Chapter 17
The first several days after the Sunrise Cove shuttered its doors were monstrous. Genevieve refused to sleep for longer than two hours at a time, which meant that Amanda was up and down and up and down, never reaching REM sleep and hardly taking time to wash her hair or cook herself a healthy meal. She felt frayed at the edges. Sam was around to help when he could, but he spent most of his days dealing with Sunrise Cove logistics and talking to the historians about what they knew thus far and when they thought he could re-open. It was like watching a caged animal try to flee. It was impossible.
Audrey and Max came over to distract Amanda often. Amanda adored them to bits, but Max’s toddler mania had reached a peak, and his screams often rattled through her and left her ears ringing. Audrey cooked for her and helped her clean up around the house, which made Amanda joke, “Look at us! The tables have turned.” But Audrey’s cleanliness wasn’t even close to Amanda’s, which meant she always had to re-do it after Audrey left. This made her feel ungrateful and also high maintenance. Would anything feel normal again?
Five days after the Sunrise Cove closed, Amanda received a call from her mother. Amanda could see Susan at the law office, her posture statuesque as she said, “I’m thinking of sending a cease and desist. Bruce thinks it’s a good idea.”
Bruce Holland was another criminal justice lawyer at their law office.
Amanda groaned. “I don’t think anything will work against these people. It feels like the Arnouts are above the law.”
“Hilton is in prison,” Susan reminded her. “We just have to get creative about how we protect ourselves from the other Arnouts.”
Amanda was stretched across the sofa, flicking through television stations and streaming sites and killing time until Genevieve woke up again. She sensed it coming like a storm.
It wasn’t like Amanda to laze around like this in front of the television. She remembered telling Audrey that TV “rotted people’s minds.” Why didn’t Audrey smack her? Past Amanda was so annoying! She had no idea how difficult it was to raise a baby!
“Are you holding up okay?” Susan’s voice switched from lawyer tone to mother tone in a second flat.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” Amanda’s voice wavered.
“You don’t sound fine. Can I bring you anything? You want a burrito for dinner? I can stop by your favorite place.”
When had Amanda become the sort of woman to yearn for a burrito as though it was the secret to happiness? She closed her eyes and groaned.
“How is Sam?”
“He’s bad,” Amanda answered honestly. “He’s working so hard to get the inn back up and running.”
“You told him about the Arnouts?”
“Not really. I don’t think telling him there’s no use in trying would help anything,” Amanda said. “I don’t want him to feel hopeless.”
“Does that mean you feel hopeless?”
Amanda rolled her tongue across the back of her teeth and wondered when she’d last flossed. “I don’t know.”
Susan gave her a brief pep talk about the benefits of eating, showering, and getting outside “where the sun was shining” to ensure better mental health, then had to get off the phone to tend to a client. “I’m coming over later,” she announced. “Whether you let me in or not.”
This was the kind of tough love Susan Sheridan offered others in spades. Amanda half remembered it from more than three years ago— after Chris had left her at the altar and she’d spent a period of time moaning in bed. Where was Chris now? Amanda gave in to her reckless tendencies to stalk Chris on Instagram and see that, apparently, he’d bought a house in Greece and had a very beautiful blond girlfriend and a shaggy dog. They beamed from tiny squares on her phone, seeming to say, “We have no problems!”
Amanda threw her phone to the far edge of the couch and continued to flick through the stations. She wound up on The HISTORY Channel, her father’s favorite. An older man walked through what had once been the battleground of Gettysburg with his fingers laced together and spoke about the “bloody battle” and its ramifications during the Civil War.
Suddenly a gong went through Amanda’s head. She bolted to her feet and stared at the man on-screen.
Off the top of her head, she could name twelve people borderline-obsessed with the Civil War in her life. Her father. Her grandfather. Uncle Steve. Uncle Trevor. Others she’d met in law school. Others she’d gone to undergrad with. The Civil War was the storied horror that had once cratered through this great nation and kept them apart.
If Sam’s hunch was correct, the secret room beneath the Sunrise Cove was a part of that history. People needed to see it. They needed to learn about the dramatic history of the Underground Railroad on Martha’s Vineyard. And maybe Amanda could be the one to bring it to them.
Amanda fled the living room to find her laptop beneath a stack of old books and unused diapers. It was remarkable how unused the laptop was now that she had no reason to work her brain. She immediately googled Cynthia Brighton, then tapped her leg with one hand as she scouted through Cynthia’s LinkedIn page and her new law office in Los Angeles for contact details. Cynthia was an entertainment lawyer who’d handled numerous documentaries for HBO, The HISTORY Channel, and Hulu. Did she know the right people to get this going?
Amanda and Cynthia went way back. They’d originally met in undergrad at a pep rally they hadn’t wanted to be at. Amanda was there with Chris; Cynthia was there with a jock she was dating at the time. They’d spent an hour screaming at each other over the sound of the pep rally about why they loved law so much. Their friendship was solidified. But Amanda hadn’t understood why Cynthia had wanted to go into entertainment law of all things. To her, it was the crassest of law arenas. Why didn’t she want to help people and deal with real-life cases?
