House of Ashes

by Loretta Marion

  “I promise we will do our very best to solve this, Cassie.” The FBI agent clasped my hand, stirring up pleasantly warm, but unwanted, sensations within me. Why now, for crying out loud? Wasn’t my life messy enough as it was?

  Brooks arrived not ten minutes after Agent Benjamin departed.

  “How could they not exist?” I was still digesting the unsettling news.

  “It’s not that they don’t exist. But the government doesn’t have a record of a Vince or Ashley Jacobson who match the age and description of the two people who were living here with you.”

  “You knew this already?”

  “Not until the FBI agent told me. Dammit,” he cursed under his breath. “I should have insisted on a more thorough background check beyond just running their names through the outstanding warrant databases.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked, looking out the kitchen window at the sound of another car.

  “The forensics techs. We’ll see if we can get some prints, maybe some other evidence.”

  I escorted them all to the disheveled guest room.

  “What happened in here?” Brooks was clearly dismayed by the condition. “I’d have thought the FBI would be more meticulous.”

  I said nothing and crept slyly down the stairs. Let the FBI take the heat on this one.

  “Did Agent Benjamin remove anything?” Brooks asked after the forensics team left with their samples.

  “A receipt.” I hesitated before adding, “At least that’s all he told me he took.”

  “Do you know what it was for?”

  “No, but I did get a quick look at the store name. Does Sincere House mean anything to you?”

  “Not off the top of my head. I’ll check it out.”

  “He said he’d let you know the details.”

  “Did he now?” Brooks leaned against the kitchen counter, arms folded, a sour look on his face. “What else did he tell you?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go over your head. It’s just …” I broke down, hiding my crumpled face in my hands.

  “Hey, hey, hey. What’s all this about?” He put his arms around me in a brotherly way. “We’ll find them.”

  “Everything is such a mess.” I took a moment to compose myself before telling him, “My divorce was just finalized.”

  “Does Zoe know?” He held me back so he could look me in the eyes.

  “No, and there’s no need to tell her.”

  He gave me a “Why would I tell Zoe?” look.

  I didn’t feel like getting into the whys of him being in touch with my sister, so instead I made my confession. “There’s something I probably should have told you before.”

  His expression morphed from sweet concern to seriously stern as I told him about the possible visitor in the woods, making me wish I hadn’t brought it up.

  “What were you thinking?” he roared, predictably furious with me. “You should have come to me immediately.”

  “I know.” I raised my hands in automatic surrender. “Sorry.”

  “We know nothing about those people staying here.” The lecture continued in earnest. “For all we know, someone may have been following them. You could have been in danger.”

  I rubbed my forehead, letting what he said sink in.

  “Look, what’s done is done,” Brooks declared in a calmer voice. And then, “Why don’t you take me for a look at those campsites?”

  * * *

  The first location was very near to where the land trust abutted my property. You could barely see any charred wood remains from the campfire. Brooks dug around with the toe of his boot but uncovered nothing of consequence.

  “Did you show Agent Benjamin?” he asked.

  “No. I thought it best to leave it to you to decide if it’s a worthy clue.” I was hoping to earn some brownie points. “The second site is further into the woods.”

  We hiked the trail another fifteen minutes until we came upon the alcove where the fire pit remnants were better preserved. Brooks donned gloves and withdrew a piece of foil, then continued his inspection of the niche, pulling free some black strands tangled on a nearby branch.

  “Some type of synthetic fiber like nylon or polyester.” He placed his discoveries in two separate plastic evidence bags.

  As we walked back to the house, I told Brooks about the conversation I’d overheard between Ashley and Vince. “You may be right about them being followed. They’d been talking about some man and worried that he was still around.”

  “Did they mention a name?”

  I shook my head. I was now regretting having let it pass.

  Before he left, Brooks cautioned, “Just because that little alcove doesn’t appear to be occupied now, you can’t just assume whoever was hiding there won’t return. Make sure you keep everything locked up tight.”

