by Barbara Ross
“Julia! I had stew meat in the fridge, and with the power out, I have to cook it all. You come over for dinner tonight with your Mom. You too, Sonny! Bring Livvie and Page.”
Sonny put the truck in park and called back, “Okay. If Livvie’s not in labor, we’ll be there.”
I was surprised he agreed. In the harbor, we were about seven minutes farther from the hospital than he and Livvie were at home. The cabin fever in their house must be considerable.
* * *
By the time I left for the Busman’s Harbor Historical Society, around ten, the town was awake and bustling. There was still no power, but on Main Street, Gleason’s Hardware had its door propped open and was selling ice melt and whatever other goods the snowed-in and powerless might need, for cash or on account, since the credit card machine wasn’t working.
At the historical society, I was pleased to see the short front walk was neatly shoveled. Mrs. Thayer was home and open for business. The society occupied the first floor of a brick house with black shutters and a brass sign that told me it was built by the Lewis family in 1840. Floradale Lewis Thayer was one of their descendants. It was the only brick house on the town common. Though a few other houses were equally grand, they were built of wood.
I knocked, feeling a bit like Dorothy calling on the Wizard.
Mrs. Thayer threw open the heavy door. “Julia Snowden! I knew you’d turn up here sooner or later.”
Did she know about the necklace?
“Why do you say that, Mrs. Thayer?” She was a big woman. Enormous, in fact. Well over six feet with the shoulders of a linebacker and, despite her sixty-plus years, the posture of a U.S. Marine. She’d always intimidated me.
“Because you Morrows have such a rich history in the town. I knew one of you was bound to take an interest, and when I heard you’d moved back, I knew it would be you.”
I was at a loss as to why she thought this. I had met Mrs. Thayer maybe a dozen times in my adulthood. How could she have formed any impression of me? I was pretty sure I’d never mentioned any interest in my family’s forebearers. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here.”
“Then let’s get started.” Mrs. Thayer hustled me through the living room, which, like the dining room across the hallway, held the society’s exhibits—old furniture, flags, and quilts, anchors and ship’s figureheads, along with an ever-changing display of black and white photos.
In a back room crowded with bookshelves and file cabinets, she sat me at a large oak table. “Where shall we start?” she asked.
I wanted to know about two things, the Black Widow and my mother’s family tree—specifically, who was around who might have sent the necklace or who might have a claim to it. I was reluctant to say this to Mrs. Thayer directly. Instead I answered more generally, “I’d like to know about my mother’s family.”
“I have just the thing.” It was widely known around town that Mrs. Thayer ran the historical society with an iron hand. The society was a nonprofit, with a board, supposedly. But it was in Floradale’s house and was composed of items and archives she’d assembled over decades, so she did what she wanted, and the board members, if they had any contrary opinions, kept them to themselves.
Mrs. Thayer completely rejected computers, which seemed like an odd thing for a person, much less an organization, devoted to history and genealogy to do. But she had tried personal computing once, in the 1980s, the story went, hadn’t liked the experience and wasn’t going to try it again.
On this particular day, I was grateful for her dislike of technology. The power was still out. Sun shone through the wavy glass of the old house’s back windows, providing some heat, but not enough, which explained why Mrs. Thayer wore an overcoat, scarf, and fingerless gloves.
She went to a card file. “Morrow, Morrow, Morrow,” she muttered, rifling the cards. She pulled one out, stalked to a cabinet, and pulled out a file. “Let’s start here.” She put the file in front of me.
Inside was a photo of an oil painting, the portrait of a man with a long face and a long nose. He had on a high, stiff collar, and a black cravat at his throat. The man wasn’t wearing a wig, so the portrait must have been painted after that particular fashion trend had ended, but not much, I didn’t think.
“That’s Frederic Morrow.” Mrs. Thayer’s voice rang with weighty import. “He started it all.”
I was staring into the face of the original progenitor. “He started the family?” I asked. “In America?”
