Sealed Off

by Barbara Ross

  Chris leaned in toward me. “I’ll go ahead and let Captain George know we’re on our way.” I nodded my thanks and he ran down the lawn, avoiding the people strolling on the path toward the dock.

  There was a shout from below. People stopped boarding the Jacquie II. Faces all turned in the same direction, over toward the clambake fire.

  There was another shout, and a scream. Sonny and I took off, following Chris by a hundred paces or so. The knot of people had backed up on the path from the dining pavilion to the dock.

  “Excuse me, excuse me.” I hurried forward.

  “What’s happening?” a man asked as I passed him.

  “I don’t know. Please stay back.” I kept moving.

  Sonny and I reached the dock and I looked over toward the fire. At first I saw nothing, but then, further down the point, by the giant woodpile where we stored our hardwood, I spotted two figures moving on the ground. Chris had almost reached them.

  When we got closer, it became clear what was happening. Terry had Jason on the hard-packed dirt and was pounding him. The sound was even worse than the sight. I’d never heard anything quite like it in my life. Off to one side, Emmy cowered, protesting. “Stop. Please stop.” Her words had no effect.

  Chris dove for his brother, knocking him off Jason. As they tumbled apart Terry was still slugging. “Enough!” Chris commanded. Terry was the older brother, but Chris was in control. Terry stopped punching.

  Sonny and I went to Jason, who was still on the ground. His nose was bloodied, his left eye already swelling.

  “You okay, buddy?” Sonny reached out a hand. “Can you get up?”

  Jason lay there for a long minute during which I wondered if we’d have to call the Coast Guard to have him evacuated. “I’m okay. I’m okay,” he finally said. “Give me a minute.”

  “You did this! You did this!” I hadn’t noticed Pru coming up behind us. She was red in the face, spitting fire. I followed her hand to where she was pointing. It wasn’t pointing at Terry. She was pointing at Emmy, who stood frozen, in tears.

  Chapter Three

  It took a while to get things sorted out. I sent Chris and Terry home with Mom, Marguerite, and Tallulah on the Jacquie II. After the action was over, the crowd resumed boarding. Chris hustled Terry up to the bridge so he wouldn’t be sitting among the guests, reminding them of what they’d seen.

  Sonny agreed to take Jason and Pru back to the harbor in our Boston Whaler, and then to return to pick up Livvie, their kids, Wyatt, and me. Jason was up and walking around. He vehemently declared he had no interest in going to the police station (Pru’s suggestion) or to the hospital (everyone else’s).

  Emmy was another problem. It didn’t seem right to send her and her kids home with either Jason and Pru or on the same boat as Terry. Since Livvie, Page, and Jack were staying on the island until Sonny returned, we decided Emmy and her family should, too.

  “I’ll look after her,” Livvie volunteered.

  As we walked toward the dock, Sonny sidled up to me. “You have to fire Terry. Today.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “If you don’t, I will.”

  “No. It’s my responsibility. It will be better coming from me.”

  Sonny put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s tough. I get that he’s your boyfriend’s brother.”

  I was touched. Sonny didn’t show sympathy easily or often, especially not to me. “Thank you. I got us into this. I’ll get us out of it.”

  He grunted and we went our separate ways, he toward the Whaler and me back to Windsholme.

  * * *

  “What took you so long?” Wyatt, who’d been at Windsholme the whole time, had no idea what had happened.

  “Long story. Where’s Mark?”

  “Talking to the demo guys. They’re packing up for the day. Come in here.” She beckoned me into the hidden room. “You have to see this. This place is amazing.”

  I stepped through the doorway in the framing. “Any hints about what happened here, why it’s closed up?”

  “Not specifically about that, but plenty of hints about who lived here. It’s obviously the nanny’s or governess’s room. Its door opened into the nursery where she could keep an eye on her charges.”

  “So we know what the occupant did.”

  “More than that.” Wyatt’s eyes twinkled. “We know who she was.” Wyatt picked the notebook up from the writing desk. “It’s her journal.” Wyatt could barely contain her glee. “We’ll learn so much about what the household was like when she was here.”

