I wasn’t sure that Isaac Fisher thought of me as Kryptonite, but he had worn his loafers when he’d met me at the door. He’d made me tea, and we had sat together in his kitchen talking for an hour or more, about his family and Cross Harbor and the old store, now long gone.
And then he’d said, without my even prompting him, “That painting, now. I think it ought to be at the museum, and I’d like for you to have it. Can you give me a receipt, though, for my taxes?”
I had promised him I could, once it had been appraised.
When I’d reported all this to the trustees, Sharon had jumped right on that. “And who,” she’d asked, “is going to pay for this appraisal? If you hadn’t put Dave Becker on your acquisitions team, we could have gone to him, but now we can’t, is that right? It would be a conflict. So, we’d have to pay an outsider, and where will we get money to do that?”
She’d thought she had me in a corner, I could tell, and it had given me a lot of satisfaction to be able to reply, “I have a cousin in New York who owns a gallery, and she said she would do it for us free of charge. If,” I had added calmly, “that’s all right with everybody?”
I had hugged the beauty of that moment for as long as possible. I’d even gone the long way home on purpose, right past Bridlemere, to show those gates I wouldn’t be intimidated.
Not that they had noticed. At nine o’clock at night this time of year it was already good and dark, and there’d been no lights on at all that I could see within that mansion sprawled along the water’s edge.
My brother’s house had been a different story. Every light had been ablaze, Sam’s truck was parked beside the tree out front, and Bandit met me at the side door to the kitchen. Or, to be specific, at the open place where the side door belonged.
Sam had his tool belt on. “Good timing,” was his greeting. “I could use an extra pair of hands.”
Obligingly I set my briefcase down, shrugged off my coat and draped it on the nearest kitchen chair, and turned to help. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“Yeah, I did.” He handed me the hinge pins. “It was bugging me. Now here, I’m going to hold this up. If you’ll just drop those pins in . . . perfect. Thanks.” As I stepped back he gave the pins a final tap in with his hammer, swung the door shut, and surveyed it with the eye of a perfectionist. “Almost.”
If there was any kind of flaw I couldn’t see it, but he knocked the hinge pins out again and handed them to me. “Just need to mortise in this hinge a little better.”
While he got his chisel from the toolbox on the floor, I looked around. “Where’s Rachel?”
“Skyping with your mom.”
“My mother Skypes?”
“Seems like it.”
Mortising a hinge appeared to take a lot of patience and restraint. He made the small cuts with his chisel, set the hinge in place and screwed it firmly back into the doorjamb, and then took the door in both his hands and said, “Okay, let’s try again.” This time it seemed to suit him better. Even so, he rummaged in his toolbox for a hand plane and shaved off the slightest bit along the inner edge below the lock plate.
I glanced up towards the ceiling, wishing I could listen in on Rachel and my mother, hoping it was going well. My mother had Opinions when it came to education, and specifically on people dropping out of it. I knew because she’d voiced them all to me, at great length, these past weeks. I ventured, “So, have you heard arguing or yelling?”
Sam assured me that he hadn’t. “It’s been pretty calm.”
Bandit, curled up in the corduroy dog bed that Rachel had bought for him and which had become a fixture now under our table, appeared to bear witness to this. Then again, he might just have been tired. It was after nine thirty and long past the hour when he should have been home.
Sam was checking the fit of the door again, swinging it wide to make sure it was up to his standards. He had to be tired, too. He’d been on the roof of the Wilde House when I had pulled into the parking lot early that morning, and after the regular workday was over, when I had been putting together my notes for the board meeting, he’d still been clearing things up, making sure that the site was secure for the night. He’d been driving out just as the first of the trustees drove in. I’d have thought, after dropping by here to get Bandit, he would have gone straight back to his place.
