Barefoot in the Sand

by Holly Chamberlin

  Another day coming to a close. Another day of comforting routine and familiar faces. Arden thought again of Villette. “The charm of variety there was not,” Lucy Snowe had said, “nor the excitement of incident, but I liked peace so well.”

  Fifty-five-year-old Arden Bell was content. Juniper End was her castle and Arden Forest was her kingdom. After all the years of wandering, all the years of a peripatetic life during which she was always looking over her shoulder, expecting to be found out and punished, she was settled, safe, and secure. If life wasn’t perfect—and she had wisely abandoned the expectation or hope of such a thing long, long ago—it was still pretty darn good.

  Arden opened the door of the fridge and took out a pitcher of homemade lemonade. As she poured the lemonade into a glass, she was again reminded that the mundane pleasures in life were often the sweetest. A cold glass of lemonade on a warm afternoon in June. A new episode of her favorite British mystery series on Acorn to watch. A cat with which to cuddle.

  For all of these blessings, as simple as they might be, Arden Bell was deeply grateful.

  Chapter 3

  Laura Huntington was a thirty-six-year-old, recently divorced woman of middling height and weight, with dark brown hair and large, dark brown eyes. She wasn’t beautiful, nor was she pretty in the common way, but she was attractive, intelligent, and energetic. She looked people in the eye when she spoke to them. Her students listened to her and liked her. She had few friends but they were stalwart friends. She liked animals. She loved books.

  On this early-June morning, Laura was genuinely trying to be an unbiased observer of Port George, Maine, but her emotions—curiosity, eagerness, even a tiny sliver of fear—were getting in the way. Of course, they would be. The task she had set herself was challenging.

  After a hasty breakfast of toast and coffee, she had left the bed-and-breakfast into which she had booked herself the evening before. She had no particular route in mind, content for the moment to wander and take in the atmosphere of this Maine town. Before leaving her home in Connecticut, Laura had read up on Port George. It had been established in 1866. The Chamber of Commerce website stated that the population as of 2018 was just shy of ten thousand. Ninety-two percent of that population was Caucasian. There were a few Native American families, members of the Abenaki and Penobscot tribes. A tiny percent of Port George’s residents were black. It seemed always to have been a semi-important commercial hub, surrounded by thriving farms. Today, the majority of people still made their living in commerce. Some, not many, still farmed. A few commuted to and from larger towns for their employment. The streets were clean; this was a point of pride. The lampposts were old-fashioned, long since fitted with electric lights. It was a policy not to cut down trees for any reason other than that they were at risk for falling on someone’s house.

  The Port George Daily Chronicle had closed with little advance notice in 1998 due to falling circulation. No online archives were available to the public. The paper published in one of those larger towns in which residents of Port George had found employment provided local news.

  Why the town, not actually on the coast, had been called Port George was lost to history.

  So, what could possibly have drawn Laura Huntington to this decidedly average though charming enough town? The answer was both simple and not so simple.

  Upon her death years before, Laura’s adoptive mother, Cynthia Huntington, had left Laura a letter to be opened if she ever decided to try to locate her birth mother. Truth be told, Laura had never been interested in tracking down the woman who had given birth to her, not when she was thoroughly content with the people who had adopted and raised her so lovingly. And then, Jared Pence had come into Laura’s life, promising to love, honor, and cherish her until death did them part. For a while longer, Laura continued to be content to let the woman who had given birth to her remain unknown.

  But death had not parted Laura and her husband. Divorce had done that, and divorce had changed Laura. For the first time in her life she felt truly alone. Her parents were dead. Jared was gone. There was no other family. Except, maybe, for that anonymous woman.

  So, Laura had finally opened Cynthia Huntington’s letter to find that it contained the only clue Cynthia had been able to glean during the otherwise secretive adoption process. Laura’s birth mother had been a teen living in the town of Port George, Maine. No name. No physical description of the girl. No clue as to the father.

  Laura was not a professional investigator; she didn’t even particularly like detective stories, but she had been an academic before she had let being a wife interfere, and she had been taught how to research. To an extent. Thus far, her research had involved only documents—obscure texts, handwritten letters, diaries crammed with hard-to-read scrawls, even the occasional legal document. She had absolutely no experience in knocking on doors and asking a complete stranger if he knew anything about a teenage girl who, back in the fall of 1984, might have been sent away to give birth to her child in secret.

  Besides, only a very, very few people would know if such a thing had happened. That was the point. The birth and subsequent adoption had been a secret. And this woman who had given birth to Laura, whoever she was, assuming she was still alive and living in Port George, might not welcome the secrets of her past being made public. That was understandable. Laura had no interest in outing this woman.

  But Laura did want to learn all she could about the past, and to do that, she had to have some reason for asking what might seem like pesky or irrelevant questions of the Port George residents. So, she had devised what she hoped was a believable cover. She would tell people that she was an advance member of a podcast team, going from town to town as part of preliminary research for a broadcast that would explore the effect on a small community of a member’s having gone missing. Had anyone ever disappeared, say, back in the mid-1980s? Gone away and come back, oh, nine or ten months later? She might have to listen to lots of tales that began with “Back when my grandmother was a kid, that would be the 1920s, there was a guy who walked out of town one day and never came back, but I never heard tell it made much of a difference to anyone,” or “Legend has it that back in the day the Indians snuck into the old settlement in the middle of the night and kidnapped a few of the young girls, but I couldn’t say if that’s true or not.”

