Chapter Nine
TUESDAY
I NEVER DID GO back to bed. By five thirty, when the tantalizing scent of fresh coffee first drifted out of the kitchen, I had decided that I’d probably feel worse after an hour or two of sleep. This is a trap, as anyone who has ever pulled an all-nighter knows. You get a burst of energy first thing in the morning, then walk around wired for five or six hours, marveling at how perfectly fine you feel. Until, suddenly, you don’t. I wasn’t looking forward to that moment, having only a few days to get my arms around a fairly ambitious amount of work, but I’d figure it out.
In the end, I didn’t have to figure out anything. At about eight thirty, just as I was leaving to walk Henry to the school, Caleb Wilder pedaled up on an old three-speed bike. A dozen friends and neighbors had already assembled to offer their support to Lauren and Mark. The women, two of whom carried boxes marked “Christy’s Bakery,” were now chatting and drinking coffee with Lauren in the kitchen, and the men were back in the barn with Mark, checking out the damage the fire had done.
“I just heard!” said Caleb. “Everyone okay?”
I nodded. Henry and I had just come back from inspecting the barn, or as little of it as the fire officials would let us see. Frances hadn’t turned up, which I was insisting was a very good thing.
“You must be Henry. I’m Caleb.”
“Hi,” said Henry.
“Caleb has two girls at the school. Kara and …” I blanked on the second name.
“Louisa,” Caleb said.
“I know Louisa,” Henry offered. “She’s painting the sign.”
“What sign?” I asked.
He gave me an incredulous look. “Burger Palace.”
“That’s right, she is,” said Caleb. “Speaking of which, you two had better get a move on. And Anza, if you need to take some time today, feel free. You were probably up half the night.”
“Thanks,” I said. “It was pretty crazy around here.”
“Yeah, no problem. As long as we get everything organized and under way in the next few days, you can finish the work at home.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, I’ll probably fade sometime this afternoon, but I’m wide awake right now. Might as well make the most of it.”
“I’ll be in at about eleven.” Caleb said. “You’ve got your key?”
“I do,” I replied.
My task today was organizational. There were thousands of pieces of paper to examine: newspaper clippings, official and personal correspondence, reports of all the inquiries into the collision of the Larchmont and the Harry Knowlton, telegrams, lists of pieces of cargo that had washed up during the subsequent weeks, and intimate, handwritten accounts of the islanders’ experiences with the dead and the injured.
There were also dozens of snapshots, and these were plaintive and haunting. According to Caleb, the pictures had been taken in the days following the disaster by a young woman named Honor Morton, an amateur photographer who had lived on the island. She had been a sickly child, asthmatic and often bedridden. When she was eleven or twelve and recovering from a bout with influenza, she had been given a Brownie box camera. These sold for about a dollar at the turn of the century, and delivered the means of photography, for the first time since the process was invented, into the hands of ordinary people.
Judging from her vision, the eighteen-year-old Honor had been anything but ordinary. Her evocative images offered a twist on the old Sufi adage “Blame the archer, not the arrow”: her eye was unerring and her composition flawless, even though her “arrow” was little more than a cardboard box equipped with a lens. For me, these curled and cracked snapshots of the stunned and hollow-eyed survivors and the islanders who nursed them were the real treasures of the collection.
I heard a knock at the door and looked up. A robust, ruddy-cheeked man in a dark olive barn coat and crisp khakis was standing on the porch. The door was unlocked, so he hadn’t needed to knock.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, opening the door and stepping inside.
“We’re not actually open.” I felt a little uncomfortable employing the first person plural. I wasn’t really in charge here. I was also a little spooked by a strange guy’s coming in while I was all by myself in the building, but I tried not to let that show. What was he going to do? Pull a knife and demand some newspaper clippings?
“I’m Porter Rawlings,” he announced.
“Anza O’Malley,” I replied. “I’m working on a project with the director.”
“Caleb? Just the man I was looking for.”
“He’ll be here in about an hour.”
Rawlings nodded but showed no sign of leaving. He looked me over, up and down, and I fleetingly regretted my rumpled appearance. Just as quickly, I reminded myself that first, I had been up all night trying to help put out a fire, and second, bookbinders wore old clothes to work, because new ones were immediately ruined by glues and dyes.
Rawlings glanced around the room, nodding. In Cambridge, I would have been on high alert by now, but I struggled not to overreact; this was small-town America, where people were friendly and not always in a rush.
“What’s all that?” Rawlings inquired, indicating the clippings and photos.
“Oh, historical papers. Some old pictures.” I tried to sound perky and unruffled, but I hoped my tone made it clear that I wasn’t exactly inviting him to sit down and paw through the piles.
Rawlings nodded. “Tell Caleb I came by. My wife and I are having a little party tomorrow night—cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, nothing fancy. I just wanted to invite him and Sally.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said.
He looked me straight in the eyes, disconcertingly, and seemed to be about to say something, but apparently he thought better of it. He gave me a brisk nod and departed.
