As usual, she got caught up in the view. From her hilltop perch she could see glimpses of Newport Harbor and of Narragansett Bay beyond it. At the moment, a big freighter was picking its way through a flock of tiny, feathery sails as it headed down the bay for other ports of call. The ship was high in the water. Whatever its cargo — cars, electronics, clothing — it had been emptied at the Port of Providence; now the ship was going back, probably to Asia, for more.
Liz tried not to think of the lost jobs the freighter represented and daydreamed instead about the magic of maritime trade. She knew — every Newporter knew — that much of Newport's old wealth had come from its deep involvement in trading with eighteenth-century China. From teas to trees to silks to willoware, everything pretty once seemed to have come from the Far East. Shipowners put the best pieces aside for themselves, and sold the rest, and got richer and richer. No one begrudged them back then, not if it meant they could have pretty blue dishes on their tables and silk dress goods for twenty-five cents a yard.
And red-lacquered boxes like the one Liz held in her hands. That it came from China, she had no doubt. Probably it had been offloaded from some square-rigger right here in Newport harbor in the days when Newport was still a major port of the United States. She was cradling a small token of the commerce that had enabled more than one man to build himself an imposing mansion on Newport's Gold Coast.
She thought of Jack Eastman and wondered where his money had came from. He had a certain Captain Bligh glint in his eye that made her think he could easily take a ship around the Horn. On the other hand, he looked like he'd be just as comfortable in the give-and-take of a trading session dockside. Heck, hadn't he just proved it?
Well, he might have his empire, but she had her red box. And she had no intention of destroying it, only to discover it was empty.
But it wasn't empty. It couldn't be. What Liz needed, she decided, was a locksmith; he'd be able to pick the lock in two seconds flat. She dusted herself off, changed, and was on her way out the door when she saw Victoria pulling onto the graveled parking area in front of the rose arbor — the rose arbor that had sealed Liz's decision to buy the house.
Victoria had Susy in the back seat of her BMW. As always, Liz's heart sang a bright song at the sight of her five-year-old daughter. As always, the thought hurtled through her mind that, if Keith had had his way ....
But he hadn't, and for that, Liz was more grateful than anyone else on earth.
"Hi, honey," she said to the child. "You must've had a good time."
Her daughter waved through the open window and unbuckled her seat belt in a very grown-up way, then got out and skipped over into her mother's waiting arms for a hug.
"Aunty Tori let me get a milkshake for dessert!"
"And you were able to drink it all?" asked Liz, glancing at Victoria with amazement.
"Well, no," Susy confessed. "Aunty Tori had to help me a little."
Victoria reassured Liz by holding her thumb and forefinger two inches apart. Two inches of milkshake wasn't so awful; Susy'd have her appetite back by suppertime. "Well, just so you know you can't have a special dessert like that every day," Liz said gravely.
"Oh, Mommy," said Susy, as if she were well aware that she didn't have a prayer.
For Liz, one of the the hardest things about sharing Susy with her parents and Victoria on a regular basis was trying to keep Susy's diet honest. It was so tempting to let them ply her with treats, so tempting for Liz herself to bribe Susy whenever she had to farm her out on a sunny weekend or a big holiday, which was inevitably when Liz had to work.
Life would've been so much easier if Keith had chosen to stick around.
Susy was peeking into the shopping bag that sat on the ground next to her mother. "What's this, Mommy? A present for someone?"
Liz smiled at her daughter's subtle fishing expedition and rumpled her dark-brown hair. "It's a box I found in the attic," she said, lifting it out for her daughter and Victoria to see. "It's locked, so I'm going to take it to someone who can open it for me. Do you want to come?"
While Susy considered her options, Victoria asked, "For heaven's sake, how did you get into the attic?"
"Jigsaw," said Liz, rolling her eyes at the memory. "I made an ungodly mess; I haven't even swept it up yet. I found a trunk of old letters sealed away, and this was in with them." -
"No kidding?"
Susy was tugging at her mother's hand. "Mommy? I think maybe I don't want to go. I think. . . maybe I should have some quiet time," she said with a tentative look in her big brown eyes.