Although now I thought of it, I wasn’t sure where Sam’s place was. I knew that he had one. I also knew it had a shed that was either incredibly large or had magical properties, because it seemed anytime I mentioned anything, even in passing, that I wished we had at the Wilde House—a good pair of shutters, a shelf, or a step stool—he’d turn up the next day with one he’d found “lying around in the shed.” And for things he considered a favour, he only took payment in food.
So I looked at his work now and asked, “Can I make you a sandwich?”
He promised me there wasn’t any need. “I grabbed a burger. And besides, you’re out of bread.”
“Oh.”
Rachel, coming through the doorway from the hall, remarked, “I tried to call you earlier to see if you could pick some up on your way home, but it’s a little hard to call you when you don’t have this.” She held my cell phone out, accusing.
“Sorry.”
She seemed more resigned to my forgetfulness this evening than upset by it. “How can you not even know that you don’t have it with you?”
“I was busy getting ready for the meeting.”
Sam closed his toolbox, unbuckled his tool belt and set it on top, and asked, “Good meeting?”
“Great meeting.”
I told them why. “So that’s two victories, really,” I finished up. “Getting the last word with Sharon, and getting that painting in spite of my grandmother.”
Sam said, “You’ve lost me, now. What did your grandmother do?”
“You remember. We asked for a grant from the Sisters of Liberty, to help us fund acquisitions. They turned us down.”
“And you think your grandmother did that?”
I sent him a sideways glance. “She is the president.”
“Maybe in name. But she doesn’t do much with them anymore. Not since the spring. It would be her vice-president running the show—Carol Speck. And she’s good friends with Sharon.” Standing there looking so casually male in his T-shirt and jeans he hardly seemed the sort of guy who’d notice who was friends with whom, but when I asked him how he knew, he said, “Small place like this, it pays to figure out how people are connected so you don’t get into trouble.”
Rachel nodded understanding. “Dad said the best thing to do is assume everybody’s related until you learn differently.”
I felt my forehead crease faintly as I tried absorbing Sam’s words. “So you think that this Carol . . .”
“Speck.”
“You think that she was the reason the Sisters of Liberty turned down our funding request?”
“I’d believe that before I’d believe that your grandmother did it.”
“And why is that?” I hadn’t meant for the edge to creep into my voice. It just did.
Sam shrugged. “It’s not her style. She’s too much of a lady.”
A short silence followed his words until Rachel said coldly, “She wasn’t too much of a lady to miss my dad’s funeral.”
Sam looked from Rachel’s face to mine. “I’ve obviously hit a nerve. I didn’t mean to. Sorry.”
With a small smile I explained, “It’s a pretty big nerve. Kind of hard not to hit it.”
He looked as though he was about to say something else, but then he didn’t, and things might have ended there except I asked, “Why since the spring?”
“What?”
“You said she hadn’t had much to do with the Sisters of Liberty since the spring. Why?”
“I don’t know. She got sick, I think. Nobody saw her in town for a while. She still doesn’t come out of the house much.”
“She came to see me,” I said dryly, ??
?that day at the Privateer Club, so she can’t be a total hermit.”
Once again he seemed about to say something, but I saw him rethink that impulse. “Anyway,” he said, and lifted Bandit’s leash from where it hung beside the door, “I’m going to get this troublemaker home. Thanks, Rachel. Charley, see you in the morning.”
Bandit dragged his heels a bit, and since Sam’s hands were full with leash and toolbox I stood there and held the door for them, which gave me time to notice something. “Sam.”
“Yeah?”
“This isn’t the same door.”
“That’s because the old one was just an interior door,” he said. “This one will actually keep out the weather.”
“But it can’t have cost nothing,” I pointed out. “And if you tell me you just found this lying around in your shed, I’m not going to believe you.”
It would have been an easy thing to miss the slight curve of his mouth because it came and went so quickly, but his eyes still held the smile. “You won’t, huh?”
“No.”
Accepting this, he said, “Okay, it wasn’t in the shed.” He let the dog go first as they stepped out onto the porch, and then he turned and told me, “It was in the basement.”
