Chapter One Caroline #2
A few days after that Caroline was getting out of her car at the drugstore when she saw him drive past. He leaned out the window and waved hello and Caroline nodded back.
She bought her shampoo, a pack of batteries, and a tube of toothpaste, and when she walked out to the parking lot there was a waxy white bag on the roof of her car.
She pulled it down and peered inside, where a jelly donut glistened with sugar.
A guy left a donut on my car, Caroline texted her friend Nina.
On your car? she texted back a few minutes later. Don’t eat it.
Too late.
Okay, well text me when you die of poison.
Caroline sent the saluting emoji.
She settled into a routine in her little Greenhead cottage, waking up early and drinking a gallon of coffee while clacking away on her laptop.
She discovered that her relationship to caffeine was as emotional as it was physical, that she would start her mornings grumpy and rise to a state of near euphoria before becoming crippled with anxiety and the inexplicable desire to clean the kitchen.
When she got to that point, where it felt like she might chew off her own arm like a mouse caught in a glue trap, Caroline would burst out of the cottage door and stumble down the wooden steps to the beach below, where she would power walk back and forth until she figured out a new scene to write or the need to pee would drive her back inside.
In the afternoons Caroline explored. She puttered around the little library at the top of Town Hill, she visited the former home of Palmer Preston, her literary benefactor, she joined a group of ladies from Essex on a tour of the High Street Cemetery, she spent fifty dollars at the Garden Club plant sale on some annuals for her front walkway before realizing she didn’t own a shovel.
Why are you doing such old person stuff? asked Nina.
I like what I like, Caroline replied.
Remember when you had your twelfth birthday party at that German art museum?
Shut up please
Literally a social disaster
I was a precocious child!!
Still defending that choice. Brave.
Caroline wanted to visit Greenhead’s famous castle on the beach, so she booked herself a spot for the “Guest of the Cranes” tour, where guides dressed up in historical costumes and led them through the mansion impersonating maids or butlers of the grand house.
The Crane Castle was at the end of Argilla Road, a massive Stuart-style country house surrounded by a hundred acres of marsh and farmland that overlooked a four-mile white-sand beach.
There were gardens and pastures, amphitheaters with Grecian statues, reflecting pools and grand promenades winding through the grounds.
As Caroline made her way to the visitor center, she could see other tours threading along the paths, the guides in old black top hats or bonnets, and she made a mental note not to mention a word of it to Nina.
As she peered around the cavernous foyer of the castle waiting for the tour to begin, she was unsurprised to realize that the rest of her group was comprised of retirees and European families.
A pair of bored Dutch teenagers with strange haircuts looked at their phones as their parents telescoped their selfie sticks.
A husband and wife wore identical green parkas, purple hiking boots, and canvas explorer hats.
A woman with the frazzled white hair of a witch blew her nose and then stuffed the tissue into her sleeve.
“Welcome to Crane Castle!” a guide cried out from the edge of the foyer.
“You have just traveled by locomotive for nearly nine hundred miles from Chicago to the seaside village of Greenhead to visit your dear friend Richard Teller Crane Junior and his wife, Florence!” The group shuffled over, murmuring in German and French.
“My name is Martha, and I have been a scullery maid here for the Crane family since 1926….”
“Hey,” a voice whispered. Caroline turned and realized with a start that the kayak guy, the jelly donut–giver, was part of the group.
“It’s you again.” Caroline felt a smile spread across her face.
He was taller than she had remembered, his dark hair shiny, the collar of a button-down shirt poking out from the neck of his jacket.
Up close Caroline could see he had really nice skin, deep brown eyes, and his nose had a small bump where it must have been broken at some point.
“Van Whittaker.” He stuck out his hand to shake.
“Caroline Lash.”
“What are you doing here?” he whispered.
“Visiting my dear friend Richard Teller Crane Junior and his wife, Florence, of course.” Caroline cocked her head at the scullery maid.
“Right, right. Same, obviously.” He laughed quietly and shook his head.
“Richard Teller Crane Junior is the second-richest man in Chicago,” the guide continued, “but while most of his contemporaries set up summer residences in Newport with the Vanderbilts, Crane spotted the seaside town of Greenhead from his yacht and fell in love with the place.”
