Seaside Harmony Part 20

The front door was slammed a little harder than necessary to get a point across. A couple of windows rattled in the parlor. Sam stalked into the room, her pale aqua T-shirt smeared with muddy paw prints, her khakis stained green at the knees. Her fists were clenched at her sides. "Where is he?"

"Who?" Caroline asked not so innocently.

"If you can't tell simply by looking at me, you need gla.s.ses," Sam practically bellowed, which was so not her style. "I'm looking for Max."

"Looks like he got into something he shouldn't have," Gracie said, looking around the room, pretending she didn't see the pup. "Please tell us it was something here at the inn and not over at Shirley's again."

"Oh, it started at Shirley's." Sam's jaw tightened. "We now have half of one of her hydrangeas in our garden, not that we didn't already have enough. We also have one of her gardening boots. A gardening boot that now has holes in it."

Caroline forced herself not to laugh. "None of that explains the mud you're wearing."

Sam tugged at the hem of her T-shirt. "In his hurry to get away from Shirley's shouting, he came running at full bore, hit the back of my legs, and sent me sprawling into the gra.s.s. And then, when I scolded him, he decided we should kiss and make up. That explains the paw prints on my shirt-twenty-five pounds of c.o.c.ker spaniel standing on my chest, licking my face."

It was all Gracie could do to keep from laughing. "You aren't hurt, are you?"

"The only one that's going to hurt is that dog. So where is he?"

Max poked his head around one of the wingback chairs, a hangdog expression on his furry face. He crept toward Sam, leaving more dirty paw prints on the floor. He came to within inches of Sam's grubby knees, tilted his head up, and whimpered.

"Is that meant to be an apology?" Sam asked, glaring down at the precocious pup. She sighed heavily and then gave in to Max's pitiful face and patted him on the head. "Okay, I forgive you. This time."

Max hopped up on his hind legs and danced around for a moment or two, until what could only be a cane rapped at the front door. Max dropped down on all fours. He tilted his head toward the sound of the second thud and then took off, his claws scrabbling on the floors as he raced to the parlor and up the curved stairs.

"I'm the one who needs to apologize since he's my dog," Caroline said, heading for the foyer. "Something tells me Shirley's not going to be in the best of moods."

The elderly woman stood on the front porch, half of a blue-flowered hydrangea caught in a hand covered with a gardening glove. She glared at Caroline before dropping what was left of the bedraggled hydrangea on the doorstep. "I believe this belongs to you now. I'll expect my new one-planted in my garden-within a week."

"I'm so sorry, Shirley. We're trying to keep an eye on Max, but-"

"If you're not careful, I'll invest in a bull mastiff to keep guard on my garden."

Caroline grinned. "Bull mastiffs are awfully sweet. I'm sure Max would love having a friend to play with."

Shirley's back stiffened as she rose to her full height of five foot two. "Any dog of mine would be much better behaved."

"Would you like to train Max?" Caroline asked in all seriousness. "I've tried, with little luck. He even had a trainer in England. Sadly, he's just a tad incorrigible."

Something told Caroline that Shirley Addison had been incorrigible as a child too. She certainly was feisty now. But Caroline could see she needed to placate her elderly neighbor.

"Would you like to come in for a bit?" Caroline asked. "Have some freshly squeezed lemonade?"

Shirley fanned her face. "Well, now that you ask, it is a tad warm out here and a gla.s.s of lemonade would be nice."

Shirley made her way slowly into the foyer. "That dog isn't around, is he? The last thing I need is for him to mow me down and I end up with a broken hip. Can't risk going to the hospital. You get pneumonia there, and people my age, well, let's just say I want to stay far away from hospitals."

"He's upstairs, probably seeing what kind of mischief he can get into." Caroline took Shirley's arm, only to have her hand gently slapped away.

"I may be old, but I'm not feeble. I get along quite well with my cane. Just tell me where you want me."

"Come on in here," Sam said, leading Shirley and her sisters into the parlor. "We're still cleaning and we have a lot of updating to do, especially here in the parlor, where we hope our guests will want to spend a lot of time."

Sam led Shirley to an overstuffed chair. "Have a seat, Shirley, and I'll bring you some lemonade."

