Ben, who’d not left yet, pulled her aside in the kitchen. “I know this is all last minute, but I want you to know you can trust me. I’ll take good care of your clients.”
He put a reassuring hand on her arm, which only flustered her further.
“These aren’t just any tourists, Ben. And it’s their daughter’s wedding weekend. They’re of the yacht set, not the Boston Whaler set, understand?”
To her consternation, this only made him laugh. “It sounds like they could’ve gone anywhere in the world to celebrate their special weekend, and yet they’ve chosen the Cape?”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“Then let’s give them the Cape.”
After that, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. Ben took off to the docks to prepare for the Suttons. Ezra disappeared with his paint supplies and returned with a carload of lobster pots. By then Holly had called Paige, and the canceled clambake seafood was on its way over.
“Is it possible your high school boyfriend helped save the night?” Linus asked. They were standing on the front porch as the first of the Sutton party in a behemoth Defender pulled into the clamshell drive.
“Just smile and nod,” Holly told him, “until the last damn lobster is boiled.”
Ezra
He’d long been a believer that the space a person resides in matters. Architects understood this concept. Structure and design could enhance the human experience: inspiring education in institutions, justice in courthouses, and faith in places of worship. There were reasons prisons were designed as monolithic blocks, and why the Library of Congress paid homage to Parisian opera houses and Notre-Dame to the imagined gates of heaven.
In its own humble way, the Cranberry left an impression on those who passed through its doors. Ezra had seen it in the eyes of guests and he’d felt it in the time he’d spent there. But the moment Holly showed him to the library to repaint the sailboats, he knew he’d stumbled into the best of it.
A few years ago, when Ezra first retired, Rachel convinced him to convert the guest room into a small studio where he could paint without intrusion. “Make it your own,” she told him. “It will inspire you.” What resulted was a utilitarian space befitting a retired man with a creaky easel and a canvas bag of oiltubes. Though his ever-sensible left lobe found its workable, his right lobe, where the artist resided, had always yearned for more. Standing beneath the vaulted ceiling in Holly’s library, Ezra was reminded of that yearning.
Had he been given license to engineer a space with more incandescent light, loftier pitches, and softer shadows, he still could not have dreamed up this room. Spartan as it was in its current state, the bones were exquisite. But that was not all. There was something more, something beyond the view outside and the light spilling in that he could not quite put his finger on. Curious, Ezra looked around for its source. Void of furniture beyond the antique desk and chair, and the stepladder Holly had brought in, there was nothing that lent itself to the strange energy Ezra was sensing. There were no other creatures, besides himself and Bruce, curled quietly into his bed. There was not even a window open, not a breeze to raise the hair on the back of one’s neck. Still, Ezra felt it.
A man of medicine, he did not subscribe to the paranormal. Neither did he consider himself religious, though he did have faith. He was not artistically brilliant, though he believed in the muse. Was that what he felt in this room? Ezra went to the windows and looked out.
Ideas and energies, he knew, had scientific explanations, as did the human brainwave. But beneath the towering bookshelves and lofty rafters of that splendid forgotten room, Ezra felt an energy he just could not explain. Still perplexed, he unpacked his materials.
If the goldfinch painting had moved him artistically, it was easy to understand why he’d been further moved by the story of the little girl whose death had inspired it, young Adeline Spicer.Ezra did not believe Adeline was responsible for the energy in the library. Nor did he think it might be some apparition of her mother, Anna, who purportedly loved books and art and wished to inspire in her children contemplation of lofty ideas. Still, as he mixed paints and climbed the ladder with his palette and brush, he decided he wouldn’t judge another for wondering if the room was haunted.
Shaking it off, Ezra got to work. He addressed the body of each boat first, with a mix of umber brown and sienna to re-create its wooden hull. While it dried, he played with different pigments for the red-and-white sails. The longer he painted, the greater he felt the energy. The air, suddenly electric, filled his lungs. His legs felt especially sturdy on the ladder as he climbed up and down, the brush did not shake in his hand even when his arm tired. The boats popped against the glass, their faded little sails signaling to him where to retouch, how much to layer. For two hours he went up and down the ladder, redefining the boats, their cloth sails, their jaunty masts that bent against the wind. Suddenly it dawned on Ezra that the strange feeling might not be coming from the library after all. Rather, it might well be coming from within, some dormant sentiment roused. Was it possible the library was drawing it out of him?
The library’s sailboats were nowhere as nuanced as the goldfinch, whose every feather lifted off the parlor fresco. In fact, there was something almost crude in the sailboats’ brushstrokes and shape, which was the point. Meant to be viewed from across the room from a vantage point lower than their position on the plate glass window, they had the same effect as Impressionist works: the loose strokes came together at a distance. And how perfectly, Ezra thought, a fleeting moment of boats skimmingacross the bay captured. Ezra wondered who had painted them, originally. It must have been done during a happier time, while Adeline was still alive. They seemed a cheerful missive: a suggestion of drifting home or away, a pair of sails catching the wind before taking off.
And then, suddenly, the energy he’d felt lifted like ether carrying in another direction. Exhausted, Ezra climbed down the ladder, legs wobbling. Hit by a sudden wave of thirst and hunger, he guzzled the water and devoured the scone Holly had left him and considered his work. Only then did he become aware of the time: somehow the morning had slipped into afternoon. She had warned that the wedding party would be arriving, that the inn would be taken over until after the weekend. He hoped to catch her now before all the hullaballoo. He needed to show her the boats.
The lobby was eerily quiet as he passed through with his wet brushes, especially given the frenzied preparations he’d skirted that morning. Ezra wondered where everyone had gone, if there had been some kind of emergency. He found the emergency in the kitchen.
Holly insisted he come in anyway, but as soon as he did he wished he hadn’t. Tensions were high, something he’d not witnessed before. Slipping behind the staff on his way to the sink, Ezra kept his head down. But he could not stop his ears from overhearing. There was a new plan underway, and it was all hands on deck.
Any thought of unveiling the sailboats in the library was abandoned. Instead, Ezra found himself kneeling in the grass outside the kitchen door setting up lobster pots. After rummaging around in his basement, he’d secured all ten of the oneshe owned and delivered them in the back of his Jeep. “Wow. You must really like lobster,” Oliver joked, as he helped unload them. The truth was that when Amy got married, they’d done an old-fashioned lobster boil for the rehearsal dinner, just as the inn was tonight. “We’re going to need more propane tanks,” Oliver said, standing back to survey their setup.
“We?” Ezra said.
Moments later Ezra was bouncing along in the passenger seat of Oliver’s truck, on the way to Chatham Hardware. Soon they were back at the inn, filling the pots with water. Nobody had asked this of Ezra. In fact, nobody questioned it, either. There was such hurry and flurry surrounding the guests, who, judging from the slew of luxury vehicles parked out front, appeared to have arrived in the interim, that if Ezra’s presence was acknowledged at all it was to give him a job to do.
If the arrival of guests and their cocktail hour was the first storm, there was a lifesaving lull when the shuttle arrived and ferried the guests away to the oyster farm. Ezra hadn’t been privy to any of the celebrations thus far, working as he was in the newly designated lobster boil area, but soon a drove of staff reappeared in the kitchen like marathoners coming into recovery tents. Through the screen door he caught snippets of chitchat as they snacked and regrouped, and there were even bursts of laughter, which cheered him.
“I can’t believe we sold them on the oyster farm tour,” Holly said.
“Bait and switch!” Linus quipped.
“The mother looked suspicious, but the bride loved the Instagram potential.”
“What did the bride call it?”
