The Passions of Chelsea Kane

by Barbara Delinsky

  His face darkened. “I wouldn’t joke about those.”

  “Have you heard them since you’ve been working?”

  “The noise scares them off.”

  “Come on, Hunter,” she scoffed. As far as she was concerned, the mere fact that he had been willing to work on the house proved the voices were a hoax. She figured it was his own private joke.

  “Just wait. When you’re living there all alone, you’ll hear them. They come from the secret passageway.”

  She grew alert. “What secret passageway?”

  “The one behind the fireplace. That’s what I wanted you to see.”

  “Secret passageway?” Chelsea repeated in excitement. She tried to picture it. “Where does it lead?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Incredible.” Her mind went to work. “Do you think there are others?”

  “Sure, with skeletons lying inside. The place is haunted, I tell you. Want to change your mind about living there?”

  “No way!” she said. “Secret passageways are great!” In her book, the discovery of one upped the value of the house immeasurably. “What if that farmhouse was a stop on the Underground Railroad? Just think of the history in those walls!”

  Hunter looked bored. “History was never my thing. Just tell me what you want to do with the door. You want it plastered over—“

  “No!”

  “Secret passageways can be dangerous.”

  “No more so than the ride you just gave me.” She looked at the motorcycle. She wasn’t wild about climbing back on with Hunter at the controls. “How about you let me drive?”

  “Uh-uh.” He reached for his helmet.

  “If you drive the way you did before, I’ll be sick again.”

  He handed her the second helmet. She hesitated before putting it on. “Hunter?”

  “You’ll be safe.”

  “Safe is one thing, sick is another. That didn’t feel real good.”

  “Neither will your legs come morning.” He pulled on his helmet. Through the mouthpiece he said, “That was poison ivy you walked through on your way to the brook.”

  She stared at her legs, which were bare from her upper calves to her ankles. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You had more urgent things on your mind. Besides, you should’ve known what poison ivy looked like.”

  “How would I know?” she asked in dismay. “I’ve never lived in the woods before.” She looked at her legs again. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Yeah. Pray you’re not allergic to the stuff.”

  “Swell,” she muttered, and watched him mount the cycle.

  “Are you coming?” he asked, starting the machine.

  She glanced down the road. “What are my chances of someone else passing by and picking me up?”

  “Slight. Very slight.”

  “How long will it take me to walk?”

  “It’s up and down, kind of roundabout. A couple of hours, I’d say.”

  Chelsea could be stubborn. She could be defiant, rebellious, and impulsive. But she wasn’t dumb. She had long since learned not to cut off her nose to spite her face. If she didn’t want to be walking on strange roads for the better part of the day, she had to climb back on Hunter’s machine.

  Helmet in hand, she walked over to him. “Okay. I’m riding with you. But if I get sick again, I’m not yelling first. Got that?”

  The look in Hunter’s eyes just before he lowered his visor said that he had.

  THERE WERE THREE SECRET PASSAGEWAYS IN CHELSEA’S FARMhouse. One ran behind the fireplace and up narrow steps into an upstairs closet. Another was little more than a hidden storage room behind the kitchen pantry. The third started at a trapdoor in the basement and ran into an underground tunnel for ten feet before ending in a wall of earth.

  Chelsea was sure that the hidden passages had once had a purpose. She was dying to find out what it was but had no time to look. With Hunter speeding up work on Boulderbrook, she added buying basic furnishings to her long list of things to do. If she wasn’t shopping in Concord or Manchester, she was on the phone, first from her room at the inn, then, once the lines were installed, from the office over the Quilters Guild. The personal clients she had left behind in Baltimore needed frequent reassurance that she was doing their work, and increasingly, in response to the letters she wrote, she received calls from the potential granite market. On top of that, the Hunt-Omni had indeed been sold for conversion into condos, which meant that she was spending what few free minutes she had designing.

