Chapter 13
The month of May for Hannah had been immersive, a necessity after everything she and Minnie had gone through.
A “nesting” period, Hannah decided to call it.
It was the first nesting period of her life, given the fact that she’d gone back to work so soon after Minnie was born.
She’d had to prove herself back then. Now, she had nothing left to prove to anyone but herself.
But during this first month on Nantucket, while Minnie was at school, Hannah had pushed herself into “home redecoration mode,” watching videos about fixing everything from window shutters to floorboards to kitchen counters.
Obviously, given her lack of experience, she wasn’t able to fix everything, and most of what she did fix looked, if not bad, then not good, either.
“Everything will look better later on,” Hannah promised herself, her hands on her hips as she assessed a wall she’d painted, a window she’d repaired, and a door that hung better on its hinges. “We’re on our way.”
As of a few hours ago, Minnie was officially out of school.
Summer was on its way, and Hannah felt a sense of purpose and ownership over the house she’d selected for them.
This was it—their new home on the ocean, one that had nothing to do with Kendall and everything they’d left behind in Miami. She was beginning to come into her own.
In a remarkable turn of events, via an old journalist contact Hannah had met years ago, Hannah had been working this month.
Not a lot, but just enough. She’d written a few health-related articles for a medical website, pocketing a couple of thousand dollars in the process.
She knew that amount was literally pennies, not only in Miami but also around here.
But she wasn’t one to turn up her nose at something like that.
She thanked her old friend profusely, updated her website, and continued applying for journalism jobs. She got crickets.
But now that it was nearly June and her part-time gig was over, Hannah was left to her own devices. Minnie was very busy with being in love, and Hannah had no friends, no prospects of friends, and no idea of where her work would take her.
Perhaps because she was endlessly curious and couldn’t turn her brain off, Thomas Bard’s mysterious death was never far from her mind.
Now that she had the time, she decided to dig a little bit, not only into what had happened to Thomas, but into the letters in the shoebox.
For some reason, she couldn’t get them, nor the concept of a Legacy Club, out of her mind. It felt ominous and exciting.
Hannah needed a new story, one to rip her old life completely out of her mind.
One to help her forget about Kendall, once and for all.
Sitting on the back porch with a glass of rosé, Hannah opened the shoebox and reread the first letter, the one she’d begun with nearly a month ago.
The recipient, Georgia Kaiser, had presumably lived in this house, since she’d been the one to hide the letter she’d received from Calvin, her beloved. But who was Georgia?
Hannah did a quick online search for a photograph of an old woman.
It was an obituary for Georgia Kaiser, who’d been born March 22, 1932, and had died April 19, 2018.
A shiver went through her. Hannah wondered if Georgia had died in this very house, perhaps upstairs in Hannah’s bedroom.
She wondered if Georgia had died knowing the letters were beneath the floorboards, waiting for someone to find them.
Maybe the house had been abandoned since 2018, waiting for Hannah and Minnie to move in?
Hannah didn’t believe in ghosts. But she did believe that mysteries lingered in the air around a place, that secrets spilled to the surface and poisoned those left behind.
According to the obituary, Georgia had died unmarried.
This stung. It meant that Calvin had never been able to come back and love Georgia the way she’d deserved to be loved.
Had the Legacy Club stopped him from returning?
Or maybe it hadn’t been so dramatic. Maybe, wherever he’d gone, he’d fallen in love with someone else and forgotten about Georgia altogether. It was difficult to say.
Without a last name, Hannah struggled to identify Calvin online.
All she had were his words, here on the page.
Although the letter was undated, she guessed that it was from the fifties or sixties.
His penmanship was beautiful, showing a skill that people had lost in this day and age.
Hannah herself wrote almost everything on her computer; her handwriting was a scrawl that even she found difficult to decipher.
“Poor Georgia,” she said aloud, gazing at the photograph of the woman. She wondered if she’d been lonely, if she’d had many friends.
