That Chesapeake Summer (Chesapeake Diaries Book 9)

by Mariah Stewart

  “I’d love to.” Grace settled back into her seat with a grateful smile. “I can’t thank you enough for indulging me, Jamie. I’m so used to driving myself around, coming and going whenever I please—I just can’t stand being dependent. On anyone. For anything.”

  “I understand. I do,” Jamie assured her. “I’ve done for myself for years, and I can’t imagine what it would be like if I had to wait for others to take me places. Believe me, I’m more than happy to take you wherever you’d like to go as long as I’m in St. Dennis.” When it appeared that Grace was about to protest, Jamie added, “Really. It’s my pleasure. So don’t hesitate to ask if there’s something you want to do or somewhere you’d like to go.”

  “Thank you. You’re a lovely young woman, Jamie. I’m sure your parents were very proud of you,” Grace said softly.

  “I hope they were. My dad’s been gone for a long time. Ten years. I often wonder what he might have thought about my writing career.” Jamie turned the car around and headed back to the inn.

  “I’m sure he would have been pleased as punch.” Grace reached a hand across the console, her fingers resting on Jamie’s forearm. “Do you have siblings?”

  None that I know of was on the tip of Jamie’s tongue. Instead, she merely shook her head.

  “You know, St. Dennis is the perfect place for you right now. The bay is almost magical early in the morning, restorative. You might consider asking Dan for a kayak to take out.”

  “I’ve never been in a kayak. I wouldn’t know what to do in one.”

  “There’s a brief learning curve. Talk to Dan when we get back. Start on the river if you don’t feel comfortable taking on the bay.”

  “To tell you the truth, I’ve never been completely comfortable on the water. I’m more of your classic landlubber, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, then, take one of the bikes.”

  “That could be fun.” Jamie considered. The thought of biking around this lovely town did have appeal. “I haven’t been on a bike in . . . I don’t remember the last time.”

  “You know what they say about riding a bike.”

  “I do.” Jamie nodded. “I think I’ll take your suggestion and go for a spin tomorrow.”

  “You can talk to whoever is at the front desk to make sure a bike is available. It’s become a very popular early-morning activity, and there are only so many bikes, so if you don’t have one reserved, you could find yourself out of luck.” Grace paused. “I suppose we should see about investing in some new ones.”

  “I’ll do that as soon as we get back.” She stopped the car near the back door and turned to Grace. “I’m going to run in and see if I can find someone to give you a hand.”

  “Don’t bother, dear.” Grace pointed toward the parking lot. “There’s one of our waiters. Looks like he’s a little early for his shift.” She rolled down her window. “Donald, if I could ask you for a favor . . .”

  The young man was more than happy to help Grace out of the car and into the wheelchair once Jamie had it in position, and he offered to wheel her into the lobby.

  “See how easy this was, Jamie?” Grace was all smiles. “No fuss, no muss.” Jamie laughed. “I can’t thank you enough for taking me with you this morning. It meant a great deal to me,” Grace told her.

  “It was my pleasure, Grace.” Jamie opened the driver’s-side door. “I enjoyed meeting your friends and seeing a little bit of the town.”

  “Next time we’ll finish that tour,” Grace promised, then turned to Donald. “All right, then. Let’s head on inside.”

  “I’ll see you later, Grace,” Jamie called before getting into the car and driving into the parking lot.

  On her way through the lobby, Jamie stopped and requested a bike for the following morning.

  “I’m sorry, but all our bikes have been booked.”

  “How ’bout the next day?” Jamie asked.

  The receptionist scanned the computer screen. “Nothing until Tuesday morning.”

  “Fine. I’ll reserve one for Tuesday.”

  “What time would you like?” the receptionist asked.

  “Early,” Jamie replied.

  “Earliest is six a.m.,” the young woman told her.

  “Fine. Six, then. Thanks.” Jamie crossed the lobby, climbed the steps, and went to her room.

