Bellewether

  This kitchen, half the size of the older Colonial one, had been “updated” back in the mid-1980s. The cabinets were white with wood trim and the counters were gold-flecked white Formica and the walls seemed to have trouble deciding if they were supposed to be beige or pale pink, so adjusted themselves to the lighting. This morning, with sun coming in through the two windows—one at the back of the house and one over the sink—the walls had apparently opted for beige. A safe choice.

  I privately suspected that the coffee-maker was a relic of the 1980s, too. It made a lot of noise and steam but in the end what it produced was only faintly recognizable as coffee.

  Still, this morning I was ready to accept caffeine in any form. I leaned against the counter while Malaika brewed a pot. While she was filling cups for each of us I ventured, “So, Frank told me all about the ghost.”

  “He likes that story.”

  “I did, too. In fact,” I added, “I’ve been thinking.” And I told her my ideas for the ways that we could use the story here at the museum for exhibits and events.

  Malaika handed me my coffee with a thoughtful look. “I like it.”

  “Could I slip that into the agenda for the board meeting tonight, under ‘new business’?”

  “Sure. Just brace yourself,” she warned me. “Sharon and her friends will fight it.”

  “Sharon would fight anything I suggested.”

  “True enough.” She sugared her own coffee with a smile. “At least it livens up the meetings. I might even stay awake through this one.”

  • • •

  “I don’t like it.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear Eve Downey echoing Sharon’s objection. Eve was one of the two trustees who always followed Sharon’s lead, although the second of them—Harvey—had probably turned things around in his mind and believed he was actually leading. Harvey was head of the Kiersted Group, named for himself, a commercial development firm that appeared to be somehow connected to everyone and everything in the area. Word was he had politicians as well in his pocket. The mayor and a congressman’s aide both went golfing with Harvey on weekends. He must have learned his smile from them. It was practiced and a shade too broad and lacking any real conviction. He smiled at Eve now, flirting with her as he often did. In jeans, his cotton oxford shirt rolled to his elbows, with his hair too uniformly dark for someone on the other side of fifty, Harvey looked like what he was—a middle-aged man stubbornly refusing to let go of youth.

  In that, he was a match for Eve. She looked amazing, and I gave her credit for the hard work she put into that—the perfect hair, darker than Harvey’s but expertly done and done often enough that her roots never showed, and the tightly trim figure that showed the effects of her hours at the gym, and the make-up that didn’t look heavy until you got close. But her jawline and neck were beginning to soften and let her down anyway, and I felt sorry for her about that, because she was the sort of a woman who wouldn’t adjust to age well.

  Sharon, on the other hand, had embraced middle age and the power it brought. Back in high school, she’d probably been the head cheerleader, queen of the popular girls, used to getting her way. But while Eve hadn’t ever left high school, not really—she’d just moved from being a student to teaching them, only retiring a year ago—Sharon had moved on and upward, becoming the wife of a local policeman who now was the chief of patrol for the county. He seemed nice enough, and was certainly capable, but I suspected his rise through the ranks had been driven by Sharon’s ambition. She knew how to lead from behind.

  It was how she’d positioned herself even now, at the table.

  The board of trustees for the Wilde House Museum met here, in the dining room on the Victorian side of the house. It was one of the few rooms downstairs that had kept its Victorian trappings. The ceiling had lovely crown mouldings and plasterwork around a glass chandelier, and an elegant bow window draped with long curtains looked over the lawn to the edge of the trees, which were blending now into the darkening sky of the evening.

  Not having a vote, I preferred to sit off to the side by the marble-faced fireplace and wait until I was called upon to supply facts or opinions, as curator.

  This gave me the advantage of observing all the personal dynamics at the table. Field Marshal Montgomery, in the Second World War, had said something about soldiers needing to know how their own smaller battles fit into the bigger one, and I had learned this was useful advice, so I always tried now to take stock of the whole field around me before I marched onto it.

  From where I sat, it was easy to see where the battle lines lay in the board of trustees.

  Three trustees hadn’t made it tonight to the meeting. Our legal adviser was sick, and one of my favourite trustees, a young single mother who owned her own fashion boutique on the main street, was still at her eldest boy’s Little League game. And our most flamboyant trustee, Don Petrella—an actor who’d shot to cult status some years ago playing a crime-fighting vampire on TV—was off on a film shoot, as we had been told several times by his wife, who was also a trustee.

  Rosina Petrella was little and likeable, one of those women whose age scarcely mattered because they were almost like pixies or fairies who seemed to be living on some different plane from the rest of us. She moved with fluttery grace and she smiled like she meant it. If she had a fault it was being too fluttery, too indecisive. But she was quick and the notes that she took of the meetings were nearly verbatim, which made her a great secretary.

  And tonight she marked the neutral territory between the two factions of the board. Sharon and Harvey and Eve hadn’t sat all together, but from their shared looks and the way they supported each other’s opinions it would have been clear to an outsider they were a team.

