“I’m using that old desk you left here, Izzy, and Rebecca gave me a sofa she wasn’t using.” She pointed to the corner where a soft merino afghan was angled over the back of a buttery yellow sofa. “I love this room.”
Nell looked around at the finishing touches, a plant in the corner, a small throw rug. And then she looked at the wall. Jules had brightened the white space by placing a small painting above the couch, an impressionistic blend of soft greens and blues, a whitewashed porch, and a basket of hanging flowers that caught the sunlight and reflected the soft canary color of the couch. She walked over to get a closer look. And then she stared hard at the painting, one hand lifting to her mouth.
“How amazing. Jules, where did you find this? Did you paint it?”
She realized the answer before the question was out. It was an old painting. The frame was weathered and the painting inside slightly buckled from humidity. Some areas were darkened, probably brittle beneath the glass. But it wasn’t its age that kept Nell staring at it, and that drew the others in the room to her side; it was the subject of the painting.
It was an old painting of the house they were standing in.
“Oh, my,” Birdie said. “What a treasure. Wherever did you find this, Jules?”
There was no mistaking the view. It was painted from the side of the backyard and captured a glimpse of the sea and sky in the background. But mostly it featured the porch, the swing, a basket of yarn on the floor. A bright green shrub with soft edges caught the sunlight, much like the overgrown cypress that still hugged the railing of the porch. The artist had layered magenta, cyan, black, and yellow, creating a vibrant bush that reflected the light.
“It’s this house, this porch,” Izzy exclaimed. “Wow. And look—” She pointed to the background. “It was painted a long time ago, before the hill became dense with undergrowth and trees, so you can see the ocean clearly in the distance. It’s beautiful. Was it in that smelly old attic above the bedroom? Or did you find it in Canary Cove? I wonder who painted it.”
For a moment Jules just stood there, still looking at the painting as she soaked in their surprise and praise and wonder. Finally she turned around and smiled.
“My mother,” Jules said quietly. “My mother painted it.”
Chapter 26
A hush fell over the room. And then curiosity took over and the questions began.
“Your mother painted this?”
“How do you know?”
“Where did you find it?”
Their voices collided in the small den, their eyes still glued to the painting.
Jules stood close to the painting now, one knee on the couch, and pointed to the initials painted into the corner—scrolled initials worked right into the shadows of one of the pillars as if part of the painting. PTJ. “Penelope Theresa Johnson. I found the paintings in a trunk after she died. I brought them with me—I’m not even sure why. Except it was easy to do—they were small—and somehow I knew they were from a time in her life that I wanted to discover. A time when she was happy. And I didn’t want to leave them in a storage unit.
“Then one day I was running along the beach. I stopped to catch my breath, lifted my head back, and there it was—or a glimpse of it at least. My mother’s painting, come to life.” She turned and looked at them. “I think I saw some of you walking with Abby that day. Remember?”
They nodded. The memory of a mesmerized Jules staring up at nothing was fresh and vivid. They had thought that day that there was something wrong, that she had been running too hard or too long. That she was seeing something that wasn’t there. A mirage.
The smell of the lasagna heating in the oven was the only thing that lured them away from the painting, but a string of questions remained. They went back into the kitchen and filled their plates with Harry’s cheesy dish, then filed out onto the porch. Birdie brought the cabernet and Izzy passed around rolls for everyone. And although they were starving, the questions lined up like a thick barricade, preventing the food from going down comfortably without at least a few more answers.
Jules confessed that she had come back that day, the day she’d discovered the house, after they were gone. She had worked her way up through the tangle of bushes and scrub trees until she found herself on the edge of the backyard. From there she could see it all, every detail. The swing, the tapered pillars, the slight overhang of the roof. It was just as her mother had seen it. She snapped a string of pictures, then slowly made her way back down the rise, trying not to be caught trespassing.
“I got the painting out of my car and compared it to the photos I had just taken. There was no mistaking that it was the same house—the house my mother had painted forty years before. I knew it was a sign, somehow. A sign that I was on the right path, that this house was important in my search.
“I went to City Hall to learn more about the house, but I was too excited, too caught up in the experience, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for.” She looked out toward the water, slowly sipping her wine, tracing back over her footsteps that day. “I ended up at the Ocean’s Edge. It seemed an easy place to go and think—and I’m hooked on their calamari. I sat at the outdoor bar and asked a few people who were milling around about the house, trying to describe where it was. It was mostly staff because it was still early for dinner. A waitress told me her friend was a new Realtor and was listing a house in that neighborhood. Then she pulled over another waiter whom she thought lived near Ridge Road. Maybe he’d know more, she said. It turned out to be the guy who lives next door.”
“Garrett Barros,” Birdie said. She looked at Nell, but Jules went on.
Jules nodded. “I know people think he’s odd, but he’s harmless, I think. It’s probably a result of very cranky parents. He told me the house was empty. Haunted, probably. But here’s the really odd thing. It’s ironic, thinking back over it now, although I never gave it a thought at the time.
