The Sea Keeper's Daughters

by Lisa Wingate

  Around Manteo, there were signs of morning activity now—the squeaky sneakers of a jogger out running, a door closing, a shout from the direction of the marina, a car passing the alley as I walked into it. At six thirty, the town was ready to greet a new day, but I wasn’t—not in this place, anyway.

  Even so, my stomach sank as I opened the car door. I hesitated again, thought, Keep moving. Just keep moving. Let it go. The Excelsior and the crazy dreams I’d hatched here had to become things of the past. Once I was away, once this place wasn’t looming over me with all its memories and secrets, its power would be gone … wouldn’t it?

  “Leaving so soon?”

  I knew the voice, even from halfway down the alley. It ripped through me like an arrow, the tip molten, easily cutting flesh, then searing off the blood flow. He was standing with his back to the gray dawn light, a hood pulled over his head, but he was easy to recognize.

  “I come down here to check for hail damage, and look what I find.”

  “Yes, Mark, I’m leaving. I’m getting out of your way. You, Clyde, Joel … all of you can figure it out from here. Make sure someone takes care of Ruby this morning, because Clyde can’t. And there’s a kitten in the stairway. It was on top of my car.” I turned back to my vehicle, my escape, grabbed the driver’s door, tightened my fingers around it.

  “So … you got what you wanted and you’re gone?”

  My heart squeezed. He couldn’t have been more wrong. I felt like I’d lost everything I wanted. “I did. You’re right. I did. Good-bye, Mark. Have a nice life.” Don’t look his way. Don’t. Yet my senses strained toward him, trying to determine … was he coming closer?

  Get in the car. Be done with it. The whole stupid fantasy. This thing I’d created in my mind—Mark, me, a charity in this building—was ridiculous. Careless. Foolish, and I was the fool. He’s just Tagg Harper in a surf suit, and you fell for it.

  “Not even going to tell me how long I have to find a new location for the shop? How many months before the condos go up?”

  “If you weren’t such an idiot, you’d know.”

  He gave a soft, rueful laugh. “I was an idiot, all right. I thought we had …”

  Something, I wanted him to say. I thought we had something.

  Instead he finished with, “… an agreement.”

  “Our agreement, which you let me out of anyway, was that I wouldn’t sell the building without telling you thirty days in advance. Well there. You’ve been told.” It was a lie, of course. I had no idea where things would go from here, nor could I think about it now. But the words were meant for impact. The rage that had been brewing inside me needed a place to go, and Mark was a worthy target.

  “Don’t spend the money yet. There will definitely be a legal challenge. This is a historic building, for starters. But I’ll think of something more.” He was closer now. Only a few feet behind me.

  Don’t do this. Not now. Please …

  “I’m sure you will. But the fact remains. It’s my building. I can do what I want with it.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I whirled toward him then, emotion welling up. It shifted without warning when I saw his face. He’d pushed the hood back. The light caught him, turned his eyes a bright, golden brown.

  Tears swelled in my chest, pressing upward, dousing the anger. “Just leave me alone, Mark. I don’t have anything more to say to you. I wasn’t making a deal with Casey, but … You know what? You can believe whatever you want. I don’t … I don’t even …” The sentence died in a whimper, a strangling gush of emotion.

  I felt the tears spilling over, hot and rapid.

  He pulled a breath to retort, stopped, studied me. “Whitney?”

  “I don’t … I’m …” But I was already sobbing, the last bits of my resolve, of my pride, washing away in the tidal flow. “Everything’s … the restaurant … the restaurant … burned.” I threw a hand over my face, ashamed, overwhelmed, lost. I wanted to sink down to the wet pavement, finally surrender. Just give up. On everything.

  “Hey …” Whether Mark caught me or I folded into him, I couldn’t say. I felt the warmth of his arms, the curve of his chest against my forehead, the strong ridge of his chin over my hair. I smelled surf wax and musky cologne, sand and the rainy night clinging to the fibers of his sweatshirt. He didn’t ask questions. He just held me while I cried. By the time I was finished, the mist had turned to rain again. We went to his Jeep to escape the weather. Rip was waiting in the back. The dog moved carefully to the console, sniffed me, and then licked the salt from my skin.