  At the head of the long polished table, Malaika sat coolly and calmly in charge, while Frank lounged in his chair to her right. Frank was no politician. If he thought a person was full of it, he let them know, by his facial expression if nothing else, and his muttered asides, if you managed to catch them, could be entertaining. Certainly they’d been amusing Tracy Chow, our treasurer, who had the seat across from Frank tonight.

  Tracy and Harvey got under each other’s skin. Harvey would have looked you in the eye and sworn he wasn’t homophobic or a racist, but he seemed to make assumptions that proved otherwise and when he told a joke it was most often inappropriate. I’d been told that he had commented, when Tracy joined the board, that it was logical that someone of her ancestry had gone into accounting, and that Tracy had replied she hadn’t been aware that people born in Idaho had any greater skills at math than anybody else. Which had made all the other trustees laugh, and from that point there’d been a thread of friction between Harvey and our treasurer, made stronger by the fact that Tracy’s longtime live-in partner was a woman.

  I might have been persuaded that, in Tracy’s case, the problem wasn’t Harvey’s homophobia but his belief that every woman ought to be attracted to his manliness. He’d side-eyed me, as well, as though suspicious of a woman who refused to do his bidding when he smiled.

  Malaika handled him with grace and skill. She let him feel important while not letting him take over. She was good at running meetings, keeping everybody moving smoothly through the night’s agenda.

  She had opened with the news about the window sub-contractor and his injury, and there had been a quick vote of approval for Sam Abrams taking on the extra restoration work. There had been reports from Tracy on the new donations we’d received on Saturday from people at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and from Sharon on the number of new members we had gained. Eve, with her teaching background, was in charge of education, and reported on her efforts to engage the local schools.

  There’d been a minor bump when Frank had named the people he had picked to join him on the sub-committee that would be in charge of vetting artifacts donated to and bought by the museum. “Lara,” he’d said, starting with the trustee who was off at her son’s baseball game, “and Tracy, and Dave B
ecker.”

  David Becker wasn’t on our board, but sub-committee members didn’t have to be. He owned a fine antiques store and had been the local auctioneer at one time, and still worked as an appraiser, which in my view made him an excellent addition to the acquisitions committee, but since nobody had asked my view I hadn’t made a comment.

  Harvey had made some remark about Dave’s work and conflicts of interest, and Frank had fired back, “You’d know all about that, Harvey, wouldn’t you?”

  And then Malaika had settled them both and a vote had been taken, Frank’s choices approved, and the meeting had moved on.

  The next item on the agenda had been less contentious: a Fall Harvest Festival on the museum grounds.

  This had been Sharon’s idea, I gathered, a couple of meetings ago before I had been hired, and she’d lit up tonight when discussing it. “I’ve got the spinners and weavers, they’re going to put on a whole demonstration, and six of the eight craft table places have already sold, so we’ll probably want to add more. Isaac Fisher says we can use his little donkey for children to ride on. And Frank, you’re still bringing your cider press?”

  Frank had assured her he was, and when Tracy had asked where the apples were coming from, Frank had replied not to worry. “I’ll call in some favours.”

  Malaika had added we’d need to apply for a permit for serving the cider, and Harvey had said, very sure, “I’ll take care of the permits.”

  Eve had agreed to make up the promotional flyers. Rosina had said Don had offered to come dressed in character from his TV show. “He’s always a big draw at Comic Con,” she’d told us proudly, “and he figured people could make a five-dollar donation to the museum fund to have their picture taken with him.”

  Even though the discussion had gone on a little long, it had been nice to watch the board working in harmony, each member giving something, no one arguing.

  But now we’d come to new business, and all that had changed.

  “I don’t like it,” Eve told me again. “I mean, with respect, it just takes us outside of our mandate. We agreed—and you can read this in the package you were given when we hired you—we agreed our purpose was to show the role that Captain Wilde played in the War of Independence. Maybe you didn’t read that part? But it’s a very specific focus, and this proposal’s asking us to go too far beyond that.”

  Not rising to her accusations of my ignorance, I only said, “I know what our mission statement says. But this still involves Captain Benjamin Wilde. He was living here, too, at the time.”

  Harvey came to Eve’s defence. “But it’s the wrong war, that’s what Eve means. Captain Wilde didn’t fight in the French and Indian War.”

  “That we know of,” Malaika concurred without really agreeing. “Though some would say that war was really when our revolution began.”

  Sharon smiled the small condescending smile usually aimed at me, and with a turn of her auburn head asked, “Are we rewriting history? Or talking about whether this fits our mandate? Because I’m with Eve, I think this takes us too far off course.”

  Frank, who’d held his tongue this long, said, “Oh, come on. You’re fine with Don coming dressed as a vampire to harvest days, you didn’t think that was ‘too far off course,’ but you’ll raise an objection to this?”

  Sharon searched for an answer to that while Rosina replied that her husband’s TV show was perfectly relevant. “Don’t you remember?” she asked Frank. “In the opening credits each week they showed us that Don’s character became a vampire during the Revolution.”

  He looked at her sideways a moment and drew breath to argue, then closed his mouth firmly as though he’d decided it would be a waste of his time to debate a fictional vampire detective’s connection to history. Instead he said, “Look, I’m the only damn Wilde at this table, and I think it sounds like a good way to draw people in.”

