That done, she wove her way through a maze of furnishings, boxes, and stacks of what looked like magazines, and went toward the opposite end of the room—a galley-like kitchen—where she pushed matching gingham curtains apart. Then she opened two small windows over the chipped enamel sink, a single window on the back door, and one on the sidewall behind an unpolished square wooden table, where a single chair sat, as if waiting for Grandma.
Maddie moved back to the center of the room that stretched from one end to the other, kitchen to living room, living room to kitchen, with no walls between. The sparse furnishings looked vaguely familiar, though the place seemed smaller than she remembered.
In the center of the living room, a threadbare plaid sofa faced a stone fireplace; a matching chair was tucked into a corner and offered views of both inside the cottage and out to the front yard. What looked like a handwoven lap blanket was draped over the back of the chair. Had her grandmother often sat there, watching the world of Martha’s Vineyard float by?
The fireplace stood on the outside wall near the chair; atop the mantel sat an odd-looking, purple-and-white half of a quahog shell that was scuffed and had a large crack; it hardly seemed like a memento that someone would have wanted to save. Next to the shell was a small, lopsided pottery bowl decorated with a childlike painting of a single daisy. But a larger item dominated the space: an acrylic-on-canvas depiction of Menemsha Beach at sunset.
Maddie recognized the painting. She knew if she stepped closer, she’d see the artist’s signature:Hannah Clieg. Her mother. For years, a similar canvas had stood on the mantel over the fireplace on Broadside Road in Green Hills, the home where Maddie was raised. One day, like her mother, the painting was gone. Her father must have stored it in the attic, as if that part of his life was long over. The image she studied now, however, was slightly different: her mother had added two silhouettes—a woman and a child—walking along the shoreline, holding hands. She’d probably captured that sweet sentiment after witnessing it one summer. Perhaps the figures had been tourists; Hannah had often painted them, always careful to disguise their faces.
Maybe, when her mother had been a young girl with an untrained eye, she’d also painted the daisy on the pottery bowl.
Rubbing her arms, Maddie was surprised that a chill had snuck into the room. There was so little she remembered about her mother—her beautiful mother who’d been killed in a car accident. Hit-and-run. It happened so long ago that Maddie rarely thought about her anymore. And yet . . .
She quickly tamped down her emotions, pushing them into a dark recess in her mind where she’d learned to push those kinds of things so she could keep moving, so scary feelings would not bog her down. After all, years ago she figured out that crying didn’t do any good; it wouldn’t bring her mother back. So she stiffened her upper lip now before foolish tears formed, and she continued to scan the cottage.
There wasn’t much to see: the place was hardly bigger than the entry hall of her ex-husband’s house that he shared with his silly society wife. Luckily, Maddie had had the good sense to get out of her brief marriage when their son, Rafe, was only three. By the time she and Owen had tied the traditional knot, her mother had been dead many years; her father, however, had continued to wear his sorrow like a nineteenth-century mourning shawl. Maddie had hoped that her marriage into a wealthy, well-known family in the Berkshires who would protect her (a laughable expectation) and provide her with security (the ultimate punch line) might help assuage her father’s grief.
She’d been wrong.
“Yoo-hoo!” A singsongy female voice that seemed more cheerful than necessary jerked Maddie back to the present.
* * *
A short, stocky woman stood outside the screen door. Her arms were cupped at her waist; she held a woven basket. She was smiling broadly.
“Are you Maddie?” Ms. Cheery asked.
“I am.”
The visitor looked thirtysomething. She had long light brown hair contained by a red bandanna; she was dressed in an outdated denim jumper and a butter yellow T-shirt. Her round face was absent of makeup; her cheeks were rosy, likely from the sun.
“I’m Lisa Jenkins. Your neighbor. My house is down the hill on the left.” She twitched her chin in that direction. “I saw your car in our lot, so I figured it was you.”
The “lot” was a small area halfway up the hill from the road where the driveway ended. It was barely big enough to park three cars. From there, a narrow sandy path led to Grandma Nancy’s cottage, which was just up the hill from where Maddie’s visitor named Lisa apparently lived.
“I ran into Evelyn—your attorney’s mother—at the post office yesterday. She said you were coming. I’m so sorry about Nancy, um, your grandmother.” She held out the basket; in it, an embroidered tea towel was wrapped around something shaped like a football. “This is one of her baskets. She made them out back in the big shed. They always sold out at the artisan fairs.” The young woman hastily jibber-jabbered, the way Maddie’s students often did. “Anyway, I didn’t know if any of her baskets are left. Just in case, I brought you this because you should have one. It’s yours to keep. She gave it to me for my birthday.” She took a short breath, then peeled back a corner of the cloth, revealing a loaf of bread nestled inside. “This is for you, too. I made it this morning.”
Maddie kind of remembered that Grandma Nancy was always busy with a project; one of them might have been making baskets. She opened the screen door.
“Please,” she said, “won’t you come in?”
Lisa shook her head. “No, thanks. I have errands to run while the tourists are still on the beach. It’s the only time there’s a hare’s chance of getting to up-island Cronig’s on a Sunday in summer.” Her face scrunched into a frown that revealed a few lines; her arms and hands looked very tan, the kind of tan one gets from working in a garden or mowing the yard, not from lazing on a beach towel. “I also wanted to tell you to please let me know if you hear too much noise from our place. My husband’s a lobsterman, so he works long hours, but we have a seven-year-old boy who likes to pretend he’s an action figure and a four-year-old girl who shrieks at nothing.”
Maddie laughed. “It sounds like a lively household.”
“That’s one way of putting it. Plus, our place is about the same size as this one, so it’s kind of crowded.”
Lisa seemed nice enough, but Maddie knew there was no point in making friends where she wouldn’t be living. She examined the gift. “Well, thanks for the bread. Are you sure you don’t want the basket back?”
Lisa shook her head again. “No. Please. Keep it. And the towel. It was one of Nancy’s, too.” She gestured to Maddie’s phone. “You can turn off the flashlight. I reminded Evelyn to make sure the power was on for you.”
“Oh. Well. Thanks.” Maddie felt idiotic for not having tried to flip on a switch. She turned off the flashlight and slipped the phone into her pocket.
“No problem,” Lisa replied. Then, as she turned to descend the granite steps, she dropped her gaze to her footing. Suddenly, she stopped. “I found her, you know.”
Maddie blinked. “What?”
“I found Nancy after she fell. They figured that by then she’d been dead five or six hours.” She spoke robotically, as if her words had been choreographed.