  “Which was when?”

  “The entry on the first page dated June 4, 1898.”

  “And the last?” I was dying to know who the woman was, why she’d left, where she’d gone, and, most important, why her room had been closed up with all her things in it.

  “This notebook is full,” Wyatt answered. “The last page ends in the middle of a sentence on August 8, 1898.”

  She handed me the journal. It was all in sepia tones, the ink faded to the color of weak tea and the paper darkened to beige. The handwriting was readable, just, a lovely, spidery script that curved across the page.

  “Look at this!” Wyatt opened the top drawer. She pulled out a corset, a petticoat, and a pair of bloomers. “There are more,” she said. “And look here.” The second drawer held two white cotton nightgowns. Wyatt pulled another item out of the drawer.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Bathing costume.” She laughed as it unfolded. It had a top with naval insignia on the lapels, a tight waist and knee-length skirt, and there were matching bloomers to go underneath.

  “What is that made of? It looks so heavy. I would sink straight to the bottom in that thing.”

  “Serge.” Wyatt rubbed the fabric between her thumb and forefinger. “Twill cotton with ridges on both sides.”

  “I don’t know what to do with all of this. Maybe we should get the historical society out here. Offer them the full contents.”

  “Whatever you do, do it soon,” Wyatt said. “The demo guys will have to get to this if we’re going to finish this fall.” She took out her fancy measuring device with the laser beam. “Meanwhile, I know what I need to do. Redraw the plans. This extra room is in your apartment.”

  We were in the part of the house that was slated to become part of my summer residence. “Okay,” I said. “You measure. I’ll keep poking around until Sonny gets here.”

  “You go ahead when he gets here. I’ll go back with Mark.”

  I went to the writing desk and sat on the hard, wooden chair in front of it. It was a simple desk with a writing surface, prettily turned legs, and two small drawers. I opened each in turn. There was a pencil in the top drawer that had somehow survived being frozen every winter and thawed out every spring for a century and a quarter. Windsholme had never been heated. The Morrows wouldn’t have considered spending time there except in the summer months.

  I moved around the room, careful to stay out of Wyatt’s way as she measured and jotted notes on her phone. There was a white blouse with long sleeves and puffy shoulders hanging in the wardrobe along with a long skirt. I lifted it out to examine its elaborate construction. It was heavy in my hand and the waistband was impossibly small. Even with the corset, the wearer must have been very slender. The front panel of the skirt was flat, but a series of flared panels in the back would have made it quite full, especially when it was worn over the petticoat. The woman who had owned it was medium height, at least by today’s standards.

  “Those clothes look more like a governess’s than a nanny’s,” Wyatt said, looking over her shoulder at the skirt. “A nanny would have worn a uniform. A governess would have had a different position, might even have taken her meals with the family, especially in an informal summer house.”

  “It’s weird enough that the room was all sealed up,” I said.

  “Definitely,” Wyatt responded.

  “But also, she left everything here, even her glasses, h
er undies, everything.”

  Wyatt looked at me, the measuring device clutched in her fist. “I think she died. That’s why she didn’t take her stuff, and that’s why they sealed the room up.”

  “An extreme reaction.”

  She was already back to her measuring. “I agree.”

  “And if you were going to turn the bedroom of a deceased person into a shrine,” I said, “wouldn’t it more likely be a family member, a child maybe?”

  “It’s not a shrine if no one can visit it,” Wyatt pointed out. “Sealing the room made it more likely forgotten than remembered.”

  “Maybe someone was sick here and they sealed the room up to keep the disease from spreading.” I’d picked up the journal and felt the urge to drop it, then laughed at myself. No germs could survive over a century of Maine winters in an unheated house.

  There didn’t seem to be much more to say. The late afternoon light barely filtered into the room. “I’m going to take the journal to Marguerite,” I said. “Perhaps it will jog her memory. Not about something she experienced, since 1898 was long before she was born, but maybe something she overheard the adults discussing.”

