Chapter Nineteen
Kit stared at her phone as if she’d heard a loud thud when the call ended.
It was pretty clear that Russ felt absolutely no remorse for having made his plans without her, despite the fact that he knew she would object to taking the trip. It was almost as if he’d wanted a confrontation with her. Well, he’d gotten that.
She finished dressing, the conversation replaying over and over in her head.
“You want to keep searching for the reason your mother hated her sister. Well, they’re both dead, Kit.
There’s no one left to tell the story, so get it out of your head that you were meant somehow to solve this big mystery.
It’s not going to happen. And it doesn’t matter anyway.
What’s to be gained even if you were to find out what their beef with each other was all about?
It’s not going to affect your life. I’d think you’d care more about me than your dead aunt, who you never even met.
“Well, as little as you care about what I want, that’s how much I care about your family and that camp. I don’t know why you can’t just sell it all and walk away from it.”
“Because it’s mine. It’s my family legacy. Well, mine and Beth’s and Abby’s and Ned’s and Benny’s, that’s why,” she whispered.
Russ’s cavalier attitude about what she was dealing with was ridiculous. Of course, he probably thought her attitude about his big adventure was cavalier as well. She tried to get her emotions under control, but she ended up crying a little from frustration. Mostly, she was frustrated with herself.
How could she have ignored Russ’s narcissism for thirty years? How could she have ignored his me first, my way or the highway behavior for so long?
Because she’d wanted to keep the peace, to keep things calm and smooth for Ned and Abby.
Because she hated confrontations and would rather quietly back down than challenge.
Well, today she challenged. Today, his me first attitude was sent to the back of the line.
She would not play that game any longer.
She had a serious situation on her hands—the remains of a child had been hidden in a house she owned, for crying out loud, and they needed to figure out who that baby belonged to.
Of course, the odds were that most likely Maxine had given birth to that child, but Kit felt obligated to find out for certain, and if possible, how the child had ended up dead and wrapped in a quilt.
Every child deserved to have its story told and a name.
At the very least, there should be a proper burial, and if nothing else, Kit was determined to make sure he or she had one.
Had that been Maxine’s purpose in bringing Kit to Tolerance? To find the child and make sure it was buried? But then why hadn’t Maxine done that herself?
The more Kit thought about it, the more she suspected that finding the child’s identity was the key. It made as much sense as anything else.
For Russ to dismiss the importance of her filling in the blanks of her family’s story was unforgivable, more proof of how uncaring he was when it came to any business other than his own.
His dismissal toward the finding of the child’s remains had been colder than cold.
His callousness toward her spoke volumes about how he really felt about her and their marriage.
She didn’t know where their story would end, but she knew she was staying in Maine for as long as it took—maybe longer, if it felt right to her. Her husband could stay in the French Alps and ski till his knees gave out. She no longer cared.
Kit ran down the steps with a new resolve.
If Russ had thought he’d scare her into coming home, he’d missed the mark by a mile.
Kit was at Ruthie’s for breakfast ahead of the herd once again, but this time when she left, it was to head to the general store, where she loaded up on coffee, half-and-half, bread, sandwich fixings, peanut butter, strawberry jelly, and several jars of condiments: mayonnaise, mustard, pickles.
She bought a package of sponges, a spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner, a multipack of paper towels, and several canisters of bear spray.
She’d be having her lunch at noon at the table in the kitchen, where her mother’s family had eaten many years ago.
She’d toyed with the idea of eggs and bacon as well, but realized she’d miss the bit of time she spent in the mornings chatting at Ruthie’s with the locals.
Every day it seemed she met someone new, learned a little more about Tolerance and the residents.
It was almost as if she were one of them.
Once at camp, she took her bags into the kitchen and placed them on the counter.
She opened the refrigerator door and removed whatever jars Greta had left there when she’d cleaned out the perishables after Maxine’s death.
She washed down the shelves with a new sponge and lined up her purchases.
Then, just because she could, she made coffee in the pot she found in a cupboard.
