Ida moved to the cabinet and found more paper than she’d expected; she’d assumed Henry would have culled it all. She pawed her way through copies of contracts for jobs she’d never heard of in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine; she fingered invoices for chain and rope and oil and gasoline; she found letters from an assortment of men inquiring about salvaging their wrecks and, also, an assortment of women. Mrs. Joseph Simpson wanted to know if Ezra could reclaim her husband’s catboat from the Herring River; Hepsibah Cain asked if he had a ship’s anchor for her west lawn that would match the anchor on her east lawn; Belle Santerre wanted to know when he would return and how long he might stay when he did. Ida dismissed it all, including Belle, with a single flick of the finger, but when she came to a grimy pamphlet titled Gold from Sea Water at a Profit: The Facts, her fingers stopped moving.
Ida plucked the pamphlet from the file and sat down. The document appeared to be a prospectus of sorts for an organization called The Electrolytic Marine Salts Company out of Boston. A teaser on page one declared: At the proportion of half a grain to a ton, gold in a cubic mile of sea water is worth $65,000,000. At first glance it appeared to be just the sort of crazy scheme a man who wanted to charge off mining in the Klondike would fall for except for one singular coincidence: the gold nuggets in Ida’s closet. Was it possible those nuggets had somehow come out of sea water? Ida folded the pamphlet and put it in her pocket. She returned to the files, stopping a second time when she came upon some paper that felt too stiff to be anything but official. Again she plucked it from the file; again she sat down to read.
Know all men by these presents that I Edward Sprague of New Shoreham on the Island of Block Island in the County of Newport in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations for and in consideration of the sum of twenty-eight dollars paid to me by Ezra Pease of the County of Dukes in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts absolutely give, grant, bargain, sell, release, convey and confirm unto him the said Ezra Pease his heirs and assigns forever a certain tract of land at the westerly shore of Block Island known as Grace’s Point . . .
Heirs and assigns. Now, today, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, that meant widows. Widows meant Ida.
There were three keys on the key ring: one to the office, one to the warehouse, and one to Mose’s apartment. It was possible although not probable, knowing Ezra, that whatever the investigator wanted had been stashed in Mose’s apartment, but Ida could supplement that slim motive for entering the apartment with another one—if Perry had cleaned out the apartment with no expectation of her husband’s return, Ida wanted to know it. She climbed the stairs.
The apartment looked the same. Or did it? A canvas coat hung on the hook, but maybe not the kind of coat a carriage maker would wear to cultivate the moneyed trade in New Bedford. A pair of rubber boots, ditto. Except for a few ancient boxes and tins, the kitchen shelves looked bare, but Ida couldn’t recall seeing much on them in the first place. Then Ida saw the window; the canvas flap had been removed and a board nailed across it. And leaning against the wall, one of the copper kettles lined with zinc.
Ida headed for the bedroom, feeling it a violation but not enough of a violation for her to change direction. She sat down on Henry’s bed, stretched out on Henry’s bed, shifted so her nose touched his pillow, taking in the musky, smoky scent. She closed her eyes and imagined his long torso tight against hers, his knees tucked behind hers, his arm tossed over her so that his palm lay open and warm and alive against her center, making her feel open and warm and alive . . .
Ida shot off the bed, strode the few feet to the closet, and opened it: a row of half-filled pegs contained a pair of winter long johns, a stained chamois shirt, and a moth-eaten sweater that Ida may or may not have seen Mose wear. On the floor she found a single glove, possibly the match to the one in the desk downstairs.
Ida returned to the kitchen and rummaged among the boxes and tins, clueless as to what she was looking for, unable to name a single thing that would prove Henry would or would not be returning to the island; canisters partially full of tea, flour, and cornmeal told no tale. A newish-looking recipe box surprised her; she never thought of Mose—or Henry—cooking, but as she leafed through it she saw that most of the recipes were for simple things like stew and buckwheat cakes and cornbread, things someone like Mose—or Henry—might certainly have attempted. One sheaf of recipes at the back of the box looked more complex, but as Ida drew them out she saw they weren’t recipes at all but letters to Mose. From Ezra.
