“What?”
He raised a hand in a helpless way. “I don’t know. There is something about it. I can’t really articulate it. But something feels right when I’m there, like things are clicking into place. But then, after several days of it, I want to leave.”
I nodded.
“Is it the same for you?” he asked.
“In a way. But more intense.”
“Intense to return? Or intense to leave?”
“Both.” I mulled it over for a moment. “Yes, both.”
“My parents miss Germany. They are appalled by what’s happening there, and deeply sad. And in public, they denounce it, probably to protect themselves from their less kind-spirited neighbors.”
“Oh, Eli, are they treated cruelly because of the war?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “It bothers my mother a great deal. But my father handles it well enough. My father is a patient man. His philosophy is to live your life being true to yourself and to God, and let that guide all your decisions and behavior.” He gave me a wistful smile. “It’s been difficult to follow in his footsteps.”
“It seems to me you live your life that way,” I said.
His face grew very serious. “I’ve found life is more complicated than I thought it would be.”
“In what way?”
He smiled at me. “You’ve been a surprise.”
Pleasure swept through me. “A good one, I hope.”
“A most excellent one.”
We kept looking at each other for a few moments as we walked. Suddenly, he grinned at me.
“What?” I asked, grinning too.
“Nothing.”
“Your ears are red.”
He laughed and took a breath. “What were we talking about?” he asked, looking desperate to change the subject. “Oh, my parents and Germany.”
I nodded, happy to listen to him.
“When they talk about their childhoods, and their homes there, and their cousins, and the lush green of it, a longing creeps into their voices. I can hear it and know how bereft they are they won’t see it again.”
“Why did they leave?”
“The Great War. They didn’t want to be a part of that.”
“Maybe the longing for home is worse if you have to leave but don’t want to.”
“Yes,” he said. “I think it would be.”
A surge of panic went through me at the thought of that forced separation from Sanctuary. Again. “Our souls seem rooted to the place we’re born. We’ll always feel that pull back.”
“Perhaps,” he said, then a quirky, gentle smile crossed his face. “But can’t we put down new roots?”
“Perhaps,” I agreed, wanting that to be true.
But it was more complicated than that. I’d put down new roots at the boarding school and felt that gentle pull back to Elizabeth and our classmates and our school in the woods. But what I felt toward Sanctuary was different. As if—beyond my control—Sanctuary was yanking me back.
It wasn’t that on the island I felt a sense of belonging, but rather that I was a possession: I belonged to it, or to something that remained here at least.
AS WE STARTED BACK ACROSS THE LONG GREEN EXPANSE OF THE LAWN toward Sanctuary, I slowed and slowed until we finally stopped.
Uncle was on the roof, Ben on a ladder, handing new shingles to Uncle. My eyes stayed on Uncle and the way he went about his task, handling the shingles as if they were precious. After he finished hammering, he ran his hand over the roof, then patted it with a strange tenderness. I felt a warring inside my soul, yearning to reach out and caress the house as well, but also to take Uncle’s hammer and smash it into the roof.
“Cecilia?”
I turned to Eli, my eyes not really seeing him.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I nodded, then looked back at Uncle, who was scowling at us now.
“Will you go into Lady Cliffs with me?” I asked Eli, not wanting to be parted from him. “I need to do something.”
“All right,” he agreed.
I found an empty spot at the Lady Cliffs’ dock. It was comforting to have Eli by my side as we walked into town. Still, I avoided everyone’s eyes, not wanting to catch those baleful stares, while Eli nodded at people we passed, giving them a polite but reserved hello.
A few cars lined the street, and quite a few people roamed the sidewalks for a small town. The main points of interest were Turner’s Store and the one brick building (a bank), but the dress shop, sweet shop, drugstore, post office, café, and filling station were also getting customers.
We made our way to the one-room library with a long front walkway and small gabled porch and two small windows on either side. Two older people, maybe in their sixties, looked up from their desks in the library, reading glasses perched on their noses. They faced each other on either side of the door.
The woman stood. “Can I help you?” Her glasses dropped, hanging from an amber chain around her neck. For the briefest of moments, her eyes registered recognition as she took me in. The man bent back over his papers with his pencil busily scribbling.
Because she didn’t give me the Town Stare, I plunged in. “May we look at the Lady Cliffs newspapers?”
“Recent papers?”
“A few years ago. Late 1929 to 1935 or 6.”
The man’s deep voice interrupted. “Look in the files,” he said, pointing to the oak cabinet. “The town had only a weekly back then.”
“You aren’t going to find a lot from the early thirties,” the woman added. “The paper was discontinued for a while after 1930.” She nodded at a table before sitting back down at her desk. “You can use that area.”
In the second drawer of the filing cabinet, we found the files, but there were only three for the period 1931 to 1935.
“What years did you want?” Eli asked.
“I need articles from September 1934.” I looked at him soberly. “The month of the fire. And from 1935 too.”
