Page 65 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

He seemed surprised and studied Betsy over his wire-rimmed glasses. “You’re going to see Melody Fleming?”

“The land I’m looking for doesn’t have a house.”

The freckled man eyed her suspiciously. “Twelve Chapel Way is Melody’s house. I deliver milk from the dairy there.”

Maybe there was a house on her father’s land? Betsy didn’t want to get into details. “Ah yes. Melody. So how do I get there?”

A few minutes later, Betsy stepped into the sunshine holding two pages of directions, thinking about a line in her father’s letter that had been niggling at her since she’d found it.For reasons that I am not free to explain, both politically and personally, I have kept this property to myself.

She opened the back door of the Land Cruiser, Louisa sighing, “What took you so long?”

“Apparently, the house is far.”

James revved the engine and Louisa whipped around and said, “Thank goodness we have this ride.”

He peeled out with a boyish smile, a puff of exhaust stinking up the back seat, and Betsy made sure he saw her roll her eyes.

It was easy enough to make their way out of the main part of town, the road tracing lines through grass pastures once used for grazing animals and interspersed with rambling, shingled beach houses. When they drove by a curvy blue inlet, situated along a marshy stretch of country road, Louisa turned to James.

“We need to come clean about something. There’s no colleague’s house. We’re going to look at some land that my father owns, and we lied to you because we haven’t told our mother about any of it. I hope you’re not upset with us.”

“I suppose I’m only offering you a ride.” James pretended to lock his lips with a key. “Why doesn’t your mother know about the land?”

The oldies radio station grew staticky. “We’re not sure yet. We found a letter from Dad telling Betsy about the property.”

“You might be fixing up your house, James, but we’re losing our house.” Betsy stretched her hand out the window, wondering if she’d ever again feel as carefree as she had as a child. “It looks like my sisters and I are leaving the Vineyard for good.”

He glanced back into the rearview mirror.

The pastoral scenery reminded Betsy of driving up-island on the Vineyard to Chilmark, with its fields of milky Queen Anne’s lace, wild-growing daisies, shimmery blue coves and crystalline ponds, andhouses built on hills overlooking the wide expanses. As they drove, the sisters told James everything they knew, trying to piece together the puzzle out loud.

“Families are so wild,” James said, clicking on his blinker and turning onto a road with a row of antique houses. Louisa said he needed to go straight, and he turned around. “When my mother died, I found myself on a similar paper trail. She had an estranged aunt that she’d hidden away from me. She was dead by the time I found out about her—the aunt, that is. I wondered why my mother didn’t want me to know her.”

The truck bounced over a pothole. Betsy grabbed for the handhold. “There are secrets in every family. You just hope they’re not ones that will hurt anyone when they surface.”

Last night in bed, Louisa had written in her legal pad until two in the morning, angling the notebook so that Betsy couldn’t see it from her vantage point. Betsyhadseen it this morning though, when her sister was in the shower: it was a numbered list of the ways she planned to fight the law firm; how she could sue under the Equal Rights Act if it was ratified again next month.

The ocean was always near in Nantucket, but now it was so close that you could hear the roar of the waves. A series of smaller roads drew a grid fingering out from the main road to the beach. James turned the car, following the quiet road to Madaket Beach, a small parking lot half-full of cars, with a roaring ocean crashing along the shoreline. “We must have missed the turn,” he said. “Let me turn around.”

They backtracked for a few minutes until they found F Street, and then Chapel Way. Betsy ruffled Peanut Butter’s ears, trying to relax. She’d woken up convinced that confirming the ownership of this land would transform her family’s fortunes, but the gentleman at the tourist info office had said there was a woman in the house. Melody Fleming. The woman in her mother’s wedding album. She’d always loved that photo of Melody and her mother, young and glamorous and genuinely happy.

For reasons personal and political…

“Maybe we should turn back.” Betsy didn’t want a confrontation with a person named Melody. What would they do if there was in fact a woman on the land? “Dad may have meant to discard that letter. Maybe we’re not even supposed to be here.”

Louisa turned around in the front seat. “You’re not even making sense. You said it yourself: this land is the best news we’ve had since he died.”

A murder of crows was perched along a telephone wire. A bad omen. Betsy looked away from the birds and swallowed hard.

James slowed down the Land Cruiser at number twelve, and even though it wasn’t marked, he pulled the truck into the driveway. Pebbles and dirt stretched in a straight line through neatly trimmed grass, ending at a small saltbox-style house with a tiny side porch and swing. A Ford truck with a dented metal bumper was parked in the driveway. Behind the house sat a serene harbor with several boats moored to sphere-shaped buoys.

“This can’t be right.” Louisa motioned for James to turn the car around. “Someone lives here.”

The number on the door said twelve. “It’s definitely the right house,” James said.

Louisa craned her neck to look at the property, her eye landing on a large window with potted plants hanging in it. “Is someone renting it?”

Betsy cataloged the rusted pink bike leaning up against the shed, the well-tended vegetable garden with mesh strung up. “Maybe we’re about to meet our long-lost aunt.”

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