True Love (39 page)

“John Kendricks’s daughter was too smart for any man to handle.”

Caleb smiled. “It is true that on that first night Captain Caleb tried to persuade the beautiful Valentina to kiss him. But that’s all there was.”

“How much rum was involved?” Alix asked.

“Measured in gallons or flagons?”

Alix laughed. “Did Valentina slap him?”

“No,” Caleb said. “She …”

Alix looked at him. “Are you blushing?”

“That is a female condition,” he said. “Men do not blush.”

“What did Valentina do to the Captain? Who, by the way, might have been a bit tipsy.”

“She played a trick on him. You see, she pretended to invite him to make love to her.”

“What does that mean?”

Caleb kept dancing, holding on to Alix, and took his time in answering. “She got him to remove his clothing.”

“You mean he was naked and she wasn’t?”

“Yes.” Caleb gave a sheepish grin. “Once the Captain had disrobed entirely, Valentina took his clothing and left the attic. She locked the door rather securely behind her.”

“Oh?” Alix began to laugh at what she was visualizing. “If the house was new there probably wasn’t much up here, was there?”

“There was only a half-empty jug of rum.” Caleb’s look seemed to be a combination of remorse and embarrassment. “And it was a cold night.”

Alix couldn’t repress her laughter. “How did he get out of this room?”

“The next morning Kendricks heard … well, some fairly strong
words coming through the floorboards. It had been very difficult to raise the household after the night’s revelry.”

“Not to mention that it was the schoolmaster’s wedding night. I don’t mean to laugh at the Captain, but he really did deserve what he got.”

“He did,” Caleb said. “Although he certainly didn’t think so at the time. When he was finally released from the attic he put on his most impressive uniform and went to Valentina’s washhouse, where she was stirring her big pots of soap. He demanded an apology from her.”

“Did she give it to him?”

“She told him to make himself useful and grab a paddle and stir.”

“Not the way a ship’s captain was used to being treated?”

“No,” Caleb said, smiling. “Not at all how he was used to being treated.”

They smiled at each other and kept dancing.

Chapter Twenty-one

J
ared was in the beat-up old truck he kept in Hyannis, driving back from Maine. In the summer it was difficult to get a reservation for a vehicle on the slow boat. What with the sixty thousand or so visitors who came and left the island, and their many vehicles taking up room on the ferry, a lot of Nantucketers kept a car or truck off island.

Beside him was Jilly Taggert Leighton, just one of the many relatives he’d met over the last few days. There seemed to be hundreds of them!

There were some, mostly Montgomerys, in the little Maine town that had been founded by their ancestors and he was told of more, Taggerts, who lived in Chandler, Colorado. He saw photos of an enormous house in Colorado built by a robber baron back in the
nineteenth century. As far as Jared could tell, the house hadn’t been updated in many years. He didn’t say so, but he very much wanted to get his hands on the place and bring it up to code. He couldn’t imagine how dangerous the electrical probably was.

As Jared looked at the pictures, he’d imagined Alix’s face when she saw the mansion in Colorado. And he thought of what she’d say when she saw the big house in Maine. Besides the buildings, he wondered which member of the family she’d like the most and who she’d never be close to. Would he and Alix have the same opinions of everything and everyone? Or would they disagree?

The truth was that Jared had thought of Alix the whole time he was away. And he’d talked about her. He thought maybe that’s what surprised him the most, that he’d spoken of her out loud. Off-island, he’d always been a very private person. His grandfather said the contrast was good. On Nantucket you couldn’t get a girlfriend, break up with one, or even flirt with a girl without half the town knowing about it. Which was one of the many reasons why Jared had only gone out with tourists while at home—and why he’d kept his New York girlfriends in the city.

But Alix was different. Never in his life had he felt so comfortable, so at ease, with anyone. From fish filleting to designing a house, they just seemed to know how to … well, actually how to
live
together.

A couple of times before Jared had lived with women, but each time it had been a disaster. For one thing, all his girlfriends had seemed much more aware of his success than his passion for his craft. He was a famous architect who moved in elite circles, and they wanted to be part of that. They wanted to wear gowns that cost thousands, jewels that cost even more, and go to parties every night of the week. They wanted to be seen with the famous Jared Montgomery, wanted to be associated with him. Jared felt secondary to that man, whom he often thought of as a media creation.

Over the years he’d tried dating women from different social strata. There was a pretty young woman from Indiana who worked
as a receptionist. But she’d been overwhelmed by Jared’s high-flying life and one day he’d found her crying in his apartment. He paid for her ticket home. The women who’d grown up rich were annoyed that Jared could spend so little time with them. Those with ambition tended to use Jared’s contacts as stepping stones on their way to the top.

Whatever their origins, all the women he’d dated had been far more interested in Jared the Famous than in the Jared the Man. Not one of them had grasped the concept of the
work
behind what he did. Sheer, huge volumes of
work
.

But Alix did. He could hand her the end of a measuring tape and she knew what to do with it. He could talk in shorthand to her and she understood. But work wasn’t all of it, or even the main part. Alix saw him as a man. She saw both sides of him and liked them both.

“Are you missing her?” Jilly asked from the passenger seat beside him.

Jared smiled. “Did I make a fool of myself talking about her so much?”

“Not at all,” Jilly said. “Most of us have been there and the ones who haven’t hope to be someday. Did you tell Alix that we’ll be arriving today?”

“No. She doesn’t expect me until tomorrow.” He was grinning at the thought of seeing her again. Two days ago he’d gone with Jilly’s older brother Kane and his identical twin grown sons, in search of the stained-glass window for the chapel. At the second store, they’d found the perfect one. Made in the 1870s, it portrayed a knight leaning on his sword and looking wistful. Jared didn’t say so, but the man looked uncannily like his grandfather, Caleb.

