The Chesapeake Bride Page 8

  “Thanks for calling it to my attention. It never occurred to me to check in on those old places that have been abandoned. I guess if I’d been here when it started to overgrow, I’d have taken notice, but once the grass grows up like that, you can’t even see the headstones.” He slowed his step just a little. It was nice to have her all to himself for just a few minutes, to not have to share her attention. There always seemed to be someone else around. Of course, last night was his doing, but still . . .

  “I should take a look around the island tomorrow and see which of the other home cemeteries need to be cleaned up,” he said. “It is kind of embarrassing, especially knowing you’re trying to sell some of those places. I don’t know what people would think.”

  “They’d think the places were abandoned, which many of them were. It’s sad for them, you know? The people who are buried there? It’s like no one remembers their names. Who they were, what they did. Who they loved. Where they’re buried.”

  “There are places like that all over the island. And you’re right. It is sad. Maybe when you start building, you can hire someone to keep up with them.”

  “That would work for as long as there’s building going on, but once the crews leave and the buyers move into their new houses, what then?”

  “I don’t know.” They’d reached the parking lot in front of the store. Owen wheeled the barrow to the shed and stopped in front of it. He knew better than to put away any of Ruby’s tools before cleaning them.

  “Go on in and ask Ruby to put some of her special salve on your palms. She’ll know what you want.”

  He brought the hose from the side of the house where it was hooked up and turned on the spray. He rinsed off the sickle and the rake, then turned off the hose and went into the store through the side door. He found Ruby and Cass in the kitchen, where Ruby was tending to Cass’s blisters.

  “Gigi, we have a wheelbarrow filled with grass outside. Where would you like me to dump it?”

  “On my compost pile, where else?” Ruby never took her eyes off Cass’s hand. “Why’d you let this girl with such soft hands rake so long?”

  “I didn’t know her hands were that soft.” He shook his head as if to shake out the thought. He didn’t want his mind to dwell on how soft Cass’s hands were. “I mean, I didn’t know she’d blister.”

  Ruby muttered something about someone not having the sense he was born with.

  “There you go, Cass.” Ruby snapped the lid on the jar of ointment and returned it to the cabinet where she kept it.

  “My hands feel better already. What’s in that stuff, anyway?”

  “Little of this, little of that.” Ruby closed the cabinet door and turned to Owen. “You going to take care of that compost today?”

  “On my way.” He went back out the side door.

  “And you be sure to be washing down those tools,” Ruby called after him.

  “Already done.”

  He’d just finished dumping out the grass and was about to wash out the wheelbarrow when he heard the door slam.

  “You should have saved some of that for me to do,” Cass said. “My mother always says a job’s not done until the cleanup is over.”

  “That’s a Ruby-ism, too.” He finished washing down the wheels and returned the barrow to the shed. He stood in the doorway, mentally debating whether the mower or the weed whacker would best finish the job around the headstones.

  “I got you into this. You didn’t have to help out.”

  “Of course I did.” Owen laughed. “It’s my island.”

  “How long before I get to call it my island, too?”

  “Depends. How long are you sticking around?”

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “Touché.” Maybe the weed whacker. The mower would be too difficult to maneuver around the stones, some of which were embedded in the ground. The weed whacker, definitely. He lifted it from its spot in the lineup of Ruby’s tools and put it into the wheelbarrow. He’d load it up with the grass they’d left near the gate and whatever the weed whacker cut down.

  “Are you going back?”

  “Yeah, I might as well finish up, cut around the grave markers with this.” He pointed to the weed whacker. “Then that plot is finished.”

  “I’ll walk back with you. I left my car down at the point. I stopped in to see how the renovations at Lis and Alec’s cottage are going.”

  “Things looked pretty good, last time I was there.” Owen headed toward the road pushing the wheelbarrow and Cass followed, a bottle of water in each hand. “The new roof is on, the HVAC guys were just finishing up, and the new kitchen was going in.”

  “Your sister has a good eye. She was certain that old place could be rehabbed, and she was right.” Cass grinned. “Of course, it took a lot of money and some good planning, but the cottage will be fabulous when it’s finished.”

  “Yeah, she was adamant that that was going to be their home. You know that Ruby and Harold lived there after they were married, raised their kids there, right? After they moved to the store, the cottage was vacant for years. Several contractors who looked at it told Lis she’d be better off tearing it down and starting over. It probably would have saved some money, but she wouldn’t hear it.”

  Cass nodded. “I heard the story. When Alec came to me and asked if I could design an addition and some bump-outs, I was skeptical. But once I talked to Lis, I knew I had to come up with something. She wanted the floors her family had walked on, she said. The stairs her grandmother—your grandmother—and her sisters had climbed every night to go to bed. Once I heard that, I knew I had to find a way to make it work.”

  “You did a great job. I’ve never seen Lis so happy.”

  “I suspect that has more to do with her rapidly approaching wedding than anything I did.”

  “I saw your name on the invite list.”

  “That was Alec’s doing, I’m sure. He and I worked together quite closely to get the island project pulled together. Of course, now that’s up in the air. Deiter Construction could, conceivably, be left with twenty-two properties we can’t build on.” She looked at Owen as if expecting him to volunteer some information she didn’t already have, but he was silent.

