“Why didn’t she tell me she came here? Every August she sent me to stay with Dad. Mom said she went to her cabin in the Colorado mountains to think and plot her novels.”
She spent that month reading my family’s journals, one by one, Jared thought but didn’t say.
“How often did she come here instead of going to Colorado?”
“She’s come here every August since I was fourteen.”
Alix opened her month to speak, then closed it. Did this mean the whole cabin-in-Colorado was a myth? “Why did she lie to me all these years?”
Jared wished none of this had started; it wasn’t his business to tell any of it. “Maybe you were too close to my aunt,” he said softly. Both his grandfather and his mother had told him how Aunt Addy went to her bed for weeks after Alix was taken from her that first summer. She’d been through the deaths of most of her family, but she’d always been strong. She’d been the one to give comfort to the grieving.
But that summer had been different. After Ken had found his wife and his business partner in a compromising situation, his orderly, easy life had turned upside down. In the ensuing turmoil, Victoria had taken four-year-old Alix and run away to give him time to calm down. She ended up on the island of Nantucket, broke and with no discernible skills. She took a job as a housekeeper-cook for Miss Adelaide Kingsley. Even though Victoria couldn’t so much as turn on the old stove, and she refused to clean anything, Addy put up with her because she and little Alix became inseparable. It was after Victoria found the journals and began to rewrite the first story that Addy began to hope that Victoria and Alix would stay.
It might have happened except for Victoria’s insistence on secrecy. When she took little four-year-old Alix off the island, it had nearly killed Addy. And only Jared could see how it had affected his grandfather. His mother, not a Kingsley, couldn’t see Caleb, but Jared could. Even the death of Jared’s father had not upset his grandfather so much.
“Why would she take her away?” Caleb had whispered to Jared. “Alix belongs here. She always has.”
Jared couldn’t get his grandfather to say any more, but by that time Alix’s father was there and Jared’s life changed dramatically.
“I think that could be true,” Alix said in reply to his comment. “My mother does have a bit of a problem with jealousy.”
“What about you?”
“Yes, she’s always been jealous of anyone who got close to me. In high school I could hardly have a boy over or she’d—”
“No, I mean, do you have a problem with jealousy?”
“A month ago I would have said no, but recently my boyfriend, Eric, dumped me and took up with someone else. I wanted to shoot him.”
“Not her?”
“She was too dumb to know what was going on.”
Jared laughed, and Alix couldn’t help smiling.
“It’s too soon to laugh about!” she said. “On the way here on the ferry I was crying and eating lo
ts of chocolate.”
“Were you?” Jared asked. “Is that a usual female remedy for being thrown over?” He put as much innocence in his voice as he could muster.
“In my case, it was.”
“That was just a few days ago. What brought you out of it?”
“I saw—” She broke off. She’d come close to saying “I saw your lower lip.” Instead, she looked out the window of the truck. They were in a rural area now, the houses farther apart, but still sided in that unfinished gray cedar that made a person aware that it was Nantucket.
“I thought maybe you did some work that took your mind off your problems,” he said.
She thought of the chapel model hidden away in the cabinet downstairs. With the way the man sauntered in and out of the house at will, she knew she needed to move the model and the papers so he didn’t accidentally see them. “Nothing important,” she said. “So tell me who Dilys is.”
Chapter Seven
They turned down a little road that was close to the water, and pulled into a driveway beside a house that Alix could have picked out as having been designed by Jared Montgomery. Tall windows peeped out of the roof, doors were recessed, and there were angles that no one expected. The trademarks of his designs were all there.
He sat in the truck, watching her, as though waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t. She was determined to keep to her bargain. Here on Nantucket he was Kingsley, not Montgomery.
A short, gray-haired woman, sixtyish, came around the house. She had skin that had spent a lot of time exposed to sun and salt water, but her eyes were exactly like Jared’s. And like Captain Caleb’s, Alix thought.