  For all her talk of putting the drafting table under a skylight in the attic, she never seemed to get to drawing until sundown, but that didn’t bother her. She plugged in a small radio tuned to soft classical music, adjusted her lamps, one on each side to minimize shadows, taped down her paper, and went to work. She kept handy a thermos of tea from the inn, as well as a lap quilt that she’d bought from the guild. Given the chill of Norwich Notch evenings, she made frequent use of both.

  ON THE FIRST OF JULY, SHE RETURNED TO BALTIMORE FOR several days of catch-up at Harper, Kane, Koo.

  Carl was there. She felt awkward with him and, for the first time, wondered whether the firm would survive what had happened.

  Cydra was dismayed when she mentioned it. “You can’t fold,” she protested as they ran. “The firm is too successful. You’ve made it so. It’s yours. Norwich Notch is only temporary.”

  “True. But if things are odd with Carl now, think of what they’ll be like later.” She couldn’t envision Carl looking at her ballooning stomach during the day and Hailey’s ballooning stomach at night. The situation was absurd.

  “When will you tell him?” Cydra asked.

  “I don’t know. I tell myself to do it. Then I wonder whether I should.”

  “It’s his child.”

  “But he’s married to Hailey. Their relationship will be strained if they learn I’m pregnant, and what good would that do? I don’t want anything from him. I can have this baby myself.” She reached down and slapped at her leg as she ran.

  “What about your dad?”

  That bothered her more than the other. “Moot point. He’s in Michigan for the holiday.”

  “You have to tell him.”

  “I wanted to do it over the Fourth.” She still felt the disappointment of that. The Fourth of July had always been a time spent with family and friends. She liked it that way.

  Grabbing Cydra’s arm, she stopped them both dead in the street. “Fly back with me, Cydra. The Fourth in the Notch will be an adventure. I guarantee it. Fly back with me. I want you to see the place.” She rubbed her shoe over the back of her leg.

  Cydra looked torn. “I wish I could, but my brother is at the Jersey shore. It’s his first summer separated from Ginger. He has the kids. I promised I’d visit.”

  Chelsea might have guessed that Cydra had plans; still, it had been worth a shot. Not that she wouldn’t be busy. She intended to experience the Fourth of July in the Notch from start to finish. But it would have been nice to share it with a friend.

  They started running again. After several minutes Cydra asked, “Do you like it up there?”

  “I think so. I’ve been so involved in setting things up that I haven’t had much time to relax. I’m hoping to do that this week.”

  “Have the people been friendly?”

  “Some. Some resent me.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Sure, it bothers me. I’ve always been one to have friends around. I miss that. I miss running with you.” She had been trying to convince Donna to run, so far with no luck. She could see that Donna was tempted, but something held her back.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be there,” Cydra said. “Being pregnant, you ought to be with people you know. If something happened and you needed help, how would you get it?”

  “By dialing 911. Come on, Cydra. Norwich Notch isn’t the end of the w
orld.” She scratched her shin.

  Cydra was the one to grab her arm this time and stop. “What is that rash?” she asked, looking at Chelsea’s legs. “Hives?”

  “Poison ivy. I had a run-in with a patch. This is the tail end. You should have seen it last week.”

  “Thank God I didn’t.” She bent over for a closer look at the rash, then straightened with a worried look on her face. “This is not a good sign.”

  Chelsea rolled her eyes.

  “You don’t see any message in it?”

  “None,” Chelsea said firmly, and started running again.

  Cydra caught up in a flash.

  “Have you done anything about the silver key?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  Chelsea wasn’t sure. “I take it out and look at it every day. I study the faces of people around town. I even read the names on gravestones when I pass the church. But I’ve been too busy to do much else. Once things quiet a little, I’ll start asking around.” Running on, she thought about that. “I don’t know how much I’ll learn, though. These people give new meaning to the word laconic.”

  “Don’t talk much?”

  “Don’t talk much. I’m an outsider, so they’re wary. Maybe once I move into my place, things will change.”