  Wyatt nodded. “It’s a long shot, but we might as well take advantage of her being here.”

  * * *

  I put the journal in the Snowden Family Clambake tote I used as a handbag and walked to the dock where our Boston Whaler was tied up. Sonny was back. He waved as he passed by with a wheelbarrow piled with boxes of liquor. In the summer, Sonny, Livvie, and their kids lived in the little house next to the dock, but once school started for Page, they moved back to their house on the mainland. That meant the island was empty overnight, and all week long during this late part of the season. So we took some minor precautions like locking up all the booze in the little house, though anyone even mildly determined could have broken in.

  Emmy Bailey sat on a bench by the dock watching Vanessa and Page fooling around. If they’d been scared or upset by the fight, neither showed it. They stood over the cages where the live lobsters were stored for the next day, pointing and giggling. Emmy’s son, Luther, was already strapped into his stroller, and she moved it back and forth, comforting him.

  “Careful, girls,” Emmy said, a reflexive comment, not because of any immediate danger.

  “Sure, Mom,” Vanessa answered.

  I sat down next to Emmy. “Are you okay?”

  She sighed. “I am. Upset mostly. I was never in danger of being hit.”

  “I get that. It was between Jason and Terry.”

  “But it was about me.”

  I didn’t say anything right away, hoping she would go on. When she didn’t I asked, “Yes, but what is it about you?”

  Emmy sighed, a long, drawn-out sigh. “I thought you might know.”

  “I might know a little.”

  She glanced around quickly to make sure the girls were out of earshot. “I’ve been seeing Jason outside work.”

  That didn’t surprise me. “Pru doesn’t like it much,” I said.

  “No, she doesn’t. They’ve been divorced for five years. And it is awkward with the three of us working here, but I thought we’d been handling it pretty well. Pru’s in the kitchen, I’m on the tables, and Jason’s working the fire, so it’s not like we’re in each other’s faces all day.” She paused. “What do you think, Julia? Have we been out of line?”

  I thought back through the last couple of months. Jason had been flirting with Emmy almost since she started working with us. But he was a flirty guy. Almost any interaction between him and a young woman, myself included, looked like flirting. He also flirted with older women, certainly with my mom. And with men. He was a chronic flirt. I thought his intent was to flatter, to communicate, “You’re interesting.” But he also wanted to bring the reflected glow back on himself. Jason wanted to be liked.

  So Jason’s flirtations with Emmy weren’t that big a deal, especially since, as she said, they had limited contact when they were working, and Emmy seemed to welcome them.

  Family meal was another matter. During the busy part of the season when we ran two seatings a day, after the lunch guests left and before the dinner guests arrived, the employees ate together. In our tiny kitchen Livvie, Pru, and Kathy put out something fresh, filling, and inexpensive as a part of their duties.

  At family meal Jason had sat across from Emmy exclusively for most of the summer. Pru sat as close to them as she could. As a cook, she would be among the last to find a seat. From wherever she was seated, she interrupted with insults and irrelevancies, lobbed at the top of her voice. The other employees caught on, and took up as many seats close to Emmy and Jason as they could fill, not out of any particular allegiance to either of them, but because eating a meal in the middle of someone else’s family spat was never pleasant. This did not deter Pru, however, who only got louder.

  It wasn’t great, but it was limited, and pretty well managed by the group.

  “No, you weren’t out of line,” I said. “I would have said something if you were. If anything, Pru was.”

  “And she’s been here forever.” Emmy’s eyes swept around the dock, surveying the girls, checking on Luther in the stroller. She was a good mother.

  It was true, I supposed, that Pru’s status as a longtime employee was the reason neither Livvie nor I had spoken to her. That and the fact that she was more than a decade older than us. But mostly, I’d figured it was between the three of them. It was slightly uncomfortable for the rest of us, but it was their business and, during the summer, I’d believed they would work it out.

  “But then Terry started work here,” Emmy said.

