He lifted his chin, then looked straight at her. “Okay. Here goes.” He drew in a long breath. “Your grandmother and I . . . well, we had the same father.”
His last two words hung in the air like spray from a Vineyard skunk, as Grandma Nancy liked to say when fish went bad. The black-and-white creatures were all over the island; when she’d been a kid, Maddie remembered they were rampant up-island. Grandma once said she knew a man who hadn’t known any better so he twirled skunks by the tail and tossed them into the woods behind the cottage. He was never sprayed, not once. God, Maddie wondered now, where were these crazy memories coming from?
Finally, she spoke. “I don’t understand.”
Joe’s eyes moved to Evelyn, then back to Maddie. “Our father was Isaac Thurston. Your grandmother was my half sister. I’m Joe Thurston, Isaac’s son. Nancy was Nancy Thurston before she married Butchie Clieg.”
Maddie was confused. “My grandmother was your sister? But . . . but she was almost ninety. Old enough to be your mother.”
“True. I’m sixty-seven,” he said. “Nancy’s mother died when she was young—and, by the way, I’m sorry you lost yours. Hannah was a sweetheart. Anyway, after a bunch of years, Isaac wanted another wife. It had been hard for him, raising your grandma alone, ’cuz he was a fisherman like your grandfather Butchie became, and he was out to sea seven days a week, so Nancy mostly was raised by the women of the tribe. Isaac tried his best, and he did okay, but he finally asked the tribal elders to pick another wife for him. They’d chosen Nancy’s mother for him, too. The story goes that the elders knew the ideal woman: she was a lot younger than Isaac, but I guess my father charmed her. It seemed like a good fit, so the elders arranged his wedding to the woman who became my mother. Her name was Violet. Like the plant. A few years after that, Isaac’s daughter, Nancy, who by then wasn’t yet twenty, married Butchie Clieg, and everybody was happy.”
Maddie thought about her father, who hadn’t married again but had not been a fisherman who worked seven days a week. Nor did he have tribal elders to help him find another wife.
“So,” Maddie said, “you were my mother’s uncle. . . .” Her words trailed off, and Joe nodded. Then Maddie realized this was pretty cool. Like her mother, Stephen Clarke was an only child, so Maddie had never had aunts, uncles, cousins. And now she knew something about . . . what was Joe to her? A great-half-uncle once removed? She had no idea how genealogy worked—until now, she’d had little interest in it. But whatever Joe was to her, yes, it was pretty neat. Rafe would think so, too. Especially since it meant they had a relative who was a Wampanoag, a Native American.
And that’s when Maddie’s brain came to a freaking-screeching halt. Because she’d realized something else: if Joe Thurston was a Wampanoag, Grandma Nancy had been, too. And because the tribal elders had picked Nancy’s mother—his first wife—for Isaac Thurston . . . she, too, must have been a Wampanoag.
Her throat closed up a little, the way it often did when anxiety rushed in—or when she wanted to cry. She stared at Joe.
“So . . . Nancy’s mother was Wampanoag? And her husband was, too?”
Joe nodded. “Yes. Both of them. Full-blooded.”
Which meant that Maddie’s mother had been a Wampanoag, too. An Indigenous person.
And, therefore, so was Maddie.
She was not half exotic Iberian, not 50 percent descended from a Portuguese fisherman, as her father had told her. Maddie Clarke was a Wampanoag Native American on her mother’s side. She’d always known that her father was part Scottish, part British, that he’d once traced his British ancestors back to theMayflower, to the same people who’d survived their first winter in America, thanks to the kindness of the Wampanoags.
She looked at Evelyn, then back to Joe. She hoped that one of them would say more. But they stayed silent.
She tried to sift through what she’d been told. Was it true? Or had her mother really thought she had Iberian heritage? But that would have been ridiculous. Hannah, after all, had grown up on the Vineyard. She’d grown up among her people. Of course she’d known the truth.
Maddie had questions, lots of questions. But right then she was numb, and her foot was throbbing. It was hard to think straight.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” was the first question she uttered. She couldn’t tell if she sounded angry or upset. Or plain stupefied, which, frankly, she was. “My father said my mother’s family was Iberian. Why would he have lied?” Then her whole body became agitated, every nerve crackling, combusting, going on alert.
Evelyn reached over and patted the armrest of the lounge chair as if it were Maddie’s arm. But Maddie didn’t want to be comforted. More than anything, she wanted—needed—to get back to the cottage and scour the place room by room, corner by corner. Closet by closet. She wanted answers....
But she was trapped in a house that wasn’t hers, with a woman who claimed to have been her mother’s friend, and a man who claimed to be Grandma Nancy’s half brother, and who, for all Maddie knew, wasn’t Wampanoag at all but another descendant of the same fisherman, who at some point could have believed it would be more acceptable to claim to be a Native American than a Portuguese immigrant, at least on Martha’s Vineyard.
Was it as simple as that? If so, why didn’t Evelyn and Joe seem to know it?
Of course, as badly as Maddie wanted to escape, she didn’t have her car. And with what felt like a fifty-pound sack of potatoes strapped from the toes of her right foot nearly up to her knee, she was hardly able to get off the damn lounge chair, let alone walk out to North Road and hitchhike her way back to Menemsha Harbor.
“Maddie, dear,” Evelyn said in her motherly tone, which Maddie now found irritating. “Why don’t we wait until Brandon gets home? I’m sure he can help straighten this out.”
She wanted to ask why she thought Brandon Morgan, Esq., who, like Evelyn, clearly was Whiter-than-White, could manage to do that. He hadn’t even been able to get a letter to her on the first try. Shifting her gaze out the window, she noticed a pond in the distance that she hadn’t seen before. She wondered how many more surprises would be in store, and if any of them—including her inheritance—would turn out not to be as it had seemed.
“If you’ll both excuse me,” she said, “I’d like to take a shower now.” She looked at Brandon’s mother. “And thank you, Evelyn, but I’ll manage to put the plastic around the cast by myself.”
Chapter 10
Maddie didn’t care if she had to call an Uber or a taxi or had to take whatever public transportation was available: early tomorrow morning, she was going back to the cottage. If she made it down the driveway on her crutches, surely she would be able to flag down a vehicle and find out where a bus stop was, if there were bus stops on the island. Maybe whoever she asked would offer her a lift. Hitching a ride most likely would be safe: she doubted that many kidnappers were on Martha’s Vineyard. Or that anyone would try to harm a middle-aged woman whose leg was in a cast and who was brandishing two metal sticks.
She could have called Lisa, but she didn’t want to. She certainly wouldn’t call CiCi. So either the bus or the hitchhiking would have to do.
No matter what it took, she would get out of there. She’d gladly exchange the cushy bedroom for Grandma’s bed with the squeaky springs. After all, the cottage was more of a home to Maddie than this exquisitely decorated, professionally landscaped, perfectly gardened, impressive island retreat. Maddie’s roots were in a ramshackle cottage that overlooked Menemsha Harbor. They were not in Chilmark with her mother’s old school chum.
