“Hi, Daddy.” I opened the door and allowed him into the foyer. “Mother’s still sleeping. Follow me to the kitchen and we’ll put those flowers in a vase next to the others.” I raised an eyebrow, seeing if he’d caught my sarcasm. Since he’d begun to re-landscape the yard and garden, the house never seemed to lack for flowers—pink roses in particular. I had deliberately tried not to pay attention to the amount of time my parents spent together, but I couldn’t help but notice that my mother seemed to spend a lot of time at restaurants around town discussing the garden with my father.
He handed me the flowers and I took them to the sink to cut off the stem bottoms before making room for them in the overflowing vase on the table. He walked over to the fireplace and peered inside. “Your mother told me about this room. Shame you didn’t find anything useful after all the trouble.”
“Actually, we did. Mother and I did a little digging last night and found a teacup, apparently from a ship called the
Ida Belle
. Haven’t had any luck discovering anything about it, yet, but I’ve only just started.”
“You should give Jack a call.”
I felt the color rushing to my cheeks, remembering the previous night and all its witnesses. “I don’t think he really wants to talk to me.”
He raised his eyebrows and stared pointedly at me. “You might be right, Peanut. He sure didn’t seem to be wanting to do a lot of talking last night.”
I held my hand up. “Stop, okay? You’re not really the relationship expert, are you? Besides, I don’t know what that was about. All I know is that he’s really angry with me and hasn’t been answering my phone calls. Last night was just an aberration.”
“Is that what they’re calling it nowadays?” He walked toward me, pulling out whatever it was that he’d been carrying under his arm. “Anyway, he came over this morning and gave me this to give to you.”
He held out Meredith’s journal and after a moment’s hesitation, I took it. “He gave you this? Where did he get it?”
“Apparently from Rebecca’s condo.”
“She gave it to him?”
“Not exactly.” He cleared his throat, embarrassed. “Rebecca wasn’t there.”
“He broke into her apartment?” I found that hard to believe, even for Jack.
My father began to studiously examine the roses behind me. “Actually, he had a key so he let himself in.”
I licked my lips, wondering if there was anything I could say to that and decided that there really wasn’t. I looked down at the journal. “So Rebecca did take it. Did Jack tell you why?”
My dad shook his head. “No. But he did mark a couple of pages that he wanted to make sure you’d read.” He reached over and flipped the journal open where a small slip of paper had been stuck and I began to read.
W showed me the secret room behind the wall in the kitchen pantry. I had to wait until R went for a stroll with C because she cannot know about it. Everything that is special to me, my cat for instance, my favorite book, or my prettiest dress, she finds a way to destroy. So I have stopped sharing things with her, even this discovery of a secret room in a house she has lived in all of her life. I am glad she cannot see W, because then she would find some way to make him go away and I would be all alone.
W kept telling me to look harder, to find what he wants me to find, but all that I saw in the room was an empty sea captain’s chest. I think W is purposefully obtuse, wanting me to figure it out on my own. He says it is because of his shame, that he cannot stand to disappoint me by telling me what he did. He will only confess that what is in the room will be the thing that will illuminate the truth, and maybe even free him from his prison. But I need to solve this for myself—if only I could. I am so confused; W told me that he saved my life and that in return, I could save his.
I looked up at my father. “Did you read this?”
He nodded. “Didn’t make a lot of sense to me, except for maybe the hidden room. I’m assuming this room used to be the pantry. Who’s W?”
“I’m not sure,” I said slowly. “But I think the teacup is what he wanted her to find.”
“And how would you know that?” he asked in the way I’d grown familiar with—his warning signal that I couldn’t answer with something he would refer to as “hocus-pocus.”
Instead of answering, I handed him the journal. “What was the other page Jack wanted me to see?”
With a pointed look, my father took the book and opened it to the inside back cover where we’d found Meredith Prioleau’s calling card. Somebody—and my bet would be on Rebecca—had pried off the rest of the glued page, exposing an ink drawing of an angel head and wings, the bottom of the body disappearing in a triangle. I looked up to meet his eyes. “It’s an image from the window. Look.”
