant for education.” Education was central, I knew, to the Sisters of Liberty’s mission, so I let the emphasis of that one word hang a moment. “We’d be very honoured,” I told them in closing, “to have your support.”

  With those words, my attention had settled again on my grandmother, and for the second time she looked right back at me. It was impossible to guess what she might be thinking.

  Then the woman who’d first introduced me came forward again to the lectern to thank me, and after that several more women approached to discuss the museum and what we were doing. They closed up the space between me and my grandmother. Offered me more tea, and let me refocus on why I was there.

  So I spent the next few minutes chatting, and making new social connections, and trying to be less aware that Elisabeth Van Hoek was sitting three tables away. And next time I dared to glance over, she wasn’t. The chair where she’d sat was pushed back at an angle and empty, and scanning the room I caught no glimpse of her lilac pantsuit. My grandmother, as she had been for the whole of my life, was not there.

  • • •

  “I thought you might be needing friendly company,” Malaika said, explaining why I’d found her in the parking lot outside the Privateer Club when I’d finished with the meeting. She’d been sitting with her car door open, talking on her cell phone while she waited for me. Now she slipped the phone back in her purse and stood gracefully, shutting the car door and locking it. “Let’s go and sit on the boat.”

  She was always surprising me. “You have a boat?”

  “It’s more Darryl’s than mine,” she said, naming her husband. “You can’t keep a mariner away from the water, and I figured letting him have this was better than having him off on a big ship for months at a time.”

  “Was Darryl in the navy?” I had only met her husband once—a tall and quiet man who’d kept his focus on the barbecue and left us to ourselves.

  “Not the navy. The merchant marine,” said Malaika. “He came out of King’s Point the year we got married, and went out to sea on the freighters, but when the kids came along he didn’t want to be gone so far.” Like me, she was wearing high heels, but she stepped with more certainty onto the long sunbleached wooden dock edging the water. “Then he was a New York harbour docking pilot, but that got tough, too. Lots of guys were getting laid off back about ten years ago, and I was doing okay with my real estate, so Darryl just decided he would rather do his own thing, work his own hours as a maritime inspector. That,” she said, “is how we ended up with this.” We’d stopped beside a slip that held a fair-sized sailboat, maybe forty feet in length. “Darryl inspected it for somebody who ended up not buying it, and he just couldn’t let it go.”

  I didn’t know much about boats, but I could sympathize with Darryl. This one did have graceful lines that made it stand out sleekly from its neighbours.

  It also had a chrome and canvas canopy that gave us shade as we climbed aboard. Malaika asked, “You want to go below, or sit up here?”

  “Up here, please.” The breeze felt refreshing after the confines of the Privateer Club’s luncheon room.

  Malaika settled back into the curve of molded fibreglass that formed the bench seat facing me. “How did it go?”

  “Really well. Their education committee is going to discuss it when they meet, and let us know.”

  “No, I meant how did it go with your grandmother?”

  “Fine.” Because she looked less than convinced I explained, “She came late and left early, so that made things easier.”

  “What did she say to you?”

  “Nothing.” I shrugged it off. “Guess that was better than having her yell at me.”

  “I told you not to worry. She’s not going to go off on you in public. When she speaks to you, she’ll be polite.”

  I doubted she was ever going to speak to me, and said as much. “She cut my father dead, and never said a word to Niels while he was living here, so I can’t see her changing now. Why would she?” Without meaning to, I turned my gaze across the deep blue water of the bay where sunlight danced and glittered in a thousand points of light. On the opposite shore I could just see the steeply pitched roofline of Bridlemere sheltering deep in the trees like a recluse. “We’re no longer her family.”

  “Family,” said Malaika, very firmly, “doesn’t work like that. A family’s not some club you join or get kicked out of. Lord knows I have cousins I’d be happy to disown, but even if I did, they’d still be family.”

  “I’m just saying. If she wouldn’t talk to Niels, she isn’t going to talk to me. He was the peacemaker.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. You’ve been doing all right yourself, keeping our trustees from killing each other.”

  “You’re doing that,” I pointed out. “I’m the reason they’re fighting, remember?”

  “You don’t think they’d fight if you weren’t here?” She sent me a look that knew better. “Frank and Sharon have been trading words since I first got involved with the historical society. And Harvey and Don, so I’m told, have been mad at each other since middle school. Some fights are rooted so deep they’re a force you can’t stand against. Best to get out of the way.”

  “Yes, well, Sharon won’t let me get out of her way.”

  “She’s a difficult woman,” Malaika agreed. “But you’re managing her fine.”

  I’d managed Sharons every day in high school. I’d just never figured out how to make friends with them. I wasn’t even sure they had friends. Followers and allies, yes, like Eve and Harvey, but that wasn’t truly friendship.

  Friendship was somebody letting you sit on a sailboat to cheer you up after you’d first met your grandmother.

  It was working. I was gradually relaxing to the gentle rocking of the boat, the creaking of the mooring ropes, the rhythmic slap of water on the hull below. I’d never spent much time on boats, apart from being taken out from time to time on the old wood-and-canvas two-man kayak that my dad had kept in our garage. I’d been too small to be much help—he’d done the paddling—but I’d always liked the feel of being buoyed above the water, and the soft splash of the paddles as they dipped into the river. I’d loved that kayak, but eventually it had started leaking and my dad had disassembled it into its canvas bags and it had sat and gathered dust until at some point it had ended up at Niels’s ho
use in Saratoga Springs. I’d seen it there in his garage when I had first moved down to stay with him. “I’m going to get it fixed,” he’d said. “We’ll take it on the lake.” We never had. For all I knew, it was in pieces in its storage bags still, somewhere in his house. He’d left a lot of things in pieces.

  As though following my thoughts, Malaika asked, “How’s Rachel doing? Is she ready to go back to college?”

  “Sort of. I mean, she’s all packed up and organized. Whether she’s mentally ready or not, I don’t know.”

  “It might do her good to get back into a routine.”

  “It might.” I looked away from Bridlemere and let my gaze slide down the shoreline, almost down to Millbank, until I saw the patch of tall reeds and the arching trees that framed the caramel-coloured siding of my brother’s house, its back towards the water. “I’m not ever really sure what’s going on with Rachel. She just lets you in so far, you know?”

  She sympathized. “She goes back this Saturday, right? Well, at least you’ll be getting a night in the city. Are you and your man going to take in a show while you’re there?”

  “He can’t make it,” I said. “He had something come up.” I was careful to keep my tone light but she glanced over anyway, making me wish I was wearing my sunglasses as I deliberately searched the small harbour for something to draw her attention to.

  Several slips over, a grey-haired man seemed to be readying a smaller sailboat to take it out onto the bay.

  He looked so familiar I shielded my eyes from the brightness with one hand to see better. “Isn’t that Frank?”

  “Where?” She looked too. “No, that’s one of the Fishers—I don’t know which one. Maybe Jim. There are three brothers, I always get them mixed up. But you’re right, there’s a family resemblance. The Fishers are one of the old families here, like the Wildes. They all married each other. They used to own most of Cross Harbor, the Fishers. They owned this marina, too, until a year ago.”

  “Really? What happened a year ago?”

  “Harvey decided the Kiersted Group needed more waterfront property.” Her side-eye spoke volumes. “When Harvey decides that he needs something, he won’t give up till he gets it.”