Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Jay
I don’t expect the whole world to know who I am or what I do. Do tens of thousands of them who have read my books know anyway? Yes. Does almost anyone working in the field of American history know? Yes. Should the director of this specific museum know my professional background as a trustee? Definitely.
“Hello, I’m Jameson Paul Martin,” I say, walking toward the desk with my hand outstretched for a shake, “and I’m a historian. I specialize in the Revolutionary War.”
Phoebe’s mouth falls open. She shakes my hand almost like she’s on autopilot. “We have your books in the museum gift shop.” She gives her head a small shake. “The Sutton did, I mean. Rogues of the Revolution . That’s you.”
“Yeah. That’s me.” I give her the performance people expect from Jameson Martin, also known in way too many circles as the Hot Prof. I wink and give the crooked grin that gets me into and out of all kinds of trouble. “The ladies love rogues, even the high-class Boston ladies.”
She blinks at me. “Right. Well, I’m glad your grandfather could get them placed in the bookstore for you. ”
I frown. “No, that’s not why?—”
“But I promise you this letter isn’t from that long ago,” she continues, like I didn’t speak. “You don’t need to bother with this. What brings you across the lawn this morning?”
“I know it’s not that old.” I’m more curious now about the mail than her comment on the phone about a beautiful male, which I’m fairly sure was about me. Chalamet on a Cavill body? I see it. “But I spend a lot of time in archives and dealing with old letters, so maybe I can help. I did an entire seminar on the ethics and practice of opening sealed correspondence for archival purposes.”
She looks down at the envelope on the desk. “To be honest, this isn’t even related to the museum. I’ve got an odd mail situation at my apartment, and I’m trying to figure it out.”
“Odd how?”
She taps the letter. “This keeps showing up in my mailbox no matter what I do with it. I wrote ‘return to sender’ and ‘no such resident,’ and it came back both times. I gave it to the building manager to deal with. It still came back.”
“Post office?” I’m sure she’s already tried there.
“I took it there myself and gave it to a clerk who said she’d handle it.” She picks it up and waves it at me. “It came back. But this time, it came back without a stamp or postmark.”
“Yeah, that’s odd.” I walk over for a closer look. “And you’re stuck because you can’t open it or it would be obstruction of correspondence?”
She bites her lip. She uses a lipstick that’s not exactly red but not exactly pink. It’s rich, and I like that she’s not afraid of color. I’ve always thought I prefer the more low-key natural look on girls, but Phoebe does her face like someone unafraid of highlighting her best features, not someone hiding behind heavy makeup.
Whatever color she’s using on that mouth of hers definitely makes it look … biteable. I need to investigate that theory. Figuring out how to give myself the chance sounds like a good way to spend some free time.
“That’s the thing,” she says, handing me the envelope. “Maybe there’s no law being broken here.”
It’s quality paper but slightly yellowed with the early ink bleed some documents get as they age. It’s old. Older than me, but not open-with-gloves-in-a-clean-room old. “Smitten Kitten?” I read the addressee’s name aloud.
“Yeah. That’s not a nickname I’ve ever had or used.”
I flip it over and examine it for stray marks or possible identifiers. “You sure it’s the same letter showing up?”
“That’s my handwriting where it says ‘return to sender.’ See that smudge on the flap?”
I look closer at the fingerprint. It’s light but unmissable, and I nod.
“It’s there every time it shows up in my mailbox.”
My eyebrow goes up. It looks like an original smudge, not the kind that would show up on reproductions. “No stamp or postmark. Since it was in your mailbox, and since anyone could be Smitten Kitten, you can legally open it.” I hand it back to her.
“That’s what I thought.” She sets it on the desk.
I pause for a couple of seconds. “Oh, sorry, do you want to be alone while you snoop on someone else’s letter?”
“As if that’s not thirty percent of your job, Mr. Seminar on Letter Snooping.”
I grin. “If you don’t want people to know about it, don’t put it in writing. There will always be nosy historians.”
“Is that what you’re doing in the cottage?” she asks. “Making history?”
“Recontextualizing it,” I say. “I’m on a deadline for a book. Or at least that’s what I tell people as an excuse for wandering around in flip-flops and not brushing my hair. You can excuse almost anything lazy you do if you tell people you’re on a book deadline.”
“Noted. Almost makes me want to write a book.”
“Are you changing the subject? Do you want me to pretend the letter doesn’t exist?”
She eyes it. “It feels weird because I did see this with a stamp and postmark before.”
“There’s no right or wrong answer here. I don’t see how it could be the same letter, and you don’t know who it’s for. But you won’t find out unless you open it. And it looks old enough that at this point, the sender and the recipient probably both know it never arrived and connected anyway.”
“What if it was important, and because Smitten Kitten never saw it, there was a falling out that never got corrected?”
I tear my eyes away from her lipstick. (What is that color?) “It’s possible. All I can tell you is that with an unstamped letter that looks that old, I’d open it in a heartbeat.”
She taps it a couple more times, then with a decisive nod, she pulls scissors from the desk and carefully cuts across the shorter end of the envelope before tipping it to let the letter slide out.