I also wanted to find anything about my father’s death, sometime after the stock market crash of 1929. The crash—Black Thursday—took place in October, taking Uncle’s money, Papa’s family money, everyone’s money, and ruining Sanctuary. But that would have to wait. “The other time period is late 1929, maybe early 1930.”
Eli retrieved several more files for me. When I pulled out one of the chairs at the table, a loud screeching noise filled the room, but the man and the woman were still quietly huddled over their books and papers.
“What are you looking for?” Eli whispered, sitting down and putting the files beside me.
“Hmm?” I asked, flipping through the one-sheet papers from 1935. Not much news to report in Lady Cliffs: notices of deaths and children’s birthday parties, Boy Scout meetings and family picnics, and even a short news item about a woman who received a postcard from her daughter on holiday in Florida who said she was lonesome.
“Cecilia,” Eli asked, “what happened in 1935?”
“A murder.”
He stopped. “Whose?”
“What?”
His hand was on mine. I looked up at him. “Whose murder?” he asked.
“A woman. I don’t know her name.”
“Who was she?”
“My cousin.”
“And you think she was murdered?”
“Maybe.”
I was startled by the woman at my shoulder, looking down at me. “You should ask Joe Reed about that,” she said.
Eli stood. “We should have introduced ourselves. I’m Eli Bauer, and this is Cecilia Cross.”
She nodded. “Rita Scott. That’s my husband, Pete.” I glanced back, but the man didn’t look up. “Joe Reed used to work for the Coast Guard before he retired. He found a woman’s body a few years ago. I’m almost certain it was in the summer of ’35.”
“Summer of ’35?” Eli asked me.
“It could be,” I said quietly.
Eli continued to look at me, but when I didn’t
say anything else, he turned to the woman. “Where can we find Mr. Reed?”
“He lives outside of town, but most likely he’ll be at Turner’s Store. He spends most of his days chatting with Earl.” She looked at me. “You know, Earl Turner, the owner.”
I nodded, remembering the grocer with his wiry mustache and cold stare. The few times I’d visited his store as a child, he took my money as if it held some evil taint or magic.
“I remember Joe finding that body. But I’ll let him tell you the details.” She hesitated, watching me. “You think she was your cousin?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“I don’t think anyone in Lady Cliffs knew that.” She kept looking at me. “Your aunt used to come in here. Your mother too, sometimes.
“Your mother was always urging your aunt to leave when the two of them were in here, and most of the time your aunt would do what your mother said. Cora Cross was clearly the leader. But both of them liked to look through the folders, like you’re doing now, and learn more about your island.”
“Did they ever bring me with them?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “This was before you were born.”
“Do you remember what years exactly?”
“It was a few years after the Great War. Maybe 1921? I remember their visits because people from Sanctuary usually kept to themselves.” She pressed her lips together. “Still do.”
“Do you know anything about the history of the island?” Eli asked. I went back to flipping through the weeklies, listening while I did so.
“As I said, the Winship islanders have always been … private people. We had some information … old land deeds, a family Bible with a list of names and births, and a fascinating article someone from Lady Cliffs had written about it in the late 1800s, mostly fanciful stuff. You know how they were then, all superstition and ghosts and contacting the dead.” She hesitated, and I looked up to find her eyes on me. “All of those things went missing. Your aunt stopped coming in about that time.” Her face flushed.
There was an uncomfortable silence. So my aunt was a thief like I was.
If those things were at the house, if my aunt had taken them as Mrs. Scott was implying, they would be very useful to me.
Finally, Eli said, “Do you remember what the article was about?”
“Sure.” She laughed nervously. “But it was nonsense.”
“What exactly?”
She cleared her throat and scratched her neck. “Every outlandish thing that could be thought of was thrown in there. What I remember most were these claims that two separate groups of women had visited Winship Island over the years,” she said, leaning forward and saying quietly, “and were never heard from again.” She pulled back, thought for a moment, and then flushed again.
Eli and I exchanged a look.
“Do you remember any more from the article?” Eli asked.
“They also brought up the old stories about the original captain—or maybe this article was the source of the old stories, I don’t know.”
“What stories?” I asked.
“You’ve heard them?” she asked.
I shook my head.
She stared at me for a moment longer. “The old captain and his young wife died on the same day under mysterious circumstances.”
“Captain Winship and Amoret?”
“Yes, yes. There was talk of murder … or …” She broke off, looking at me, turning red again. “No one knows what happened.” She looked back at her husband. “I’ll leave you to your work,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m glad to help.”
I shut the last file from 1935. There were no newspapers at all for the summer of 1935, and only one that fall, and it had no mention of a body being found.
I flipped through the weeklies from 1934, easily finding what I was looking for: an article about the burning of my grandmother’s cottage. Scanning over the first paragraph, I could tell it was written in an ostentatious style that had probably created more of a rift between the people of Lady Cliffs and Sanctuary. A slow, sick unease swept over me, so I broke off reading and glanced at the other articles on the page: a short biography of my father and his career as an artist, and a brief history of the island, complete with pictures of its first inhabitants.
