I felt ashamed for ever having doubted his ability to do such specialized repair and restoration. I couldn’t imagine any sub-contractor doing a more expert job. His hands kept up their movements, sure and certain, even as he raised his head. I think he’d only meant to smile and nod and say hello. Instead he looked more closely at my face and asked, “Is something wrong?”
“I just came to apologize for Harvey. He can be so . . .” Words failed me. “Culturally insensitive” seemed too tame and too polite, but what I wanted to say wasn’t very professional.
Sam’s smile showed briefly. “Yeah, well. I’ve dealt with guys like Harvey my whole life.”
“You shouldn’t have to here, though.” I could feel my own frustration breaking through a little as I noticed Harvey, in his flashy costume, heading back towards the barn and Eve and Sharon. “It’s not right,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to just stand here and take that kind of—” Once again the word I needed wasn’t one that I could say while working.
Sam seemed capable of filling in the blank. “Are we still talking about me?” he asked. I looked at him, and met his understanding eyes. He said, “Don’t let them make you crazy.” Then, as if he knew I needed to make light of it, he added, “Or is it too late for that?”
I smiled back. “It’s a little late.”
“Then here.” He handed me a hammer. “Help me put this frame together. You’ll feel better if you hit something.”
I did feel better, though I had to give my hammer up five minutes later to a little girl who, stopping with her family to observe what Sam was working on, was keen to help. For someone who’d been called in at the last minute to demonstrate, Sam did a decent job of it. He knew how to explain things, how to keep people’s attention—how to teach, and make it memorable.
I was as absorbed in his talk as the little girl until a hand brushed the back of my neck and I jumped.
“Hey,” said Tyler, surprising me more just by being here than he had done with his unannounced touch.
“Hey!” Recovering from my initial disbelief I leaned into his hug. “What are you doing here?”
“Since you won’t let me take you somewhere fun this weekend, I thought I could bring the fun to you.” He flashed The Smile. “You do have restaurants here, right? We can go to dinner, maybe catch a movie, then tomorrow we—”
“Tomorrow I’ll be here,” I told him, “cleaning up. But you can come and help with that.”
“Since when do you work Sundays?”
“Since you’ve known me. When we have special events, I work the days and hours I’m needed, Ty. You know that. And this is our big Fall—”
“—Harvest weekend. Yes, I know.” He looked around at the activity. “Good crowd. You’ve got good weather for it.”
I didn’t bring up Don Petrella’s scar and its prediction that a storm was on the way, because he’d already changed focus. With his left arm still around me, Tyler held his right hand out to Sam, who’d finished with his demonstration. “Hi,” he said, and introduced himself, and added, “I’m the boyfriend.”
Sam, above the handshake, said, “I gathered that. Sam Abrams.”
“You’re the contractor.”
“That’s right.”
I always found it interesting watching men meet other men. It was an almost primal and subconscious thing, the way they took each other’s measure, marking out their relative positions in the hierarchy. I’d watched while Tyler did this countless times in business and in social situations, but this was my first time watching Sam. While Tyler used his tone of voice and body language and his posture, Sam achieved the same thing with his eyes alone—his level gaze that held a quiet confidence and knew its worth and wasn’t all that easily impressed. He didn’t change how he was standing and his voice remained polite.
But it was Tyler—taller, dressed in more expensive clothes, and speaking with more force—who broke the contact first and looked away, then asked me, “How much longer do you have to stay here?”
When I told him we’d be done at five, he pulled his phone out. Checked the time. The last time I had done that, not too long ago, it had been ten past two. I was about to offer him a tour when he said, “Tell you what, babe. Let me have your house keys. I’ll go down and get unpacked and take a shower while I wait for you.”
I’d thought he’d stay on site awhile—he’d heard me talk so much about the Wilde House and the work that we were doing, but he’d never seen it. But he was already holding his hand out and I knew if he didn’t want to stay, there wasn’t any point in trying to convince him to. I handed him the keys and deftly hid my disappointment.