  “Rip, cut it out.” Mark elbowed him aside, then reached across to comb back the hair Rip had disturbed. I felt his fingers brush my ear and then my shoulder. They stayed there.

  “So … what’s going on? There was a fire in your restaurant? The one that’s in dispute right now?”

  He handed me a leftover restaurant napkin, and I wiped my eyes, brushing back the mass of damp, dark waves I hadn’t taken the time to bind that morning. “No.” I swallowed hard, gulping down the swell of grief. “Not the new restaurant, the old location. The one that was open. It’s gone.”

  “Gone? How? When?”

  “A few hours ago. They’re saying they think it could have been the range hood. We just had it cleaned and fixed and fully tested. It wasn’t the range hood. It doesn’t matter, anyway. With the old store gone, we’re finished. I just need to get home and …” Do what? Do what exactly? “And see what I can figure out.”

  I gathered my hair in my fingers, tugged it hard and held it, tried to think. “I need to go … to … to get on the road. It’s a long drive.”

  Mark caught my hand. “Whitney, just hold on a minute.”

  “I want to get home.”

  “You’re in no shape to be taking off. Talk to me. Let’s think this thing through.” His was the voice of reason, but it was hard to hear. Everything in me was screaming, Run, fight, do something!

  “I know this was Tagg Harper’s doing, and when I see him …”

  “That’s exactly why you don’t need to be there right now. Judging from what you’ve told me, he’d probably love to have a legal reason to go after you. And what about the museum and the necklace? I thought you had a meeting today?”

  “I’ll tell them I can’t be there. They’ll have to understand.” The gears were grinding inside me, pushing forward while Mark stepped on the brakes. “I can’t leave my cousin to deal with all of this on her own.”

  Maybe I should fly … drive to the airport and catch a plane after all. I could be home by early afternoon. But I’ll need my car when I get there. There’s no money for a rental. There’s really no money for a plane ticket. Who’d pick me up at the airport? Mrs. Doyne might be …

  “Let me make the trip to Michigan instead.” Mark’s request was somewhere outside the din of my own thoughts. “Let me tell them you sent your lawyer to look into the situation. That’ll help, both on the criminal end and on the settlement end. It never hurts to hit the insurance company from the initial stages. You go down to Hatteras. Do what you need to do there. Let me handle Michigan.”

  I gaped at him, dumbfounded. “What … but …” Conflicting urges warred—two instinctive reactions. I needed to rely on someone, but relying on people was dangerous. At any moment, people could decide to just … not be there anymore. I’d always relied on myself. “Why would you do that?”

  He leaned closer, stared into me in a way that held me against the seat. “You really haven’t got a clue, do you? I didn’t come here this morning to check for hail damage. I came because I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about you—about the way you looked when Casey drove up. I wanted to see you before you left for Hatteras, to at least hear what you had to say about it.”

  His fingers brushed my chin and sank into my hair, and he pulled me near, his lips meeting mine softly, gently at first and then filled with an intense need that mirrored my own. The feel of him, the taste of him, eclipsed the racing in my
head. I gave myself to it, let it take me over.

  I felt the ebbing of one tide and the swelling of another, this one as powerful as the sea itself. There was a knowing in it, the sort of knowing I’d never felt before.

  To love and be loved is the very thing our souls scream for from birth and every moment after, the urge to need and be needed as natural as breathing, as life-giving as breath. For the first time since childhood, I felt as though I was no longer fighting for air, but instead sailing through it with no fear of where I might land.

  Benoit House was strangely quiet this late in the evening. No tourist crowd, no charter buses, no docents or caterers wandering around. The one-eared cat who’d terrorized the caterer last time now lounged in a window of the grand ballroom, looking harmless and comfortably at home. By contrast, I was as nervous as … well … a cat.

