by Barbara Ross
“Great. I’ll pick you up at the train station in Portland. Can’t wait.”
I was surprised to realize that I couldn’t wait. I’d been single for years when I’d lived in New York, and I’d thought I would relish a little alone time, a break from the man I worked with and all but lived with. But it turned out, I didn’t need a break at all. I wanted him home.
“What have you been up to?” he asked.
“You won’t believe it. Someone sent my mother a diamond necklace in the mail. Anonymously.”
“A diamond necklace?”
“It’s a family heirloom. I’ve been tracking down relatives.” As quickly as possible, I told him what I’d learned.
“So your family made their money in the frozen-water trade?”
“Crazy, huh?”
His voice dropped, echoing concern. “Who have you told this to?”
“Just family so far. And the Snugg sisters. Why?”
“Julia, the ice business in Maine was brutal and dangerous. I had ancestors who worked the rivers, back in the day. Men and horses regularly broke through the ice and drowned. Or got caught in the machinery that carried the ice from the river to the icehouse. Many of the workers were children. They were old men by the time I was growing up, but I remember the stories. People in Maine regarded the ice barons the way people in Pennsylvania and West Virginia regarded the coal barons—as ruthless men who exploited people and natural resources. The ice barons were seen as worse than the coal barons, since they didn’t even own the rivers they took the ice from. It was like making money off public property.”
“Oh.” I’d seen Frederic Morrow as creative and entrepreneurial, a genius inventor. I hadn’t stopped to consider this side of the story.
“I wouldn’t go mouthing around about your relatives making piles of money from the ice trade and buying two-million-dollar diamond necklaces,” Chris concluded. “People in Maine have long memories.”
At the end of the call, I stood in the dark road. People in Maine did have long memories. Even though my family had forgotten their past, that didn’t mean everyone else had.
The streetlights flickered on. I looked at Mom’s house. A warm light glowed in through the clambake office window. The power was back.
Chapter 8
My phone buzzed on the bedside table. I’d spent the night at Mom’s. By the time the power came back, it had felt too late to pack up Le Roi and slog over the hill to my apartment.
Livvie. “Julia! I’ve done nothing all night but think about that necklace.”
“It’s a mystery,” I agreed.
“Not the necklace. The money,” she clarified. “Think about what we can do with it. We can pay off Quentin, for starters.”
I rolled onto my stomach, balanced on my elbows, and held the phone out in front of me. “I know.” The truth was, I had thought a lot about the money too. “The necklace may not even be ours,” I cautioned. “Remember, Cuthie says these cases are almost always a mess. Other people who think they have claims ‘will crawl out of the woodwork.’ That’s a quote.”
“What other people?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“The note says ‘For Windsholme,’” Livvie said. “So it must be from someone who knows about us. I think it means we’re supposed to fix up Windsholme.”
“Or it could mean ‘This is a remembrance of Windsholme,’ or ‘This is to atone from something that happened at Windsholme,’” I suggested.
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“No.”
At the moment Windsholme was boarded up against the elements, awaiting a decision about its fate, though deep down, all of us knew fixing it up would never make economic sense. We were putting off the inevitable, horrible decision to tear it down.
“Even if the Black Widow is Mom’s,” I said, “she won’t get all the money. There may be gift or estate taxes to pay, and the auction house will get a big cut. We’ll have to spend money to have the necklace authenticated and insured. Plus, we’ll probably have to pay lawyers a bunch to prove we own it.”
Livvie sighed. “And I was in such a good mood.”
“Did you tell Sonny about it?”
“Of course.” She and Sonny had been together for so long, they practically shared a brain.
“What does he think?”
“Same as you. Don’t get my hopes up. What does Chris say?”
“That the people who made money on ice exploited the workers and rivers of Maine.”
“Figures. That’s what you get for dating a commie.”
I laughed. “So says another member of the proletariat.”
“Ah, but I have ambitions not to be. Figure out who the necklace belongs to, will you? We need to either get this money, or I need to stop dreaming about it.”
* * *
Mom had already taken off for work. I took advantage of her hot water heater for a long shower, enjoyed a cup of coffee in the kitchen, and then gathered Le Roi and his food for the trek back to my apartment.
The cat was already loaded into his carrier when a familiar clanging rang out from somewhere deep in the house. The landline. I set Le Roi down and headed toward the sound. The phone in the kitchen was so ancient, it didn’t have a display to show me who was calling.
I picked up. “Hello?” Silence. Or maybe breathing. I pressed the old receiver to my ear, trying to tell which it was. “Hello. Who’s calling?” More silence. I tried one more time. “Hello?”
There was a click and a dial tone.
I stood in the kitchen, fully dressed to go outdoors, my heart beating. Wrong numbers happened all the time, but everyday occurrences seemed different and more sinister with a two-million-dollar necklace in the house.
In the front hall, I upended Le Roi’s case. He threw me a quizzical look. “Sorry, old man. We’ll be staying with Mom tonight.” The phone call had unnerved me enough I didn’t want to leave Mom alone in the house with the Black Widow. Tomorrow, before her shift started, I’d take her to First Busman’s Bank to rent a safe deposit box.