  Be that as it may. Laura’s birth mother—and, for that matter, her birth father—were indeed missing people, so she wasn’t really lying, and anyway, missing-person stories were popular with the general public. Hopefully, the guise would serve as a way into Port George. And if not, she would just have to think on her feet.

  Laura had come to the center of town. It looked much like the center of any old town you might find on a road trip through New England. A neatly kept green square, punctuated by beds of seasonal flowers, and in the center, a statue of a man wearing the uniform of the Northern Army. Iron benches placed at intervals around the park, each with a plaque of dedication. Maples. Oaks. And dominating the green space, on the north side of the square, a tall white church with a clock tower.

  It was a Tuesday morning, post–rush hour (if there was such a thing in Port George), and Laura, lowering herself onto one of the iron benches, was alone except for an elderly man across the square, reading a newspaper.

  She wondered what it would have been like to be a child in Port George twenty, thirty, even forty years ago, surrounded by farmland, only a short drive to the Atlantic Ocean. Where had the kids of Port George played? There might have been a public playground, and a ball field. There was always a ball field. Her mother would have passed that clock tower that soared over the square many times in her life. She might have sat under one of the ancient oaks, chatting with a friend, watching passersby. Had she been a cheerleader or a member of the debate team? Had she campaigned for a girls’ sports team? As difficult as it was to believe, girls’ sports teams weren’t exactly ubiquitous back in the 1980s.

  After a time, Laura continue
d her tour of Port George, passing a Methodist church set back on a neatly trimmed lawn. Had her mother’s family attended this church, or one of the other local churches, the Episcopal, or the Catholic? The Chamber of Commerce website stated that these three denominations had been represented in Port George for over a century.

  Where had her mother lived? In one of the big old houses that lined the streets perpendicular to Main Street? On one of the streets farther away from the heart of town—Laura had seen a few pictures online—in one of the smaller, newer houses? There were few economically distressed people in Port George now; had there been many at other times in the town’s history? Her mother might have been terribly poor, maybe the daughter of a farmer who had come upon hard times, maybe one of several children being raised by a single mother barely able to meet her monthly expenses, let alone help her teenage daughter raise a child of her own.

  And raising a child on one’s own presupposed that the father would not or could not help. Who was this male who had contributed to Laura Huntington’s life? Had he been a local boy, someone her mother had known from school? Had they gone to the prom together? Had they been going steady, or had their relationship been only a heated one-night stand after a wild, drunken party at a friend’s house?

  Or, Laura mused, passing a man about her own age dressed in a navy blazer, white shirt, and chinos, perhaps her father had been an older man of the community, a teacher or a minister going through a midlife crisis and finding a solution in a sexual relationship with a teenage girl. Maybe Laura’s origins had been even darker. Maybe her birth mother had been raped by a stranger or even by a family member. It was possible. Sadly, evil always was.

  Laura was no longer a wide-eyed romantic, but she still very much hoped that her mother had been in love with Laura’s father, and he with her, even if the love was only teen lust in disguise. Laura didn’t know if she could bear to learn that she was the daughter of a brutal cad. But she had set out on this quest knowing full well that she might discover joy as well as sorrow, happiness as well as pain.

  And the one question that might truly bring pain with its answer was this: Why had her birth mother given her up?

  Laura had never felt abandoned; from the moment she was born, she had been a part of a loving family. She had been chosen, pampered, and nurtured. She wasn’t angry about what life had given her. But she did want to know the truth.

  Might her mother have been eager to get rid of her unplanned child? Or had she been forced to give up her baby by her parents, assuming her parents had been alive at the time? For all Laura knew her mother had grown up with a grandparent; maybe she herself had been adopted. Laura understood that she might never know the answer to any of these questions. Even if she did locate her mother, and the woman agreed to meet, she might not want to admit to certain aspects of whatever had happened almost forty years ago. That was her right. That was okay. It would have to be okay.

  Laura turned a corner and found herself in the path of a middle-aged woman, dressed plainly in cargo shorts and an oversized button-down shirt. “I’m sorry,” Laura murmured as she stepped out of the woman’s way. The woman nodded and smiled as she passed. For all Laura knew, she thought, glancing quickly over her shoulder, that woman in the cargo shorts could be her mother.

  Had this anonymous person ever married? Had she gone on to have more children? If so, any of the people Laura might encounter in Port George between the age of about twenty and thirty-five might possibly be a sibling. Assuming her mother had stayed on in Port George to have a family. Assuming the children of that family had stayed on, as well.

  Assuming this. Assuming that.

  Laura felt her shoulders sag. It was all so frustrating, and yet, she had only just begun her quest. She should continue on, hope to glean some bit of emotional information from Port George itself, attempt to . . .

