by Barbara Ross
* * *
Mom waited in her armchair in her sitting room, a shawl across her shoulders and a blanket spread out on her lap. In the light of the single lamp beside her, she was practically invisible in her deep, pink chair.
The room was an old sleeping porch my parents had “winterized” sometime in the late eighties. Outside, the branches of the tall pines that divided our yard from the neighbors whooshed and crackled.
I didn’t take the empty chair beside her, but instead, sat on her ottoman so I could look her in the face. “Mom, Mr. Gordon says the necklace is real, every gem in it.”
“I thought so from the first.”
“It’s quite valuable.”
She shrugged. “Well, it would be.”
I smiled a little. “How valuable do you think it is?”
Mom cast her eyes heavenward. She hated guessing games. “A hundred thousand dollars?”
“Two million.”
That got her attention. She sat forward so quickly the blanket fell from her lap. “You’re joking.”
“I’m not. It wasn’t a proper appraisal, of course, just his best guess. It could be quite a range, but we need to face the fact that someone, somewhere, put that necklace in a box, without insurance, or tracking, and sent it to you, using your proper name and your correct PO box number.”
She blinked a few times and then the power surged, snapping off the silent TV, and momentarily brightening and then dimming the lights before they returned to normal. Without even looking, Mom opened the drawer in the end table by her chair, pulled out a flashlight, and set it on the tabletop. “My heavens. We have to figure out who sent it.”
“I agree. I talked briefly to Cuthie Cuthbertson. He said you would have a claim to the necklace, since you possess it, but whether it’s really yours would depend on whether someone had a better claim. So, I think we have to do that, Mom. Figure out who might have a better claim.”
My mother chewed on her lower lip. I waited while she processed the information I had given her. It was a lot to take in. I’d had over an hour with it, and I was still processing.
“It’s important to find out whom the necklace belongs to, I agree,” she finally said. “But there’s a more important reason to find the sender. Whoever it is, is most likely a member of our family.”
“Why do you say that? What about the story that a housemaid stole it?”
“I don’t think that explanation could be true. A poor woman’s family never would have kept the Black Widow all these years as a souvenir. If a maid had taken it, it would’ve been fenced immediately, and it probably would have resurfaced sometime between then and now.” Mom looked down at her hands in her lap. “I think the necklace must have been with someone in the family the whole time. That’s the only way anyone would have sent it here to me.” She looked back up at me. “Julia, you have to help me find my family.”
I knew how much my mother longed for a connection to family, cut off when her mother died, found via her cousin, Hugh, and then lost again with his disappearance. Mom was right. I did have to help her find her family. She needed it, and there were practical considerations too. Two million dollars’ worth.
I squirmed on the tufted pink ottoman. “You said your cousin, Hugh, first told you about the Black Widow. We’re going to have to talk about him.”
My mother nodded to show she understood.
“My first question is, how is Hugh even your cousin?”
As the words came out of my mouth, a mighty gust blew outside. The lights brightened, dimmed, brightened, and went out.
Chapter 5
When you live at the end of a peninsula, literally at the end of the road, power outages are a fact of life. My mother was prepared. A half hour later, we were seated in front of the living room fireplace, a roaring fire burning on the hearth. We’d made peanut butter sandwiches for ourselves and heated hot chocolate on Mom’s gas stove, converted to run on propane since gas lines didn’t come all the way into town.
Mom had called Livvie to check on her. She, Sonny, and Page were fine, but also without power, even though they were twenty minutes farther up the peninsula. Mom had also checked on our neighbors, the elderly Snugg sisters across the street. They were also fine, though their Scottish terrier was refusing to go out in the storm and his situation was increasingly desperate.
I hoped the relative darkness of the room, lit only by the glow of the fire, would make it easier for Mom to talk about Hugh. My mother was an only child, and her mother, Ellen Morrow Fields, had been an only child as well. That was why Mom owned Morrow Island, because her mother had been the only heir. Hence my question, how was Hugh a cousin?