  The suite was quiet and felt oddly empty. Jamie checked the time and was surprised to find that less than two hours had passed since she’d gone down to breakfast. She picked up the copy of the St. Dennis Gazette that room service had brought with her coffee and skimmed each page. There was little news but several interesting, well-written features and a lot of advertisements. She read the piece on the historical society’s plans for a new museum, and one on Dallas MacGregor, the A-list actress who made her home in St. Dennis with her young son and her new husband, Grant Wyler. According to the article, Dallas had renovated several old warehouses and started her own film production company and studio in St. Dennis. In the accompanying photo, the smiling star stood outside one of the warehouses holding a copy of The Autumn of My Dreams, the book she’d recently announced would be the second film her new company would produce. Jamie finished reading the article, then folded the paper and dropped it on the coffee table, but not before noticing the byline, Ford Sinclair, whom Jamie had agreed to meet on Monday. Who knew what could come out of the interview? Everything she did in St. Dennis, everyone she met, could eventually prove to hold a clue.

  While the tour of the town with Grace had been interesting, it had left Jamie feeling restless and out of sorts. Was it her imagination, or did everyone in town have roots that went back to the beginning of time, complete with ancestral home and pedigree? Was one of those pedigrees hers? Were some of her roots here in this bayside town?

  Jamie sat at the desk and opened her laptop and logged on. She still had a book to write and needed to spend more quality time trying to come up with the opening chapter. Her hands rested on the keyboard, waiting for a signal from her brain, but her mind was blank. The premise her agent had suggested in the email Jamie had read last night—“Inherent Truths: Honesty in Our Everyday Lives”—was good, but Jamie couldn’t come up with an opening line.

  After an hour, it became abundantly clear that as hard as it had been for her to talk about honesty to the crowd who’d gathered for her last book signing, writing about it was proving to be impossible. She closed the file and opened the one containing the names of girls who had graduated from local schools in ’79 and ’80. To the list, she added the names she’d jotted down earlier in Cuppachino. There was always the chance—remote thought it might be—that one of them might prove to be the one she was looking for.

  Chapter 8

  DAN paused in the doorway of the family’s living quarters and watched his mother scan the latest issue of her newspaper. “Mom, I’m sorry about this morning.”

  “Apology accepted.” Grace peered over the top of the page. “I hope you apologized to Jamie as well.”

  “Not yet.” He avoided his mother’s eyes.

  “You were very rude to her, and I didn’t appreciate it,” Grace said from behind the paper. “She was doing a favor for me.”

  “I’ll run into her at some point, I’m sure.”

  “Or you could make it a point to see her and admit that you’re a jerk sometimes.”

  “Did my mother just call me a jerk?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Swell.”

  The last thing Dan felt like doing was apologizing to Jamie Valentine. Jamie the busybody who couldn’t seem to help herself when it came to interfering with other people’s lives.

  “I have to pick up Diana and Paige at Scoop and drop them off at Ellie’s. Gabby is having a sleepover, and they were both invited. Dallas did the driving the last time, so . . .”

  “So it’s your turn tonig
ht. It’s only fair to take turns.” Grace smiled before going back to her reading.

  “Right. I’ll see you later.”

  “Give Ellie and Cameron my love.”

  “Will do.”

  Dan started down the steps, then slowed as the busybody in question came through the lobby doors. If he didn’t meet up with her, he could honestly say he hadn’t had an opportunity to apologize. His eyes narrowed when he saw her pause near the dining room doors, where his son stood talking with his friend Hunter. She and D.J. acted like they knew each other. What was that all about?

  Jamie disappeared into the dining room, and Dan hurried down the rest of the steps and caught up with D.J. before he could leave the building.

  “Hey, that woman you were just talking to . . .” Dan grabbed his son by the arm.

  “She’s hot, right?” D.J. grinned.

  Dan was this close to rolling his eyes à la Diana. Instead, he said, “How do you know her?”

