Bellewether Read online

  “We don’t have many real estate lawyers in Millbank. In my line of work you do business with all of them. He was a good guy, your brother.”

  I found an excuse to look up at the roofline and shaded my eyes with my hand even though there was hardly the sunlight to warrant it. “Yes, he was.” I had a feeling this would lead to sympathetic comments and condolences, and knowing that I really wasn’t up to that, I asked him, “Have you lived here long, in Millbank?”

  “Eight years. Why?”

  “I’ve been told we have a ghost light in our woods.” My tone was offhand. “Have you ever seen it?”

  Not offhand enough, apparently, because his glance held interest. “Have you?”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts.” I was speaking to myself as much as him. The place where I’d been standing by the line of trees looked innocently empty, and the climbing sun was shortening the shadows. But I still felt braver having Sam and Bandit here for company. “I’ve got a pot of coffee on,” I offered, “if you want a cup.”

  • • •

  The coffee-maker had outdone itself this morning. Instead of its usual watery brew it had gone to the other extreme and produced something so strong I half feared the spoon might dissolve while I stirred sugar into my cup. Sam, apparently tougher than me, drank his black without any complaint. He stayed standing, leaning back against the counter by the sink while Bandit curled up by his feet, nose on the small round braided rug. I wasn’t sure what the official policy was on having dogs in the museum’s kitchen, but I knew two of our trustees, Don and Rosina, had brought their dachshund with them when they’d dropped by once to check on things. And Frank, when he came through the kitchen door ten minutes later, didn’t seem to mind at all that he was greeted by the thump-thump of a wagging tail against the floor.

  “New dog?” he asked Sam.

  “Picked him up last month.”

  “Another rescue?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Looks a little calmer than the last one.”

  Sam looked down at Bandit, too. “He has his moments. But right now he’s full of food. He’s happy.”

  “Well, I’m happy, too, when I get fed.” Frank smiled and looked at me. “And how are you this morning, kiddo? Fit for battle?”

  “Always.”

  “Good. Because I’ve brought you ammunition.” He was carrying a thick manila envelope, and raised it now to show me. “Uncle Walt’s collected research for the book he never wrote about our family. After he died, my aunt packaged this all up and gave it to me. Thought I might want to finish his work for him.” He moved to set it on the counter, saw my face, and said, “Relax. The originals are in my safe-deposit box. These are just copies.”

  Even so, I rescued the envelope from the damp countertop as soon as he set it down, and the thickly stacked papers inside slid and shifted their weight as I tilted it upright.

  “You’ll find all kinds of goodies in there,” was Frank’s promise. “Consider it a donation to the archives.”

  Our “archives” at the moment was the third drawer of the filing cabinet in my office, where we kept our copy of the inventory taken by Captain Benjamin Wilde’s wife of the contents of the old house at the time the British occupied it in the Revolution, and a copy of the logbook of the Bellewether—Captain Wilde’s most famous ship and the one with which he’d made his mark as a patriot privateer. And that was all we had. Most of the other documents having to do with the Wildes, I’d been told, were already in the possession of the local library. I hadn’t known that Frank had any articles to add. “Did you tell Malaika you had these?”

  “Oh, probably. I don’t remember.” He didn’t seem concerned. “There’s nothing in there about Benjamin that the historians haven’t already said twenty times over, so there didn’t seem any point in my bringing it in before, but I had a quick look at it last night and there are a few things about Benjamin’s father and brother,” he said. “And his sister. I thought it might help you get one up on Sharon.” He glanced at Sam, including him with the brief explanation: “Sharon Sullivan.”

  Sam nodded in a show of shared and total understanding, as though no more needed to be said.

  It made me feel a little better. “So it’s not just me, then, who finds Sharon kind of . . . challenging?”

  Frank said, “That’s not the word I’d use, but no, it’s not just you. Sam, here, could likely tell you lots of stories if he wasn’t so damned diplomatic all the time. He did some work on Sharon’s house a while back.”

