Chapter 26 Wren
Twenty-Six
Wren
Eryn sees the text from Lili when it flashes on my phone, but doesn’t react the way anyone else in her position might.
She doesn’t frown or sigh, she just sits back and in a normal voice says, “I hope everything is okay.”
“I’ll just be a second,” I tell her, lifting the phone to my ear.
Lili answers on the first ring.
“Wren. Where are you and how quickly can you get to my neighbor’s house?”
“What’s going on? Your voice is all high and shaky.” I make eye contact with Eryn, who is leaning in, trying to hear.
“Everything is fine, but you need to come over now. Not my house, my neighbor’s house.”
“Is something wrong with Mrs. Mayhew?” I’m reaching for the gear shift before I’ve even finished speaking.
“No, she fine, the cats are fine.” I hear her inhale like she’s trying to steady her voice.
“Wren, I found something. And I’m honestly afraid to look at it too closely without you.
It might be—” There’s another pause. “If it’s real, then I’m holding a letter written to Kezia Gardner dated December 22, 1776. ”
“Did you say the twenty-second?”
“Yes. Tell me I’m wrong about what good King George passed that day.”
I clutch the phone tighter. “The Prohibitory Act.” It was the tipping point for the Revolutionary War when Britain barred
any country from trading with the US, on pain of forfeiture of the ship and all goods to the Crown.
There’s absolute silence from Lili’s end of the phone.
“Who’s it from?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Lili, who was writing to her?”
“It’s from Edmund Harrington.”
I close my eyes.
“Do you recognize that name?” she asks, almost in a whisper.
“Yeah, I recognize it. He, um, was an American-born merchant and customs official who worked for the British government. He
was a Loyalist through and through.”
“Well,” she says, her lighthearted words immediately undercut by the break in her voice. “That doesn’t look good for my girl,
does it?”
“Did you read it?” When she doesn’t answer, I soften my voice. “Lili, did you read it? And remember I can’t see if you’re
shaking your head.”
There’s a watery laugh coming from her end of the phone. “No, I didn’t read it. Edmund has terrible penmanship and”—she clears
her throat—“there are a lot of creases. Someone folded and unfolded it many times. It’ll take some time to transcribe it.”
Which means it was reread again and again. Kezia wanted to make sure she didn’t miss a thing. If it’s real.
“It might be fake. Or about nothing. Or about literally anything else.”
I hear her sniff. “See, I know it’s bad when you start being nice to me.”
I am acutely aware of Eryn sitting quietly beside me during this conversation and, while there’s no judgment coming off from
her, there’s plenty going on within me. Because I want to rush over to Lili, to be there for her, and dig into this thing
until she’s smiling again. Hearing her break on the phone like this is killing me.
I glance over at Eryn. “I can’t meet you right now, but I’ll try to call you later and—”
Eryn takes the phone right out of my hand. “Lili? Yeah, he’ll come. No, it’s fine. I hope you guys can find something helpful.
Sure, okay. Bye.” Then she’s pushing her door open.
“Wait a minute, what about going to eat?”
“I’ll come by the museum later,” she replies. “This sounds kind of urgent, doesn’t it? And I’m not sure that I got all the
seawater out of my hair.”
“Yes, you are. Why not just come with me?”
“Because I have no idea who Edmund Harry-whatever is or why you looked so upset hearing his name. I’d just be in the way,
and bored. Go,” she says again, this time from outside the truck. “It’s better this way, trust me.”
Several minutes later, I see Lili pacing in front of the dirt road that meanders off to Mrs. Mayhew’s home. She’s chewing on her lip and squeezing her elbows, but the second she looks up and spots me, it’s like all the tension leaves her body.
And slams right into mine.
She crosses the front of my truck to the passenger door. I lean over to push it open for her, tracing her features when she
sweeps her bangs to the side and smiles at me like I’m the best thing she’s seen all day too.
I swallow. “You okay?”
She nods a little too quickly. “I said I wanted answers, right?” She squeezes her fingers around a puffy leather photo album
in her lap. “So why do I feel like I’m adrift on the ocean and there’s this huge wave waiting to capsize my raft?”
“Because you might be holding something that condemns your ancestor.” I keep my tone gentle. At this point I’ve invested in
Kezia’s story too. Lili even had me doubting myself a little after she debunked the Mitchell account.
“I want it to be fake,” she confesses.
“I know.”
