Town in a Pumpkin Bash

by B. B. Haywood

  “This is Ellis, a year or so after we came out here to the island,” said Nettie, pointing to the man in the picture. “He was quite handsome, wasn’t he? And so good with his hands.”

  She then tapped at the image of the taller woman who stood next to the skinny young girl. “I don’t suppose you know who this is?”

  Candy did. It came to her in a rush.

  It was the same woman whose portrait she’d seen hanging in the front hall at Pruitt Manor.

  “That’s Abigail Pruitt.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  There was no mistaking it. In the photograph, Abigail’s clothes were unadorned yet well made, and her accessories looked expensive. She had the same firm set of the mouth, the same long nose, the same high cheekbones and pointed chin.

  The same stern, scary demeanor.

  “But what was Abigail Pruitt doing out here on the island?” Candy asked, looking up at Nettie. “And what did she have to do with Emma?”

  In response, the caretaker’s wife sat back down in her chair, clasping her hands on her lap, remembering. In a soft, even tone, she said, “I remember it was late spring—May, I think. We cleaned the house for a week before she arrived. We didn’t know who she was at first. We heard an important visitor was coming out to the estate for a visit. There was to be some sort of celebration. We heard it had something to do with Emma, but again, we didn’t know exactly what. So we worked our fingers to the bone to make the place shine. Ellis toiled on the yards until well after dark for several nights in a row to make sure the place looked nice. And on a Tuesday morning, our important visitor arrived in a private boat, spent most of her time in private talks with Cornelia, attended a brief party—a dreary, low-key affair, from what I’ve heard—and left on the boat that same afternoon, well before dinnertime. She was on the island for less than four hours, and seemed to barely notice all the work we’d done. In fact, she said practically nothing to us at all, and we were told not to speak to her unless she addressed us first. So we didn’t. Mostly they kept us in the dark.”

  Nettie paused, her gaze flicking to her guest and then out the window. “We didn’t know much about the island in those days. We’d only recently arrived ourselves. Ellis had been working as an electrician and maintenance man in Brunswick when he saw the ad in the local newspaper. We drove up to visit the place and fell in love with it. How could we not? We were just youngsters then, looking for a better life. I was still in my mid-twenties, and Ellis eight years older. Cornelia was the one who interviewed and hired us, and she’s the one who paid us. She was a widow who lived out here much of the year, even during the winter months. Back in those days, when we first arrived, she had several servants with her over there at the estate, including two maids, but she told us she needed a maintenance man to help with the upkeep of the place and extra help inside as well, so she hired us both after carefully checking our references. It changed our lives. We had a place to live and a future. Ellis took care of the house and worked on the yards and gardens, and I helped clean the place and did the laundry. Cornelia also had a cook back then, so we didn’t have to worry much about that. But everything changed when she came to live here.”

  A stab of Nettie’s eyes, which then returned to the sea, indicated the photo of Emma.

  “When was that?” Candy asked, looking back down at the faces in the image.

  “Well, let’s see. Ellis and I came here to the island in the spring of 1965—April, to be exact. I remember it was still very cold and raw out here on the island when we moved into the caretaker’s cottage. And Emma arrived that fall.”

  At that point, Nettie paused as she considered her previous statements. But finally she nodded. “Yes, I’m sure that’s right,” she said, reassuring herself. “Emma was living at the estate for our first Christmas here, so she arrived later that same year.”

  “And you said everything changed after her arrival. How did it change?”

  Nettie took a deep breath as she collected her thoughts. “Well, the atmosphere at the house changed. It became very secretive. There were lots of whispers in the hallways and behind closed doors. Within weeks of Emma’s arrival, both maids were let go. Then they found a new cook who lived on the mainland, and only came out to the house during the day. Ellis and I were the only ones Cornelia kept on the permanent staff, probably because we didn’t live at the big house like the other servants—we had a place of our own, here on the north side of the island, hidden out of sight. Cornelia took advantage of that to ensure her privacy. She changed our work schedules as well. She allowed us to work at the big house only at appointed hours. Ellis mostly worked out there in the mornings, for instance, and then in the afternoons he helped out at some of the other properties on the island, and for a while he even took some work on the mainland. And I worked at the estate only two days a week, usually in the mornings as well, helping with the laundry. Both of us dealt directly with Cornelia but we rarely saw the girl—Emma. She was kept hidden away in her room. She almost never came out. In the entire time she was here, over a period of several years, I probably saw her no more than a dozen times. I rarely spoke to her. Even when I did, it was only to exchange brief pleasantries. I never had a conversation with her.”

  Nettie pointed to the photo again. “That picture was taken about a year after we arrived, on the day Abigail came out on the boat. As I mentioned, it was a special occasion of some sort. Later, Ellis told me it had been a birthday party.”

  “For Emma?” Candy looked down at the photo again, studying the skinny girl in her crisply pressed white linen dress and shiny black shoes, with her hair neatly curled.

  Emma’s wearing a birthday dress, she realized.

  She looked back up at Nettie, who nodded. “After we’d cleaned up the place for Abigail’s visit, I helped Cornelia put up a few decorations around the place. I wasn’t allowed at the party itself—they said it was a private affair—but the cook was there, and Ellis. He said he was asked to witness the signing of a document by Emma.”

