Town in a Pumpkin Bash (30 page)

Nettie paused, her gaze flicking to her guest and then out the window. “We didn’t
know much about the island in those days. We’d only recently arrived ourselves. Ellis
had been working as an electrician and maintenance man in Brunswick when he saw the
ad in the local newspaper. We drove up to visit the place and fell in love with it.
How could we not? We were just youngsters then, looking for a better life. I was still
in my mid-twenties, and Ellis eight years older. Cornelia was the one who interviewed
and hired us, and she’s the one who paid us. She was a widow who lived out here much
of the year, even during the winter months. Back in those days, when we first arrived,
she had several servants with her over there at the estate, including two maids, but
she told us she needed a maintenance man to help with the upkeep of the place and
extra help inside as well, so she hired us both after carefully checking our references.
It changed our lives. We had a place to live and a future. Ellis took care of the
house and worked on the yards and gardens, and I helped clean the place and did the
laundry. Cornelia also had a cook back then, so we didn’t have to worry much about
that. But everything changed when
she
came to live here.”

A stab of Nettie’s eyes, which then returned to the sea, indicated the photo of Emma.

“When was that?” Candy asked, looking back down at the faces in the image.

“Well, let’s see. Ellis and I came here to the island in the spring of 1965—April,
to be exact. I remember it was still very cold and raw out here on the island when
we moved into the caretaker’s cottage. And Emma arrived that fall.”

At that point, Nettie paused as she considered her previous statements. But finally
she nodded. “Yes, I’m sure that’s right,” she said, reassuring herself. “Emma was
living at the estate for our first Christmas here, so she arrived later that same
year.”

“And you said everything changed after her arrival. How did it change?”

Nettie took a deep breath as she collected her thoughts. “Well, the atmosphere at
the house changed. It became very secretive. There were lots of whispers in the hallways
and behind closed doors. Within weeks of Emma’s arrival, both maids were let go. Then
they found a new cook who lived on the mainland, and only came out to the house during
the day. Ellis and I were the only ones Cornelia kept on the permanent staff, probably
because we didn’t live at the big house like the other servants—we had a place of
our own, here on the north side of the island, hidden out of sight. Cornelia took
advantage of that to ensure her privacy. She changed our work schedules as well. She
allowed us to work at the big house only at appointed hours. Ellis mostly worked out
there in the mornings, for instance, and then in the afternoons he helped out at some
of the other properties on the island, and for a while he even took some work on the
mainland. And I worked at the estate only two days a week, usually in the mornings
as well, helping with the laundry. Both of us dealt directly with Cornelia but we
rarely saw the girl—Emma. She was kept hidden away in her room. She almost never came
out. In the entire time she was here, over a period of several years, I probably saw
her no more
than a dozen times. I rarely spoke to her. Even when I did, it was only to exchange
brief pleasantries. I never had a conversation with her.”

Nettie pointed to the photo again. “That picture was taken about a year after we arrived,
on the day Abigail came out on the boat. As I mentioned, it was a special occasion
of some sort. Later, Ellis told me it had been a birthday party.”

“For Emma?” Candy looked down at the photo again, studying the skinny girl in her
crisply pressed white linen dress and shiny black shoes, with her hair neatly curled.

Emma’s wearing a birthday dress,
she realized.

She looked back up at Nettie, who nodded. “After we’d cleaned up the place for Abigail’s
visit, I helped Cornelia put up a few decorations around the place. I wasn’t allowed
at the party itself—they said it was a private affair—but the cook was there, and
Ellis. He said he was asked to witness the signing of a document by Emma.”

Candy’s brow fell. “What sort of document?”

Nettie shrugged. “Ellis never found out. He said he wasn’t allowed to see the whole
thing—just the last page. He wasn’t sure he should have signed it without reading
it, but he told me later that he felt he didn’t have much choice in the matter. He
said it was a legal document of some sort, brought out by the woman we later learned
was Abigail Pruitt. That’s when they took the photo—after they’d signed the document.
As I said, it was some sort of commemoration, we thought—or a documentation.”

