Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Vabella Publishing
P.O. Box 1052
Carrollton, Georgia 30112
©Copyright 2014 by Helen Naismith
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author. All requests should be addressed to the publisher.
Cover painting by S. Forbes.
13-digit ISBN 978-1-938230-88-2
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Kathi, Shauna, and Drew with love
Acknowledgements
While the characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictional, any mention of the Red Hat Society is in reference to one of the largest women’s social organizations in the world. The Red Hat Society supports and encourages women to pursue fun, friendship, freedom, fulfillment of lifelong dreams and fitness. If you would like to learn more about the Society or become a Member, please visit the website at www.redhatsociety.com.
I want to thank those who made this book a reality. First, special thanks go to two fine civil servants dedicated to keeping our communities safe: Mitch Floyd, Fire Chief, Towns County Fire Rescue Dept, Hiawassee, GA and Jake Ehrhart, retired Captain, Volusia County, FL Sheriff’s Office. I also thank Dr. Cheryl Bergeron, a member of my Red Hat Chapter, for medical advice, and Claire Palmer for help with research and proof reading. Pam Roman supports me in everything I do as she did with this book. I also greatly appreciate the work of the four book reviewers who read and critiqued the manuscript: Ernie Freda, Lisa Jackson, Sylvia Turnage, and Beth Schilling, all of whom share my love for the written word.
Introduction
“There’s no place like home if home is New England,” reads a promotional piece in the popular Yankee Magazine.
I was born and reared in this beautiful East Coast region and, although I’ve spent the majority of my life in the South, at heart I’ll always be a New Englander. I have many fond childhood memories of shuffling through ankle-deep autumn leaves to and from our little red three-room schoolhouse on the edge of town. Though our house was a good distance from the Atlantic Ocean, I still felt the strong inland winds of the devastating 1938 hurricane as I rode my bicycle on that afternoon in late September. I also remember the long-ago night of our first blackout during WWII when slow-moving headlights pierced the darkness as an ambulance made its way into our neighborhood. Our next-door neighbor was an elderly gentleman from Ireland who had bought passage, but missed the sailing of the Titanic. A heart attack ended his life that memorable night.
The six New England states are Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, each with its own uniqueness, but common to all its residents is their identity as native Yankees. While mostly known for its beautiful snow-covered landscapes in winter and gorgeous splashes of colorful leaves in the fall, so, too, are lilac blossoms and pussy willows in the spring and white sails on Buzzards Bay on hot summer afternoons.
As a writer with cherished memories of this very special place, it is easy for me to write about the land that I love, with its rich cultural history and pristine natural beauty. It’s also a joy to write about the Red Hat Society and what it means to women approaching their golden years. As the Queen Mother of an active chapter deep in the mountains of North Georgia where I now live, I have met many wonderful friends whom I wouldn’t have met otherwise, and traveled to places and done things with the Red Hat Sisterhood that I would never have done alone.
As its founder, Sue Ellen Cooper, herself a native New Englander, says, “We might as well join red-gloved hands and go for the gusto together,” which we do.
This is a story about four Red Hat friends from the North Shore of Massachusetts who get together at an ancestral lodge in New Hampshire’s White Mountains to plan a mystery trip for their chapters. But life is what happens, not what we plan, and tragedy claims the life of the hostess, a member of one of Boston’s elite founding families. How the surviving women respond to their heartbreak is a testimony of friendship, love and human kindness.
Helen Naismith
Prologue
The roadside sign read “Woodbridge Notch, Incorporated 1794.” In the language of its founding fathers, notch meant a pass between mountains. Just beyond the sign was a narrow one-lane wooden covered bridge over a rock-filled creek, which gave the area its name.
While vacationing with his family one summer in the early 1900’s, George Carleton Endicott, a wealthy Boston businessman, fell in love with the small New Hampshire valley in the heart of the White Mountains. Endicott was a member of an elite Brahmin family which helped found the city of Boston. Although a descendant of a distinguished American politician, he had no political aspirations of his own. Instead, he became a successful capitalist, making his fortune in the shoe industry in suburban Lynn on the North Shore.
For several years Endicott closed the family’s Beacon Hill mansion during July and August to spend the hot summer months at The Fairview House, a grand hotel in North Woodstock. Upon arrival by train from Boston, a carriage from the hotel met his family and was at their disposal for day trips throughout the mountains.
In 1915 he decided to build a vacation home to enjoy the natural beauty of New Hampshire year-round. By then Henry Ford had changed the world with his Model T, which allowed Endicott to tour the state for a suitable home site. By summer’s end, he had purchased 1,800 acres in the heart of the White Mountains, and commissioned a Boston architectural firm to design a large comfortable home for his family, which at the time consisted of his wife, Elsie, and two grown children.