  Candy’s brow fell. “What sort of document?”

  Nettie shrugged. “Ellis never found out. He said he wasn’t allowed to see the whole thing—just the last page. He wasn’t sure he should have signed it without reading it, but he told me later that he felt he didn’t have much choice in the matter. He said it was a legal document of some sort, brought out by the woman we later learned was Abigail Pruitt. That’s when they took the photo—after they’d signed the document. As I said, it was some sort of commemoration, we thought—or a documentation.”

  “But commemorating what?” Candy asked, still confused. “What was Abigail’s connection to the whole thing?”

  Nettie arched an eyebrow. “We asked ourselves the same question, but Ellis finally figured it out,” she answered. “It was something Cornelia let slip at one point during the day—she said something to Ellis about her sister.”

  “Her sister?”

  Suddenly it dawned on Candy, and she looked back down noticing the resemblance between the two adult women. “That’s it, isn’t it? Cornelia and Abigail were sisters!”

  And it struck her then. Abigail’s initials, which she’d seen on the stationery on her writing desk, were A.W.P.

  Abigail Wren Pruitt.

  “We believe so,” Nettie said with a nod. “But as I’ve explained, we didn’t know the whole story for many years, until after Cornelia passed away. But finally we were able to patch together at least some of it, from bits and pieces of conversations we heard while working around the house. As best we could determine, Emma had been living in an orphanage in Lewiston when they found her and brought her out to the estate.”

  “An orphanage?”

  It fit exactly with what Finn had told her that morning. The paperwork found in the folder sitting on the front seat of Sebastian J. Quinn’s car had dated back to the nineties, and gave the home address for a woman named Emma Smith as an orphanage in Lewiston, run by the Sisters of Charity.

  They�
��d found Emma in an orphanage.

  Candy looked up at Nettie again. “Who found her?” she pressed. “In the orphanage? Who found her there?”

  The elderly woman thought about it a moment, but finally shook her head. “I don’t know. As I said, they kept it all hushed up. Cornelia never spoke about it with us—she only told us what was needed around the house—and Emma certainly never said anything to us about her background. She was a very reserved girl, very shy, and lived under the ever-watchful eye of Cornelia. As I’ve said, she never left the property, and rarely left her room. It was as if she was imprisoned in the place. That’s why we were only allowed to come out to the estate at specific times, we soon came to realize. They wanted to control our access to Emma. They didn’t want anyone else to speak to her, or to even know she was there.”

  “But why? Why were the sisters so secretive?”

  Nettie pressed her thin lips together and again shook her head.

  Candy took a sip of tea, thinking. There were so many questions twirling around her head, she didn’t know what to ask next. Finally, she said, “So what happened to her? To Emma, I mean?”

  Nettie pursed her lips, and her eyes became shadowed. “Cornelia had her first stroke in 1970. She was in the hospital and then the rehabilitation clinic for several months as she recuperated. In her absence, Abigail returned to the big house on occasion, and spent a few nights there, but mostly she stayed at her sister’s bedside. When Cornelia finally returned to the island, she was never the same. She spent the last few years of her life in a nursing home. During that time, Abigail continued to check in at the big house from time to time, but Emma stayed out at the estate mostly on her own. Ellis still kept up the place and I still did the laundry, and the cook still came out during the day. But Emma stayed in her room. The place became like a ghost house. Most days, when I was there cleaning, there was not a sound inside that building other than my footsteps as I did my chores around the place.”

  “You didn’t talk to her?” Candy asked.

  Nettie shook her head. “She never came out of her room. I believe she did her best to avoid us. We used to leave her meals on a tray outside her door, and she would only open it after we were gone.”

  Candy shivered, thinking of what a lonely life that must have been, and what could the young girl have possibly done to condemn her to it? “How long did that go on?” she asked.

  “For some time,” Nettie admitted. “I felt so bad for that girl, but nothing I tried could get her to talk to us. Eventually Abigail hired a governess to watch over her—a very strict Catholic woman by the name of Mrs. Murphy. I think she might have been a nun once, or perhaps she still was one, though she never wore a habit. She did tend to favor dark colors though. For some reason she didn’t like me much, I can tell you that. She followed me around as I worked, pointing out any spots I’d missed or chore I’d forgotten. But Ellis got along with her fairly well.” She smiled wistfully. “Ellis got along well with just about everyone. He was just that type of person. Anyway, Mrs. Murphy kept Emma on an even tighter leash than before, if that was possible. I wasn’t allowed upstairs at all, and for the most part, Ellis was kept out of the house as well. She was here for a year or so, until Cornelia passed on. And then, one day, shortly after that, Emma was gone too.”

  “What happened to her?” Candy was almost breathless.

  Nettie looked out the window one last time, then rose to clear away the tea service. “No one knows,” she said as she worked. “I heard that Abigail searched everywhere for her but couldn’t find her. They read Cornelia’s last will and testament, and Ellis and I learned that we’d been given this cottage. After Abigail passed on, lawyers took over the estate. We always thought it might have been left to Emma, but we never saw her again…until…”

  “Until she was buried here,” Candy finished for her.

