Skepticism took the place of Mr. Carmichael’s smiles, and it was Amelia’s cue to launch into her scene.
“Mr. Carmichael, I’m sure this isn’t a good time, but we’re following up on some loose threads regarding my mother’s estate. And, I suppose, my father’s, too.” She paused a beat, studying him.
His face fell. “I’m so sorry to hear about Nora. You know, I intended to come to the funeral, but...”
She cut him off, uninterested in his excuse. “Oh, it’s fine. We were going through some of my mother’s personal effects in an effort to pin down how the old lighthouse up north came to be sold. We’ve found a name—a woman called Liesel Hart—but it turned into a dead end. In some of her...” Amelia glanced briefly to Clara, finding the right word, “paperwork,” she swallowed, “she named you as, um, well.” Amelia hadn’t lost him yet. In fact, Gene Carmichael had narrowed his gaze on her and gripped onto a piling to steady himself. He waited the brief moment it took her to find exactly what she was going to say. “Mr. Carmichael, our mother told us to find you and ask you.”
He smirked at Michael, who replied by crossing his arms and setting his jaw.
“Ask me what?” Gene replied.
“Mr. Carmichael, what happened to our father, Wendell Acton?”
***
Some minutes later, Amelia, Michael, and Clara were seated at the bow, each with a margarita in hand.
Gene Carmichael had shocked Amelia when instead of begging off of the question, he invited them to sit and talk.
She accepted. Their host busied himself indicating to his guests that he had a pressing matter to attend to, then he brought out a round of drinks. Amelia caught Clara pucker, but all three of them acted politely and sipped periodically from their sour beverages while Gene Carmichael began.
“I’m not sure what you know and what you don’t,” he began, waiting for an answer from Amelia. She swallowed and exchanged a nervous glance with Clara. Maybe this was bigger than an impromptu houseboat meeting. Maybe Kate and Megan should be there.
Sucking in a deep breath, Amelia pulled from some inner reserve of leadership and maturity that she’d often hidden from her daily interactions. “If you know something, Mr. Carmichael, and it’s important, then I think I need my other sisters to hear it.”
Michael, who sat beside her, covered Amelia’s hand in his own. Her heart pounded against her chest wall, and she flicked a glance to Clara, who nodded her on.
“Well, like I said, I’m not sure if what I know is important. Or news or whatnot. You’re welcome to invite your sisters here. My company can entertain themselves. We dock at Birch Harbor no less than twice a week, you know. Usually more often than that.
“Where do you live?” Amelia asked.
“Heirloom Island.”
Her mouth fell open. “I didn’t know you were so close. I figured you’d left for a bigger city or something.”
“My heart belongs to Birch Harbor. But I couldn’t stand to be here day in, day out. Not once I retired.”
Amelia nodded as if she understood, but she did not. She turned to Clara. “I think,” she began, worried she was about to make the wrong decision. In her life, Amelia, social though she was, had usually acted independently. It rarely served her well, if her long history of loser ex-boyfriends and dead-end waitressing jobs and lack of acting gigs was any indication. But Amelia liked it that way. She liked to fight her way to a happy ending. And though for many years, her path hadn’t ended in a pot of gold, there she was. Back in Birch Harbor, with her sisters and a new friend in Michael-the-lawyer. She still didn’t have a home. She still didn’t have a job.
But there she was, on the verge of having the truth.
“We can’t do this without them,” she continued, holding Clara’s nervous stare, “why don’t you call Megan and Kate. Michael and I will wait here with Gene. Tell them it’s important.”
Clara nodded and stood, pacing a short distance away and leaving Amelia and Michael to sit with Gene, who seemed nice enough, but who also seemed to bear a deep, dark secret.
***
Soon enough, a commotion broke out on the jetty. Amelia heard her name and craned her neck to see Megan, clad in a black dress and Kate, in a white dress, appear in front of a small group of people. Squinting further, she recognized Matt Fiorillo, Brian, and Sarah huddling near the man she’d asked for help earlier. The marina manager. Jake.
