A shiver wriggled up Maddie’s spine. “My grandmotherfell?”
Lisa nodded.
“Is that how she died?” Then Maddie realized that the attorney hadn’t specified Nancy’s cause of death, only that she had “unfortunately passed away.”
The young woman nodded again. “Sorry. I thought you knew.”
Maddie drilled her gaze back to the granite steps. “This is where she fell? And lay dead for five or six hours?” She backed into the house.
“It was so sad,” Lisa continued. “I might have heard her if she’d yelled for help, but I guess it happened while I was at work. I’m an administrative assistant at the town hall.” She lowered her voice, then pointed to a sharp corner of the top granite slab. “She was right there. The police said it looked like she caught her foot on the edge. Lost her balance. Hit her head. At least, that’s what I heard at work.”
In spite of the background noise—boats in the harbor, traffic on the street, and people (and dogs) yipping everywhere, Maddie’s ears plugged up. Totally blocked. As if she’d gone deaf.
“Right here?” she asked again, as if she had misunderstood. Her gaze remained riveted on the steps. She tried, but failed, to picture her grandmother. She tightened her grip on the basket.
“I’m afraid so,” Lisa said.
Maddie wondered why on earth she’d assumed her grandmother had simply died in her sleep. Or in a nursing home, where she’d lingered for a while with a terminal disease. It never had occurred to her that Grandma Nancy had been lying on the ground at her own front door. Alone. For hours.
A small ache rose inside her. She lifted her eyes and considered the bread-baking neighbor. “It must have been awful for her. And for you, too. To have found her that way. I’m so sorry, Lisa.” It wasn’t the right time to admit that she hadn’t seen her grandmother in years and could hardly remember what she looked like. After Maddie’s mother died when Maddie was still five, her father said it was time to sever “those island ties,” because her grandmother lived too far away to maintain a connection. Which was easy to understand back in the age before cell phones, the internet, and godawful social media. When Maddie turned ten, she asked her father if she could visit Grandma. But he said the woman had been old and feeble and that she had died. Maddie hadn’t questioned him. Why would she have? She’d been too young to realize that, realistically, the woman would still have been too young to typically become feeble and die.
With a slow shrug, Lisa said, “I keep thinking she might have had a stroke or something before she fell. If you hear anything, will you let me know?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t want to pry, but what with you being her only family, and, well . . . she was my friend.” She paused again, as if searching for words. “I know it probably was a freak accident. But if anyone knew her own turf it was Nancy. She might have been old, but she was as sure-footed as I am.”
“I’ll let you know if I learn anything,” Maddie said, half wondering if Lisa was trying to suggest that something sinister had occurred.
Lisa nodded and mumbled a few words about her husband coming home soon. Then she lifted an arm in a short wave and headed toward the path.
And Maddie remained standing in the doorway, gripping the woven basket by its wide handle, watching Lisa disappear through the tangled overgrowth of tall grass and beach roses that crept down to the harbor. And all Maddie could think of was that nothing could bring back the past. It could not bring back her mother; it could not bring back her grandmother, no matter how she had died. Or when. And the sooner Maddie got the cottage cleaned out and sold, the better.
Chapter 2
Maddie left the front door open, intending to sweep out the dust and the sand and whatever else Nancy left behind at the time of her unexpected departure. With any luck, the fresh air would help cool off the place. Setting the basket on the counter, she removed the bread, wrapped the tea towel more tightly around it, and put it in the oven in case the streaking critter showed up again. She wondered if she should have asked Lisa for advice on rodent removal; it wasn’t something Maddie had ever dealt with in Green Hills, in the sunlit, second floor of a lovely Victorian home nestled among tall pine trees. The house was a former faculty residence on the campus of the college where her father, Professor Stephen Clarke, taught political science. If any mice dared to take up tenancy in the house, her father no doubt would have alerted the property manager without telling her. After all, he wasn’t given to making a fuss about much of anything.
When Maddie and Owen separated, her father suggested that she and Rafe move in with him. (Though technically retired now, the professor still taught a course or two and had been allowed to remain in the Victorian—seniority was paramount in the academic world.) It hadn’t taken long for Maddie to decide: her father was a good influence on his grandson, and she liked how he showed Rafe that, contrary to Owen’s belief, having a rich life didn’t have to mean having hefty financial investments. In any event, other than an occasional raccoon that Maddie heard rooting through the trash cans in the driveway when she was up late grading papers, her experience with critters was nil. Which was how she liked it.
Returning to her task at hand, she found a broom that must have seen better days, but, as the old saying went, “none of them were recent,” and surveyed the rest of the cottage. Two modest bedrooms. One bathroom, which she expected would be ancient but had been noticeably renovated. A sleek, walk-in shower now stood where an old claw-foot porcelain tub used to be. The old one hadn’t had a shower . . . the shower was outside, loosely enclosed by a makeshift stall of wood slats that were wide enough so people could peek between them. By mistake, Maddie once saw Grandma Nancy’s wrinkly backside through them; she’d quickly scampered away.
And then she remembered something else: the outdoor shower was tucked into an alcove of the house that was created when another room, tinier than the others, had been added behind her mother’s childhood room; like a fairy-tale portal, the room was accessed through a miniature door at the back of her mother’s bedroom closet. The secret place fit an old army cot, a nightstand, and a seaman’s chest that once belonged to Maddie’s great-grandfather and was where Grandma stored Maddie’s dolls, books, and a few toys. The room had a single, round window that opened like a porthole; Grandma said Maddie could fit through it in an emergency.
Closing her eyes, she could almost hear her mother’s sweet laughter and her gentle voice. “It’s your special place, honey. Grandma had it built just for you.”
By a man with long black hair in a ponytail, Maddie suddenly remembered. He’d banged his hammer day after day because he hadn’t been able to finish before Maddie and her mother arrived that summer. He was a nice man, though. Tall and skinny. And she’d never seen a ponytail on a man before, let alone one that reached halfway down his back. But she didn’t remember his name, if anyone had told her.
She laughed now, surprised that though she had few memories of those early years, she could picture the man with the ponytail who’d built her a room. It might have been the year before their last visit there, which meant Maddie would have been four. Grandma said they should call it Maddie’s Hobbit House.
“Hobbits are happy little people,” Grandma had explained. “Sometimes they live underground because they love to hide.” Maddie wasn’t sure what she had to hide from, but she loved the special space that Grandma—and the man with the ponytail—had built just for her.
Happy to have unleashed another memory, Maddie started down the hall now, toward the closet where the small door led to the room. Then her phone rang.
She stopped. As badly as she wanted to ignore the call, she realized it could be the attorney, trying to confirm their meeting for tomorrow.
But the caller was not Brandon J. Morgan; it was her son.
She decided not to answer. It was bad enough she’d lied to her father, saying she was going to visit friends in Boston. But Maddie never lied to her son. She was not, however, ready to tell Rafe what she was really doing. Or that his grandfather—the esteemed Stephen Clarke, PhD—had either lied to her decades ago, or someone had given him misinformation about her grandmother’s supposed death. Which was hard to believe, because what would have been the motive for either to have happened? But the timing had been rather convenient: he’d never told her Grandma was dead until Maddie said she wanted to see her again. Yes, she thought, she shouldn’t talk to Rafe yet. So, with her emotions now too raw for her liking, she set the phone on a table in the hallway and decided to change her clothes and go for a run. Like Rafe, Maddie’s Hobbit House would wait.
