Bellewether

  “I can’t believe,” he’d said, “that you would say yes without talking to me first.”

  “They’re my family.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “What? You would have told me to say no?”

  “No. No, I—” He had broken off again to rake a hand through his endearingly unruly hair. “I just don’t think you’re thinking about us.”

  And he was right. I hadn’t been. But in reply I’d only told him, “Ty, I have to go.”

  “But two years? Really? That’s a hell of a long time.”

  “I’ll still be in New York, and you can drive there in five hours. We can make it work.”

  He’d looked at me with open irritation. “Do you want to make it work?”

  “Of course I do.” My face had probably displayed some irritation, too, because I’d thought it crazy he would even ask. “Of course I want to make it work.”

  I hated arguing. We’d almost never argued, from the time six months before when we’d been introduced by friends at a reception. Our relationship so far had been a relatively calm one, free of drama, so this recent patch of turbulence had left us both off balance.

  I restored my balance now by briefly fixing on the broader world that showed beyond my window, which looked out across the mossy shingles of the older section of the house and gave a peaceful green view of the branches of the nearer trees.

  Their shade was welcome. Even with the window-mounted air conditioner along the hall, it was still August, and the morning sun would otherwise have made this room an oven.

  As it was, the young reporter had begun to use her notepad as a fan.

  I sent her a small smile as I acknowledged this, apologizing for the heat. “We can finish this downstairs, if you’d like? And there’s no air conditioning in the Colonial part of the house, so if you still want that tour we should probably go while the sun’s where it is.”

  She still wanted the tour. She had gathered her notebook and pen and recorder and stood in the time that it took me to push back my chair, and by the time I’d crossed to join her she had flipped the stapled pages I had given her when we’d begun our interview, to look more closely at the page of floor plans for the house.

  She said, “So this room, your office, is actually in the Colonial part of the house.”

  “Well, it is and it isn’t. This would originally have been one of the garret rooms in the Colonial house, but then in the mid-1800s they opened up this corner of the back wall and the roof so they could build on the Victorian addition, so now this room is kind of half-and-half.” Like the rooms of the Victorian addition, it had undergone a total renovation in the 1980s, with the painted woodwork and the wallpaper to prove it; but the floor, though painted, was still the same wide-planked floor that had been here when this was just a garret room in the back corner of the old house, and I still got that wonderful walking-through-a-wardrobe-into-Narnia feeling every time I opened the old-fashioned panelled door in the wall behind my desk and stepped through into what felt like another century.

  The spacious upstairs bedchamber that lay beyond that door had not seen many changes since Colonial times. Large and square, it had a lovely feel to it with all its windows opened wide to let in the faint breeze that danced and rustled through the leaves outside, casting shadows over the floorboards and the dusty fireplace hearth. The air was fresh, the room was quiet, and I felt myself relax. In the older part of the Wilde House, this room was my favourite.

  I was about to launch into a proper description of how this first house had been built, and what things had been altered, and how our new project was going to restore them, when the young reporter, studying her floor plan, cut me off with, “Which room was Benjamin Wilde’s?”

  From her tone, anyone would have thought him a living celebrity—someone with legions of fans who would line up to see where he’d slept.

  I was still getting used to that.

  Benjamin Wilde, I had learned, was our museum’s claim to fame. A daring privateer, a dashing hero of the Revolution, and—if one could trust the portraits—devilishly handsome, he was largely why the Wilde House had been designated a historic building to begin with, and why funds had been donated for its restoration. Benjamin’s descendant, Lawrence Wilde, may have become a fairly famous poet of his day and dined with presidents, but all these years afterwards, Benjamin’s was the name everyone knew. The man everyone wanted to hear about.

  I smiled and told her, “Over here.” We crossed the landing to the other upstairs bedchamber. This one was essentially the mirror image of the first—a square with two windows at the front and another in the side wall overlooking the green clearing at the forest’s edge, where guests would soon be gathering to hear the speeches and take part in the official groundbreaking ceremony.

  The room was plain, with nothing in it I would call remarkable, but still the young reporter seemed to revel in its atmosphere. She crossed the floor with reverence. But I thought I caught, within her voice, a hint of disappointment. “There’s no furniture.”

  “It’s all been put in storage. There’s a bedstead that’s original, and two chairs and a table that we know belonged to Benjamin, because during the Revolution, while he was away fighting and the British came to occupy his house, his wife wrote down a careful inventory of what was in each room. She must have thought the British officers would damage things, or steal them.”

  “Did they?”

  “Not that we can tell. Most of the furniture that left the house left in the usual way,” I said. “Sold off by later descendants who didn’t want old-fashioned things.” And who would have most likely been shocked by the prices Colonial furniture fetched these days in fine antiques stores. “We know where some pieces went, and we’re working to get them back. But what we can’t track down, we can at least replace, thanks to the records of Benjamin’s wife.”

  She made a note of this, then looked around appreciatively at the peeling plaster walls and scarred wood of the panelling surrounding the room’s fireplace. “So you’re going to have this whole house restored to the way it looked when he was living here?”

