The Wedding Dress

by Mary O'Donnell

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epiloque

  The Wedding Dress

  Copyright © 2011 DRG.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews. For information address DRG, 306 East Parr Road, Berne, Indiana 46711-1138.

  The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

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  Library of Congress-in-Publication Data

  The Wedding Dress / by Mary O’Donnell

  p. cm.

  I. Title

  2011909878

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  AnniesMysteries.com

  800-282-6643

  Annie’s Attic Mysteries

  Series Creator: Stenhouse & Associates, Ridgefield, Connecticut

  Series Editors: Ken and Janice Tate

  Dedication

  To the women in my life who have taught me so much: my grandmothers, Ida and Myrtle; my mother, Pat; my sisters, Doris and Becky; and my daughter, Julie.

  Prologue

  “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” —William Shakespeare

  On a bright spring day in 1895, Captain Zacharias Grey stood atop a high hill overlooking the rocky coast of Maine. Behind him, the remains of the previous year’s tall grass, brown and flattened by the wind and by layer upon layer of winter snow, were being pushed aside as new sprouts of green plants took over. The deciduous trees were budding, the leaves nearly ready to burst forth after a long, cold and dark winter, and the branches of the pines were tipped in the light green of new growth. Soon wildflowers would open their petals and dot the landscape with color—yellow marsh marigold and golden Alexanders, purple spiderwort, red columbine, deep blue lupine and light blue Jacob’s ladder.

  Before the captain lay the ocean; that day it was a deep blue color, reflecting the clear blue sky above. In his many years at sea, he had seen the ocean in a range of colors and moods from black as night, to iron gray, to the sparkling blue he saw before him. The wind was blowing briskly inland at about 10 to 12 knots, he had calculated, both by the feel of it on his hands and face, and by the appearance of white caps on the waves. The air was cold and full of the smell of the sea.

  He loved the sea. It had been his life since he had left home as a young man—a boy really, only 17 years old—to work as a seaman on his first voyage aboard a merchant vessel. By the age of 22, he had worked his way up to second mate, and from there he proceeded to higher ranks. With each advancement in experience and responsibility he garnered a larger share of the profit. Fifteen years after he stepped foot on that first ship as a simple seaman, he was a captain, and soon he hoped to be co-owner of his own ship.

  It was not a foregone conclusion that he would achieve his goals. There were many men, older than he, who remained seaman, or rose to second or first mate, but no further. He had the good fortune to be born with a mind adept at learning, and he had had mentors along the way who taught him not only the craft of seafaring, but lent him books to further the education that had been cut short when he took to the sea.

  The sea captains of that age were learned men. They did not normally socialize with the crew and spent long hours alone in the evenings and on days when there was a lull of activity. Reading was a way to pass the time and expand their knowledge. Under the tutelage of a few of these men, young Zacharias Grey studied the fundamentals of learning—grammar, logic, arithmetic, geometry—so that he might advance to study higher things. He read with relish stories like Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Tempest. The understanding of astronomy that was fundamental to sailing was expanded to a greater understanding of the earth’s place in the sea of the universe. His goal was to be able to hold his own in conversation with those with whom he hoped to become a peer, but he was enriched beyond his expectation.

  Now in his mid-30s, Captain Grey envisioned his plans for the future as he watched the gulls sail high into the air off the shore of the small town of Stony Point. He had purchased the outcrop of land where he was standing, where there would soon be built a fine home for himself and his young bride-to-be, who was herself from a Boston family of long-standing. In their new home, they would raise the large family they wanted to have. It would be the first house built along what had formerly been an earthen track, only recently having been paved with brick and christened “Ocean Drive.”

  An architect from Boston had been engaged to draw up plans for a large, many-gabled house featuring a wraparound porch, with a carriage house situated nearby. The carriage house had already been started, and soon the builders would break ground to begin the main house. Captain Grey estimated that by the time he returned from his next commercial voyage, the house would be complete. After a honeymoon in Europe, he would bring his bride to live in Stony Point. She might accompany him on some of his voyages, if she liked, before the children were born. He could see the future laid out before him in his mind’s eye.

  He had decided he would give the house a name, like some of the grand places he had seen in his travels to England—with names like Holkham Hall, Sandringham House and Mentmore Towers. He knew that his house would not be palatial like those magnificent buildings, but nevertheless his home would be one of the finest houses in Stony Point. The name he had chosen was Grey Gables.

  1

  Annie Dawson awoke early in the morning with a sense of resolve that she was really going to make some progress in the attic that day. She had been in Stony Point, Maine,for quite a while, living in the house that her grandmother, Elizabeth “Betsy” Holden, had bequeathed to her. Annie had made the long drive up from her home in Brookfield, Texas, with a mission: to put things in order, and then return as soon as possible. Her beloved husband Wayne had passed away, but her daughter, LeeAnn, still lived in Texas with her husband, Herb, and their twin children, Joanna and John. Annie also had many wonderful friends she had come to know and love over the years. But when she arrived at her grandmother’s home, Grey Gables, she found that there was so much more to do than she had expected.