Stomachache, dammit. Liz threw Victoria a scolding glance, then said to her daughter, "Okay, sweetie. I'll take the box to the locksmith some other time."
"Liz, just go; I'll stay with Susy," said Victoria amiably. She held out her hand to the little girl and said, "You can have quiet time while I tell you another adventure of the Princess and the Magic Petunia."
Susy was all for that, which left Liz with mixed feelings. Her daughter's early years were precious ones, and on Liz's deathbed she was going to want every lost moment of them. She felt guilty for wanting to open the box ... but she wanted desperately to open the box.
"Okay, then, sunshine. I'll be right back."
****
Jimmy's Lock and Key was located in a peeling colonial house, one of the many historic buildings, most of them updated, that lined both sides of downtown Thames Street. The concept of gentrification, however, had not yet occurred to Jimmy; his ancient, tattered shop was a jumble of new brass hardware, carousels of key blanks, and boxes of mysterious metal innards. Liz laid the red-lacquered box on the painted plywood counter and said, "Can you get it open without damaging it?"
Jimmy, a bulldozer of a man who could probably pry open a locked safe with one arm tied behind his back, picked up the box in his thick, stubby hands and said, "Shouldn't be too hard. Where'd you get it — flea market, or antique shop?"
"Neither. It was in the sealed-in attic of the house I've just bought, along with a bunch of old letters. Isn't that weird? If this box were bigger, I'd be afraid of finding someone's bones in it," Liz said with a self-conscious laugh.
"Or ashes," said Jimmy, shaking it back and forth the way Liz had.
Ashes! She hadn't thought of ashes. "Can you pick the lock?" she asked with more dread than before.
Jimmy shrugged and reached under the counter. "Won't need to, maybe." He brought out an El Producto cigar box and flipped open the cardboard top. "Let's see what we got in here," he said, pushing an assortment of tiny keys around in the box. "Sometimes we get lucky."
His eye lit on a little brass key that must've looked promising. He picked it up and tried inserting it. No luck. He tried another. Ditto. Liz's hopes began to sag. Then he pulled out a third key, a tiny key turned dark with age, and tried that one.
"Well, well," he said, obviously pleased as the key turned smoothly in the lock. "Nothin's frozen."
What Jimmy did next showed he had an instinct either for chivalry or for caution, Liz never did figure out which: he turned the box around to face her so that she could open it herself.
Liz bit her lower lip and laid both her hands gently on the lid. She'd half convinced herself that there was an important letter wedged inside, or a map, a treasure map left behind by Captain Kidd. But she did not want ashes.
Slowly, expectantly, she raised the lid. Almost at once her ears seemed to ring, as though somewhere in the far, far distance, someone were playing an instrument. A chime, perhaps: a single-noted chime whose echo began to fill the room with its extraordinary tone.
She was confused; she thought perhaps the box was some sort of music box or that — bizarrely — it was rigged to sound an alarm when opened. But the tone stayed with her, filling her head with its melodious note.
"Well? What've we got?" asked Jimmy.
"I ... what?" Liz asked, hardly registering the question.
The inside of the box was lined with rich black satin, and on
the satin sat a heart-shaped pin. The heart itself was open and gold, shaped into a twining leafy pattern. The inside point of the heart ended in a tiny red stone sitting on five gold petals. It was very pretty, but worth less, probably, than the box it was pinned to.
"Are you all right, miss?"
The single, chiming note became more intense as Liz reached into the box and gently released the heart from its satin anchor. "A pin," she murmured. Her own heart had taken off at a flyaway rate; her hands began unaccountably to tremble. The silvery ringing in her ears ... was she about to faint? "It's a pin," she repeated in a whisper, unbelievably distressed.
"Oh, yeah," said Jimmy with a sideways tilt of his balding head. "Very nice. Got any idea how long it was sealed away?" he asked.
"I ... do not. The house was built in the thirties," Liz said, shaking her head, trying to rid herself of the ringing sound. She took a deep breath or two and looked around the shop in confusion, then said, "Do you have an appliance somewhere that makes some kind of high-pitched sound?"