“There they are.” Amelia pointed and waved, and Clara, who was still standing, deboarded the boat and waved, too. Calling out to them.
Megan and Kate sped down the jetty toward Dock C and turned. “Is everything okay?” Kate demanded, her eyes flashing from even yards away.
“Over here!” Amelia cried, standing near Michael, her body tense and awash in goosebumps at that moment. Michael and Gene also stood, smiling tightly.
With Michael’s help, Amelia’s three sisters came aboard and joined them.
“Care for a cocktail?” Gene asked.
Kate and Megan sat, bewildered, each politely declining.
“What’s going on?” Kate asked. Amelia noticed her fresh face of makeup and blown out hair. She’d been on a date. With Matt. Guilt briefly pooled in Amelia’s stomach for tearing her sister away, but she could go back to him. She would go back to him. After Gene spilled the beans.
“Gene wants to tell us something,” Amelia answered simply, lifting her palm and returning to her seat.
“I’m going to excuse myself, ladies. Gene.” Michael nodded to each then dropped his voice. “Amelia, if you need anything, I’ll be just over there.” He gestured to the shore, where the others stood confused.
She thanked him and they waited until Michael had left.
“Mr. Carmichael? I think we’re ready.”
He smiled sadly, let out a long sigh and hitched his trousers before sitting across from the four of them.
And then he walked them down a very ambling, very twisted memory lane.
Chapter 35—Nora
I’ll bury this entry. I’ll bury it deep in my hope chest and lock it up. It can sit under something heavy, so it stays in place, and I’ll tell Clara to be sure to find the hope chest. I’ll tell her when she’s older. When I’m older and on my deathbed. Maybe I’ll go down in history as one of those enchanting women who call a loved one to her deathbed to share a shocking secret.
No, that’s a little too “tabloid” for my style. But I’ll tuck this page underneath something heavy, like Wendell’s revolver or a paperweight, deep in the bottom of the hope chest. And there it will stay until they pull it out and see for themselves that I wasn’t selfish.
I have to hide this, because if I don’t and it’s discovered, then everything could fall apart, and I can’t have things fall apart. Not when they’ve finally started to calm down.
Yet, I want it down on paper so that the truth isn’t lost forever. One day, my girls will want to know. They probably want to know now, but it wouldn’t help them. What will help them is for us to push on and live our lives as normally as possible. How could I live with myself if I interrupt Kate and her newly perfect life? Or Amelia, bless her wild heart, who’s following her dreams? And Megan, secure, dark Megan with her clever husband and babbling baby girl? I won’t do it. And Clara’s still in school. She deserves her normalcy. Needs it, really.
I know what it’s like to hold a secret to my breast and have my entire life spin out of control, and I’ll never put that on any of my children. But one day, I’ll die, and they won’t know about the lighthouse. They won’t know about what happened to me and what I had to do. So here it is.
When I was a teenager, I thought I met a boy. I probably wrote about all this back then. He was a tourist, and he was cute. I fell pregnant, and I told my mother. This was a mistake, in retrospect. I thought she would help me and raise the baby with me. We could pass her off as my youngest sister. I thought everything would be okay.
My mother was enraged and shared the news with my fat
her. They threatened us. They told the boy and me that we had two choices, get married and move out or give the baby away.
The boy wanted to marry me. Maybe I ought to have done that. But to marry him would be to move off the lake and somewhere else. He was going to school to become a teacher, and in the end, I didn’t love him.
I told my parents that I would not marry him, but I would keep the child.
That didn’t happen. It turned out that they made the decision for us, adopting the baby out to a good family from the south. A big, Catholic family happy to take in another Catholic baby.
For some years after, I searched for my daughter, never to find her. Instead, I found the man I would fall in love with, Wendell Acton.
I made another mistake, though. I never told Wendell about my past. I was too worried it would be a deal-breaker for him and that I’d be faced with new heartache. I feared I would drown from all the tragedy, and so I kept it a secret.
By the time Wendell and I were married, and we had our own three beautiful girls, I found a new comfort in my new life. I could move on. I had to move on from my first bouncing baby girl.