Willie, returning to take up his tools just as Tyler was walking away, remarked, “Either that lad’s a fast worker or you are, if he’s got your keys.”
Sam said, “That was her boyfriend.”
“Ah.” Willie grinned. “What does he sell, then?”
The sun speared my eyes and I shaded them. “What makes you think he sells something?”
“Well, does he?”
I admitted, “Yes. Insurance.”
Willie’s grin broadened, and taking his mallet in hand he said, “There you go.”
He winked and got to work, and left me wondering what it had been that tipped him off. I didn’t get a chance to ask, because by then another group of visitors was gathering, and Sam and Willie and the wheelwright started with their demonstrations. And I was distracted by Frank’s whistle.
Frank had one of those distinctive whistles—sharp and short and through his teeth—that carried right across the clearing. When I turned my head to look towards the barn he raised his hand to call me over.
In the grass around his antique cider press the wasps were hovering with stealth, attracted by the pungent apple pulp that clung to all the working wooden pieces and collected in the sloping tray below that caught the cider. A few wasps had also laid claim to the apples still stacked in round bushel baskets up against the barn wall in the shade beside Frank’s chair, but with a careless hand he brushed them off and chose a few more apples to run through the press.
I chose my steps more carefully, not wanting to be stung.
Frank acknowledged my arrival with a short nod. “Keeping me a secret, are you? From your boyfriend,” he said, when I looked at him blankly. “You didn’t bring him over.”
I knew Frank was a watcher. He noticed things. And that meant he would have noticed that Tyler had only been here a few minutes, so I didn’t need to explain. “Sorry. Next time.”
“It took me a minute to figure out that’s what he was. Thought at first he was selling you something. But listen—” he began.
I interrupted him, the opposite of listening. “What is it about Tyler that makes everybody so sure he’s a salesman?”
Frank paused. “Isn’t he?”
“Well, yes, but—”
Frank assured me, “Nothing wrong with selling stuff. I’ve got a bunch of salesmen in my family going generations back, and so does Isaac, there. And listen, that’s what I was going to tell you. Isaac says that all the old sales registers from Fisher’s store, the old store at Cross Harbor, were donated to the library. Benjamin Wilde would have had an account at the store, so I’m thinking that maybe those records would help us in figuring out what he had in his house at the time.”
“Good idea.” I’d met the librarian. She’d seemed approachable. “I can go take a look at them this week.”
“Isaac also says he’s got a painting,” Frank said, “of the Bellewether.”
Benjamin Wilde’s famous ship had been widely immortalized. We had two paintings of it in our budding collection already.
“But this painting,” Frank told me when I raised that point, “shows the ship being built. And it came from this house.”
I considered this. “Really?”
“Yep. The story goes Isaac’s great-grandfather bought it from mine at the auction.”
I knew about the auction but it took m
e half a minute to sort the generations of Frank’s family into place so I could put a name to his great-grandfather, who’d been—if I worked backwards—the great-grandson of our famous Captain Benjamin. He’d also been the second son of Lawrence Wilde, the poet, who had given all his children great, romantic names, like . . .
Arthur. That was it, I thought with satisfaction: Arthur Wilde. He hadn’t had his father’s writing talent nor his great-grandfather’s daring, but he’d left his own mark on the history of the house. In the early 1880s he’d lost four of his six children in one week to typhoid fever. Grieving, he had blamed the cove and its “unhealthy” air, and hastily moved his surviving children and his wife to a more modern townhouse in Manhattan, leaving the Wilde House shuttered and empty for all but a few weeks each summer, for years. It was during this time, with the costs of his Gilded Age Manhattan lifestyle increasing, that Arthur had auctioned off some of the Wilde House contents, specifically things that had been owned by Benjamin Wilde and would bring a high price. Arthur’s auction was one of the prime reasons we were now having to track down the long-missing items snapped up at the time by museums and private collectors.