I went to my purse on the counter and pulled out my cell phone where I still had the photo of the window. “It’s not really clear, but when I zoom in on that section it’s obvious it’s the same thing.”
He took the phone and stared at the picture of the window, then back to the page. “What in the world is it?”
“I don’t know. But it seems that Meredith—whoever she is—might have known about the window and the hidden images. Or somebody else drew the image inside the journal much later because the journal predates the window.” I rubbed my temple, trying to get the facts to shuffle into an order I could understand.
My dad scratched his ear, a familiar sign to me that he was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear. “Mellie, Rebecca was here a couple of days ago. I was working in the garden and she was asking me a lot of questions about the flowers and plantings and what I had planned. But whenever she thought I wasn’t watching, she was taking pictures of the window. Lots of pictures.”
“Who was taking pictures?” We both turned around to see my mother standing in the threshold with General Lee in her arms. She put him down and he ran to his newly installed doggy door.
“Rebecca,” I answered. Then I held up the journal. “Jack got the journal back from Rebecca and gave it to Daddy.” I turned the journal around to show her the drawing. “It’s on the page that was glued to the back cover.”
She stepped closer but didn’t touch it. “So you’re thinking the writer knew my mother, and knew why the window was changed.”
“Yes.”
She nodded, thinking for a moment. “What about the ship? Have you had a chance to go online?”
“I did, and I got a lot of hits related to baby names, handmade soaps, and an Iowa family genealogy. Just nothing that could have been the ship we’re looking for.”
“You should call Jack.”
I looked at my father, then back to my mother, wondering if they were conspiring against me. “No. I shouldn’t call Jack. As I explained to Daddy, Jack doesn’t really want to have anything to do with me.” I caught them exchanging a glance over my head.
“I’m going to call Yvonne at the historical society and see if I can come in this morning.”
My dad reached into his coat pocket. “One more thing I brought for you, Mellie. I found this with all the other pictures I took from the house. I was going through them again last night and I came across this one and thought you might like to see it. I remembered you telling me that you wished you had a picture of Rose as an adult, so when I saw her name written on the back of this photo, I knew I had to bring it to you.”
I flipped the photo over, expecting to see a short, fat woman with a cane. Instead I saw a picture of a tall, lean, handsome couple dressed in clothing from the earlier part of the twentieth century, smiling at the camera and standing on an embankment in front of a very tall waterfall. I turned the photo over and read in faded blue ink, “Rose and Charles Manigault, Niagara Falls. Honeymoon, January 1900.”
I looked at my parents. “Come with me,” I said before leaving the kitchen and heading toward the drawing room where the portrait of the two girls still sat against the unpainted wall. I held the photograph in my hand up to the portrait, comparing them. “Now I’m positive that the girl wearing the
R
locket can’t possibly be Rose.” I continued to compare the two girls. Although separated in age by at least five years, I could see that the shape of the face of the girl in the portrait was rounder, her shoulders wider, her eyes harsher. The young woman in the photograph had a light about her, an aura that made you think she was your friend. And I remembered what I’d thought the first time I’d seen the shorter girl in the portrait, how her eyes held a secret, a secret I didn’t necessarily want to know.
Then my gaze shifted to the other girl in the portrait, the one wearing the locket with the initial
M
engraved on the front and saw again the widow’s peak—a widow’s peak just like the one my mother and I had, and a pair of eyes that tilted up at the corners.
My mother looked at me and I knew her thoughts echoed mine. “But she could definitely be her,” she said, pointing to the taller girl—M as I referred to her—who stared back at us from the canvas with eyes that were identical to my own.
As I drove to the historical society library on Meeting Street, I dialed Mrs. McGowan’s number one more time, hoping I wouldn’t get the answering machine again. As I dialed the final digit, a new call came in and I sighed with relief when I recognized the McGowans’ phone number.
