Willie looked proudly at Lara. “See there? I’d hire him.”
“I may take you up on that, too.”
Sam came back up the stairs with the box in his arms. “You weren’t kidding,” he told Lara, handing back her keys. “These things are heavy.”
I had him bring them through into my office, and his shoulder brushed the floor lamp. Set it rocking. “You should move that thing,” he said. “There’s room behind your desk.”
I couldn’t tell him that the ghost refused to let me plug anything in there, but I could say with full honesty, “That outlet isn’t useable.”
I should have known Sam would see that as something to fix. With the box of books safely set down, he selected a screwdriver. Knelt by the plug.
I said, “Shouldn’t you turn off the breaker, first?”
“I’m just going to look.”
I couldn’t bear to. I pretended interest in the books that Dave had sent, instead: The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, printed at London in 1743 and containing two hundred and fifty-four sermons and discourses on several subjects. It was a beautiful set, bound in full calf with gilt and raised bands on the spines. Twelve volumes, marked with numbers on the sides. I counted all of them, hoping in silence the ghost wouldn’t mess with Sam.
“Look at this,” Sam said.
I sighed. “What?”
“This wiring. A good thing you didn’t plug anything in here,” he told me.
I felt the hair lift on the back of my neck as I turned.
“If you’d left something plugged into that mess,” he said, very sure, “you’d have burned the whole place down.”
• • •
Childhood fears and childhood wishes never lost their power. At the moment you were certain they’d been set aside, they rose up unexpectedly and took you over just as strongly as they had before, as though reminding you that no one ever truly left the past behind.
I wasn’t sure which held me strongest, fears or wishes, but I felt them both as I approached the red brick posts that framed the iron gates of Bridlemere.
I’d actually begun this long walk in my mind two days ago, when I’d been in my office and Malaika came in with the morning’s mail. There’d been a card from somebody donating fifteen dollars to our artifact appeal, a little padded package that had held an old clay pipe—one of the items on our list—and a slim envelope, addressed to me. I’d smiled at the pipe. “Dance or not,” I had said to Malaika, “we’re doing okay with our fundraising.”
“Yes, we are.”
Then I had opened the envelope.
It held a cheque, with For the Wilde House Fund marked on the memo line. I’d looked at the amount, and at the signature. I’d had to sit.
Malaika had asked, “What?”
I’d shown her. She’d sat, too. She’d told me, “That’s enough to take us past our goal.”
“I know.”
“That’s more than we asked from the Sisters of Liberty.”
I knew that, too. What I didn’t know was, “Why?”
Malaika, watching me, had said what both of us were thinking. “I guess you’ll just have to ask her.”
I’d known she was right. I’d known it, just as I’d been well aware a huge donation like the one my grandmother had made deserved a formal thank-you. But it was one thing to know it, and another altogether to work up the courage to approach these gates.
In childhood dreams I’d knocked and they had opened and my grandmother had met me with a hug of welcome, taking me inside as though this place had always been my home.
Today, the gates were firmly locked. A gardener was working just beyond them in the flower beds that edged the path. It might have been a woman or a man, I couldn’t tell, but they wore overalls, a denim shirt, and one of those Australian hats whose brims could be snapped up to make them look more stylish. The gardener’s hat brim was left down, forgoing style for common practicality.
I’d parked the car beside the road, because I felt it would be harder, if I was on foot, to run away. I’d set out walking with my head up, showing confidence, but now that I’d come right up to the gates, with every window of that mansion staring down at me like disapproving eyes, I lost my nerve.
I took the thank-you note I’d written from my pocket, and prepared to pass it through the black iron bars. “Excuse me,” I said to the gardener, “could you give this to Mrs. Van Hoek, please? It’s from the museum.”
There. That sounded formal enough, in control, and polite.
Except when the gardener straightened and faced me, she wasn’t a gardener.
My grandmother’s eyes met mine with the same cool reserve they’d held that day at the Privateer Club. My hands shook a little, the way they’d done then, but I held the card steady so it became almost a dare to see if she would cross the small distance between us and take it.
She did.
I said, “That was a generous donation you made to us. Thank you.” And then, in the hope I would look like a dignified grown-up, I turned away.
“Charlotte.”
Her voice was melodic. A likeable voice. When I turned back and met her eyes this time, I realized my father’s eyes looked like that when he was on unfamiliar ground, worried he’d make a mistake.
She said, “I was about to have lunch.” She reached over to touch a post, and the gates started to part. “Would you like to come in?”
• • •
Her favourite room appeared to be the one I found most beautiful—an elegant conservatory, ringed with windows, filled with light. It opened to a terrace with a view across the gardens and the lawn down to the bay. The room was done in white and green and lilac, rich with texture, and my chair beneath its cushions was an Art Deco revival of the style of Spanish chair we’d just retrieved for our museum. We had lunch here, chicken sandwiches and tiny sweet tomatoes tossed with olive oil and herbs, brought by a woman who was either a devoted servant or a nurse, I couldn’t tell. She gave my grandmother a pep talk on the benefits of protein before leaving us alone.
