Prologue
Jared Montgomery Kingsley
NANTUCKET
“She’s coming on Friday,” Jared said in answer to his grandfather Caleb’s question, “so I’m leaving before then—and I think it’ll be better if I stay away the whole time she’s here. I’ll get someone to pick her up at the ferry. Wes owes me for drawing the plans for his garage, so he can do it.” Jared ran his hand over his face. “If someone doesn’t meet her, she’ll probably wander down an alley and never be seen again. Some ghostly figure might carry her off.”
“You always did have too much imagination,” Caleb said. “But perhaps in this instance you could imagine less and try for some kindness. Or has that become an outmoded commodity in your generation?”
“Kindness?” Jared said, suppressing his anger. “This woman is going to take over my house for an entire year and force me out. My house. And why? Because as a kid she could see a ghost. That’s it. My house is being confiscated because now, as an adult, she might possibly be able to see someone other people can’t.” His tone conveyed his disgust at the whole arrangement.
“It’s a little more complicated than that, and you know it,” his grandfather said calmly.
“Oh, right. I can’t very well forget all the secrets, now can I? First of all, there’s the girl’s mother, Victoria, who is hiding twenty years of visits to this island from her own daughter. And of course there’s the Great Kingsley Mystery that needs to be solved. It’s the two-hundred-year-old unanswered question that has plagued our family since—”
“Two hundred and two.”
“What?”
“For two hundred and two years it’s been unsolved.”
“Right.” Sighing, Jared sat down on one of the old chairs in the house his family had owned since it was built in 1805. “A mystery that no one has been able to solve for two hundred and two years, but for some unfathomable reason this outsider is supposed to be able to figure it all out.”
Caleb stood with his hands clasped behind his back and looked out the window. It was early in the summer season, yet traffic was already increasing. Soon the cars would be bumper to bumper even on their quiet lane. “Perhaps the mystery hasn’t been solved because no one has truly looked into it. No one has really tried to find … her.”
Jared closed his eyes for a moment. After his great-aunt Addy died it had taken months to sort out the ridiculous will she’d left. The will said that a young woman, Alixandra Madsen, who hadn’t been in the house since she was four years old, was to live in it for one year. During that time she was to try to solve the family mystery—if she wanted to, that is. Aunt Addy’s will clearly stated that if she didn’t want to do any searching, she didn’t have to. Instead, she could spend her time sailing or whale watching or doing any of the thousands of things that Nantucketers came up with to occupy the god-awful number of tourists who invaded their island every summer.
If that was the only secret involved, Jared could have handled it, but concealing a lifetime of people and events was too much to ask of him. He knew it would make him crazy to try to keep this young woman from discovering that her mother, Victoria Madsen, had spent a month each summer at his aunt Addy’s house in order to research her bestselling historical novels. Jared took a breath. Maybe he should change tack. “I don’t see why an off-islander was given this job. You can’t throw a harpoon without hitting someone whose family has been here for centuries. If one of them was given the job of researching, this girl wouldn’t need to come here. The researchers could solve the mystery, and the secrets Victoria insists on keeping would be safe.”
His grandfather’s look stopped his words. There wasn’t anything that hadn’t already been said.
“You’ve made your point,” Jared said. “One year and that’s all, then this girl leaves here and everything goes back to normal. I will get my family home and my life back.”
“Except maybe by then we’ll know what happened to Valentina,” Caleb said softly.
It was annoying to Jared that he was so angry and the old man was so calm. But he knew how to even out the playing field. “So tell me again why dear Aunt Addy didn’t look for your precious Valentina.”
His grandfather’s handsome face immediately changed to stormy. Like at sea. His shoulders went even farther back, his chest out. “Cowardice!” he bellowed, a sound that had frightened shiploads of men. But Jared had been hearing it all his life and was unperturbed. “Pure cowardice! Adelaide was afraid of what would happen if she did find out the truth.”
“Meaning that her beloved ghost might disappear and leave her all alone in this big old house,” Jared said, grimacing. “And besides, people thought she was a spinster lady with money inherited from Kingsley Soap. The soap money was long gone, but you and Aunt Addy and Victoria figured out a way to keep a roof over this house, didn’t you? That it involved airing our ancestors’ dirty laundry to the world seems to have bothered only me.”
His grandfather looked back out the window. “You are worse than your father. You have no respect for your elders. And you must know that I advised Adelaide in the matter of the will.”
“Of course you did,” Jared said. “And everything was done without consulting me.”
“We knew you would say no, so why should we have asked?”
When Jared failed to answer, his grandfather turned to look at him. “What are you smiling about?”
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“You’re hoping this girl will fall in love with the romance of the Kingsley ghost, aren’t you? That’s your plan.”
“Of course not! She knows about that world thing, that … What’s it called?”
“Why ask me? I’m not consulted about anything.”