Toby helped Alix make petit fours, even putting the yellow rosebuds on top. They made little sandwiches with the crusts removed and filled them with thinly sliced cucumbers. And Lexie entertained them with more stories of Roger Plymouth’s escapades.
When Dr. Huntley arrived, Toby and Lexie slipped out the back, and Alix opened the front door.
Alix’s first thought when she saw him was that he was a very unhappy man. He stood with his shoulders hunched a bit forward, and his eyes tended to dip down at the outside corners.
It took only minutes for Alix to ask for his help in finding out about John Kendricks. He wrote down the name and dates, said he’d look into it, then sat there as though waiting to hear what else she needed.
“Won’t you have some tea?” Alix asked as she began to pour. “My mother speaks so highly of you.” It was a flat-out lie but she thought that in this case it was allowed.
Dr. Huntley gave a bit of a smile and Alix thought the man might be younger than he seemed.
He stayed for over an hour. They drank two pots of tea, ate all the food, and Alix got to hear a lot about the charm of her mother, and how Dr. Huntley and his wife had so enjoyed the company of her and Adelaide.
“They were such interesting women,” he said. “There was Victoria’s extensive travel to research her wonderful novels, and Addy knew everything about the island. Her details were so vivid it sometimes seemed as though she’d actually known the people who lived in this lovely old house centuries ago.”
Captain Caleb’s ghost probably told her everything, Alix thought but didn’t say. As for her mother! Travel indeed. She was more of an armchair explorer. Alix now knew that the descriptions of foreign places that ran through her mother’s books were from the journals of women who had actually been there. Her mother certainly wasn’t going to go traipsing across some remote South Sea island trying to find where some awful event had happened so she could describe it. Alix used to think she made it all up. Now she knew that she just transposed it.
Dr. Huntley remembered when Alix was a child and spoke of how she’d built towers out of museum-quality artifacts. “When I got home, my wife had to revive me with a shot of brandy.”
“You’ll have to bring her with you the next time,” Alix said.
It had taken an hour to get the sad look from the man’s face, but in an instant it was back.
Quickly, and in a wa
y that sounded rehearsed, as though he couldn’t bear the pain of actually telling it, he said that his wife had died two years before. He had been diagnosed with cancer and while she’d been with him throughout his treatment, her own illness had been neglected.
“By the time I was in remission, it was too late for her.” When he looked back at Alix, the grief in his eyes was horrible to see. “Well, now,” he said as he stood up, “you’re young and you have your life ahead of you, and I mustn’t keep you any longer.”
Alix was glad that she’d never experienced anything like what this man had. She stood up and put her hand on his forearm. “I very much wish I could have met your wife.”
“She would have liked you. She adored Victoria, so alive and energetic and always looking ahead. And Victoria never stopped talking about her wonderful daughter.”
“Did she?” Alix asked, surprised.
“She said it was one of the hardships of her life that you always chose to spend the time she was on Nantucket with your father.” He gave her a chastising look. “You should have visited us at least once.”
Alix somehow managed to keep her smile even as she vowed to give her mother a piece of her mind—not that it would do any good, but it might make Alix feel better.
On Monday, Ken took the fast ferry to Hyannis to greet the truck the superefficient Stanley was escorting to the port. He’d outdone himself in so quickly getting together all the building materials.
“Give me some men and a fleet of pickups and in two days I could assemble a cathedral,” Stanley had told Ken, who reported the brag back to Alix. When she twisted it around that Stanley was proof of how good Jared was at hiring people, Ken was glad the phone hid his eye rolling.
He bought extra tools in Hyannis and, like all Nantucketers, he went to the local wholesale warehouse and loaded up on household supplies. The truck drivers, who weren’t local, were shocked at the sheer number of things, like giant packages of paper towels, they were expected to jam between the lumber and nails. When they asked what was going on, the ferrymen looked at them like they were crazy. “They live on Nantucket” was the answer for every question, as though that explained it all—and to an islander, it did.
When Jared got to Warbrooke, he called Alix. She’d found the names of Michael Taggert and Adam Montgomery online in the town directory. Based on their involvement in the community, she guessed that they were patriarchs of the family. “It looks like the family owns most of the town,” she told him.
“It’s a nice place,” he said about the town in Maine. “Reminds me of Nantucket.”
“High praise indeed.”
On the day Jared was to meet the men Alix had tracked down, she found she was a bit nervous and had trouble concentrating on what Toby was saying. They had nearly all the wedding preparations done, including reservations for all of Glenn and Izzy’s guests. A few were staying in hotels—which cost a fortune—but most of the guests were being put up in the houses of the Kingsley relatives. Lexie had organized that, as well as persuading Roger Plymouth to let her use his six-bedroom house for guests.
“Will he be there?” Toby asked.
“No!” Lexie said. “He’s promised to stay at his house in Taos then.”
“Darn!” Alix said. “Toby and I were thinking of taking over the master suite.”