Eleanor raised a single eyebrow, assessing him. “According to several sources, she was heard asking around about various things last night. Things she shouldn’t know about.”
Julien’s chest ached with worry. “I don’t know anything about that.”
Eleanor sniffed. “Yes, well. It’s come to our attention that Hannah bought Georgia Kaiser’s old place. You remember the one? Terrible dump, these days. Georgia must be rolling over in her grave.”
Julien remembered Georgia Kaiser, all right. That ancient woman who’d moved down the boardwalk at a snail’s pace, looking at everyone distrustfully.
“Georgia was always a nostalgic woman,” Eleanor continued. “Clarice suggested that Georgia might have left things in the house. Things that, perhaps, Hannah has discovered.”
“What kind of things?” Julien asked.
“That’s not anything we can answer for ourselves,” Eleanor retorted. “But Rosamund suggested that you should go.”
Julien was taken aback. “You’re kidding.”
Eleanor laughed. “Have you ever known me to joke?”
“Like I said, I don’t know Hannah. We’re strangers,” Julien said.
“You were seen getting out of her vehicle on the day of the funeral,” Eleanor pointed out.
“That was a chance encounter,” he said. “She was parking in a no-parking zone and needed help finding a spot. It was an act of service. It’s what anyone would do.”
Eleanor tapped her nail against her thigh. “It sounds to me like you know her better than anyone else in Nantucket. More than that? Shall I say it? You’re a handsome man. She’s single and lonely after a difficult breakup down South. The more we learn about it, about everything that happened in Florida, the more alarmed we are. It seems that she really made a mess of things.” Eleanor paused. “Do you want her to make a mess of things here on our beautiful island? Do you want her to destroy everything we’ve built?”
Julien knew better to say what he was thinking. He knew better than to belt out,I don’t care about your stupid club. Why can’t you leave me alone?He remembered the past. He remembered all that had happened and all they were sure he owed them. So he shook his head.
“That’s settled then,” Eleanor said. “You’ll go to Hannah’s. You’ll be very discreet. You’ll figure out what she knows and how she knows it. And, Julien? It will be helpful to you if she falls in love with you. I hope you remember how to make someone fall in love with you?”
Julien flared his nostrils. “That must be a joke,” he said.
This time, Eleanor chuckled good-naturedly. “Of course it was,” she said. “Maybe I still have a little comedy left in me. Who would have thought?”
Eleanor stood grandly, then walked through the kitchen, through the foyer, and into the darkness that awaited her outside. There was no telling how she’d arrived, nor where she’d parked a car if she’d driven herself. Julien listened for the sound of a motor that never came. It was almost as if she could fly—a thought that made him laugh darkly, as he’d thought she was a witch when he was younger.
Leaning back on the sofa with his beer in hand, he thought about what he’d told Eleanor he would do. He brought Hannah into his mind’s eye, remembering how beautiful and sharp-witted she was. He’d loved getting into her clunky car and helping her find a parking spot. Being around her had been easy. It had reminded him of his first wife, how simple it had felt to be quiet together. They hadn’t demanded anything from one another. Had it been that way for Hannah with her first husband?
He sat for no more than twenty minutes before a text buzzed through his phone.
UNKNOWN: We meant today, not some other time in the future. We want this cleaned up as soon as possible.
Julien’s heart ached with what he needed to do. But it was only seven thirty at night, not late by any standards, and it was summertime, warmer than yesterday, with gray-rose waves thatrolled gently toward shore. Maybe today was a good time to see Hannah, no matter the reason.
Maybe he could pretend he was there with only good intentions and her journalistic instincts wouldn’t kick in and peg him as a fraud. He hoped they wouldn’t. He was in over his head.
16
Hannah had spent the day in a sort of trance. After three hours at the Nantucket library, going over older newspaper articles that had never been scanned into online databases, she’d discovered something incredibly sinister. Thomas Bard was not the only man to die under mysterious circumstances in the history of Nantucket Island. In fact, he was just the tip of the iceberg. Something about this rattled her and demanded her attention. This became especially clear when one of the men who’d disappeared turned out to be named Calvin Jones.
Now, safe at home with printouts of various newspaper articles spread out on the kitchen table alongside letters to Georgia Kaiser, Hannah shivered with excitement. She felt she was circling the drain on this story. No, she couldn’t begin to deduce who was the mastermind behind the so-called Legacy Club. But she’d found the link between Calvin Jones and Georgia Kaiser. There they were, photographed at a sailing competition in the late fifties. There was a caption under the photograph listing their names and their parents' names. They’d been Nantucketers, through and through.
Calvin had disappeared sometime in the mid-sixties. The very few articles regarding his disappearance had spoken about his years in New York City, and how he’d gotten involved with criminals and taken to hard drugs and gambling. To Hannah, there was a vagueness to the articles, as though whoever had written them had been told to make Calvin out to be a bad guy. There was no mention of Georgia in the articles, nor of any wife or girlfriend. Rather, it seemed that Nantucket wanted to peg Calvin as someone “not fit for Nantucket living” and move on.
What had Georgia thought about that?
Hannah returned to the letters to dig deeper. Although, of course, she had nothing written by Georgia herself and only letters written to Georgia, she could deduce that Georgia’s love for Calvin had, at some point, faltered. It was hard to tell what he’d done or why that love had dried up. Had he been gone for too long? Had she met someone else?
And then, she discovered a clue.
