Emily's Ghost (25 page)

"Oh, dear," Emily said
apologetically. "Please, I need the necklace just for a while yet.
But when I'm done, I'll bring it back to you. I really do promise."
Emily tried not to think about the cost of that promise as she
said, "For now can you tell me anything -- it's so important --
about the necklace?"

Having been reassured that
the necklace would soon be hers again, Hattie relaxed, and she and
Emily had a nice little chat, helped along by the lemon tea the
director herself brought them.

"My uncle discovered that
necklace in 1910, the year I was born, hidden between the walls of
his house," Hattie began. "Uncle Eric was enlarging a dressing room
so that my mother, who was about to have me, could live with his
wife and him while my father was at sea. He was a good man, Uncle
Eric; my mother always said so. It's just too bad that he lost
everything in the Depression."

Hattie took a sip of lemon
tea and went on. "He gave my mother the necklace at my baptism.
Said if it weren't for me, he'd never have known about it anyway.
My mother left it to me when she died fifty years later. And that's
all I know about it. Except that it ain't worth nothin'. Jeweler
told me that." She gave Emily a look only New England Yankees
understand: a little bland, a little sorry, a little
shrewd.

"What an interesting
story," Emily said, hoping to find out more. "Your uncle sounds
like a kind man. How did he lose everything?"

"I told you," Hattie
snapped. "In the Depression. It was bound to happen, with or
without the crash. Uncle Eric was the kind of man that gave away
everything that wasn't nailed down. He and Aunt Alice took in
boarders, but half the time nobody paid. It was Uncle Eric's
father
that had all the
ambition. That would be Great-uncle Henry. I never knew him myself,
but my mother told me she distinctly remembered someone toasting
'the next governor of the state of Massachusetts' at Christmas one
year. Course, Great-uncle Henry Abbott never did make it to the
governor's office."

Abbott. The remembered
name leaped up at Emily from the yellow pages of one of her legal
pads. "Henry Abbott?
Mayor
Abbott, could you mean?"

"Oh, yes," said Hattie
matter-of-factly, "he was mayor, all right. Mayor of Newarth. Then
he got too big for his breeches and ran for governor. Now tell me,
who'd elect a small-town mayor to govern a great big state like
Massachusetts? But that was Great-uncle Henry all over, my mother
used to say. Always wantin' what he couldn't have. Always
hobnobbin' with the rich. There never was
that
kind of money in our family,
even before the Depression."

Emily was now in
overdrive. Mayor Abbott had played cards at Talbot Manor every
Thursday night. Fergus had said so. There was no question that he
must have known Hessiah Talbot. The question was, where did his son
Eric and the necklace fit in? "Did Mayor Abbott ever offer any
theory about how the necklace ended up between the walls of his
son's house?"

"Great-uncle Henry was
long dead by the time I was born," Hattie said. For the first time
since Emily had first set eyes on her, the frail old woman seemed
uncomfortable. Her head shook slightly as she said almost angrily,
"Great-uncle Henry killed himself, the fool. He was forty-five.
Wasted half his life. Just threw it away." Hattie shivered and
pulled the yellow afghan up higher on her lap.

"Do you remember anything
about your uncle Eric's house?" Emily asked softly, partly to
change the subject.

"Not much. I was three
when we moved away from Newarth, and we never went back. It was a
big old house, expensive to heat. Uncle Eric never could have
afforded to live there without taking in boarders. I sometimes
wonder how Great-uncle Henry managed to keep the place up before he
shot himself. Yet they said he lived like royalty."

Emily's eyes opened wide.
"Do you mean the necklace was found between the walls of
Mayor Abbott's
house?
That it was
his
house you were born in?"

"Wasn't his house then. It
was Uncle Eric's. I told you."

Hattie was tiring, that
was obvious. Her head was beginning to droop. She was clearly
losing interest in the subject. Emily replaced her china teacup
carefully in its saucer and stood up. "I'm very, very grateful to
you for seeing me, Mrs. Dunbart," she said. "And I want you to know
that I will bring the necklace back to you as soon as I've finished
writing the story I'm working on."

"That would be nice,"
Hattie said wearily. Her head drooped ever closer to the ruffled
collar of her dark blue dress. "Now go away . . . shoo . . . I'm
cold."

By the time Emily gathered
up her canvas bag to leave, Hattie had fallen into a nap. Emily
tucked the yellow afghan gently into the sides of the wheelchair
and tiptoed away, leaving Hattie like a small, thin finch perched
in a thicket, huddled against the coming snow.

Emily found a quiet bench
nearby in Ocean Park and tried to summon up Fergus. He was a ghost,
not a genie in a bottle; she understood that. Nonetheless, she was
using up
her
time
and
her
money
on
his
problem,
and it seemed to her that the least he could do was to be there
when she called. "Fergus.
Fergus!"
she hissed from her park bench. Three young boys
on mountain bikes pedaled past and stared; she heard their snickers
as they burned rubber getting away.

She had no idea where
she'd lost Fergus. Had he even been on the ferry? Did the
forty-five-mile rule really work? Was it all –- after all -- a
dream? She gazed across the dried grass of the treeless park at a
benign ocean curling gently on a slender strip of beach. It was a
beautiful day for a swim . . . or a sail . . . or a garden party.
It was a beautiful day for just about anything except sitting alone
and hissing at air.

The heck with him.
She whipped out a small notebook and began
jotting down details of her interview with Hattie Dunbart before
she forgot them. It had been a great day's work. Emily trusted
Hattie's memory even if the director didn't. And Hattie had
remembered two very critical pieces of information: Mayor Abbott
had owned the house where the necklace was eventually found, and
Mayor Abbott had committed suicide

Why would someone kill
himself? Either he was fatally depressed, or he carried a heavy
load of guilt. If only Hattie had known the address. It would have
saved Emily the trouble of wading through years of recorded deeds,
which was next on her list. Maybe Abbott's descendants still lived
in the house; maybe they had even more useful information than
Hattie.