She wondered if Georgia was as lonely as Hannah now was, spending most of her hours here at the house, watching the ocean roll up on the sand.
Hannah dug deeper into the shoebox of letters.
All the letters were addressed to Georgia, but not all were from Calvin.
This was intriguing. The ones from Calvin were similar to the first one, discussing the Legacy Club and how wretched the people involved were, how the Legacy Club was getting in the way of Georgia and Calvin’s love, and how much he truly and completely loved Georgia, down to his bones.
Hannah could have spent forever in the poetry of his love.
But some of the letters struck a different tone. Hannah continued to pore through them, digging through time. Most especially, she was looking for anything relating to the Legacy Club.
In one, a woman named Heidi Setters wrote:
Dear Georgia,
It is my understanding that you have decided to take on the Legacy Club, to tell them what you think of them, to get in their way. I implore you to step away from this mission. Everything they do, they do for a reason. They have far more power than you could ever imagine.
You cannot beat them. Please believe me, better women and men than you have tried and failed.
Stay safe.
Yours, Heidi
Hannah felt her journalistic instincts on high alert.
The afternoon dimmed to evening in the sky above the beach house, and she hurried back inside and set herself up at her laptop.
Maybe for reasons that had everything to do with paranoia, she set up her VPN so that nobody could tell it was her, Hannah Moore, researching this.
She knew she was probably overthinking things. Whoever the Legacy Club was, they likely had no idea who Hannah Moore was or what a VPN was either.
Then again, she had no idea if the Legacy Club was still around.
Maybe, like so many historical things, the club had dried up.
But something told her that wasn’t so.
With bated breath, Hannah searched for the Legacy Club online.
Just as she’d suspected, there was no website, and certainly no social media presence.
She laughed at the very idea of a secret society having an Instagram page.
But that didn’t mean that the Legacy Club had escaped all online notice.
Most of the mentions of them were in local write-ups, announcements of sailing races, or local picnics on the various beaches.
They were listed as sponsors of various groups, but they were discussed only in vague terms. They were referred to as “important local supporters” and “an essential foundation of Nantucket.” It was difficult to tell whether the journalists who’d written about the Legacy Club—with publication dates ranging from the 1950s to the 2020s—were pandering to them, supporting them out of fear, or genuinely respecting them and wanting to show that respect.
There were no photographs of the people involved in the Legacy Club, at least not online, which didn’t surprise Hannah either. Still, she was annoyed. She wanted to know more.
Maybe the library held the key? But already, the library was closing for the night, which meant that Hannah’s obsession had to be put to rest as well. She closed her laptop and texted Minnie.
Hannah: How are things going? Happy summer vacation!
Minnie: We grabbed burgers, now we’re going to the movies. I’ll be home late. I’ll be safe, don’t worry.
Hannah sighed and rubbed the back of her neck. She wished Minnie would spend a little more time with her for a change. But she knew better than to ask for that, especially after everything that had happened.
For the first time in nearly a month, Hannah thought of Natalie.
They’d had an awkward start. Natalie hadn’t been thrilled that Hannah crashed Thomas Bard’s funeral.
But Hannah supposed that she could still make up with Natalie, if only to get more information about the Legacy Club.
She could play dumb about the awkwardness at the funeral.
She could pretend that everything was fine.
After a brief internal pep-talk, Hannah called her, and Natalie picked up right away, using that false, happy voice that Hannah knew not to trust. “Where have you been, Hannah Moore?” Natalie asked.
Hannah used her own charm in return. “I’ve been busy with this fixer-upper!
You weren’t lying when you said there was a lot to do.
” She went on to say she loved getting her hands dirty, that she was “building herself a new life post-divorce.” She could tell that Natalie liked that.
She could practically feel Natalie, making excuses for Hannah, telling herself that Hannah had acted so strangely because she had a broken heart.
“Honey, you must come over. We’re having a few people out on the veranda for wine and cheese. Right now!”
Hannah knew better than to refuse an offer like that. “I’m on my way,” she said.