I had expected explanations from my grandmother. Instead she asked a thousand questions, everything from whether we’d had pets when I was young to where we’d lived and where we’d travelled, and inevitably everything came back to, “And your father, what did he do? What did Theo say?” and “What did Theo think of that?”
It wasn’t that I didn’t understand. I couldn’t keep from thinking of my father, either. Everywhere I looked I’d think: my father used to climb those stairs, watch sunsets through that window, cross that hallway. Even so, her desperation to have word of him was touching and infuriating all at once, and finally I just had to set my teacup down and say, straight out, “I need to ask you why.”
She turned her head away, and watched the shadows lengthen on the lawn. “It was a different time.”
“He was—he is—your son.”
“I had two sons.” She said it quietly. “My handsome boys. They were a handful, let me tell you, and I was the only woman in the family, all those years. Even the dogs were male.” Her smile was faint. “I didn’t mind. I had my boys. And then,” she said, “I didn’t.” In the pause that followed she turned back to me. “When they sent Jack home in that body bag from Vietnam, I was so angry, Charley. May I call you Charley? That’s what Sam said you prefer, but . . . I was angry. I just wanted to go over there myself and take a gun and shoot whoever killed him. Burn that country to the ground. The whole place. Burn it all. I couldn’t understand why anybody wouldn’t feel the same. But Theo,” she began, then stopped. Another pause. “He couldn’t kill things. Ever since he was a little boy. If he went fishing, he would take the fish right off the hook and put it back.”
“He’s still like that. He never kills a spider, he just traps it in a glass and takes it outside.”
“Yes, that’s Theo. And he told us. When his draft card came, he stood right there and told us that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t kill someone. He told us th
at he thought the war was wrong. And I told him he was a coward.”
I could see the sadness touch her face when she remembered that. I asked her, “Did you mean it?”
“I don’t know. I think I did, yes. But I didn’t understand, back then.” She looked away again. “I watched a documentary a while ago, on Vietnam. They interviewed some men who, like your father, went to Canada. I heard them say how hard it was to leave their loved ones, leave their country, and I knew for Theo we had made it so much harder.”
“You disowned him.”
“No. We threatened to. We never did. He’ll still inherit everything. But we didn’t give him support when he needed us.”
“We managed fine.” Two hours ago my tone would have been more defensive. Now it sought to reassure. “I never felt deprived.”
“You’re very sweet.” She studied me. “I wish I’d met your brother, too. He sounded like a nice young man.”
“He was.”
“He phoned here once, and left a message saying that your father was in surgery. He thought I’d want to know. It was a shock, you understand. I should have called him back immediately, but I thought I’d take a few days, pull myself together. Only . . .”
“Only Niels,” I finished for her, “didn’t have a few days left to wait. Is that why you weren’t at the funeral?”
“Who would have wanted me there?” she asked. “Nobody. I would have been a distraction. Besides, I felt so dreadfully ashamed. He was my only grandson, and I’d never even taken time to stop and say hello. I knew what people would be saying. What they’d have a right to say.”
“You came to see me at the luncheon, though.” Now I knew why. But I still wondered, “Why did you leave?”
“Because while I was waiting to speak to you, two women at the next table were talking, as women will do, about how your face looked when I came in the room, and one commented I was most likely the last person you would have wanted to see.”
I wasn’t sure I understood. “You left because you didn’t want them gossiping?”
“I left because I realized they were right.”
There was the sadness, pushed down deep behind her elegant facade. I didn’t see her, at that moment, as a woman of authority and influence. I saw her as a lonely woman, sitting in a big house, on her own. And while I never liked to lie, I reasoned this was in a good cause.
“They were wrong,” I said. “I’d actually been hoping you would come that day, so we could meet.”
The sadness vanished briefly as she smiled. “You know, your father, when he said something that wasn’t true, would do that same exact thing.”
“What thing?”
She smiled, but didn’t answer. Her tea must have grown as cold as mine had, but she sipped it. “As I said, you’re very sweet.” Setting her cup down, my grandmother settled back into her chair, looking thoughtful. “Sam tells me you’re thinking of having a dance.”
• • •
The last time there had been a ball at Bridlemere, my father was in high school, Elvis Presley was a newlywed, and NASA had just publicly announced the crew of the first manned Apollo mission. So when we started planning one for the first Saturday in June, it caused a stir in Millbank. Before we’d even posted an announcement, word of mouth took over. People started calling the museum, and within a few days every ticket had been sold.
“You’ll need a dress,” said Lara. She’d just added a new section in a corner of her boutique, selling vintage clothing, and she had the perfect piece in mind. “It’s from the 1960s,” she said, smoothing down the layers of pale yellow silk that floated from a bodice set with delicate pearl beads and tiny rhinestones. When my grandmother had seen it, she’d produced a rhinestone necklace that lay lightly on my collarbone, and small earrings to match.
“When I was your age,” she told me, “everyone wore rhinestones. I had diamonds, but I liked these better. There. Now, if you do your hair just simply, put it up like this,” she said, and showed me. In the mirror I could see the happy concentration on her face as she combed back my hair, and it reminded me of what she’d missed—what we’d both missed—for all these years. The lost time we were making up for. With an expert twist she slipped a final hairpin in to hold the updo. “There. Just like Grace Kelly.” She was smiling when her eyes met mine in our reflection. “Perfect for the ballroom. You’ll look right at home.”