  “That’s the plan, yes. With luck, we’ll be able to have the museum officially open for visitors sometime next summer,” I said, “but we have some ideas for special events in the meantime, so people can follow along with the project: a Christmas open house, maybe, and a plastering party in the spring.”

  “And ghost tours at Halloween?” Seeing my blank face, she said, “There’s a ghost here, right?”

  I couldn’t tell from her tone of voice if she was being serious, so I kept my reply neutral. “I’m not aware of one.”

  “Oh. Well, you’re new here. I’m new here myself, I just moved here last winter, but I’ve had lots of people tell me things about the ghost.”

  I waited politely, but she showed little interest herself in sharing the tales she’d been told, so I agreed with her it might be fun to do a Halloween event, and on that note we moved on with our tour.

  She didn’t show much interest in that either, though in fairness it was getting close to noon and with the sun directly overhead the upstairs rooms were growing hotter. She began to fan herself again, and seemed content to briefly peek into the downstairs rooms and take a picture of me standing posed beside the massive old stone fireplace in the kitchen before we went out to join the others on the lawn.

  The crowd, though small, was starting to assemble.

  At its centre stood the town of Millbank’s mayor, a handsome man in his mid-forties with broad shoulders and a smile designed to charm. The young reporter fixed her sights upon him, shook my hand and thanked me for my time, and left so quickly that I doubt she was aware of my relief.

  But someone was.

  Malaika Moore, the current chairwoman of our board of trustees, sent a knowing smile across the space between us as she raised a hand to call me over. Standing in the sunshine, she looked elegant as always, the deep violet of her linen dress a perfect
foil for the dark brown tone of her skin, her closely clipped hair giving her a huge advantage over my own pinned-up hairdo that had started off this morning looking almost chic and now had wilted to a sagging mass of waves beginning to escape their clips. I tucked a strand behind my ear and crossed the lawn to stand beside her.

  “Well,” she said, “that’s done. How many questions did she ask about your grandmother?”

  I tried to recollect. “She didn’t, really. She just asked about the family name, and moved on pretty quickly. She found Benjamin more interesting.”

  “Everyone loves Benjamin.” Malaika smiled, assessing me with a calm look that didn’t judge yet still had an opinion. “You look tired.”

  “It’s just the heat.”

  “You’re still not sleeping.”

  “I sleep fine.” An outright lie, but I delivered it with confidence, and when Malaika let it pass I changed the subject. “We’re supposed to have a ghost here, did you know?”

  I knew what sort of glance she’d give me in reply to that, and so she did, replying dryly, “That’s a local superstition. Don’t believe it.”

  “Oh, I don’t. But I should know about it, if it’s common knowledge.”

  “Frank’s the one to ask. He tells the story best.”

  I’d learned to trust Malaika Moore.

  She’d been my brother’s friend and, in a way, his business partner. Real estate lawyers like Niels needed good contacts, and in Malaika, the best high-end agent in this part of Long Island, he’d found a steady supply of referrals. They’d liked one another. Respect had grown into a friendship so firm that she’d transferred that goodwill to me when I’d come here, and when she had learned I’d be needing a job she had wasted no time recommending one.

  “I’m on the board of the local museum,” she’d told me, “and we need a curator. Give me your résumé.”

  She hadn’t told me that she chaired the board, but when I’d had my interview it had been clear she was firmly in charge. “We’d be lucky to have someone with Charley’s qualifications,” she’d said to the others, in front of me. “I think she’s perfect for this.”

  It had not been unanimous. I knew at least two directors had not been in favour at first, and they’d made that plain to me since I’d been hired, but the others had welcomed me, solely because they, too, trusted Malaika.

  It should have been her, I thought, making this opening speech to the crowd.

  I eased the cotton collar of my light blouse from my neck, where it had stuck from the damp heat inside the house. “Aren’t we waiting for the contractor?” I asked. I hadn’t met him yet, and so I didn’t have a hope of recognizing him in the assembled group in front of us, but still I scanned their faces as I stalled for time.

  “He couldn’t come. He’s working on another job,” Malaika said. “He wants to get that finished off so he can start here Monday.”

  There was movement in the little crowd.

  Malaika said, “It’s time. You ready?”

  “No.”

  She smiled and nudged me forward anyway, and told me, “You’ll do fine.”

  • • •

  “Good speech,” was Frank Wilde’s curt review of my performance when he came to find me later. He was carrying an extra glass of lemonade. “You look like you could use this.”

  “Is it spiked?”

  That earned a smile from him. Frank was an older man with features tanned and weathered from his years of farm work. He was stingy with his smiles. “It should be.”

  Frank was also a director on our board, by virtue of his being a descendant of the man who’d built the Wilde House, and a cousin of the woman who had willed it, with its wooded acres, to the town of Millbank on condition that they make it a museum. Many said it had been Frank who had persuaded her to do that, since Ophelia Wilde had never really been the giving type. Frank, they told me, always got his way, though I’d have said that came less from persuasion than from his refusal to back down once he had set his course. He wasn’t like the mayor, who tried to charm his way through every situation. Frank was aptly named. He said exactly what was on his mind.

