Ever After (Nantucket Brides 3)

“How do you think Edith got all this here?” Hallie asked. She was eating a dumpling filled with vegetables and chicken.

“Probably someone from the B&B brought it over in one of those electric golf carts.” He had just finished a little lobster roll. “Best lobster I’ve ever had and I’ve spent a lot of my life in Maine. Wonder where they got it.”

“This cheese is fabulous.”

Jamie smiled, his mouth full.

“I’d like to see some of Nantucket,” Hallie said as she bit into a cupcake that tasted of oranges. “Try this. It’s really good.” She’d meant for him to take the other cupcake off the plate, but he took the half she’d bitten into from her hand and ate it.

“Fuzzy navel,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a drink of orange and peach juice and that’s what it tastes like. My guess is that it’s made with peach schnapps and if so, it’s fairly lethal. Here, try it again.” He bit into the second cupcake, then handed her the other half.

Hallie hesitated, but there was a look of challenge in his eyes. Daringly, she bent and took the cake from his hand with her lips. “Mmmmm. Quite delicious.”

Jamie was smiling broadly. “It’s named fuzzy for the peach and—”

“Navel for the orange. Now, as I was saying, I’d like to see some of the island. Jared drove through town and I saw some nice shops. Maybe you’d like to go too.”

“No, thanks,” Jamie said. “I have enough trouble with these blasted crutches without tackling streets and sidewalks.”

She’d already learned that half of what Jamie said was teasing, so she played along. She mentioned beaches and a meal out. No, he didn’t want to do that. Drinks at sunset? No. A boat ride? He said he’d had enough of that with his Montgomery relatives. “They live on the damned things. I like the earth.” No matter what she came up with to try to entice him to go into town, he said no.

“I guess I’ll have to go alone,” she said as she picked up a piece of what looked to be poppy seed cake. For a tiny bit of a second, she saw something flash across his eyes, some emotion, but she wasn’t sure what it was. If it weren’t coming from such a strong, healthy young man, she would have thought she’d seen fear. But that was, of course, ridiculous.

Whatever it was, it was gone in an instant and Jamie’s handsome face was back to smiling. “What I want to know is where Edith came from,” he said.

“You mean where she grew up?”

“No. Here. Twice now I’ve seen her walking out from the side of the house. Yesterday when I woke up, I went looking for my brother with the intention of telling him what I thought about what he’d done to me.”

“And what was that?”

Jamie waved a sweet, sticky ball of rice around before popping it into his mouth. “It’s a long story, but my point is that on the far side of this house are two big doors and they’re locked. I thought maybe my brother was hiding in there so I used a bit of force to try to open them, but they didn’t budge.”

Hallie licked coconut off her fingers. “Let me see if I get this straight. You woke up angry at your brother—for a reason that you won’t tell me—and tried to batter down a couple of my doors to get to him? Possibly with the intention of murdering him?”

Jamie nearly choked on a square made of carrots and honey but managed to recover himself and said, “Pretty much.” His eyes were laughing. “I wonder if Edith has a key and what’s—”

“In there?” Hallie finished for him.

“My thoughts exactly. What would you say about searching for the key? Whoever finds it gets to kiss the other one.”

“And what does the loser get?” Hallie asked.

“Two kisses?”

She laughed. “Go on and start searching. I’m going to clean this up and have it ready in case Edith returns for the dishes.”

“I’ll help,” he said.

After they cleaned up the kitchen, they went out to the side of the house and inspected the doors, but as Jamie had said, they were locked tight. He wanted to try again to use his considerable strength to open them, but Hallie persuaded him not to. Inside the house, all the doors that led into the hidden room were also locked. They began to search for the key, but even though they looked through every drawer, under every piece of furniture, they didn’t find any stray keys. They did, however, find brochures and tickets dated from the 1970s to two years ago.

As they made a pile of what they found, they speculated about Henry Bell. He seemed to have been very interested in the history of Nantucket. Twice he’d won the annual Jeopardy-like Nantucket trivia contest. There were a couple of newspaper articles with photos of him with Nat Philbrick, who wrote so well about Nantucket.

What they saw made Hallie and Jamie say they were going to learn more about the island. But when Hallie repeated her invitation to go exploring, Jamie’s face closed. He said that he’d be the researcher and she could do the footwork.