Once Faye was certain Carrick had gone to bed and shut the door behind him, she sprang into action. She couldn’t make any more gaffes. First stop, the kitchen. Faye went through the pantry and the cabinets, wanting to memorize what they had and where it was stored. It wouldn’t look good if Carrick asked her for a cracker or a cup of coffee and she couldn’t find them.
In the cabinet by the stove she found familiar items—baking powder (Clabber Girl brand, which she’d had at home), along with condensed milk, molasses, brown sugar, white sugar, yeast, cornmeal, spices, salt and pepper and Jell-O. Even in 1921 there was room for Jell-O.
With the vegetable garden and all this dry food, at least she knew she wouldn’t starve. She might drown, blow up in a gas explosion or contract malaria, but she wouldn’t starve. And she wouldn’t get scurvy, either, it seemed. Faye found several dozen jars of canned fruit preserves—cranberry, blackberry, cherry and orange marmalade. Plus, several cans of peaches, apples and cherries.
Under the sink she found bleach in an amber glass bottle and vinegar in a clear glass bottle. More baking soda, too. While the packaging wasn’t what she was used to, everything in the kitchen was recognizable. She took comfort in the little girl with the umbrella on the Morton’s salt canister. She never thought she’d welcome the sight of a familiar product logo. The kitchen reminded Faye of her grandmother’s. And it was certainly well stocked with pots and pans and silverware. Nothing looked foreign to her, except maybe the millet, whatever that was. Surely they had a dictionary in the house. Asking Siri, “What is millet?” wasn’t an option anymore. Faye almost missed Siri. Once in a dark and desperate moment she’d asked Siri to tell her a joke. She’d responded with “Two iPhones walk into a bar. They didn’t get a good reception.” That had been the night Hagen had pried the pill bottle out of her hand, the night she’d realized a telephone robot was her only friend in the world.
In the living room, Faye pulled the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog out from under the Bible, hopeful it would help her understand the world of 1921 America. She also wondered whatever happened to this Roebuck person. Had there been a dramatic falling-out, a breakup of sorts, between him and Mr. Sears? Were they the Beatles of their day—Sears was Paul McCartney and poor Roebuck John Lennon? On the cover in large letters it said, “Buy from the World’s Largest Store.”
“Oh, I get it,” Faye said to herself. “It’s the Amazon of 1921.”
As she leafed through the book, she stopped at random pages studying the goods and their prices.
Blankets, cotton, white or tan—she could buy a pair for $2.75.
Men’s silk socks in black or white—$1.48 a pair. Not bad considering the silk and cashmere socks she’d gotten Hagen for Christmas had cost more than a hundred dollars.
“Oh, my God...” Maybe 1921 wouldn’t be so bad. If Faye had a spare $14.45, she could order a “Home Vibrator.” The drawing showed a woman using the vibrator to massage her head. She’d always heard foreplay began with stimulating the brain, and this woman seemed to take that literally. The advertisement said it was for “Household Use.” And she could hear Will in her head saying, “Household use? As opposed to what? Business use?” Too bad they didn’t have electricity at the house, as the vibrator needed to be plugged into a wall socket. Then again, Faye was content to take her orgasms into her own hands if necessary. Or Carrick’s.
“Not Carrick,” she said to herself. Even if she wanted to sleep with him—she didn’t—she shouldn’t. Apparently she was married, and Carrick was Catholic with a decent streak as wide as the ocean. And she was in another woman’s body in 1921. Was there any sort of birth control in the 1920s? The pull-out method, of course. She remembered the old joke—what do you call people who use the pull-out method? Parents.
Near the back of the catalog, she found houses for sale. Not real-estate listings, actual house kits that one could order and then assemble—brick and mortar not included. These weren’t the generic-looking manufactured boxes of her day. No, these houses were nice. One model called the Castleton was a beautiful two-story home with a basement and a porch. Four rooms on the first floor, four rooms on the second. She wondered what the cost of shipping on a house was. You couldn’t buy a house-assembly kit off Amazon.
“Get on that, Bezos,” Faye said. “You’re behind the times.”
A two-story four-bedroom home, and all for the low price of $1,989.
That amount was about half the mortgage payment on Hagen’s five-bedroom brick McMansion in their Columbia, South Carolina, gated community. She’d told him five bedrooms was a little excessive for two people. “But we’ll have the kids,” he’d said, as if children were inevitable and not, as they turned out to be, an unattainable fantasy.
Faye was almost scared to look at the cameras, but she made herself do it. There they were—on page 587. In 1921, Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold the Conley Junior film cameras in four sizes ranging in price from $9.85 to $17.25. The advertising copy promised they were “modern in every detail” and equipped with “Extra Rapid Rectilinear Lenses.” The Conley Fixed Focus folding camera pledged “no focusing, no guessing at distances and snapshots always sharp.” Film was for sale, of course, at forty-one cents per roll of six exposures. When Faye thought of the thousands of photographs stored on her iPhone...
