As for Jared, he was so happy to turn things over to her so he could create that he could hardly stop smiling—something few in the office had seen.
Last night they’d returned to Nantucket for the first time since the wedding, and this morning Alix had run off to see her mother and Toby. As soon as she left, Jared went to see his grandfather at Dr. Huntley’s house in tow
n.
Since Victoria was living in the little house with him, and because Jared knew she wouldn’t like the modest place, right away he’d offered them Kingsley House.
“I never want to enter that house again,” Caleb said with so much venom that Jared laughed. They had a lot of catching up to do. It was too soon for him to have mastered a keyboard or even a cell phone, so they’d left everything to when they saw each other in person.
“Did you find out from the journal what happened to Valentina?” Jared asked.
“Yes,” Caleb said. He was sitting by a window and lifting his face up to the sun, loving its warmth. He knew Jared had waited a long time to hear the story, so he didn’t postpone it. “Even when I was here on the island, my odious cousin Obed used to follow Valentina around. He would skulk and hide behind trees to watch her. I threatened him more than once.”
Caleb took a breath. All this was hard for him even after so many years. “Valentina begged me not to go on what was to be my last voyage, but I wouldn’t listen. I was so full of myself! Anyway, after I left, Obed must have seen the symptoms in Valentina and known she was in the family way. He didn’t wait long before he told her a lie. He said that he’d had news that my ship had gone down with me on it. This was years before it actually happened.”
He paused, remembering the story. “Valentina wrote in her journal how gentle Obed was when he told her about my death, and how kindly he offered her marriage. He said he’d give my child the Kingsley name, and he swore to love them both and to build them a fine house on Main Street. Valentina wrote that she was so miserable at hearing of my death that she couldn’t think clearly. She married him.”
“But it was all a lie, wasn’t it?” Jared said.
“The only truth was that my son got the Kingsley name. Obed always was a skinflint and he kept Valentina in what was little more than a shack on the North Shore. I’d given him that place but I’d meant for him to build there,” Caleb said. “What Obed really wanted was her recipe for soap. It seems that when he’d been stalking her he’d been trying to see how she made it.” Caleb shook his head. “I was so in love with her that I thought everyone looked at her as I did.” He grimaced. “Yes, it was all a lie. After they were married, Obed treated my son like a servant, and he kept Valentina making that damned soap fourteen hours a day.”
Caleb took a breath. “On the day she disappeared she wrote that she’d paid an off-islander to take her and our son to the mainland. She was going to make her way home to Maine. She felt she could tell no one she was leaving, not even Parthenia, because she feared what Obed might do to them when he found Valentina gone. She also knew that his rage wouldn’t be because she and the child had left, but would be due to the fact that she was taking her soap recipe with her. But then she saw that as her son’s future.”
“He did get the recipe,” Jared said, and he knew the next part of the story. After Valentina disappeared, Obed had continued to make and market Kingsley Soap. It made Obed rich. Besides that, when Caleb exchanged ships with his brother and wrote a will leaving everything to Valentina and their son, that money went to Obed. For a while he had been a very rich man.
But it hadn’t lasted long. A few years after his ship went down, Caleb had shown up as a ghost. He’d been confused and dazed, not understanding what had happened to him, and the only person who could see him was his young son, Jared.
When Obed saw the boy talking to what looked to be nothing, the man reacted out of fear. Obed beat the child. That night Caleb’s anger made him so strong that even Obed could see him. The man screamed in terror and died instantly—before Caleb could get an answer from him about Valentina.
“He must have found out about her plan to escape,” Jared said.
“Yes. She said she thought he’d always paid people to spy on her. He was the lowest of the low and always loved sneaking about.”
“What did the journal say happened?” Jared asked.
Caleb got up from the chair, went to a cabinet in the wall, and withdrew Valentina’s journal. He sat back down, opened it to the last page, and began to read.
I have killed my wife. I did not mean to. May God forgive me but what the woman said put the devil into me. She said she would rather be with Caleb in death than with me in life. At her words, my soul was taken from me. For a while I could not see and when I was myself again she was dead on the floor, her neck twisted half around. I go now to give myself over to the authorities and take mortal man’s idea of justice, although I swear I am not guilty. As she always did, Valentina forced me to do what I did not want to. She deserved her ill fate, but I do not. May the Lord and my fellow man have mercy on my innocent soul.
When Caleb finished reading, he looked up at Jared. The pain in his eyes was breathtaking.
“But he didn’t turn himself in,” Jared said.
“No. I figure he took her … her body to sea, then he blackened her name forever. He must have paid those men who told her relatives that they’d taken her to the mainland.”
Jared was thinking about what people did for money. Obed’s treachery, his greed, caused the deaths of many people. Caleb, in his urgency to get home, had taken an entire shipload of men down with him.
But Obed hadn’t lived long enough to receive the full benefit of the soap company he’d killed to get. Caleb’s son and Susan, the woman Obed had married soon after Valentina’s disappearance, had run the company. For a long time the Kingsley family had been very wealthy, but many years later, Five wasn’t good at business so he’d sold the company and squandered the proceeds. By the time Jared was growing up, nothing but some old houses that needed constant repair were left. And it was only through Caleb, with Addy’s help, that they were saved from being sold.
“Why didn’t he destroy the journal?” Jared asked. “You’d think that with his confession written in it, he’d be frantic to find it.”
Caleb smiled. “He probably was, but young Alix found the book and hid it.”
“My Alix? Oh. You’re talking about reincarnation again.”
“I am. She was Alisa back then, the daughter of John Kendricks and his first wife. Parthenia—”
“Who is now Jilly.”