“And?”
“Nothing.” Abby seemed suddenly shy.
Foster wondered if she’d been about to say money. Foster didn’t know much about horses, but she figured they were expensive.
“I always ride first thing in the morning. Before the fog lifts.”
“So, it does get sunny in California at some point?” She was beginning to think every postcard she’d ever seen was a lie.
“Usually by noon.”
“I’m not really a morning person. I’m only up now because it’s nearly ten o’clock in Atlanta and my phone woke me up.” Foster ate half a biscuit in two bites. It was delicious. Cora was a good cook, that was evident.
Abby watched Foster as she studied the old dresser along the far wall of the kitchen. Teacups with various patterns hung across the front of it, and the shelves were lined with vintage dishware. The antique cabinet had belonged to her great-great-grandmother. After a minute, Foster looked back, and Abby turned her focus to refilling her tea.
Foster was an adorable soft butch. Her hair was charmingly tousled from sleep, and she had on a well-worn blue crew neck sweater over a white T-shirt. The sweater looked like a hand-me-down from a bygone era. Foster adjusted her glasses and smiled.
Abby had never dated a woman before, but if she ever did, she decided that Foster would be her type. She had an alluring innocence that made Abby want to scoop her up, cradle her head against her chest, and run her fingers through Foster’s hair. But that would be a terrible idea. Abby knew that getting close to someone she was attracted to, physical contact, was never a good idea.
But was separation what she really wanted? Not really, but she’d decided a long time ago it was safer for others if she kept to herself. Ever since that fateful kiss when she was a teen, she’d been afraid to let anyone get close. Richard, the boy, had recovered fully from the—accident—but things were never the same after that with the other kids in town. And then it had happened again with Elissa, in college. Abby took a deep breath and sighed.
“Is everything okay?” Foster had a look of concern on her face.
“Yes, sorry.” She’d let her mind wander to dark places. She fidgeted in her chair and smiled.
“Can I ask you a few questions?”
Abby was reminded that Foster was here to write a memoir. This wasn’t a casual breakfast with a friend. This whole thing had been arranged by Gertie. She’d meant to ask Foster to leave, but now they were sitting here having tea and biscuits as if they were becoming fast friends. Maybe she should allow Foster to stay for another day. It seemed rude to send her away after only one night in California after traveling from Georgia.
“What sort of questions?”
“Well, I was thinking I’d drive into Spencer’s Cove later and visit the library.” Foster sipped her coffee. “It doesn’t seem like you have Wi–Fi here and my cell service is so spotty that I can’t really use my phone as a hotspot.”
“No, sorry, we don’t have Wi–Fi.”
“It’s okay. I need to visit the library anyway to start research for the book.” She reached for another biscuit and applied jam as she talked. “Cora mentioned a shipwreck yesterday, and I just wondered how much you knew about it.”
“Not much really.” That wasn’t entirely true. She held her tea with both hands and sipped. “It’s probably more folklore than fact.”
“Funny, that’s the same thing Cora said.”
“Really?”
“So, you’ve never checked into the story?”
“No, not really.” The truth was, she had been curious, but her father had sort of shut down her pursuit of details. She was much younger then and let it go. Now she wondered why he’d done that.
“Do you by chance have any journals or personal papers from any of your grandparents? If you did, that’d be a good place to start.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Specifics. You know, names, dates.”
“There are some things in my grandfather’s old desk in the study. I could—” What was she doing? She’d forgotten for a moment not to trust Foster. She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, um, will you excuse me.” Abby stood, scraping the wooden chair loudly across the stones of the tile floor. “Please enjoy your coffee.”
She fled the kitchen and climbed the steps hurriedly to her room as if she feared Foster would give chase. She’d felt backed into a corner by their conversation and didn’t know how else to escape. Once in her room she crossed to the bathroom sink and splashed cold water on her face. She needed to calm down. A warm soak in the tub would help her relax and refocus. She sank to the side of the tub with her face in her hands and let the water run.
Chapter Seven
Foster stared at the empty chair across from her. Abby had practically rushed from the room without preamble and without warning. Had she done something to upset Abby? She replayed the conversation in her head, but nothing stood out. She stared at the empty seat, with a half-eaten biscuit midair, when she heard the back door close.
“Oh, hello there. You’re all by yourself then?” Cora seemed as surprised as Foster.
“Yes, um, Abby had somewhere to be.” Foster wasn’t sure what else to say.
“Well, I’ll just sit for a minute and keep you company then.” Cora poured herself a cup of tea and reached for a biscuit. “I’m needing a second cup of tea anyway.”
Foster found Cora to be pleasant company, but Abby’s abrupt exit was still bothering her. She’d thought if she lingered for another cup of coffee that Abby might return to join them, but she didn’t. Finally, Foster excused herself to shower and change. She was anxious to see what she could sleuth out at the library about the origins of Spencer’s Cove. Even if Abby chose not to participate in the research, her curiosity about the shipwreck was piqued.
By ten past ten she was parked along Main Street near the front of the Spencer’s Cove public library. It was a small, square building. Red brick rose halfway up the front. The rest of the building was constructed of weathered gray wood. The thought had occurred to Foster that most of the structures were wooden because of earthquakes, but that was just a hypothesis.