  The elderly woman nodded. “Even that was done in secret. They must have brought her body in at night, by boat. We didn’t even know about it for a week or so, until one day Ellis was tending to the cemetery, and there it was—that gravestone with just her first name on it.”

  Candy filed all this information away, along with everything else she’d learned over the past few days. She had an even stronger feeling now that everything was connected, and that she was close to putting all the pieces of the puzzle together.

  But there were still a few pieces missing.

  She closed the photo album and sat staring at its cover for several moments, until she finally pushed it back across the table, thinking as Nettie finished cleaning off the table. She was over at the kitchen sink when Candy turned to her and asked, “Who owns it now—the estate?”

  Nettie stopped what she was doing and faced Candy, wiping her hands on a towel as she spoke. “I believe it’s currently being held in some sort of a trust,” she said, “though I couldn’t say for sure. Every once in a while, someone in a suit stops by to check on the place, and occasionally a workman comes out and makes repairs. But no one’s lived there in quite a while. I’ve heard there’s talk they might sell the place, though that rumor’s been going around for some time, and there’s still no for-sale sign on the gate. So it sits out there on the point, deserted.”

  “Hmm.” It struck Candy as odd that such a prime piece of property on this busy stretch of the coast should sit empty for so long. Surely there must be an heir somewhere who would want to get his or her hands on it—and whatever fortune went along with it.

  So why was the place kept in limbo like that? Candy wondered. It seemed like such a waste.

  Unless, she thought, there was a reason behind it.

  Maybe the reason was simply to keep people away from the place.

  But why?

  Again, the only obvious answer was Emma.

  On an impulse, Candy reached into her daypack and pulled out her notebook. She flipped back to her most recent entries: the texts of the inscriptions she’d seen on Emma’s tombstone.

  “There are two Latin phrases engraved on Emma’s stone,” Candy said to Nettie, and she laid her notebook flat on the table, angling it so the elderly woman could see what she’d written. Candy did her best to read the phrases correctly; she’d missed Latin in high school. “One says, Deus pascit corvos and the other reads, sapiens qui assiduos.” She looked over at Nettie. “Do you have any idea what those phrases might mean?”

  Nettie had walked back to the table, and now she looked down at the phrases in front of her, a melancholy smile on her face. “I never took Latin myself,” she said, “but Ellis did. He was classically trained, despite his vocation. He had four years of Latin, so he told me what those passages meant.”

  “And what do they mean?” Candy asked.

  “Well, let me see. I believe Deus pascit corvos translates to God feeds the ravens, and sapiens qui assiduos means he is wise who is industrious. Or something like that. I have the exact wording written down somewhere around here.”

  Candy’s face twisted.

  God feeds the ravens?

  He is wise who is industrious?

  They sounded like old, random sayings. “What do they mean?” she asked.

  “Well, it was Ellis’s idea that they were family mottoes. We never thought about it much more than that, until one day, about a year after Emma disappeared, we received a box in the mail. It was from her. When we opened it up, we were surprised to find some of her mementoes inside, including that photo I showed you, and a book or two. She wrote us only the briefest of notes, saying she had moved far away but wanted us to hold on to the items for her. She never explained why, and she never came back for them.”

  Candy was intrigued. “You say you found some books in the box? What kinds of books?”

  “Well, that’s the interesting thing,” Nettie answered, suddenly animated. “One was a volume of Pruitt history, and on an inside page there’s an image of the Pruitt family crest. You’ll understand once you see it. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Again, th
e elderly woman crossed the room, but this time she climbed a steep set of wooden stairs to the second floor, where Candy assumed the bedrooms were located. Candy could hear her moving around up there. Nettie was gone for several minutes before she came back down and into the kitchen.

  “Here it is,” she said, cradling a box perhaps two feet square. “I had to look for it. It was in the back of a closet. I almost thought I’d lost it there for a few minutes.”

  As she set the box down on the table, Candy rose from her seat. She watched as Nettie delicately opened the box’s four flaps, folding them back one at a time.

  As Nettie had said, inside were a girl’s mementoes—a mirror and hairbrush, a small doll, ribbons and necklaces, as well as two old hardcover books and a few faded color photographs. The photos showed a young, pale woman with a painfully solemn expression, though in one of the images, in which she held an infant, she smiled wistfully. The photos were perhaps twenty or thirty years old, Candy guessed.

  “That’s Emma, I presume,” she said, pointing to the young woman in the photos. With her pinky she indicated the infant. “And who’s this?”

  Nettie shrugged and shook her head. “We don’t know.”

  Candy hesitated. “May I?” she asked, and when Nettie nodded, she reached inside the box and took out the photos. She studied them closely for a few moments, and then flipped each one over to check the back. But she found no writing, nothing to identify the date or the people in the images.

  She placed the photos back in the box and retrieved the two hardcover books.

  The smaller one was a well-read copy of Walden by Thoreau. Candy opened it gently to peer through the pages, and as she thumbed through, she found several small wildflowers pressed and dried between thin slips of colored paper.

  Candy smiled. She’d done much the same thing when she’d been younger.