Mose—Block Island parcel secured but Maine site looks better for EMS purposes I’ll look over again before purchase Zinc arrived 10th Should have the accumulators lined by 18th—E
Mose—Include “At the proportion of half a grain to a ton, gold in a cubic mile of sea water is worth $65,000,000—” Fish are getting bigger—E
Mose—Need to melt more jewelry Have to salt three for next run investors Can you put your hands on any Should be able to add some when I get home Look for me on late boat Friday—E
Ida spread out the letters and pulled the Gold from Sea Water pamphlet from her pocket. With it came the deed to the parcel on Block Island that she’d also added to her pocket, but heirs and assigns notwithstanding, it was the Gold from Sea Water pamphlet that Ida wanted. Yes, there were the same words in the pamphlet that Ida had read in Ezra’s letter: At the proportion of half a grain to a ton, gold in a cubic mile of sea water is worth $65,000,000. And as she read the details the pamphlet offered up she came on other words that had appeared in the letters: Accumulators. Zinc. And a description of a convoluted process where an electrical current passing through sea water, copper, and zinc in a specially constructed accumulator resulted in the separating of gold from said water.
Zinc. Copper. The odd, flat-bottomed copper kettles lined with zinc that Morgan had brought up from the Cormorant. The accumulators? And this salting process—jewelry melted into what? Well, of course. Those nuggets. Nuggets that would be used to salt the accumulators. And the EMS notations in the ledgers that Henry had inquired about so long ago—here it was again in the letter. EMS. Electrolytic Marine Salts. Ida pored over the documents again, but she hardly needed to; it was clear enough to her that Ezra hadn’t fallen for someone else’s scam; Ezra—and Mose—were the scammers.
Ida rode home with the various papers she’d collected crackling in her pockets. The sheep were in the far pasture where the grass was full and fresh and green; her artist’s eye regretted that now the fields looked their best the animals looked their worst, small and forlorn and long-necked without their fleece, but that was all the time Ida could spare for sheep. She carried her papers up the stairs and dug out the gold from the closet, spilling it onto the bed alongside the papers. She picked up and examined each nugget, imagining it the melted-down result of someone’s jewelry.
Someone’s. Ida bolted off the bed and opened her jewelry box. Her mother’s gold locket was there, and her father’s gold stickpin; Ezra wouldn’t dare touch those. But Ida had lost a gold ear bob—or thought she had—Ezra claiming she’d worn them on a rare night traveling in style in Ruth’s carriage to dine at the Wentworths’ in Edgartown. He’d even made a great show of searching Ruth’s carriage. Yes, that was Ezra’s style—take only one ear bob because one could be lost, but two would indicate theft, which would lead to questions, precautions. What else was missing? A pearl ring set in a gold band her father had brought home for her when she was still a child and had long outgrown but treasured all the same; she’d kept it wrapped in one of her father’s handkerchiefs in the box. The handkerchief was still there; the ring wasn’t.
Ida spent the rest of the night alternately tossing between the sheets or pacing between the closet and her dresser, piecing it together. Ezra and Mose had created a fable of gold from sea water and written a pamphlet describing in just enough incomprehensible detail the process to extract it. Flashy “accumulators” lined with zinc. A sophisticated system of electric currents that reac
ted chemically with the zinc and turned the sea water into gold. Big-fish investors being brought to Block Island or perhaps Maine where they went round-eyed at the sight of actual gold nuggets materializing out of a kettle of sea water—gold nuggets manufactured from melted-down stolen jewelry hidden in Ezra’s closet. Then what? Some investor somewhere had likely gotten wise and sent Dermott Hale to track the men down, but there Mose and Ezra had gotten lucky. They had gone down on the Portland.
At some point Ida dozed, but each time she woke a new question arose. The investigator Dermott Hale hadn’t seemed ready to stop once he learned the men were dead; the men must not have been the first object of his search. Perhaps the money was. Perhaps he hoped or believed the funds were recoverable. Which led Ida to the next question: if Ezra had secreted some money somewhere, and Ida found it, what would she do with it? Again, that troubling question: in the face of the newly revealed scope of Ezra’s dishonesty, where along the line from honest to Ezra lay Ida?