If Isaac Fisher had a painting that had been sold in that auction, chances were that it was something we would want. Especially if it was of the Bellewether.
“Do you think he’d let us have it?” I asked Frank.
He shrugged. “Don’t know. But knowing Isaac, I doubt he’d have brought it up in conversation in the first place if he wasn’t thinking of a deal. He’s an old fisherman, Isaac. He likes to bait his line and throw it out there, see what happens. But you never want to take that bait too soon, or else you’re done for.”
“Good to know.” I filed that fact away.
“And if you want to come out on the right side of a deal with Isaac,” Frank advised, “it never hurts to do a favour for him. Like right now, he’s been walking round in circles with that donkey for a couple hours. You could just wander over there and offer to step in so he could have a break. He’d like that.”
I looked towards the line of children waiting for a donkey ride on Dennis, who was plodding after Isaac Fisher in a steady circle.
Frank said, “He doesn’t bite. Dennis, I mean. And he wouldn’t be the first ass you’ve dealt with today.”
I turned around a little bit defensively because at first I thought that he was talking about Tyler, but he winked and told me, “Saw you putting Harvey in his place. I’m guessing he deserved it.”
“Yes,” I said, “he did.”
“Well, then. If you can deal with Harvey, you’ll have no trouble with Isaac. He’s a pussycat.”
In retrospect, when I had walked across and talked to Isaac Fisher, I wasn’t sure “pussycat” was how I would describe him, unless that included grizzled, wily barn cats that had fought their way through several lives and earned the notches on their ears to prove it, and could spot fresh quarry by the faintest twitch beneath the hay. But he was grateful for the break, as Frank had said he’d be, and in the end Dennis and I got along so well that I was sorry to hand his reins back an hour later.
I did, though. And keeping Frank’s advice in mind I didn’t bring the subject of the painting up with Isaac. I just gave him Dennis back and went to have a break myself, and hoped whatever goodwill I’d just gained would help us come out, as Frank put it, on the right side of the deal.
Under the trees that ringed the picnic tables, snacks and drinks had been set out for visitors to buy. Malaika’s husband, Darryl, reigned over the barbecue where hamburgers and hot dogs sizzled, sending plumes of tantalizing, stomach-tugging scents upwards to catch the cooling breeze. One wafted my way and I changed my course because of it.
Malaika, standing next to Darryl, handed me a hot dog bun. “You’re making friends,” she said. “I’ve just had Isaac Fisher telling me how nice you are.”
“That’s good,” I said. And told her why. I finished with, “So even if he doesn’t want to donate the painting, he might at least go easy on the price. And if the Sisters of Liberty give us that grant, we’ll have money to buy it.”
I saw the brief look Darryl sent to Malaika, and noticed the glance that she gave in reply. They could speak without words, like my parents could, and I envied that. Envied the easy way both of them seemed to be always connected, each strong in their own self but stronger together. Most times when I saw them “talk” to each other like that, I imagined how wonderful that must feel, being so fully in sync with the person you loved.
But today, I was focusing more on what they might be saying, because I felt certain I knew. And it wasn’t good news. “They’ve refused us the grant,” I guessed. “Haven’t they?”
Darryl set a hot dog on my bun as consolation, as Malaika nodded. “Their treasurer called me last night, but I figured that the news could wait. You had enough on your mind for the weekend.”
Deep inside my pocket, my phone vibrated to tell me that I had a call. I took a look, saw it was Tyler, let it go to voicemail. Then I used the time it took to put the mustard on my hot dog to collect my jumbled thoughts and try to turn them to the positive. Because, although I’d hoped my presentation had persuaded them, I’d known from the beginning that my grandmother had power and prestige here. And she wasn’t on my side.
I didn’t bother asking why they’d turned us down. I knew.
Instead I said, “Well, that’s okay. We’ll find some way to raise the money.”