  The second such warning issued in the space of an afternoon.

  Later, as I double-checked the locks, I replayed in my head Ashley and Vince’s conversation. We don’t even know why he’s here. Vince said this when they’d been freaking out over the mystery person. Was it the same thing they’d said about the person from upstate New York they claimed to have met at Nauset Beach? Their explanation had sounded flimsy then and in retrospect seemed even less believable. If they were being followed, was it by whoever had been hiding in that alcove in the woods? And if so, where was he now?

  15

  A week following the disappearance

  Seven long days had passed since Ashley and Vince disappeared, and there’d yet to be any productive leads.

  Search teams had combed the National Seashore. Missing Persons alerts had been issued nationwide. Airport passenger rosters had been checked, and all travelers had been identified and accounted for, none matching the descriptions or the identifications of my friends who had vanished. Brooks had been really good about keeping me informed. As for Agent Benjamin, I hadn’t heard from him since the day he stopped out at The Bluffs. But he had been in contact with the Whale Rock police chief.

  “I had a call from your friend at the FBI.” Brooks phoned me to announce the surprising development. “I’m no longer leading the investigation.”

  “What? That makes no sense.”

  “None of this makes any sense, Cassie. I have no clue why the FBI got involved with this case in the first place.”

  I thought back to the day Daniel Benjamin showed up in Whale Rock. I’d been the one to call the FBI, but he could have blown it off. Instead, he’d made a cavalier remark about liking the Cape and taking a drive out. Was that how the FBI usually worked?

  “Did you ask?”

  “The FBI isn’t beholden to me, and so far they’re disinclined to provide an explanation.”

  We were both quiet a moment, and then Brooks said, “Did I tell you Johnny Hotchkiss’s boat has been located?”

  “No. Where was it found?”

  “It was anchored in an uninhabited cove near Plymouth.”

  “Any clues?”

  “None. No footprints along the beach, but the tide could have washed away any tracks. It was in good shape, everything tied down securely, nothing missing. And wiped down, no fingerprints.”

  “Well, at least I bet Johnny’s happy.”

  “He will be, whenever he gets it back.” His tone was laced with notes of cynicism. “It was confiscated by the FBI.”

  I’d been sorting through bills and only half-listening to the developments about the missing boat. But now he had my full attention. Why would the FBI have an interest in the theft of a small sailboat? Unless it had something to do with an active missing person’s case in the same small town.

  “Do they think it’s connected to Ashley and Vince?”

  “I don’t know what they’re thinking, ’cause they’re not talking to me.”

  I felt bad for Brooks, but I was equally discouraged about the well of information drying up on me.

  After the call with Brooks ended, I needed a distraction to keep the worst po
ssible scenarios from monopolizing my thoughts. I took myself down to the dock to spend some quiet time on the Queen Jacqueline, and brought along the knotted rope left behind by Vince and Ashley with the picnic basket. Something about the knots had been bothering me. It was possible that Vince or Ashley had been using it to practice sailing knots, but that didn’t explain why there were some I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t shrug off the feeling that this rope had been left behind for a reason. My contemplation was interrupted by a voice calling out from above. Quickly hiding the knotted rope, I shielded my eyes and waved as Agent Benjamin descended the steep hillside steps.

  “Have you just tied up, or are you getting ready to take her out?” He crouched down on the dock, level with me, his startling gray eyes piercing me.

  “Neither, actually.” I forced my gaze away. “Sometimes I just like to come down here and sit on the boat to clear my head.”

  “Do you have some heavy thinking to do?” he asked. “Should I leave you alone?”

  “Yes to the first question, and you can easily guess the subject of those thoughts.”

  He nodded solemnly but offered nothing on the status of the case.

  “But a definite no to the second.” I was honestly glad for the company.