“As Garrett and I were talking, Jeffrey Meara walked around the bar, checking on the waiters and bartenders, making sure things were ready for the dinner crowd. He saw Garrett and pulled him away, chewing him out for bothering a customer. I spoke up and said that wasn’t the case, that I had been asking him a question and he wasn’t bothering me—he was just answering it.
“Then Garrett spoke up, too. He tends to talk more than he has to, but I think he wanted to make sure Jeffrey wouldn’t fire him. So he told him I was asking about an empty house that was right next door to his parents’ on Ridge Road, so I had picked a good person to ask and he was just trying to be helpful.”
She paused, remembering the conversation more vividly as she revisited it now. She took another drink of wine and frowned. “Maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there these days—especially in retrospect—but it seemed to me that Jeffrey Meara’s face froze when Garrett mentioned the house on Ridge Road. And then he stared at me, a stare that even that day seemed a little odd and out of place.”
“Did Jeffrey say anything more to you?”
“No, but he kept staring at me, just like he had done a few days before when someone introduced us. It was uncomfortable, and then some emergency in the kitchen called him away, and he left, motioning to Garrett Barros to get busy and clean up a wait station. But I didn’t have any more questions for Garrett anyway; I was ready to go. The waitress had given me an address and a name: Stella Palazola at Palazola Real Estate on Harbor Road. They’d know more about the house, she said.”
Nell remembered what happened next. She had watched Jules talking to Gus McClucken in front of his store, looking up at the window of the real estate firm, closed for the day. She had thought Jules needed a dentist. Now the thought made her smile. How very far off she was.
Izzy put her empty plate on the table and picked up Abby, waking now from a nap. “You decided right then that you wanted to buy the house?” A question they’d all been wondering. “Becaus
e of a painting?”
Jules half smiled. “It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I came here thinking I’d spend two weeks tracking down my past, the things my mother refused to talk to me about. I would file the information away, and get on with my life back in Chicago. Before my mother got sick, I was managing a catering company. I liked it—I met great people—and they wanted me back. I had good friends there. And look at me now—I own a house halfway across the country in a place I’ve never been before.”
“It is a bit crazy,” Birdie agreed. “What are your plans? Will you stay on here in Sea Harbor?”
There was an awkward silence as they all realized that Jules’s decisions right now were limited.
“Even if I wanted to leave, the truth is, I can’t. Not until the police are convinced I didn’t kill Jeffrey Meara.” She twisted her necklace, the small charm glinting in the porch light.
Although she spoke in a matter-of-fact way, her words held an emotion that Nell suspected Jules Ainsley didn’t often reveal: fear. A certain amount of trust had come into the small house on Ridge Road, circling around them and emboldening the conversation. It was a shift in relationships, an opening to let out—and in.
“But once I get my life back, I don’t know what I’ll do. There are still many things I don’t know about my mother’s life forty years ago. And about the man she was with here in Sea Harbor. Finding this house, though, and looking at the painting again, is telling me one thing, something I’m sure about now, no matter what my mother led me—or herself—to believe.”
Nell had pulled out the small sweater she was knitting for Abby. She put it in her lap and looked over at Jules. “What is that, Jules?”
“I know that my mother was happy here, at least when she painted this house. That painting is a happy painting.”
It was definitely that, they all agreed. Happy. Nell thought back to the summer Izzy lived in the house, the same summer Sam showed up in Sea Harbor to teach a photography class. The summer they fell in love. That summer, the house looked exactly like the painting in Jules Ainsley’s den. Filled with love. A happy house.
Jules got up and went inside. Soon strains of “Waiting on the World to Change” drifted over a small speaker. She returned with a plate of chocolate chip cookies that a neighbor across the street had brought over that morning. “It was a welcome to Ridge Road,” she said, passing them around.
They savored the cookies in silence, content to let John Mayer’s soulful voice fill the porch and roll softly down the hill.
Cass took another cookie from the plate and sat back, looking over the trees at the sky, dark now with a sprinkling of stars. “You mentioned that you brought paintings with you,” she said. “Do you have more than one?”
Jules nodded. “She did three paintings of the house. Growing up, I never saw them. They were in an old trunk in the corner of her bedroom. The other two paintings were slightly damaged and I haven’t had time to get them repaired yet. But I will. They will go right next to the first one, along that wall.”
“What else did your mother paint? Did she have a gallery?” Nell asked. “She’s very good. I love the light and shadow she’s created in the painting of the house. I’d love to see more of her work.”
“She didn’t ever show in a gallery, although my grandmother told me once that my mother would have been a fine artist, a well-known artist. If only . . .”
The sky was dark now, and somewhere in the safety of the evening shadows Jules spoke more frankly. “‘If only,’ my grandmother would sometimes say, ‘she hadn’t gone to the ocean that summer and let her life be ruined by an evil man.’”
The word “evil” was punched out, as they imagined Jules’s grandmother might have said it.
“My mother got her rigid code of ethics in the womb, I think. My grandmother didn’t allow much give when judging people and actions.”
“Your grandmother knew who your father was?”