Once again my phone vibrated, and again I let it go. Tyler should understand why, I thought. He’d lectured me enough times on why he couldn’t answer a personal call during working hours, and since I was standing right now talking to my boss it wouldn’t be at all professional to answer.
When my phone went off a third time, though, I reasoned that it might be an emergency. I said, “Excuse me,” to Malaika, stepped away, and answered it.
“You have to come home now,” were Tyler’s first words. I could hear exasperation in his tone.
I tried to keep him calm. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I have to—”
“Rachel’s here.”
That stopped me. Rachel was supposed to be en route to join my parents in Toronto for Canadian Thanksgiving. They had sent her down the plane tickets. Her flight, if I remembered right, should have been in the air by now. “She can’t be.”
“Well, she is. She just walked in with suitcases and everything and all I did,” he told me, heated, “all I did was ask why she was here, and she ripped into me.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. But I don’t need this, babe. I really don’t. You have to come home now. I mean it.”
My stomach sank below the crushing weight that came with knowing that my weekend would now be completely taken up with trying to keep Tyler, Rachel, and my parents on an even keel while fielding arguments and explanations. “Let me see what I can do.”
Behind me, Darryl said, “Hey, Don! You want a burger?”
Turning back around, I saw that Don Petrella had now sauntered over to the barbecue in search of something more sustaining than a vampire’s normal diet. “Sure,” he said, and took his teeth out. “Make it two.”
Malaika asked, “And how is your day going, Don?”
“Pretty good.” He rubbed his shoulder. “Scar’s been acting up, though. There’s a storm coming. A big one.”
Pocketing my phone I smiled tightly, and beneath my breath I answered, “You have no idea.”
• • •
Rachel sat very still, facing her window. The trees in the backyard blocked most of the view of the bay but the branches would dip now and then in the changeable wind and stray flashes of evening light dancing across the blue water broke through, making patterns of shadow and light on the ivory-striped wallpaper. I wasn’t sure Rachel noticed.
Niels had done the same thing when emotions got the best of him—he’d withdraw inside himself so deeply he’d be unaware of everything around him, sitting there unmov
ing like a thick-walled tower with its drawbridge up. He’d never wanted anyone intruding then, and knowing Rachel had inherited my brother’s moods I was about to close her bedroom door again and give her privacy instead of going in, but as I started easing the door shut she spoke.
“I’m sorry.”
Pausing with my hand still on the doorknob, I said, “That’s okay. You don’t need to be sorry.”
Tyler, I knew, wouldn’t have agreed. He’d been hit full force with her anger and frustration. He had told me where she’d told him he should go. “You need to talk to her,” he’d said, “because there’s no excuse for that.”
But clearly he had missed the full significance of what I’d noticed right away when I’d come in. She hadn’t just brought suitcases, the way you did when staying for a weekend. She’d brought everything—her bedding and her pillow and her laundry basket packed with smaller items wrapped in tissue, and a cardboard box of books.
“Was someone driving her?” I’d asked, because she didn’t have a car.
“What?” He’d been irritated, but he’d said, “She took a taxi. What difference does that make?”
“Did she carry all this in herself?”
“The driver helped her. What—”
I’d interrupted him with, “Ty. Just stop a minute. Look.”
He’d looked. And slowly reached the same conclusion I’d already come to. “She’s left college?”
Rachel didn’t want to talk about it.
I could tell, from standing in the doorway of her room right now and looking at her, that she wasn’t ready to discuss why she’d come home. She needed time, and understanding, and the space to work things through in her own way. I fought the urge to hug her, knowing that would only make her more uncomfortable. Instead I asked her, “Is there anything you need?”
A pause. And then she shook her head, and even though the movement was a small one it allowed a single tear to squeeze through her defences and escape the corner of her eye. It trailed a jagged path down her pale cheek, and hurt my heart.
“It’s going to be okay,” I promised. Then, because I saw that she was trying hard to pull that drawbridge up again, I left her on her own with, “If you need me, I’ll be right downstairs.”