by Nora Roberts
“Colors inspire.”
“No,” he said after a moment, “I can’t keep up.”
“With what?”
“You.” Relief when he finally cruised through the village tempered with frustration. Love to radio stations, systematic searches to ambushes to paint fans. “How many directions can you go in at one time?”
“I can think in a lot of directions, especially if I consider them important, relevant or interesting. Love’s important, and certainly on a different level I think music on a drive’s important. Searching on the third floor and refining any plan to, hopefully, catch Suskind inside the house are absolutely relevant, and paint colors are interesting—and eventually both important and relevant.”
“I surrender,” he said as he pulled up and parked at Bluff House.
“Good choice.” Abra got out of the car, spread her arms, turned a circle. “I love the way it smells here, the way the air feels. I want to take a run on the beach and just fill myself with it.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off her, couldn’t block the lure of her. “You matter to me, Abra.”
“I know it.”
“You matter more than anyone has.”
She lowered her arms. “I hope so.”
“But—”
“Stop.” She hauled her bag out of the car, shook back her hair. “You don’t have to qualify it. I’m not looking for you to balance the scales. Take the gift, Eli. If I gave it too soon or wrapped it the wrong way, it can’t be helped. It’s still a gift.” She started for the door, and from inside, Barbie sent out a fury of barks.
“Your alarm’s going off. I’ll change and take her with me for that run.”
He got out his keys. “I could use a run, too.”
“Perfect.”
She said no more about it, and instead plowed straight on with the new agenda. They unpacked trunks, with Abra diligently inventorying the contents on a laptop.
They weren’t experts, she’d stated, but an organized itemization might help with Hester’s hope for a museum. So they separated, studied, cataloged and replaced with Eli culling out the household ledgers, account books and journals.
He paged through them, making his own notes, outlining his own theory.
She had to work, and so did he, but he adjusted his own schedule to include what he thought of as mining-the-past time. He added to his stack of household ledgers with meticulous recordings of purchases of fowl, beef, eggs, butter and various vegetables from a local farmer named Henry Tribbet.
Eli decided Farmer Tribbet was an ancestor of his drinking pal Stoney. He amused himself imagining Stoney wearing a farmer’s straw hat and overalls when Barbie let out a warning woof, then dashed out, barking.
He rose from the temporary work space of card table and folding chair, started out. A moment after the barking stopped, Abra called up.
“It’s just me. Don’t come down if you’re busy.”
“I’m on three,” he called back.
“Oh. I’ve got a few things to put away, then I’ll be up.”
It sounded good, he admitted. To hear her voice break through the silence of the house, to know she’d come upstairs to join him, work with him, bring up bits and pieces of her day and the people in it.
Whenever he tried to imagine his days without her in them he remembered the dark cloud of time, his self-imposed house arrest where everything had been dull, colorless, heavy.
He’d never go back there, he’d pushed too far into the light to ever go back. But he often thought the brightest light was now Abra.
A short time later, he heard her coming up at a jog. He watched for her.
She wore knee-length jeans and a red T-shirt that claimed: Yoga Girls Are Twisted.
“Hi, I had a massage cancel, so—” She stopped on her way to the table where he sat, anticipating her hello kiss. “Oh my God!”
“What?” He sprang up, ready to defend against anything from a spider to a homicidal phantom.
“That dress!” She all but leaped on the dress he’d left draped over the trunk he was cataloging.
She snatched it up as his heart gratefully descended from his throat, and rushed to the mirror she’d already undraped. As he’d seen her do with ball gowns, cocktail dresses, suits and whatever else caught her fancy, she held up the boldly coral twenties-style dress with its low waist and knee-length fringed skirt.
She turned right and left so the fringes lifted and twirled.
“Long, long pearls, masses of them, a matching cloche hat and a mile-long silver cigarette holder.” Still holding it, she spun around. “Imagine where this dress has been! Dancing the Charleston at some fabulous party or some wild speakeasy. Riding in a Model T, drinking bathtub gin and bootleg whiskey.”
She spun again. “The woman who wore this, she was daring, even a little reckless, and absolutely sure of herself.”
“It suits you.”
“Thanks, because it’s fabulous. You know with what we’ve found and cataloged already, you could have a fashion museum right up here.”
“I’ll take the option of a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”
Men would be men, she supposed, and she had no desire to change that status.