“Sam.”
“No, honestly. I had it left over from another job. It didn’t cost me anything.”
He clearly wasn’t going to let me pay him back, so I could only say, “Well, thank you. We really appreciate it.”
“Anytime.” He briefly eyed his handiwork from this new angle, by the porch light. “My grandmother,” he told me, “had a theory about doors. Whenever things were going wrong, she’d have my stepdad come hang a new door for her. He’d tell her she was nuts, that doors were doors, but she’d say no door ever opened exactly the same as the last one, the new one was always that little bit different, and anyway it never did any harm to walk through a new door now and then, and see where you end up.”
I thought about that for a minute. I thought about what he’d been actually trying to do for us, hanging that door on this house where right now it seemed everything was going wrong; and I thought how incredibly thoughtful and nice he was, and how inadequate any reply I could make was, to thank him. And by the time I’d thought all that, there was nothing I could say, because he had already walked to his truck and he wouldn’t have heard me.
I did step out onto the porch, though, and Sam was right. It was a little bit different.
I was a little bit different.
Malaika had said, when we’d talked about how she had fallen for Darryl, that there had been something about him, just something, and every time he’d come around she had noticed it more. She had liked it more.
Sam put his things in the back of his truck, lifted Bandit up onto the seat of the cab, and got in himself, as I had seen him do countless times. And as he always did, he raised his hand in a brief wave goodbye as he backed out.
I waved back.
The night was a clear one, the wind blowing sharp from the bay. It was cold on the porch, and I hugged myself tighter, but I stayed and watched the red taillights of Sam’s truck roll up the long driveway, and in that one moment I knew, beyond all doubt, why I hadn’t cared much when Tyler had gone.
• • •
Malaika had noticed that I was distracted at work the next morning, but she put it down to the after-effects of our board meeting. “It was a beautiful thing, seeing Sharon shut down,” she said. Sinking into the chair on the opposite side of my desk in my office, she swivelled to look out the window. “What on earth is Sam doing now?”
I’d been acutely aware of exactly what Sam had been doing since I had arrived. I’d tried not to be. I’d reminded myself I was probably just on the rebound, and that it was never a good or professional thing to get mixed up with men in the workplace, and that Sam had never done anything anyway to make me think he was interested back, but it still hadn’t kept me from noticing what he was doing and where he was, so I could answer Malaika with no hesitation, “He’s building a platform for Willie to use when he starts on the chimney.”
The stonemason and his mate were on their last day of foundation work, two days ahead of schedule, and given that this was the last month they could work outside before it got too cold for their mortar to set, they were wasting no time moving on to the great central chimney. “A wee bit of scaffolding,” Willie had told Sam, “would be just the thing.” What he was getting was more than a wee bit, but Sam never did things by halves.
Malaika, watching Sam’s surefooted steps along the roof’s ridge, shook her head. “I don’t know how they even do that. I hate heights. But then I guess with Sam it’s in his blood.” And seeing that I didn’t understand, she said, “His father was an ironworker. It’s a Mohawk thing, Sam tells me, walking up there in the open on those steel beams. It’s tradition.”
I had heard about the famous Mohawk ironworkers who’d earned the respectful nickname “skywalkers” by working on the skyscrapers and bridges of New York and other cities. In fact, one of the men who had served as a consultant at my previous museum had been a retired ironworker, and he’d told me that many of them came from a community near Montreal, where I’d been born. I wondered if Sam’s family came from there as well.
Malaika didn’t know. She said, “I think he comes from Brooklyn.”
He could not have heard us talking. It was cooler out that morning and I’d had my window closed, but when I’d seen his head begin to turn I’d looked away abruptly, feigning sudden fascination with the papers on my desk, and that had made Malaika notice them.
She’d asked me, “What’s all that?”