  The house had fallen into a certain amount of disrepair, as her grandmother, in her later years, was unable to keep up with all that goes with maintaining a large house. The old Victorian-period house had been her grandparents’ home since the 1940s. When Annie’s grandfather had died, her grandmother couldn’t bear to “downsize” like other widows often do out of necessity. She stayed at Grey Gables, the home where she had lived since she was a young wife and mother, living daily with memories of the people she had loved and cared for, and continuing to reach out to her friends and neighbors. Annie loved the house too. She had spent her summers with Gram, as she liked to call her grandmother, from the time when she was a child until she went away to college.

  But time had passed so quickly. After college, Annie had married, and she and Wayne worked long hours to establish their business, a car dealership, in Texas. And t
hen LeeAnn was born. … Annie just never seemed to find the time to go to Maine. The last time she was there was to attend her grandfather’s funeral. After that, it was easier to arrange to fly Gram down to Texas for holidays or special occasions. Being so far away, Annie hadn’t realized that Grey Gables had become too much for her grandmother to handle.

  When Annie arrived in Stony Point, she quickly saw that she had her work cut out for her. She was not a do-it-yourself kind of girl when it came to home repairs, but fortunately, she found a great handyman in Wally Carson, who was helping her get things in shape. She and Wally had made progress in nearly every part of the house. Slowly, Annie was working her way through each of the rooms, keeping the feel of the home she remembered as a child, but applying her own sense of style as an organizing principle. She thought that Gram would approve.

  And then there was the attic. Annie sighed deeply just thinking about it. As she lay in bed, watching the first sunbeams of another summer day stream through lacy crocheted curtains, she knew that today was the day when she was really going to see a significant change in the attic. It was the one part of the house where she just hadn’t seemed to be able to make any headway. But today would be different.

  She had asked Wally to come by to do some electrical work in the attic. He would remove the old ceiling fixture, with its bare lightbulb and dangling pull string, and install new lighting fixtures and outlets that Annie had picked out the previous week at Malone’s Hardware Store. She hoped that the new lighting would give her a needed boost, as she sorted through all of the miscellanea in the attic.

  Her immediate impression, after she arrived from Texas and wandered up into the attic for the first time in nearly 30 years, was “clutter and dust.” After that, she always went up the narrow stairs into the attic with the intention of getting everything cleaned and organized. The dust she could deal with, but the clutter was complicated. Without fail she found that she was distracted from her organizational goal by some unexpected treasure. No, it wasn’t always something that belonged on Antiques Roadshow—though some of the things she had found certainly did. Other items, while not antiques, were valuable nonetheless, and not just monetarily. She thought of the first “treasure” she discovered—her grandmother’s “Betsy Original,” an embroidered portrait of a mysterious lady. Even mundane articles that seemed at first to be the antithesis of “mysterious,” often turned out to be clues that led to all different sorts of long-buried secrets that Annie had helped to see the light of day, and in the process she had ultimately helped those who were connected.

  Each “treasure” that she came across had a unique aura. As she held the object in her hands, it seemed to “tell” her that it had an interesting and important history of its own, and that it was her duty to uncover it. She just couldn’t pack everything in boxes and take them down to the secondhand shopz or to the church rummage sale to get rid of them. She felt she owed an obligation to her grandmother who had saved these precious things, and to the people who had been associated with them, to discover that special history. Somehow she would make sure each item was where it should be, and that any loose ends associated with it were resolved. Her grandparents and her parents had engrained into her the idea that she should care for others, even strangers, and she took that idea seriously.

  Her friends at the Hook and Needle Club liked to call her attempts to discover the stories behind her attic treasures her “mysteries,” and were almost always eager to lend a hand to solve the mystery at hand. Annie smiled as she thought of the ladies, who got together as a group every Tuesday morning at the local needlework shop, A Stitch in Time, to ply their particular needlecraft, whether it be crochet, knitting, embroidery, or quilting.

  At first, she had been hesitant to share details of her finds with them, all except for Alice MacFarlane, that is, who was her best friend from those summers of her youth. Gram had treated Alice like a second granddaughter, and as an adult, Alice had looked on Betsy Holden as a treasured friend and mentor. Now Alice lived down the hill in the old carriage house that had been converted years ago into living quarters and was no longer part of the same parcel of property with Grey Gables. Annie would often see her auburn-haired friend coming from and going to the various home parties she conducted for Divine Décor and Princessa Jewelry companies.