Emily closed her notebook,
put the cap back on her Bic pen, and put them away. Her chores on
the Vineyard were done. Now it was time to do a bit of shopping,
and find an inn, and have something to eat before the twilight
concert.

"Fergus . . . Fergus,
come
on."

There was no response.
Emily wandered through all the rainy-day shops, priced some rooms,
treated herself to clam cakes and an ice-cream cone, and still --
still! -- there was no Fergus. He was around, she was convinced of
it. But it brought home the frightening possibility that at any
moment he could be called back to Noplace.

Monday, first thing,
Newarth City Hall,
she told
herself.

But that was Monday, and
this was Saturday. It was still a long time until twilight, and
Emily was feeling alone and out of sorts. What was the point of
planning a day on an island if there was no one to share it with?
What was the point of doing
anything,
good or bad, if there was
no one to share it with?

Uh-oh.
Blame it on Fergus, but this was very new thinking.
You
like
your singleness,
she
reminded herself.
It's efficient.
Remember?

For a moment Emily really
did try to remember. Then something snapped, and she hopped into a
standing cab. "Lee Alden's place, please. He told me you'll know
where
it
is."

"That I do," the cabbie
said as he swung out into traffic.

Emily didn't really come
to her senses until the cabbie pulled off State Road onto a narrow
lane, and by then, of course,
it
was too late. The cab stopped in front of a white
rose arbor buried under riotous climbing pink roses that nearly
knocked her down with their scent.
Fergus
would know the name of the rose,
she
thought as she paid the cab. Right now she desperately missed him
and his common-folk ways.

She paused for courage
under the arbor and stared through the full-moon opening at an
exquisitely proportioned Greek Revival house, crisp and white and
trimmed with black shutters, and set off to perfection by a
perennial border bursting with yellows and pinks and whites. A
towering oak tree covered the south end of the property with
restful shade, and a row of shivering poplars hid the house from
its neighbor to the north. It was less than a mansion, much more
than a house. It spoke of good taste and sound judgment, and Emily
knew that whoever had it built a century and a half ago was a man
who knew exactly what he wanted.

Emily lifted the latch on
the arbor gate and with a pounding heart started over the flagstone
walk. The front door was open and she could see, through its
screen, that
it
lined up with a set of French doors at the back of the house
that led onto a lawn where people were gathered. What could have
possessed her to think she'd be welcome among them? She decided to
cut and run; it wasn't too late. She turned to flee and was
startled by two children, a boy and a girl of about eight or nine,
popping out from behind a butterfly bush.

"She's here!" the boy
cried out to the company, although no one could possibly hear him.
"I'll take your bag," he said to Emily, relieving her of the canvas
carryall. "Uncle Lee said to be on the lookout for you, and I
was!"

"No,
I
saw her first!" the blond girl
said, with little hopping jumps in place. "Can I carry your hat?
You're Emily," she said, the way she might if Emily were Santa
Claus. "And I'm Jane. And my brother isn't Dick; he's Richard.
Everyone has to call him Richard or he gets mad. This is so pretty;
can I try
it
on?
But I won't try it on if you don't want me to. So if you say no,
you don't have to feel bad."

"Jane never stops
talking," Richard said with disgust. "If you want to say something,
you have to wobble your hands in front of her face, like
this,"
he added,
flipping them back and forth in front of his sister the way
brothers have a way of doing.

Emily, overwhelmed by the
welcoming committee, laughed and said, "I'm pleased to meet you
both, and yes, Jane, you may wear the hat, and thank you for the
advice, Richard." She wobbled her hands back and forth in front of
his eyes. "Did I do it right?" she asked innocently.

Richard stopped in his
tracks, gave her a quick and somewhat suspicious appraisal, and
then burst into a grin. "Yeah. Like that. I'll take this bag to
your room and show you where it is."

"No,
I'll
show her where her room
is."

"No, you can show her
where to freshen up."

"Okay! No, but first you
have to meet everyone," Jane insisted, turning to Emily. "Or would
you rather freshen up? Your room almost has its own bathroom. Yours
is the best room; you can see Woods Hole from it. Only grown-ups
get to use it. Uncle Lee says when I'm fourteen I can sleep in it,
but not Richard because he'll always be a pig."

She made an awful face at
her brother, and he waved his hands furiously in front of her nose,
and before Emily knew it, they were being descended on by half a
dozen more children in the two- to six-year-old range, galloping
across the rolling lawn. Behind them, at a slower pace, came a
slender and still quite beautiful woman leaning gently on the arm
of the man who had told Emily, "Don't think. Just come."

She saw at once that Lee
Alden was in his element. He seemed neither besieged, as he had at
the fund raiser, nor tense, as he had on the ferry. He'd changed
from the workaday clothes he'd worn on the ferry to a pair of
khakis and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back. His blue tie
was loose and flapping uselessly in the sea breeze; his hands were
in his pockets. The look in his eyes was filled with satisfaction,
the smile on his face relaxed and tender with love for the ones he
so obviously held dear.

Emily paused spellbound
and waited, her lips parted with a greeting that seemed unnecessary
to deliver. The wind whipped her skirt around her legs and blew her
big straw hat off little Jane's head; the girl let go of Emily's
hand with a laughing screech and raced her brother in hot pursuit
of the cartwheeling object. The toddlers followed the example of
the rest of the children and cried, "Emly, Emly, Emly" over and
over, jerking their short, fat arms excitedly, oblivious to what an
"Emly" was but drooling with anticipation anyway.