Kane’s wife, Cale, was a famous writer and she made everyone laugh with her witty little remarks, some of them quite sarcastic but always right on target. She could nail a situation perfectly in just a few words.
“So what’s Nantucket really like?” she asked on his second day there. She’d walked out to a point on the Maine coast where he’d been sitting and watching the ocean. As always, she had a notebook in her hand.
“It’s quiet,” he said. “If you ignore the visitors, that is.” She was small and pretty, her eyes full of curiosity. It was a look he’d often seen on Victoria’s face. Were writers always looking for ideas? he wondered. “And we have lots of ghosts on the island.”
Her eyes widened.
He’d also seen that look on Victoria’s face. “Some of the stories of how they came to be ghosts are long and complicated, and quite fascinating.”
“Oh,” she said, but didn’t seem able to say anything else. As a professional writer she was always on a quest to find more material. Like an alcoholic craved booze, writers were addicted to stories.
“I better let you get on with your writing.” He nodded toward her notebook as he stood up, but then turned back to look at her. “There’s a house on Kingsley Lane that’s for sale. It’s big and old. It’s called BEYOND TIME because there’s a legend that the ghost in it can take you back to his time.” Jared waved his hand. “But that’s just hearsay. I don’t know if anyone has actually done it. Though I wonder how the rumor got started? But then it’s been around for centuries. I hope to see you at dinner.” He’d walked away, smiling. Unless he missed his guess, that old house was as good as sold.
Jilly flew in from Colorado a few days after Jared’s arrival. She was a widow, and her two grown children were in summer camps in their home state. It was their last summer before they left for college.
Jared had been told that after Jilly’s husband died, she’d been hired by the family to become their genealogist. She’d spent years going through the mass of family documents and writing histories of everyone. Recently she’d posted a detailed family tree online, which was where Alix had found Valentina and Parthenia.
Jilly brought with her from Colorado three big boxes of photocopied papers. “The originals are in a vault,” she said at dinner at the huge table that first night. In one of the boxes were the letters from Valentina and Parthenia to each other. She recapped them for Jared.
As she told him what the letters said, of the two young women missing each other and planning to visit, he watched her. She was sweet and gentle while the other Taggerts were big and rough.
“She looks like her maternal grandmother,” Cale, sitting on his other side, said. “Or else she’s an alien from another planet.”
Jared laughed. Jilly, so fragile-looking, so soft-spoken, sitting amid her great, hulking brothers, did indeed look as though she were from another dimension.
Seeing that she had an audience, Cale kept on. “What do you think her planet looks like? All pink and cream?”
Jared didn’t miss a beat. “I think it must look like Nantucket, with mists and sunsets over the ocean, sun-warmed sand, and houses grayed by centuries of life.”
Cale blinked at him for a moment, then looked across the table at her husband. “I need your checkbook.”
“Yeah?” Kane said, his eyes alight. “What are you going to buy?”
“A house on Nantucket.”
Kane looked from Cale to Jared and back again. “Let me guess. It has a great story attached to it.”
“Maybe,” she said and everyone laughed. They knew how much Cale loved stories.
It was after dinner, the night before he was going to leave, and Jared was sitting outside in a swing with Jilly beside him. Since the first moment he met her, she’d reminded him of someone. At first he’d thought it was Toby. They both had a quiet elegance about them, but at dinner there was something about the way she held her fork—in that tines-down European way—that made him realize that she reminded him of Ken. A gesture here and there, a tone to her soft voice, made him want to call Ken and say he’d met the perfect woman for him.
But Jared knew that would end it before it started, so he only told Alix about his idea of returning home with Jilly. On the last night, he sat with her and listened as she told more about the letters. “After the first visit to Nantucket, Parthenia returned to Maine and their letters started again. But this time they wrote about the men they cared for. Parthenia had fallen in love with the schoolmaster, and Valentina with—”
“Caleb,” Jared said. “But what happened to her?”
“We know no more than you. When Valentina disappeared, Parthenia was married to her schoolmaster and living on Nantucket, so there were no more letters between them. A Montgomery ancestor wrote home that after Valentina disappeared three men from her family went to the island to search for her. They discovered a couple of sailors who said they’d taken her to the Cape, but no trace of her was found there or anywhere else. She certainly never came home to Maine. After Parthenia’s death, all the letters between her and Valentina were sent back to Warbrooke. I’ve read everything and an explanation for Valentina’s disappearance is nowhere to be found.”
Jared was frowning. “I was told … heard, anyway, that no one had seen Valentina leave the island.”
“Perhaps it was kept quiet. A woman leaving her child behind wouldn’t have been looked on favorably, and I doubt if her relatives would have spread that information. It was all so long ago. Do you have many family documents at your house?”
Jared could tell by her voice that she’d like to see them, so he took the opening. “I have acres of them. Nothing is ever thrown away in my family. We own several houses and all of them are packed to the top of the mast with yellowing old papers, letters, and books.”
“It sounds fascinating.”
“Not to hear Alix tell it.” He smiled in what he hoped was a persuasive way. “Why don’t you come back with me and spend the rest of the summer going through them?”
“I couldn’t possibly,” she began, then sighed. “On the other hand, both my children will be leaving home soon and I’ve nearly finished with our family papers. I’m afraid I have a serious case of empty nest syndrome.” Her head came up. “Actually, I’d love to go to Nantucket with you. Should I make reservations to stay somewhere?”