Shirley knocked her cane against the upholstery and coughed when a speck or two of dust floated into the air. She offered her now familiar harrumph, at last lowering herself into the chair. "If you have cake or cookies, I'll take those too. The walk over here takes all the starch out of me."

Caroline couldn't help but notice the way Shirley looked around the room with a critical eye, and with the sunlight now pouring in through the windows, it was all that much easier to find things to be critical about. Shirley's gaze settled on the pile of cleaning rags and then the piano. "You aren't using water to clean the wood on that piece, I should hope."

"No," Gracie said. "A little lemon oil is all."

"You might want to clean it first. You can pick up a good wood cleaner at Malcolm's. Ask Bill Dekker to get some for you. He's usually in that neck of the woods every day. If you haven't worked with antiques before, talk to Bill. He'll steer you right. And whatever you do, don't use water, at least not a lot of water. Loosens the glue and the veneer. And don't allow anyone to tell you it needs to be stripped down. Nothing ruins an antique more quickly than getting rid of color that comes with age."

"Thank you," Sam said, setting a gla.s.s on the table at Shirley's side, along with a dessert plate filled with snickerdoodles Sam had made that morning. "Gracie's knowledgeable about antiques, but I'm a rank amateur."

Shirley looked pleased as punch. "If I didn't tell you, Quincy Court, my home, was built in 1799. We've been fortunate enough to keep it in the family since the very beginning, but there have been a few generations that let the place slip. One of those generations had the house before me." Shirley clucked her tongue several times. "Took me and Mr. Addison a good year to get it looking as it should. Nowadays I polish everything once a week."

"Sounds a bit overwhelming," Caroline said, glancing at all the woodwork in the parlor. "Exhausting too."

"Not when it's a labor of love." Shirley nibbled at the edge of a snickerdoodle, looking slyly from one sister to another. "By the way, there was something more I remembered about that woman."

"Hannah Montague?" Caroline asked, pulling a dusty ottoman up close to Shirley. "Something about her disappearance?"

Shirley nodded slowly. "I heard she drowned. Of course, I also heard she was a thief," she said, her voice low. "Heard that from an old-timer when I was just a kid. Also heard that she was a spendthrift, that she'd squandered all her husband's money."

"But it's still just rumors, right?" Gracie asked. "There's nothing in writing about any of this, is there?"

"Could be, but I don't know. Of course," Shirley's voice turned conspiratorial, "if she was a thief, if she got involved with a bad guy, she might not have drowned. She might have been killed, and who knows where the body was dumped."

Caroline hoped that wasn't the case. But they'd never know the truth until they learned more about Hannah's life.

"I know it was a long time ago when you bought the hymnal," Caroline said, hoping Shirley's memory was good enough to stretch back over sixty years, "but did you buy anything else at the same time? Antique toys? Dolls?"

Shirley gazed off in the distance for a moment, and then she said, "Well, yes, there was a doll. Prettiest thing I'd ever seen, and I just had to have her."

"You bought her?" Caroline asked, growing more intrigued by the moment.

"For a dollar. My mother thought the doll was ugly, but not I." She took a sip of lemonade. "I still have her, and I'd hate to part with her."

"Would you mind if we looked at her?" Caroline asked. "We've found several other old dolls that we think might have belonged to Hannah, and last night we found a little something hidden in one of the gowns."

Shirley's eyes brightened. "Money? Jewels?"

Caroline smiled. "An old postcard."

"A postcard?" Shirley white brows knit together. "Hidden away in the lining of a doll's dress, you say? Sounds quite odd. I suppose you could look at Jezebel-that's what I call her, from the Bette Davis movie, because she has pretty much the same eyes-but I'd hate to part with her."

"You can keep the doll, Shirley," Caroline said. "We'd just like to look at her. See if her gown was used as another hiding place."

"Do you want to look at her now?"

Boy, did they ever! Who would have thought that their feisty next-door neighbor might hold the answers to many secrets?

Quincy Court was pure Nantucket. Its exterior was boxy, with gray shingles crawling with pink roses. The garden was neat as a pin, Sam thought, except for the hole where the blue hydrangea bush had been. Now there were heaps of dirt splattered about the neatly mown lawn, and there were flower petals and leaves scattered about. Max had created one terrific mess.

