Chapter 13
Wes spent that evening watching the news with Beatrice. Twice, they showed a clip of him on television wearing his N95 and bracing himself as Dr. Whitehead entered the trapdoor. He’d been terrified that Dr. Whitehead was walking into something sinister; something that should never have been opened in the first place—like in that film The Mummy. But when he shone a flashlight through the ten-by-ten space, his heart had opened with awe. Whatever that room was, it had a story. And Dr. Whitehead was going to get to the bottom of it.
“You look so handsome,” Beatrice said when they showed Wes on screen again. She stood behind him and swept her fingers through his hair, then lightly massaged his head. Wes could have swooned.
“What do you think it was?” Beatrice asked as they got ready for bed later that night.
Wes wasn’t sure. “Dr. Whitehead said it’s at least one hundred years old and that it was absolutely a part of the burnt-down house. He has theories about what it was used for. A hiding place of some kind.” He stroked his five o’clock shadow and sat on the edge of the mattress. “He thinks it was covered up by accident when my grandparents built the Sunrise Cove.”
“How will he put together the story of the past?” Beatrice asked as she lay back in bed, adjusting the pillow beneath her head.
“I assume he has his ways,” Wes said with a laugh. “It’s scary how much he’s uncovered. He was at a Mayan site a few years back when he noticed a stone that looked a little out there, and he used it to find an enormous stone floor beneath the sand. It was completely preserved.”
“He’s like a magician. He can see through time,” Beatrice said.
Wes wanted to make a joke about that. To suggest that Dr. Whitehead see through time to find the youthful and unimpaired version of Wes that still existed somewhere inside him.
Wes was still in the process of testing to see if he qualified for the brand-new drug Dr. Hamilton mentioned. When he was there, he couldn’t read Dr. Hamilton’s expressions enough to guess if he passed the tests or not. He wondered if not being able to read people as well was a part of his decline. He assumed so.
Perhaps because of the chaos at the Sunrise Cove, Wes was again plagued with nightmares. In them, he was a younger man still living at the Sheridan House with Anna. For some reason, he needed to talk to her and tell her something so desperately that it ate him up inside. But every time he entered a room to speak to her, she left through another exit, so he never saw anything more than the back of her head.
“I’m in here, Wes!” Anna called from every room. He chased her until he staggered to a halt on the back porch, putting his hands on his thighs to steady himself. Anna wore a white dress and stood at the far edge of the dock. She faced the Vineyard Sound. The wind swept through her long, thick hair and her dress, and she raised her hand to wave to someone. Wes reached out. He wanted to tell her to get away from the water, that it would kill her, but when he opened his mouth, he couldn’t speak.
Wes woke up with a gasp and pressed his hand to his chest. His pajamas were soaking wet with sweat. Bit by bit, the world came back to him. Beatrice was fast asleep, curved away from him. He was in the house they lived in together. Not the Sheridan House. Anna had been dead for nearly thirty years.
What had he wanted to ask Anna? What had he been so desperate to know?
Wes grabbed his ledger and tiptoed through the dark to sit at the kitchen table. He recorded everything he could of the nightmare. Maybe it would serve him someday. Perhaps he could share it with Dr. Hamilton, who would explain that the dream didn’t mean Wes was getting sicker. “All it means is you and your first wife have unfinished business,” Dr. Hamilton might say. And Wes could respond, “Tell me something I don’t know!” and laugh darkly.
* * *
Wes returned to the Sunrise Cove the following morning to meet Sam and Dr. Whitehead. Amanda had been up all night with the baby and couldn’t make it, but she sent numerous text messages about how to handle the situation from a legal standpoint. Wes hoped Sam would remember them. They’d already flown out of his head.
Dr. Whitehead had friends with him—other historians who specialized in this specific arena of history.
“And what arena of history is that exactly?” Wes asked.
Dr. Whitehead’s glasses glinted. He took a little too much time to speak, as though he wasn’t sure he wanted to share. “The Civil War.”
“That far back? Wow,” Sam said.
“That’s our assumption thus far,” Dr. Whitehead said. “The van is stocked with specialty equipment that will allow us to handle and test various items that have been kept in the room for more than one hundred years. It’s best not to bring anything into the light or out of that air. That environment is all those items have known.”
That made sense to Wes, he guessed. But as Dr. Whitehead and his historian friends headed downstairs, he burned with more questions. This was his family history. He had to know more.
“You don’t think it could have been part of the Underground Railroad, do you?” Sam muttered.
Wes’s adrenaline spiked. He hadn’t considered this. “Did the Railroad come this way?”
Sam removed his cell from his pocket and typed furiously. Wes would never maneuver his cell the way the younger generations did. His clumsy thumbs always hit the wrong buttons.
“Looks like it did,” Sam said, showing Wes a cartoon map that illustrated one of the paths of the Underground Railroad.
“We don’t know anything for sure yet,” Sam continued to mutter to his phone as he searched for more information. “But this is intriguing. Crazy intriguing. I have to talk to Amanda. See what she thinks.”
It certainly captivated Wes to consider that his family had been involved in the Underground Railroad. Everybody wanted to believe their families were good people; that they’d done the right thing in a historical context. Nobody sat well with themselves when their family had been slave owners or Nazis, even if it had nothing to do with them.
Wes tried to add up the years and figure out who had owned the property back in the 1860s. His grandfather had been born in the late 1880s; his grandfather’s grandfather had been born in the 1830s or 1840s. Maybe he could ask Susan about their genealogy. She kept a good record.
Natalie worked the front desk that morning, waiting for Wes to relieve her of her duties. “The guests won’t stop pestering me about what’s downstairs,” she said. “Like I look like someone who knows anything!”