  Maybe later. It was time, Laura decided, to return to the Lilac Inn. She was tired. Normally, she didn’t take naps, but now wasn’t a normal time. Life might not be normal for a long while.

  Chapter 4

  Arden loved being alone at the shop before the business day began. It was then that she often thought about Margery Hopkins, the former owner and founder of Arden Forest, the woman who was responsible in many ways for giving Arden the good life she now enjoyed. Margery had been thrilled that her new shop assistant was called Arden. “It was meant to be,” she had pronounced happily at their first meeting. Maybe it had been. It wasn’t long before the two women had grown close. Margery had found in Arden Bell a sort of surrogate daughter. Arden had found not only a friend but a mentor and, even, a sort of guardian angel. When Margery passed away, Arden found herself in possession of Arden Forest as well as the rest of her friend’s modest estate.

  Like most if not all independent bookstores, Arden Forest sold new and “used” books. It was a pet peeve of Arden’s, that term used. There had to be a better word for a book that had been read by one person before being passed on to be read by another. You didn’t hear of used paintings or sculptures or films. Old items that might be considered more utilitarian—china or furniture or even jewelry—were referred to as vintage or antique or estate pieces. Not used. Was recycled any better? Maybe not. Previously owned, as secondhand cars were described? Were library books used?

  For a long time, Margery had resisted stocking items such as note cards, bumper stickers, and oversized pencils with erasers in the shape of maple leaves and lobsters. She had believed in the purity of a bookshop; she would sell books and only books, not even popular magazines or newspapers. While Arden tended to agree in principle, there was rent to pay and bills to meet and the competition of other bookstores in neighboring towns, let alone online venues such as Amazon, to consider. Eventually, Arden had convinced her mentor that integrity would not be lost if they broadened their offerings to include a few carefully selected book-related items. Hand-printed birthday and get-well cards; pretty bookmarks decorated with quotes from famous poems and novels; fancy pens; moleskin notebooks. Datebooks sold big in November and December, and miniboxes of chocolates made by one of the women in town were always a hit around the holidays. Popular impulse purchases such as magnifying reading glasses brought in a fair amount of cash.

  Even more popular than the chocolates, however, was the Arden Forest Book Club, in existence since the 1970s. Membership waxed and waned. Men—mostly older and retired and often single—occasionally joined, but the majority of the members always were women. Discussions were routinely lively and inspiring, and not until everyone who wanted to speak had spoken did the wine and cheese, crackers and cookies, come out. The book was paramount. The socializing was important but less so.

  Several times a year the shop hosted special events, such as the Fairytale Creating workshop, led by the Maine-based writer of fairy tales Deborah Eve Freedman. Last year’s Children’s Books for Adults miniseries had helped get people through a notoriously long winter. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy had been everyone’s favorite. The talk on memoir writing given by a lecturer at the University of Maine had drawn a huge crowd. Readings by local writers drew smaller crowds, but were always enjoyable.

  The book club met in a corner of the shop where two low couches were draped with clean quilts to hide the badly worn upholstery, with a few mismatched ladder-back chairs and a tufted velvet armchair that had many years before been salvaged from a hotel lobby in Portland. The once-magnificent chair always attracted one member of the book group, Mrs. Shandy, who looked nothing less than a dignified monarch seated in its depths. Mrs. Shandy had been the English teacher at the local grammar school for over forty years before she retired. She was a formidable source of knowledge—her specialty was nineteenth-century American writers—and a stickler for proper grammar even in conversation. Only once in Arden’s time did someone whom Mrs. Shandy had corrected midsentence have the nerve to argue that in conversation among friends the rules need not apply. Things had not gone well after that, but
still, Mrs. Shandy attended the next meeting of the book club unbowed and ready once again to correct members who got the use of lay and lie mixed up, or those who insisted on adding an r to the word idea.

  In spite of the shop’s moderate success, Arden couldn’t afford a full-time employee, but she was able to employ a part-time second-in-command. If the salary wasn’t great, the working conditions and the perks (such as first read of hot new titles) seemed to make up for that. For the past two years that part-time employee had been a young man named Brent Teakle. Arden dreaded the day Brent had saved enough money to leave Eliot’s Corner for a more cosmopolitan life in Boston. She would wish him well but she would sorely miss his energy, his attention to details, and, to be totally honest, his brawn. Boxes of books were heavy.

  Each summer, following Margery’s example, Arden chose two high school kids to intern. Interested candidates were asked to submit an essay on their relation to books and to provide two personal references, one from a teacher or counselor at school, and one from a friend or neighbor. This summer, Arden had chosen a fifteen-year-old boy from the public high school and a sixteen-year-old girl who was homeschooled. Zach was serious-minded and had decided to become a lawyer, and he seemed to be anticipating his responsibilities by conducting himself with a gravity beyond his years. In contrast, Elly had a bubbly personality, had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up, and, though she was very intelligent, didn’t much care about a career.

  Arden hoped the two kids would get along. Though both voracious readers—Zach favoring nonfiction and Elly, novels by contemporary writers—they were so different in temperament. Arden knew she could rely on Brent to negotiate any tensions. Brent was tough but fair with the interns, doling out responsibilities as if they were rewards, which in a way they were.