“Hello—Mrs. McGowan?”
“Yes, good morning, Melanie. I’m sorry I didn’t call you back sooner, but I’ve been out in my garden. My camellias are simply beyond gorgeous this year. I’ll be happy to send you home with a clipping next time you’re here.”
“Thank you, Mrs. McGowan. That would be lovely. But what I’m calling you about this morning is the Crandall family tree. Have you had any luck in locating it?”
“No, dear. And I have looked all over for it. Did you ask Miss Edgerton?”
“I haven’t had a chance to. But I really need to know if a name appears anywhere on the family tree. I’m just looking for any connection, by marriage or by birth. You mentioned to me that you’d created the family tree by going through the family letters you found in the attic, and I was wondering if it would be possible to do it again.”
After only a short pause she said, “Of course I can. When would you need it?”
I cringed, hating myself for doing this. “As soon as possible—like today? I wouldn’t need anything detailed, just the name and how the person is related to the rest of the Crandall family.”
There was a longer pause this time, and then she said, “I can do it, but I’m going to ask you for something in return.”
“Yes?” I asked, dreading what was coming next because I could think of only one thing that she might want that I might be able to give to her.
“Could you bring that lovely Jack Trenholm here so I could meet him? I’ve read all of his books, and he sounds so charming on the phone. I really would love to meet him in person.”
I groaned inwardly. I would have to ask Chad or Sophie or even either one of my parents to ask him, but I figured who got him there wasn’t important; Jack Trenholm showing up on Mrs. McGowan’s porch step was.
“Sure,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”
“Okay, then. I’ll get to work right away, as soon as I get these camellias in vases. They really are lovely. It would be super to bring Jack now when the weather’s mild and I can show him my garden.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I gave her the name I’d originally come up with on a whim, until it seemed that the more I thought of it, the more certain I was that I was right. “Just call me on this number as soon as you have the information. If I don’t answer, that means I’m still at the library and I won’t be able to talk, so if you could please just leave a detailed message.”
“All right,” she said. “And I hope that one day you’ll tell me what this is all about. I’m very intrigued.”
“It’s a deal. Thank you, Mrs. McGowan.” I flipped my cell phone closed and tossed it into my purse just as I pulled onto Meeting Street. Lacking the Jack Trenholm touch, I once again had to search for a parking spot, finally finding an open one several blocks away. I was panting by the time I returned to the Fireproof Building and climbed the steps.
Yvonne was waiting for me as usual in the reading room and greeted me with a smile. I smiled back and said, “I’m assuming your good mood means that you were successful in finding the
Ida Belle
.”
“You’ve yet to stump me, Melanie, but you’re welcome to keep on trying.”
I sat down at the table and she surprised me by sliding over a laptop.
“It’s my personal computer. I bring it here sometimes so I don’t have to walk around so much. I have access to all the library’s databases. Not that I needed them for this search.”
I sent her a questioning look. “What do you mean? I didn’t turn up anything on my preliminary Internet search.”
She flipped open her laptop. “You’ll have to excuse the slowness. It’s an old laptop and I have a really slow connection.” She mashed on the power button and I heard the computer come to life with a slow grinding noise, like gerbils on a spinning wheel. Yvonne continued. “The Internet is a great thing, but only when you use it correctly. You have to know how to narrow down your query first, before you can expect to find the results you’re looking for.” She leaned forward, peering over the tops of her bifocals. “Jack taught me that, by the way.”
I gritted my teeth, then squinted to see the laptop screen better.
“You’ll get wrinkles,” she said without looking at me as she started typing slowly, just using her index fingers. Being a fast typist myself, I had to restrain myself from asking her to move aside to let me type.
“We know the
Ida Belle
was a three-masted schooner, which more or less gives me a time period to work with. Logic would tell us to start looking here in South Carolina, and then extend our search to North Carolina and Georgia and so on until we find what we’re looking for.”