The library seemed empty except for a woman at the checkout desk. She was probably in her late forties and was the antithesis of the sexy librarian fantasy. Not that Foster cared, but if she’d been cute that would have only made the research more fun. The woman looked up as Foster approached the desk. Her shaggy brown hair was dangerously close to a mullet. She wore large round glasses that looked like they were a holdover from the eighties and possibly had not been properly cleaned since then. Fingerprint smudges on glasses bothered Foster to no end. The woman was wearing a flannel shirt, two sizes too large, baggy jeans, and Crocs. Foster liked Crocs about as much as socks with sandals. No one should wear them, ever.
“Hello.” Foster spoke first. Trying for her best friendly Southerner routine.
“Can I help you?” The woman’s question had an insincere ring to it.
“Yeah, I’m trying to find some information about a shipwreck…” She angled her head to read the woman’s nametag. Dena Alvarez. “…Dena.”
“I’m afraid you’ll need to be a bit more specific.” Dena was surly, her demeanor completely flat. She had clearly not attended charm school, in fact, if there was a charm school in the area Dena had never even driven by it. “If you know the date and the name of the ship and perhaps its captain, where it came from, and where it was headed, then perhaps I could help you.”
Foster opened her mouth, but before she could formulate a response, Dena cut her off.
“Ships had to register from port to port even during that era, so there would certainly be records.”
“Actually, I believe it was a shipwreck that happened here. Probably in the 1850s.” Foster took an educated guess at the date.
“Hmm, the Equus.”
“As in, the Latin word for horse?” That seemed like an odd coincidence given Abby’s interest in hors
es.
“Equus is a genus of mammals in the family Equidae, which includes horses.”
Foster bristled at the librarian smackdown but was determined not to let Dena get to her. If she was the only librarian in town then Foster needed her help, at least initially.
“Yes, I guess that’s the wreck I’m looking for.”
“The Equus sank near Lighthouse Point in the summer of 1850.” Dena turned to scribble something on a scrap of paper. “Luckily, California was hopping at that time because the gold rush was in full swing. A number of newspapers covered the wreck. Check this source.”
Dena handed the paper to Foster. On it, was a URL for the library at the University of Southern California’s list of historical newspapers by region. Jackpot.
“Thank you.” Despite her grumpy, “I’d rather chew barbed wire than smile” demeanor, Dena had just given her a great launch point for her research.
It didn’t take long to find two stories about the Equus. One from the Bombay Times and the other from the Alta California, the first daily newspaper in California. The first issue was published from San Francisco on Thursday, January 4 in 1849, and the paper had some connection to Mark Twain. He was a literary hero of Foster’s so she made a note to return to that lead at a later date.
According to the story in the Alta California, the Equus was a V-hulled ship built by the Gardner Brothers of Baltimore. A cross-reference told her that V-hulled ships were built for speed and often used for the opium or slave trade. That last detail tingled uncomfortably in her gut. She scrolled down.
The headline read Shipwreck and loss of life. The brig Equus had sailed from Boston to India and then departed China on the sixteenth of June. The ship was lost on the reef about sixty miles above Fort Ross on the twenty-sixth. A point of origin from China meant this ship was probably carrying opium or other goods from Asia. Master E. H. Howe had been at the helm, and only his daughter had survived. Now Foster was really intrigued.
***
Abby couldn’t stop thinking about the questions Foster had asked during breakfast. The house was quiet when she came back down after her bath, even Cora wasn’t about. She assumed Foster had embarked on her research trip to the library. Abby decided to pay a visit to her grandfather’s old roll top desk and do a little research of her own.
The study was a small room adjacent to the library. Most days the door remained closed and Abby rarely went in. There were items in that room that had not been used in years. Cora dusted the room, but she put things back in their place. The small study was lined with bookshelves, and there were random stacks of books that had probably been where they were since her father had read them. A well-loved, well-worn upholstered chair sat in one corner, with a small ottoman in front of it. A floor lamp, an antique radio from the 1920s with wooden sides, an old camera on a nearby shelf, and her grandfather’s desk along the opposite wall. The entire space looked like a collection of things from the Antiques Roadshow.
The room offered a sense of comfort and sadness at the same time. Comfort from objects loved by persons who at one time were close to her, and sadness because every object in the room reminded her of the loss of those connections.
She traced the groove of the roll top with her fingertip before she lifted it. Expecting it to be stiff, she gave it more force than was required. The top retracted like an accordion fan, slipping up and over to reveal her grandfather’s writing instruments. Two glass jars of ink, one almost empty, a blotter, and random sheets of loose-leaf paper were on top of the main desk surface. Slots above the surface were filled with folded notes and envelopes. She pulled one of the envelopes free and realized right away it had been sent from her father back in the 1960s. The postmark was from Chicago, so he’d no doubt sent the letter during his study there at Northwestern. She stowed the letter with the intention to come back and read it later.
What she was really looking for was the journal she’d thought of earlier during her conversation with Foster. She’d seen it once, a long time ago, in the drawer of this desk. She drew the drawer out slowly. There it was, just where she remembered it.
