Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Amos
June 2025
F or the second night in a row, Amos sat on the back porch of Nina’s rental cabin with a glass of wine and a feeling in his gut that he couldn’t fathom. Nina was inside, paying a delivery driver, and he could hear her light words of thanks, the shuffling plastic bags, and the drawer opening and banging shut. She returned with forks, plates, and a nervous smile. It’d been eight hours since they had burgers and fries at the diner, and Amos felt depleted. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d shared two meals in a row with someone like this.
Of course, their lunch had been cut short.
When Nina had told him her last name—that she was, impossibly, a Whitmore—Amos had been more-or-less staking out the Historical Society, waiting for her to come out. After she’d broken the news, Amos had searched her face for understanding and discovered, sure enough, Jack’s nose, planted right there at the center of her face. Her hair was dark as night, just as Francesca’s always had been, and her eyes were bright and eager, like Benjamin Whitmore’s.
“It’s why I’m here,” she’d gone on. “I want to understand them. There’s so much I don’t know.”
But before Nina and Amos could really dig into the chaos of everything Nina didn’t know and before Amos could reveal anything he remembered, Nancy had called him. There’d been an incident with one of her rentals, a raccoon break-in that had led to busted lamps and dirty rugs and broken glass. Amos was tugged away from Nina, his thoughts swirling.
They’d agreed to meet again tonight. So here Amos was.
He’d considered not coming. He’d considered deleting Nina’s number, going back to his cabin, and locking the door till she got the hint and left the island for good.
Nina had ordered Thai food. Now, she separated various curries out on the plates, keeping her eyes downcast. Her hands shook just the slightest bit. She seemed nervous, far more nervous than even Amos, who was saying something.
Amos didn’t want to break the silence. He didn’t want to frighten her.
But it was Nina who finally raised her glass of wine and said, “So I’m guessing you knew the Whitmores?”
Amos tilted his head and reckoned with what he’d already put together. Nina Whitmore, the youngest of that troupe of six children, the little black-haired and mysterious one who’d loved Jack so much that, when she was really young, she’d sobbed when he left the house. Amos had wondered at the time what it was like to be loved like that, loved in a way that rooted you somewhere and made you want to come home every night. Most of the time, Amos’s mother had hardly looked at him when he’d left the house. She’d hardly said hello when he came in—sometimes late at night, sometimes when the sky was tinted pink with morning.
“I did. But everyone did,” Amos said. “I mean, they were the Whitmores. One of the wealthiest and most prestigious families on the island. And there were so many of you!”
He did not say, my mother hated your family because something like that didn’t matter anymore, not now that his mother was gone.
Nina’s shoulders dropped. She took a small bite of Thai curry and let her eyelids fall. “I don’t know why I ordered food,” she said, putting the plate aside and looking at it sadly. “I’m not hungry.”
“You hardly touched your burger earlier,” he reminded her. “You need your strength.”
Nina arched her eyebrow and reached down to tug something out of her purse. From between the pages of a book, she procured a photograph Amos had never seen before—a typical beach-day display of beautiful people in their twenties or so, strewn across the sand, glowing from sunscreen and long days of doing nothing but that. Nina’s hands were shaking even more. Amos took the photograph and scanned the faces. He recognized most of them as people who’d either grown up in Nantucket or spent summers here.
And then his eyes stopped on the man who looked like Jack. His heart dropped.
“Do you see it, too?” Nina whispered.
Amos put his plate of food to the side and clutched the photograph with both hands. That was when he noticed the time-and-date stamp in the corner. The year was 2002—four years after Jack died. It couldn’t be him.
Unless it was.
Don’t indulge in conspiracies, Amos.
Amos returned the photograph and pressed his hands together, studying Nina’s face for clues. She was a brilliant anthropologist, after all. Everything she’d studied made her a prime candidate to uncover the truths that churned beneath the surface.
“You knew Jack?” Nina asked.
“He was in my year at school,” Amos said.
“Were you close?”
Amos raised his shoulders. “Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. But it was Nantucket High. Everyone knew everyone else. Everyone was at the beach parties. Everyone drank beer and drove too fast and ran around.”
Nina furrowed her brow. Amos recognized that he was describing a portrait of a teenage youth that Nina hadn’t been allowed to see because she’d left the island after the fire. She’d gone to Michigan, a place he couldn’t even picture.
“It sounds like a fantastic way to grow up,” she said.
Amos shrugged again. It was too much to get into the specifics of his own upbringing and how different it had been from the White Oak Lodge and the Whitmores.
“Did you see the date on the photograph?” Nina asked.
Amos nodded. “It’s 2002. But it has to be wrong.”
Nina went pale. “What if it isn’t?”