  I thought I caught a smile behind the raised rim of Sam’s coffee cup as he agreed, “She’s challenging.”

  Feeling better still, I said, “Well, good. Then I’ll try not to take it personally.”

  Frank assured me, “It’s not personal. She’s only sore because we wouldn’t make Eve the curator.”

  “What?” This was the first I had heard of it. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, sure. When we started this thing Sharon figured eventually she’d be the big boss, museum director, and Eve would be hired as the curator, that was the plan. Until you came to town and Malaika suggested we might want to hire somebody with actual training.” Frank reached past my head, took a mug from the cupboard, and poured himself coffee. He never seemed to mind the way it tasted.

  I found I couldn’t finish mine. I poured it down the sink and would have set the envelope aside a moment while I washed my cup, except Frank took the cup from me and said, “I’ll do that. You go get your nose in Uncle Walt’s research, and see what you can find. Just don’t go too far down the rabbit hole,” he warned. “My collections committee is having its first meeting here in”—he checked his watch—“forty-five minutes. You’ll want to sit in with us. Dave’s bringing cinnamon buns from the bakery.”

  Sam wondered aloud if this meeting was one that the contractor should be a part of, too.

  “Nope,” Frank said. “Nice try, though.”

  “I’ll save you a cinnamon bun, Sam,” I promised.

  “The hell you will,” Frank told me. “There won’t be any to save.”

  “Well, then he can have mine.”

  Sam looked at Frank sideways. “She’s nicer than you.”

  “Half the planet is nicer than me. What’s your point?”

  They were obviously comfortable with one another, so I didn’t feel bad when I left them there, excused myself, and went up to my office.

  I liked my little office in the mornings. The wide-planked floor and woodwork had been painted over grey during the renovations in the 1980s, and the wallpaper they’d chosen then was emerald green with floral twists of peach. But in the dance of light that filtered softly through the branches and green leaves outside my window, the effect was soothing and serene, like being underneath the sea.

  The light was dim and quiet, though—the sun not risen high enough to let me read the papers Frank had brought me without switching on a lamp. I didn’t want to spoil the ambience by using the strong ceiling light. Instead I reached behind me for the floor lamp in the corner. I knew I’d changed the lightbulb last week, so I was surprised that nothing happened when I switched it on. Until I noticed that it wasn’t plugged into the wall socket.

  With that fixed, I sat back and opened the big envelope.

  Frank’s uncle had been organized. He’d numbered every page in pencil in the top right corner, and he’d typed up a table of contents that served as a finding aid, letting me know what each section of pages contained. Benjamin Wilde’s section, as I’d expected, was by far the largest, twice as long as that of his poetical Victorian descendant, Lawrence Wilde. The part I was interested in, though, was at the beginning: From Reuben to Zebulon Wilde in the table of contents.

  Zebulon Wilde had been Benjamin’s father. And if I hadn’t known that to begin with, I’d have learned it from the handy family tree Frank’s uncle Walt had made, his tidy printing leaning backward just a bit, but keeping to the lines he’d drawn and noting dates and
places of the births and deaths and marriages of everyone he’d found. He’d obviously taken genealogy very seriously, and had footnoted each entry, citing sources.

  Zebulon had been the youngest of four children—five, if you counted the first-named boy, Samuel, who had been born and died all in one day. There were two sisters after that, one who was written down simply as Daughter, Unnamed, which I took to mean her name had not yet been found in the documents, not that her family neglected to give her one. Then one more brother, named Reuben, who’d married and had at least one child himself. And then Zebulon.

  Born at Newtown, Long Island, in 1697. Married Patience Hallet at the same place in 1722. Died at Snug Cove, 1765.

