True Love (43 page)

Jared held up the piece of paper. “All that for this.” It was just a simple sketch, drawn with a quill pen by a young woman writing home to her family. It vaguely showed the whereabouts of the North Shore house and three outbuildings. “Why didn’t she get a cartographer to do the coordinates? There were certainly enough men on Nantucket at that time who could have made a proper map. Any first mate worth his salt could have charted it for her. How’s anyone supposed to find anything with this thing?”

Alix took it out of his hand and put it on the table. “Parthenia drew it for her family. She didn’t think that someone was going to need it two hundred years in the future. Come on, let’s go to bed. You can complain about women and maps all day tomorrow when we go to the site and try to find where the washhouse was.”

“Maybe we should wait on that, and I’m not complaining. I’m—”

She stood on tiptoe to kiss him to make him stop doing what he said he wasn’t doing, then led him into the bedroom. It took only seconds for Jared to strip down to his underwear and for Alix to pull on one of his big T-shirts. She didn’t have any of her own clothes and she was too tired to think of rummaging through Dilys’s closet.

“Now, where were we?” Alix began as she started to kiss him, but she drew back and looked at him. There was no blue fire in his eyes. In fact, it was more like a hazy bluish-gray fog. But he was putting his arm around her as though he was about to make love to her. Gently, Alix pushed him back down on the bed, tucked the quilt around him, and kissed his forehead.

“Thank you,” he whispered and was asleep instantly. Before Alix fell asleep she couldn’t help but think that this snuggling was even more romantic, more intimate, than all their lovemaking.

Chapter Twenty-three

A
lix awoke when a small hand hit her in the mouth. At first she didn’t remember where she was. As the sleep cleared from her mind, she saw that sometime during the night Tyler had escaped the confines of his crib and climbed into bed with them. He was in the middle of the two adults, sideways, so his body was over both of them. Jared was on his side, facing Alix, his arms out, encasing both her and the child, as though he were protecting them.

Smiling, Alix carefully extricated herself, then stood for a moment looking at them. They looked so sweet together that she picked up her phone and snapped a photo. She made her way to the kitchen, pulled one of Dilys’s cookbooks off a shelf, found a recipe for biscuits, and set about making them.

She patted out the fluffy dough. Even through her pleasant
thoughts about where she was and who she was with, she couldn’t help feeling frustrated. She had so much to tell Jared about what Caleb had told her and what she’d seen, but she couldn’t seem to find a time. But then Jared wasn’t making it easy for her. Every time she mentioned Caleb, it was as though a shutter closed on Jared. His expression became distant, as though he was refusing to listen to what she had to say.

But she knew it was important. If the family considered Valentina’s disappearance significant enough that the house was willed to an off-islander for a whole year, then what Alix knew
needed
to be told.

And besides, Alix had a lot of questions she’d like to have answered. Number one was, Who was Caleb? Why hadn’t she been introduced to him? He looked enough like Jared that he was obviously a close relation, but she’d not heard him mentioned. Did he live on the island?

The
big
question was, Why hadn’t Caleb told his family what he knew? Jared hadn’t been told that Valentina kept a journal and that Caleb might know where it was hidden. Nor did Jared know about Parthenia’s map. Why had Caleb told all this to Alix, an outsider? Was there some family feud? But if that were true, Caleb wouldn’t have felt free to wander about Kingsley House. Or did he show up because he’d known Jared was away?

If Alix hadn’t been so absorbed in the old documents the morning after she met Caleb, she would have called Lexie and found out more of the particulars. As it was, the first chance Alix got, she was going to bombard Jared with every question running through her mind. She needed answers!

By the time the biscuits were done, Alix had strengthened her resolve to force Jared to answer her questions. The will said that Alix was to look for Valentina and doing that had to include Caleb.

As she removed the biscuits from the oven, she looked up to see Jared, shirtless, with a sleepy Tyler snuggled against him. It was a truly beautiful sight.

“The smell woke us,” Jared said. “At first I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

At the sight of the two of them, Alix’s steely resolve left her. Feeding a child was more important than Caleb and his mysteries. “Think Tyler eats bacon and eggs?”

Jared was putting the boy into the high chair. “From the heft of what he put in his diaper yesterday, I think he eats whole roast rhinos for breakfast.” He took a biscuit off the sheet, tossed it from hand to hand to cool it, broke it apart, buttered it, and gave it to Tyler. After the first bite the boy laughed and banged his heels in appreciation.

“That’s the way I feel too,” Jared said as he sat down and took another hot biscuit. “I was thinking,” he said as he slathered it in Dilys’s homemade strawberry jam, “that you and I ought to drive up to Warbrooke and spend a few days there. We could even go before Izzy’s wedding. We need to take a look at that old Montgomery house and get its floor plan on paper. I could send some of the kids from the office up there, but …”

What he was saying sounded so wonderful—especially his frequent use of “we”—that Caleb and Valentina seemed to fly out of Alix’s mind. “But you’d like to get to know your new relatives.”

“I would. Mike Taggert and I hit it off, and I told you that his twin brother, Kane, is married to Cale Anderson.”

“Don’t tell Mom, but I love her books.”

“Okay, but only if you promise not to tell Lexie I met her. She’d be hysterical. One time Lex made a trip to Hyannis just to get Cale’s latest novel on the day it came out.”

“What’s she like in person?”

“Smart, funny, perceptive. She’s little and her husband is the size of a bear. All the Taggerts are big, heavy men while the Montgomerys are like me.”

“Tall, lanky, and beautiful?”

Jared laughed. “You didn’t think that yesterday when I was covered in the offerings of young Tyler here.”

“
Especially
then. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sight.”