She pecked a few more keys on the keyboard and I had to dig my fingernails—what was left of them—into my palms to keep from reaching over and doing it myself. “What a lot of researchers overlook is the variety of museums we have nowadays—science, technology, art, history, that sort of thing.”
I leaned forward. “So you did a search on nautical museums.”
“Uh-huh,” she said as she triumphantly hit the ENTER key. “And I got a hit on the
Ida Belle
when I visited the North Carolina Maritime Museum Web site.”
I stared at the screen as an image slowly emerged like a secret not wanting to be divulged. I stared at the very familiar image of an angel with long, flowing hair and abundant wings, re-created on the computer in all of its three-dimensional glory. Instead of the familiar flattened image on stained glass, this was carved wood, with weathered and chipped paint that spoke of untold stories. “What is it?” I asked.
Yvonne twisted the laptop toward me so I could see it better. “It’s the figurehead from the
Ida Belle
. It was found on Edisto Island. The storm that sank the ship most likely sent it there, but there’s no way of knowing.”
My head felt like it was filled with effervescent bubbles rising to the surface as I realized I’d just made a considerable discovery. I just had no idea yet what it meant. “Does the site say anything else about the shipwreck?”
Yvonne nodded. “There was a link to another page that was all about shipwrecks including the big ones like
Titanic
and
Lusitania
. But there was a small footnote about shipwrecks off the coast of the United States and one of them listed was the
Ida Belle
, which included a note about the cargo and a link to the passenger list. You might not have seen it when you did your preliminary search because it was listed under its original name, the
Victoria
. It was sold and rechristened a year before it sank, and named after the wife of the ship’s captain. I actually came across that little gem by accident in a book we have here in the archives, naming every ship whose port of origin was Charleston. That’s how I knew to search for the
Victoria
.”
“Do you have the passenger list?”
With an admonishing glance for doubting her abilities again, she slid over two pieces of paper. “I printed these from the Web site.”
I found the three names easily, listed near the top: Josiah Crandall; Mary Crandall; Nora Crandall, infant. All had “Darien, Connecticut” printed next to their names. Slowly, I flipped to the next page, which appeared to be a photocopied page of an insurance claim made by a Suzanne Crandall for jewelry amounting to the total sum of twenty thousand dollars—a nice bit of change now, but almost a fortune for back then.
Moving my hand up to my face so Yvonne couldn’t see, I squinted to read the fine print on the claim. It read like a laundry list: emerald-cut ruby cocktail ring surrounded by twelve diamonds set in gold; one diamond butterfly hairpin with three large diamonds set in platinum; sapphire-and-diamond chandelier earrings, pierced, with matching sapphire-and-diamond collar necklace consisting of . . .
I sat back, my eyes hurting from squinting, and my head spinning.
Sapphire-and-diamond chandelier earrings, pierced, with matching sapphire-and-diamond collar necklace.
Quietly, I said, “I’m betting the jewelry wasn’t found on the bottom of the ocean floor.”
My phone buzzed and I looked down to see that someone had left me a voice mail. Turning to Yvonne I gave her an impulsive hug. “You are worth your weight in gold, Mrs. Craig, and I will be thinking of ways to thank you for the next decade or so.”
She looked up at me in surprise as I slid back my chair. “I’ve got to go. I’ll give you a call later to tell you everything.” With a quick smile and a wave, I left the room, running down the steps and nearly tripping in my hurry to listen to my voice mail.
I hit the button on my phone and held it up to my ear, realizing that I was holding my breath only when I began to feel faint. Taking air into my lungs again, I began to listen.
“Hello, Melanie, dear, this is Mrs. McGowan. I think I found what you were looking for. Alice Crandall, who as you know was the twin of the girl Nora lost in the shipwreck and who moved to Mimosa Hall when she was a teenager, had a son and a daughter. The daughter, Allison, married a John Edgerton. Descendants of Allison and John live not too far away in Summerville, although I’ve never met them. I’m curious, Melanie, if this family is any relation to your friend, Rebecca? I’m assuming that’s why you wanted to know, although I’m surprised she didn’t mention it when she was here and saw the family tree. If you need any more information, please call me. And I look forward to meeting Jack and seeing you again soon. Good-bye.”
