Page 12 of Return to Whitmore
Now, Addison was talking a mile a minute, recounting the drama she’d undergone during her long trip from Hawaii to the East Coast. Charlotte heard herself ask a few relevant questions, like about her children, where they were staying while she was here in Nantucket. Why did Addison have to come now? It was terrible timing.
“The kids are with my mother,” Addison said.
“You have three, right?” Charlotte asked, narrowing her eyes, trying to concentrate on the road. They were only a few minutes from home.
“Kennedy and Penelope are twins. They’re eleven,” Addison said. “Gavin’s the youngest. My baby. He’s ten.” She continued talking, explaining that Gavin was the most eager for Addison to get home, that her twins had already “shifted toward teenager-ness.” Charlotte ached, wishing she knew them. But there was so much about the Whitmore family that remained unexplainable.
Charlotte pulled into the driveway of the little house and cut the engine. “This is it,” she said.
Addison was stunned speechless. She got out and gazed at the house, her hand still gripping the car door. “This is his other house,” she said. “This is his secret.”
Charlotte had to bite her tongue to keep from saying, there are many more secrets where this one came from. She didn’t know how much to betray. It was a mess.
Charlotte carried Addison’s suitcase to the front door, which she unlocked and opened wide. From the foyer, she watched Addison wander through the living room and kitchen before taking her things to the guest bedroom and changing into a big T-shirt and a pair of shorts. When she returned to the living room, she accepted Charlotte’s glass of wine and said, “It’s strange. Isn’t it strange? I can’t believe we’ve never met. I mean, we’re family.”
Charlotte raised her glass and clinked it with Addison’s. “It’s about time, isn’t it?”
“I hope you mean that.” Addison looked uncertain.
They sat on the sofa, settling under blankets. The house creaked under a violent Atlantic wind.
“So,” Charlotte said, wanting to draw Addison out of her nervousness, “when was the last time you saw him?”
“The last time I saw Seth?” Addison asked.
Charlotte nodded, although even all these years after the fire, she still struggled to call him Seth. “How long ago did he go missing?”
“It was about two months ago,” Addison said.
“Did something happen to chase him away?”
Addison furrowed her brow. “He had a visitor. It was a visitor he didn’t tell me anything about. I never would have found out about him if I hadn’t stopped by Seth’s office. It was lucky. Or maybe it was the thing that drove him away. I don’t know!”
Addison threw her hands over her face and took a deep breath. Charlotte decided to backtrack.
“What did Seth do? On the island, I mean.” They were details Charlotte had never been allowed to know.
“Seth’s a repairman. He fixes everything from boat motors to garage doors to plumbing,” Addison said, removing her hands from her face, sounding proud of her husband.
“I see. That’s wonderful,” Charlotte said, remembering that Jack had been handy as a kid, always eager to take something apart and figure out how to put it together again. “What was the stranger like?”
“He was an older guy,” Addison said. “Maybe sixties or seventies? Silver-black hair.”
Charlotte couldn’t speculate for the life of her who that could be. Unless Nina was right about who had and hadn’t died the night of the fire, that is. But Charlotte wasn’t sure she could wrap her mind around that yet.
“Did you talk to him?” Charlotte asked.
“He was really curious about me,” Addison said. “He was asking me all kinds of questions about me and the kids and what we were up to. He was really fascinated with Kennedy’s love of sports. I showed him a few videos of Kennedy playing soccer onmy phone. I got the sense that he was a grandfather, or that he always wanted to be a grandfather and didn’t get the chance.”
“Huh.” Charlotte took a long sip of wine and tried and failed not to imagine the man as Benjamin Whitmore. But that was impossible. “And that was the last time you saw Seth?”
“He came home that night,” Addison remembered. “We got into an argument about something stupid. I wish I could remember what it was. We went to bed, woke up, and got the kids ready for school. That was the last morning I saw him. He didn’t come home that night.”
“And there was no indication that he was up to something?”
Addison shook her head, her eyes glinting with tears. “Like I said on the phone, when he was gone for forty-eight hours, I called the cops, but they thought Seth had just left me and didn’t want to get involved. Everyone knew that Seth could be like that.”
“He cheated on you?” Charlotte gasped.