“Okay, not here, but you definitely have enough for a fantastic display in Hester’s museum. One day.”
Unlike Eli, she carefully folded the dress with tissue. “I checked the telescope before I came up. He’s still a no-show.”
“He’ll be back.”
“I know it, but I hate waiting.” Belatedly, she walked over to kiss him. “Why aren’t you writing? It’s early for you to stop for the day.”
“I finished the first draft, so I’m taking a break, letting it cook a little.”
“You finished it.” She threw her arms around his neck, shook her hips. “That’s fantastic! Why aren’t we celebrating?”
“A first draft isn’t a book.”
“Of course it is, it’s just a book waiting for refinement. How do you feel about it?”
“Like it needs refinement, but pretty good. The end went quicker than I’d expected. Once I really saw it, it moved.”
“We’re absolutely celebrating. I’m going to make something amazing for dinner, and put a bottle of champagne from the butler’s pantry on ice.”
Thrilled for him, she dropped onto his lap. “I’m so proud of you.”
“You haven’t read it yet. Just one scene.”
“It doesn’t matter. You finished it. How many pages?”
“Right now? Five hundred and forty-three.”
“You wrote five hundred and forty-three pages, and you did that through a personal nightmare, you did that during a major transition in your life, through continuing conflict and stress and upheaval. If you’re not proud of yourself you’re either annoyingly modest or stupid. Which is it?”
She lifted him, he realized. She just lifted him.
“I guess I’d better say I’m proud of myself.”
“Much better.” She kissed him noisily, then wrapped her arms around his neck again. “By this time next year, your book will be published or on its way to publication. Your name’s going to be cleared, and you’ll have all the answers to all the questions hanging over you and Bluff House.”
“I like your optimism.”
“Not optimism alone. I did a tarot reading.”
“Oh, well then. Let’s spend my staggering advance on a trip to Belize.”
“I’ll take it.” She leaned back. “Optimism and a tarot reading equal a very powerful force, Mr. Mired in Reality, especially when you add effort and sweat. Why Belize?”
“No clue. It was the first thing to pop into my mind.”
“Often the first things are the best things. Anything interesting today?”
“Nothing that pertains to the dowry.”
“Well, we still have plenty to go through. I’ll start on another trunk.”
She worked alongside him, then decided to change gears, abando
n the trunk and work her way through an old chest of drawers.
It was amazing what people kept, she thought. Old table runners, faded pieces of embroidery or needlepoint, children’s drawings on paper so dry she feared it would break and crumble in her hands. She found a collection of records she thought might be from the same era as the gorgeous coral dress. Amused, she uncovered a gramophone, wound it up, and set the record to play.
She grinned over at Eli as the scratchy, tinny music filled the room. She did some jazz hands, a quick shimmy, and had him grinning back.
“You ought to put the dress on.”
She winked at him. “Maybe later.”
She danced back to the chest of drawers, opened the next drawer.
She made piles. So much unused or partially used fabric, she noted, arranging them in neat piles. Someone had used the chest of drawers for sewing at one time, she thought, storing silks and brocades, fine wools and satins. Surely some lovely dresses had come from this, and others simply planned and never realized.
When she reached the bottom drawer, it stuck halfway open. After a couple of tugs, she lifted out scraps of fabric, and an envelope of pins, an old pincushion fashioned to resemble a ripe, red tomato, a tin box of various threads.
“Oh, patterns! From the thirties and forties.” Carefully, she lifted them out. “Shirtwaists and evening gowns. Oh God, just look at this sundress!”
“You go ahead.”
She barely spared him a glance. “They’re wonderful. This whole project has made me wonder why I never tried vintage clothing before. I wonder if I can make this sundress.”
“Make a dress?” He flicked her a glance. “I thought that’s what stores were for.”
“In that yellow silk with the little violets, maybe. I’ve never sewn a dress, but I’d love to try it.”
“Be my guest.”
“I could even try on that old sewing machine we found up here. Just to keep it all vintage.” Imagining it, she stacked the patterns, turned back to the empty drawer.
“It’s stuck,” she muttered. “Maybe something’s caught . . .”
Angling herself, she reached in, searched the bottom of the drawer above for a blockage, then the sides, then the back. “I guess it’s just jammed or warped or . . .”
Then her fingers trailed over what felt like a curve of metal.