I stood in the middle of the sidewalk as people brushed by me, too stunned to move out of the way. Rebecca was related to the Crandalls of Mimosa Hall, and to the girl in the portrait, Alice, but had kept the information to herself. And I had every intention of finding out why. As I walked to my car, I dialed her numbers again, receiving the expected voice mails, then started dialing Jack’s cell before I could talk myself out of it. I hung up before the first ring. I wasn’t sure where our relationship—whatever it was—stood after the previous night, when he’d kissed me in the rain. I was planning to never mention it, in the ridiculous hope that he might have forgotten about it. Still, despite everything, he was the first person I wanted to talk to about my recent discovery, and since I wasn’t too far from his condo, I decided to just show up. Besides, I doubted he’d answer his phone and I’d already had a lot more luck begging entry on his doorstep.
I parked my car in a nearby garage and was pleasantly surprised to see the entry door to his building propped open to allow a moving company easy access to move in furniture from a large truck parked at the curb in front. Smiling as if I belonged there, I walked past the moving men to the elevator and confidently hit the button for the top floor. I relaxed only after the door opened on Jack’s floor and I exited the elevator, waiting for it to close behind me for good measure.
My smile faded, however, when I reached Jack’s door. It wasn’t closed completely, as if maybe he’d been bringing in groceries and had to close the door with his foot and hadn’t noticed that it hadn’t latched.
I knocked and waited and when I didn’t hear anything, I knocked again and called his name. After about a minute, I pushed open the door a little wider and called his name a little louder. I was about to leave when I noticed that his bedroom door was closed, and I thought that he might be sleeping or taking a shower and that he probably wouldn’t mind if I sat and waited for him.
Leaving the door slightly open—for no other reason than to prove to him that that’s how I’d found it—I walked into the main living area, forcing myself not to make any judgment calls about the mess or to start cleaning anything. My gaze settled on the glass-and-bronze dining table that had been cleared of its iron candelabras and centerpiece bowl—they’d been carelessly stacked in a corner of the dining area—and was covered with stacks of books and what looked like photographs organized in some kind of a pattern. Thinking to myself that since it was out in the open it couldn’t be private, I walked closer to get a better look.
I moved around to the other side of the table to examine the photographs and had to stare at them for a long moment until I could tell what they were. They were apparently the pictures Jack had taken at my grandmother’s grave the day Rebecca, Jack, and I had gone to St. Philip’s cemetery. He’d blown up each of the photographs and cropped them so that each word was separated into its own rectangular picture. I looked at them closely, trying to see anything new or telling from these photographs, but I was unable to do so.
I looked to the last row of photographs, which weren’t from the tombstone but of the stained-glass window as seen from the outside at the precise moment the sun hit it correctly to illuminate the hidden image. This picture, too, had been separated into individual photographs. I recognized portions of what I knew now to be the figurehead, and the house, and the oak tree. But he’d also taken the odd border that encircled the entire window and cropped it into individual photographs, laying them out so that they appeared to be in the order in which they appeared in the window. I stared at the pictures closely, noticing that some of the seemingly random markings were thicker and larger than the others, and I wondered if Jack had noticed it, too, and what he thought it meant.
I walked to the other end of the dining table to where the stacked books, some lying open on top of each other, were arranged. I peered at several of the titles, realizing with a start that they all had something to do with ships, shipwrecks, and the maritime history of the southeastern United States. I picked up the top book and scanned the open page. At the bottom were three paragraphs that had been highlighted with a yellow highlighter. Bringing it close to my face and squinting so I could see it, I read the passage three times, just to make sure that I’d read it correctly.
The entire passage concerned the disappearance in clear weather of a British schooner bound from Charleston to Boston in 1785. It was last seen near Johns Island on the fifteenth of July, and no further news of the ship or its crew and passengers was ever heard again.