Amos held his breath and didn’t answer.
“Did you go to his funeral?” Nina asked.
Amos tilted his head and tried to throw himself back into that harrowing time after the fire. He remembered where he’d been when he first smelled the flames: a beach bonfire, watching the fireworks explode over the sound, bratwurst, and too much beer in his belly. He’d been seventeen years old and expecting a call from the police at any time. The terror of that had done a number on his soul.
But had Amos gone to the funeral? He couldn’t remember one. He couldn’t remember a starchy suit or the ache in his gut that came from the guilt of having lived longer than one of his peers. He couldn’t remember having looked into the beautiful and inky eyes of Francesca Whitmore, saying how sorry he was.
That didn’t mean the funeral hadn’t happened. It was twenty-seven years ago. Memories had fallen through the cracks of his mind.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t remember,” Amos answered, feeling both sorry for himself and sorry for Nina. Amos was the wrong person to ask, and he was all she had.
“After it happened, I was sent to Michigan almost immediately,” Nina explained. “And my great-aunt Genevieve told me that I couldn’t go back for the funeral.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Amos said, taken aback. “Your father died. Your brother died. You needed to grieve with your family!”
“They didn’t see it that way. I think they wanted me out of the way,” Nina offered, unable to look him in the eye. She picked up the photograph again and tilted it so that Amos could see Jack’s face. “He looks older than I remember him. Doesn’t he look like he’s twenty-one or twenty-two here? Doesn’t that make the date correct?”
Amos tugged at his hair nervously. He didn’t want to indulge any of Nina’s fantasies, but then again, he didn’t want her to think he didn’t believe her.
“You don’t think he, um, didn’t die in the fire, do you?” he asked finally, stumbling over his words. He felt like saying, you don’t think the sky is orange, do you?
“At the Nantucket Historical Society, there were no obituaries,” Nina offered stiffly. “There was no mention of a funeral, either.”
Amos’s jaw hung slack. His mind searched for meaning, and he eventually said, “You know how the Nantucket newspapers can be. They aren’t exactly the most, um, organized. I’m sure they’ve missed a few weddings or births or…”
In the far distance on the Nantucket Sound was the dark shadow of a boat. Amos knew that whoever was on it couldn’t see them, that they were on a dark and shadowy shore.
“I get that,” Nina said.
She went on to tell him about the photograph she’d found when she’d come to Nantucket on a spontaneous honeymoon with her husband in 2012. It was the first time she’d mentioned her husband, and Amos felt a sting when she didn’t throw the term “ex” into the ring. But when she said, “I couldn’t believe he’d dragged me here to learn about my family when I’d made it very clear I was happy without them, happy not to know more,” Amos buzzed with goodness. Her husband had thrown her happiness under the bus for his own experimentation.
“Anyway, I kept this photograph hidden from him for all these years,” she said. “Now I have the chance to get to the bottom of it.”
Amos remembered she’d said she was staying for a few weeks or more. His heart suddenly ached with the idea that sometime, sooner rather than later, she’d go.
“If Jack or my father are still alive, someone knows something,” she said. But then she formed a fist and looked down at it.
Amos could feel her twisted thoughts. For twenty-seven years, she’d been sure that Benjamin and Jack were dead.
“But what if all this is made up?” Amos asked. “What if they’re really gone?”
Nina’s eyes stirred. “I need to know that, too.”
Nina waved the photograph around. “Do you know anyone else in this photo? Are any of them associated with that restaurant with the glass walls?”
“That place doesn’t exist anymore,” Amos said. “It was damaged in a storm back in ’15 and torn down.”
Nina’s eyes sparkled. “But the owner must be in the photo?”
Amos studied the faces again, searching his mind for names and connections.
When he didn’t speak for a while, Nina took a breath and said, “You really don’t have to help me. I’m sorry for assuming that you’d even want to!” Her voice brightened, and she twisted to hide the photograph away. “Please, I’ve taken up too much of your time. Eat your food!”
But Amos reached for the photo, stopping her. “Give me a minute,” he said sternly.
Nina watched him, waiting.
Suddenly, Amos knew who to ask about the photograph. “My friend Calvin owns the diner we ate at today,” he explained. “Restaurateurs on the island know each other well, and he’s been in the business a while. Maybe he’ll recognize the restaurant owner in here. Perhaps we’ll have a name.”
Nina grinned and slipped the photograph back between the pages of the book.
It felt as though they were on a wild goose chase. But Amos wanted to remind her that the answers to all these questions and more had burned in a massive fire back in 1998. There were dead ends no matter where they looked.
And Amos certainly did not want her to know what he’d been up to back then. He hardly wanted to think of it himself.