Ever After Read online

  “Good plan,” Jamie said and after they’d hauled the supplies from the car, they began. They put on white cup masks and opened all the windows and doors. Hallie began taking load after load of dishes into the kitchen to wash them, while Jamie tackled the pantry.

  At first they worked in silence, but gradually they began to talk. Jamie asked her a lot of questions about her life. As she had earlier, she talked only about before her father married Ruby.

  “I don’t understand something,” he said as he raised his mask. “If your dad was gone most of the time and you just said that a lot of his work was in Florida, when your grandparents left, why didn’t you go with them? Why did you stay with your stepmother, who you hardly even knew?”

  “I wanted to go with them and my grandparents begged Dad to let me go, but Ruby said Shelly needed her big sister. Dad was still crazy about Ruby then, so he agreed and said I couldn’t leave.” She gave a little laugh. “Sometimes I felt like I was being used for body parts. My function in life became to ‘help Shelly.’ Helping my stepsister took precedence over school-work, my social life, et cetera.” When she looked at him, she saw the concern on his face. “Feel sorry for me now?”

  “I don’t believe in pity,” he said. “I don’t take it and I don’t give it out.”

  “Good philosophy,” she said. “Sometimes you just have to accept what is and live with it.”

  “I agree completely,” he said and they smiled at each other.

  Chapter Eight

  At six o’clock Hallie had an unpleasant run-in with one of the many spiders in the room and Jamie gallantly saved her life—or at least that’s the way he described it. When he said he had earned a hero cape, she laughed.

  They were both dirty and tired, but a half day’s work had made a big dent in cleaning the place. When they went through the pantry to the sparkling clean, well-lit kitchen and looked at the dirt on each other, they laughed.

  “We should go upstairs, take showers, put on clean clothes, then come back down here and have a civilized dinner,” Hallie said.

  “What are you? A Montgomery?” Jamie said as he went to the kitchen sink, pushed up his sleeves, and began to lather his hands and face.

  “You’re going to have to explain to me about your relatives so I can understand these comments.” Hallie went to the other side of the big sink and took the soap from him. For all that she wanted some part of her to be clean, her job was always in her mind. She hadn’t seen his bare forearms before and she couldn’t help sneaking glances at them. There was a long scar running up his left arm and three small ones crossing his right wrist.

  When he saw her looking, he turned away and grabbed a towel.

  “Montgomerys,” he said, as though the little incident hadn’t happened, “were born with a salad fork in their hands.” He pulled a container of chicken out of the fridge. “At home they use real napkins that somebody has washed and even ironed.”

  “They sound like monsters,” Hallie said without a smile.

  “They’re too delicate for that. Mom said the two families are Beauty and the Beast. Guess who is who?”

  Jamie’s hands and face were clean, but his hair and neck were coated with sweat-drenched dirt, and his heavy clothing was filthy.

  “I don’t know,” she said as she frowned in decision, “you’re kind of pretty.”

  Laughing, Jamie bent over and kissed her neck. “You’re—” He stopped because he was sputtering. “I think I got a mouthful of cobwebs.”

  “That’ll teach you,” she said as she ran a towel over her neck. “Are you going to share some of that chicken?”

  After they ate, Todd called and as always, Jamie sought privacy to talk to him. But as he walked away, Hallie heard him say that he’d driven a car. “Yeah, Hallie did it,” Jamie added.

  Smiling and feeling like all her late nights of studying were paying off, she cleaned up the kitchen.

  Later, after a long, hot shower, Hallie turned in early and, as was becoming her habit, she awoke at two A.M. For a moment she thought Jamie was going to forgo his nightly terrors, but at the first groan, she was by his side. She was beginning to develop a routine for calming him. Telling him he was safe and saying her name and Todd’s helped. But most of all, sleeping kisses settled him.

  Within minutes he’d calmed down, turned on his side, and began to sleep peacefully.

  She started back to her own room, but instead she paused to stroke his clean hair. “Tell me what happened to you,” she said softly. “Tell me what you went through that did this to you.” But there was only silence from him, and she went back to bed.

  When she awoke the next morning Jamie was already at work. She dressed and went to the kitchen, where a beautiful breakfast of cheese, pastries, and hard-boiled eggs was on the table. It looked like Edith had been there early.

  She opened the door into the pantry, but that was a mistake. Dust filled the air. Coughing, she waved her hand about. “How long have you been at this?” she asked Jamie, who had his arms full of animal-shaped pewter molds.

  “I started before daylight,” he said. “About four, I guess.”

  She was about to express astonishment but saw the twinkle in his eyes. “Got here ten minutes ago, did you?” she said, laughing.

  “More like eight. Did you eat?”

  “Just starting. Come on, the tea is hot.”

  After they’d eaten, they went back to cleaning. What they found in the pantry was fascinating. Items were three rows deep and they seemed to cover all the years since the young women had died. There were iron pots and wooden implements in the back, and what looked to be Victorian gadgets in the middle. In the front was cookware from after World War II. There were even a few ration cards.

  “I guess we should contact the Whaling Museum and get someone to come look at these things.” Before them, spread out on the sheets they’d put on the grass, were a lot of the artifacts they’d cleaned, many of which they had no idea what they were. “Or maybe we should call Dr. Huntley at the NHS.”

  “Are you sure?” Jamie asked. “Didn’t he say the sailors brought the Tea Ladies gifts? If that’s true, then all of this belongs to them.”

  “You think we should put it all back in there, don’t you?”

  “It’s an option,” Jamie said.

  She was watching him. “You pretend that you don’t believe in them, but you do think they exist as ghosts, don’t you?”

  “I’d like to think there is more than just the finality of death, yes.” When he looked at her, there was something in his eyes, an emptiness, a hollow place that ran through them. It was there and gone in an instant.

  He knows about death, has felt it, she thought. But in the next second Jamie gave his devil-may-care grin and he was back to being the guy who jetted around the world from one party to the next.

  “What’s made you—?” she began, but he cut her off.

  “You ready to hit it again?” he asked.

  Obviously, he didn’t want to talk about anything serious. “Shall we take on the last layer of the pantry?” She looked him up and down. The heavy sweatsuit he had on was covered in dirt and drying sweat. “If I can stand the smell of you, that is.”

  Jamie looked down at himself. “You’re right. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She watched him disappear into the house, then sat on the grass and began to clean some more of the old kitchen items. There were half a dozen pretty white ceramic molds that she thought were for ice cream. They had designs of fruit and flowers on the bottom. She dunked one into a bucket of warm, soapy water and began to wash it.

  She wondered if her ancestor Leland Hartley had touched the molds. Had he eaten ice cream made from them? The thought led her to that wedding day long ago, when two beautiful young women had caught a fever and died within a week.

  What were they like? she wondered. Did they have dreams for the future? Were Juliana and Leland planning on living on Nantucket? Or were they going to his home in Boston? If they w