  “I met her at the historical society the other day.”

  “The historical society?” Dan frowned. What would she have been doing there?

  “Yeah. When we were dropping off those boxes for Gramma. She was waiting for Mrs. Ferguson to get there and open up. Mrs. Ferguson was late, so I talked with her—with Jamie—for a while. She said she always liked to learn stuff about places she visited.”

  “Stuff like what, did she say?”

  “Stuff about families who’d been in St. Dennis for a long time. So I told her about the First Families. She seemed real interested in that.”

  “That’s all?”

  “All that I know.” D.J. shrugged.

  “That’s the same lady I saw at the library the other day,” Hunter said.

  “It’s summer. What were you doing at the library?” Dan asked.

  “I had to stop to see my mom. She’s the librarian,” Hunter explained.

  “And Jamie was in the library?”

  “Yeah. She was looking through a bunch of old yearbooks. She had a stack of them on the table.”

  “Yearbooks? Did you notice where they were from?”

  “The one on top of the stack said St. Dennis High School.”

  “What year, did you notice?”

  “Nope.”

  “Thanks, guys.” Dan patted his son on the back and walked away. What would Jamie want with a bunch of old yearbooks? Maybe she was looking up a relative. St. Dennis High had been closed for as long as he could remember.

  For the rest of the day, his curiosity nagged him. What was Jamie Valentine looking for in a bunch of old yearbooks?

  He’d promised his mother he’d apologize to Jamie, and he would, though he wished he’d kept his big mouth shut earlier in the day, wished he hadn’t said a damn word other than “Thank you for making my mother happy.” He did owe Jamie an apology for being an ass, and he owed her gratitude for showing such kindness to Grace, whose mood had improved greatly since her morning outing. He was kicking himself in the butt for not having thought to do what this relative stranger had done. Which made him more of an ass and maybe even a little more resentful of Jamie.

  If he were honest with himself—which he wasn’t really in the mood to be—he’d admit that Jamie had caught his eye the minute she first walked into the lobby. He might have been interested if his mother hadn’t tried to play matchmaker; she wasn’t fooling anyone when she goaded him into helping Jamie with her bag. Or worse, when she twisted his arm into taking Jamie to Book ’Em. There were times when Grace was anything but subtle. He could tell she really liked Jamie, and she wanted Dan to like her as well.

  He kicked a stone from fifteen feet away into one of the Jeep’s back tires. He knew his mother had his best interests at heart, and only wanted what she thought was best for him. He was well aware that she wanted nothing more than for him to find someone to fill his life.

  Not that he hadn’t had his share of female companionship these past few years, mostly with women he’d known for years, women who understood their relationships to be mutually beneficial and without expectations beyond spending an occasional night together. Dee Baldwin, his last such friend with benefits, had recently announced her engagement to a broker from New Jersey, and no one had been happier for her than Dan had been. Well, maybe Dee’s mother, but that was to be expected. But as for a true romantic relationship, there’d been no such thing since his wife, Doreen, died eight years ago.

  The truth was, for a long time Dan just hadn’t been ready to think about sharing much of anything with another woman. Doreen’s death had been sudden and traumatic, and even now he got a lump in his throat if he thought too much about her drowning, alone, in the bay. That maybe she’d brought on a bit of her own bad luck by going out too far on a day when a storm was brewing only factored into the pain he and the kids had felt. Her bad judgment had left him angry and confused for a long time, and the bombshell she’d dropped in his lap that very morning had only made the situation more difficult to deal with.

  How could anyone keep a secret like the one she’d kept for as long as she had kept it? How had he never suspected? Was he so thick-skulled, so dense, that he’d never caught on? Or had he been so wrapped up with running the inn that he’d been oblivious to the fact that she wasn’t happy—hadn’t been happy for a very long time and wanted out of their marriage. That she was leaving to go back to California where her family lived and it was always warm.

  “Look, I know it sounds harsh,” she’d said, “but I’ve had about all I can take of being the innkeeper’s wife.”