  Almost seventy years of a life distilled down to three dates on a page. It was humbling to think that my own life, someday, would be summed up as blandly for some future reader, and probably then only if I got lucky and had a descendant who did something worthy of being remembered. Zebulon Wilde, by becoming the father of a Revolutionary War hero, had hit the jackpot—assured of a mention in every school history book, even if that was no more than his name. Not too bad for a man who appeared to have been, from a glance through this section of Uncle Walt’s research, a farmer and carpenter. One of the documents copied here was a page from a receipt book for work he had done while in Newtown. For work about stairs read one line, and another: For building a bedstead and putting up ledges and shelves, and the still more ambitious: For laying on shingles and building a barn. He’d been paid in the way of Colonial trade in both money and shares of the livestock and crops of the neighbours he’d worked for, a good hog and winter wheat being as useful as cash to a man in those times.

  He hadn’t stayed in Newtown, though. The last six of his eight children had been born here, at Snug Cove.

  The family tree had them all listed in order of birth. First came William, whose name I had already learned. While he wasn’t as famous as his brother Benjamin, he’d made a mark of his own on New York, being one of its wealthier merchants and ship owners, making a small fortune through his trade with the West Indies in defiance of the British laws that tried to put a stop to it. The next son listed, Daniel, had been William’s partner in that trade. The family tree said Daniel had been married at Jamaica and had died at Hispaniola, so he’d evidently liked the warmer weather.

  There were three sons after that, all with the same name, none surviving long. Samuel Wilde, born 1727, died 1727. Samuel Wilde, born 1728, died 1729. Samuel Wilde, born 1730, died 1731. Again, those spare numbers on paper seemed hardly an adequate record of all of the hopes and the loss and the sorrow that would have marked those painful few years for Zebulon Wilde and his wife. It appeared, for this family, that “Samuel” was not a fortunate name.

  With the next son, they’d broken the pattern. And he had survived.

  Joseph, born at Snug Cove, 1733. So then this was the United Empire Loyalist, as we in Canada called those who, in the Revolution, had stayed loyal to the British Crown, finding themselves fighting their friends and families in what could be argued had been America’s first civil war. Frank had been right when he’d told me the family didn’t talk much about Joseph—all he had here was a birth date, nothing more, the rest left blank as though they’d wanted to erase him. And if Frank was also right about the family legend, Joseph was the brother who had shot and killed his sister’s French officer.

  Benjamin came next in line, but I skipped over him and all his details, having memorized them all before the board had interviewed me for this job. I could recite his children’s names and who they’d married and go down the line from there. That didn’t interest me this morning.

  What did interest me was the name that followed Benjamin’s—the last child born to Zebulon and Patience Wilde, here at Snug Cove. Their only daughter.

  Lydia.

  Unlike her brother Joseph, she had been remembered by two entries: born 1739, died 1760—the source for her death date being cited as a letter in the Fisher family’s personal collection, written June eleventh of that year, which simply stated: Zeb Wilde’s girl was buried this day.

  According to this chart, then, she’d been twenty-one when she had died. That hit me in a way the death all of those infants named Samuel hadn’t done. They, too, were sad, but this seemed worse, somehow. For someone who’d survived all the hazards of childhood, who’d gathered the knowledge and life lessons and the experience to start her out on her path in the world, to be blotted from the record before she’d had any hope or chance of taking more than a few steps along that path, seemed cruelly wrong. And so unfair.

  If I’d been motivated before by my desire to prove to Sharon I was smarter and more stubborn than she thought, then I was motivated even more right now by seeing those two simple, soulless dates bookending what had been the life of a young woman; and by knowing that, through research, I could fill the space between those dates with something that approached that woman’s shape.

  I’d have to wait, though. I could hear the door to the staff kitchen downstairs creak and bang above a cheerful rise of voices, and a half a minute later up the stairwell wafted one of the rare irresistible things that could draw me away from my reading—the scent of fresh cinnamon buns.

  • • •

  Frank’s way of chairing a meeting was much more laid-back than Malaika’s. Declaring the dining room too hot and stuffy, he’d moved us outdoors to a shady spot under the trees by the parking lot, crafting an informal board table by dragging two picnic tables together end to end. At the centre of these, in a large clamshell box, were the cinnamon buns that Dave Becker had brought from the Millbank bakery.