It was by then that that child would have turned eighteen, but the no-contact order had been two-way. My parents and her adoptive parents had agreed that neither we nor they would ever get in touch. To do so would break the law.
On her birth certificate, my parents and I agreed to leave the boy’s name off in favor of a humiliating note: Father Unknown. I’ll never forgive them for that, but then I’d never have wanted to include the boy’s name. The simple truth was that I did not love him. Despite my preference for excitement and adventure, it was never a summer boy I wanted.
It was a local one. And once I found Wendell, all I wanted was for the past to be buried for good.
Then, Kate unwittingly followed in my footsteps. To me, there was just one option, to raise the baby as Kate’s sister, as I had wanted. Wendell disagreed and thought perhaps Kate and Matthew ought to be together. But I thought then that we shouldn’t force that on Kate. I sometimes wonder if I was wrong. If that’s why Wendell left?
And unfortunately, I’ll never know. As much as I wish I could answer that mystery in this note, I cannot. All I know is that wherever Wendell is now, he’s not with me. And I can’t stand it. So, I’ll ask my daughters to look for him. In my own way, I’ll see to it that they find their father and come to know that whatever happened, he surely loved them. As much as I do.
Kate, Amelia, Megan, and Clara: Go find him. Please.
Chapter 36—Amelia
“I met your mother one summer when I came here with my folks. We lived in the city, but my mom heard about a bed-and-breakfast somewhere in town. I don’t think it’s up and running any longer. I was a bored teenager, and I ran into this beautiful blonde local. Townie, I suppose. Anyway, I fell hard for her, but she treated me as little more than a plaything.” He chuckled, but the sisters remained perfectly still. “Anyway,” he went on, passing his hand along his jaw as a deep frown took hold, “your mother got pregnant.”
Amelia’s face fell slack, and she felt dizzy. It came on hard and suddenly, and she tried to focus her eyes. Clara, beside her, gasped audibly. Kate interrupted. “You’re joking.” Her voice was flat, her expression pained. Amelia reached out her hand to Kate, squeezing her arm.
Megan added, her voice a whisper. “That can’t be.”
“Yes. It’s true. After we found out, I asked her to keep the baby. She said she would, but that she didn’t want to be with me. She thought we couldn’t make it work, especially since I didn’t live here.” He lifted a helpless hand and dropped it to his knee. “Honestly, after she told me, I didn’t learn much more. She sent one letter, months later. In it, she said her parents were going to force her to give the child up. A day didn’t go by that I didn’t call her, write a letter, or mope about the whole thing. Once I finished with my degree, I applied to teach at Birch Harbor High. I—” he looked down at his hands. “I became a little obsessed over the whole thing.”
Amelia tried to offer a smile, but he didn’t look up.
“Your mother married Wendell, of course, and I had to find a way to move on. I dated, sure, but it took many years until I met my current wife. Long after I’d gone back for my principal’s certificate and been promoted. Watching you three—” he pointed along to Kate, Amelia, and Megan with precision — “move up through the school nearly killed me. But I made it and retired and married and moved. Never quite moved on, though.”
Amelia frowned. “So why would she write that you had something to do with Wendell’s leaving?”
He shook his head. “Well, I’m not sure. I never contacted him or her. Ever. I swear it.” The sisters kept quiet, waiting for a better answer. At last, he heaved a sigh. “I can share my theory, but it’s pure speculation.”
“Mr. Carmichael,” Amelia pleaded. “We’re desperate. Our lives changed in the matter of a summer. We went from a big, happy, hard-working, normal family to a broken one. Our mother took us to Arizona to hide Kate’s pregnancy. She chose Kate’s future for her, which now we can understand why... but everything changed. We came back, and we had a baby sister. We had to sneak away to a half-finished cottage inland. We had to lie to our friends and even to other family about why we were gone. But that was all fine and dandy compared to learning that our dad had left us. And then there were more lies, it felt like. We started thinking, Mr. Carmichael, that maybe he hadn’t left. We started thinking—” Amelia glanced at her sisters, whose strained expressions mirrored her own inner plight, “—that maybe he died.”