  “Terry made it more complicated,” I acknowledged.

  “He’s a nice guy,” Emmy said. “He helps me with things like packing up to leave at the end of the day or getting the kids into my car at night. It doesn’t . . . I never . . . he never. And it’s not like with Chris.”

  With that elliptical sentence she’d said a whole ton. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I had the background to decode it. When Emmy said Terry wasn’t like Chris, she was referring to a miserable conversation she and I had much earlier in the summer. Chris was absolutely convinced his brother Terry was Vanessa’s father. His only evidence was Vanessa’s green, green eyes, so like his own. Chris swore she was the spitting image of his mother.

  Emmy, for her part, was unclear on Vanessa’s origins. She’d been born before Emmy had married her ex-husband, who was Luther’s father. Vanessa was the product, Emmy had told me, of an alcohol and drug-fueled one-night stand with a man she could not remember. That behavior was in her past, and aside from Vanessa, there was no part of it Emmy wanted to recall.

  Emmy had noticed Chris had an interest in Vanessa, and had misunderstood it. She and I had a deeply mortifying conversation where she had asked me to tell my creepy boyfriend to back off.

  Chris had been horrified by her fears. He’d immediately backed way off. I convinced him that if there was anything to his theory, it was between Terry and Emmy. He agreed, mostly. But there was one more terrible revelation hanging over the whole situation. Chris’s mother had Huntington’s disease. If Terry had inherited the gene, if he’d passed it to Vanessa, didn’t Emmy have a right to know? And Vanessa when she was old enough?

  Chris’s revelation to me about his mother’s genetic disease and his father’s reaction to it had answered many of my questions about him, but had raised many new ones. Like Terry, he’d never been tested for the repeating sequence of genes that caused Huntington’s devastating symptoms. With no treatment and no cure, he saw no reason to be tested.

  “I don’t want to live my life differently,” he’d said. “We all die. I don’t want to know how I’m going to die, just like everyone else. Besides, I could be hit by a bus tomorrow.”

  Given the number of gigantic touring buses rumbling through Busman’s Harbor’s narrow streets during foliage season, it wasn’t an impossible scenario.

  But him opening up about
the disease and his refusal to be tested left open the question of our future and the possibility of children. Chris had lived with the knowledge about his mother’s disease and its effect on his family for more than two decades. I’d had two months to adjust to it. While he was always patient about my many questions, I tried not to bring it up all that often.

  When Terry got out of prison, Chris told him about Vanessa. Chris had told me so, but I would have known regardless because of the way Terry acted around Emmy and her kids. It wasn’t intrusive or overly familiar, but there was a wary watchfulness there if you knew what to look for, a helpfulness that went beyond collegiality.

  And that was where the situation had stalled out. I didn’t know for sure that Terry hadn’t talked to Emmy, but there was no indication in their interactions that he had. I wondered what Emmy really thought about him hanging around.

  I wanted to ask her about him, but that question would have led back into territory that I’d told Chris was none of our business. So I sat with her in silence on the bench, watching the sun get lower in the sky, and waited for the others to be ready to return home.

  Chapter Four

  On the mainland I stopped at Mom’s house on the way to my apartment to get cleaned up. Chris was already in Mom’s kitchen cooking. He’d volunteered to feed the family that night. He and Livvie had a friendly cooking rivalry going and the rest of us were the beneficiaries.

  I thought Marguerite might be napping after the physical and emotional exertions of the day, but she and Tallulah were in the living room, both reading in the two easy chairs that faced the sofa.

  Mom entered the darkening room with a bottle of wine tucked under her arm and cheese and crackers on a wooden cutting board. “You all look so serious. It’s time for a break. Hello, Julia. I didn’t know you were here.” She put the wine bottle and the cheese on the coffee table.

  “I’m not. I have to run home to take a shower.”

  Mom went to the dining room to fetch wineglasses and I followed.

  “How are you doing?” she asked in a low voice.

  “Okay. I guess. I have to fire Terry.”