  ON THE THIRD OF JULY, CHELSEA MOVED INTO BOULDERbrook. Her bedroom and bathroom were finished. The plumbing worked. The electricity worked. She even had a telephone that worked. The fact that once she stepped foot outside her bedroom door everything was still slightly raw was secondary to the fact that she was out of the inn and in a home of her own. The farmhouse was different from anywhere else she’d lived. It was more intimate, and all hers. Unfinished though it was, temporary though it was, she loved it.

  The bedroom was rust-colored—walls, area rugs, even window shades. She had bought a large, light oak bed with a contemporary headboard and footboard and had found sheets and a comforter in a patchwork pattern that combined the same rust with bits of purple, hunter green, and beige. A long, low dresser stood beneath a mirror on the opposite wall. On either side of the bed itself were matching nightstands, each with a cinnamon-shaded lamp. Beneath one of those lamps, lit gently, was a clock radio. Beside it was the telephone.

  When it rang for the very first time, she grinned. A ringing telephone meant that all was right with the world. Pleased with herself, with the farmhouse, and with Norwich Notch, she dropped the clothes she was putting into the dresser and went to answer it.

  “Hello?” She wondered if it was Kevin calling from Mackinac Island. She had left the number with his answering service, knowing that he would be checking in. “Hello?” It was definitely Kevin. The connection was bad, that was all. “Dad? Can you hear me?”

  After a minute, when no sound came across the line, she hung up. She was confident that he would call again, working through an operator this time.

  She waited for the phone to ring. When several minutes passed and it didn’t, she returned to the dresser. She finished unpacking one suitcase, then another, then several cartons, filling the dresser drawers, plus two shelves at the top of the closet, plus the closet itself. She made a grouping of favorite photographs on the dresser—one of Kevin and Abby on their wedding day, one of her as a baby, one of the three of them at her high school graduation, one of the three Kanes, the three Harpers, and six other close friends crowded together and smiling on the deck of a boat in Narragansett Bay.

  She was looking at the photographs, letting her mind meander, when the phone rang again. She was across the room in a jiffy. “Hello?”

  Again there was silence.

  “Hello?”

  She wondered if there was something wrong with the line. Pressing the cutoff button, she dialed the number of the inn. She had stayed there long enough to know that Sukie Blake would be at the front desk, looking for whatever diversion she could find.

  Sukie was perfectly willing to help. Chelsea gave her the number and hung up, waited until the phone rang again, then picked it up. Sukie’s voice came across loud and clear, which meant that if it had been Kevin calling, the problem was on his end of the line.

  Chelsea went into the bathroom and began arranging the new towels she’d bought—some rust-colored, some cream—on racks first, then shelves. This time when the phone rang, she was slower to answer it.

  “Hello?”

  Silence.

  Feeling a thread of annoyance, because she did so want to tell someone about her new home, she said, “Hello.”

  When there was no reply, she hung up less gently.

  She wondered if Carl had been on the other end of the line, afraid to speak, simply wanting to hear the sound of her voice. If not Carl, perhaps Hunter, trying to spook her. But she wasn’t being spooked. She didn’t believe in ghosts. The farmhouse was peaceful and quiet.

  She finished unpacking, soaked for a long while in the oversize bathtub that Hunter had complained about, then got into bed. That was where she was when the phone rang next, in the limbo between wakefulness and sleep, which was why she paid no heed to the static she heard. She simply hung up the phone, turned over, and fell asleep.

  It wasn’t until the next morning that she identified the static as the distant buzz of children’s voices.

  Eleven

  Judd missed the pancake breakfast at the church so that he could have breakfast with his father at home. Leo Streeter might not have known he was there, but Judd knew, and that was what mattered.

  It hadn’t always been that way. When he had first returned from Pittsburgh, his sole purpose had been pleasing Leo. Drawing on memory of all that his father liked, he had squeezed orange juice fresh, grilled steaks until they were black, trimmed hedges straight across, left the bedroom door wide open. He had been sure that the familiarity of all he did would somehow strengthen Leo’s touch with reality.

