Chapter 7
Punkin has a lot of instructions for me on her first day of school. Number one, I am not to call her Punkin in front of the other kids.
“My name is Elise,” she reminds me. “Say it.”
“Your name is Elise. Elise Frossard.”
She sighs. “No one will be able to pronounce it, I bet. Not even Emily.”
“Miss Flanagan to you,” I tell her. “If it’s easier, you can call yourself Elise Cooper.”
“It’s too late for that. I’ll have to bear it, that’s all.” She arranges her insulated lunch sack on her lap and stares out the window at the foggy sea that blurs in and out of view as we roll down the winding road to the village. “At least I have a whole three weeks until I’m the teacher’s kid.”
“You’re not looking forward to that?”
Punkin turns back to scowl at me. “Don’t touch the maps while I’m gone, okay? I have a system.”
—
The real estate agent is waiting on the porch when I return from the school.
It’s one of those warm, dry days toward the end of September, when the weather doesn’t want to let go of its old summer habits, and I’ve left the windows open to collect the breeze.
She rises from one of the wicker chairs and tells me I should be more careful.
“The odds of a burglary on Winthrop Island are small,” she says, “but never zero.”
“Well, he’s welcome to help himself,” I tell her. “It would make my job a little easier right now.”
Sedge Peabody connected us. As we left the reception after my father’s memorial service, I asked him who I should talk to about putting the house on the market. He was taken aback.
“Put the house on the market?” he said. “But why?”
“Um, because I need the money?”
“Oh.” He scratched his head and said that would probably be Bixie Huxley.
“Bixie Huxley?” I asked. “That’s her real name?”
“Last I heard. But there hasn’t been a house changing hands around here in a couple of years.”
“Let me guess. She’s sixty years old, she divorced her husband after he had an affair with her best friend, and she’s summered on the island all her life in the same house her grandparents built.”
“Wrong,” said Sedge. “She’s in her seventies, I think.”
“And there’s nobody else?”
“Not that I can think of. There’s not much scope for career advancement on an island with one house listing every leap year or so.”
Still, Bixie knows her stuff. She wears a J.McLaughlin shirtdress in a colorful geometric pattern from at least a decade ago and a pair of red Stubbs I like a little cream. I top us both off and sit back down. Bixie’s wearing a couple of vintage enamel Hermès bracelets that clink against the coffee cup when she lifts it from the saucer.
“So how much?” I ask.
“Let’s say eight point four to start. But you’ll need to get presumption of death before you can close. Or else petition the court for administration.”
“How long will that take?”
She shrugs. “Depends on how good a lawyer you hire. Which will cost you. And of course you’ll need to clear the liens on the property.”
I sputter out coffee. “Excuse me?”
“I take it you haven’t done a title search yet?”
“What’s a title search?”
“Oh boy,” she says. “The good news is, eight million should cover all the claims on the property from the mortgage and the second mortgage, both of which are in significant arrears.”
“That’s the good news?”
“The bad news is, it might take a year or two to find a buyer and close the deal.”
“I thought Winthrop Island was an elite housing market.”
“It’s elite, all right,” she says. “But it’s unique.”
“What does that mean?”
Bixie scowls at the brown stain spreading from the corner of the ceiling. “Illiquid.”
I stir in some additional cream with a tarnished spoon. “That eight million dollars. I assume it includes the loan from the Dumonts?”
“Oh Jesus,” she says.
—
Before Bixie leaves, she makes me promise to exercise a little more caution.
“This end of the island’ll be empty by the end of the month,” she says. “Nobody to hear you scream.”
“The Summerly caretaker is right next door. Nobody’s going to mess with him.”
She gives me a stern look. “I’m headed back to Greenwich myself on Wednesday. But my caretaker’s around if you need a hand with anything. He’s in the cottage with his wife. Nice couple. Steve and Jenny. The Huxley place, on the northern side. Sound Road.”
“Steve and Jenny,” I say. “Sound Road. Got it.”
Once Bixie departs on a current of Chanel No. 5, I drop to the chair in front of my father’s desk. We made a lot of progress over the weekend, but you wouldn’t know it. There’s just so much. Piles of unsorted mail. Bills, no doubt, that he couldn’t pay. Never intended to pay.
But ten million dollars?
How—how how how—did my father accumulate ten million dollars in debt?
My brain whispers—And that’s just the debt you know about.
This house. My one legacy. When my siblings dressed in their designer clothing and drove around in their special cars and walked the halls of their country villas and city apartments, I would say to myself—quietly, because I didn’t want to think of myself as somebody who envied the wealth of others—At least you have the house.