She used to make coffee for her father in the same sort of pot at her parents’ lake house when she was a kid.
There was a measuring spoon in a drawer that she used to scoop out the ground beans, and she spread them around the basket in the old percolator, then filled the pot with water.
Fifteen minutes later, she was standing on the back porch, sipping her first cup of coffee.
“This is my house,” she whispered. “This is my place.”
Smiling, she shouted for the moose and the bears and the birds to hear. “This is my house. This is my place.”
It felt self-affirming—empowering, even—at the time, though later she thought it might have been overly dramatic, maybe even a little silly and definitely out of character for her.
Even so, she couldn’t deny how good it had felt to acknowledge who she was, and to stake her claim to her family’s land.
She knew that in order to claim the house, she had to start to clear it out in earnest, so she started there in the kitchen.
She knew the cupboards and drawers were filled to near bursting, so she’d go through them, see what was there, what was still useful.
Starting with the utility drawer, she found nine—nine!
—spatulas. Even if she—or someone—were to stay there, surely they’d need fewer.
She set aside three and put the other six on the counter to go into a donate box.
In that same drawer she found a lone key randomly tucked beneath the knives and whisks and can openers.
There were so many doors in the house, it could’ve fit any one of them.
She pulled up Greta’s number on her phone and hit “Call.”
“How are you feeling today? Did you have nightmares last night?” Greta immediately asked. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Yes.” Unless the hours she’d spent muttering about Russ counted. “How ’bout you?”
“Tossed and turned all night long. I’m exhausted. I doubt I’ll ever get over it.”
“Greta, I’m so sorry. Maybe this was a bad time to call. Why not get back to me when—”
“Did something else happen? Did you find something else?” Greta’s melancholy slipped away and excitement took its place.
Kit was grateful her new friend couldn’t see her smile. “Actually, no. Well, yes, I did find something I wanted to ask you about but nothing like what we found upstairs.”
“What is it?”
“I was cleaning out a kitchen drawer and I found a key.”
“What kind of a key?”
“Just a key. It has a long piece of twine tied onto it. I wish there was another way to describe it.”
“That could be for the basement.”
“Hold on.” Kit tried the door and it opened. “It’s not locked.” She put the key into the lock anyway but it didn’t fit.
“That’s not it,” she told Greta.
“Wait, is there a section of the twine that has yellow paint on it?”
Kit held it up. “Yes, it does.”
“I bet that’s the key for the annex. That addition off the side of the house.”
“Oh. Let me try it.” Kit had tried to open the door a few days earlier but it was padlocked, and in all the mayhem of the past few days, she’d forgotten to ask Greta what that extra space had been used for.
Greta continued to chat while Kit tried the lock.
“Now, that addition was added back in the 1950s. When we were kids, we called it ‘the mess hall,’ the place where the campers gathered for special breakfasts or dinners—‘all-campers nights,’ we called them.”
The padlock fell open and Kit removed it.
She stepped into a long, cold room with a concrete floor.
She’d thought maybe she’d find an auxiliary kitchen, but she found several refractory tables with benches—no chairs—and wide, generous windows on both long sides of the room.
The windows on the left looked out over the lake, while the ones on the right faced the forest.
“This is like a big dining hall. Did the campers eat all their meals here?”
“Not every, no. Your grandparents would have a fish-fry night on Wednesday of every week, and they’d cook up the fish that the campers had caught when your grandpa took them out on the lake.
Bass, trout, whatever. Your grandma would have potato salad and baked beans, corn on the cob when it was readily available, that sort of thing, and all the campers were invited to come up there at six o’clock sharp for dinner, whether they’d been fishing or not.
This was in the summers, of course. Winters, if it wasn’t too cold, they’d have everyone for beef stew.
Winter months weren’t so busy, not as many people as in the summer by far.
But there were still people who wanted to ice fish and cross-country ski, skate on the pond, that sort of thing, so back in the eighties, they opened it up for campers. ”
Kit made a face. “People actually paid to sleep in those unheated cabins?”