“But commemorating what?” Candy asked, still confused. “What was Abigail’s connection
to the whole thing?”

Nettie arched an eyebrow. “We asked ourselves the same question, but Ellis finally
figured it out,” she answered. “It was something Cornelia let slip at one point during
the day—she said something to Ellis about her sister.”

“Her sister?”

Suddenly it dawned on Candy, and she looked back down noticing the resemblance between
the two adult women. “That’s it, isn’t it? Cornelia and Abigail were sisters!”

And it struck her then. Abigail’s initials, which she’d seen on the stationery on
her writing desk, were
A.W.P.

Abigail Wren Pruitt.

“We believe so,” Nettie said with a nod. “But as I’ve explained, we didn’t know the
whole story for many years, until after Cornelia passed away. But finally we were
able to patch together at least some of it, from bits and pieces of conversations
we heard while working around the house. As best we could determine, Emma had been
living in an orphanage in Lewiston when they found her and brought her out to the
estate.”

“An orphanage?”

It fit exactly with what Finn had told her that morning. The paperwork found in the
folder sitting on the front seat of Sebastian J. Quinn’s car had dated back to the
nineties, and gave the home address for a woman named Emma Smith as an orphanage in
Lewiston, run by the Sisters of Charity.

They’d found Emma in an orphanage.

Candy looked up at Nettie again. “Who found her?” she pressed. “In the orphanage?
Who found her there?”

The elderly woman thought about it a moment, but finally shook her head. “I don’t
know. As I said, they kept it all hushed up. Cornelia never spoke about it with us—she
only told us what was needed around the house—and Emma certainly never said anything
to us about her background. She was a very reserved girl, very shy, and lived under
the ever-watchful eye of Cornelia. As I’ve said, she never left the property, and
rarely left her room. It was as if she was imprisoned in the place. That’s why we
were only allowed to come out to the estate at specific times, we soon came to realize.
They wanted to control our access to Emma. They didn’t want anyone else to speak to
her, or to even know she was there.”

“But why? Why were the sisters so secretive?”

Nettie pressed her thin lips together and again shook her head.

Candy took a sip of tea, thinking. There were so many questions twirling around her
head, she didn’t know what to ask next. Finally, she said, “So what happened to her?
To Emma, I mean?”

Nettie pursed her lips, and her eyes became shadowed. “Cornelia had her first stroke
in 1970. She was in the hospital and then the rehabilitation clinic for several months
as she recuperated. In her absence, Abigail returned to the big house on occasion,
and spent a few nights there, but mostly she stayed at her sister’s bedside. When
Cornelia finally returned to the island, she was never the same. She spent the last
few years of her life in a nursing home. During that time, Abigail continued to check
in at the big house from time to time, but Emma stayed out at the estate mostly on
her own. Ellis still kept up the place and I still did the laundry, and the cook still
came out during the day. But Emma stayed in her room. The place became like a ghost
house. Most days, when I was there cleaning, there was not a sound inside that building
other than my footsteps as I did my chores around the place.”

“You didn’t talk to her?” Candy asked.

Nettie shook her head. “She never came out of her room. I believe she did her best
to avoid us. We used to leave her meals on a tray outside her door, and she would
only open it after we were gone.”

Candy shivered, thinking of what a lonely life that must have been, and what could
the young girl have possibly done to condemn her to it? “How long did that go on?”
she asked.

“For some time,” Nettie admitted. “I felt so bad for that girl, but nothing I tried
could get her to talk to us. Eventually Abigail hired a governess to watch over her—a
very strict Catholic woman by the name of Mrs. Murphy. I think she might have been
a nun once, or perhaps she still was one,
though she never wore a habit. She did tend to favor dark colors though. For some
reason she didn’t like me much, I can tell you that. She followed me around as I worked,
pointing out any spots I’d missed or chore I’d forgotten. But Ellis got along with
her fairly well.” She smiled wistfully. “Ellis got along well with just about everyone.
He was just that type of person. Anyway, Mrs. Murphy kept Emma on an even tighter
leash than before, if that was possible. I wasn’t allowed upstairs at all, and for
the most part, Ellis was kept out of the house as well. She was here for a year or
so, until Cornelia passed on. And then, one day, shortly after that, Emma was gone
too.”