The long ballroom at Bridlemere, impressive in the daylight, became dazzling after dark. It had a grand, palatial feel—white marble floors, a soaring ceiling, chandeliers with sparkling strings of crystals. There were mirrored walls, and tall French doors in pairs that had been opened to the evening air, allowing guests to move outside and stroll along the terrace and the gardens, and the whole effect—the white and gold and glittering of guests and light—was beautiful.
Frank had expressed his doubts about it being a black tie affair. “I’ll have to shave,” had been his main complaint. But he looked right at home himself in a tuxedo. “It’s a great invention,” he admitted. “You rent it, you wear it, you take it back. And if I don’t spill a beer on it, they give me ten percent off.” He looked around the crowded room. “Besides, it’s a great leveller. You put a group of guys in penguin suits, it’s hard to tell the farmers from the millionaires.”
He had a point. Men stood straighter when they were in formal wear, and it wasn’t always easy telling who was who.
Except the man now coming in, more than an hour late, from the main entry hall. Even through the swirl of people I knew him immediately from the way he walked. A short way in, he stopped to talk to Darryl and Malaika, and Frank said, “I see Sam finally made it,” and excused himself and made his way across the busy floor to join them.
I would have followed if a big man hadn’t stepped in front of me and started chatting as though we’d already met and he felt very certain I’d remember him. I didn’t, not until he looked towards the silent auction table while he was explaining something, and I glimpsed the dark edge of his neck tattoo, and then I recognized him as the man who’d come up after our first ghost hunt in the woods at Halloween, to thank me. “So I made you something for the auction,” he concluded. “Want to come and see?”
He’d built a wooden model of the Bellewether, to scale, complete with rigging, sails, and miniature cannon. It had already attracted several bids.
I said, “It’s gorgeous.”
“Thanks.” He was showing me some of the smaller, meticulous details—the hatches that opened on hinges, and the real glass windows in the captain’s cabin—when he glanced past my shoulder. “Hey, Sam.”
“What’s up, Tiny?” He greeted me, too, before leaning in to look more closely at the model ship. “Very cool. How many hours did that take you?”
The two men were discussing the materials, mechanics, and tools needed to build such a faithful model when my grandmother came by, a little flushed and sipping ice water but looking otherwise unruffled for a woman in her eighties who’d just spent the best part of the past hour on the dance floor. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” she said, of the Bellewether model. “I was admiring it earlier. He used to make beautiful yachts, too—real ones—before his father sold the shipyard. I suppose he has to put all that creativity somewhere.”
I put my local knowledge to the test. “Before his father sold the shipyard? At Cross Harbor? So then he’s a—”
“Fisher, yes,” she said. “He’s Isaac’s nephew.”
“Everybody really is related here, aren’t they?”
“Oh, yes. You have to be careful what you say to whom, in Millbank.” She’d been watching the couples whirl by us, but now she sent a pointed look towards a short, round woman standing near the mirrored wall. “And be especially careful, my dear, what you say to her.”
“Who is she?”
“Carol Speck.” I’d heard the name before, but couldn’t place it until she continued, “She’s one of our Sisters of Liberty. This year’s vice-president.” Then
I remembered Sam saying he thought the reason we hadn’t got funding was because of Carol Speck. He’d told me she was friends with Sharon.
I studied Sam’s bent head, as nonchalantly as I could.
My grandmother went on, “When I had shingles last spring, she was only too happy to take over running the meetings, and move them to the Privateer Club. Out of my hands. I should really have said something then, but I didn’t. I just felt so ill and so tired, and so much was happening, what with your father in the hospital and your brother dying and . . . well, I just didn’t feel up to doing very much of anything.”
I glanced towards the anteroom where the refreshments and the bar had been set up, with Tracy’s Veronica in charge of catering, and Gianni helping serve the food and drinks, and Rachel keeping close to him. I hadn’t thought she’d come—she was still working to reconcile with my grandmother, and was too anxious to feel comfortable in such a large crowd, but Gianni had asked her and she’d said she’d give it a try, for him.
I said, “It’s called situational depression. I think we’re all working through it, on some level.”
“That may be. Anyhow, watch what you say around Carol. With people like that, you just say what you need to, and keep the rest private.”
Advice I could take, I thought. “I’m good at hiding things.”
I heard the smile in my grandmother’s voice as she followed my gaze to Sam’s shoulders. “Not everything.”
Then, as I blushed, the musicians changed tunes and she said to the man Sam called Tiny: “George, come dance this waltz with me. And Sam, get Charley out there. She’s been wasting that dress all night.”
Sam, left alone with me, held out his hand. “It’s a nice dress.”
It seemed I’d been waiting so long to be close to him, to have him hold me, that I didn’t know how to process these feelings. They came in a rush, tumbling over each other, confusing and breathtaking. I couldn’t speak. Didn’t want to, afraid I might spoil it.
He smelled nice. He danced well. He held my hand lightly, his other hand warm at the small of my back. He felt solid and perfect and just so incredibly right.