“I want it to last for generations so my children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren can come up to these beautiful mountains and enjoy them as I do,” he told the contractor.
For the prosperous patriarch of the Endicott clan, nothing short of a strong, enduring structure would do, and the Granite State had plenty of natural resources to fill his every need.
Endicott’s acreage fronted an isolated stretch on a secondary road twenty miles from the town of Woodbridge Notch. His closest neighbors were two elderly maiden sisters, Ruth and Olive Mason, who lived in a small but neat cabin a short distance from the roadside entrance to his property.
Despite his uncompromising business manner, privately the entrepreneur was kind and generous to his family and friends. One morning soon after work began at his construction site, he knocked on the sisters’ cabin door and introduced himself.
“Good mo
rning, Ladies,” he said with a warm smile, “I’m George Endicott from Boston. We’re going to be neighbors, so I thought I’d stop by and say hello. My family will be here in the summertime, and if you need anything we can help you with, anything at all, just let me know.”
It was the beginning of a long and pleasant friendship. Each day the sisters trekked down the road and up the long driveway to watch the house take shape. As loads of lumber arrived from the Woodbridge Lumber Mill and the framing took shape, Ruth couldn’t conceal her amazement at its size.
“It’s so big, Mr. Endicott,” she beamed. “I’ve never been in a house that big.”
He chuckled good-naturedly. “Well, Ruthie, my wife and I have friends who will be spending weekends with us, and our two active children have friends. Living way out here, we’ll want them to stay overnight when they visit.” Then he added with a smile, “You will always be welcome here, too, Ladies.”
A few weeks later when she saw load after load of granite arrive from a quarry in Conway, Ruth expressed more excitement.
“Is all that stone gonna be used on the house?” she asked. “It’s so big it looks like a lodge, and being stone, it’ll last forever.”
“That’s the idea, Ruthie,” he responded, again chuckling at her childlike wonder.
“It’ll be solid. A hundred years from now, hopefully, my descendants will still be enjoying weekends up here in these magnificent mountains.”
Construction took two full years, as no work could be done during New Hampshire’s frigid winter months. Upon completion, it was a rare example of colonial architecture made of native stone, granite and timber.
The first floor included a large country kitchen with a bay window and walk-in pantry, laundry room, servant’s bedroom and lounge, formal dining room, spacious living room, powder room, library-den and music room. On the east side of the house was a sun porch with a large bay window offering views of beautiful sunsets sinking into the mountains at day’s end. From the front foyer, a wide oak staircase wound its way up to the second level to eight bedrooms and four full baths.
The interior was that of an English manor house. Flooring in the entrance hall was polished granite. Sandstone slabs covered the kitchen and pantry floors, with heart pine wood throughout the rest of the house. The kitchen walls were painted white; the library had pine paneling. The bedrooms, halls, and other rooms were wallpapered with rich textures and British colonial designs. Oriental rugs, indoor plants, and Lexington Barclay furniture throughout bore further witness of the English influence. But instead of heavy drapes, Elsie chose light sheers to let in the sunshine and mountain breezes during warm weather. The furniture on the sun porch, which was heated during winter, was white wicker with large cushions of colorful floral fabric and matching valances.
Outside on the first level, a veranda with twelve stone columns wrapped around the entire house and a portico graced the main entrance. Above the portico and the entire veranda was a wide terrace with French doors leading from each of the bedrooms, providing expansive views of lofty peaks along the Presidential Range.
The huge dwelling sat on a rise in a five-acre clearing at the base of a mountain bounded by a Federal preserve. A three–foot wall of fieldstone lined the north side, and a small branch of the winding Pemigewasset River flowed through the back end of his land. The fact that native stone was a prominent feature of the house and a rippling brook meandered through the property inspired Endicott to name his mountain retreat Stone Brook.
But the name didn’t stick, at least not within the family. In the spring of the second year, the proud homeowners walked around the grounds enjoying the landscape and lilacs in bloom. Gazing up at the magnificent structure before her, Elsie chided her husband.
“Ruthie was right, Dear,” she said. “It does look like a lodge,” and from that time forward, generations of Endicotts called their mountain home simply the Lodge.
The relationship between the wealthy Endicotts of Boston and the lowly spinsters of Woodbridge Notch blossomed into a warm friendship which continued for many years. During their first summer in the Lodge, George and Elsie attended worship services at the small Congregational church at the edge of town. It was a short distance from the sisters’ cabin, and they had been walking it every Sunday for years. But in summers when he didn’t have guests, Mr. Endicott drove them in his late model Ford, occasionally treating them to lunch in the village.