“No, he wasn’t the first Morrow to come here. He was born in New England, on a farm outside Boston. He’s the man who founded the family business and made the original fortune.” As she talked, Mrs. Thayer moved back and forth between two additional card files, peering into each through her reading half-glasses. She bustled over to a bookshelf, plucked off a thick book, and put it down in front of me. A History of the Morrow Ice Company, it said on the beige cover, which was encased in plastic like a library book. “Your family made their money in the frozen-water trade. They sold ice.”
“To the Eskimos?” I made the obvious joke.
“To the English in the Bahamas and India, to the Spanish in Havana, and to the French in Haiti. The English in England never took to ice, but not for want of Frederic trying.” She sniffed. “They still drink their beer warm, I’m told.” She pointed to the book. “Frederic Morrow was the man with the vision to see what no one else did. Before him, ice was a small, personal operation. If you had a farm pond, and you lived in a place where water froze, you cut the ice on the pond and stored it in your icehouse, which was built into the ground. You used it to preserve food and for iced drinks and desserts in the summer. But Frederic Morrow understood the value people in hot places would put on ice.” She cleared her throat. “Seeing you don’t seem to know a thing about it, perhaps you’d best start reading.”
I was intrigued, to say the least, to have this door suddenly opened to my ancestors. Mom had never mentioned the Morrow Ice Company. It was probably one more thing she’d lost when her mother died so young.
I looked at the man with the long face and the long nose again. If not for you, I would not be here. I would not be me. Under Mrs. Thayer’s ever-watchful eye, I turned to the first page of the introduction to A History of the Morrow Ice Company and started to read. The book was written in the 1950s by a well-credentialed professor at the Harvard Business School, where Frederic Morrow’s business diaries resided.
The story of the first man who loaded ice, packed in hay, on tiny wooden ships and sent it halfway around the world was fascinating. However, I still had a two-million-dollar necklace sitting at home in our safe. That little problem generated a lot of urgency. Interested as I was, I needed to move on.
When Mrs. Thayer finally drifted back to her desk, I used the opportunity to skip ahead in the book, turning to the first section of photos, which were on glossy pages about a third of the way through. The photos were reproductions of painted portraits of men, always men, including the one I had already seen of Frederic Morrow. There was also a reproduction of a woodcut print of men and horses on a frozen pond, cutting the thick ice into enormous strips, using a tool that looked like a cross between a plow and a sled.
The images in the second section of plates were newer, all photographs by then—men in muttonchops and icehouses in exotic locations. It was finally in the third set of plates, the ones from the 1890s through the 1920s, that I found was I was looking for, a photo of a formidable woman dressed in Victorian garb, wearing the Black Widow. My mother was right. The necklace had been ours. My heart pounded, pulsing blood that echoed in my ears.
“That’s Sarah Morrow.” I’d been so transfixed by the photo, I hadn’t heard Mrs. Thayer come up behind me. “And that”—she pointed at the necklace’s center stone—“is a seventy-carat black diamond.”
“Holy cow.” I knew what it was. I had seen it in real life, but the idea still bowled me over.
“Your three-times great-grandfather, Lemuel M
orrow, gave that to her. The diamond was a celebration of the triumph of his business. Black diamonds are sometimes called ‘black ice,’ and in his business, black ice was considered the best ice of all. Black meant the ice was perfect, frozen quickly with no air bubbles. Black ice stayed frozen longer and was more aesthetically pleasing to the customers.”
“I wonder what happened to the necklace,” I ventured.
“No one knows,” Mrs. Thayer snapped, in a tone that implied if she didn’t, no one did.
Chapter 7
“Let me get this straight,” Sonny protested. “Your relatives made their money selling frozen water? Un-freaking-believable.”
We were gathered around the Snugg sisters’ formal dining table, eating beef stew out of china soup bowls. Its aroma filled the room, mingling with the smell of burning wood and candle wax. The power hadn’t returned, but the fire in the hearth threw heat and light across the oriental carpet. The silver candelabra on the table supplied the rest of the light.