“Hugh and I met at boarding school,” Mom said. “We were in the same biology class our freshman year. When the instructor called the roster the first day, he read out full names. When he said my name, ‘Jacqueline Morrow Fields,’ a boy turned to stare at me. Later in the alphabet, when the instructor called out ‘Hugh Windsholme Morrow,’ it was my mouth that dropped open. After class, Hugh approached me and said, ‘I think we’re cousins.’”
I marveled at the coincidence of this. Mom had gone to the same prep school I had, the same one as her mother. It was the sister school of the one attended by her grandfather, so there was a family tradition that Hugh’s branch might also have been part of. But my mother had gone there only a few years after the brother and sister schools had merged. Five years earlier and there would have been no shared biology class, no shared campus, just a few annual dances. She and Hugh might never have met.
Mom nestled back into the couch, relaxing with the telling. “It took us a while to figure out exactly how we were related. I, of course, had no one to ask, my mother being gone and Dad being absolutely hopeless with that stuff. Hugh was for some reason reluctant to ask his parents about it, but he knew a bit more than I did. His branch of the family was in San Francisco. His ancestors had gone out there in the nineteen-teens, chasing a fortune, which they, in fact, had made. They came east infrequently after that, but he’d heard of Windsholme. It was natural to be curious. It was his middle name. His ancestors had stayed there frequently, until sometime in the 1920s, when there was a terrific rift, and the two branches of the family never spoke again.”
I counted on my fingertips. “So that made you and Hugh, what, third cousins?”
“Yes. Our great-great-grandfathers were brothers.”
“So, not very close.”
“No, but remember, at the time I thought I had no living relations on my mother’s side. I barely remembered her and was eager for a connection. Besides, Hugh was such a sweetheart. A nice, nice guy. Smart, funny, good-looking. He made friends easily, and since I was more reserved, I was happy to be taken under his wing. At the end of the school year, I invited him to visit Morrow Island. I thought he should see Windsholme for himself since he was named for it. We took the train together. Your grandfather picked us up in Portland. Hugh helped us open the little house together, and then he stayed. He stayed the whole summer and all the summers after. He came to our apartment in New York for several Thanksgivings, Christmases, and spring breaks too.”
My mother had teared up as she spoke and I hesitated to push her. But she looked me full in the face, inviting the next question.
“It seems odd he would spend so much time with you and Grandfather. Hugh was at school all the way across the country from his parents. You’d think they’d want to see him on his vacations.” I didn’t add what I really thought, which was that it was hard to imagine someone wanting to spend their holidays with my distant, cold grandfather. And that, with Windsholme long closed down, the little house by the dock on Morrow Island where my mother and her father spent the summers didn’t offer an extra bedroom for a distant cousin, only a daybed in the living room. I was sure Mom and Hugh had been close friends, but I couldn’t understand why he’d have spent so much time with her family.
Mom hesitated. “I knew there were problems between Hug
h and his parents. It wasn’t something he liked to talk about, but I gathered they had problems of their own. His father was tyrannical and controlling, and his mother small-minded, very concerned about the opinions of others. That clashed with Hugh’s personality, which was adventurous, open, up for anything, interested in everyone. I don’t know the details, but I do know it was a most unhappy family.”
“And then he disappeared,” I prompted. On the one hand, this story was a legend in our family, but on the other, I had never heard any details, certainly not from my mother’s lips.
Mom nodded and soldiered on. “It was on my twenty-first birthday. Your grandfather had given me a party on Morrow Island. It was not something he would normally do, or had ever done before, but I guess my twenty-first was important to him.”
To me, Mom’s father had always seemed disengaged and vaguely befuddled. He handed Livvie and me twenty-dollar bills on our birthdays, blinking through his thick glasses as if he was astonished to be related to us. Or to my mother, for that matter. But though I’d always felt sorry for Mom growing up with this strange man and a revolving series of housekeepers, she spoke of her father only with love, both when he was alive and in the eight years since his death. Throwing her a twenty-first birthday party was not completely uncharacteristic of him. I’d heard of evidence of this behavior before, for example in his insistence that my mother attend the dances at the Busman’s Harbor Yacht Club. It was as if, in a few important ways, he tried to do what he imagined his late wife would have done, had she been alive.