Wes laughed and eyed the dark basement door. It looked like a cave.
“Did they say anything else this morning?” Natalie asked.
“They think it’s from the Civil War period,” Wes explained. He decided not to mention their speculation about the Underground Railroad. It excited him so much, and he didn’t want to be wrong.
“But don’t tell the guests it’s Civil War-related yet!” Sam hollered from the office next to the front desk. From where Wes stood, he could see Sam looking over paperwork, his head bent. If Wes tricked his mind for a split second, he could imagine that was himself back there. That he had paperwork to tend to, and Anna was coming back soon with their young girls. He shook his head of the image.
“It’s all fascinating,” Natalie said. “How many times have I been in that basement?”
“Think about how I feel,” Wes said. “I was practically raised here.”
The morning continued the way it had since the big discovery downstairs. Guests paraded past him and peppered him with questions. They called him “Indiana Jones.” They laughed with him about how “strange and fun” it all was. Wes felt boisterous and slightly manic. He sent guests all over the island for hikes and restaurant picks and beach walks, reminding them to put on sunscreen. “It’s not that warm out there yet, but the sun can bite you anyway.” He remembered his own girls’ sunburns and how they’d wept with pain.
Frequently, he made notes in his ledger. Every once in a while, he caught himself thinking, as soon as I get that new medication, I won’t have to use this ledger anymore. I’ll remember everything again. It wasn’t logical, maybe. But he loved thinking about it.
Sam came and went and came back again. He watched the baby in the afternoon so that Amanda could take a shower and have a nap, then hurried back to the Sunrise Cove to chat with Zach about the approaching dinner menu. Everything about the day felt smooth and glowing with expectation for whatever came next.
The news crew came out of nowhere.
Wes couldn’t help but smile at Rhonda Evans as she entered the foyer. She was one of the news anchors who’d shown a video of the Sunrise Cove last night, and she wore a smart navy blazer and her hair in a sharp bob. She strode toward him with a confidence she must have trained herself to have. Or were some people born with that much confidence? Wes had never had it.
“Good afternoon! Welcome to the Sunrise Cove Inn,” Wes greeted her.
Rhonda smiled. “Are you Wes Sheridan?”
“I am!” Wes was surprised she knew his name. A blush crawled up his chest. “And you’re Rhonda Evans.”
Rhonda laughed in a big and brassy way and waved for her camera guy to get the shot. “Do you mind if I interview you for a little special on Sunrise Cove tonight?”
“Not at all.”
Wes had decided long ago that he wanted to be filmed as much as possible before his brain gave up on him. He wanted to be remembered. It was vain, but it was the truth.
Rhonda smiled, fixed her already perfect hair, and raised her microphone to her mouth. The cameraman said, “Action,” and Wes smiled goofily. When he tried to stop, he smiled even more.
“Good evening. Welcome to the Sunrise Cove Inn on Martha’s Vineyard. As we mentioned last night, a secret room has been discovered in the basement of the old inn that was, according to some reports, sealed off after the original building burned to the ground and the Sunrise Cove Inn was built in its place.” She turned to look at Wes. “I’m here with Wes Sheridan, the longtime owner of the Sunrise Cove Inn. Wes, how long has your family owned this property?”
Wes’s neck was slick with sweat. “Oh, hundreds of years,” he said. “My father always told a story about his long-ago coming here from Ireland to whale professionally. My grandparents were the ones who built the Sunrise Cove Inn back in the day. That was after the fire.”
“And they didn’t know anything about the secret room?”
Wes raised his shoulders. “They never mentioned it to me.”
“Is it possible that they covered it up on purpose? To hide a secret?”
This hadn’t occurred to Wes. “I don’t see why they would have done that.”
Rhonda’s eyes flickered. It felt like she dug through his mind, searching for a potential story. Wes was having second thoughts about being on television.
“But it’s possible, isn’t it?” Rhonda said. “I’m sure your grandparents didn’t tell you everything.”
“I was a kid. Probably not,” Wes said.
Rhonda smiled. “Can you tell us your plans at the Sunrise Cove now that the room has been discovered? Will there be a public reveal? Will you make the inn a historical site?”
Wes felt flustered when he realized this wasn’t a question for him. It was for Sam. But as he pondered what to say so as not to look like a fool, the foyer door burst open again to bring in two balding men in suits. Wes couldn’t forget that his main job right now was to operate the front desk. He put on a smile and said, “Good afternoon! Welcome to the Sunrise Cove Inn.”
The men in suits didn’t care that Rhonda was filming. They strode right into the shot and blocked her.
“Excuse me?” Rhonda cried as her cameraman turned off the camera.
“Are you the owner of the Sunrise Cove Inn?” the man on the left asked Wes. He removed something from a manila folder and licked his lips like a cat who’d just eaten a mouse.
“I am,” Wes said, although the legalities of that were more complicated now.
The man put a document in front of him. Wes blinked at it but needed his reading glasses to see it clearly.
“We hereby state that the Sunrise Cove Inn is closed for the foreseeable future,” the man said formally. “It is a historic site in the State of Massachusetts and requires a thorough analysis before reopening. If it ever reopens in the same capacity again.”
Wes gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”
The man set his jaw. “It is up to us to uphold the historical nature of all Massachusetts sites.”
“You don’t understand.” Wes pulled at his hair. He felt as flustered and confused as a very sick old man. “We need the inn. We’ve always needed the inn to survive.”
But the men turned around without another glance and retreated from the foyer. Wes and Rhonda stared down at the legal document, and Rhonda had a hungry glint in her eyes. She looked at her cameraman and asked, “Did you get any of that?” When the guy said yes, she snapped her fingers. “Yes! Now that’s a wild story.”
Wes’s heart thudded. He was in over his head.