She felt naked without a camera on her. She’d been a photographer since her junior year of high school. The editor of the school newspaper had been a sixteen-year-old smart-ass named Kev Conner who had been sexy in a junior-in-high-school sort of way. Being nerdy and gangly and not knowing how to flirt, Faye had joined the paper, since it had seemed like the best way to get closer to her crush. Quickly her loyalties had shifted from the guy to the job. She’d taken all the pictures for the newspaper that year, and most of the club and team photos for the yearbook. In front of a camera, she felt uncomfortable and trapped, but behind it...that was where she belonged. She’d felt powerful bossing the football players around, telling them how to stand for their team photo. And they’d done what she said. When she’d seen her name as the photo credit for the first time in the newspaper, Faye had found her calling.
It could be her calling again for the low price of $9.85 for the fixed-focus camera. She wanted to take pictures of the island and the lighthouse. The question was, did she have $9.85? Did Carrick? How much did he make a year? Did she have any money at all? Carrick had said she’d sacrificed a great deal to be with him. And apparently she didn’t do housework, at least not until today. Once upon a time, Faith Morgan must have had money. Faye would have to find out if Faith still did.
Asking Carrick for a camera was out of the question. She’d pay for it herself or she would live without it.
Faye leaned back on the couch, her hands crossed over her stomach, which was aching now from a combination of fear and greasy food. Buy a camera? Why would she buy a camera? Was she planning on staying? What choice did she have? She was here either by accident or design, so she might as well face facts.
Faye slapped the catalog closed, placed it back on the coffee table under the Bible and headed upstairs. Last night it had been so dark in the house, Faye hadn’t seen any rooms other than her bedroom and the bathroom. She’d assumed the door across from the bathroom was a linen closet or something, but when she leaned her ear against the door, she heard a low hum from inside, a sound like a wheel turning rapidly. Slowly so as not to startle Dolly, Faye opened the door and slipped inside.
“You have got to be kidding me.” Faye laughed at the sight of the Singer sewing table. It looked identical to the one in her room at the Church Street house. Except this sewing table still had the machine on it and the treadle and someone using it like it had been intended to be used. Dolly sat at the machine, her foot pumping the treadle with an easy rhythm.
Faye glanced around the room, enraptured by its feminine beauty. A twin bed sat by the wall. The rectangular wooden footboard and headboard had been painted a pale yellow, and the quilt pattern was all
yellow-and-white squares. Someone had sewn a pillow-size turtle and given it a green shell. The curtains were a lacy blue and the walls a soft buttercream color. The rug on the floor was blue and yellow, and someone had decorated the bed table with three perfectly formed conch shells, one large, one medium, one small. A mirror with a bamboo frame hung on the wall, reflecting a slender white vase set in the windowsill that held a single yellow daisy. If Faye had ever dreamed of what her and Will’s baby’s nursery would look like, it would be something like this. Only they’d have a yellow crib where the bed stood. She was in her dream house. What did you call a dream house when you dreamed it in a nightmare?
Dolly, sensing her presence, stopped her sewing and turned around.
Faye picked up Dolly’s chalkboard and wrote, “This room is beautiful.”
Dolly smiled at the words and wrote back, “Thank you.”
Thank you? Faye erased the board and wrote a new question. “Did you decorate this room?”
To which Dolly replied, “Chief said I could.”
The answer was wary, defensive. Did Dolly think Faye disapproved? And Chief? Was that what everyone called Carrick? She’d seen the writing on the back of his photograph last night—Senior Chief Petty Officer. Well, Chief it is, then.
“Did you sew the quilt?” Faye wrote. Dolly nodded in the affirmative.
“The curtains?” Faye wrote. Dolly nodded.
“Paint the walls?” Dolly nodded.
“Make the rug?” Dolly nodded.
This girl needed to own and operate her own interior design firm.
“Find the shells?” Faye asked.
Dolly gave her a strange look. “You did,” she wrote on the chalkboard. Shit. Another gaffe.
“I forgot,” Faye replied on the board. “You should decorate my room.”
Dolly’s grin was like a sunburst across her face.
“I will!” she wrote.
Faye laughed at the girl’s eagerness for what amounted to doing extra work. Although she loved the look of beautiful homes, Faye never had the knack for interior decorating. Her apartment with Will had been functional and decorated mostly with his collection of baseball memorabilia and her favorite photographs in black square frames. Hagen had hired a professional for their house in Columbia, so Faye had been spared the task that Dolly seemed to relish so much. But really, what else was there for a teenage girl to do with her spare time in 1921? Not like she could play “World of Warcraft” or start a Pinterest account.
“Today?” Dolly wrote on her board.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Faye wrote back. “We’re busy today. What is that?”
Dolly unfolded the bundle of pink-and-white cloth. It was a dress, tiny and pretty with a white ruffle at the bottom.
“For you?” Faye wrote on the board, and Dolly laughed hard when she read it. She shook her head and the expression on her face seemed to say “Crazy lady.”
“Baby sis,” Dolly wrote on the board. “Church.”
