“Everyone loves the idea of hidden treasure,” Alexander agreed thoughtfully.
“I don’t know if that has any longevity,” Benjamin interjected. “Doesn’t it cheapen what we offer here? The luxuries of the Lodge?”
The Whitmore children considered this. But Francesca felt each of her children had a point: that the Lodge’s provocativestory could get people through the doors after so many years. “The kids are telling me it’s a difficult market,” she said. “Anything that can put our name in people’s minds again should help us.” She wouldn’t tell them what she thought she knew about the treasure. She wasn’t sure what kind of mess that would make.
Benjamin’s face glowed with happiness, as though the fact that Francesca wanted to offer her opinion at all thrilled him. “The treasure angle it is, then,” he said. “Lady Whitmore has spoken, and she’s the greatest mind we have.”
Francesca rolled her eyes into laughter and took another bite of food. “The Whitmore treasure,” she said when she’d swallowed. “It’s been a rumor since I came to Nantucket.”But I couldn’t have fathomed what that rumor would do to my life, she thought.
“It’s been a rumor going back to the beginning of the Lodge,” Benjamin said.
“And you never looked for it?” Alexander asked his father.
“Of course, we looked,” Benjamin said. “My brother and I. Sometimes your Aunt Quinn would join us. But we always got distracted or nervous in the tunnels by ourselves.”
“How far do those tunnels go, Dad?” Charlotte asked.
Benjamin raised his shoulders. “They dug them so many years ago that there’s no remaining record of their plan. Maybe one of these days, we’ll get down there and create a brand-new map for future Whitmores. But for now, I’m more focused on what we can do above ground, away from what your Tio Angelo was up to, away from the past.”
Chapter Seventeen
Autumn and Winter, 1978
It was at the end of a tireless and harrowing season at the White Oak Lodge that Benjamin Whitmore packed up his bags and left. Francesca didn’t realize he’d gone till dinnertime, when she and their three children and her mother waited for him at the dinner table, listening for the familiar creak of his footsteps as he descended from his office upstairs. Francesca threw her napkin on the table and went up to look for him, but returned with a sharp anger in her chest. “Let’s eat,” she said. “He’ll be down soon.” It was a lie, and her mother looked at her as though she knew it. But what could Francesca say or do but lie? She was so ashamed.
Ronald’s death had cratered through her husband’s chest and made him incapable of life at the Lodge or life in their family. A small, dark part of her thought that maybe it was better if Benjamin never returned. She and her mother could manage the White Oak Lodge. They would keep it running until Alexander was old enough to take over. Because Francesca hadgiven up on film and on Italy and had lost her identity in so many ways, the White Oak Lodge was all she had. It made her feel powerful and confident. It made her feel important.
That night, Francesca waited up for hours on the back porch, listening for Benjamin to return. Through the moonlight, Jefferson slipped out of his quarters and strolled down the beach, his hands in his pockets. He didn’t see Francesca watching him as he stripped to his underwear and went on a night swim. Throughout his months at the Lodge, Francesca hadn’t seen Jefferson with a single girlfriend and hadn’t known him to spend any time in town, hanging with locals and drinking at bars. He seemed like a solitary sort of man, a man who didn’t need anyone. She was envious of this. Sometimes her loneliness felt like it was eating her alive.
A few days later, Francesca and her mother took the kids to the beach. Allegra was nearly a year old, and she ambled around, crawling and trying to walk on the sand. Francesca’s heart skipped a beat when she imagined that Benjamin would never see Allegra walk. She took a bite of an apple and tried to distract herself from her own misery. But her mother, who saw everything and seemed to know everything, wouldn’t let her off the hook.
“Has he left you?” she asked softly, her eyes to the ocean.
Francesca took another bite of the apple and refused to answer.
A week went by, and then another. The Lodge continued to welcome guests who came to the island to enjoy the peaceful autumn weather, the crisp air, and hearty food. Alexander, now four, started preschool, and Francesca had a big cry about that. When she picked him up on his third day, she overheard some of the other mothers gossiping about Benjamin, saying that he’d left his family and wasn’t coming back. She wanted to snarl atthem and tell them to mind their own business. But a part of her also wanted to beg them for information about where he was.
At the beginning of Benjamin’s third week of absence, his parents, Charles and Elaine, came for dinner. It was bizarre to serve them in the kitchen where they’d once treated her like a guest, but Francesca threw herself into it, playing the part of a perfect wife and mother. Benjamin’s name didn’t come up until the tail-end of their meal, when Charles gave her a list of potential people to call about Benjamin’s whereabouts. He looked pale and thin, as though losing first Ronald and now, maybe, Benjamin had run him ragged.
“I’m sure he’s just fine, dear,” Elaine said before they left, kissing Francesca on the cheek.
Francesca initially felt too proud to phone Benjamin’s random friends from the city to inquire about his whereabouts. But after another few days without a word, she forced herself to sit in front of the phone and call the first few numbers. The women who answered were the wives of men that Benjamin had known during a brief stint of college in the city, a time Francesca knew very little about. She wondered how Charles had gotten the numbers in the first place. None of the wives knew where her husband was. They didn’t seem to know where their own husbands were. Francesca wanted to cry for all of them.
At the beginning of November, Francesca’s mother asked if she wanted to return to Italy and raise the children there. “I miss your father,” she said simply. “He doesn’t know how to be on his own.”
Francesca sensed this wasn’t true of her father. She guessed that her father was a lot better at being alone than her mother was, especially given that her father had traveled all over the world, making films, while her mother was at home with Francesca and Angelo. But she sensed, too, that her mother was at the end of her rope with this Benjamin business. Francescawas brokenhearted but livid, waiting up for her husband to return, wondering if he was gone for good.
It was after this conversation with her mother that Francesca donned one of her husband’s massive winter coats and went outside to clear her head. Snow blew through the blustery winds and stitched into her hair. She felt terrible. Somehow, she watched herself walking to the horse stables, where she found Jefferson Albright similarly bundled up, tending to the horses with a soft smile on his face. When he spotted her in the doorway, his eyes lit up. It was almost as though he’d been expecting her.
Jefferson kept a bottle of whiskey in a locker in the stables. He poured two glasses and handed one to her, saying, “It’ll warm up your soul.”
“I don’t think my soul can be warmed,” she said. “It’s frozen solid.”
Jefferson laughed. “That’ll serve you well on this island.”
Francesca sipped the bitter liquid and grimaced. She hardly drank anymore, and she felt it go straight to her head. “Are you going to stay at the Lodge during winter?” she asked him.
Jefferson arched a single dark eyebrow, gazing at her. “I’ll stay if you tell me to stay,” he said finally.
