She swung around, searching for the ocean that she knew was out there not far from where she stood. But the house was on low land; there was no water view. It didn't matter. She inhaled a lungful of cold salt air, her chest expanding from the effort. Now this was living, she thought, grateful simply to be alive.
It was at that exact, precise moment of gratitude that Jane found herself slammed violently in the back, so hard that she went sprawling on the soggy grass in front of her. Shocked and winded, she rolled over on her elbows and found herself staring at the massive head of a dog — or some cross between a dog and a mastodon — that was hovering over her. Drooling.
"Buster! Dammit, Buster! Come back here!" It was a woman's voice, high and musical and totally without authority.
Jane didn't dare take her eyes off the panting beast, who seemed to be regarding her as he would a smallish partridge. It was only after the woman — pretty, twenty, and dressed in jeans and a bomber's jacket — grabbed the dog's collar with both hands, that Jane allowed herself to sit up. The collar, which looked pretty much like a large man's belt, seemed sturdy enough, but Jane wasn't so sure about the woman. She looked as fragile as stemware.
"He's just a puppy; he won't hurt you," the girl said with an apologetic grin.
"That's what they all say," Jane said with a shaky laugh, wiping the drooly sleeve of her jacket on the grass. She stood up.
"I'm Cissy Hanlin, by the way," the pretty blonde said, not daring to let go of Buster's collar. "I live next door."
Jane introduced herself, and Cissy explained that she'd always wanted a dog but her husband didn't like animals but now they were separated and so the first thing she did was get a dog, a big dog, because she felt safer being so all alone and it was so lucky that she discovered Buster, who was a cross — ould Jane tell? — between a black Lab and a Saint Bernard or at least that's what the waitresses who brought him to the shelter before they left the island after summer was over said.
She paused, at last, for breath.
Jane said, "Yep. He looks like a black Saint Bernard."
At this point Buster's tail was wagging furiously, landing with quick hard thumps on the back of Jane's thighs. It did not seem possible that an act of friendliness could inflict so much pain. The interlude ended abruptly when a squirrel — dumber or braver than most — scampered across the lawn not far from them. Buster took off in loping pursuit, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, his paws ripping out consecutive mounds of earth.
He crashed through a rhododendron, breaking off several branches, and plowed over an azalea before fetching up at the trunk of one of the huge hollies that blocked Jane's front door. His bark, like the Hound of the Baskervilles', came straight from hell. From somewhere high, high in the holly tree, the squirrel twitted him.
"Silly puppy," Cissy cried. She turned to Jane with a helpless shrug. "I can't seem to get him to stay."
And I can't seem to get you to go, Jane thought, surveying the damage. She smiled weakly, her thoughts turning to stockade fences, and said, "Maybe it's just a phase."
Cissy rolled her eyes and said, "I wish. Well, it's nice that you're going to be around for a little while; I get so bored by myself. If you need help with anything, just shout," she added, and began whistling her dog away from the tree.
Eventually Buster came and dragged Cissy off, and Jane was able to unload the car. Her plan was to spend the next week cleaning, seeing to critical repairs, and talking to realtors (once she'd deodorized the place a bit) about listing the house in spring.
But first things first, she thought, taking down a jelly jar glass, which she wiped clean with her shirt. She took the rum and the glass into the fireplace room and poured a tot for herself.
Then she lifted the glass to the fireplace, the focal point of the room, and said, "Aunt Sylvia — thank you. I don't deserve this, but I thank you. I'll make this place pretty, and someone with children will live here and love it, and you and I will somehow share in their joy."
She tossed off the glass, and the odd-tasting rum shot through her winter-chilled body like a ball of flame. Her aunt had visited Bermuda once, and brought back the rum, and that's the only kind she drank for the rest of her life. (Jane used to smuggle a flask into the nursing home, and the two would sneak a tiny ceremonial drink together before she left for the night.)