She let out a long, slow breath after her confession. Amelia knew it’s what Kate and Megan and Clara believed, too. Deep down. Even if it wasn’t something they discussed. No other reason rang true. And the police investigation came up empty. Even Wendell’s own family came to accept that he just left. With his duffle, maybe even his gun and wedding band.
Waiting for Gene Carmichael to scoff and disagree, Amelia leaned back into her polyester seat. From where she was, she could see Michael and Matt and Brian and Sarah watching with focus. Though Amelia didn’t regret coming to see Gene, she was ready for the ordeal to be over. Maybe they could go out for pizza after this and wash it all away, out to shore, with every other secret in their family history.
Gene held up his hands. “I’ve considered that, too,” he replied. “I’ve wondered if maybe there were some unresolved feelings on Nora’s end. Maybe he found out, but then, how would he? And if he did find out, why not confront Nora? Or me, for that matter?”
“Back up a moment,” Kate interjected. “Are you saying you don’t think Wendell ever knew about you or the baby?”
Amelia felt her chest swell in anxiety. Was that the key to this whole thing? She drew the watch from her pocket and held it out to Gene. “We found this at the lighthouse. Stuck under the dock. We can’t find his wedding band or anything else that suggests something bad happened, but his brother says he was on his boat last they knew.”
They were throwing a lot at him, but he could handle it. He looked first at Kate. “No. As far as I’m aware, Wendell never knew the truth.”
“But we don’t know for sure,” she answered.
He shrugged. “And about his personal effects, that was the evidence the police used when they determined they weren’t going to drag all of Lake Huron.”
Amelia frowned. “They didn’t drag the lake? Did they even look for him?”
Shaking his head, Gene replied, “Everyone looked for him. But neither your father nor his boat ever turned up. When they learned he’d taken his duffle, they called it a day and packed it in.”
Amelia’s face fell. “Okay, well,” she tried to accept what he was saying, but it didn’t feel like enough. She wracked her brain for any other question she could think of to nail down the facts. Kate beat her to the punch.
“What about the baby?” she asked him.
A moment paused before Gene answered. “
I never heard from her. Nora never mentioned her. It was a closed adoption, and we weren’t allowed to make any sort of contact. Period. I’m so sorry I can’t help. I realize this means you have another sister out there somewhere.”
Clara let out a small sob. Amelia wrapped an arm around her, shushing her. They began to thank Gene, Kate apologizing for taking his time and asking if they might stay in touch in the future. He accepted, but while she took out her phone, a thought occurred to Amelia.
“Wait a minute,” she hissed to herself.
Megan and Clara pulled themselves out of their deep disappointment and turned to look at her. “What is it?” Megan asked.
“I can’t believe we didn’t think of this. Kate,” Amelia stood, grabbing Kate’s wrist and keeping her from adding Gene Carmichael’s number to her phone. “The baby. The baby girl.”
“What are you saying?” Kate asked bewildered.
“I think we know who she is.”
Chapter 37—Amelia
“Slice of Life, now.” Amelia had all but run from the boat to the others waiting, directing everyone to the Village’s pizzeria. It sat squarely in the middle of the plaza with ample outdoor seating. They didn’t have to wait for a hostess, they could seat themselves and get straight down to business.
Which Amelia did.
Everyone had joined, except for the marina manager, who’d disappeared before Amelia rushed off the pier and into the plaza. Now, they were waiting for her to explain.
Kate held her hands out over the table. “Let’s just calm down a minute. They don’t even know what’s going on,” she lifted a hand to the motley group of men whose faces drew up in concern. Sarah, for her part, had plucked a menu from the hostess stand and was busying herself for an order. None of them had eaten dinner yet. Food felt like a priority even to Amelia. But it had to wait while she revealed her hunch.
Briefly, Amelia brought everyone up to speed, reviewing the truth about Nora and Gene’s history and covering the fact that it seemed increasingly clear that Wendell might have died, by accident or, more darkly, otherwise.
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