Abby didn’t have a lot of memories of her grandfather, as he’d died when she was a child, but she remembered her father saying once that his father had been too distracted by history. Her father never wanted to dwell in the past; he was always about moving forward. Abby had always held this belief that certain aspects of the past made people who they were. Not that people were predestined to be who they were, but maybe at least their past, their heritage, foreshadowed who they might become.
Sometimes Abby felt as if she’d been born in the wrong era. She’d have felt much more at home had she come into the world a hundred and fifty years earlier. This feeling made her an ill fit with her very modern parents. It was also one of the reasons that she’d never put Wi-Fi in the house, or cable TV. She wanted to hold at bay the twenty-four-hour news cycle and create a place where one could still seek and find quiet spaces.
She lifted the journal from the drawer and closed it, and then settled into the overstuffed chair across the room. The pages of the journal were stiff from age and dried ink. The variation in the opacity of the ink made it obvious that the words had been written with a quill of some sort. Abby marveled at how much of the density of the ink on the page had been preserved. But enough with the tactile details, she began to focus on the words. She returned to the beginning, then sank back into the high-backed chair and read.
***
Research at the library made the hours pass quickly. The discovery of Howe’s daughter made Foster’s brain light up with other questions. She wondered if it was unusual for a captain to bring his daughter along. A secondary search revealed that while it wasn’t common practice, it also wasn’t unheard of, if the girl was preteen. For a little while, Foster got utterly sidetracked following related threads about women at sea before she was able to tear herself away and return to her original search.
Sometimes that happened. She’d come across some tantalizing tidbit doing research for something else and she’d have to follow the wormhole to see where it might lead. Foster could waste hours getting lost in subsequent searches. During her recent bout of writer’s block, the tendency to lose herself for hours by following a line of investigation had only gotten worse.
Who was this Howe fellow, the captain? She started a search for E. H. Howe of Boston and fairly quickly found a connection between Howe and the Salem witch trials. That was unexpected. One of his ancestors, Mercy Howe, had been accused of witchcraft and hanged. What had she been accused of?
Sidetracked again, Foster couldn’t help herself.
In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft. Innocents were hanged, while some, believed to be guilty, actually escaped. From recorded accounts it seemed that in the darkness, at the edge of the wilderness, the sacred and the occult had collided. Several unfortunate citizens were caught up in the carnage.
Fascinating, but she was unable to find a direct reference to Mercy Howe’s acts of witchery. She sank back in the chair. There was definitely a story here, somewhere. A story behind the so-called facts. Hunger pangs caused her to check her watch. She’d been scrolling through entries for two hours. It was almost twelve and the biscuits had worn off. She copied the links and emailed them to herself so that she could easily find her place after lunch.
Her cell phone rang just as she was stowing her laptop. Gloria again. How much trouble could one oversized feline cause?
“Hello, Gloria.”
“I think William Faulkner has escaped.” Gloria sounded panicked. “I can’t find him anywhere.”
“Did you check my car?”
“William Faulkner can drive?”
Yeah, about as often as he eats marbles.
“No, Gloria, he can’t drive.” Foster held the phone against her shoulder as she slid her notes into her bag. “If he gets into the garage he sometimes likes to climb i
nto the back seat of the car.”
When she looked up, Dena was glaring at her, arms across her chest.
“There he is! I found him.” Gloria was out of breath from hustling to the garage. The garage was attached to the kitchen, but there were a few steps involved. “Everything’s okay. Don’t you worry.”
“Thanks, Gloria. I’ve gotta go.” She clicked off.
“This is a library, not some snooty café where everyone is permanently attached to their cell phones. The policy is clearly marked.” Dena pointed to a sign near the main entrance with a big red circle and a horizontal line drawn across a very rudimentary drawing of a cell phone.
“Got it.” Foster was hungry and not in the mood to argue.
She amused herself for a few seconds imagining introducing Dena and Gloria. That would be a floorshow for sure. Foster and Dena were still the only people in the library. She wondered if it was safe to take a chance and ask Dena for a recommendation after the whole cell phone incident. She waited a few minutes to give Dena time to calm down.
“Hi, sorry to bother you, but could you point me in the direction of a good spot for lunch?”
Dena pointed toward the window. Foster partially turned to look over her shoulder.
“That direction?” When she’d asked Dena to point, she hadn’t meant it literally.
“Uneda Eat.”
“Yeah, I do need to eat, but—”
“No, Uneda Eat. Uneda, with a U. It’s across the street.” Dena pointed again.
“Oh.” She started for the door. “Thanks.”
Once outside, she could see that the vintage sign had at one time read Uneda Meats, but the “M” and the “S” were now missing. She checked for traffic and then strolled across the street. Abby had been right about the sun. It was breaking through the clouds and warming the sea scented air. In another half hour she wouldn’t need her thrift store jacket with the suede elbow patches. She’d brought two suit jackets. Foster felt pretty sure that this one, with the suede elbow patches, raised her IQ a few points. At least that was her theory, although Dena was clearly not impressed.
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