I removed several layers of outerwear and climbed the stairs to the office. At the computer, I started the simplest way I could think of, entering “Hugh Morrow” into a search engine. It was far too common a name to get anything useful. “Hugh Morrow” and “San Francisco” wasn’t helpful either. Cousin Hugh had disappeared in 1978, so I added the date, hoping a San Francisco paper had covered the loss of a native son, but got only hits in our local paper. The articles confirmed the story my mother had told. A young man disappeared from a party, “a relative of the birthday celebrant.” The man’s friends and the Coast Guard carried on a fruitless search, which ended three days later. Thanks were issued on behalf of the family by my grandfather. As Mom had told me, Hugh’s parents never talked to the press.
One thing in the article did stop me in my tracks—a photo of my father as a young man, walking across the craggy rocks of Morrow Island, his hands cupped around his mouth, no doubt calling Hugh’s name. “John Snowden, a friend of the missing man, searching Morrow Island,” the caption read. Seeing Dad, suddenly summoned up by the web, so young, so healthy, brought tears to my eyes. The futility of what he was doing made the photo even sadder.
I sighed and stretched, annoying Le Roi, who’d settled in my lap. Clearly, garden-variety web searching wasn’t going to work. Had I really thought I could find someone who’d been missing for more than thirty-five years simply by Googling him?
I did successfully find Frederic Morrow, in Wikipedia, among other places. My ice-industry-inventing ancestor was famous. The site provided more information about his personal life than A History of the Morrow Ice Company had—at least the parts I’d been able to read. He’d married quite late in life, at almost sixty, his empire secure. Nonetheless he’d gone on to have eight children, four boys and four girls.
I got out my credit card and entered the number into a genealogy site on the web. I was going to have
to build a bridge from Frederic to my mother and therefore to me.
I quickly abandoned that strategy as impossible. With seven generations between Frederic and me, he had hundreds, probably thousands of descendants. Lots of those descendants had already created family trees on the genealogy site, which made my searches fast, but not particularly fruitful. There was no way to find my way through the thicket of people descended from Frederic Morrow to my own branch of the family tree. Besides, Morrow Island hadn’t been purchased until 1880, ten years before Windsholme was completed, and the Black Widow hadn’t come into the family until around that time, either. Everyone who was out of the direct line before 1880 was irrelevant to my search.
Flexing my fingers, I started back the other way, working from what I knew. I knew my mother’s name, Jacqueline Fields, and date of birth. I knew her mother’s maiden name, Ellen Morrow. From there I got to my great-grandparents’ names. Like my mother, they had lived in New York City. But my great-grandfather, born in 1905, was still two generations younger than the purchaser of Windsholme and the Black Widow. I had to keep looking.
There weren’t any helpful family trees constructed by other people along this path. Why would there be? My mother and her mother were both only children. Who else would be looking?
I placed Le Roi, protesting rigorously, on the floor and went downstairs to the kitchen. I made myself a tuna sandwich and returned to my desk. Momentarily stymied in my investigation up my mother’s line, I searched the genealogy site for information about Hugh. In its richer database, I was able to locate his death certificate; 1985, seven years after his disappearance, as my mother had said. His parents must have petitioned the court to have him declared deceased as soon as the law allowed it.
The death certificate gave me his parents’ names, something I surely could have asked my mother for, which in turn gave me access to their listing in the San Francisco city directories of the 1980s. I opened another browser and found a street view of their home, an imposing brick mansion on Divisadero Street. There was obviously still plenty of money in Hugh’s family in the eighties. I thought of the modest New York City apartment where my mother had grown up. Yet she was the one who owned Morrow Island. Funny how families evolved.
I searched through documents associated with Hugh’s father, mostly city listings affirming he remained at the Divisadero address. I’d resigned myself to not finding anything useful and was burrowing down rat holes in a vast world of data, when something did come up. A birth certificate. Not for Hugh, but for an Arthur Morrow, thirteen years Hugh’s senior. Hugh Morrow had a brother. Why hadn’t Mom told me about him? Perhaps the family had gone on.
Chapter 9
Half an hour later, stiff from sitting and eyes vibrating with fatigue from staring at the screen, I pulled on my coat and boots and walked over the hill toward the Busman’s Harbor Historical Society. My initial attempts to find Arthur Morrow on the genealogy site and on the web had come to nothing, but I was still buoyed by optimism. Hugh’s branch of the family had come down to my mother’s generation, which meant Arthur, or one of his kids or grandkids, might have sent Mom the Black Widow. But why? And how might they have ended up with it in the first place? I was determined to spend a few more hours with A History of the Morrow Ice Company, and whatever else Floradale Thayer had to offer.
Unlike the day before, the town common was alive with children, sledding, screaming, and throwing snowballs. The sunny sky and warmer temperature had brought them out. I spotted Page waiting her turn at the top of the common’s small hill, an old blue plastic sled in her hands. She returned my wave with a modest gesture intended not to attract the attention of her friends.
When I knocked on the historical society’s front door, Mrs. Thayer’s swift footsteps echoed from the back of the house. “I thought you’d be back,” she said, peering down at me from her great height. She turned and walked away. I followed.