It’s a few pages of beige (or yellowed?) lined stationery, folded in thirds. I can tell with a glance that the paper itself is in good condition. Still, Phoebe doesn’t touch it.
She purses her lips.
“You want gloves,” I guess.
“I do.”
“Butler’s pantry. Give me a second.” Grandad always kept lint-free cotton gloves around. Contrary to what a lot of movies show, the older the document is, the better it is to handle it with clean, dry hands. Gloves increase the chance of accidentally tearing fragile paper. But in the case of old photographs, books with metal or ivory parts, or any time you can’t be sure what to expect when you open a sealed envelope, gloves are the smart play to protect against a potential hazard, like mold.
“Second cabinet, third drawer down,” I say when I return and hand them to Phoebe a minute later. “He also had a few other stashes around the house.”
Phoebe smiles. “Sounds like Foster. Impulsive enough to know he might get the urge to handle old items, smart enough to keep gloves in every room when he did.”
“You really did know him,” I say as she pulls on the gloves. It might be one of the things I like best about her—that I’ll never have to explain the Foster Martin experience to her. She gets it.
“I understood him,” she says. “We understood each other. I never had to defend museum work as a career.”
“Let me guess: everyone wants to know why you aren’t a lawyer or a computer programmer?”
She shoots me a wry smile. “You get that a lot too, huh?”
“And also finance. That one bugs me. I resent the implication that I have finance bro energy.”
She flicks a glance at me before picking up the letter. “You don’t have finance bro energy.”
Something about her sentence implies a but , and I want to know what it is. “But I have some kind of bro energy?”
She keeps her eyes on the letter. “Don’t we all have some type of energy?”
“Tell me,” I say. “What’s mine?”
“Oh, you know.” She says this in a vague way that I already know is not very Phoebe-esque.
“I don’t.” I do, but I want to hear her take.
She gives me a look that says I see your game, and I’m not playing. This only makes the game more fun.
“Try one of those online personality tests,” she suggests. “ Meanwhile, I’ve got some clues now, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.”
“Context clues in old letters? Sounds boring but you’d probably better tell me anyway.”
She grins. “So boring. First clue: the letter is dated September 13 of 1965, and the sender starts it with ‘Dear Smitten Kitten.’ It’s signed ‘Ardently’ by Dear Heart. Ready to hear the rest?”
I settle into my chair, ready to listen, and I smile. “I have so many memories of sitting in this same spot. My grandad would invite me into the library to talk about all kinds of things. We would discuss anything and everything. ‘Cabbages and kings.’ It’s from a Lewis Carroll poem.”
“I know it. ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’ My grandma would read me that book when I visited her. I didn’t like it, especially that part.” Then she winces. “I just stomped all over a nice memory for you. I’m sorry.”
“I haven’t read the book, just the poem,” I said. “Why didn’t you like it? The walrus was only being a walrus.”
“He ate the baby oysters.” She looks at me like nothing else needs to be said.
“They were dumb baby oysters. It was Darwinism. If it wasn’t the walrus and the carpenter, a shorebird would have eaten those idiots by dinnertime.”
“But would the shorebird have tried to convince the oysters he was their friend? Or would he have consumed them honestly, with straightforward violence as nature intended?”
“Why is this shorebird a guy? Maybe it’s a lady shorebird.” I shake my head. “This is concerning, your majestical directorness. You need to challenge your implicit gender biases.”
She laughs at me. “I’m beginning to see how you and Foster would end up talking of cabbages and kings.”
“I never knew where those talks would take us. One day he might bring me in to discuss the migratory habits of monarch butterflies. Another day, it might be the Federalist papers.” I smile as more memories come. “It was probably the Federalist papers. That came up a lot.”
“We once got into a heated debate about who owed whom an apology between Adams and Jefferson.” She laughs when I wince. “Don’t worry, he sent me a bouquet of hyacinths the next day with a card that said they were sympathy flowers because it must be painful to be so wrong.”
I shake my head, imagining Grandad’s glee when he dictated the note to the florist. “So you also spoke of cabbages and kings.”
“It was a privilege.”
I glance around the library, and his absence overwhelms me for an intense minute. My grief at his death has never been sharp. He’d been ready to go at the end, satisfied with the time he’d had and how he’d used it. But I still miss him.
“What do you think about the migratory habits of monarch butterflies?” she asks.
I appreciate her trying to lighten the mood. “They’re highly intelligent, obviously. Florida is a much better place to spend winters than in Massachusetts. Clearly smarter than dumb baby oysters.”
The corners of her mouth turn up. “My lunches with Foster were one of the highlights of my job. He knew so much about so many things, but he could listen as well as he talked.”
“And he collected knowledge like treasure.” That was Grandad for sure. “I’m surprised he never mentioned you to me.”
“You came up,” she says. “Every now and then he would say something like ‘my grandson went to Stanford like some kind of infernal hippie.’”
I laugh outright. “He did not.”
She grins. “No. But he would say things like ‘my grandson this’ or ‘my grandson that,’ and he never said your name, so I thought he had more than one. You’re the grandson who played baseball for Stanford and did an internship in the Senate?”