"The fridge out back drives me nuts," Jimmy volunteered.
"No, no ... this is more ... beautiful, than that."
"Beautiful?"
"And scary."
"Scary?" He frowned and said, "An appliance?"
"Maybe your neighbors have chimes hanging outside?" she asked him without much hope.
"Chimes! Don't get me started on chimes," Jimmy said, snorting. "Damned clanging pipes. As if we don't have enough noise blastin' outta car speakers all summer long. The traffic eventually dies down; you can catch an hour or two of quiet at night. But chimes! All day, all night ... chimes just keep chiming. Chimes in the city," he said pontifically, "are not a good idea."
"Yes, like that," Liz whispered, ignoring his speech. "You have some nearby?"
"No," he answered grimly. "Not anymore."
She needed some air. She slid the pin back into its satin cushion and closed the red box. The silvery, penetrating sound ceased at once.
That left Liz more disturbed than before. She wanted to lift up the lid, just to test the box, but she was so grateful for the quiet, the peace, that she let it stay closed.
"I guess my ears were ringing," she said in a clumsy lie. "How much do I owe you for the key, then?"
Jimmy flapped a beefy hand at her and said, "Ah, nothin'. It's just an old key."
"Thank you," Liz said, still in a subdued voice. "That's awfully nice." Afraid that she wasn't seeming properly grateful, she took a business card from her purse and handed it to the locksmith. "If I can ever return the favor. . ."
Jimmy read the card. "Parties, eh? Well, I got grandkids, and no mistake. Do you have one of them Barney getups available?"
Liz smiled wanly and left with her red box and her new old key.
Buy Time After Time
BELOVED Sample
Antoinette Stockenberg
"Richly rewarding … a novel to be savored."
--Romantic Times Magazine
A Nantucket cottage by the sea: the inheritance is a dream come true for Jane Drew. Too bad it comes with a ghost —and a soulfully seductive neighbor who'd just as soon boot Jane off the island.
Chapter 1
"Do you think she's really dead?"
"Man, we don't even know if she's in there." The boy reached out a grimy hand and laid it gingerly on the closed lid of the gleaming casket.
His pal — younger, cleaner, better behaved — sucked in his breath. "You're not supposed to touch it!"
"What's she gonna do? Open it and come after us?" The older boy's voice was defiant; but he glanced around furtively, then rubbed away his smudge marks with the sleeve of his jacket. "Come on, let's go. It looks like we have to take their word for it."
Watching the two from her seat in the front row of folding chairs, Jane Drew tried not to smile. You never should've kept their baseballs, Aunt Sylvia. Fifty years from now they'll still be saying you were a witch.
The kids made a run for the door around a plain-dressed woman, who promptly collared the younger one.
"Walk. This is a place of respect."
The boy squirmed out of her grip, then walked briskly the rest of the way out. The woman, sixty and bulky, shifted her handbag from her right forearm to her left and glanced tentatively around the room, taking in the closed coffin, Jane, and the two visitors chatting quietly in the back.
Jane went up to the new arrival. "I'm Jane Drew, Sylvia Merchant's great-niece," she said with a smile.
The visitor stuck out a well-worn hand. "How do you do. I'm Mrs. Adamont. Adele Adamont. I work at the A&P where Mrs. Merchant shopped," she explained. "I wanted to pay my respects because, well ..." She nodded to the empty chairs. "You see for yourself. When a widow has nobody, this is how it ends up."
Surprised by the islander's bluntness, Jane said something dutiful about her great-aunt having outlived most of her friends.
"Oh, no; she never had none, not that I recall," Mrs. Adamont said evenly. "Everyone on Nantucket knew that. They say her husband died in the First World War; I suppose she never got over it. She was always one to say good morning, but never one to stop and pass the time of day. She was funny that way. How old was she?" the woman added.
"My aunt had just turned ninety-four. The last two years were hard for her," Jane volunteered. "She didn't like living in a nursing home, away from Nantucket."
"I did wonder why she decided to go into a home off-island. Was she all right — you know — up there?"
"Sharp as a tack," Jane said, taken aback again.