  Dave was generous like that. I’d been in his antiques store several times now since I’d moved here, and even when I hadn’t made a purchase he had never let me walk out empty-handed, always giving me some little item—an egg cup or handkerchief—that he’d had tucked in the back of a cabinet or stuffed in a drawer; and this morning without any arm-twisting he’d taken on the job of keeping minutes for our meeting. He set his pen down now. “So let’s see if I’ve got this straight. I can keep doing appraisals for people outside the museum, the same as I’ve always done, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “But if somebody donates an article to the museum, and needs an appraisal of what they’re donating, for taxes, then I can’t provide that appraisal.”

  “Right. That would be conflict of interest. I can’t appraise either.”

  Museums weren’t private collectors. Whatever we held was considered to be in the public trust, meaning when people donated things to a museum they expected us to manage and preserve them for the benefit of everyone, not hoard them for ourselves or, worse still, use them for our own financial profit.

  There were rules for accepting something into the collection, and rules for taking care of it, and even more restrictive rules for how and when we could dispose of it, all written down in our policies.

  Frank moved the meeting along. “I’ve broken down the inventory Captain Wilde’s wife made of what was in the house when it was being occupied by Redcoats. On this first page, here, are all the things my family managed not to sell, the things that we held on to.”

  It wasn’t a bad start. A four-poster bed that had been in the chamber of Benjamin Wilde and his wife, and two chairs and a small table matching the ones she had listed as being downstairs in the parlour; an old copper kettle, a soup tureen, six silver spoons and four candlesticks, and a long mirror, its frame carved and inlaid to match the description she’d made of a looking-glass, brought by my husband a gift from Jamaica.

  Tracy, reading the list, asked, “And these are all in our storage facility?”

  Frank replied, “If by ‘storage facility’ you mean my barn and the safe in Dave’s shop, then yeah, that’s where they are.”

  “And this second page?”

  “These are the things that my family got rid of, but we have a record of where they are,” he said. “Or wher
e they’re supposed to be. The dining room table, for instance—Lawrence Wilde donated that to his club in the city, and I’m pretty sure we can get them to donate it back to us.”

  “Some of these things are in other museums,” Dave said. “What’s the process there?”

  Frank looked at me. “Charley?”

  “Well, we could ask those museums to give us those items on permanent loan. And given the situation, we might persuade some curators to deaccession the artifacts from their collections so we can add them to ours. But there’s no guarantee.”

  Frank accepted that. “And on these third and fourth pages, I’ve listed the rest of the things that we’ll need to find, somehow.”

  The four of us read through the list, our easy silence challenged by the steady noises of the workmen digging a new section of the trench, and by the swelling whine and hum of insects stirred to life by the increasing heat of this late August morning. My shirt had started clinging to my neck and back from the humidity, and I felt a deep sympathy for Captain Wilde’s wife and other women of that period who’d spent their summers cooking over open hearths. Two racks, the list read, two dripping-pans, eight iron pots, two spits, six pairs of pot hooks, three frying pans . . .

  A flash of white beside me made me jump, but it was only the fifth member of our small committee.

  Lara Hollis Dennison was one of those rare people who could brighten any room that she walked into. A year younger than me, she was the single mom of four boys and the owner of Millbank’s trendiest fashion boutique, which mixed things I couldn’t afford with some quirkier pieces and vintage accessories. Very much Lara, in other words. Naturally pretty, she rarely wore makeup except for a bold stroke of eyeliner, letting her ivory skin glow on its own and her long wavy blond hair hang loose down her back. Today, in a tunic of pale yellow linen worn over a crinkled white skirt, she was sunshine personified.

  “Sorry,” she said, sliding onto the picnic bench seat next to me with a cheerful disregard for any dirt she might be sitting on. “When I said I’d be late I didn’t think I’d be this late, but the dentist was running behind.”