My mother took a breath and allowed herself to be transported back to the earlier, happier part of that evening. “Hugh and I were in different colleges by then, but he still spent his summers with us. He had a job teaching sailing at Busman’s Harbor Yacht Club. There was a tent on the old croquet lawn, and a live band. It was a perfect August night. Bright stars, light breeze.”
I closed my eyes and pictured Morrow Island before the buildings that housed the Snowden Family Clambake were built, when the great lawn was an expansive plateau below the stone staircase that led up to Windsholme.
My mother continued. “Your father was there. So handsome. We were so in love.”
This part of the story, I did know. It was the stuff of family legend, how the lonely girl, a summer resident on a private island, had fallen in love with the boy who delivered groceries on his skiff, who had fallen for her too. And how they clung together, despite family objections, despite separations, and despite the odds against all summer romances. They’d married, raised a family, founded a successful business, and stayed in love until my father’s death from cancer six years earlier. My mother was in love with him still.
“At first, no one noticed Hugh was missing.” Mom’s voice grew quieter and I sat forward on the chair, straining to hear. “My father had hired the Morgana to bring the guests out to Morrow Island, and take them and the caterers and the musicians home when the party was over. Some people came in their own boats, but most sailed on the Morgana. I kissed your dad good-bye, maybe a little too passionately for public consumption, but I was so happy and so in love. My father and I walked back to the house together. I expected to find Hugh there, but he wasn’t. I waited up for him, thinking he was somewhere on the island, maybe with a girl, though I hadn’t seen him with anyone in particular that night. Hugh had been his usual gregarious, friendly self. Dancing with everyone. Telling jokes. The life of the party.”
Mom gulped air and finished the story. “At dawn, when Hugh still wasn’t home, Dad called the Coast Guard and we began to search. The obvious places at first—Windsholme, the playhouse, the beach. By then, several friends had arrived from the mainland; we searched the whole island, climbing the bluffs, calling his name. Looking below . . .”
Her voice caught, and I mentally finished the sentence . . . for a body on the rocks.
“His body was never found,” I confirmed. Sadly, that wasn’t unusual given the ocean currents in our part of the world. Lots of families in Busman’s Harbor left flowers on graves where no body rested.
“No. And no one had seen him go to the mainland on the Morgana. And most telling, of course, he was never seen or heard from again.”
“When did you last see him that night?”
“At ten, in the tent when they brought out the cake and the band played ‘Happy Birthday.’ He led the singing, as he did every year on my birthday, though it was usually just him and me and my dad, not a whole grand party.”
“Was he drunk?”
“No. I’m sure he wasn’t. His parents were both heavy drinkers. He hated that about them. He never overdid it.”
“Other substances?” It was the seventies.
“I can’t swear, of course, but I highly doubt it. I knew him well. We’d been to lots of parties together. I’d never known him to take anything.”
“Was he depressed?”
“Not that I could tell. To all outward signs, for most of his life, Hugh was the happiest, most well-adjusted person I knew.”
“For most of his life?”
“There was something bugging Hugh that summer. I can’t really describe it, but he was pensive. He often went off to other places on the island to be alone, which was unlike him. He was the definition of a people person.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
“I tried, but he refused to open up. Said it was nothing.” She paused. “After two days, the Coast Guard called off the search. Morrow Island is so tiny. We’d explored every nook and cranny of it. Seven years later, my father told me that Hugh’s parents had him declared dead.”
“His parents didn’t tell you this personally? Seven years later you were a wife and mother, not a young girl to be shielded. You had been Hugh’s best friend.”
“I never had a relationship with Hugh’s parents. My father barely did.”
“They didn’t come to Maine at all, during the search or after?” I couldn’t imagine any parent who wouldn’t rush to the place where their son was last seen to help search for him. What kind of people were they? It seemed beyond cold, almost pathological.