The Gold from Sea Water scheme had accomplished what nothing else had; it had driven Henry from Ida’s mind, so when the telegram finally arrived, delivered by Chester Luce’s errand boy, Ida had some difficulty putting it in the proper context. Complications send me back to New Bedford. Would my direction were other. Well, Ida already knew he was in New Bedford, with his daughters, and most likely now with his wife too. Ida balled up the telegram, opened the door to the stove, and fired it inside. She was tired of waiting for news. She was tired of waiting for life to have its way with her. She’d taken apart her house, the office, even Mose’s apartment; if there was a secret hoard of money Ezra and Mose had left behind, she’d have found it by now or she never would. But Ida did hold in her hand something as good as money: a deed to a piece of land on Block Island.
Ida set off up the hill in big, gulping strides, her fist barely knocking on the door before she thrust it open herself, her lesson learned from Ruth. Hattie came into the kitchen first, followed by Oliver, who was just the one Ida wanted, or rather, she wanted Oliver’s atlas. It cost her precious minutes of listening to the boy spout off his new knowledge about various states until an idea struck her.
“I wonder if you know which is smallest.”
“Rhode Island!”
Oliver pushed the pages with his thumbs until he found the map of Rhode Island. He told Ida about its manufacture of cotton goods, about its two capitals, Providence and Newport, that Newport had a fine harbor and was known as a watering place. “For horses,” he said. Ida didn’t think so, but the good news was that at least one of the two women he currently lived with continued to read to him, although no one had troubled to explain what a watering place was. The even better news was that Ida could look around Oliver’s thumbs at the map, and on the western shore of Block Island she spied it: Grace’s Point, ticked with Ezra’s pencil.
Of course, Lem didn’t like it. “You’re going out to Block Island. By yourself. And you want me to mind the place.”
“You understand I can’t ignore a single asset.”
“I understand why you want to do it; I just don’t think it’s an errand that’s wise for a woman alone.”
“What errand do you think is wise for a woman alone, besides a trip to Luce’s? I’ve already been to Wellfleet alone, Boston alone—”
“I’ll mind the place.”
“I’ll leave tomorrow and be back the next day. If you could just check in—”
“I said I’d do it.”
“And you won’t tell Ruth?”
“I won’t tell Ruth.” He hoisted himself into his wagon and started for the track. He looked back, called to her over his shoulder: “I won’t tell Ruth if you won’t try to tell me you went to Boston alone.”
Oh, this island.
Ida’s recent immersion had done little to reconcile her to water, but it helped that the steamer scudded across a placid Sound as if absent all effort. By the time they bumped up to the dock at Woods Hole safe and secure, Ida could almost have said she’d enjoyed the trip; she was leaving the island behind, the farm behind, the sheep behind, Ruth, Hattie, Lem, Henry. All of it.
It was a different story with the steamer from Newport: more people, more carriages, more baggage, more elegance, and seas so rough they almost cost her her breakfast. At the Block Island dock Ida’s head continued to reel over the huge hotels perched on the bluffs like a flock of vultures; runners and hackmen accosted the passengers before they’d gotten both feet on the ground: Surf Hotel, ma’am! Best on island! Step right here, I’ll run you up . . . Ocean View, headland view, right this way for the thrill of your life . . . Pequot House has a room for you, miss! Clean, safe . . .
At least Ida wouldn’t have trouble finding a room if she needed one. She dodged the horsecars and the fine gentlemen and ladies filing onto the dock like sheep to the shearing pen. She hadn’t expected the small island to be so populated, so hectic, so . . . fashionable. She accosted the first hack driver she saw and engaged him to take her to Grace’s Point, to wait for her to explore, and to return her to town.
“Grace’s Point,” the man said, as if to verify Ida’s madness, but he hoisted her in without argument. In a very few minutes they’d left behind the commotion of the harbor as well as the sprinkling cart, which meant they were forced to cope with the dust churning up behind the horses, and soon Ida could spy nothing but stone walls and empty fields on either side of them. Clearly they were not headed in the most populated direction.