His kindness to his lonely neighbors never wavered. When he was at his winter home in Florida, he sent them a gift basket of fresh fruit every Christmas, and they reciprocated with embroidered “fancies,” which Elsie graciously placed on small tables throughout the Lodge.
As time went on, advancement in automobiles and highway networks throughout New England brought great expansion into rural areas and small towns. In the 1950s, economic and cultural links between New Hampshire and the greater Boston region opened wide the gates of tourism year-round: the White Mountains, North Woods and Lakes Region soon became popular spots for vacations in the summer, foliage tours in the fall, and skiing in the winter.
Not to be overlooked was the tiny township of Dixville Notch, population 100, which proved that large things can happen in small places. Located twenty miles from the Canadian border, and a two-hour drive from Stone Brook, the Ballot Room of the historic castle-like Balsams Grand Resort Hotel became the place where the eyes of America turn every election year to watch the town’s traditional midnight voting. The votes in Dixville Notch, being among the first to be cast, counted and reported nationally, showed these Yankee voters to be “right” seventy percent of the time.
“As Dixville goes, so goes the nation,” is a common dictum every election year.
In the fall of 2008, Stone Brook, still affectionately dubbed the Lodge, stood as sound as a fortress on the grassy knoll at the edge of Woodbridge Notch and continued to be visited by still another generation of George Endicott’s descendants. But unfortunately, time had taken its toll on the Mason cabin, and its present occupants were unlike the maiden sisters of years past.
Chapter 1
Following the death of George Carleton Endicott III in December 1998, Stone Brook was inherited by his only child, Claire Endicott Benson, making way for the fourth generation of the prominent Boston family to occupy the ancestral estate. Although still a private residence, a plaque from the Woodbridge Township Remembrance Society honored its unique colonial architecture and subjected it to renovation restrictions. Like previous heirs, Claire consulted the historical organization before modernizing interior facilities and furnishings to her liking. Most changes updated the kitchen and bathrooms, which didn’t affect the exterior appearance. During the next ten years, she and her family and their many friends enjoyed year-round vacations and weekends in the large, comfortable stone mansion.
Claire Benson was an attractive woman with a slender figure who, at age sixty-three, wore the same size clothes she did in college. Her soft gray hair was short and fashionably styled. She had lovely blue eyes, high cheekbones and full lips, which smiled often. Her sincerity, kindness, and great sense of humor added to her attractiveness and popularity. Although she herself was a descendant of one of Boston’s elite Brahmin families, she freely laughed at the legendary ditty ridiculing those early settlers who embraced aristocratic England’s strict social class system.
“And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to the Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God.”
Claire’s lifestyle as a health-conscious vegetarian no doubt contributed to her natural beauty. The outdoors type, she loved gardening and animals, also reading and the Boston Pops. For generations, members of the Endicott family attended the city’s famous Old North Church seated in their private white-hued box pew. The typically English Georgian-style church made history on the night of April 18, 1775, when Paul Revere signaled the sexton, Robert Newton, that t
he British were planning an attack. In response, Newton warned the colonists with lanterns in the small church window – one if by land, and two if by sea — and thus began the American Revolution.
Claire Endicott’s life was one of wealth and privilege. A staff of six served the needs of her immediate family of three in their Beacon Hill mansion. It included her mother’s personal secretary, a maid, a governess during Claire’s early childhood, a personal chef who prepared family meals in addition to extravagant menus for social events, a part-time pilot for their private plane stored at the municipal airport in Beverly, and a part-time captain for their yacht docked at the Lauderdale Marina near Port Everglades, Florida.
Despite her family’s affluence and social position, Claire never considered herself above others. In fact, from a very early age, she entertained thoughts of altruism and later acted upon them. She graduated from Wellesley, a prestigious women’s liberal arts college with a major in psychology and minor in sociology. During summer breaks she traveled abroad, not to study haute couture or fashion in London or Paris, but to volunteer at crude medical facilities in the ghettos of India and outreaches of Africa. What she saw opened her eyes to a world where the physical and emotional needs of the poor and uneducated were never met. To her, the sanctity of human life was just as important in the slums of India and the jungles of Africa as it was in cottages on Cape Cod and mansions on Long Island. The human suffering she witnessed during these visits touched her deeply and she decided to put her wealth to good use: her life’s work would be philanthropy. She discussed her decision with her parents and, with their blessing, began by contributing generously to the medical clinics she had visited in both countries.
At age twenty-two Claire met the love of her life. Ed Benson had joined a Boston investment firm the previous year and a mutual friend introduced them at a social in Manchester-by-the-Sea. Claire found him attractive and hoped she’d see him again. She did, the following week at a concert at the Half-Shell in Boston.
The Mystery Trip Page 1
