Chapter 11 #2
“But we spent many years together after that.” Charlotte lowered her voice. “We lived together in Manhattan. He was my best friend. My greatest confidant. I kept making documentaries, and…”
“Wait. Slow down.” Alexander’s heart was pounding. This was his first confirmation that Jack was really and truly alive; it was his first “spotting” from someone he knew he could believe. “But why? Why did he fake his death? What did he tell you?”
“You said you knew what Jack was up to back then?” Nina asked.
Alexander nodded. “Yeah. Selling drugs for Tio Angelo. With your friend Amos.”
Nina bit her lower lip and glanced at Charlotte. “You remember that the cops were sniffing around before the fire. I think they were onto Tio Angelo’s game.”
“Okay. Yes. I buy that.” Alexander nodded. “But why would Jack, Tio Angelo, and Dad all fake their own deaths?”
“Do you think Dad was selling drugs?” Nina rasped, pressing her hand to her chest.
Alexander remembered Tio Angelo and their father at the summer solstice party in 1996 and how chummy they’d been. It had been two years before the fire, two years before their lives had exploded. But had they been chummy after that? Alexander’s memories were fuzzy.
“I don’t know,” Alexander admitted.
“Dad wouldn’t have done anything to jeopardize the White Oak Lodge,” Charlotte said stiffly.
“That’s what I used to think,” Alexander said. “But nothing is for sure anymore.”
They were quiet for a moment, trying to hold on to other people’s secrets and finding them like water in their hands.
“But you must know where Jack is now?” he said finally, looking at Charlotte.
Charlotte winced. “I got engaged in my twenties,” she explained.
“I was excited because Jack decided to ‘reveal’ himself to the family at my wedding. We had it all planned out. But before the wedding, there was an accident. Jack was driving, and my fiancé was severely injured. We didn’t think he’d make it.
Jack disappeared after that. I think the guilt ate him up. ”
Alexander gasped. He tried to imagine it: Charlotte, young and beautiful, at the start of her life, and Jack, destroying her plans with his reckless driving and raucousness.
“After my fiancé got better, he left me,” Charlotte said with a wry smile. “I think it was for the best.”
“You’re better off with Vincent,” Nina said.
Alexander’s ears rang in recognition. “Vincent? Like, high school Vincent?”
Charlotte grinned mischievously. “I can’t believe it either. I ran into him on Nantucket. Actually, funnily enough, it was when I took Jack’s wife out to dinner.”
Alexander couldn’t fully fathom these next factoids about his disappeared brother: that he had a family in Hawaii, that his wife, Addison, thought his name was Seth Green, and that he’d disappeared again.
“About four months ago, he left with some guy,” Charlotte explained with a shrug.
“That’s all we know. Addison had to go back to Hawaii to take care of her kids. She’s broken up about it.”
“It’s a mess,” Nina agreed.
When Alexander asked Nina what had led her back to Nantucket, Nina groaned and proceeded to update him on the mess of her own life: her anthropology background and the anthropology professor she’d married, who’d always known more about the Whitmore family than he’d let on.
“He even forced me to go to Nantucket Island for our honeymoon,” she said.
“He knew how devastating that would be for me. I think he wanted to watch me squirm.”
Nina went on to say that at a fancy restaurant on the island, she’d discovered an old photograph within which was a man who looked so much like Jack Whitmore that she’d stolen it and kept it for herself.
When she’d learned that her husband was having an affair with one of his students, she’d taken the kids to camp and come to Nantucket Island—maybe to search for Jack, maybe to search for herself.
“I met Amos on the first night, and things have really spiraled from there,” she said.
“When I tracked down ‘Seth Green’s house’ on Madequecham Beach, you’ll never guess who answered the door. ”
Charlotte waved her hand, and Alexander gasped.
And then he burst with, “I have the worst private detective in the world.”
Nina, Charlotte, and Alexander laughed so uproariously that they surely woke their mother, if only momentarily. It took ages for them to settle down. But this story was rife with humor if you looked past the death, sorrow, and pain. It was hard to believe it was real.
“What was your husband after?” he finally asked Nina, wiping tears from beneath his eyes. “Why was he so obsessed with the Whitmores?”
Nina raised her shoulders. “I think he subscribes to the Whitmore treasure theory.”
Alexander snorted. “You’re kidding me. A super-intelligent guy like that?”
“He thinks he’s smart,” Nina said sadly.
“That ridiculous treasure,” Alexander said. “In all your times in the tunnels under the Lodge, did you ever find anything?”
Nina and Charlotte shook their heads.
“Of course not,” Charlotte said.
“I always wanted to,” Nina said. “But I was too afraid to go down there by myself, and you were all too old to play with me.”
“Too old, too cynical,” Alexander said. “I’m sorry, Nina.
I wish we’d been there for you.” He remembered how little she was when she’d been shipped off to live with Aunt Genevieve.
When he’d thought about it during the months and years after, he’d always pictured her, freezing in the frozen snowy hills of Michigan, homesick and frightened.
But Nina had turned into a remarkable woman.
“You know what?” Charlotte said, as though she’d just remembered. “I always sort of thought you were the one who set the fire.”
Alexander’s eyes widened with surprise. Never had he thought someone would accuse him of that. “You did?”
Charlotte tried to laugh, but it sounded false. “I mean, I knew how much you came to hate the Lodge,” she said. “Mom and Dad were never going to let you do what you wanted to do. I figured you wanted a path out of there.”
Alexander’s heart pounded. “Did you really think I was capable of that?” Of a fire that supposedly killed three of my family members, he didn’t add.
Charlotte grimaced. “Not at first. It occurred to me after you were already gone. After all of us were already gone. I started adding up what I knew about our family. I started to pin the blame.” She sighed, looking sorrowful and old. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Alexander was quiet and contemplative, crossing and uncrossing his ankles.
Finally, Alexander burst with another question. “Do you think there’s something wrong with Mom?”
“Wrong? What do you mean?” Charlotte looked pleased that he was letting her off the hook about the fire accusation.
“I mean, sick? Tired? I don’t know.” Alexander studied his wine, unable to look at either of them.
Nina raised her shoulders. “She’s nicer to me. But I think she’s had a lot of time to think.”
“Maybe she’s softening,” Charlotte offered. “But she’s a woman with secrets. Sometimes I think those secrets are eating her alive.”
Alexander furrowed his brow and contemplated this. It didn’t seem entirely rational to him, especially when he considered her bodily health, but he decided to let it go.
The night was now entirely black, peppered with bright stars. It was an altogether different atmosphere than the one he’d hidden from back in Florence. He was grateful.
He turned to look at Nina, lovely Nina, and whispered, “I know the identity of your mother. And I know why she never reached out to you. Well, she tried.”