Not that I was calculating my own inheritance, for God’s sake. It was just—there. An asset of great value that would one day, far in the future, rightfully belong to me.
A comforting thought, as I struggled to pay the bills in the here and now.
It turns out, like everything else to do with my father, it was just a mirage.
I settle my gaze on the envelope Ben gave me. The bump where the key sits inside it. The single hint my father left behind.
Well, it must unlock something, right?
—
The basement is not large. I flip the ancient switch at the bottom of the stairs and the single bare bulb blinks awake, shedding a dim yellow light on the four walls and the shadowy entrance to the crawl space.
In the corner squats the boiler—probably the same one installed by my grandparents during the Roaring Twenties.
Shelves line the walls, bearing stacks of vintage canned goods, paint pots, rusted tools, cobwebs.
A damp mustiness thickens the air. I pull my cardigan close around my shoulders and walk the perimeter, scanning the shelves and the bare walls and the corners for anything that might have a lock on it.
When I was a kid, my dad used to send me down here to fetch things.
Old board games, maybe, or cans of WD-40.
I remember how I used to swallow my fear and climb down the stairs, one by one, calling out to scare away any ghosts that might be hanging out among the cobwebs.
Once, I mentioned those errands to my mother.
She was horrified. What on earth is that man thinking, she said. That place is haunted.
The same apprehension returns to me now. A shudder inside my gut.
I fold my arms and feather my gaze along the familiar shelves, sheltering the same cans and tools.
A whole new generation of spiders spinning identical cobwebs.
Along the walls and in corners, I see no obvious home for the key in my pocket.
No safe. No neglected file cabinet. No hidden doors built into the stone and plaster.
At the far end of the basement, the crawl space stretches from the level of my waist all the way to the back of the house.
A short, wide window used to illuminate the area, but decades of dust have long since blocked out the daylight.
I peer into the gloom and pull my phone from my back pocket.
Swipe on the flashlight and shine it along one wall, then along the back where the ridges of the window interrupt the stone.
As I drag the light along the back wall, it finds a large, rectangular object humped in one corner.
I lean forward so my elbows rest on the crawl ledge. The gloom is so deep, the must and cobwebs so thick, I can’t make out any details. What this thing is made of. What it might be.
Why it’s crammed there at the back of the crawl space, where nobody can see it.
I raise my knee and climb onto the ledge.
As I work my way to the back of the space, it occurs to me that I probably should have put on some protective clothing.
A mask, at least. God knows how many rodents have made their nests here, how much mold and toxins have settled into its crannies.
At first, I figured the floor was made of stone that had been plastered over, but in fact it’s dirt, packed hard.
This is stupid, I think. This is so stupid.
I clutch the phone in my right fist. The flashlight beam bounces luridly from the walls and from the ceiling that brushes my hair. The air reeks of old garage—a chemistry of motor oil and dust and decades.
A few feet away from the object, I lift my phone to shine the flashlight along the sides. It looks like a crate, underneath the grime. A wooden crate, nailed shut.
I grasp one corner. It won’t budge. Whatever’s inside, it’s heavy.
I wipe the dirt and cobwebs from the side, hoping to find a label of some kind. Nothing appears. Plain wood, strangely fresh. As new as if someone had nailed it together a week ago, then set the spiders on it to feed and breed.
I stick my phone back in my butt pocket and grab the crate with both hands. Winch it back and forth until it comes free from its resting place.
A music of glass clinks from within.
Knee by knee I retreat, dragging the crate awkwardly with both hands until my legs reach air and I shinny down the ledge. The lightbulb casts a seedy glow on the wooden slats.
You should call for help, I think. You should get Ben to lift this beast.
I stick my phone in my back pocket and drag the crate to the edge of the ledge.
Engage your core, I tell myself, and Ben’s voice clamors in my head—What the fuck do you think you’re doing, girl?
I dig my fingers between the slats and engage my core.
The crate teeters into my arms, so heavy that I brace the leading edge against my thighs for an eye-watering second before the whole box slides in a controlled descent to the floor. The rattle of glass makes me wince.
I wipe my hands on my jeans and rummage the shelves until I find a hammer. Work the claw between the lid and the slats and pull the wood free.
Bottles. Over a dozen of them, as clean and new as the day they were filled.
I lift one free and examine the label. In this dim light, I can’t read the writing. I carry it upstairs, into the kitchen, and squint at the crisp letters printed on the paper.
Old Orkney, it says, in elaborate script. Fine Scotch Whiskey.
And underneath—BOTTLED IN CASK, 1926.