  “Doreen, you can’t take the kids to California” was the first thing Dan had said.

  She had shaken her head. “Who said anything about taking them?”

  “You’d leave your kids?” He’d been stunned.

  “Only because I agree they belong here. They’re happy, they’re doing well in school, they adore your mother, and they both love living in the inn. They love St. Dennis.”

  “I thought you liked St. Dennis.”

  “I did. For a while. For the first couple of years, it was okay. But for someone who grew up in the sun, who swam and surfed every day growing up—the Chesapeake just doesn’t cut it, Dan. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Diana . . . D.J. . . .”

  “I love them, I really do. Look, they’ll be fine. They have you and they have Grace and they can spend their summers in California.” Doreen actually patted him on the back. “You’ll all be fine, but if I stay any longer, I’ll be even more miserable than I am.”

  “I had no idea,” he’d mumbled.

  “Of course you didn’t.” She’d stood and walked toward the inn. “You’re busy doing what you love.”

  The anger he’d felt with her that morning had been all-consuming for a long time even after her death. There was also a touch of guilt at the undeniable relief he’d felt when he realized that he wouldn’t have to explain to his kids why she’d left them. He hadn’t been sure which pain would have been greater—that of her death or that of knowing she was leaving them.

  It was only after he realized how his anger was affecting his son and daughter that he knew he’d have to let it go and concentrate more on helping them cope with the realities of being without their mother than on whatever issues he might have. After all, he was the grown-up; they were kids who needed their father to be strong and focused. For the most part, Dan had been. He was there for almost all their activities—D.J.’s softball and football games and sailing competitions, Diana’s dance recitals and lacrosse and field hockey games. He made it a point to have at least one meal with them every day, and he tried to have one dinner every week with everyone at the table.

  And he never, never told anyone that Doreen had planned to leave them—all of them—and that she hadn’t wanted to take her children with her.

  Thank God for his mother. When Dan wa
s falling apart, Grace had held him together. If he’d grown stronger over the years, it was because she had strength enough to share. He could never thank her enough for all the ways she helped them to be a family. Having Lucy come back to St. Dennis and marry her childhood sweetheart, and having Ford—finally—come home and find his place had made his mother beyond happy. All she’d wanted was to have her family together again. But once she had that, she’d gotten it into her head that she had to find someone for Dan, since he hadn’t found someone on his own. He knew from past experience how futile it was to try to talk his mother out of anything once she got hold of an idea.

  He blew out a long breath as he started the engine and backed out of the parking spot. The trip to Scoop took less than five minutes; he had another fifteen minutes’ wait once he got there for the girls to finish their shift. The usual Friday-night crowd packed the small shop, so Dan waved to Diana to let her know he was there, then gestured to the door to let her know he’d be waiting outside. The bell over the door rang, and he stepped aside to let a few more customers enter, then slipped out behind them and headed for one of the benches on the nearby wooden walkway.

  It was quiet by the water, the silence broken only by the occasional banging of the door at Scoop, or the chatter of this group or that coming from Captain Walt’s on the other side of the marina. It was so still, Dan could hear the lapping of the water against the sides of the boats that were tied up twenty-five feet away. The heat of the day had not left with the setting sun, and in the halo of the glow from one of the light poles, moths fluttered and burned themselves out on the hot bulbs. The scent of diesel fuel hung over the marina and reminded Dan of a small outboard his dad had owned when Dan was about ten. They’d take it out to Goat Island and spend the afternoon crabbing in the narrow inlet and soaking up a little too much sun on their arms and backs, and Grace would scold them both when they got back to the inn. Dan had brought up that boat with Ford one night, and his brother had drawn a total blank. He didn’t recall ever having been on it. What he did remember was the Bay Rider he and their dad used to take all the way down the bay to watch the Bay Bridge–Tunnel being constructed. Conversely, Dan hadn’t spent much time on the Bay Rider.