  “There won’t be many more days like this.” He was standing now, gazing out to the horizon. “It seems a shame to waste it.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a sailor, Agent Benjamin.”

  “I thought we agreed on ‘Daniel.’ ” Before I knew it, he’d hopped aboard. “It’s been awhile, but I’ve taken part in a few regattas in my day.”

  “I’m impressed. And here I had you figured for a city boy.”

  “Oh, I am that. The worst part of the city as a kid. Ever heard of the Fresh Air Project?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I was a Fresh Air kid and an extremely fortunate one. My summer family lived in Marblehead. Need I say more?”

  “Sailing capital of the country? I fear my little boat might not prove worthy.”

  “She’s a Cat, right?” He nodded with confidence and began to inspect the vessel more closely. “I got my sea legs on one of these. Not as old a girl as this one.” Daniel ran his hands along the gunwale. “She’s still in pretty good shape. Someone loved her.”

  “Lots of people did. You might even say she was a heartbreaker. She originally belonged to my great-grandfather more than eighty years ago. She was the Femme Celeste back then.”

  His head shot up. “Isn’t it bad luck to change the name of a boat?”

  “It didn’t end happily.” Of course, her rechristened name hadn’t exactly brought good fortune either.

  Daniel looked to the sky where a few clouds were skimming by at a good clip. “So, are you game?”

  I leaned forward. “You mean, take her out? Now?”

  “You have something better to do?” He cocked his head and offered a disarming smile.

  “No, but I imagined you might.”

  “I could use a day off.” He began unwinding the line from the cleat near the bow.

  “Let’s do it.” My desire to take the Queen Jacqueline for a sail around the Cape won out over a momentary hesitation as I considered how Brooks might feel about my consorting with his rival on the case.

  I clapped for Whistler, who’d been exploring along the rocky coast. The dog leapt gracefully onto the bow, taking Daniel by surprise.

  “He’s sailed before?”

  “This guy’s an old sea dog.” The first time I’d taken Vince and Ashley sailing, there’d been lots of prodding and bribing to get Whistler into the boat, but in the end he feared being left behind more than the unsteady craft. After his maiden voyage, he’d needed no coaxing to come aboard again.

  Within minutes, the sail was billowing in a warm autumn breeze. It turned out, Daniel and I were pretty good sailing partners. When we brought the Cat back in and were tying up after our sail, he suggested grabbing dinner.

  “I’ll come back around six to pick you up.”

  “You’ll never make it back in time.” The commute to Boston was a good two hours at this time of day.

  “A buddy of mine has a cottage in East Falmouth. He’s letting me use it as a base while we’re investigating this case. I’ll just pop over there and shower.”

  By a quarter to six, nearly every outfit I owned had been tried and discarded in a heap on my bed. When was the last time I’d actually been on a real date? Ethan and I hadn’t exactly had a traditional courtship. We met. He moved in. We married. As for Billy? Our encounters certainly wouldn’t fall under Emily Post’s concept of proper dates, especially when one of the people involved was already married to somebody else. I swatted the air to chase away the annoying memory.

  I returned my focus to the dilemma at hand: finding an acceptable outfit that didn’t scream “desperate.”

  “What will we talk about?” I asked Whistler, who cocked his head and then made a whining sound. “You’re right. I shouldn’t delude myself. This is business to him.”

  The last option was my fallback ensemble. Camel slacks and black turtleneck. I’d throw my mother’s cashmere wrap around my shoulders. She would have approved of the casual elegance. Papa would have teased by calling it my classic Hepburn look, sort of an amalgamation of the two famous icons—with my wild auburn hair pulled into a casual up-do, there was a slight resemblance to a young Kate, but I’d been blessed with prominent cheeks and a slightly turned-up nose, which were much more Audrey. Neither Zoe nor I had inherited our mother’s fair hair and blue eyes. And now that the portraits of our great-grandparents had been discovered, anyone could see that my sister was practically an identical image of Celeste. If only she could be bothered to return to Whale Rock and see for herself. Brooding over Zoe right now would only put me in a mood, so I dabbed on a hint of blush, smacked my lips with gloss, and scrutinized my appearance in the large oval mirror above the art deco vanity.