“Beautiful. I want one for me,” Faye replied. A joke, but Dolly immediately pulled a tape measure out of her skirt pocket. Faye shook her head. “Not today,” she mouthed.
Dolly sat down again. She wrote on her slate, “Do you need me, miss?”
Faye took the board back and wrote, “Call me Faith, not miss, please. Tell me what you don’t like about that man who came today.” She had to use both sides of the board. Perhaps they could order Dolly a conversation-size chalkboard from the Sears catalog.
Dolly shook her head as she read the question, not in refusal but in obvious disgust. She drew a picture on the board, a man with his leg sticking up and his foot in a giant boot. Faye narrowed her eyes at the drawing, parsing it out.
“Bootlegger,” Faye said. She wrote back on the board, “How do you know that?”
Dolly looked at her with the most teenaged expression of “duh” and wrote two words in reply.
“Everybody knows.”
Faye smiled. All right, that was Hartwell’s game. Faye had forgotten Prohibition was in effect in this decade. Did people in 1921 call it Prohibition? Or did they refer to it as the Eighteenth Amendment or the Volstead Act? Was that why Mr. Hartwell seemed so disingenuous during his visit? Was he there scoping out the island for some reason? If Faye were going to be a booze smuggler, this wouldn’t be a bad base of operations. The island was owned by a bourbon distiller and from here one could take a boat all the way up the coast. And with no permanent residents on the island but her and Carrick, a bootlegger wouldn’t have to worry too much about getting caught in the act. If bootlegging was Hartwell’s only game, she’d let him play it as long as he left Dolly and her alone.
Dolly wiped the board clean again and wrote, “You need help?”
Their teenage housekeeper was eager to please, that was for sure.
Faye wrote, “Yes. I want to do chores. What should I do?”
Dolly went wide-eyed at the words. Apparently telling the boss’s daughter what to do wasn’t in Dolly’s job description. Faye added an addendum to her question.
“He said I should help you more.”
Carrick hadn’t said that, but it seemed like a good explanation for Faith’s sudden change in behavior.
Dolly wrote, “Chief wants you to help me?”
“Yes,” Faye wrote. “What do you do around the house?”
Dolly heaved a sigh so loud it blew a spool of white thread across the table. Faye caught it just before it went over the side. With a shake of her head, Dolly pulled out a used envelope from a drawer and started writing along the back of it.
She wrote.
And she wrote.
And she wrote some more.
Faye took the envelope from Dolly and read the list of chores.
Clean house lamps
Weed garden
Fill lamps, trim wicks
Clean stove
Sweep & wash floors
Wash windows
Sew curtains
Make soap
Beat rugs
Bake pie
Milk Nanny
This house had a lot of damn lamps and that was a big garden out there. Make soap? What, was she supposed to be Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies now? Beat the rugs? What had the rugs done to deserve that?
Just reading these chores aged Faye a good ten years. So much for her pretty fingernails.
“This is a long damn list,” Faye said out loud. Dolly looked at her in shock and confusion. Apparently Dolly could read lips a little bit and had seen Miss Faith say something entirely not very Faith-ful.
“You do all this?” Faye wrote.
Dolly nodded.
“What do you want me to do?” Faye asked.
“Can you milk Nanny?” Dolly wrote.
Nanny? Who was... Oh, yeah, Nanny. That had to be the goat Carrick had milked last night for her. Faye tried not to make a face.
“I’ll try. I’m not great with goats.”
Dolly was not sympathetic. She wrote two words. “Good luck.”
Faye reread the list.
“I can bake a pie,” Faye wrote. “And weed the garden.”
Dolly smiled, looking both relieved and grateful. Better inept help than no help at all.
“Do you like working here?” Faye wrote.
Dolly nodded enthusiastically. Faye added Why to the beginning of her question.
Dolly wrote her answer on the board, and Faye read it. It told her all she needed to know about life on this island in 1921. And if a bus had pulled up outside with a sign on the side that said Destination 2015 with a travel time of ninety-four years, Faye would have boarded that bus then and there.
“Because it’s so easy.”
13
Maybe Faye wouldn’t bake that pie after all.
In the cupboard over the sink, Faye had found a cookbook. She found the manual for the oven in the junk drawer under a notepad, a rubber band ball, a screwdriver, a set of jacks and some twine. And while she did have some experienc
e baking an average dessert, that was in the twenty-first century with 2015 technology. The cookbook was not helpful. The ingredients for peach pie were simple enough—peaches, butter, flour, sugar. And the instructions were fairly straightforward—combine, stir, cream and so forth. The final sentence of the recipe, however, was a cryptic puzzle: “Bake in a moderately hot oven for forty-five minutes.”
Moderately hot oven? That’s it? No temperature listed? What did that even mean—moderately hot? How moderately hot were they talking here? George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven hot? Or Daniel Craig in Skyfall hot? Probably not Daniel Craig hot. That heat level would scorch any straight girl’s peaches.
If the vague temperature directions weren’t bad enough, the
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