"Take your shoes off," Shirley ordered, when they stepped into the foyer. "No need tracking in dirt needlessly. Just makes more for me to clean."

Caroline slipped out of her flip-flops. Gracie and Sam did the same, before Shirley led them into the parlor, a quaint and charming room that enveloped Sam in the sweet scent of the roses sitting atop a coffee table. "Did you decorate this yourself?" Caroline asked, realizing as soon as the words came out of her mouth that they might have sounded insulting, as if it seemed impossible for Shirley to create such a room. She quickly added, "It's beautiful. I love all the nautical pieces."

"I haunt estate sales and thrift shops. None of those excessively expensive antiques stores for me. Megan Folger-Wildes' shop is different, of course, but even she's been known to inflate a price or two."

"Sam saw a ship's masthead not long after we arrived on the island and she just had to have it," Gracie said, "until she saw the price tag. Changed her mind right away."

"I originally thought it would look good inside the inn. I had these grandiose plans to decorate the rooms just like yours," Sam said, "with a ship's wheel here, a harpoon there, but the inn doesn't really lend itself to that."

"There's nothing that says you can't decorate one of the bedrooms to look like this. You could move furniture around too," Shirley said. "Nothing says you need to keep that heavy furniture in the parlor. And really, girls, mixing styles can work, if you do it well. I don't have much time, but if you need any guidance, I'd be happy to steer you in the right direction."

Using her cane for balance, Shirley lowered herself into one of the white chairs. Its upholstery had bright blue, yellow, and green flowers on a white background, with throw pillows made from striped fabric in matching colors. It worked beautifully. It wasn't as clean and simple as she had been envisioning, but Caroline could certainly see the inn's parlor looking bright and cheerful like this. Looking at her sisters, she could see they were thinking the same thing.

"I'm sure you ladies have more to do than stand around here talking to me all afternoon, since you really came over just to see the doll."

They hoped that wasn't an admonishment. Besides the dinner, they'd had Shirley over for the Fourth of July fireworks, and she'd already been over a couple of other times just to complain or offer her opinion. But maybe she just enjoyed the attention.

Sam seemed to sense that too. "Do you like putting together jigsaw puzzles?" she asked. "If I'm not doing cross-st.i.tch or watching cooking shows, I like to put together puzzles. I think I'm driving Gracie and Caroline crazy asking them to join me all the time."

"I've done a few in my day."

"As soon as we get a bit ahead on our cleaning and redecorating," Sam said, "I'll have you over. We can have a girls' night and work on a puzzle."

"b.u.t.tering me up will get you nowhere." Shirley grinned. "But I'd enjoy that. The kids and grandkids don't come much anymore, and I don't think the great-grandkids even know who I am. Getting old can be rather sad. But that's neither here nor there." She wagged a finger toward a picture-perfect Wedgwood blue cabinet in a far corner of the room. "Open the doors carefully. I have some delicate china in there, but Jezebel's there too. As much as I'd like to keep her out and on display so I can see her all the time, I don't want dust or the sun getting to her. I'd like to keep her aging gracefully."

Caroline felt her fingers shake as she approached the china closet. She didn't know if the one postcard they'd found meant anything at all, but why else had that one seemingly innocent postcard been secreted away inside the lining of a doll's gown? And who was William? Oh, how she hoped there'd be another postcard inside Jezebel.

Slowly, cautiously, she opened the gla.s.s-paned doors on the top of the cabinet. The china inside clanked together, but thank goodness nothing fell. Jezebel sat on one of the shelves, and the beautiful smile on her bisque face seemed to say, Thank you for rescuing me. I've hated being stuffed away. Sam held her gently, taking her from her hiding place, while Gracie closed the doors.

"Feel anything?" Gracie whispered, as if their current adventure was totally hush-hush.

"Not yet," Caroline said. "She feels even more fragile than the other dolls and the fabric her dress is made from could shred if we're not careful."

Caroline put the doll into Sam's loving hands. She could see her sister breathing shallowly. Sam moved at a snail's pace. She appeared to be testing the weight of the fabric, trying to determine if there was a postcard inside. "I feel something," Sam said, "but I'm not sure if it's a stiffening agent or-"

"A what?" Caroline said.

"A stiffening agent. Another piece of fabric that was used to give the gown more body. Or it could be something else entirely."