  “You’ve done enough,” he told me, with a pointed look at the untidy stack of paper plates I was collecting from the plastic-covered table where the cake had been. “Let Sharon and her girls do that.”

  I glanced across the clearing to the bustling red-haired woman who ruled over our few volunteers, and had them all now busy stacking chairs. “She has enough to do.”

  “She argued against hiring you as curator.” His tone was dryly practical. He pressed the lemonade upon me. “Let her do her own damn job.”

  I wasn’t going to win against a man who’d had his way for seventy-odd years, so I gave up and took the glass from him and thanked him.

  He acknowledged this and looked at me assessingly. “I’m told you want to hear about the ghost.”

  “Oh. Right. Yes, the reporter from the Herald said we had one. Do we?”

  “Well now, that depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether you believe in ghosts.”

  “I don’t.” With someone else, I might have been less absolute, not knowing whether they believed, not wanting to offend them, but from what I knew of Frank I figured I was safe on that count.

  His short approving nod confirmed this. “Good for you,” he said. “My aunt, now, she wouldn’t go into the old house at all. Always hearing things. Jumping at shadows. She used to leave Uncle Walt’s lunch on the back step and whistle for him to come get it, when he was at work in there.”

  Frank’s uncle Walt was the reason the house had come down to us in its preserved condition. A self-styled handyman, he’d also been a keen family historian, proud of his ancestry, and even after the family had moved to Manhattan and no longer lived in the Wilde House full-time, coming only in summer to make their escape from the city’s heat, Walter had worked hard to keep the house standing. Or so we’d been told.

  Frank had stories, and he loved to tell them. I had only been on site a week, and I’d already heard at least a dozen of his tales.

  “There was one time,” he told me now, “my aunt came screaming downstairs saying someone was touching her hair, she could feel it.”

  “And nobody was?”

  “Not unless you count spiders.” He took a long drink of his lemonade. “Plenty of those in the house.”

  I agreed. I had seen them.

  Across the clearing Sharon and her volunteers had finished with the chairs and were gathering, actively looking for what to do next. Frank appeared to have noticed this, too, because he gave another brief nod at my glass. “Drink up. Let’s take a walk.”

  I’d already drunk nearly all of my lemonade, so I was able to empty my glass in one swallow and follow Frank as he set off towards the nearest path.

  My favourite path, in fact, because I hadn’t yet got lost on it. The property was riddled thick with walking paths that twisted through the woods. The longest, starting at the far end of the clearing near the parking lot, was crossed by all the others and could take you all the way around, if you knew which turnings to take, but I still hadn’t conquered it. I managed better on this shorter path that wound down through the trees to the edge of the cove.

  The trees closed above us. The air here was instantly cooler and quieter, and through the tangle of green leaves I glimpsed, in small patches, the blue of the bay.

  It almost felt like nothing could intrude upon us here.

  Frank said, “The story of the ghost has been around for generations, and every generation adds their bit to it, but I’ll tell it the way I first heard it from my uncle Walt—the way he heard it at his great-grandfather’s knee, so he said.”

  From what I could remember of Frank’s family tree, his uncle Walt’s great-grandfather had been the poet Lawrence Wilde, who’d likely told a decent story.

  “Back before the Revolution,” Frank began, in the same tone he always used when startin
g on a story, “back when we were fighting on the same side as the English, in the French and Indian War, Zebulon Wilde and his family took in a French officer, captured and sent to these parts as a prisoner.”

  “Zebulon Wilde,” I said, checking my memory, “was Benjamin Wilde’s father, right?”

  “That’s right. Benjamin was barely out of his teens at the time—twenty-two, twenty-three maybe—still a bit reckless, so his father kept him at work on the farm. Didn’t want him to run off and join the militia. The one brother, Joseph, had already been halfway ruined by the war. Nearly killed, so they say, in the raid on Oswego, and never quite right in the head after that.”

  There were so many names to remember. I asked him, “Was Joseph the brother who went to the West Indies or the one who was a merchant in New York?”

  “Neither. Joseph was the one who turned a traitor in the Revolution, and went up to Canada.”

  “A Loyalist? I don’t remember hearing about him.”

  “Well, we don’t talk about him much.” Frank’s voice turned dry, but when I glanced at him he winked. He knew that I was half Canadian. “Anyhow, here was this Frenchman, this officer, living right here in the old house with Zebulon Wilde and his sons. And his daughter.”

  I thought I could see where the story was going, but I let Frank tell it.

  “The daughter,” he said, “was a lonely young lady. She’d been set to marry a neighbour boy, one of the friends of her big brother Joseph, but he had gone up with her brother to work on the fort at Oswego, and when the French attacked them he was killed. That’s what drove Joseph over the edge, they say: seeing his best friend get butchered in front of him. So Joseph came home half crazy, and his sister—Lydia, that was her name—lost her fiancé.”