She had papers spread out across the oak conference table where I’d worked the day before. I’d interrupted her in the middle of a project. She pointed toward a small desk in the corner. I removed my coat, hung it on a wooden coatrack, and sat on the hard chair.
“And today?” Mrs. Thayer asked.
“I’d like to see A History of the Morrow Ice Company again. And anything else you think might be useful.”
Mrs. Thayer retrieved the book from the shelf. “Start with this. I’m in the middle of something. I’ll bring more items when I’m done.”
I skimmed through the middle chapters of the book, which chronicled the building of icehouses, the purchase of ships, and the vagaries of New England winters—years when the ice was clear and clean and three feet thick, and years when the ice came late and melted early. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the business had moved north, from the lakes and ponds of Massachusetts to the great rivers of Maine. The ice harvesters worked at night, when the temperatures were lowest. An engraving captured shadowy images of the river, teeming with men, boys, and horses in the darkness.
At last, I came to the part of the book that covered the period between the Civil War and the new century, the time when Windsholme was built and the Black Widow acquired. I turned the pages eagerly. The Morrow who ran the ice company then was named Lemuel. His portrait showed a portly man with muttonchops and a waistcoat. His thick-lipped mouth turned up slightly in a self-satisfied grin. The ice business had changed yet again. It was no longer necessary to ship ice to India or the Caribbean. New residents poured into the cities of America—country people who’d migrated from the farms, and immigrants from Europe. Far from the sources of fresh food and thirsty from hard, physical work, the city residents demanded ice. New York alone needed four million pounds of it a day. The money rolled into the Morrow Ice Company.
“Here you go.” Mrs. Thayer put a folder in front of me.
In it was a single photo of Windsholme, with Lemuel, his family, servants, and even his dog arranged artfully on the front lawn. In the sepia image, the magnificence of the house took my breath away. Windsholme had been empty my entire life, provided with the minimum of maintenance to keep it standing. In the picture, I could see the house for what it was—an architectural beauty. Its strong, clean lines must have seemed odd or even off-putting in Victorian times, but it blended perfectly with the raw power of the island setting.
In the photograph, the imposing figure of Lemuel stood on the terraced lawn. From the portrait, I hadn’t been able to see how tall he was. His height along with his girth made him a formidable figure.
“Do you know who these other people are?” I asked Mrs. Thayer.
“Not by name, but we can tell by their clothing.” She pointed to a man dressed in work clothes, holding a hedge trimmer. “The gardener. Windsholme was famous for its formal gardens. The yacht captain. The butler.” She pointed to each in turn. Then she focused on the women. “Lemuel’s mother, certainly.” The senior Mrs. Morrow was as stout as her son, but short statured. The facial resemblance was unmistakable.
“Sarah Morrow, Lemuel’s wife,” Floradale continued, pointing to a woman in a high-collared dress. “You’ve already seen her photo in the book.” Lined up a bit away from Sarah were two housemaids and a woman in more formal clothes.
“Housekeeper?” I guessed.
Mrs. Thayer squinted at the image. “Nanny, I’d say.”
So these were the ancestors who’d built Windsholme, these funny Victorians who escaped the humid, disease-ridden cities of the Northeast in the summer by building a home on a rock in the cold North Atlantic. Windsholme, with its enormous public rooms, was meant for entertaining a summer-long flow of houseguests, not as a cozy family home.
On the other side of the lawn in the photo were two little boys, maybe five and three, in stiff sailor outfits, standing on either side of a cart. The smaller boy looked shyly out from under his dark bangs, while the older one stared boldly at the camera. Behind them was a swath of lawn that stretched all the way to the playhouse
that still stood today, a miniature of Windsholme. The area around it had long since gone to woods, and it was a shock to see it as originally intended.
Mrs. Thayer followed my gaze. “That’s William and Charles, the Cain and Abel of Morrow Ice Company.”
“You’re not saying one of them killed the other?” The possibility of murderous progenitors had never occurred to me.
“No, but they hated one another, and between them, they killed Morrow Ice.”
This was the part I’d been waiting for. “Which one am I descended from?”
“William, the older one.”
I stared at the boy. Did I recognize anyone I knew in his face? My mother, Livvie, Page, or even myself? I didn’t. He seemed far away, and not just in time.
“How did he and Charles destroy Morrow Ice?”
“The business was all about New York City and its enormous demand. Shipping ice successfully meant that the winning companies not only had to control the ice, they had to control the ships that hauled the ice, and the labor unions that controlled the stevedores who unloaded the ships. Morrow had to compete against the big companies that harvested ice on the upper Hudson. The Hudson River was dirtier than the Kennebec, but it was also much closer to the city. Some years the Hudson froze sooner and thicker, and some years the Kennebec did.” Mrs. Thayer looked at me to see if I was following. I was. I’d been in business long enough to understand risk.
“William and Charles had quite different temperaments,” she continued. “William was a big personality, like his father. A hunter and a fisherman, a man’s man. Charles was shy and bookish. They say he was never so happy as the years he was at Harvard. Yet their father left the business to them fifty-fifty. He didn’t appoint a successor, either during his lifetime or in his will.