“He was unbelievable,” I countered. “He was the only person who believed ice would last long enough to be shipped so far. He spent years looking for investors, went to debtor’s prison twice.” New England had no cash crop like cotton or tobacco, no natural resources like iron or coal. Ships came into its ports filled with goods from Europe and departed with boulders in their hulls to provide the needed ballast. Frederic Morrow had seen an opportunity.
“He had to build icehouses in Havana, Port-au-Prince, Madras, everywhere he shipped the ice.” My words came out in a rush. “When he first sold ice in Cuba, a customer took it home and left it on his front steps, then complained that he’d been sold a faulty product when it disappeared. So Frederic invented a device to store ice in the home. Then he figured out he could leave a little ice in the hulls of his ships for the return trip and bring tropical fruits and vegetables to New England,” I concluded, with a flourish. “One man invented three industries, ice exporting, the home icebox, and frozen food. And he is our ancestor.”
“They made enough money selling ice to build Windsholme?” Page asked. Her idea of buying ice was probably the chest outside the gas station where we picked up extra cubes for parties.
“Yes,” I answered. Her amber eyes widened. Frederic Morrow had died at the age of eighty-one, in 1864. Windsholme wasn’t built until 1890. His descendants had grown the family fortune even larger, but I didn’t know who had done it or how. I’d only managed to read four chapters of A History of the Morrow Ice Company. I’d known better than to ask Mrs. Thayer if I could borrow the book. None of her painstakingly assembled collection was ever lent. I’d taken down the information and would search for the book on the web when the power came back on.
“Where did all this happen?” Livvie asked.
It was a reasonable question. My mother had grown up in New York City, where her father taught at Columbia. Hugh’s family had lived in San Francisco. There was no obvious family seat. “In Boston,” I answered. “Frederic started his business cutting ice on the ponds around Boston, and then loaded the big blocks onto horse-drawn carriages that hauled them over barely passable roads to the port. Later, he built railroads to bring the ice to the harbor. Henry David Thoreau woke up the middle of the night at Walden to see sixty men with horses on Walden Pond harvesting the ice. He hated the noise and the industrial nature of the operation, but even he couldn’t escape the romanticism of knowing water he had bathed in would end up in India.”
“The ice business may have started out in Boston,” Fee Snugg said, peering through her thick glasses, “but the best ice in the world was cut right here in Maine on the Kennebec River. There were icehouses all up and down the river back in its day.” Fee was as plain as her sister Vee was glamorous. She liked people well enough, though her great love was her succession of Scottish terriers. The latest, Mackie, slept in front of the fire.
The conversation flowed around me—tidbits about the history of the town, a discussion about whether the ice froze earlier and thicker back then than it did today. I dug into Vee’s beef stew. I’d had it many times before, but this batch seemed especially good. The beef was flavorful and tender, the vegetables soft enough to spear with a fork, but not so soft they fell apart. The familiar dish warmed and comforted me, as did the company. I caught Mom’s eye across the table in the candlelight and lifted a glass of the Snugg sisters’ excellent Malbec to toast our secret.
Then Livvie asked me the obvious question. “Why all this sudden interest in our ancestors’ business?”
I hadn’t told them about the necklace. This was my sister, her husband, her child, and two of our family’s most trusted, oldest, closest friends. Why did I hold back? Mom had said nothing about the Black Widow. It was her secret to tell, so I followed her lead. “I have time this week with the restaurant closed and I’ve always been interested.”
“You have?” Livvie sounded skeptical, but she let it pass.
When the meal was finished, I stood to clear the table. I was as comfortable in Fee and Vee’s kitchen as I was in Mom’s or my own. I thought Livvie might follow and we’d have a chance to talk, but as she rose, everyone told her to stay put and relax.
