But someone was.
Malaika Moore, the current chairwoman of our board of trustees, sent a knowing smile across the space between us as she raised a hand to call me over. Standing in the sunshine, she looked elegant as always, the deep violet of her linen dress a perfect foil for the dark brown tone of her skin, her closely clipped hair giving her a huge advantage over my own pinned-up hairdo that had started off this morning looking almost chic and now had wilted to a sagging mass of waves beginning to escape their clips. I tucked a strand behind my ear and crossed the lawn to stand beside her.
“Well,” she said, “that’s done. How many questions did she ask about your grandmother?”
I tried to recollect. “She didn’t, really. She just asked about the family name, and moved on pretty quickly. She found Benjamin more interesting.”
“Everyone loves Benjamin.” Malaika smiled, assessing me with a calm look that didn’t judge yet still had an opinion. “You look tired.”
“It’s just the heat.”
“You’re still not sleeping.”
“I sleep fine.” An outright lie, but I delivered it with confidence, and when Malaika let it pass I changed the subject. “We’re supposed to have a ghost here, did you know?”
I knew what sort of glance she’d give me in reply to that, and so she did, replying dryly, “That’s a local superstition. Don’t believe it.”
“Oh, I don’t. But I should know about it, if it’s common knowledge.”
“Frank’s the one to ask. He tells the story best.”
I’d learned to trust Malaika Moore.
She’d been my brother’s friend and, in a way, his business partner. Real estate lawyers like Niels needed good contacts, and in Malaika, the best high-end agent in this part of Long Island, he’d found a steady supply of referrals. They’d liked one another. Respect had grown into a friendship so firm that she’d transferred that goodwill to me when I’d come here, and when she had learned I’d be needing a job she had wasted no time recommending one.
“I’m on the board of the local museum,” she’d told me, “and we need a curator. Give me your résumé.”
She hadn’t told me that she chaired the board, but when I’d had my interview it had been clear she was firmly in charge. “We’d be lucky to have someone with Charley’s qualifications,” she’d said to the others, in front of me. “I think she’s perfect for this.”
It had not been unanimous. I knew at least two directors had not been in favour at first, and they’d made that plain to me since I’d been hired, but the others had welcomed me, solely because they, too, trusted Malaika.
It should have been her, I thought, making this opening speech to the crowd.
I eased the cotton collar of my light blouse from my neck, where it had stuck from the damp heat inside the house. “Aren’t we waiting for the contractor?” I asked. I hadn’t met him yet, and so I didn’t have a hope of recognizing him in the assembled group in front of us, but still I scanned their faces as I stalled for time.
“He couldn’t come. He’s working on another job,” Malaika said. “He wants to get that finished off so he can start here Monday.”
There was movement in the little crowd.
Malaika said, “It’s time. You ready?”
“No.”
She smiled and nudged me forward anyway, and told me, “You’ll do fine.”
? ? ?
“Good speech,” was Frank Wilde’s curt review of my performance when he came to find me later. He was carrying an extra glass of lemonade. “You look like you could use this.”
“Is it spiked?”
That earned a smile from him. Frank was an older man with features tanned and weathered from his years of farm work. He was stingy with his smiles. “It should be.”
Frank was also a director on our board, by virtue of his being a descendant of the man who’d built the Wilde House, and a cousin of the woman who had willed it, with its wooded acres, to the town of Millbank on condition that they make it a museum. Many said it had been Frank who had persuaded her to do that, since Ophelia Wilde had never really been the giving type. Frank, they told me, always got his way, though I’d have said that came less from persuasion than from his refusal to back down once he had set his course. He wasn’t like the mayor, who tried to charm his way through every situation. Frank was aptly named. He said exactly what was on his mind.
“You’ve done enough,” he told me, with a pointed look at the untidy stack of paper plates I was collecting from the plastic-covered table where the cake had been. “Let Sharon and her girls do that.”
I glanced across the clearing to the bustling red-haired woman who ruled over our few volunteers, and had them all now busy stacking chairs. “She has enough to do.”
“She argued against hiring you as curator.” His tone was dryly practical. He pressed the lemonade upon me. “Let her do her own damn job.”
I wasn’t going to win against a man who’d had his way for seventy-odd years, so I gave up and took the glass from him and thanked him.
He acknowledged this and looked at me assessingly. “I’m told you want to hear about the ghost.”
“Oh. Right. Yes, the reporter from the Herald said we had one. Do we?”
“Well now, that depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you believe in ghosts.”
“I don’t.” With someone else, I might have been less absolute, not knowing whether they believed, not wanting to offend them, but from what I knew of Frank I figured I was safe on that count.
His short approving nod confirmed this. “Good for you,” he said. “My aunt, now, she wouldn’t go into the old house at all. Always hearing things. Jumping at shadows. She used to leave Uncle Walt’s lunch on the back step and whistle for him to come get it, when he was at work in there.”
Frank’s uncle Walt was the reason the house had come down to us in its preserved condition. A self-styled handyman, he’d also been a keen family historian, proud of his ancestry, and even after the family had moved to Manhattan and no longer lived in the Wilde House full-time, coming only in summer to make their escape from the city’s heat, Walter had worked hard to keep the house standing. Or so we’d been told.
Frank had stories, and he loved to tell them. I had only been on site a week, and I’d already heard at least a dozen of his tales.
“There was one time,” he told me now, “my aunt came screaming downstairs saying someone was touching her hair, she could feel it.”
“And nobody was?”
“Not unless you count spiders.” He took a long drink of his lemonade. “Plenty of those in the house.”
I agreed. I had seen them.
Across the clearing Sharon and her volunteers had finished with the chairs and were gathering, actively looking for what to do next. Frank appeared to have noticed this, too, because he gave another brief nod at my glass. “Drink up. Let’s take a walk.”
I’d already drunk nearly all of my lemonade, so I was able to empty my glass in one swallow and follow Frank as he set off towards the nearest path.
My favourite path, in fact, because I hadn’t yet got lost on it. The property was riddled thick with walking paths that twisted through the woods. The longest, starting at the far end of the clearing near the parking lot, was crossed by all the others and could take you all the way around, if you knew which turnings to take, but I still hadn’t conquered it. I managed better on this shorter path that wound down through the trees to the edge of the cove.
The trees closed above us. The air here was instantly cooler and quieter, and through the tangle of green leaves I glimpsed, in small patches, the blue of the bay.
It almost felt like nothing could intrude upon us here.
Frank said, “The story of the ghost has been around for generations, and every generation adds their bit to it, but I’ll tell it the way I first heard it from my uncle Walt—the way he heard it at his great-grandfather’s knee, so he said.”