Authors: Mariah Stewart
Well, if Brooke had been on a mission, she’d learned precious little. And the irony was that Ellie actually learned more from Brooke than Brooke had learned from her.
She walked back to the house, mindful more than ever of its connection to her mother. Ellie’d known that Lynley had spent time here when she was younger, but she’d assumed it had been with her parents. Why, she wondered, had her grandparents sent her mother to live here with a relative? And how long had Lynley stayed?
Unfortunately, it appeared that everyone who would know for certain—everyone directly involved—was gone, and had been gone, for a long time.
It seemed the more she learned about her mother’s life here in St. Dennis, the less she really knew.
H
AVING
become increasingly tired of take-out burgers and fried chicken, Ellie resolved to start cooking for herself. Organizing the cupboards had helped galvanize her game plan. The few pots and pans she thought she might need were washed, dried, and back on their respective shelves, the remaining having been delegated to a box which she dragged into the closet by the back door. She doubted any of them would be of interest to Nita, but they could be donated to a thrift shop, if, in fact, St. Dennis had such a thing. She’d have to ask around.
She made a run to the grocery store late in the afternoon, and by seven was happily eating a piece of chicken she’d sautéed, a pile of green beans, and some organic sweet potato fries she found in the frozen food section. For dessert, she tackled one of Brooke’s cupcakes. Deciding which one had been the toughest decision she’d had to make all day.
Nothing at all like my old life
, she reflected as she covered the remaining cupcakes and put them into the refrigerator.
But satisfying in its own way
.
Her corporate world had been a constant round of
meetings, and luncheons and dinners at some of the finest restaurants in Manhattan with Henry, her fiancé. She’d never been without her BlackBerry and spent hours each day sending or responding to e-mails. The view from her home and office windows had been defined by concrete, steel, glass, and a bit of Central Park. There’d been someone to clean her apartment, someone to drive her wherever she wanted to go. Someone to shop for her food, prepare, and serve it to her. A personal assistant to handle all those little details of life she hadn’t time for: making her appointments, paying her bills, buying gifts for the significant people in her life, making her travel arrangements.
With her father’s downfall, all of those people had vanished from her life like vapors, as if they’d never really existed, like her beautiful apartment on Mahattan’s Upper East Side and the family’s homes on Martha’s Vineyard, in East Hampton and Vail, the town house in London, and the house she and Henry had bought two years ago on Martha’s Vineyard. Her father’s Greek island had been the first to go.
Sitting in the quiet of what had been Lilly Cavanaugh’s cozy living room, with the wind picking up off the Bay to rattle the windows every now and then, Ellie wondered if she’d been better off then than she was now. The contrast between her former and present lives was about as stark as it could be, and yet, with almost a year between her and the worst days of her life, she reflected on how much of that other life she really missed.
She studied her fingernails. In the old days, she’d never gone more than five days between manicures. Now she was hard-pressed to remember when those
nails had last been polished. Chipped and filed down with an emery board she’d picked up at the market, they were nails she barely recognized as her own.
Back then, she rarely gave much thought to money, because it was never an issue. From lunch to cars, jewelry, and homes, whatever she needed was always available. These days, she had to watch the price of everything she bought, and often found herself not buying at all.
And then there was Henry.
Henry, whom she’d loved, whom she’d planned on marrying and spending the rest of her life with. Ellis had thought that he’d loved her, too, until the house of cards he’d helped her father to build imploded. It hadn’t taken Ellie long to realize that what Henry really loved was the media tag “the son Clifford Chapman never had.” Even now, the truth still caused her cheeks to burn.
If she had to choose between then and there, here and now, would she go back to her old life? Well, maybe to the time when her mother was still alive, so that she could ask all those questions she wished she’d asked back then. And only if she could change things, like have her father develop a conscience and be something other than a criminal.
Other than those few things, given the choice, she just might choose to stay where she was.