The thought that there would be no more smuggling hit Jane hard; she poured another ounce, this time for her aunt, and sipped it as she wandered around the room, pausing to stroke a worn chair cover, taking a moment to scan the titles of the books on their shelves. How sad, she thought, that there were no framed photographs of loved ones anywhere in the room, not even of Sylvia's cats. All Jane saw was a charcoal sketch of a young woman in a plain gown, with a coal-skuttle bonnet lying on the floor beside her. A nineteenth-century Quaker, Jane decided, and an unhappy one at that.
She walked up to the framed sketch, which was hanging in a quiet corner of the room. All in all, it wasn't badly done. Perhaps it was her aunt's work. Sylvia Merchant had enjoyed dabbling with charcoal and pastels, although her subjects had generally come from the garden. Jane looked more closely and saw that she was right: In the corner of the drawing were the initials SM
Jane took the frame from the wall and walked over to a window with it. There was evidence of erasure, as if her aunt had struggled to capture an exact degree of unhappiness in the young woman's face. And what unhappiness! Her brows were tilted upward and toward one another; tears rolled down her face. Her full mouth was partly opened, as if she were imploring someone, while her hands were curled tightly around one another in obvious distress. As for her long dark gown, it hung a little too closely to her body to be historically correct. Like the curls that ringed her brow, the clinging garment gave the woman a voluptuous air that was at odds with the modest intents of Quaker fashion.
Jane shivered, deeply moved by the subject's distress. The drawing had the immediacy and power of a photograph. Well done, Aunt Sylvia, she thought, hanging the sketch back up on its hook. You should have done figures more often. She wondered who'd posed for her aunt. An island girl? Or had Sylvia merely copied someone else's work? But no; the sketch had too much emotion in it. Jane looked around the room, half expecting to find a companion sketch, this one of the brute who was causing the Quaker woman such pain. But there was nothing else.
She finished her rum and put the bottle away. There was work to be done — and in the next several hours she found out just how much, when the contractors dropped by one by one with their estimates.
The roofer looked things over, frowned, and said, "Five thousand dollars."
The electrician looked things over, laughed, and said, "Five thousand dollars."
The plumber shook his head and said, "Torch it."
By the end of the day Jane was bloodied but unbowed. Okay, so the house isn't perfect, she admitted as she boiled some tea water in a pot that looked as if it had a questionable past. But at least now she had heat — in most of the rooms, anyway; and water — even though it was flowing through lead pipes; and as for the roof, well, it wasn't supposed to rain for a day or two.
But now it was one in the morning; it was time to drag herself back to the Jared Coffin House. She sipped her Earl Grey tea tiredly, eyeing the Empire sofa in the room. Tomorrow she would definitely sleep here. She simply couldn't afford not to. She went around turning off the lights, aware that she hadn't even allowed herself the diversion of going through the boxes and closets. Today it was all Lysol and Tilex; maybe tomorrow she could relax and poke around a bit.
And tomorrow she would pick up a book on interpreting tarot cards before she packed away the deliberate arrangement that had been left sitting on the game table. That, she was determined to do.
She was just switching off the red ginger-jar lamp in the fireplace room when she heard the unmuffied roar of the dark green pickup turn in from the road again and race past her house. Buster, next door, heard it too and
began woofing maniacally. The pickup had passed in and out at least half a dozen times in the course of the day, setting off the beast each time, and now it was one in the morning and they were both still hard at it.
What's going on? she wondered, disturbed by the implications. Short hops, in and out .... The only other time she'd noticed a travel pattern like that was when she was in college: the guy in the house across the street used to zip in and out all day and night, and eventually he was arrested for dealing drugs.
Terrific. She was beginning to think just like her mother. Surely there must be some everyday explanation. The man was probably ... probably ....
But she couldn't come up with an everyday explanation.
Chapter 3
Saturday morning dawned sunny and dry. After checking out of the Jared Coffin House, Jane bought the cheapest sheets she could find, a book on the tarot, and half a dozen gallons of white paint. Her plan was to paint the interior entirely white, which would end up looking clean and offending no one.
