by Nora Roberts
a Spanish one.”
“He could’ve been impressed. Is that the term? Or just as likely she met and married him after she left home. Was there really never any attempt to reconcile, until this? Until she was dying?”
“I don’t know. Some of the stories speculate she ran away with a lover, most just speculate she ran off after her lover was killed by her brother. During this research, I’ve come across a couple of speculations she was shipped off because she was pregnant, and then disowned because she wouldn’t fall in line. Basically, they erased her, so there are no family records or mentions of her after the late 1770s. Now that we have this, we can do a search for James J. Fitzgerald, Cambridge, and work back from there.”
“Eli, the next letter, it’s written in September of the same year. Another plea. She’s worse, and the debts are mounting up. He says his mother’s too weak to hold a pen and write herself. He writes her words for her. Oh, it breaks my heart. ‘Brother, let there be forgiveness. I do not wish to meet God with this enmity between us. I beseech you, with the love we once shared so joyfully, to allow me to come home to die. To allow my son to know my brother, the brother I cherished, and who cherished me before that horrible day. I have asked God to forgive me for my sins and for yours. Can you not forgive me, Edwin, as I forgive you? Forgive me and bring me home.’”
She wiped tears from her cheeks. “But he didn’t, did he? The third letter, the last. It’s dated January sixth. ‘Violeta Landon Fitzgerald departed this world on this day at the hour of six. She suffered greatly in the last months of her time on this earth. This suffering, sir, is on your hands. May God forgive you for I shall not.
“‘On her deathbed, she related to me all that occurred in those last days of August in the year 1774. She confessed her sins to me, the sins of a young girl, and yours, sir. She suffered and died wishing for the home of her birth and her blood, and for the embrace of family refused her. I will not forget nor will any of my blood. You have your riches and hold them dearer than her life. You will not see her again, nor meet with her in Heaven. For your actions you are damned, as are all the Landons who spring from you.’”
She set the last letter with the others. “I agree with him.”
“By all accounts Edwin Landon and his father were hard men, uncompromising.”
“I’d say these letters bear that out.”
“And more. We don’t know if Edwin responded, or what he wrote if he did, but it’s clear both he and Violeta ‘sinned’ in August of 1774. Five months after the Calypso wrecked on Whiskey Beach. We need to search for information on James Fitzgerald. We need a date of birth.”
“You think she was pregnant when she left, or was disowned.”
“I think that’s the kind of sin men like Roger and Edwin Landon would condemn. And I think, given the times, their rise in society, in status, in business, a daughter pregnant with the child of someone less, someone outside the law? Untenable.”
He walked back to her, studied the letter again, the signature. “James would have been a common name, a popular one. Sons are often named for fathers.”
“You think her lover, the seaman from the Calypso, was James Fitzgerald?”
“No. I think her lover was Nathanial James Broome, and he survived the wreck of his ship, along with Esmeralda’s Dowry.”
“Broome’s middle name was James?”
“Yeah. Whoever Fitzgerald was, I’m betting she was pregnant when she married him.”
“Broome might have run off with her, changed his name.”
Eli ran a hand down her hair absently, remembering how she’d given the doomed schoolteacher and long-ago Landon a happy ending.
“I don’t think so. The man was a pirate, fairly notorious. I don’t see him settling down quietly in Cambridge, raising a son who becomes a clerk. And he’d never have let the Landons have the dowry. Edwin killed him, that’s how I see it. Killed him, took the dowry, tossed his sister out.”
“For money? At the bottom of it, they cast her out, erased her, for money?”
“She took for a lover a known brigand. A killer, a thief, a man who would certainly have been hanged if caught. The Landons are accumulating wealth, social prestige and some political power. Now their daughter, whom they’d have married to the son of another wealthy family, is ruined. They may be ruined as well if it becomes known that they harbored or had knowledge of a wanted man being harbored. She, the situation, her condition needed to be dealt with.”
“Dealt with? Dealt with?”
“I’m not agreeing with what was done, I’m outlining their position and probable actions.”
“Lawyer Landon. No, he wouldn’t be one of my favorite people.”
“Lawyer Landon’s just stating their case, the case of men of that era, that mind-set. Daughters were property, Abra. It wasn’t right, but it’s history. Now instead of being an asset, she was a liability.”
“I don’t think I can listen to this.”
“Get a grip on yourself,” he suggested when she pushed to her feet. “I’m talking about the late eighteenth century.”