  “It’ll have to do.” Whistler barked to announce Daniel’s prompt arrival, which brought on an unexpected rush of wildly fluttering butterflies. I held a calming palm to my tummy and inhaled deeply, seeking that reassuring scent of warm caramel.

  * * *

  Maybe it was the wine, but I found myself opening up with Daniel in a way I hadn’t expected. I stopped short of telling him about Percy and Celeste—nothing says crazy like talk of ghosts inhabiting your home, even if they are relatives—so when he asked how I’d ended up living alone in the big old Victorian, I skipped over recent events with Ethan, gave a brief account of the long-ago fire, and picked up where my parents’ story began.

  “My mother’s family felt she’d married beneath her station in life. They were wealthy tourists summering on the Cape, and my father was just a lowly sailor running a charter fishing and sightseeing service. Plus Mama was quite a bit younger than Papa.” Their unlikely romance had endured by virtue of the couple’s strong united front against class differences and attempts to tear them apart.

  “It’s a familiar story.” For a wisp of a moment Daniel’s face clouded, making me want to know more about his history. Earlier while sailing, he’d uttered an offhand comment about his ex-wife, but nothing more. “Please go on.”

  “My mother admitted to me once that she’d intentionally gotten pregnant with my older sister so that her parents wouldn’t try to stop the marriage. Of course, Mama was delirious on morphine at the time. Otherwise, I’m certain she’d never have confessed such a scandalous deed to her impressionable teenage daughter.”

  “Did your mother’s folks ever accept your father?”

  “It took awhile. Their first home was a tiny harbor apartment that Mama’s parents refused to set foot in it. It wasn’t until Papa bought back Battersea Bluffs, a home they felt was worthy of her background, that peace was finally made.”

  Bridging the gap between my mother and her parents was yet another motivation my father had had for reclaiming the Mitchell homestead.

  “I�
�m sure they would have come around eventually anyway, though, since my sister and I were their only grandchildren.” This was fortunate for us, since they turned out to be exceptionally generous and were in fact the benefactors of our healthy trust funds, even if mine was currently uttering a death rattle.

  “So your parents achieved their ‘happily ever after’?”

  “For a while.” I hesitated, but when Daniel inclined his head and offered an encouraging smile, I told him about the sad end of their lives together. “They were very much in love, but my mother had a lot of health problems even before the cancer that she eventually died from, and it wrecked my father. It was hard for the rest of us too, having to watch them in such a hopeless state, knowing their precious time together was approaching the end. It was toughest on my grandmother. She’d always been very protective of her family, my father especially.”

  ~

  Eighty years ago

  November ~ a month before the fire at Battersea Bluffs

  As Fiona rested in her lover’s arms under the moonlit sky, that night before he left, they’d laughed off Robert Toomey’s curse. She’d been intoxicated in the aftermath of her first night of passion, deluded into the misguided confidence that nothing could interfere with their happiness.

  But once she realized that she had a tiny baby growing within her, conceived during that single night’s tryst on the aft deck of the Femme Celeste, she was determined never to relent to a vengeful curse. Fiona laid a protective hand upon her not-yet-swelling belly and made her own vow. She would do all in her power to ensure the Mitchell family bloodline would remain strong and endure. She and her baby would see to it. Fiona was certain she’d bear Ambrose a son. A Mitchell boy. Percy and Celeste would be welcoming their first grandson in about seven months.

  ~

  Present day

  “How old were you when your parents passed away?”

  “Seventeen when Mama died, and Papa passed just before my twentieth birthday. Then not long afterward, I lost my Granny Fi.”

  “So you lived alone in the house for quite a while before you got married?”