Her voice is barely audible when she lowers her head and adds, “But I don’t think it is.”
“Hey,” I say, reaching out to push her fallen hair back from her face. It’s the first time I’ve been the one to reach out
and touch her. My fingers graze the side of her cheek as she turns to look at me with eyes that have gone shiny. “Let me see.”
She lets me ease the album from her grip, and then we’re both holding our breath as I open it.
The shiny, plastic film encasing the letter catches the sunlight at first, forcing me to lift the album up at angle to see
it clearly.
The letter is written on paper yellowed from age with slightly frayed edges and a tear on the bottom right corner.
The ink has faded to a brownish-black, typical of how iron gall ink from the time would have aged.
I try to keep my breathing under control as I carefully turn the protected page over.
The wax seal I’m both hoping and dreading to find isn’t there, but the roughly round stain it left attests to the letter once having been sealed.
Lili is fidgeting beside me, waiting for a verdict that she knows she’s not prepared for. “Is it—?”
I shake my head, not an answer, just a delay. “I don’t know,” I finally tell her. And then, because I know she won’t be satisfied
with a simple yes or no—which history rarely gives us—I let her in on where my thoughts are.
“Without testing the paper, I can’t say for sure how old it is, but McCleave’s has documents from the same time period and,
with allowances given for the amount of handling, I wouldn’t argue with the date on the front.”
“What about the name?” Lili presses, and not just with her words; she’s leaning into me to better see the letter.
“I’d have to do some research and compare the handwriting with other known examples from Edmund Harrington. I’d just be speculating
at this point.”
She slumps beside me. “So either it’s real or someone from the same time forged his signature?”
“It’s real as in it’s old, but as to whether or not Harrington wrote it . . .”
I turn the other plastic pages and see a few other old letters.
It will take time to transcribe them, but from what I can make out of the names, they’re all to Kezia from friends and family, including one from her famous cousin, Benjamin Franklin, about sending her a pair of snuffers and some candlesticks.
“I can’t believe Mr. Mayhew just had these in a photo album,” I say, showing Lili. “Anything of note in any of the other letters?”
“Not that I saw, but they are all addressed to Kezia. Well except for an older copy of the Ewer map in the back,” Lili says.
“I guess maybe he just stuck that in there?”
The final “page” shows what does at first look like the famous Ewer map of Nantucket from 1869, which is universally considered
one of the most detailed and significant maps of the island from the era. Unlike earlier efforts, which often provided only
rough outlines of Nantucket, Reverend Ferdinand Ewer captured the island with remarkable precision, including its harbors,
inlets, and settlements. McCleave’s even has a copy hanging in the gift shop, albeit with several additions indicating where
our various exhibits were “found.” I’m about to turn back to the Harrington letter when other details—unfamiliar details—start
jumping out at me.
“I don’t think this is the Ewer map.”
“What? Yes, it is. Look at the—” But she cuts herself off when I carefully slide it out and unfold it.
“Ewer based his map on Henry Walling’s trigonometrical survey of the state, but added details that made his map invaluable
not only to navigators and merchants but also to military planners and smugglers.”
Lili stares at the map, seeing but not understanding. “Okay, and don’t take this the wrong way, but so? Both of those maps
were created years after Kezia died.”
I shift the map closer to her. “They were. This? This looks a lot closer to the map J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur published in 1782, but with far more detail.” There were subtle differences though, like a decorative coastal hachure border around the coastline and a rope-twist pattern at the map’s edges.
“I don’t know that one.”
“Whatever it is, if Mayhew had it in here with all these other letters to Kezia, then it’s possible, even probable, that she
had it too.” Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t, but the letter from Edmund Harrington dated the same day as the Prohibitory
Act is potentially bad enough for her dad’s theory.
“Wren.” Her voice softens. “It’s okay. Whatever it ends up meaning.”
She says that, but I can tell she’s far from okay. She’s got more than Kezia’s reputation hanging in the balance here, and
that reminder instantly sobers me.
“There’s more. Boxes of who knows what. Goldie made it sound like you could fill a museum with the things Mr. Mayhew collected.”
My heart, which has been racing since I opened the album, pounds from more than just that possibility. Even in the middle
of all this new evidence about Kezia—and likely not good evidence from Lili’s point of view—she’s thinking about what this
all might mean for me.
I’ve got to get out of this truck and quick, because if I stay pressed up against her any longer while she’s looking at me