She bought coffee and a sticky bun and headed for Lilac Cottage, mentally revising her calendar as she drove. One week for the cleanup would not be enough, but two might do it if she worked like a fiend. After all, she did have the time. If only she had the money. At the moment it was a toss-up between trying — ha! — to get an equity loan or spending the last of her rainy-day fund.
She shook off the sobering thought. The morning was too wonderful, all bright and mild and unlike March. Even Lilac Cottage seemed to have thrown off its winter chill. With all the shades pulled up and the drapes pulled back, the tattered house looked as relaxed as an old, sun-warmed cat.
Jane opened her car door and had one foot on the ground when she heard the by now familiar woofwoofwoof of Big Buster, hell-bent for her car. She yanked her leg back and slammed the door just in time: Buster's muddy paws landed on the car's window, not on the front of her jacket. She cracked the window open and was trying unsuccessfully to shoo him away when a shrill whistle pierced the air. It came from a man walking in the road. Buster took off for him like a bat out of hell and Jane thought, Does the dog have any speed besides full speed?
The man, tall and blond and about her age, and with a good-natured smile very much like Cissy's, threw a stick the size of a railroad tie in the opposite direction from Jane. Buster bounded after the stick, scooped it up in his massive jaws, and kept right on going. Jane got out of the car. The man walked up to her, smiling ruefully and shaking his head.
"He doesn't have the concept of 'fetch' down yet — praise the lord. He'll turn around eventually. By then you should be safely inside."
Feeling cowardly, Jane felt forced to explain. "As it happens, this is my last clean jacket."
He nodded. "Say no more. My cleaning bill's quadrupled since my sister adopted that mutt. I'm Bing Andrews, by the way. Cissy told me about you. Jane Drew, isn't it?"
They shook hands and Bing said, "I was sorry to hear about Sylvia Merchant. I didn't know her personally — I bought my place just after she left the island — but I've heard that she was a very ... interesting woman."
"You mean you heard she was a witch." The words blurted out before Jane could think to stop them.
There was the smallest of pauses. Then Bing burst into a laugh and said, "That's exactly what I heard!"
By rights Jane should have been offended. But Bing's laugh was so infectious, so good-humored, that she found herself laughing with him. Maybe it was the warm sun, bouncing off his blond hair; or maybe it was the way he cringed and crossed his forearms when he saw Buster loping back toward them — whatever it was, she liked his style. And besides, she was the one who'd brought up the subject of witches.
"My aunt told me the kids around here really believed it," Jane explained. "When you're an old woman without children or friends — and you refuse, for example, to give back a baseball that's gone whizzing through your living room window — the witch thing becomes inevitable."
Bing was watching her with a lively, appreciative look on his face. "Ah, but I heard — this talk doesn't bother you?"
"Not at all. What did you hear?" Jane asked, curious.
"I heard that she used to walk around talking to someone —"
"To herself. Old people do that. Heck, I do that."
"— who talked back" he said, finishing his thought. "In another voice. A man's voice."
There was an openness in his look that kept the chill out of what he was saying. He spoke completely without malice, and that made it impossible to get angry with him. "Who told you this?" she asked, wondering.
"The people who sold me my house. Actually, it came from the wife, who was a bit of a crone herself."
"Well there you are!" Jane said, relieved. "It's one old woman's word against another's."
Bing grinned, and she caught her breath. He was almost too handsome, in a young Robert Redford, boyish kind of way.
"She seemed sharp as a tack to me," he was saying. "But then, so did your Aunt Sylvia. Since they've both passed on, I guess we'll never know." He loomed over her, tall and friendly and completely at ease.
Jane was remembering that he was a bachelor. She folded her arms across her chest. Oh yes. Definitely a heartbreaker, she decided. She found herself nodding with herself in agreement.
"Will we?" he asked, misinterpreting her response.
"Uhh-h ... well ... who knows?" she said vacantly. She had dropped the thread of their conversation, and now she cast her eyes downward, looking for it. Instead she found Buster, sniffing interestedly at her ankles. She jumped away.
Bing grabbed Buster's collar and said, "Don't even think about it, pal."