Leave it to an islander to think anyone living on the mainland must be insane. Jane racked her memory, trying to remember whether her aunt had ever mentioned a Mrs. Adamont. But the visitor was right; Sylvia Merchant had had little interest in other people. In the nursing home she'd reminisced about her house, and her garden, and the two cats who'd shared it with her. Books were important to her. So were movies: she'd had a VCR in her room, and her own copy of Casablanca. But as for friends and neighbors ....
"She did give me zucchini from her garden once," Mrs. Adamont said, as if that were reason enough to pay her last respects. "So then, you're all there is for family?"
"Almost," Jane answered, drawing herself up to her full five-feet-seven, trying to make up for lost relatives. "There's an elderly cousin no longer able to travel. I have a sister living on the West Coast, and of course my parents; but unfortunately they're in Europe right now." Not that they'd come in any event, Jane knew. Other than an occasional exchange of Christmas cards, there'd been no contact between her parents and Sylvia Merchant for decades.
Mrs. Adamont looked Jane up and looked Jane down and Jane's first thought was that the pale gray suit she was wearing just wasn't funereal enough.
"I see. You're the one who'll be getting the house, then." Jane blinked. She was thirty-three; a career woman (even if an unemployed one); and reasonably sophisticated. Hosting a wake shouldn't have been a daunting social challenge—but this portly, plain-spoken visitor wasn't making it easy.
"As a matter of fact ...."
As a matter of fact the cottage was Jane's now. She'd found that out just two hours earlier from her aunt's attorney when he picked her up at the ferry.
"Oh, you don't have to say if you don't want to, dear," Adele Adamont said, seeing that Jane was reluctant to talk about it. "Everyone will know soon enough. You're not actually staying at Lilac Cottage, are you? The place does need work. Well, never mind. All in good time. Let me just say my good-byes to poor Sylvia. She had a long life, and — despite all the silly gossip — who's to say it wasn't a good one?"
Mrs. Adamont wrapped her coat around herself a little more snugly and approached the coffin. She bowed her gray head and murmured a short prayer, ending it with the sign of the cross, a kind smile for Jane, and a purposeful exit. She had done her duty to the deceased.
The two women visitors in the back — elderly sisters who had no idea who Sylvia Merchant was but who never mi
ssed a wake in town — left shortly afterward. For the next hour and a half Jane sat alone in the second row, her heart steadily filling up with sorrow, unwilling or unable to believe that no one else would be coming.
Finally, ten minutes before the end of the wake, someone did show.
He was a few years older than Jane and had the look of a man who's had to juggle his schedule ruthlessly to find the time to break away. He nodded to Jane and walked directly up to the casket, where he stood for a moment of quiet reflection.
As for Jane, she could hardly keep from staring. He was almost the first person under sixty that she'd seen all day, tall and good-looking and handsomely dressed, with an air of quiet confidence. He was, she knew at once, a man of some success.
He turned to Jane again, his face sympathetic. It was a handsome face, chiseled to near-perfection and framed by dark hair.
"I'm sorry to barge in so late," he said.
Jane had become so used to the thick sound of silence that she jumped a little. "Not at all; I'm glad you've come," she said, as if his showing up made a quorum. "I'm Jane Drew."
"Sylvia's great-niece. Of course. I'm glad to meet you at last. Phillip Harrow," he said, taking her hand in his. "I'm sorry about your great-aunt, Miss Drew," he said softly. "Ninety-four is a wonderful old age, but a hundred and ninety-four would have been better still."
Somehow Jane didn't want to argue with him, didn't want to admit that just a month earlier her aunt had slammed her tiny fist on the bedstand and shouted, "I'm ready to go, goddammit!" So Jane nodded and said simply, "Yes." She added, "How did you know my aunt?"
"She was a neighbor. She —"
Just then the funeral director, his lips pursed in sympathy, appeared in the entryway; it was time to close up shop. Phillip Harrow acknowledged him with a somber "Evening, Fred," and turned back to Jane. "I'm leaving the island tonight. I'm sorry — I won't be attending the funeral," he said, his voice low with regret.
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