“Senator Rawlings?” Caleb said.
A senator? I thought. “He’s having a party tomorrow night. He stopped by to invite you. And Sally.”
“My wife,” Caleb explained.
“I figured.”
“So what is he, a state legislator?” I asked hopefully.
“He’s the senior senator from Rhode Island, and head of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He and his wife have a summer house out on Harbor Point.”
This explained a lot, particularly the way the man had felt entitled to walk right in, behaving as though the mere mention of his name would tell me everything I needed to know about him.
“Did he stay long?” Caleb asked.
“No.”
“Did you discuss any of your ideas with him?”
The question struck me as strange: why would I? “He was only here for a few minutes.”
“Sure, yeah, of course,” Caleb said. “It’s just that he’s always been interested in what we’re doing here, in the history of the island. But you’d have had no way of knowing that.”
“No,” I said. I sensed that there was something Caleb wasn’t telling me, a detail missing from the overall picture, but I wasn’t at my sharpest this morning. My head felt as though it was wrapped in heavy cotton batting.
“What’s he doing here now, on the island?” I asked. “How come he isn’t in Washington?”
“I’m a little surprised that they’re down here this early. It might have to do with the Environmental Impact Review.”
I was now officially lost.
“The Wind Farm Initiative,” Caleb explained. “They’ve just done a huge study on the impact the windmills might have on birds, fish, noise levels, navigation.”
And ghosts? I thought.
“The results were due at the beginning of the month.”
“Has the senator been involved in the debate?”
“Oh yeah,” Caleb said.
“For or against?” I asked.
“Against. Vehemently. He’s a staunch environmentalist, and he’s worried about migratory birds and fish habitats and all that.”
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br /> “Oil spills aren’t so great for them, either.” I smiled, hoping to soften the edge of my comment.
“Oh, I’m all for putting them up, myself, but it’s a real touchy subject. The island’s split right down the middle.”
“Really?” I knew that Mark had encountered resistance to his efforts; he and Lauren had used words like ugly and vicious to describe the tenor of the wind farm debate. I was also well aware of the fact that the ghosts were on the rampage. But hearing that half the island opposed the installation of windmills really surprised me.
Caleb nodded. “It’s made for some pretty strange bedfellows, I have to say.”
“How so?”
“Oh, folks who have literally nothing else in common. Windsurfing yuppies and lifelong year-rounders, fishermen and stockbrokers; it’s crazy. Half the time they don’t even agree on why it should or shouldn’t happen—they’ve got completely different reasons—they just agree on the fact that it should or shouldn’t be built.
“Take the environmentalists. You’d think they’d all be for it. I mean, climate change isn’t just a theory anymore; everybody believes it’s real and serious and happening much faster than anyone thought it was. But you’ve got people like Rawlings trying to protect the natural landscape and the ocean floor and the birds and the fish, and they’re arguing with other environmentalists, folks who are more concerned about our carbon footprints and our dependence on fossil fuels. Not only is neither group wrong, they’re both right. Then there’s the impact on tourism and property values.”
“How big are they?” I asked.
“The windmills themselves? Over four hundred feet. You’d definitely be able to see them from the island, but some people actually find them beautiful. I don’t mind the look of them at all, but plenty of folks feel they’ll ruin the view and take the tourism industry down with it.”
“How many windmills are they talking about?” I asked.
“Forty.”
“Wow. Yeah, you’re going to see forty of them.”
“My guess is that this little gathering tomorrow night has something to do with that report. I mean, Rawlings is a perfectly nice fellow, very down-to-earth, but he and his wife usually keep pretty much to themselves when they’re here. They don’t throw a lot of cocktail parties; or if they do, Sally and I aren’t on the guest lists.”
“It might be fun. Who knows?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Caleb.
We turned our attention to the documents on the table. I was starting to feel the effects of my sleepless night and hoped it wouldn’t show.
“I do like the idea of working chronologically,” I began. “I like that a lot. But we have an awful lot of material, and at some point, that concept is going to break down. People are going to want to follow the drama of the whole situation and may start to feel impatient or lose interest if the telling of the story, for lack of a better term, is being delayed by too much information. I don’t know if this is making any sense to you.”
From the expression on Caleb’s face, I suspected that so far, my concept was as clear as mud.
“Go on,” said Caleb.
“For example, at the beginning of the story, our story, meaning the book we create that tells the story of those hours, we might have, oh, profiles of some of the passengers and their reasons for boarding the boat. This would serve to draw in the reader and add a feeling of anxiety and tension, because we know what’s about to happen to them. It’s poignant, in a way, to think of them getting on that boat and having absolutely no idea that they’ll never reach New York. That can really hook the reader emotionally. But later, we might be less interested in every last passenger and much more interested in how the news reached the island, who heard it and what they did first, how they felt.”
“Okay,” said Caleb.