My hands shook as I studied Captain Winship, the man in my visions and dreams looking like he might jump out of the page and slap me. This was his portrait at Sanctuary, showing a man with a large, grim face and cruel eyes that stared condescendingly out of the frame. He had not been handsome or kind.
My eyes went to the other one I recognized: It was Amoret Winship. It stunned me a little, seeing it. Every image I saw of her revealed some other side to her. Her ghostly self was angry. My dreams showed her vulnerability.
But the artist had captured a different view of her. Amoret had no affection for the painter, so I doubted William Clemson painted these. Her hair was piled perfectly on top of her head, not a strand out of place, and dark eyes looked to the side. Her pose was almost relaxed, with an arm draped over a round upholstered edge of a couch, but her rigid posture belied that sense of calm. It was her beautiful face that truly revealed her disdain, her pretty mouth set angrily, keeping her from looking empty and sad. Had the captain forced her into this painting? If we could look underneath her fine clothes, would we see bruises?
The portrait alone would have been enough to spin tales, even without the rumors of murder.
The third picture was of a man whose portrait wasn’t in the hallway of Sanctuary. I knew who he was before I even saw his name: Dr. William Clemson, with dark handsome looks and kind eyes. He too had visited my dreams. I felt as if I knew him a little. The newspaper said that Dr. Clemson had been murdered by one of the villagers on the island. But after my vision of the scene between Amoret and the captain, I wondered if that was true.
The day following Dr. Clemson’s murder, the bodies of Amoret Winship and the captain were found in the dining room at Sanctuary. My heart sped as I thought of all the vileness I felt in that room.
Their deaths were a mystery. Amoret had bruises on her body. The cause of the captain’s death was not known. Stories began to circulate that the spirit of William Clemson had murdered them both.
There was maddeningly little detail about the matter.
I braced myself before I began the article I most wanted to read, but was still not prepared for what I discovered:
Tragic Fire on Winship Island
Two people, one only a child, died tragically yesterday when a French-style cottage on Winship Island was consumed in flames. Mrs. Lancaster and her granddaughter, thirteen-year-old Tess Cross, were sleeping in the two upstairs bedrooms at the time of the blaze.
Jess Turner, the stable master at the estate, awoke to the smell of smoke and the “extreme agitation” of the animals. He alerted the household, but it was too late. The cottage was completely consumed in less than an hour. In a miraculous stroke of luck, the heavens opened up as the cottage dissolved into ashes, releasing a heavy torrent of precipitation, extinguishing the devilish flames and sparing the remaining estate and its inhabitants from perishing in the horrible inferno.
Mrs. Lancaster’s younger daughter, Laura Wallace, and granddaughter twelve-year-old Cecilia Cross were asleep in the main house at the time of the incident and are in shock, according to an unidentified servant at the estate. Mrs. Wallace, married to the owner of Sanctuary, Mr. Frank Wallace, had to be sedated by Lady Cliffs’ own Dr. Wilson.
This family has had its share of tragedy. Mrs. Lancaster’s daughter (and Tess’s mother), Cora Cross, was confined to a sanitarium a few months ago after prolonged grieving for the loss of her husband, the renowned artist James Cross. In 1929, on Black Thursday, Mr. Cross—whose inheritance allowed him to pursue his art—shot himself in Sanctuary’s graveyard. His body was found by his wife.
The police have not yet discovered the cause of the fire, but this reporter has
it on good authority that they suspect arson. Despite rumors to the contrary, it is not to be believed that any of the good citizens of Lady Cliffs could be responsible for this horrendous deed.
Townspeople of Lady Cliffs and inhabitants of Winship Island have a long history of being suspicious of one another. A wealthy English captain settled Winship Island in the mid-1700s, long before Lady Cliffs was established. Those who have lived there tend to be recluses or to seek the company of well-to-do people not from Maine.
My vision blurred. With shaking hands, I stuffed the papers back into the folders and walked out of the library.
“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” ELI ASKED, CATCHING UP TO ME ON THE SIDEWALK.
He leaned toward me, and I felt his hand on my back as if he were steadying me for just a moment.
I looked in his eyes, but I only saw my father’s eyes.
“You’re so pale,” Eli said, taking my arm.
We found a bench at a little park across from the shore.
“I saw the article,” he said. “I’m sorry about your father.”
I nodded.
“Did you know how he died?” he asked gently.
I shook my head.
He took my hand, and we sat and watched the tied-up boats bobbing in the harbor. It was midday and there wasn’t much going on. All the fishermen were resting, preparing themselves for the next journey out to sea.
The sun was out. It was warm. It should have been a nice September day, a glorious day—one to enjoy the weather, spread out a blanket, and have a picnic before the cold set in.
“Do you miss your father?” Eli asked finally.
“Miss him?” I asked absently. “I barely knew him.” Images came to me. “I do remember his hands, moving, working over a canvas, colors and things popping out of the blankness.” I looked at Eli in surprise, and my eyes stung. “I didn’t see that until now. Could I have just imagined it?” Had it been triggered by Patricia’s memories of my father, or was I just stealing hers because I had none of my own?
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