While filled with ease and luxury, her entire life up until now had been built on fraud and lies. Since she arrived in St. Dennis, she’d done nothing but work. She’d had to learn to do things she’d never done because there’d always been someone else to do them for her. She had aches and pains in places she hadn’t
realized she had muscles or nerve endings, and yet she felt more alive here than she had in a long time.
At least what I’m doing now isn’t hurting anyone. At least here life is more honest, and when someone offers you a hand in friendship, it isn’t because they want something from you or are trying to figure out how to use you
, she told herself. Not that everyone in New York was like that, but most of the people in Ellie’s circle had proven to be disloyal and cowardly when it came to keeping up their friendship. Except, of course, Carly, who on general principles had promptly dropped anyone who’d dropped Ellie.
And at least here, no one pretended to be in love with her.
Her conscience made an attempt to remind her that, these days, she was the one doing the pretending, but she chose to ignore it.
When she laid her head upon her pillow, rather than lie awake worrying about the next day’s meetings or the next press release or media campaign, she fell into a deep sleep within minutes. She’d awaken the next morning as she had every day since she’d been in St. Dennis, not to the shriek of an alarm, but to the sound of branches from an evergreen lightly scraping across the bedroom window, and geese calling as they landed or took off from the nearby marsh.
A loud and eerie
kronk
had awoken her early the previous morning, and she’d sat up in bed, eyes on the window, past which had flown a bird that looked positively Jurassic. When later that day she mentioned it to Linda, the waitress at the Crab Claw, Linda had laughed and said, “Oh, that’s a blue heron. Some have already fled south, but others might stick
around until it gets really cold. If we have a mild winter, a few might hang here straight through the season. As long as they’re still catching fish and the temperatures are still mild, they’ll stay.”
This morning, Ellie took her second cup of coffee—brewed as per Brooke’s instructions in the coffeepot she’d found—and wandered down to the beach before she started work for the day. The sun was bright and strong enough to have warmed the rock she often sat on, and she’d no sooner taken her seat than the heron passed overhead. She watched it land in the marsh and disappear among the reeds. She’d sighed with a contentment she hadn’t expected to feel, sipped the rest of her coffee, and went back to the house to work. After years of having chased herself without even realizing she’d been doing so, she was finding the change of pace refreshing.
The room on today’s list was the dining room. She’d started to dust the furniture two days ago, but organizing the kitchen had been more of a priority. She spent most of the morning polishing the mahogany table, sideboard, and china cupboard. She’d just stood back to admire her work when the doorbell rang.
Ellie held her breath for just a second. Unexpected company put her on edge lest she say something that might come back to haunt her. She peeked through the curtains and saw Grace Sinclair on the top step holding a basket in both hands.
Reluctantly, Ellie made her way to the front door. If the people she’d met were determined to be hospitable and welcoming, she just didn’t have the heart to leave them standing on the porch.
“Grace, nice to see you again.” Ellie opened the door and greeted her visitor. “Please, come in.”
“Thank you, dear.” Once inside, Grace handed the basket to Ellie. “The chef at the inn made some delicious beef stew last night and I thought perhaps you’d enjoy some.”
“You didn’t have to.…” Ellie checked herself. “But thank you so much. This is very thoughtful of you.”
“There’s also some bread that our new baker made earlier this morning, and some brownies they’re serving for dessert at lunch today. I ran into Brooke this morning and she told me how hard you’re working here and I thought you might like a home-cooked meal.” She smiled. “Our chef makes everything we serve from scratch, so technically, it’s home-cooked.”
“Oh, my goodness, it all smells so wonderful.” Ellie’s rumbling stomach reminded her that she’d only had a light breakfast, and that was hours ago. “I might not wait until dinner.”
“There’s more than enough there for several meals, so you enjoy.” Grace’s eyes flickered from left to right, from the living room to the dining room. “I heard this old place was starting to look like a home again. You know, it’s always been a happy place. Good people have lived here as far back as I can remember. I’m happy to see someone give it some love again.”
“Well, I know that I have to show it in its best light if I want to sell it for the maximum amount,” Ellie replied. “Right now I’m just at the cleaning and let’s-see-what-we-have-here stage.”