“You sound like you’re okay with it.”
“It’s history, and the only way I can try to get a clear picture is to think logically and not emotionally.”
“I like emotion better.”
“You’re good at it.” So, they’d use that, too, he decided. Both emotion and logic. “Okay, what does your emotion tell you happened?”
“That Roger Landon was a selfish, unfeeling bastard, and his son, Edwin, a heartless son of a bitch. They had no right to throw away a life the way they threw away Violeta’s. And it’s not just history. It’s people.”
“Abra, you realize we’re arguing about someone who died nearly two hundred years ago?”
“And your point?”
He rubbed his hands over his face. “Why don’t we say this? We’ve reached the same basic conclusion. Part of that conclusion is Roger and Edwin Landon were coldhearted, hard-minded, opportunistic bastards.”
“That’s a little better.” Her eyes narrowed. “Opportunistic. You really believe, not only the dowry existed, not only that it came ashore with Broome, but that Edwin killed Broome and stole the dowry.”
“Well, it was already stolen property, but yeah. I think he found it, took it.”
“Then where the hell is it?”
“Working on that. But all this is moot if the basic premise is wrong. I need to start tracing Violeta’s son.”
“How?”
“I can do it myself, which would take time because it’s not my field, but there are plenty of tools, some good genealogy sites. Or I can save time and contact someone whose field it is. I know a guy. We were friendly once.”
She understood—someone who’d turned his back on Eli. And, she realized, however logical his argument, he understood what Violeta had gone through. He knew what it was to be cast aside, condemned, ignored.
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“I thought about doing it weeks ago, but I put it off. Because— No, I don’t really want to do it. But I’ll try to take a page out of Violeta’s book. When the chips are down, it’s better to forgive.”
She moved to him, took his face in her hands. “You’re going to get that celebration after all. In fact, I’m going to go down and start on that. We should put those letters somewhere safe.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Eli, why do you think Edwin kept the letters?”
“I don’t know, except Landons tend to keep things. The chest of drawers may have been his, and putting them in that hidden niche might have been his way of keeping them but not seeing them.”
“Out of sight, out of mind, like Violeta.” Abra nodded. “What a sad man he must have been.”
Sad? Eli thought when she left. He doubted it. He thought Edwin Landon would have been a self-satisfied son of a bitch. No family tree grew without a few bent branches, he supposed.
He used his lapt
op to search for the contact number for an old friend, then took out his phone. Forgiveness, he discovered, didn’t come easy. But expediency did. Maybe forgiveness would follow, and if not, he’d still have answers.
Twenty-eight
WITH HER HAIR BUNDLED UP, HER SLEEVES HIKED TO HER elbows, Abra looked up from layering slices of potato in a casserole dish when Eli came into the kitchen.
“How’d that go?”
“Awkward.”
“I’m sorry, Eli.”
He only shrugged. “More awkward for him than for me, I think. Actually, I knew his wife better. She’s a paralegal at my old firm. He teaches history at Harvard and sidelines in genealogy. We played basketball a couple times a month, downed a few beers here and there. That’s all.”
That was enough, to Abra’s mind, to deserve a little loyalty and compassion.
“Anyway, after the initial stumbling around and that strained and overenthusiastic ‘Good to hear from you, Eli,’ he agreed to do it. In fact, I think he feels guilty enough to make it a priority.”
“Good. It helps balance the scales.”
“Then why do I want to punch something?”
She considered the potato she’d just sliced in several vicious whacks. She knew exactly how he felt.
“Why don’t you go pump some iron instead? Work up an appetite for stuffed pork chops, scalloped potatoes and green beans amandine. A manly celebration meal.”
“Maybe I will. I should feed the dog.”
“Already done. She’s now stretched out on the terrace watching people play in what she considers her yard.”
“I should give you a hand.”
“Do I look like I need one?”
He had to smile. “No, you don’t.”
“Go, pump it up. I like my men ripped.”
“In that case, I might be a while.”
He sweated out the frustration and the depression that wanted to walk hand in hand. And once he’d showered off the dregs, he found he could let it go.
He had what he needed, an expert to solve a problem. If guilt helped solve the problem, it didn’t and shouldn’t matter.
On impulse, he took Barbie for a walk into the village. It struck him that people spoke to him, called him by name, asked how he was doing without any of the wariness, the awkwardness he’d become so accustomed to.