The dirt road ended. The driver stopped in the middle of it and pointed ahead to a rock-strewn gully that appeared to drop off over the edge of a bluff facing the sea. “There?” Ida asked. The driver nodded, lowered his hat, and settled in for a nap.
Ida set off in the direction of the water. Just when she’d concluded that walking muscles and biking muscles weren’t the same muscles, she came upon a slight hollow on the hill and what appeared to be an abandoned shack, its door half off its hinge, its roof missing more shingles than it had kept, the glassless windows nailed over with what looked like salvaged hatches from shipwrecks. Ida set down her bag and walked to the edge of the bluff to examine the shoreline; a precipitous drop ending in more rocks, the surf making miniature rainbows as it struck the solid objects and reared back up. She returned to the stoop and opened her bag, pulled out the deed, read over the landmarks. Was that the “great boulder” that bound the tract on the north? Was that shack what was meant by “homestead”? The sea was obviously the sea, bounding the land on the west, but bounding what exactly? What could this bit of land possibly be worth if it contained no landing, no farmland, nothing but one rotting shack and enough cobbles to pave all of Boston?
Ida had brought lunch—a thick pair of bacon sandwiches; her father used to tell her that sea hunger was bigger than land hunger and he was right; she dropped to the stoop and demolished both sandwiches in minutes. She wiped her hands in sand that had been warmed by the sun and felt the comfort of it sliding through her fingers; she looked around, pondering Grace’s Point and what she might make of it. Well, nothing. What on earth had Ezra seen in a place so remote and inhospitable . . . other than the fact that it was remote and inhospitable. On her return to the busy harbor she would make inquiries for an agent to handle a land sale for her; at the least she might hope to reclaim the twenty-eight dollars Ezra paid for it, which was something.
Ida sat on, deep in thought. Had Ezra ever even been here? she wondered. Had he perhaps sat on this very stoop, eating his own bacon sandwiches, a favorite of his? Why did this place make her so sad? What was she meant to do with these feelings, this place, this life? She leaned back against the door of the shack and closed her eyes.
Ida dozed. Dreamed. Ezra, leaning over her, shouting her name. Angry, of course—Ida could never manage to dream of a pleasant Ezra. So real the dream was! So vivid was Ida’s sense of him that when she opened her eyes she actually thought for a minute that the man who loomed over her, dark-haired, heavily bearded, broad-shouldered, was
Ezra.
“Jesus God, Ida, what are you doing here?” Ezra said.
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Ida leaped up; the beard might have fooled her for that single instant of waking, but never the voice. That voice. As to the face above the beard, there seemed to be something wrong with it; it wavered before her, teeth exposed, gleaming. He couldn’t possibly be grinning? He seemed to be talking, but now there was something wrong with Ida’s ears too—she could hear nothing. Ezra had stopped grinning and Ida’s vision—and hearing—cleared.
“Jesus God,” Ezra was saying. “Ida. If you aren’t the last person I expected to see when I came over that rise.” He peered at her hard. “And I’m the last person you expected to see, am I right?”
Ida said nothing.
“You thought I was on the Portland?”
Still Ida could say nothing. She was aware of time passing but how much time she couldn’t say before Ezra tried again.
“You thought I was on the Portland and I drowned. Well, I guess now you know. I wasn’t. I didn’t.”
Ida turned for the path.
Ezra came after her, grabbed her arm.
Ida whirled. “Don’t. Touch. Me.”
Ezra dropped his hand. “Ida, listen to me. Don’t you want to know what happened? It wasn’t some big cooked-up plot—”
Ida kept walking. Ezra kept following, talking. “Mose and I were in Boston, we heard everyone shouting up and down the streets, the Portland’s gone down, no survivors, no one even sure who was on board because the only passenger list was on the ship. I swear, it wasn’t like I said, oh, I think I’ll run off and play dead, confuse the hell out of Ida . . . Ida! Will you hold up?”
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