Page 6 of Signed, Sealed, and Smitten
Guilt feathers through my stomach as I wonder if Foster would still feel grateful if he’d been around when the Sutton board had voted against my promotion. Would he have agreed? Would he have still offered me this job?
I want to believe he would, but I’ll never know the answer. What I do know for sure is that I will give it everything I have while I’m here so that if he was still alive, he’d have no cause to regret choosing me to open his museum.
I sniff to disperse the threatening tears. Living up to Foster Martin’s faith in me starts Monday. Right now, I need to handle basic living. Time to make this gem of an apartment my home base. I slip the letter into an empty drawer so it won’t get lost in the shuffle and hurry downstairs.
For the next hour, we unload the truck and trailer, my new neighbor helping the whole time. When everything is in the apartment, I thank Scarlett profusely and promise to treat her to lunch sometime as she’s leaving. Then as if we rehearsed it, Daniel and I both collapse on my sofa with matching sighs.
“Best brother,” I say after we’ve rested for a couple of minutes.
“Only brother.”
“Still best brother. Better than everyone else’s brothers. How about we power nap for fifteen minutes and then we go walk around a bit and find some more food before we unpack?”
“Deal.” He taps his phone. “Timer set. Power nap.”
And then, in the tradition of all true Hoppers, we catnap like champs. When we get up, we find a funky café with delicious salads and come back to my apartment to put on my “Unpacking Playlist” while we get back to work. It starts with “My House” by Flo Rida, of course.
The next day, after unpacking what’s left and eating a big Sunday lunch, we drive back to Boston so I can return the moving truck and pick up my car. Then I drop Daniel at the airport with hugs and promises to come home for Christmas.
When I get back to The Serendipity, I’m happy not to run into anyone on the way up to my apartment. I need to save all my mental energy for my new job tomorrow, because right now, my instinct is to ignore all the education, training, and experience I have and instead google “How to be a museum director.”
Maybe I already did that. Several times. Maybe there’s not an article that specifically explains the many, many facets of the job I’ve spent the last ten years learning.
Maybe. I’ll never tell.
But I do settle on my sofa and pull up all my saved research on Serendipity Springs. I could recite it, I’ve read through it so many times. And these are just the highlights. I’ve read every known book (nine) written on the history of Serendipity Springs, or central Massachusetts, or any of the nearest communities. Factually, there isn’t much I don’t know about my temporary new hometown.
It was established not long after Boston but stayed small for nearly two hundred years until Serendipity Springs joined the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century. This era is my expertise, and I know the pattern of the spread of industrialization through New England. But the curious thing about Serendipity Springs is that although it should have followed the same trajectory as nearby Worcester, the distinctdifferences between them usually make up the meat of the books written about it.
Worcester had the advantage of closer proximity to Boston, the powerful engine of the Massachusetts economy, but it suffered great rises and falls in its fortunes. Serendipity Springs, on the other hand, managed to comfortably weather everything from revolution against Britain to the bank failures of the Gilded Age without any of the hardships that tried other cities.
One of the earliest accounts of Serendipity Springs was from a man writing about his memory of stopping one night with his family to camp beside the spring. They were traveling with a group of other families to homestead property they’d been promised in New Hampshire. His mother had fallen ill almost as soon as they set out, and they’d had to stop often until her stomach pains subsided. That night, she’d drunk the water from the spring—they all had—and she’d felt so much better that they decided to stay longer until she was recovered.
None of that group of families ever reached New Hampshire because their stay near the spring became permanent. That journal was from Foster Martin’s many times great-grandfather, whose family had been among those first English settlers in the area. Others began to join them, and any time a newcomer would ask in surprise why the soil was easier to turn here and the pests never much fussed their crops or why the sky was always a bit brighter blue than Worcester, they always got the same answer: It was something in the water.
Modern experts from all sorts of academic disciplines attempted to study and explain the remarkable placidity of Serendipity Springs, but without fail, they were always met with the same answer by the locals: It was something in the water.
Three of the books I read were collections of claims localsmade about the spring through the years. While they credited the water with everything from improving their luck to healing their gout, no one could exactly say how the water did it. At some point early in the town’s settlement, someone said it was just serendipitous that people got what they needed when they spent time near the spring, and the name stuck.
As an origin story, it’s the kind of colorful legend you can build a great museum around, and Foster trusted me to do it. So I go through my notes, my questions, and my lists of ideas again and then again. Because whatever self-doubt I may be trying to ignore, I’m not letting a bit of it show tomorrow when I officially walk back into the Martin House as its new director.
Chapter Five
Jay
I haveno idea what I thought a museum director named Phoebe would look like. Phoebe is kind of an any-era name. I guess I imagined a middle-aged woman with sensible shoes and an air of terrifying competence.
When I caught a hottie with a nice body and long dark braids joyriding on the library ladder in cutoffs and sneakers, I did not expect her to be the new museum director. It’s a positive development, all in all. The only thing that threw me besides her ladder riding was her apparent lack of knowledge about who I am. Maybe she didn’t read the terms of Grandad’s trust that closely. It’s the only way I can see her being surprised by my presence on the property.
Well, she’ll get used to it. At least until I get this book to my publisher.
Strangely, it’s not a red flag. Not if Foster Martin handpicked her for the job. My grandfather was an excellent judge of character and an absolute history fanatic. We’ll never know if my obsession with history is nurture or nature, but either way, it came from Grandad. He spent the last fifteen years of his life preparing to pass his estate to the city. He wouldn’thave entrusted its transformation into a museum to just anyone. Phoebe Hopper is no doubt excellent in her field.
I glance at the time on my laptop screen. I’ve managed to piece together two chapters with a narrative through-line that occurred to me as I was falling asleep last night, and I think it works.
I yawn, having written through the night once the idea grabbed me. I’ve learned the hard way that I might as well get up and go with it when that happens. If I don’t and try to remember it the next morning, it will be lost in whatever dream I had, because mine are Technicolor and weird. I remember once I thought a brilliant idea had come to me, fell asleep happy, and woke up with no idea how to excavate it from a dream I’d had where I was made the king of Canada and spent the whole time trying and sentencing goose after goose to prison labor.
It’s not even helpful to keep a notebook or my phone nearby to write it down. That wakes me all the way up anyway, so I might as well work.