“What you have here are years’ worth of history.”
Grace smiled and walked to the dining room doorway.
“Cameron mentioned that a previous owner was the light keeper.” Ellie pointed toward the place where she understood the lighthouse once stood. She’d been intrigued by the story Cameron had told and would have liked to hear more.
“Yes, but he was so much more. Benjamin Fray emigrated from Scotland as a boy of ten and was indentured to a local tobacco farmer who’d lost his only son to disease. The story goes that he took young Ben under his wing during the period of his indenture. So while Ben was working in the fields, he was learning everything there was to know about tobacco, from growing it to selling it. By the time his seven years were up, he’d amassed enough knowledge to start up his own business. His previous master sold him some acres on the outside of town, and he farmed until he was well into his forties, and was very successful. The farm, this house, and the lighthouse passed to his grandson, Eli, who in his later years was an active participant in the Underground Railroad.” Grace smiled.
“And then, of course, there were the pirates …”
“Pirates.”
“Oh yes, back in the day, more than one ship dropped anchor right out there in the cove. They’d come ashore for provisions—steal what they could and terrorize the locals a little while they were at it. But that’s a story of its own.”
“Who’d have guessed? The Underground Railroad and pirates, to boot. You certainly know your local history.”
“I was on the committee that researched some properties to be proposed for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. I got to know a lot about many of the places in town.”
“Is this property on the Register?”
“It’s still in the proposal stage, I’m afraid. We’ve had to go house by house to establish a historic district in the area of Old St. Mary’s Church Road, and that’s been very time-consuming. Once that project is completed, we’ll be starting on other properties in town. I’m sure that your house will qualify, though.”
“It does sound like it has quite a history.” Ellie thought for a moment. “So was the woman I bought the house from descended from Benjamin Fray?”
“No. The Ryders didn’t come into the picture until after the Civil War. Sometime in the 1870s. They purchased the house from Eli Fray’s widow. Eli died at Appomattox, fighting for the Confederacy, as some from around these parts did.”
Grace glanced around the room, her gaze pausing on the sideboard.
“Lilly always kept a pair of silver candelabras there on the sideboard. They were a wedding gift from Ted’s grandmother, and Lilly was very proud of them. She lit them every morning from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day, then didn’t light them again until Easter Sunday.”
“You knew Mrs. Cavanaugh well?”
“Oh, quite well. Perhaps not as well as my older brother, who was in her year at school. He had quite the crush on her back then, though he never would admit it. Now, if you want to know more about Lilly, you might talk to Violet Finneran.”
“The woman who works for Jesse Enright?”
Grace nodded. “She and Lilly and Jesse’s grandmother, Rose, were inseparable when they were younger. The three blossoms, people called them. Lilly, Rose, and Violet.”
Ellie smiled. “I love that. I love the old-fashioned names.”
“Violet could most likely answer any questions you might have about Lilly and her family.” Grace paused, then added, “And you might want to speak with Berry Eberle as well. She lived next door to the Ryders at one time—that’s Lilly’s maiden name.” Grace tilted her head for a moment. “Interesting that your last name is Ryder, dear.”
“I’m sure it’s just one of those cosmic coincidences.” Ellie shrugged and changed the subject, all the while mentally kicking herself. For some reason, she’d always thought that Ryder had come down through her father’s family. “Who’s Berry … what did you say her last name was?”
“Eberle. She lives in that big Victorian place over on River Road. If you see it once, you won’t forget it. You might have heard of her by her stage name. Beryl Townsend.”
“The movie star from, what, the thirties? Forties? Fifties?”
Grace nodded. “Forties, fifties, sixties, and even later. She was born here, left town when she was, oh, seventeen or eighteen, thereabouts, to make her mark on the film industry. Her grandniece is Dallas MacGregor. I’m sure you’ve heard of her.”
“I’ve seen many of her films. Brooke stopped over
yesterday and she mentioned that Dallas lived here, married a local boy.”