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Love does not, in fact, suck, which is of course not a term we used in my day, but I understood the girls’ meaning quite clearly. Now, love sometimes has a way of bashing one around like whitecap waves on the rocks of the shore, but it really is the most precious thing in the world, and to hear those beautiful, young—and alive!—women write it off so easily, well, it made me want to ruin their dinner all over again.

I’ve been working on my ghostly powers, and it seems that, the longer I stay here, the more I’m able to do. I finally figured out how to muster enough strength to move small things around, and I find myself able to move a bit past the range of my cookbook, all of which is helping me quite a bit in getting my message across.

I do hope that my gal Cam can finally locate her spine, whether it’s taking a chance with that Ian fellow (I’m working on that one) or telling that horrendous Izzy woman where she can stick that ghostwriting job and those silly rocks of hers. And most of all, I hope Cam finds the clue that I put in my cookbook!

Since she seems to be my only hope, I suppose I really should be nicer to her and take back those mean things I might have said about her, which would be the polite thing to do, although I saw something the other day while I was walking with Cam and her little dog along Main Street. It was like a little sign affixed to the rear of an automobile, and it read “Polite Women Rarely Make History,” and I thought that was quite true.

And while there seems to have been some progress, I suppose I just have to wait for Cam to find the message I left. But patience, as dear Mother used to remind me, was never my strongest suit.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

It looks magical!” Cam said, stopping at the entrance to the main room of the town hall and taking in the decor that Francine had set up for the dinner that evening. The tables, covered in white tablecloths, were arranged in long rows. Greenery that looked like it had been touched with the lightest dusting of frost snaked down the length of each, winding around glittery mercury glass votive candleholders. A green napkin sat at each place, tied with a silver bow with a single holly leaf tucked into it. Strings of lights overhead were twined with evergreens. The whole effect was of a wintertime forest blanketed in snow.

Cam could picture the warm glow that the candlelight would cast on the plates of her food. “It’s so elegant.” Cam shook her head. “Francine, you are a freaking wizard!”

“I don’t know.” Francine contemplated the scene, her head cocked, and tapped a red-lacquered nail against her chin. She was wearing another kerchief tied in her hair and a bright-pink pair of coveralls that made her look like a factory worker at a bubblegum plant. “Maybe it’s too subtle?”

“You’re thinking that Roxy might prefer candy canes and jingle bells?” Cam asked. “Maybe Santa figurines?”

Francine shuddered.

“Everyone will love it,” Cam said firmly. She only hoped her food would live up to the setting. She had given herself enough time to do a walk-through before heading over to the cafe to meet Paige to make their final preparations.

“Let me show you how we’ve got the buffet arranged,” Francine said, leading Cam to a table to the side, where all the clean dishes had been stacked. Cam made a mental diagram of how she would lay out the food.

“And Tiny will be set up over here at the drinks station.” Francine motioned to another table where glasses and rows of bottles gleamed. They had enlisted Captain Jeb’s bartender to serve the beer and wine and soft drinks. An urn would dispense coffee after dinner. Cam nodded. Everything looked in order.

“Oh,” Francine said as Cam studied the table. “I’ve been meaning to show you something, but with all the chaos this week over all this, I haven’t had a minute.”

She pulled out her phone and scrolled through her photos. “The day that I had off work when we couldn’t make it to the historical society, I decided to go back to the library,” she said. “I spent hours looking at all the local books. It was fascinating. I wasn’t looking for clues about Ada, necessarily. Just trying to get a feeling for the era she lived in. Anyway, I spent forever digging into the African American history section, and I think I might have found the woman who originally owned Ada’s apron.”

“Seriously?” Cam was instantly riveted, even though her mind had been racing in a thousand different directions, from the position of the beef’s chafing dish to the status of the Sterno supply to wondering if Izzy was practicing her knife skills to Avery’s newly blackened heart.

Francine pulled up an image. “A historian and a photographer came through Silver Cove in the early 1920s documenting Virginia’s African American community. There’s a whole book about their project. Anyway, here’s the picture.” She showed her a picture of a group of African American men and one woman, all in work clothes. The only woman in the photo was wearing a dress with the sleeves turned up and an apron tied around her waist. Francine used her fingers to zoom in on the apron. “It was the heart-shaped patch at the bottom that helped me identify it—and the family it says she worked for.”

“‘Muriel Cooper, a cook for the Poulson household, and her son, Coleman Cooper,’” Cam read. “That must be Coleman,” she said, pointing to the young man to Muriel’s left. He was tall and thin and was holding a wire oyster basket and seemed to be looking intently into the camera.

“He had kind of a Clark Gable thing going on,” Francine noted, pointing to Coleman’s pencil mustache. “Is it weird to say that a guy who’s been dead for God knows how long is sexy?”

“Huh, the apron belonged to her family’s cook, but it wound up with her things,” Cam said. “I guess it’s just another Ada mystery. Oh, I’ve got another newspaper clipping of Ada to show you, too. We found it the other day. I feel like we have all these threads but they’re not quite adding up to anything.” She sighed in frustration. “Plus, I finally got through the list of people who donated items to the jumble sale, and it was a dead end. No one I reached knew what I was talking about.”

“Look, why don’t we have another committee meeting?” Francine asked. “Maybe brunch tomorrow? So we can all rehash tonight’s fete and compare notes.”

“A committee meeting?” After the week of preparing for the fete, Cam had had about enough of Silver Cove town activities.

“I mean a meeting of Team Ada.” Francine smiled. “You, me, Avery, and Birdie. Izzy, too, I guess. You guys are leaving for New York the day after tomorrow, right?”

Cam smiled. Brunch sounded great, especially since she knew it would involve mimosas, which Cam liked to make with freshly squeezed juice and just a touch of ginger. She would need a morning’s rest before getting back to work with Izzy and packing for her return to New York.

Going back to Brooklyn as fast as she could had been the idea all along, but with Ada’s mystery lingering over her and Avery moping around, Cam felt there was so much here in Silver Cove that she didn’t want to leave.

“Brunch tomorrow sounds like a plan,” she said. “Why don’t you come over to Birdie’s around eleven? I’ll make a frittata.”

“Are you sure you’ll feel like cooking after tonight?” Francine said. “I could always make my specialty, Pop-Tarts. I’m famous for them.”

“Trust me, it relaxes me to cook,” Cam said. “Brunch tomorrow—assuming I survive tonight.”

As darkness settled in that night on Silver Cove, Cam checked the time for about the three hundredth time in the span of an hour. Timing, she knew, was everything. She wanted the hors d’oeuvres to be ready when people arrived, but not sitting out too long to dry out.