“That’s me.”
“You have range, I’ll give you that.”
“Yes. Baseball, Congress, and research. My history senses are now activated, so do you want to read that letter?”
She glances down at it, her mouth twisting for a moment before she pulls off the gloves and picks it up.
My darling Smitten Kitten,
Is the fur rising on your adorable neck that I dared to call you that? It seemed appropriate. What was it you said when you stormed out of the club and left without so much as a goodbye? Let’s see … oh, yes, the words are etched into memory. “I’ll never be one of your smitten kittens, so save your breath.”
You’re correct, of course. You could never be “one of” because there’s only one: you. How could another girl turn my head when you’re around?
Imagine my surprise when I went to the club to tell you as much last Friday, assuming you would be there with your parents as usual and instead found out you’d fled to Serendipity Springs. Of all the places to run away to, Kitten, you picked there? I imagined you as a Paris girl or, at the very least, New York.
What in the world could have sent you running so suddenly out of Boston? You say you don’t care about me at all, but I don’t believe that. I think you care about me too much, that’s why you’ve run. If you didn’t care at all, you’d still be here, laughing at me.
I can hear you already, indignant that I presume to know what you think when you’ve said the very opposite. But I know what your eyes say when you don’t think I’m looking, and what your smile says, the special one I’ve never seen you give anyone else but me. I most certainly know what your lips said when we kissed on the boat beneath the Fourth of July fireworks, and it had nothing to do with words.
I’m not sure who is putting ideas into your head about my sincerity and intentions—or why—only that they’ve given you the most incorrect of ideas.
Would a man who is looking only to feather his cap by dating through the Boston socialite scene bother putting pen to paper when the object of his affections runs out on him? That’s you, by the way, Kitten. You are the object of my affections. The sole object of all of them. I thought for certain my actions have shown that, but since they apparently have not, let’s make it so my words do.
If you are not also chicken in addition to your feline perfection, I would very much like to hear why you left Boston so quickly that you couldn’t tell me you were leaving. And if you’re very brave and honest, you’ll tell me.
I’ve laid out every one of my cards here, Kitten. I have nothing to hide.
Ardently,
Dear Heart
I give a low whistle. “Shots fired.”
Phoebe sets the letter back down. “One and a half pages, front only. Definitely a gauntlet thrown.”
I pull out my phone to make notes. “We’ve got 1965 and a woman from Boston who met and got involved with this guy who’s writing her, possibly through a club, and from the sound of the boat action, likely a yacht club. ”
“They had some sort of argument,” Phoebe says, “and he thinks her feelings scared her into suddenly running away to Serendipity Springs.”
“But he doesn’t know that for sure,” I say. “We don’t either, without hearing her side. And we likely won’t, because you had to unseal that letter to read it, which means?—”
“She never saw this one.”
“That’s a shame,” I say. “He seems like he was into her.”
She gives me a skeptical look. “He seems like he was into the idea of her being into him. It sounds like that’s the exact accusation she made.” She taps the letter.
“It also sounds like she wrongly accused him,” I say. “That’s his whole point here.”
“Let’s stick with known facts. We know Smitten Kitten lived in The Serendipity in 1965.”
I give a slight grimace. “We know he thought she lived here in 1965, but since she never got this letter, he could have been wrong.”
“All right, that’s a good point.”
“How much do you know about The Serendipity?” I ask. “I know where it is, but I’ve never been inside. Maybe if we knew more about its history, we might know why a young woman would have been living there back then.”
“I don’t know much,” she says. “There are some quirks to the layout that make it obvious it didn’t start life as an apartment building, but I’ve lived there barely a week. Foster left a note for me when I moved in saying he’d picked it specifically because he thought I would enjoy it, but that he’d leave me to discover more on my own. I jumped right into work, so I haven’t had time to explore it.”
“I knew you had a one-year lease as part of your salary package, but I didn’t realize he’d chosen the building.” Grandad was a highly organized man, but not a control freak. The specificity of his will regarding his vision for the museum and who he wanted hired weren’t a surprise. That he would go as far as choosing Phoebe’s housing is.
“He chose well. I love the aura of it. Original brick exterior, a grand staircase, original hardwood floors, high ceilings with crown molding. It was definitely built before World War II. It has a gorgeous courtyard and pool. But then, there’s also a kitchen on the main floor.”
“As in, not in anyone’s apartment? That is odd,” I say when she confirms with a nod.
“Right? I’ve been wondering if it was a small hotel. It has what definitely used to be a front desk. Like a check-in desk. And there’s a big room behind the desk labeled ‘Ballroom.’”
“No way. Like the one here?”
“I’m not sure. It’s written on an old brass plaque over the doorway, but I didn’t poke my head in to look because a newer sign beside the door says ‘Manager.’”
“Well, your majesty, I believe this is when you invite me over to come explore.”
She fixes me with a look like she’s torn between scolding me, laughing at me, or saying yes. But when she speaks, it’s none of those things.
“Well, your worshipful trusteeness, since this is the third time I’ve seen you in my whole life, it’s time for a define-the-relationship talk.”