“No. My father went to the mainland to call them on the phone that first day. After that, they kept up communications with the Coast Guard, which was easier.” Communicating with Morrow Island had been only by radio then, as it still was today. “They never expressed any interest in coming east.”
“Do you know if either of his parents is still alive?”
She shook her head. “No idea. They’d be quite old, I think. Older than my dad.”
We stared into the dying fire. Hugh had been the one who knew about the Black Widow. He’d been the only relative my mother knew, so he’d seemed like the best route to an answer. But my mother truly believed that was a dead end. I’d have to figure something else out in the morning.
Chapter 6
I woke up the next morning to the sound of the town plow. I’d heard it go by a few times in the night, but in the daylight something had changed. I lay in the warmth of my childhood bed, listening. What was it?
Silence. The wind no longer howled. Once the plow had continued up the road and out of earshot, there was nothing to hear. The sun streamed through the windows. I reached up and turned the light switch. Still no power. Not surprising. It often took a while for Maine Power to get to us.
My phone said 6:54. More important, it said it was at 20 percent power. I shut it off in case I needed it later. I heaved myself out of the warm bed and dressed in as many layers as I could scare up from the discarded bits of wardrobe still stored in my old room. The house was cold. The heating system was oil, but the pilot light required electricity. Hot water required electricity too. A shower would have to wait for later.
Mom was already in the kitchen, brewing coffee on the stove using an old camp pot she kept stowed in the pantry for just these occasions.
“Morning.”
“Morning. Sleep well?”
“Yup. You?”
I gazed o
ut the window into the backyard, a sun-dazzled, white wilderness. Somewhere under all that stuff was our driveway. I sighed. It would have to be dug out.
When I’d finished my coffee, I put on more layers and made for the front door, the shortest route to the street. “I need to go check on Le Roi,” I called to Mom. “Back in a jiff.”
“Bring him back with you. It’ll be cold in your apartment. We’ll light the fireplace here.”
Outside, my L. L. Bean boots sunk into the snow, but the sun felt great on my face. According to the thermometer on the front porch, the temperature was in the upper thirties. At least we didn’t have to worry about the pipes freezing while the heat was out.
The town stirred slowly to life. A pickup drove by me as I walked in the street. Then a Subaru. I was acutely aware of the Black Widow sitting back in the safe at Mom’s house. It was extremely weird walking around being one of only two people—or three if you counted Mr. Gordon—or four if you counted whoever sent it—who knew there was something possibly worth two million dollars at Mom’s house.
How could I find out where the necklace came from, or who might have a better claim to it than us? The web was out until the power came back on. The library was probably closed due to the power outage. But then I realized one place was sure to be open. The Busman’s Harbor Historical Society. It would be open because the woman who ran it, Mrs. Floradale Thayer, lived above it.
At my apartment, I grabbed Le Roi’s food and dug the cat carrier out from the storage closet under the eaves. The moment he saw it, Le Roi preened and pranced. In the harbor, the carrier could only mean one thing; he was being transported to car-free, predator-free Morrow Island. There he ruled all he surveyed from the top of his particular food chain, and kind-hearted seniors and little children snuck him lobster meat under their tables.
He jumped in. I closed the lid. “Boy, are you in for a surprise,” I told him. “Life is full of disappointments.”
I clumped him back to Mom’s house. He weighed close to thirty pounds, so it wasn’t easy. When I came over the hill, I heard a scraping sound and saw Sonny in his pickup, plowing Mom’s driveway. Thank goodness. He usually plowed Mom out after a big snow, but I hadn’t been sure if he’d risk traveling twenty minutes away from Livvie with her due date so close. I waved and called out a thank-you as he backed out of Mom’s drive and started on the Snugg sisters’ across the street. When I reached Mom’s door, Viola Snugg came out on her front porch stamping her feet. She wore high-heeled boots, trimmed with a strip of lamb’s wool around the ankles. Terribly impractical for a woman in her middle seventies out in a Maine winter, but Vee was always glamorous. I’d never seen her, at any time of day, without her white hair swept up in a chignon and full makeup on her strangely unlined face.