  They’d reached the graveyard, and Cass paused outside the fence while Owen went through the gate.

  “It’s nice now that you can see the gravestones.” She leaned on the fence, and it swayed but held.

  “It’ll be even nicer once I trim the rest of the grass away.” He pulled the string on the weed whacker and it roared to life.

  She went through the gate to look over the stones while he worked, and gathered the loose grass with her hands and dumped it into the wheelbarrow.

  “It looks great,” she said when he’d finished and the weed whacker was silent. “Nice and tidy. But I wish all the names and dates were legible. Still, there’s enough here that you can read the history of the family.”

  “Let me guess. You’re thinking in terms of marketing your houses again, how cool it would be if you could give the new buyers a little history of their property.” For some reason, the thought irritated Owen.

  Cass glanced up at him. “You say it as if it’s a bad thing.”

  “I don’t think it’s a particularly good thing to be using a family’s dead to promote a sale.”

  “That isn’t at all what I’m doing,” she snapped.

  He could tell by the look on her face that she was offended. Good. He was starting to become offended by the constant marketing of his home. “What would you call it?”

  “I call it making the best use of what I have to work with. Look, if I’m selling a property, of course I want to promote its best features. If the property happens to have a graveyard on it, I have to present that in a manner that potential buyers don’t think is . . . well, creepy. I mean, how would you feel about living in a house where there are graves right outside your door?”

  Her hands were on her hips and she’d remov
ed her sunglasses. The better to glare at him, he supposed.

  “I grew up with dead people right outside my door.” He snorted. “And no one ever tried to call it anything other than what it was: your dead relatives’ final resting place.”

  “Well, I don’t see where the families of all these ‘dead relatives’ have shown much respect for them. It seems to me that once people move from the island, they don’t look back very often, if at all. Do they ever think about what they left behind? Do they even remember the names of the people who were buried on their property?”

  Cass went to the far corner of the graveyard, the section she hadn’t gone through earlier, and knelt next to a small flat stone. “Rachel Singer. Born August second, 1854—died January twenty-fourth, 1856.” She looked up at Owen. “Think anyone ever wonders what happened to her? Why she died so young?”

  Cass took three steps to the right and pointed to one of the standing white headstones. “It’s another Mary—her middle name is gone, looks like it might have been Ida? Born 1815—died 1820. Looks like it says . . .” Cass drew closer. “ ‘Gone to fever.’ ” She looked over her shoulder. “She was five years old when she died. And look here.” Cass stepped to another grave marker. “Cora Singer, born May eighth, 1790—died November fourteenth, 1820. Looks like she was buried with a baby—see, under her name? Willie Singer, born November fourteenth, 1820—died November fourteenth, 1820. She must have died in childbirth and her baby died with her. It’s a sad story, Owen, but it’s her story. She lived here and died here.” Cass looked around the small plot. “There are a couple dozen stories here. Don’t you think someone should remember them? When do you suppose was the last time someone uttered their names?”

  Owen stared at her for a long moment. He wasn’t sure what he thought. “I don’t know. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that you want to remember them and you want the people who eventually build a home on this lot to know who came before them. But maybe it’s a little crass to use them—to use their names—to make money.”

  “Did you just call me crass? Seriously?” In the blink of an eye, Cass was standing in front of him, her eyes flashing with anger. “You think I spent the better part of my day out here, sweating my butt off, because I thought it would help my father make money?” She pushed him, both hands on his chest. “You’re even more of a jerk than I thought you were.”

  She turned on her heel and walked briskly to the road and headed toward the point, where she’d left her car.

  Owen stood in the graveyard, feeling stupid and small, and wondering how he could possibly mess things up more than he just had.

  Chapter Five

  Cass returned to the hotel in time to shower off the grass, sweat, and sunscreen and still make it to the veranda for tea, but even the prospect of spending an hour or so with Grace did little to improve her mood.

  “Crass?” she’d muttered as she stepped into the shower. “Yeah, Crass Cass, that’s me. Shame on me for wanting to shine the spotlight on generations of people who stood up for what they believed in, paid the price, and went on to settle an island that had been considered uninhabitable. Built homes, raised their families, stayed true to their way of life for a couple of hundred years. Bad Cass.”

  That Owen failed to understand she was, in fact, honoring Cannonball Island’s deceased made her see red. Names that had been forgotten for God only knew how long would be remembered. As she’d walked through the Singer plot, she’d envisioned a little memorial book to be given to each of her buyers. The booklets would contain historical photographs of the island and photos she’d take of the headstones of some of those buried on the buyers’ new properties so they’d know the names. She’d seek out photos of previous owners and include them. How better to take the fear from the fact that your new property contained a little graveyard than to put names and stories and faces to those buried there? Cass thought of it as a way of helping the new owners to accept, maybe even feel pride in, that their properties came with the remains of some of the prior occupants. After all, Deiter Construction would be asking premium prices for the limited number of homes they were going to build or renovate.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if she could remove the graves. That would be illegal and, to her mind, unethical. The islanders who were laid to rest there were there to stay; it was up to her to put the best possible spin on that. She thought she’d found a way to make their presence less objectionable to prospective buyers. Damn Owen for making her feel like an opportunist for doing her job and, at the same time, serving what she saw as the island’s best interests.