“I’m doing research on our painting.” I had started with the inventory made by Captain Wilde’s wife. A lot of inventories, since they were usually taken to value a person’s estate when they died, left out things like people’s portraits that would stay within the family and weren’t seen as having value to anyone else, but because our inventory had been taken for a special purpose while the homeowners were still alive, they had left nothing out.
My father’s portrait, Captain Wilde’s wife had noted first among the contents of the parlour, in a gilded frame. 1 writing desk with leather bottom chair, 4 mahogany chairs, 2 arm chairs, 1 square walnut table, 1 pair andirons with tongs, 1 carpet, 1 bookcase—the books listed separately on their own page—3 brass candlesticks, and last of all, a painting of the Bellewether at Halifax.
“And that,” I’d told Malaika, “isn’t Halifax.”
We’d looked towards the painting, leaning up against the far wall of my office out of everybody’s way, with quilted padding on the floor beneath its frame. Except the impact of my statement had been lessened by the fact the painting had been turned around, so we were looking at the back of it.
I’d thought I’d left it facing out when I’d carried it up after our meeting, but that morning my thoughts were admittedly muddled while I’d sorted through this new shift in my feelings for Sam, and I couldn’t rely on my memory. I’d risen and turned it around again, so I could prove my point.
It was a beautiful painting, not flat in its imagery like some Colonial paintings could be. It had life. It showed a half-constructed ship careened upon its side with three men hard at work upon it, framed by tall trees casting shadows on a curve of beach that was, without a doubt, the beach here at Snug Cove.
The broad gilt frame was beautiful as well, and bore a narrow brass plaque with the title of the piece: The Building of the Bellewether.
I wasn’t an expert on ships, but the ship in the painting did look like the Bellewether when I compared it to the other images I had collected—and there were a lot of them. Benjamin Wilde had been captain of several ships over his lifetime, but only one became part of his legend. Like Drake’s Golden Hind, Nelson’s Victory, and Charles Darwin’s Beagle, the Bellewether’s name was forever bound to Captain Wilde’s. Her portrait had been painted and engraved as many times as his had, and historians had writte
n of the sloop’s exploits as though she’d been alive.
“The Fearless Bellewether” was actually the title of the article I reached for first when trying to explain my doubts about the painting’s subject. “Here’s the thing,” I told Malaika. “I don’t think this shows the building of the Bellewether at all. It says here she was built at Jackson’s shipyard, which was here on the North Shore somewhere, but from all the accounts that I can find it was a proper shipyard, and that’s not what’s in this painting.”
Thoughtfully Malaika had agreed, “No, that’s our cove.”
“With just one ship and a few men. Not a shipyard. But here in this article it says the Bellewether had to be overhauled. Listen to this: ‘In autumn of 1759, the brave sloop was attacked by enemy pirates in the West Indies, the crew and captain were killed, and she was brought home in a sad state, barely afloat. Instead of giving up on her, William Wilde had the little privateer brought to the cove, where she was restored to better than her former condition and lengthened by fifteen feet.’ ” Turning again to the painting, I said, “I think that’s what this shows. See? She’s being repaired, not built.”
“You may be right.” She’d side-eyed me as though my theory was amusing.
“What?”
“You’re just determined to get that old Seven Years’ War in there somehow, aren’t you?”
I’d smiled. “I have a whole display space planned. You want to see it?”
We had gone downstairs so I could walk her through the room below my office, which, when we’d restored the kitchen to its former size, would still leave space for an exhibit on the early life of Captain Wilde; his childhood, and his family. And his sister. And her doomed, beloved French officer—assuming I could find sufficient proof that he’d existed, that the legend of their love affair was true, so Sharon and the board would let me tell the story.
From the floor above, a muffled thud had interrupted us. It had been light, not loud, a little like a footstep, but although we’d stopped and listened, there had been no other sound. Malaika had dismissed it. “Someone walking on the roof,” she’d said.