Harvey came to Eve’s defence. “But it’s the wrong war, that’s what Eve means. Captain Wilde didn’t fight in the French and Indian War.”
“That we know of,” Malaika concurred without really agreeing. “Though some would say that war was really when our revolution began.”
Sharon smiled the small condescending smile usually aimed at me, and with a turn of her auburn head asked, “Are we rewriting history? Or talking about whether this fits our mandate? Because I’m with Eve, I think this takes us too far off course.”
Frank, who’d held his tongue this long, said, “Oh, come on. You’re fine with Don coming dressed as a vampire to harvest days, you didn’t think that was ‘too far off course,’ but you’ll raise an objection to this?”
Sharon searched for an answer to that while Rosina replied that her husband’s TV show was perfectly relevant. “Don’t you remember?” she asked Frank. “In the opening credits each week they showed us that Don’s character became a vampire during the Revolution.”
He looked at her sideways a moment and drew breath to argue, then closed his mouth firmly as though he’d decided it would be a waste of his time to debate a fictional vampire detective’s connection to history. Instead he said, “Look, I’m the only damn Wilde at this table, and I think it sounds like a good way to draw people in.”
Sharon paid no attention to him. She was looking at me when she countered, “You can’t just start serving up legends and fairy tales as though they’re facts. It’s not right. It’s misleading our visitors.”
Harvey said, “Let’s take a vote.”
Predictably, it was three votes to three, with poor Rosina hovering a moment like a bird between two trees, forced to decide which branch to land on.
In the end she raised her hand for “No,” and sent me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, it’s a nice idea, but as Sharon says, it’s just a story, really. If we knew that it was real . . . if we had proof, then that would change things.” Her glance darted from my face to Sharon’s. “Wouldn’t it?”
Magnanimous in victory, Sharon said, “Of course. When we find any proof Captain Wilde had a sister who had a romance with a captured French officer, then we can open this up for discussion again.” But her tone made it clear she considered the chances of that to be almost as likely as finding a unicorn. “Shall we move on?”
I didn’t let my face betray my disappointment. I had learned to pick my battles and I knew this was a minor one. It was the losing, really, that stung more than what I’d lost.
The meeting ended, and the trustees mingled briefly in the kitchen before leaving, one by one. Malaika touched my arm as she went out. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Frank hung back and would have walked me to my car, but I was keen to have a moment on my own. “That’s okay, go ahead,” I told him. “I’ll be fine. I’ll finish locking up.”
He gave a nod and said, “Don’t let them get you down.”
I didn’t plan to. In the greater scheme of things, I thought, with all that I was dealing with, three board members who seemed bent on opposing me was hardly the worst problem I was facing. And whatever Sharon, Eve, and Harvey did, there were still seven members on that board who liked me well enough, and gave me their support. But knowing all that didn’t take away my irritation.
I did my rounds and checked the rooms and doors and windows, seeking peace as always from the calm routine of putting things in order.
In my office I made sure that things were perfectly in place. I closed the blinds and cleared my desk of all the notes I’d used that day while I was writing my proposal for the board meeting. And then I reconsidered.
“You don’t think I know my job?” I asked an imaginary Sharon and her allies, underneath my breath. “You don’t think I’ll find proof about the Wilde girl and her officer?” I took the notes out of the drawer again and stacked them firmly on the corner of the desk where I kept things I hadn’t finished. “Well, just watch me,” was my parting challenge to the empty air, and feeling satisfied with that I went downstairs.
The staff entrance door had to be locked from the outside. The security light here was on a motion sensor that sometimes acknowledged you were there and sometimes didn’t, and tonight it had clicked on for thirty seconds before clicking off again, refusing stubbornly to “see” me even when I waved my arms.
It wasn’t raining, but a bank of clouds still blanketed the moon and I was forced to bring my cell phone out to give me extra light so I could fit the key into the lock. The cell phone made a faint but useful flashlight, too, that helped guide my steps along the side of the house.
When the walls of the Victorian section gave way to the wider siding of the old Colonial part, I slowed my pace a little and searched with the beam of my “flashlight” for the edge of the trench that the workmen had been digging. Finding it, I walked past it carefully but my foot still brushed a pile of excavated dirt and sent a scattering of pebbles bouncing down the hard bricks of the walkway.
And something, not a pebble, struck a half a step in front of me and landed with a small, metallic clink.
I stopped, and bent, and searched for it. A disc that nestled in my palm, its one side slightly domed, its other bearing a squared central bump, and made of a material that, even as I rubbed away the clinging dirt, I recognized as brass.
And then I brushed more dirt away and shone the cell phone light directly on it and I recognized exactly what it was. I’d catalogued enough of them when I’d been with the Hall-McPhail Museum.
It was a button, very old and showing traces still of gilt. A button that, back in the mid-eighteenth century, would have been part of a line of bright buttons sewn onto the uniform of a French officer.
I felt a tiny, thrilling tingle of discovery.
Suddenly a stronger light flashed on behind me. Startled, I looked back towards the side door and the motion sensor activated light above it. Nobody was there. The light shone brightly on the empty steps and walkway for a moment, then clicked off again.
The wind, I thought, or else a leaf.
But as I looked away, my gaze fell sharply on a smaller light that captured my attention.
It was shining at the dark edge of the forest, where there had been, moments earlier, no light at all.
Suspended maybe two feet from the ground, it slightly swayed from side to side as though in time with someone’s steps. A clear light, burning warmly yellow like a lantern in a hand.
My heart leapt hard into my throat. I didn’t realize that my fingers had closed tightly round the button in a fist until I felt the metal edges pressing cold into my palm. I didn’t realize, either, that I’d made a sound when I had caught my breath. Until the light stopped moving.
My heart dislodged itself and dropped. Began to race against my ribs.
The light stayed there hanging a moment, then travelled away from me into the trees and the darkness, along the old path to the cove.
The same path I’d taken with Frank when he’d told me, “Some fools in this town think he still walks these woods with his lantern, the same as he did on the night he was killed. Waiting for Lydia Wilde to come follow him, so he can light her way down to the water.”
Lydia
He’d lost a button from his uniform. She’d seen him pacing slowly on the shaded strip of grass beside the house, as though he knew exactly where the thing had fallen and, by force of will, could make it reappear. But the gap remained along the long bright line of buttons down the centre of his rich blue waistcoat.
She guessed the loss would not improve his mood.