“I think so. But she took the information to her grave. My mother’s parents took her away from Sea Harbor, away from Bryn Mawr, away from the life she had found in the East. They sent her to a home run by the nuns until I was born. And then they hired a nanny for me in their own home and enrolled my mother in Northwestern University. Soon after, they encouraged her relationship with a law professor at the school, a nice, quiet, respectable man who was fifteen years older than my mother. He adopted me and gave me his name.”
She looked out into the vastness of the sea, her voice barely audible.
“And my mother never painted again.”
Chapter 27
Nell hurried toward Archie Brandley’s bookstore, checking her watch as she pushed open the door.
Ten minutes to spare before meeting Mary Pisano at the Ocean’s Edge. A drink, a simple plan for the anniversary celebration, that would be it, Mary promised. Ben couldn’t join them, but Cass and Birdie said they might stop by to provide moral support and keep Mary’s plans under control. Nell wanted to tell Cass that she shouldn’t come. Any extra time she had in her busy life should be directed toward Danny Brandley.
But she’d never say that, of course. Cass hugged her personal life close to her chest, sometimes even shielding it from the people who were closest to her. Sometimes Nell thought that was to ward off unwanted advice; other times she thought Cass did it to protect those she loved. They were all invested in one another’s lives—they celebrated joys and suffered one another’s sadness. But they did both gladly, something that maybe Cass hadn’t grasped yet.
She walked in to the wonderful dusty smell of books and over to the counter, shielded behind the new-books display.
“Danny,” she said, surprised.
Danny Brandley looked up from the computer. “Hey, Nell. Good to see you. I bet you’re here for Ben’s weekly stash. When are you going to open your own bookstore with the books he finishes?”
Nell laughed. “I recycle a lot of them right back to your father. Or the community center. What puts you behind the checkout desk?”
“Dad took Mom into Boston for a doctor’s appointment and the guy who usually helps them out on Tuesday afternoons is sick. That leaves me.”
He straightened his glasses and pushed a shock of hair off his forehead. “I’m cheap,” he said. “It works well. Free digs, free labor.”
Nell’s eyes rotated up to the ceiling as if she could see the small apartment off the back of Archie’s store. “You’re still staying here?”
“Yep. It’s not a bad place, though my feet hang over the end of the bed and the hot plate doesn’t work. I’m thinking Tommy Porter will soon get up enough courage to propose to Janie Levin and she’ll move out of Izzy’s apartment above the yarn shop. And then I’ll pounce on it, promise to love Purl the cat forever, and I’ll once again be able to walk into the bathroom without cracking my head on the slanted ceiling.”
“That sounds like long-term planning.”
Danny thought about Nell’s pointed words, then crouched down and pulled a stack of books from beneath the counter. He set them on the counter and pulled out a bag. “Long term? Who knows?” The look he leveled at Nell was thoughtful and steady—and noncommittal.
And, Nell thought, sad.
Danny slid the books into a bag and handed it to Nell. “Cass needs time. She doesn’t want to simply pick up where we were, and I need to respect that. This whole thing shook her in a way I wouldn’t have expected, and I’m not sure I can do anything about it. She needs to figure it out.”
“What thing?”
“Oh, the Jules situation. Being upset that we were spending time together, imagining false scenarios. It was like a bad movie.”
“But she understands now what that was about.”
“Yes. But she didn’t for a while—she was angry and upset. And she didn’t believe me, not completely. Those are big things.”
“So this is s
imply a cooling-off time?” Nell pushed away the sinking feeling inside her.
“I don’t know exactly what it is. I’m forty, Nell. For a while I was okay with being a bachelor—I liked it. I was happy doing my thing, being completely independent. But coming back here to Sea Harbor gave me a different perspective on things, changed me, I guess. That and getting older, maybe. I want to have a family, kids. I look at you and Ben, my parents, Sam and Izzy, and I think, Yeah, that’s what it’s about. That’s why we work hard, why we try to be good people. It’d be for all that. For having an Abby, a lifelong partner, a family. A life.”
“For a Cass?”
Danny didn’t hesitate. “I love Cass, there’s no question about that—crazy and ornery as she sometimes is. But whether that’s enough right now, I don’t know.”
The ringing of the bell above the door sliced through the conversation, severing it as Stan Hanson walked over to the counter to ask about a book.
“Hi, Stan,” Nell managed to say around the catch in her throat. “It’s nice to see you out in the middle of the day. Giving a talk to some civic group, I’d imagine.”
Stan smiled, but it wasn’t the usual polished meet-and-greet smile Nell was accustomed to seeing from the mayor. Stan Hanson looked diminished somehow.
“No. I’ve put the kibosh on some of that for a while. I have plenty of things on my desk needing my attention—wind turbines, trying to help the fishermen, things I’ve started and need to finish.”
Nell smiled as if she understood. But her mind was back behind the counter, where Danny Brandley busied himself and hid his feelings behind the computer, looking up the book Stan had asked about.
Nell took the bag from the counter, nodded her good-bye, and walked out into a brisk September day, the breeze a welcome salve for the feelings collecting inside her.
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