  But it hadn’t. As the months, then years, passed, Leo’s world shrank to include little more than the fewest, most immediate moments in time. It was doubtful he knew that the orange juice was fresh-squeezed, or that it was orange juice at all. He had forgotten that he liked his steaks black, that he liked the hedges trimmed straight across, that he liked the bedroom door left wide open. He often forgot that he had a son and regarded Judd with a total lack of recognition.

  Those times were the worst. Over the years Judd had progressed from denying the condition to fighting it, begrudging it, and then detesting it, but the pain was most brutal when he hunkered down by his father’s chair and had to reintroduce himself.

  In the end, after taking Leo from one doctor to another in search of a treatment that didn’t yet exist, he had accepted the facts. He had modified the old house to make things safe for a man in his sixties with the mind of a child. He had hired local women to be there when he couldn’t. He had bought comfortable porch furniture so that Leo could sit outside, had put benches in the yard, had installed a satellite dish so that Leo could watch Red Sox games live.

  Leo had been a die-hard Red Sox fan. Judd couldn’t think of his childhood without remembering the afternoons he and Leo had spent by the radio. Eventually radio had become television. Now, with the Sports Channel broadcasting every game, Judd had been sure that Leo would be glued to the screen. But Leo sat there blankly, as apt to doze off as to stand up midgame to respond to a doorbell that hadn’t rung. He didn’t know the players, didn’t know the team, didn’t know the game. When Judd reacted to a play, Leo looked startled, and though he always answered in the affirmative when Judd asked if he’d enjoyed the game, Judd never knew for sure. The activity was forgotten the instant the set was turned off.

  Yet, when it came time, Judd put the next game on. There was a ritual to it, he realized—a ritual that benefited him far more than Leo. Long after he knew it made no difference at all, he continued to squeeze the orange juice fresh, trim the hedges straight across, and grill the steaks black. He did it because he needed to do it, as an act of love for t
he man who had worked so hard to see his son move ahead in the world.

  Had Judd moved ahead? He asked himself that question as he walked down the street toward the center of town with Buck by his side.

  Had he moved ahead? He supposed he had. Hell, wasn’t he wearing a new sport shirt and shorts? Wasn’t he wearing new sneakers? If the measure of a man was how he dressed, he’d moved ahead, all right.

  Growing up in Norwich Notch as the son of a split-stone wall builder, he had known two kinds of clothes. There were work clothes, which were sturdy, practical, and rarely clean, and church clothes, which were sturdy, practical, and always clean. When church clothes showed the slightest sign of being outgrown, they became work clothes, which meant that something was always tight. For reasons of comfort rather than vanity, Judd had rejoiced when he’d finally stopped growing.

  But his height had had one advantage. It had given him an edge playing basketball, and basketball had been his ticket to college. With a scholarship for tuition and his father’s pitiful savings for incidentals, Judd enrolled at Penn State. Once there, he quickly discovered how ill-equipped he was in many respects, not the least of which was in his wardrobe. He worked as a short-order cook in a local sandwich shop to earn extra money, with which he bought a blazer and slacks to wear to social events, an overcoat to wear around campus during the winter, and oxford cloth shirts to wear with jeans for class. There were more blazers and slacks, finer shirts and ties, when he started working in Pittsburgh. After several years there, he even bought a tuxedo.

  The tuxedo hung in his closet unused now. Likewise the blazers, slacks, and ties. Norwich Notch wasn’t a place where a man had much call for those things.

  So, had he moved ahead in life or not?

  He was still mulling over the answer when the town green came into view. It looked exactly as it had on the Fourth of July when he’d been a kid—the same bunches of red, white, and blue balloons tied to fence posts, the same streamers decorating the bandstand, the same American flags raised on makeshift poles every dozen or so yards around the green. The same crowds thronged the lawns, professional families with professional families, trade families with trade families, quarrymen with quarrymen. Timothy McKeague, dressed in full Scottish regalia, played “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on his bagpipes. Some things never changed.