  Letting Mark go to Michigan, my coming here instead, had been a shaky, clumsy leap of faith. The decision still had me on pins and needles, but I’d learned something in my time on the Outer Banks. I’d seen the difference between Alice’s choices and my grandmother’s. In opening herself to an unplanned future, in taking the risk, Alice had found her way back to life and joy and hope.

  By closing herself away, my grandmother had gained nothing. She’d withered within her own walls long before her death. She’d worn misery like a cloak and covered those closest to her in its suffocating fabric.

  Living, really living, wasn’t about clinging to control but about giving it away.

  Closing my eyes, I took in a long breath, exhaled, wiped sweaty palms on my pant legs and tried to relax. Breathe, breathe. It’s going to be okay.

  More than okay …

  I positioned my hands here and there around the chair, trying to decide which would look best when they entered the conference room. Tandi had stepped out to meet the board president and the historical specialist at the front door. I’d been kept waiting most of the day as travel snafus and other issues prevented them from reaching Hatteras. The board president had insisted we not go forward without him. I knew why. He was coming to give me the strong arm about leaving the necklace here on loan.

  I’d been silently tossing the question around all day—yes, no, maybe. Do the easy thing? Do the right thing and trust that our struggle with Bella Tazza will work out?

  The choice had eclipsed even the aftermath of the restaurant fire. Selling the necklace and getting the money would assure me the means of serving up the ultimate revenge against Tagg Harper. Denise—who right now was handling things much more sanely than I would have—could relax, given the kind of muscle the money could provide. On the other hand, Denise had assured me that Mark was quite an intimidating force all by himself, when in lawyer mode. She’d also texted, Holy cow! You didn’t tell me he was drop-dead-flipping gorgeous.

  My phone chimed in my purse and I scrambled to turn off the sound. Footsteps echoed in the hall—the click, click of Tandi’s heels, the slap, slap of Lily’s flip-flops … another set of heels … and a man. Wearing boots, maybe. He was tall, his footfalls even and far apart.

  I stood up, then sat down, then stood up again and moved around the corner of the long, claw-footed mahogany table, braced my fingers on it, trying to appear cool, calm, confident.

  Voices drifted through. “We’ve kept this meeting very quiet, for obvious reasons,” Tandi was saying. “I have my fingers crossed for the best possible outcome, of course.”

  “I hope it’s worth the trip.” The board president sounded older, professorial, somewhat impatient—like a man who wasn’t accustomed to being told no.

  Sweat beaded underneath my shirt as they entered the room and Tandi made introductions. The board president’s appearance matched his voice. Gabriel Sorenson was a mountain of a man, midsixties, bald head, neatly trimmed beard, one of the state’s foremost authorities on North Carolina’s precolonial history. Along with him came his historical specialist, Kay Harper, a middle-aged prof from NC State.

  Sorenson didn’t mince words or waste time. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” He motioned toward the table, and we moved to our chairs, Tandi sitting at the head, the board president and historical specialist across from me. Lily, the intern, hurried to the nearby buffet and retrieved a black plastic briefcase. My heirlooms had found better housing since I’d left them here.

  “These are so amazin’.” Lily looked like a kid at Christmastime. “If we could ever prove for sure that these carvings were done by somebody who was on one of the Lost Colony ships, that’d be beyond huge. It’d prove that at least one group of survivors got all the way to the mountains and lived there. It’d be the biggest Lost Colony story since the Dare Stones.” She cast a furtive glance my way as she opened the briefcase and turned its foam-padded interior toward the newcomers.

  Guilt and apprehension settled heavily on my shoulders. If I ended up selling that necklace and the scrimshaw to a private collector, I would be Public Enemy Number One around here. Word would spread on the Outer Banks. The next time I came to Manteo, the reception would be bitter. Mark, Clyde, Joel, Kellie … everyone would be disappointed in me.

  I’d be betraying Alice just as completely as my grandmother had when she’d destroyed the letters.

  Could I live with that?

  Could I live without the security and self-reliance the money could provide?

