“I hate to interrupt your moment here but at this rate it’s going to be night before we get there.”
Reluctantly, Alix began to walk again, still studying each building they passed and admiring its perfection. When they came to what looked to be a movie set for a nineteenth-century drugstore Alix got excited. “I remember this place! I know it.” She opened the old-fashioned screen door and rushed inside, Izzy right behind her. To their left was a well-used counter, complete with stools in front and a mirror behind.
Alix put down her packages and sat on a stool. “I want a grilled cheese sandwich and a vanilla frap,” she said decisively to the young woman behind the counter.
Izzy took the stool next to her. “How can you be hungry, and what’s a frap?”
“Milk, ice cream.” Alix shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s what I always ordered and I need it now.”
“Ordered when you were four?” Izzy asked, smiling, pleased that her friend was remembering things.
A “frap” turned out to be an Americanized term for frappé—a milk shake. Izzy ordered the same and got tuna sandwiches to go.
“She bought things here,” Alix said as she ate her sandwich, which was served on a thin paper plate. “In the back.”
Izzy couldn’t resist a look around the store. At first glance it seemed to be a rather simple place, but a closer examination showed that the merchandise was very high-end. The skin products were the kind you found on Madison Avenue in New York.
“I bet your mother loved this store,” Izzy said when they were back outside on the sidewalk.
Alix looked at her friend. “What an interesting thought. If my mother did arrange all this about the will, when did she do it? She told me we spent a summer here when I was four. That’s when she and Dad split up, but she’s never mentioned Nantucket since then. When was she here? How did she know this Miss Adelaide Kingsley?”
“What I want to know,” Izzy said, “is who is ‘she’?”
“What are you talking about?”
“In the drugstore you said, ‘She bought things here.’ Did you mean your mother?”
“I guess so,” Alix said. “But I don’t think so. Right now it’s like I’m sinking down into another time. I have no conscious memories of this island but with every step I take I see something familiar. That store …” She was looking at Murray’s Toggery with its gray and white painted wood and the full glass front. “I know that children’s wear is upstairs and she … someone, that is, bought me a pink cardigan there.”
“If it was your mother, surely you’d remember her. Victoria is rather distinctive.”
Alix laughed. “Are you referring to her red hair and green eyes and a figure that causes car wrecks? I’m glad I look more like my father. Where do you think the bank is?”
Izzy was smiling at her friend. To hear Alix tell it, a person would think she was a plain little sparrow when compared to her mother, but far from it. While Alix didn’t stand out in a crowd as her mother did, she was extraordinarily pretty. She was taller than her mother and slender, with reddish blond hair that was naturally streaked. She wore it long with wispy bangs swept to one side and fat curls at the end. Whereas Izzy had to work to get curls in her dark hair, Alix’s were natural. She had blue-green eyes and a small mouth with full lips. “Like a doll’s,” Victoria had said at lunch one time, and her daughter had turned red at the compliment.
Alix’s modesty about her looks, her background, and even her talent was something Izzy had always admired about her friend.
Alix drew her breath in and came to a halt. “Look at that.” She was pointing to a tall, majestic-looking building at the end of the street. It was on a raised foundation, with a steep curved staircase leading up to the front door, which was set under a curved roof portico. The elegant building seemed to look over the town, a grand empress watching her subjects.
“A knockout,” Izzy said, but she was more interested in finding Kingsley House.
“No. Look at the top.”
Raised letters said THE PACIFIC NATIONAL BANK.
Izzy had to laugh. “Doesn’t look like my bank. What about you?”
“Nothing here looks like anything anywhere else,” Alix said. “If that’s the bank, we need to take that road on the left.”
They crossed the cobblestones on the brick walkway and headed up Main, past Fair Street. It was a road of houses, and each place was a
historian’s dream nestled under graciously weathered old shingles. There were very few of the usual gaudy Victorians that so many small American towns treasured as historic homes. Nantucket had been formed by Quakers, people who believed in plainness in their clothes, their attitudes, and especially in their houses. As a result, the homes weren’t covered in unnecessary ornament. To Alix’s trained eye, every roof, door, and window was a work of art.
“Think you can stand looking at this town for a whole year?” Izzy asked, laughing at Alix’s expression.
When they reached the three brick houses Alix looked like she might go into an old-fashioned swoon. Big, tall, impeccably maintained, the three houses were indeed impressive.
Alix seemed to be glued to the sidewalk as she looked up at the buildings, but Izzy moved past her.