“Something’s back here in the corner,” she told Eli. “In both corners,” she discovered.
“I’ll look in a minute.”
“I can’t see why it’s hanging up the drawer. It’s just—”
Impatient, she pushed at the corners, and the drawer slid out, nearly into her lap.
Eli glanced up again at her surprised “Oh!”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, just bumped my knees a little. It’s like a compartment, Eli. A secret compartment in the back of this drawer.”
“Yeah, I’ve found a few of those in desks, and one in an old buffet.”
“But did you find anything in them like this?”
She held up a wooden box, deeply carved with a stylized, looping L.
“Not so far.” Intrigued now, he stopped his inventory when she brought the box to the table. “It’s locked.”
“Maybe the key’s in the collection we’ve been compiling, more of which I found in the hidden drawer in the old buffet.”
She glanced over at the jar they were using to store keys found during the third-floor rummage. Then just pulled a pin out of her hair.
“Let’s try this first.”
He had to laugh. “Seriously? You’re going to pick the lock with a hairpin?”
“It’s the classic way, isn’t it? And how complicated can it be?” She bent the pin, slid it in, turned, wiggled, turned. Since she seemed determined to open the box, Eli started to get up for the jar. Then heard the quiet click.
“You’ve done this before?”
“Not since I was thirteen and lost the key to my diary. But some skills stay with you.”
She lifted the lid, found a cache of letters.
They’d come across letters before, most of them as long and winding as the distance between Whiskey Beach and Boston, or New York. Some from soldiers gone to war, she thought, or daughters married and settled far away.
She hoped for love letters as she’d yet to find any.
“The paper looks old,” she said as she carefully took them out. “Written with a quill, I think, and— Yes, here’s a date. June 5, 1821. Written to Edwin Landon.”
“That would have been Violeta’s brother.” Eli pushed his own work aside, shifted to look. “He’d have been in his sixties. He died in . . .” He scoured his mind for the family history he’d pored over. “I think 1830 something, early in that decade anyway. Who’s it from?”
“James J. Fitzgerald, of Cambridge.”
Eli noted it down. “Can you read it?”
“I think so. ‘Sir, I regret the unfortunate circumstances and tenor of our meeting last winter. It was not my intention to intrude upon your privacy or your goodwill. While you made your opinions and decision most . . . most abundantly clear at that time, I feel it imperative I write to you now on behalf’—no—‘behest of my mother and your sister, Violeta Landon Fitzgerald.’”
Abra stopped, eyes huge as they met Eli’s.
“Eli!”
“Keep reading.” He rose to go study the letter over her shoulder. “There’s no record in the family history of her marrying or having children. Keep reading,” he repeated.
“‘As I communicated to you in January, your sister is most grievously ill. Our situation continues to be difficult with the debts incurred at my father’s death two years past. My employment as a clerk for Andrew Grandon, Esquire, brings me an honest wage, and with it I have well supported my wife and family. I am now, of course, seeing to my mother’s needs in addition to attempting to reconcile the debts.
“‘I do not and would not presume to approach you for financial aid on my own behalf, but must again do so in your sister’s name. As her health continues grave, the doctors urge us to remove her from the city and to the shore, where they believe the sea air would be most beneficial. I fear she will not live to see another winter should the current situation continue.
“‘It is your sister’s most heartfelt wish to return to Whiskey Beach, to return to the home where she was born and which holds so many memories for her.
“‘I appeal to you, sir, not as an uncle. You have my word I will never ask for consideration for myself due to that familial connection. I appeal to you as a brother whose only sister’s wish is to come home.’”
Mindful of its fragility, Abra set the letter aside. “Oh, Eli.”
“She left. Wait, let me think.” He straightened, began to wander the room. “There’s no record of her marriage, any children, of her death—not in family records, anyway—and I’ve never heard of this Fitzgerald connection.”
“Her father had records destroyed, didn’t he?”
“That’s what’s been passed down, yeah. She ran off, and he not only cut her off, he basically eliminated all records.”
“He must have been a small, ugly man.”
“Tall, dark and handsome in his portraits,” Eli corrected, “but you mean inside. And you’re probably right. So Violeta left here, estranged from the family, and went to Boston or Cambridge and they disowned her. At some point she married, had children—at least this son. Was Fitzgerald the survivor of the Calypso? An Irish name, not