He bought a bouquet of tulips the color of eggplant. On the way back, he waved to Stoney Tribbet as the old man strolled toward the Village Pub.
“Buy you a beer, boy?”
“Not tonight,” Eli called back. “I’ve got dinner waiting, but keep a stool open for me Friday night.”
“You got it.”
And that, Eli realized, made Whiskey Beach home. A stool at the bar on Friday night, a casual wave, dinner on the stove and knowing the woman you cared for would smile when you gave her purple tulips.
And she did.
The tulips stood along with candles on the terrace table with the surf crashing, the stars winking on. Champagne bubbled, and right there, right then, Eli felt all was right with his world.
He’d come back, he thought. Shed the too-tight skin, turned the corner, rounded the circle—whatever analogy worked. He was where he wanted to be, with the woman he wanted to be with and doing what made him feel whole, and real.
He had colored lights and wind chimes on the terrace, pots of flowers and a dog napping at the top of the beach steps.
“This is . . .”
Abra lifted her eyebrows. “What?”
“Just right. Just exactly right.”
And when she smiled at him again, it was. Just exactly right.
Later, when the house lay quiet and his body still thrummed from hers, he couldn’t say why sleep eluded him. He listened to the rhythm of Abra’s breathing, and the muffled yips from Barbie as she dreamed, he imagined, of chasing a bright red ball into the water.
He listened to Bluff House settle, and imagined his grandmother wakened late at night by noises that didn’t fit the pattern.
Restless, he rose, thought to go down for a book. Instead he climbed up to the third floor to the stack of ledgers. He sat at the card table with his legal pad, his laptop.
For the next two hours he read, calculated, checked dates, cross-referenced from household accounting to business accounting.
When his head throbbed, he rubbed his eyes and kept going. He’d studied law, he reminded himself. Criminal law, not business law, not accounting or management.
He should pass this to his father, to his sister. But he couldn’t let go of it.
At three in the morning he pushed away. His eyes felt as though he’d scrubbed his corneas with sandpaper, and a toothy vise clamped over his temples and the back of his neck.
But he thought he knew. He thought he understood.
Wanting time to process, he went downstairs, dug aspirin out of the kitchen cabinet. He downed them with water he drank like a man dying of thirst before walking out onto the terrace.
The air glided over him like a balm and smelled of sea and flowers. Starlight showered and the moon, waxing toward full, pulsed against the night sky.
And on the cliff, above the rocks where men had died, Whiskey Beach Light circled its hopeful beam.
“Eli?” In a robe as white as the moon, Abra stepped out. “Can’t sleep?”
“No.”
The air rippled her robe, danced through her hair, and the moonlight glowed in her eyes.
When, he wondered, had she become so beautiful?
“I have some tea that might help.” She came to him, automatically reached up to rub at his shoulders, seek out tension. When her eyes met his, her look of concern turned to one of curiosity. “What is it?”
“A lot of things. A lot of big, unexpected things in one even more unexpected bunch.”
“Why don’t you sit down? I’ll work on these shoulders and you can tell me.”
“No.” He took her hands, held them between his. “I’ll just tell you. I love you, too.”
“Oh, Eli.” She gripped his fingers with hers. “I know.”
Not the reaction he’d expected. In fact, he thought, it was a little irritating. “Really?”
“Yes. But God.” Her breath caught as she wrapped her arms around him, held tight with her face pressed to his shoulder. “God, it’s so wonderful to hear you say it. I told myself it would be okay if you didn’t say it. But I didn’t know it would feel like this to hear it. How could I know? If I had, I’d have hounded you like a wolf to drag those words out of you.”
“If I didn’t say it, how do you know?”
“When you touch me, when you look at me, when you hold me, I feel it.” She looked up at him, eyes drenched. “And I couldn’t love you this much without you loving me back. I couldn’t know how right it is to be with you if I didn’t know you loved me.”
He brushed at her hair, all those tumbled curls, and wondered how he’d ever gotten through a single day without her. “So, you were just waiting for me to catch up?”
“I was just waiting for you, Eli. I think I’ve been waiting for you ever since I came to Whiskey Beach because you’re all that was missing.”
“You’re what’s right.” He laid his lips on hers. “What’s just right. It scared the hell out of me at first.”
“I know, me too. But now?” Tears spilled out of mermaid eyes and sparkled in the moonlight. “I feel absolutely courageous. What about you?”
“I feel happy.” Struck with tenderness, he kissed the tears away. “I want to make you as happy as I am.”