Jane was deciding whether or not to run for it when a dark burgundy Mercedes slowed to a halt in front of Bing and her. The driver was Phillip Harrow, casually but still beautifully dressed, in turtleneck and designer jacket.
"Hey, you two," he said, rolling down his window. "How about dinner at my place next Saturday? It'll be a chance for you to meet your neighbors, Jane."
Bing waited for Jane to answer. Caught off guard, she stammered an affirmative. Bing said to Phillip Harrow, "What time?"
"Say seven thirty. Strictly casual." Harrow put the Mercedes in gear and drove off.
Bing began hauling the dog toward his house. "Let me give you a tip," he said to Jane. "Phillip's idea of casual is a doublet and waistcoat."
"Dear me," she answered with an ironic flip of her wrist. "I shall have to wear tea-length, I suppose."
Hell and damnation, she thought, going into the cottage. I don't have time to socialize. I just want to fix up the house, sell it, and get on with my life.
Her mother was right: She couldn't afford to keep the place, so what was the point of getting to know the neighbors? Besides, now she'd have to go back home for dressy clothes.
"Ah, well," she said, sighing for the benefit of no one in particular. "If I go home, I can get my own car and turn in the rental."
****
Jane worked diligently through the morning on the Lysol/Tilex detail, and when she couldn't stand it anymore, she went for a walk in fresh air. She had no clear remembrance of just how much land went with Lilac Cottage, and it seemed like a good time to find out.
There was hardly any. Lilac Cottage was shoehorned in between Bing's more generously sited house to the east, and a really grand parcel called Edgehill, bounding hers to the north and the west, which belonged to Phillip Harrow. Somewhere in the northeast corner lay the tiny old graveyard, and beyond that she saw a row of arborvitae that blocked off the view. That was where the green pickup truck kept heading in and out.
There was also a wet gully, from a spring perhaps, with a tiny and quite charming old footbridge over it, on Phillip Harrow's land behind Lilac Cottage. As Jane drew near, some furry thing scampered out of the gully and waddled away.
Jane Drew was a city girl and proud of it; she knew the New York subway system like the back of her hand. But she was taking to this rural side of
Nantucket like — like that furry thing to water, she thought, smiling to herself as she picked her way through crunchy-cold brush toward the northeast end. Her breath came fast and frosty as she tramped on at a bracing pace. And yet, here it was, March, the worst month of the year — Hate Month, the islanders called it. What would a good month — a June, or a September, say — be like on Nantucket?
Oh no you don't, girl. You are going to sell the house and use the money to start a new career. Boutique, yogurt bar, graduate school. Whatever. Fortunes are built in times like these. She could hear her father saying it. And he was absolutely right.
She almost missed the little graveyard that was snuggled between the adjacent properties; grasses and bushes obscured most of the dozen or so historic, crooked gravestones that stood like drunken sentries over their forgotten captives. It saddened her; somehow the neglect was less tolerable here than on her aunt's property. She wondered who had the responsibility to maintain the burying ground — surely, the town of Nantucket? Her recollection of the place was that it had been neat and well kept.
A wistful thought came to her. Too bad Aunt Sylvia couldn't have been buried here, almost in her own garden. She wandered from gravestone to gravestone, wondering when the most recent burial was. But among the Obadiahs and Elizabeths, the Mitchells and the Whitsons, there was no end date later than 1854. Her aunt had died a century and a half too late.
One of the gravestones was half missing; but it, too, must have dated to the period. JUDITH, it read, and 1802. But the last name was broken off, and the end date. Jane wondered about vandals; but the damage seemed to have been the work of a thorny, robust shrub rose that was growing atop the grave.
The roots have gone under the gravestone and broken it in two, she decided. Part of the broken stone lay under the thorny canes. Jane reached in gingerly to turn it over. It was blank. Disappointed, she began to stand up, but she was careless: she suffered a sharp, long scratch through the sleeve of her sweatshirt. With a yelp of pain she fell back to her knees and carefully disengaged herself from the thorny cane.
Beloved Page 3