  “Someone looks like she got a bit of sun today,” Grace remarked as Cass took a seat at the tea table. Today’s group was smaller, though Joanna was present, as always.

  “Oh, yes.” Cass nodded and smiled at the server, who offered her a choice of teas. “Earl Grey today, thank you.”

  “At the beach?” Joanna asked.

  “No.” Oh, what the hell. Let’s test my theory right here and now. “Actually, I was on Cannonball Island, cleaning up an old family graveyard.”

  After a bit of a silence, Grace asked, “Anyone I know, dear?”

  Cass suppressed a smile. Was there anyone Grace didn’t know in St. Dennis or on Cannonball Island?

  “The Singer family. I noticed the grasses were so high around the graves you couldn’t even see the stones, so I thought I’d tidy things up a bit.”

  “I knew the Singer family well,” Grace said. “Edward and Paula were the last to raise a family there. They moved to Ohio to be with her folks back in the eighties—she wasn’t from these parts—but a few of their boys stayed around for a bit. I think the last of them left the island, oh, my, it must have been ten or fifteen years ago. No idea what happened to any them. I don’t recall any of them ever coming back.”

  “We found one of the sons, still in Ohio, and the company bought the property from the family. And last night, I met one of the descendants at a dinner.” Cass almost said, At Emily Hart’s, but she didn’t want to shine the spotlight on Emily’s operation, which, as had been pointed out, was probably illegal.

  “Oh, yes. Diane Jenkins. She and her husband have been staying here this week. We chatted at breakfast this morning.” Grace paused to stir her tea. “She mentioned she was going to look for her grandmother’s grave before they left.”

  “Well, now she’ll be able to find it. And others of her ancestors as well.”

  “That’s so nice of you,” Joanna said. “But if I may ask, what would motivate you to do something like that? Especially on such a hot day.”

  “Because the gravesite was a mess and the people buried there deserved better.” As she spoke, Cass remembered why she’d taken those first steps to clean up the Singer plot. Owen Parker’s cynicism be damned. “Besides, I think it would be nice for the people who buy the properties to know the family who built their home, the people who lived and died there and are buried there.”

  “What do you mean, buried there?” Joanna raised one eyebrow.

  Cass explained the islanders’ burial practice and her thoughts on documenting the family plots for the buyers of each of the properties.

  “Wait, are you saying you’d have a graveyard in your backyard?” Joanna’s expression left no doubt what she thought about that.

  “More like the front or side yard, dear.” Grace declined a refill from their server. “It’s actually a charming custom, one that’s been practiced for centuries. Remember, for a long time, there were no organized cemeteries in the rural areas. Do go visit the island, and you’ll see little white fences here and there. Those fences mark the final resting places of the families who lived in the nearby houses.” Grace turned her gaze to Cass. “How good of you to take it upon yourself to clean things up.”

  “Still, I don’t know if I’d want to buy a house that had its own graveyard.” Joanna was still frowning. “I don’t know if I could sleep at night that close to the dead.”

  “Dear, you’ve
been sleeping close to the dead from the time you checked in here,” Grace said. “My husband’s ancestors—and my husband, for that matter—are buried on the far side of the lawn. Actually, I believe you can see the markers from your room. As I said, it’s a custom in these parts, one I wish hadn’t gone out of favor. I think it’s a lovely idea to keep your ancestors close to where they lived.” Grace turned to Cass. “I applaud what you’re doing. I love the idea of honoring the island’s early inhabitants. It brings a sense of continuity and history to the houses you’ll be building, a weaving together of the past and the present. I think I’ll write about it in my column for the St. Dennis Gazette.”

  “When you put it that way, well, yes, I can see where it might be . . . interesting.” Joanna clearly was slowly coming around to the idea. “It would certainly make one feel more a part of the island.”

  “Exactly.” Cass took a sip of tea and looked into her cup to avoid Grace’s eyes. Once again, the older woman had saved the day.

  “Perhaps you’ll let me interview you sometime soon,” Grace said to Cass. “It would make a nice feature piece for my newspaper.”

  “Of course. Whenever you like.”

  “Now, do you have plans to clean up any of the other plots?” Grace asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about seeing if there’s any interest in forming a sort of committee on the island to take care of all of them. I do want to clean up what’s there now, but maintenance could be an issue in the future.”

  “I’m afraid there aren’t too many able-bodied residents of the island these days. The population has aged, and I don’t know of any young folks who have taken up residence there. I would think you’d be able to recruit my nephew Alec, though, since he’ll be an island resident after his marriage to Lisbeth. But I’m sure you’ll do the right thing, Cass. I have total confidence in you.” Grace stood to signal tea was over for the day, at least for her. “Now, my little break is over. Time for me to get back to work. Thank you all for joining me this afternoon. Do stop back again tomorrow.”