  Annie and the ladies from the club had been through a few rocky patches as they got to know each other, and they had learned to trust her, as she had learned to trust them. Barring the occasional misunderstanding, they were as dear to her as her old friends back in Texas. Annie knew that if she ever decided to head south again, she would miss them terribly.

  Taking a deep breath, Annie threw off the covers and rolled out of bed. After putting on her comfy bathrobe and sliding her feet into cozy slippers, she headed down the open staircase to the first floor, where she made her way toward the back of the house through the main hallway that began at the front door and ended just beyond the door to the kitchen on the right and the library on the left. She wasn’t surprised to find that she was being closely followed by a small, gray, furry object. Boots, who had been her grandmother’s cat, was Annie’s constant companion around the house, and was especially attentive to Annie at mealtimes. After making sure that Boots’s bowl was full of kibble, Annie sat down at the kitchen table to have a quick breakfast of cold cereal and milk, and an invigorating cup of coffee. She sat at that table every morning for breakfast, just as she had on those summer mornings when she stayed with Gram. Together they had enjoyed the view of the beach and the sun rising over the ocean through the kitchen window, and it pleased her to do the same now. It was a great way to start the day.

  She didn’t tarry long over breakfast; she had a lot to do before Wally showed up to work in the attic. Annie wanted to move as many cardboard boxes as possible to make room for him to work, and to make sure that things that were not in boxes, like furniture and old lamps, were protected from whatever mess would result from the work. She knew that she could depend on Wally to help move the heavy items. Sometimes she wondered how in the world some of the larger pieces of furniture were moved up those narrow stairs. If and when the time came to take them out of the attic, it would be helpful to know how someone had managed to get them up there in the first place!

  A short time later, Annie was ready to tackle the attic, dressed in old jeans and a well-worn flannel shirt of her grandfather’s that she had found in Gram’s dresser and saved for just such a purpose. She tied up her shoulder–length blond hair in a red bandanna. Armed with several dust cloths, a broom and dustpan, and carrying several bedsheets she intended to use to cover some of the larger items, she caught a glance of herself in the hallway mirror. She laughed out loud, her getup reminding her of the antics of Lucy and Ethel in an old episode of I Love Lucy. How Wayne would have teased her.

  The thought of him made her smile. It was odd how time really did heal wounds. Her husband’s death from a heart attack was so unexpected, and it seemed to her that the ache of his absence would never go away. But lately, she found that she was beginning to be able to think of him with less sadness, and remember instead only the love and laughter they had shared. Her time at Grey Gables had given her the distance and the distraction she needed to begin to come out of the depressed state she had been in before she left Texas.

  She had felt sad and alone, or at least unneeded. She knew that her daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren loved her, and that she had many friends who cared, but they had their own lives to live. It was a shock to think of herself as a single person in the world, when for most of her adult life she had had Wayne to confide in and to share decisions with. She felt that no other person could ever take his place, and the future had looked bleak and somewhat frightening.

  Then Annie thought of Gram, and how she must have gone through the same feelings when Gramps had died. She had been happily married to Charlie Holden for over 50 years, yet after his death, she found the resolve to carry on with her
career as a talented needlework designer, and remained active with her friends and in the community. Annie wished that she would’ve understood better what her grandmother must have been going through at that time. It was so easy to get caught up in one’s own life and not fully comprehend another person’s feelings. If only …

  But the past couldn’t be changed.

  Annie opened the door and trudged up the attic stairs, feeling a bit less lighthearted than she had only moments before. She could only think that everyone must have those experiences in the past, that when they look back at how they handled certain situations, they wish they had done better. All you can do is to try to do better the next time, she thought.

  As she entered the attic, Annie could see well enough to find the pull string of the light fixture by the faint sunlight that was filtering in through the small eyebrow windows at both ends of the attic. She had always thought that those half-oval windows gave a lot of character to the exterior of the house, and that whoever designed the house, with its many gables and unique windows, had a wonderful aesthetic sense. The original gray trim heightened the effect of the angles and highlighted special features like the eyebrow windows and the gingerbread-work around the porch.

  She especially loved the porch, and back when she and Alice were young girls, they had spent many happy hours on the porch swing, talking and giggling. This was done in conjunction with other activities: Sometimes they had been given the job of snapping green beans from Gram’s garden for supper that night, or they worked on crochet projects that Gram encouraged them to try. She always made sure their hands were busy.

  Annie looked at her watch and realized it was after six-thirty; Wally would be there around eight o’clock. She surveyed the room, and determined a few of the larger items were fine where they were for the time being. They were mostly located along the one side of the attic, and the ones that were exposed, like the old washstand and a few high-backed chairs could just be covered with sheets. It was the center of the room under the ridge of the roof where she hoped to clear a bit. She picked up a couple of boxes, resisting the urge to look inside, and moved them toward one corner.