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  “I don’t have time to reminisce with you about the good ol’ days. Just please go over to the house and tell them some nice, quiet story that will keep them from jumping on the next ferry and leaving the island. I especially want Hallie to stay calm. She can’t leave until I get this business about her stepsister straightened out.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Caleb said. “You handle your buildings and leave the ghosts to me.” As soon as Caleb hung up, he buzzed for his assistant. When she entered he said, “If I draw a map of the attic of Kingsley House, could you go there and get something for me?”

  Like all historians, her eyes lit up at the prospect. Kingsley House had been owned by the same family since it was built in the early 1800s. It was rumored that the attic was full of treasures that should be in museums: journals, clothes, historic artifacts, things historians could only dream about. “Yes,” she managed to say.

  Caleb quickly drew a map of the arrangement of the attic. Third row from the door, all the way to the back, under four crates full of China imports, inside an old trunk, on the bottom left side, was a little cinnabar box that contained a key. He wanted that key.

  Chapter Six

  When Caleb got to the Hartley-Bell house, he knew he should go to the front door and knock, but he didn’t. Instead, he went around to the back gate. It wasn’t the big double gate by the B&B but the small one hidden behind shrubs and the old chicken coop. It took some muscle to open the gate, but in the last year Caleb had spent a lot of time in a gym. At first he’d protested what was, to his eye, an artificial form of exercise. He believed men got muscles from climbing rigging and hauling anchors. Jared had scoffed at that idea and hired him a personal trainer. Caleb hated to say it, but it had worked.

  The first thing he saw was that the chicken coop had been remade into a home gym. The yard where the chickens had scratched and fluttered in their mud baths had a pretty grape arbor over it and two chairs beneath it.

  He sat down in one and looked out over the long view of the garden. It was awful! It had once been lush to the point where it looked like the Garden of Eden. Now it was nearly bare, the flower beds still outlined but empty.

  The big pergola was gone. The girls had served tea under it, and he remembered pink and white rose petals dropping onto the tablecloth. He’d always thought the petals matched the perfect skin of those beautiful girls.

  As he envisioned those soft summer days, the food, the laughter, and most of all, the perfection of the girls, he could feel tears coming to his eyes. So many years had passed, but today it all seemed fresh.

  He heard a door close, then a woman’s laughter, and he knew he should leave. If he went back out the gate and around to knock on the front door, they’d never know he’d been there.

  He was about to get up, but when he saw them, he sat back down. He was always curious about people. They were a young, handsome couple and Hallie looked like Leland. How many generations separated her from her ancestor? he wondered. But no matter the time, the resemblance was still there.

  For a moment Caleb closed his eyes in memory. They had all envied Leland so very much. Every man on Nantucket had tried to make the girls fall in love with him. They’d brought back gifts from their sailing voyages to far-off places, poems written on scrimshaw, busks made of ivory to slip into their corsets, buttons. The risks they’d taken to get recipes for the girls! Around Nantucket it became a saying, “What did you bring back for the Bell girls?” Their father made his daughters return silks and jewelry, but they were allowed to keep plants nurtured on long voyages, pretty pieces of china, and their favorite, recipes from foreign lands.

  When the young men were home from their long voyages, they hung around the house constantly. The girls’ father used to run them off with an oar, threatening them. But it didn’t deter any of them. They were back again before daylight, with a new gift and a new hope.

  But none of them came close to receiving that look of love. The girls were the same to all the men who visited. They were gracious, kind, generous. But there was no spark.

  Until Leland Hartley arrived. He had come over from Boston, a young man who wanted time away from his blue-blood family, away from his endless studies. One of the Starbuck boys invited him to tea at the Bell house to meet the sisters. They were young and at the height of their beauty.

  Caleb hadn’t been there that day, but he’d heard about it—as had everyone on the island. Hyacinth opened the door, smiling as always, and was introduced.

  Then Juliana came into the room. She and Leland looked at each other and…Well, that was that. They were married six months later. A week after that…

  Caleb didn’t want to think about the end of the story, of when he’d been told of their deaths. None of the Nantucketers could imagine the island without the Bell girls, and for days everyone was silent in grief.

  Afterward, the girls’ father lived alone, willing himself to join his cherished daughters in Heaven. The garden became a mass of weeds and the house was always dark. As for Leland, Caleb was told that his deep sorrow had made him suicidal, and he’d been put under watch to prevent him from harming himself.

  As Caleb watched the young couple, he could see Leland in the girl, and he couldn’t help marveling at how characteristics were passed down through the centuries. The way the girl moved her hands was like Leland. The tilt of her head was like him. Even her laugh sounded like his.

  She was walking with a big, muscular young man on crutches, and their heads were very close together. He could hear quiet laughter between them. Like Leland and Juliana, he thought. They had eyes only for each other.

  Oh, my poor, poor Juliana, Caleb thought. How it must hurt her to see this young woman who was so like the man she loved. Or did it make her feel good to see that he’d lived on in this pretty girl?

  The couple were coming closer and even as absorbed in each other as they were, they’d soon see him and that would be embarrassing. He started to get up, but then that odious woman from the inn next door threw open the big red gates and came storming toward the couple. The gate slammed behind her, loud enough to be cannon fire.

  The young man, Jamie, was a bit behind the girl so she didn’t see his reaction—but Caleb did. Jamie dropped to one knee, reached out to grab the girl, but then seemed to remember where he was and let his hand fall away. His action was something that Caleb had seen many, many times and he knew what caused it.

  When the young man was using his crutches to get himself up, he saw Caleb sitting in the chair. Instantly, his face took on a look of aggression.

  “Jamie!” Hallie called. She was with the angry woman. “Have you seen Edith today?”

  He hardly turned around, but kept his eyes on Caleb. “No, I haven’t,” he said over his shoulder as he made his way to the older man. His face was glowering, menacing, even. “May I ask who you are and why you sneaked onto this property?”

  “I’m Caleb Huntley,” he said, “and I shouldn’t have come unannounced. I apologize for my lack of manners.”

  Jamie recovered himself, his face relaxed, and he sat down in the other chair. “Sorry for the…” He waved his hand, not knowing how to explain his actions, then nodded toward the older woman standing in front of the gate. “I take it you know who we are, but that’s Betty, and her mother-in-law, Edith, constantly runs away.”

  “Do you blame her?” Caleb asked. They could hear the angry tone of Betty’s voice.

  “Not at all. I think that even if Edith were here, we’d not tell on her. She sneaks us food from the inn, so we have these wonderful afternoon teas, or a lavish breakfast after an early workout.”

  “Does she?” Caleb asked, smiling, his eyes sparkling as though from some mischief. “Does she still serve those little anise seed biscuits?”

  “Oh, yeah. And cookies with bits of fruit buried in them. And fuzzy navel cupcakes.”

  “From the 1960s,” Caleb said, nodding. “I remember them well. That recipe was from a woman trying to f