The answer was money, of course. It always came down to that. And right now, Amanda needed money more than anything to keep the Sunrise Cove alive.
Amanda wrote a polite and professional-sounding email. She didn’t want to seem too cozy with Cynthia, as they hadn’t kept up with each other after Amanda had moved to Martha’s Vineyard full-time and taken law classes online. She’d sort of abandoned her friends and replaced them with her Sheridan family. She didn’t regret it, but it came with professional consequences.
In the email, Amanda suggested that one of Cynthia’s clients might want to document the “exciting new historical site on Martha’s Vineyard and analyze the dramatic history of the Underground Railroad on the island itself.” It was amazing bait. People across the United States loved the idea of Martha’s Vineyard; loved the long stretches of white beaches, the lighthouses, the fishing boats, and the wealth of the celebrity tourists. The fact that its history went so far back was illuminating. It activated the imagination.
Amanda was so excited about her idea. She felt restored. She vacuumed the living room, scrubbed the kitchen counters, then prepared a feast of salmon, greens, and sweet potato fries for dinner. She even popped a bottle of wine that she’d been saving for Thanksgiving or Christmas. When Sam stumbled into the house, world-weary and gaunt, his eyes stirred with confusion.
“What’s all this about?”
Amanda threw her arms around Sam and said, “I don’t know if it will work. But hear me out.”
Over dinner, Amanda explained everything. Sam listened intently, ate his salmon, and nodded; his eyebrows furrowed. When Amanda said she’d already reached out to Cynthia, he raised his lips into a near-smile. It was the first Amanda had seen in days. It felt like the sun.
“It seems like it really was used for the Underground Railroad,” Sam admitted, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “The guys downstairs finally showed me some photos when they finished up today.”
Sam had taken photographs of their photographs. They showed the dark room with its two beds, bunk bed, cabinets, the baby crib, and trunk from numerous angles, plus personal items: a very old comb, a home-made teddy bear, and a few other items that, apparently, were used as “baby supplies.” Amanda didn’t recognize them as anything used today.
“It seems likely that Wes’s great-great-grandfather was instrumental in setting up this safe room for the Railroad,” Sam explained, parroting what he’d learned.
“My great-great-great-great-grandfather, you mean,” Amanda said with a smile.
“Exactly.” Sam swiped through his photos to show an old black-and-white family portrait of a man, a woman, and four children. The man had a thick black beard and kind eyes, and the children looked to be between the ages of one and seven. The wife was stern and sad-looking. Amanda could only imagine why. One baby was no picnic, so four, far before the era of microwaves and baby monitors, must have killed her.
Amanda was living in the easiest era it had ever been to be a woman, and she still struggled to survive.
“This is him,” Sam explained. “Matthew Sheridan, his wife Wendy, and their children, Randolph, Anna, Henry, and Nadia. It seems like he bought a camera around 1862 or 1863 and really enjoyed taking portraits. Many of the ex-slaves stayed with him, which was really risky if you think about it. He was literally recording his crime.”
Sam brought up several more photographs. They were all of the Black people who’d fled the South and sought freedom in the North. The Black women and men looked far skinnier and gaunter than the Sheridan family. Their eyes were sorrowful, and their clothing was often torn and ratty.
One thought rang through Amanda. In taking their photograph, Matthew Sheridan had given them a place in history. He’d made it known that they mattered to him as people.
In all, thirty individual photographs were discovered in the trunk downstairs. Mr. Sheridan had apparently hidden them.
“But something else was in the trunk,” Sam declared. “A diary.”
Amanda’s eyes widened.
“Unfortunately, it’s way too delicate to handle on-site,” Sam said. “One of the historians is taking it to a lab to read over it and record everything he finds. It’ll open the window to that time period and into Matthew Sheridan’s life. It’s astonishing.”
It truly was. Amanda collapsed back in the chair beside Sam, reeling. The past felt like a tremendously heavy thing. Her plight as a “new mom” seemed so laughable now.
More than that, thinking of a young mother—or multiple young mothers—in the basement floored her.
“None of the photos had babies, did they?”
“None that they showed me,” Sam said.
Amanda chewed her lip. “I’m sure Cynthia will want to know all about this. I’ll email her right away.”
But when Amanda pulled up her email, Cynthia had already written back. She’d already heard about the discoveries beneath the Sunrise Cove and had been thinking of reaching out to Wes Sheridan. “Are you related to him?”
Amanda wrote back immediately to say that she and her husband were now more or less in charge of the inn. She didn’t want to burden her grandfather with the horror of their current expenses. She wanted to sweep this stress under the rug and plunge into HISTORY Channel wealth.
“Let’s set up a call,” Cynthia said in her email. “I hope we get to work together again!”
Upstairs, Genevieve woke up again and rattled with cries. Amanda bolted to tend to her, feeling stronger and more awake than she had all week. When Genevieve saw her, Amanda half imagined that she smiled at her—a real smile that was definitely not possible this early in Genevieve”s life. But real smiles were coming. Amanda couldn’t wait.