After he’d purchased the window, Jared started to help put it on the back of the truck, but Kane said, “You’re a Montgomery so you better let us do it.” Jared had soon learned about the rivalry between the two families. The big Taggerts said that the taller, thinner Montgomerys were weak and scrawny, while the Montgomerys said the
Taggerts had no brains. Of course it was all untrue, but Jared enjoyed the ribbing.

All in all, he fit in with the family and, yes, he was more like the Montgomerys. They were the relatives who encouraged him to talk about what he’d designed over the course of his career, and who enjoyed puzzling out how they were related.

Of the Taggerts, Jared especially liked Kane and Mike, men in their early fifties who had amassed great fortunes—but were as down-to-earth as could be. They were identical twins, so alike Jared couldn’t see a difference between them—but their wives could. And none of their children were fooled.

Kane’s wife, Cale, was a famous writer and she made everyone laugh with her witty little remarks, some of them quite sarcastic but always right on target. She could nail a situation perfectly in just a few words.

“So what’s Nantucket really like?” she asked on his second day there. She’d walked out to a point on the Maine coast where he’d been sitting and watching the ocean. As always, she had a notebook in her hand.

“It’s quiet,” he said. “If you ignore the visitors, that is.” She was small and pretty, her eyes full of curiosity. It was a look he’d often seen on Victoria’s face. Were writers always looking for ideas? he wondered. “And we have lots of ghosts on the island.”

Her eyes widened.

He’d also seen that look on Victoria’s face. “Some of the stories of how they came to be ghosts are long and complicated, and quite fascinating.”

“Oh,” she said, but didn’t seem able to say anything else. As a professional writer she was always on a quest to find more material. Like an alcoholic craved booze, writers were addicted to
stories
.

“I better let you get on with your writing.” He nodded toward her notebook as he stood up, but then turned back to look at her. “There’s a house on Kingsley Lane that’s for sale. It’s big and old. It’s called
BEYOND TIME
because there’s a legend that the ghost in it can
take you back to his time.” Jared waved his hand. “But that’s just hearsay. I don’t know if anyone has actually done it. Though I wonder how the rumor got started? But then it’s been around for centuries. I hope to see you at dinner.” He’d walked away, smiling. Unless he missed his guess, that old house was as good as sold.

Jilly flew in from Colorado a few days after Jared’s arrival. She was a widow, and her two grown children were in summer camps in their home state. It was their last summer before they left for college.

Jared had been told that after Jilly’s husband died, she’d been hired by the family to become their genealogist. She’d spent years going through the mass of family documents and writing histories of everyone. Recently she’d posted a detailed family tree online, which was where Alix had found Valentina and Parthenia.

Jilly brought with her from Colorado three big boxes of photocopied papers. “The originals are in a vault,” she said at dinner at the huge table that first night. In one of the boxes were the letters from Valentina and Parthenia to each other. She recapped them for Jared.

As she told him what the letters said, of the two young women missing each other and planning to visit, he watched her. She was sweet and gentle while the other Taggerts were big and rough.

“She looks like her maternal grandmother,” Cale, sitting on his other side, said. “Or else she’s an alien from another planet.”

Jared laughed. Jilly, so fragile-looking, so soft-spoken, sitting amid her great, hulking brothers, did indeed look as though she were from another dimension.

Seeing that she had an audience, Cale kept on. “What do you think her planet looks like? All pink and cream?”

Jared didn’t miss a beat. “I think it must look like Nantucket, with mists and sunsets over the ocean, sun-warmed sand, and houses grayed by centuries of life.”

Cale blinked at him for a moment, then looked across the table at her husband. “I need your checkbook.”

“Yeah?” Kane said, his eyes alight. “What are you going to buy?”

“A house on Nantucket.”

Kane looked from Cale to Jared and back again. “Let me guess. It has a great story attached to it.”

“Maybe,” she said and everyone laughed. They knew how much Cale loved stories.

It was after dinner, the night before he was going to leave, and Jared was sitting outside in a swing with Jilly beside him. Since the first moment he met her, she’d reminded him of someone. At first he’d thought it was Toby. They both had a quiet elegance about them, but at dinner there was something about the way she held her fork—in that tines-down European way—that made him realize that she reminded him of Ken. A gesture here and there, a tone to her soft voice, made him want to call Ken and say he’d met the perfect woman for him.

But Jared knew that would end it before it started, so he only told Alix about his idea of returning home with Jilly. On the last night, he sat with her and listened as she told more about the letters. “After the first visit to Nantucket, Parthenia returned to Maine and their letters started again. But this time they wrote about the men they cared for. Parthenia had fallen in love with the schoolmaster, and Valentina with—”

“Caleb,” Jared said. “But what happened to her?”

“We know no more than you. When Valentina disappeared, Parthenia was married to her schoolmaster and living on Nantucket, so there were no more letters between them. A Montgomery ancestor wrote home that after Valentina disappeared three men from her family went to the island to search for her. They discovered a couple of sailors who said they’d taken her to the Cape, but no trace of her was found there or anywhere else. She certainly never came home to Maine. After Parthenia’s death, all the letters between her and Valentina were sent back to Warbrooke. I’ve read everything and an explanation for Valentina’s disappearance is nowhere to be found.”

Jared was frowning. “I was told … heard, anyway, that no one had seen Valentina leave the island.”

“Perhaps it was kept quiet. A woman leaving her child behind wouldn’t have been looked on favorably, and I doubt if her relatives would have spread that information. It was all so long ago. Do you have many family documents at your house?”