“What happened to her?” Candy was almost breathless.

Nettie looked out the window one last time, then rose to clear away the tea service.
“No one knows,” she said as she worked. “I heard that Abigail searched everywhere
for her but couldn’t find her. They read Cornelia’s last will and testament, and Ellis
and I learned that we’d been given this cottage. After Abigail passed on, lawyers
took over the estate. We always thought it might have been left to Emma, but we never
saw her again…until…”

“Until she was buried here,” Candy finished for her.

The elderly woman nodded. “Even that was done in secret. They must have brought her
body in at night, by boat. We didn’t even know about it for a week or so, until one
day Ellis was tending to the cemetery, and there it was—that gravestone with just
her first name on it.”

Candy filed all this information away, along with everything else she’d learned over
the past few days. She had an even stronger feeling now that everything was connected,
and that she was close to putting all the pieces of the puzzle together.

But there were still a few pieces missing.

She closed the photo album and sat staring at its cover for several moments, until
she finally pushed it back across the table, thinking as Nettie finished cleaning
off the table.
She was over at the kitchen sink when Candy turned to her and asked, “Who owns it
now—the estate?”

Nettie stopped what she was doing and faced Candy, wiping her hands on a towel as
she spoke. “I believe it’s currently being held in some sort of a trust,” she said,
“though I couldn’t say for sure. Every once in a while, someone in a suit stops by
to check on the place, and occasionally a workman comes out and makes repairs. But
no one’s lived there in quite a while. I’ve heard there’s talk they might sell the
place, though that rumor’s been going around for some time, and there’s still no for-sale
sign on the gate. So it sits out there on the point, deserted.”

“Hmm.” It struck Candy as odd that such a prime piece of property on this busy stretch
of the coast should sit empty for so long. Surely there must be an heir somewhere
who would want to get his or her hands on it—and whatever fortune went along with
it.

So why was the place kept in limbo like that? Candy wondered. It seemed like such
a waste.

Unless, she thought, there was a reason behind it.

Maybe the reason was simply to keep people away from the place.

But why?

Again, the only obvious answer was Emma.

On an impulse, Candy reached into her daypack and pulled out her notebook. She flipped
back to her most recent entries: the texts of the inscriptions she’d seen on Emma’s
tombstone.

“There are two Latin phrases engraved on Emma’s stone,” Candy said to Nettie, and
she laid her notebook flat on the table, angling it so the elderly woman could see
what she’d written. Candy did her best to read the phrases correctly; she’d missed
Latin in high school. “One says,
Deus pascit corvos
and the other reads,
sapiens qui assiduos
.” She looked over at Nettie. “Do you have any idea what those phrases might mean?”

Nettie had walked back to the table, and now she looked down at the phrases in front
of her, a melancholy smile on her face. “I never took Latin myself,” she said, “but
Ellis did. He was classically trained, despite his vocation. He had four years of
Latin, so he told me what those passages meant.”

“And what do they mean?” Candy asked.

“Well, let me see. I believe
Deus pascit corvos
translates to
God feeds the ravens
, and
sapiens qui assiduos
means
he is wise who is industrious
. Or something like that. I have the exact wording written down somewhere around here.”

Candy’s face twisted.

God feeds the ravens?

He is wise who is industrious?

They sounded like old, random sayings. “What do they mean?” she asked.

“Well, it was Ellis’s idea that they were family mottoes. We never thought about it
much more than that, until one day, about a year after Emma disappeared, we received
a box in the mail. It was from her. When we opened it up, we were surprised to find
some of her mementoes inside, including that photo I showed you, and a book or two.
She wrote us only the briefest of notes, saying she had moved far away but wanted
us to hold on to the items for her. She never explained why, and she never came back
for them.”