And then . . . Sam smiled triumphantly. "There's something here."

"A postcard?" Caroline asked.

"I'm not sure yet."

"Would you mind terribly if we took the doll back to the inn?" Sam asked Shirley. "I have a big magnifying gla.s.s there that I use with my cross-st.i.tch, and I have a good pair of scissors that'll help me take the st.i.tching out of the gown and sew it up again. I'll make it look like it's never been touched."

Shirley was clearly hesitant. She heaved a sigh. "Well, all right, but I want her brought back tomorrow. Understand?"

Sam didn't know just exactly what possessed her, but she gave Mrs. Addison a kiss on the cheek, and the elderly woman blushed. She shooed them off. "Be gone with you now. I've had just about enough of you for one day."

Once again Sam hunkered down with scissors and a needle, staring at the intricate st.i.tching through the lighted magnifying gla.s.s. Caroline paced, eating one snickerdoodle after another, waiting for the doll's surgery to end.

"Just a few more st.i.tches," Sam said, hoping her sister would get the message, "and I should be able to work my fingers inside and pull it out."

Gracie leaned against the kitchen counter, biting her lip. "You know, this could all be a waste of time. We don't know anything about Hannah Montague other than she existed and she had a father who was a . . . well, not a nice man. No one can give us a definitive answer about anything else. For all we know, she could have been an elegant woman who died happy in her bed upstairs."

"Which bedroom do you think would have been hers?" Jamie asked, She grabbed a snickerdoodle, popped half into her mouth, and fed a piece to Max.

"Periwinkle, I'm sure," Caroline said. "It's the biggest one and it has that lovely marble fireplace with seash.e.l.ls etched into it."

Sam knew which room she was talking about, but they hadn't even started working on the guest rooms yet. And they had planned to strip off that faded blue wallpaper.

"Since when is that room named Periwinkle?" Gracie asked. "I don't remember talking about guest room names."

Sam looked up from the doll's pretty royal blue velvet gown in time to see Caroline shrug. "I thought it sounded nice. Did you have some other thoughts?" Caroline asked Gracie.

Sam braced herself. Part of the reason they hadn't done much with the guest rooms was that they still hadn't agreed on what the rooms should look like. Her sisters' decorating tastes had never been the same, and the disagreement had to come to a head at some point. She focused on the doll dress.

Gracie plopped down in the chair next to Sam. "Actually, I kind of like the name Periwinkle."

"Me too," Sam said hesitantly. After all this, was it really going to be that easy? "We could use blue as the main color in that room." She looked back up to see her sisters nodding.

"We could replace that dusty old wallpaper with a pretty floral print," Gracie said. "I bet we could find some with flowers that look like periwinkles."

Caroline looked hesitant, but she nodded slowly. "If we keep the bed linens clean and simple. Just a nice white duvet, maybe with some light blue pillows for accent."

"With the dark furniture, that would look nice," Sam said, looking from one sister to the other.

"Let me go get my notebook. I want to write this down before we forget it," Gracie said, pushing up from the table. A moment later, she was back, and she wrote down Sam's idea of matching the towels in the bathroom to the wallpaper.

"I think this might work," Gracie said. She chewed on the end of her pencil. "What about the other rooms? What should we call them?"

"That pink room could be Amaryllis," Sam said, looking up from the fine st.i.tching in the doll's gown to give her eyes a break. "We can make the room rosy pink, I think, the colors variegated from light to dark."

Gracie flipped a page in her notebook and wrote it down. "It's a pretty name and a pretty flower. Think we can find just the right wallpaper?"

"Heaven only knows." Sam pulled another st.i.tch out of the gown. "I have an idea. Let's take a break from all the cleaning and go into town tomorrow or the next day and look at wallpaper. That might give us more ideas for the other two rooms."

"My aching muscles think that's the best plan I've heard in days." Caroline flexed her neck, tilting her head from side to side, front to back, stretching out her muscles. "I vote for-"

"Got it!" Sam drew the postcard out of its hiding place in the gown, her hand shaking again. She didn't know why she was so excited about this. They could simply have been part of a game Hannah played with-who? Her husband? Her friends? The mysterious William?

Once again there was a masterly ink sketch on the front of the postcard. "What's this?" Sam asked, holding it up for her sisters and Jamie to see.