  The questions cycled silently as Sorenson and Harper leaned over the case, their chins dropping.

  Sorenson slipped on exam gloves and lifted the scrimshaw carving, held it to the light. “We haven’t seen anything like this.”

  Pulling a file from the front pocket of the briefcase, Tandi slid it his way. “We’ve had three different historical experts look at it over the weekend, as well as an art history specialist. All four concluded that the scrimshaw was done by the same carver as the other story keeper necklaces.”

  Sorenson’s fingertip traced the image of the woman at the ship’s wheel. “Is there anything that ties these to the Outer Banks, other than the fact that they were found here, that is?”

  Everyone turned my way, and suddenly I was the focus of the meeting again. “I don’t have proof, but there are some old letters that were written by my grandmother’s sister. She describes finding things like this in the Blue Ridge Mountains and learning the story behind them, which seems to tie them to the coast. My guess is, she sent the necklace and the scrimshaw carving to my grandmother.” I hurried through an explanation of Alice’s story. “I brought along her letters for you to see, but there are so many parts missing… . We can only guess at the rest.” Reaching into the dried and crackled leather attaché I’d borrowed from Clyde’s closet, I pulled out the faded military binder that held the plastic sleeves filled with his work.

  Sorenson was already nodding before I even handed them over. “Let’s see what you have.”

  “We put the letters back together as well as we could.” I slid the stack toward him. “They’re still a mess, so it’s slow reading, but Alice does mention encountering necklaces like this one among a group of Melungeon people in the Blue Ridge, and she talks about being given a scrimshaw carving shaped like a tusk. It’s obvious from the last letter that she was becoming more and more obsessed with the topic, but it’s also clear that there were people who didn’t want the stories of groups like the Melungeons to be told.”

  I waited while he thumbed through the pages, the historical specialist anxiously reading along. “These are incredible,” she whispered.

  “I wish we had more, but we don’t. It’s possible that Alice’s original manuscripts are somewhere among the volumes of stored material from the Federal Writers’ Project, but I don’t have the first clue how we’d find out. Alice was just starting to learn more about the Melungeons and that’s where the letters stop. If there were any more, they’re gone.”

  Sorenson’s attention turned my way. “Would you consider committing the letters to our collection on loan as well? If not, we’d like to at least ha
ve them long enough to transcribe the contents. These may not be a complete solution to the puzzle, but they could provide some critical context.”

  Expectation tightened the air. My moment of truth had arrived. Now or never. “As far as the letters go, I haven’t decided what to do with them, but I’d be happy to let you take them long enough to transcribe what’s there. I think Alice would have wanted that.”

  She would’ve wanted the necklace and the carving to be here too… .

  “How long?” I could barely force the words out. Fear had me by the throat. Be careful, it was saying. Protect yourself. “How long are you asking me to leave the necklace and the scrimshaw on loan to the museum?”

  Do what’s right, another voice whispered. Look at everything else that has fallen into place since you came to Manteo.

  Blessings aren’t fully realized until they’re passed along. How many times had my mother said that to me? Alice had written almost the same thing in her letters.

  “We’d like to ask you to commit to the loan for a term of one year.” Sorenson braced an elbow on the table, bushy eyebrows lowering as he leaned toward me. “During that time, we hope to secure further funding for our studies here and for the exhibit. Our end goal would be to be able to bring your pieces into the collection permanently. In the meantime, the artifacts will be housed properly, studied, and kept safe. Your other pieces—the ship’s manifest, the taffrail log, and the Benoit ruby brooch—we’re prepared to make an offer on today.”

  He lifted a folder from his briefcase and slid it my way. “Here’s the yellow sheet with our assessment of those pieces. I can promise you that we’re offering top dollar. Because they’re tied to the Benoit family, they’re worth more to us than they would be to anyone else.”

  “That makes sense.” I sounded surprisingly clinical—as if my hands weren’t trembling and my nerves weren’t vibrating like overcharged electrical circuits. My heart was sounding off like the Energizer Bunny clapping his cymbals. Surely everyone else could hear it.