“So I thought that the main book, the one people would look at if they were only going to examine one, might be a very creative if somewhat loose chronology using the most dramatic pieces we have, whatever we decide they are. Some passenger profiles, say, followed by a weather report, followed by that first-person narrative you have about the captain’s retiring for the night, those quotes about hearing the ship’s warning siren, maybe that lace handkerchief that washed up, anything that would make the story of that night come alive. I’m not saying that these would be the actual pieces, but the idea is that we’d find documents and maybe some objects that generate emotion of one sort or another and then we’d string them together like pearls on silk. All in the service of telling a dramatic story.”
“That’s great,” Caleb whispered.
“Really?” I thought I’d sounded dense, slow, and inarticulate.
“I like it,” he said. “And of course, there would have to be other books, given that we have so many other documents.”
“Acid-free boxes might work for some of them. I don’t see everything in a book. Also, I wouldn’t rule out using some of the documents as the basis for exhibition pieces.”
“Like what?” Caleb asked.
“You might record people reading the first-person accounts. Maybe the descendants of the islanders who actually wrote them. There could be an audio component to the exhibit. It wouldn’t be very expensive.”
“Maybe actors and actresses!” Caleb said. “We’ve had some fairly high-profile vacationers.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“This is great,” said Caleb. “I like these ideas a lot.”
“There’s one more thing,” I added. “Those snapshots, the ones by Honor Morton. We really should do something with them.”
“They’re amazing, aren’t they?”
“You couldn’t frame them all—it would be too expensive—but maybe you could have them put between mats.”
“We could have an exhibition! Celebrate the opening of the—Larchmont Archive!”
“She deserves it,” I said. “She had an amazing eye. Whatever became of her?”
“It was strange,” Caleb replied. “It seems she left the island when she was twenty years old and never came back. There were rumors that she—” He broke off.
“Died?”
“Took her life,” he said sadly.
Chapter Ten
I MET LAUREN IN the upstairs hall. It was about one thirty, and I had walked back to the inn from the Historical Society, planning to get a few hours’ sleep before I had to pick up Henry. With Caleb’s permission, I’d filled a sturdy plastic file box with most of the documents I hoped to include in our principal volume. My plan was to go to bed for the rest of the afternoon, pick up Henry and spend the evening with him, and then, once he fell asleep, settle down to a few hours’ work before turning in myself.
Though Caleb had liked my idea for the main book’s structure, I wanted to lay out all the pieces in the order in which I was thinking of using them, just to make sure that this concept really worked. I also planned to e-mail my favorite suppliers of leather and paper and ask them to FedEx us samples. We wanted to have a look that unified all the materials pertaining to the Larchmont disaster, so Caleb and I had decisions to make on everything from the shade of the papers and the texture of the leathers to the matting material we’d be using on the snapshots and the color and shape of the acid-free boxes.
“I was just bringing you this,” Lauren said, handing me a copy of the book we had discussed over tea on Sunday, Antony Wicklow’s Inn of Phantoms.
“Oh, thanks, great! I’ll take a look at it.”
“I didn’t know you were around.”
“I just got back.”
“You must be ready to drop,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. Did you get any sleep?” I’d found her in the kitchen when I’d come in for coffee at about a quarter of six this morning. She, too, had been tossing and turning for hours.
Lauren nodded. “I just woke up a little while ago.”
“Good. Any sign of Frances?”
“No. I’m n
ot surprised, though. There have been so many cars and trucks in and out of here that she’s probably spooked. If she … I mean …”
“At least she wasn’t in the barn,” I noted quickly.
“No, no, they looked everywhere. No sign of her in there.”
Lauren suddenly teared up.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” I said. “She’s probably just hiding somewhere until things quiet down.”
Lauren sniffed and shook her head, obviously trying to get her emotions under control, but the tears spilled over.
“It’s not that,” she whispered.
“You poor thing. Come here.” I took her arm and steered her over to an upholstered chair by the hall window. I pulled out its matching hassock and we both sat down.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really, I am. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“You don’t? I could offer some possibilities.”
“They think the fire was set,” she announced abruptly.
“You’re kidding. You know, I didn’t want to mention anything last night, but Frank—your neighbor Frank?”
“Frank Hansen?”
“He said the same thing. He claimed he could tell by the color of the smoke. But then when Mark was talking about the cans of gasoline …”
“They found signs of accelerant all along the exterior foundation. The gasoline caused those black plumes inside, but somebody poured something on the outside and lit it.”
“That’s terrible! Who in the world would do that?”
“We don’t know. We have no idea. It’s such an awful feeling, to be asked if you have any enemies!” Lauren began to cry again. “Enemies? We thought everyone—liked us.”
“Everyone does like you! You should have heard the way Caleb talked about the two of you—how much admiration everybody has for you both.”
“Not everybody, obviously.”
“So they have no clue as to who might have done it?”
Lauren sniffed and shook her head. “There’s one weird thing, but it’ll probably turn out to be nothing.”
“You never know. What is it?”
The Ice Cradle Page 8