“Yeah?” That blue fire returned to his eyes—but then Tyler laughed and threw a chunk of buttered biscuit, hitting Jared on the nose. “Talk about a mood killer!”

Alix walked over and kissed Jared long and lingeringly. “It didn’t kill
my
mood.”

Jared looked at Tyler and shook his head. “You’re going to learn that any man who says he understands women is a liar.” He looked back at Alix. “You ready to go find Valentina’s journal?”

Alix’s smile was deep. He
had
been thinking about Caleb. “Give me about ten minutes. I thought we’d take a whole package of diapers. Think it’ll be enough?”

“Are you kidding? Those packs are so big that if I run my truck into the sea it’ll float.”

“True, but will it be enough for Tyler?”

They looked at him, at the egg, milk, jam, and buttered biscuit on his face, in his hair, and down the front of him.

“We’ll take the second pack just to be safe,” he said.

“I’m on it and I’ll get some towels too.”

“Great idea,” Jared said as he pulled the child out of the chair and headed for the kitchen sink. “Can you get him a clean shirt?” he called to Alix.

But she was ahead of him and handed him one before he finished speaking.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said as he kissed her forehead.

Alix went away smiling.

It took longer to get all the things needed for Tyler into the truck than it did to drive to the site. They decided that figuring out how to strap in the car seat required a degree in engineering.

“I used to think my education was worth something,” Alix said as she stood on the ground and leaned across the truck seat to hold the safety belt for Jared. Tyler was trying to start the engine.

“There were too many long-legged girls in school for me to think mine mattered.”

“Give me a break!” Alix said, groaning. “Tyler, sweetie, don’t eat that.”

Jared pulled the boy away from the gas pedal, put him in the car seat, and fastened it. “Everybody ready?” he asked as Alix got in and shut the door.

“All of us long-legged creatures are ready to go. Right, Tyler?”

He laughed, kicked his stubby little legs, and said, “Go! Go!”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Jared said and pulled out of the driveway.

When they got to the North Shore, Twig’s men were there working. Right away, two of them gathered a stack of scrap wood, put it in the shade, and Tyler ran to it.

Alix hadn’t seen the chapel for a while and she stood there transfixed. To see her own design come to life was almost more than she could bear. The structure wasn’t yet complete, but enough of the chapel was done that she could envision the finished product. The exterior, the windows, the doors, the steeple, were all just as she’d seen them in her mind.

“Like it?” Jared asked from behind her.

“Very much.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed. As a fellow architect, he knew how she felt.

“Okay,” he said, “enough daydreaming. Let’s get to work.” He was holding Parthenia’s map. “Not that anyone could find anything from this thing, but—”

“What’s that?” Alix pointed to a rectangle drawn beside the washhouse. Last night she’d been too sleepy to do more than look at the drawing.

“It says
SOAP
. I guess Valentina stored her soap there.”

Alix took the sketch, pointed the front of the house toward the sea, then looked to her right where the washhouse was drawn. There was no distance given, so it could be fifty feet or a hundred yards, as the property was quite large.

The only thing near the washhouse was a funny little icon of two round circles with a rectangle connecting them with the word
SOAP
written beside it.

Alix and Jared looked at each other, having no idea what the symbol meant, but it was west of the house so they walked that way. The centuries had covered the ground with fierce little bushes and it was slow moving through them.

A short distance from the house, Alix saw a chest-high rock and another near it. There were some boulders on the island, left over from some long-ago glacier, and these two were only about six feet apart.

“They’ve been flattened here,” Alix said, running her hand across the top of the first rock. Someone had chiseled out a place on the top surface and a matching one was on the other rock. It was subtle, not something a person would notice, but a tabletop could be held in the chiseled places.

Jared looked at the map. “If this was a table—”

“Or open shelves to hold the drying soap molds,” Alix said.

“Right. Then the washhouse was …” He stepped over about three feet. “Here.” Reaching down, he scraped out a stone from the sandy soil. It was a round rock, the kind used in a fireplace, and under it was a very old piece of rusty metal. It looked to be the handle of a big washtub.

Alix smiled. “Looks like Parthenia
did
draw a good map.”

Jared gave a one-sided grin.

“Petticoat Row rules again!”

Jared laughed. “Stop bragging and let’s go get some shovels. This has to be dug out by hand.”

Twig’s men stopped work on the chapel to help find the washhouse.
Over the years they’d found many artifacts—coins, ivory, buttons—in the old houses they’d remodeled, but no matter how many things they discovered, each one was of interest.

It didn’t take much digging to see that a building had once been on the site. There were a few pieces of charred timbers, broken china, more scrap metal. After about an hour, they had the stone of the basement outlined. They could see where the foundation of the big fireplace had been and started digging there.

The men took turns, filling the bucket, then the wheelbarrow. Alix stayed under a tree with Tyler, trying to keep him occupied so he wouldn’t get in the way. At first she’d tried to keep him clean but soon found out that wasn’t possible. They broke for lunch and started again an hour later. It was slow going, as the old stones needed the dirt to hold them in place. Three times they had to stop to construct forms to fortify the stones. Two trips were made to Island Lumber to buy reinforcing materials.

It was late afternoon when Jared called to Alix. “I think we have something.”

She picked up Tyler and went to what was now an impressively large hole. Jared and Dennis, the tile setter, were at the bottom. Some stones had fallen out of the thick walls and the men were standing in rubble. Jared stepped back to expose what they’d uncovered. Just behind him, set deep into the stone, was a rusty iron door. All the men were standing over the hole, looking down, and watching. Dave, the cabinetmaker, passed down a crowbar to Jared. After a look at Alix, he pried the door open.