  Sharon paid no attention to him. She was looking at me when she countered, “You can’t just start serving up legends and fairy tales as though they’re facts. It’s not right. It’s misleading our visitors.”

  Harvey said, “Let’s take a vote.”

  Predictably, it was three votes to three, with poor Rosina hovering a moment like a bird between two trees, forced to decide which branch to land on.

  In the end she raised her hand for “No,” and sent me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, it’s a nice idea, but as Sharon says, it’s just a story, really. If we knew that it was real . . . if we had proof, then that would change things.” Her glance darted from my face to Sharon’s. “Wouldn’t it?”

  Magnanimous in victory, Sharon said, “Of course. When we find any proof Captain Wilde had a sister who had a romance with a captured French officer, then we can open this up for discussion again.” But her tone made it clear she considered the chances of that to be almost as likely as finding a unicorn. “Shall we move on?”

  I didn’t let my face betray my disappointment. I had learned to pick my battles and I knew this was a minor one. It was the losing, really, that stung more than what I’d lost.

  The meeting ended, and the trustees mingled briefly in the kitchen before leaving, one by one. Malaika touched my arm as she went out. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Frank hung back and would have walked me to my car, but I was keen to have a moment on my own. “That’s okay, go ahead,” I told him. “I’ll be fine. I’ll finish locking up.”

  He gave a nod and said, “Don’t let them get you down.”

  I didn’t plan to. In the greater scheme of things, I thought, with all that I was dealing with, three board members who seemed bent on opposing me was hardly the worst problem I was facing. And whatever Sharon, Eve, and Harvey did, there were still seven members on that board who liked me well enough, and gave me their support. But knowing all that didn’t take away my irritation.

  I did my rounds and checked the rooms and doors and windows, seeking peace as always from the calm routine of putting things in order.

  In my office I made sure that things were perfectly in place. I closed the blinds and cleared my desk of all the notes I’d used that day while I was writing my proposal for the board meeting. And then I reconsidered.

  “You don’t think I know my job?” I asked an imaginary Sharon and her allies, underneath my breath. “You don’t think I’ll find proof about the Wilde girl and her officer?” I took the notes out of the drawer again and stacked them firmly on the corner of the desk where I kept things I hadn’t finished. “Well, just watch me,” was my parting challenge to the empty air, and feeling satisfied with that I went downstairs.

  The staff entrance door had to be locked from the outside. The security light here was on a motion sensor that sometimes acknowledged you were there and sometimes didn’t, and tonight it had clicked on for thirty seconds before clicking off again, refusing stubbornly to “see” me even when I waved my arms.

  It wasn’t raining, but a bank of clouds still blanketed the moon and I was forced to bring my cell phone out to give me extra light so I could fit the key into the lock. The cell phone made a faint but useful flashlight, too, that helped guide my steps along the side of the house.

  When the walls of the Victorian section gave way to the wider siding of the old Colonial part, I slowed my pace a little and searched with the beam of my “flashlight” for the edge of the trench that the workmen had been digging. Finding it, I walked past it carefully but my foot still brushed a pile of excavated dirt and sent a scattering of pebbles bouncing down the hard bricks of the walkway.

  And something, not a pebble, struck a half a step in front of me and landed with a small, metallic clink.

  I stopped, and bent, and searched for it. A disc that nestled in my palm, its one side slightly domed, its other bearing a squared central bump, and made of a material that, even as I rubbed away the clinging dirt, I recognized as brass.

  And then I brushed more dirt away and shone the cell phone light directly on it and I recognized e
xactly what it was. I’d catalogued enough of them when I’d been with the Hall-McPhail Museum.

  It was a button, very old and showing traces still of gilt. A button that, back in the mid-eighteenth century, would have been part of a line of bright buttons sewn onto the uniform of a French officer.

  I felt a tiny, thrilling tingle of discovery.

  Suddenly a stronger light flashed on behind me. Startled, I looked back towards the side door and the motion sensor activated light above it. Nobody was there. The light shone brightly on the empty steps and walkway for a moment, then clicked off again.

  The wind, I thought, or else a leaf.

  But as I looked away, my gaze fell sharply on a smaller light that captured my attention.

  It was shining at the dark edge of the forest, where there had been, moments earlier, no light at all.

  Suspended maybe two feet from the ground, it slightly swayed from side to side as though in time with someone’s steps. A clear light, burning warmly yellow like a lantern in a hand.

  My heart leapt hard into my throat. I didn’t realize that my fingers had closed tightly round the button in a fist until I felt the metal edges pressing cold into my palm. I didn’t realize, either, that I’d made a sound when I had caught my breath. Until the light stopped moving.

  My heart dislodged itself and dropped. Began to race against my ribs.

  The light stayed there hanging a moment, then travelled away from me into the trees and the darkness, along the old path to the cove.

  The same path I’d taken with Frank when he’d told me, “Some fools in this town think he still walks these woods with his lantern, the same as he did on the night he was killed. Waiting for Lydia Wilde to come follow him, so he can light her way down to the water.”