“Enjoy the last weeks of your pregnancy,” Mom said. “You’ll be busy soon enough.”
Sonny and Page and I did the dishes. I loved watching them together, two heads of fiery red hair bent to the task. When we were almost done, Mom stuck her head through the swinging kitchen door. “Sonny and Page, can you finish up? I need to take Julia and Livvie across the street for few minutes.”
Sonny furrowed his red eyebrows, but when Page grumbled, “Probably baby stuff,” his face smoothed out.
Poor Page. She was a typical oldest-only, comfortable with adults, maybe more than with her peers. The cozy world she’d occupied as the beloved single focus of two devoted parents was about to come to a screeching halt. I thought her disdain for the “baby stuff” was a cover for her anxiety. She had no way to imagine what was to come.
* * *
We were out into the street, bundled up against the bracing night air. The full moon lighting the snow made up for the darkened streetlamps. Mom and I walked on either side of Livvie, holding her arms to make sure she didn’t slip in the road. Livvie, normally grace personified, had turned ungainly in her last month of pregnancy.
“What is this about?” she demanded.
“There’s something you need to see,” Mom answered.
We climbed the front steps and stomped our boots across the porch. When we got inside, Livvie tried again. “What the heck is going on?”
Mom took a flashlight out of her coat pocket and we felt our way upstairs to the clambake office. She trained the light on the safe while I twirled the combination. I could sense Livvie’s tension. “It’s nothing bad,” I reassured her. At least I hoped it wasn’t.
I opened the safe and took out the white jewelry box. Mom and Livvie gathered close as I pulled off the lid with a flourish.
“It’s a box of cotton?”
Darn, I’d forgotten about the padding. I removed the top layer of cotton and the Black Widow sat on its downy white bed, caught in the stream from Mom’s flashlight.
“What is it?” Livvie asked. With its enormous black gem and Victorian design, the necklace looked like costume jewelry.
“It’s the Black Widow,” Mom said. “It belonged to my great-great-grandmother.”
“Someone sent it to Mom anonymously,” I added. Livvie was silent, still not getting why we’d pulled her out of Fee and Vee’s warm house to see this. I took the necklace out of the box, dangling it from my fingers while Mom shone the flashlight on it. The big black diamond sparkled like a Christmas ornament. “It’s real,” I said. “Mr. Gordon thinks it might be worth two million dollars.”
In the dark room, I heard Livvie’s sharp intake of breath, but no intelligible words followed.
* * *
I walked Livvie out to the pickup, which Sonny had idling in the middle
of the street. She hadn’t recovered from her initial shock, or asked nearly as many questions as I’d expected. Even though I’d passed along Cuthie Cuthbertson’s cautions and caveats, it appeared Livvie was as bowled over by the idea of two million dollars as I had been when I first heard those words.
As their truck chugged away, I pulled my cell phone from the pocket of my down coat and turned it on. Two calls from Chris, one this afternoon, one twenty minutes ago. Holding the phone in my slippery wool gloves, I called him back.
“Hello, beautiful.”
“Hello! Where are you?”
“In port. Key West. Got in today.”
Relief flooded through me. Parts of my body I hadn’t even realized were tense relaxed. When Chris was off in a little boat on a big sea, I tried not to think about it. I told myself he was an expert, as were Joe and Sam. But I’d almost lost him in a boating accident in the fall and worry was never far. “How is it down there?”
“Beautiful. Warm. I’m barefoot right now.”
“Don’t tease me.”
“Truly. Coming across, the sunsets over the Caribbean were incredible, and the stars at night. We have to do this sometime. Together.”
“Sounds wonderful. When will you be home?”
“Saturday. Joe’s got a week to get this boat shipshape before the tourists start showing up for their excursions, and I want to give him a hand. Sam’s going to stay longer, but I’ll come back so we can resupply and open the restaurant on Monday. A ticket to Portland was crazy expensive, so I’m flying into Boston. I’ll take the train up.”