“I love that Crane was ‘the second-richest man in Chicago.’ You know that must have ticked him off,” the guy whispered.
Caroline snickered. “I’m only visiting him and Florence because the first-richest man was busy.”
The group shuffled their way through the gallery and rotunda, Martha the Scullery Maid telling them all about the history of the castle.
The Grand Allée that led to the ocean cliff had been designed by the famous Olmsted Brothers, creators of New York’s Central Park, and completed by the landscape architect Arthur Shurcliff, while the painting of Richard’s wife, Florence, had been done by John Singer Sargent himself.
Caroline subtly tried to keep in step with Van, not pushing too far to the front of the group, not lingering too long over any painting or display.
She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like he was also trying to walk near her, like they were tethered together by invisible string.
“Here, above the clock, you can see a wind indicator.” Martha pointed over the fireplace. “There are four such indicators in the house. This is because the Crane children are avid sailors, so when the wind is right, the family all races to the boat.”
“A hundred years later a tech bro would invent an app that did the same thing and sell it for half a billion dollars,” Van murmured.
“But sadly, the tech bro still wouldn’t be the second-richest man in Silicon Valley,” Caroline whispered back.
There was a model of the family yacht, the Illyria, in a glass case on a sleeping porch, and a display of the blue-and-cream custom-designed china that the Cranes used in the ship’s mess.
“Quick! The wind is blowing! Grab the soup tureen and climb aboard!” Caroline murmured, and Van muffled a laugh with his fist.
As their group meandered through grand drawing rooms and elegantly appointed bedrooms, they crossed paths with other tours, their guides dressed as stable boys and chambermaids, monologuing away in an actorly fashion.
There was something vaguely cringe about the guides, desperate theater kids stuck in the historic home rotation, and Caroline felt a pang for them.
She thought she might be able to write a short story about a tour guide and tucked it away in the back of her mind for future use.
They made their way through the bedrooms and back down the stairs before leaving the Great House to walk through the Rose Garden, Martha keeping up an animated stream of conversation with the crowd.
“What are those islands in the distance?” asked the man with the mustache, pointing out across the ocean.
“We scullery maids are mostly knowledgeable about the interior of the property,” Martha demurred. “Van? Do you know?” She turned to him expectantly. Caroline frowned, confused. How did the maid know her kayak guy?
“Sure.” He walked easily to the front of the group. “So, that’s Plum Island, then the Isles of Shoals are those low ones, then you can actually see Agamenticus, which is in southern Maine, and Boar’s Head over there.” He pointed to various spots along the horizon.
“Van, since we have you, do you want to tell them anything about the nesting sites?” Martha pushed.
“Am I that predictable?” Van laughed and Martha looked at him like she wanted to rip off his shirt.
Why was the scullery maid flirting with him?
Caroline pulled her lip balm out of her pocket and applied a layer, feeling flustered.
“The piping plover is a threatened species,” Van continued, “and one of the important things we’re doing here at Crane Beach is preserving their nesting site.
You’ll see areas that are roped off, and that’s to protect the two dozen breeding pairs we have here.
By paying for your tour today you not only support this beautiful castle but also our important work protecting wildlife.
” Van nodded quickly at Martha and retreated to the back of the crowd.
“What was that?” Caroline whispered, baffled.
“Oh, I work here.” Van ducked his head down, embarrassed.
“You’re a tour guide?”
“No, I work for the Trustees of Reservations in land management. I’m an environmental scientist. Our offices are on the third floor.” He gestured up at the Great House.
“So, you’re not here to visit your Chicago friends Richard and Florence?” Caroline looked at him in mock accusation.
Van shook his head and smiled bashfully.
“Wait.” Caroline realized something. “Did you just do the tour because I was doing it?”
Van covered his face with his hands. “I was just going to say hi, but kind of got sucked in.”
“Damn it! I was here thinking you spent your Wednesday mornings touring historic castles—which, by the way, is a totally normal thing to do—but you were actually at work!”
“Uh, well,” Van looked at his watch, “if it makes you feel any better, I think I missed a semi-important meeting and am now supposed to be telling my staff what they’re doing today.”
“I am also very busy and missing some important things.” Caroline nodded.