Page 56

Stormy of Silver Cove

By Marshall Merriweather

Cam turned the pages, examining them closely. The rest of the manuscript was in Ada’s familiar handwriting. Cam flipped back to the cover. There had been two writers. Suddenly, Cam could picture it: Marshall had replaced the cover that Ada had handwritten—the one bearing her name—with a second one. The one with a big, fat lie. She wondered how he had done it, and when. And had no one noticed that the cover page was in a different handwriting? Or maybe they had and just hadn’t realized the significance of it. Maybe they had thought that the great man himself might have wanted to put at least one page of his work in his own pen.

As she looked through the manuscript, Cam thought of what Francine said about the way the story had been changed. In the initial draft, it was clear that the protagonist was Polly, the daughter of the family, not Jack, her brother—the way it was in the book. Marshall had changed that, though. Apparently, his one contribution to the book was to relegate the girl to a minor character.

And as she flipped the pages, another name caught her eye—Mr. McGrew, the farmer in whose barn the young girl had secretly kept the horse—and something tugged at her. Cam rummaged through her bag and found the newspaper clipping about the stunt Ada had pulled putting the goat on top of the schoolhouse. The farmer’s name in the Silver Cove Weekly article was named Vern McGrew. The connection sent ripples of irritation through Cam. Stormy of Silver Cove contained so much of Ada. She had poured her life, a life that had been so tragically brief, onto its pages. The character’s name might seem like a minor detail, just like the fact that Ada had named Stormy after her favorite pet, something Marshall had probably never known. But by appropriating her work, Marshall Merriweather had taken more than just credit. He had stolen a part of her very soul.

Cam resisted the urge to rip the cover off and ball it up. The poor docent would probably freak out over that. And Ada seemed agitated, too. Cam swore she could sense the ghost darting around the house with a warm current of air swirling around her. Instead of resorting to vandalism, Cam took out her phone and snapped pictures of the cover page and several ones inside. Maybe this would be enough to corroborate what Cam was now entirely convinced was more than just a theory. Was this what Ada had wanted her to find?

She put her phone away and approached the desk. “Are there any items here that belonged to Ada Poulson Merriweather? Any papers or writings?”

“No writings, except, of course, the manuscript that was dictated to her,” the young woman said. “We do have a pair of needlework gloves that she wore on her wedding day and a wedding portrait over there.” She pointed to a case that held the same picture Cam had seen at the library.

“What would have happened to all her things when she died? Her clothing, her books, things like that?” Cam asked. She still didn’t know how the dress, apron, and cookbook had wound up at the tag sale.

“Some might have been given away, possibly to her parents,” she said. “The less-fine clothes might have even gone to servants. And it’s possible that they were just tucked away here in Merriweather House. After Mr. Merriweather’s death in 1956, there was a small fire and much of the contents of the attic were destroyed.”

Cam sighed. Ada’s things had been scattered to the four winds—the ones that hadn’t burned to a crisp. “Okay, I appreciate it,” she said, turning to leave.

“Before you go, let me give you another brochure about our fundraising efforts.” The docent offered Cam yet another paper. “The museum operates on the royalties from Stormy, and they’re actually quite modest. We’re raising a capital fund to someday restore not just the first floor of Merriweather House, but also the upstairs, where the bedchambers were, as well as the lower-floor kitchen and servants’ quarters.”

Cam took it politely and stuffed it into her coat pocket on her way to the door. As she passed a giant, gilt-framed oil painting of Marshall Merriweather, another wave of anger swelled inside her. She paused for a moment and took in his haughty, poker-up-the ass expression and then extended her hand to offer him her middle finger.

Back outside, Cam pulled up Miles’s number.

“Hey, Mac,” he greeted her.

“Hi, Miles,” Cam replied. “I’ve got something to show you that you are going to want to see.”

“Pepperoni sounds just fine, Mac,” Miles said, his voice oddly bright.

Cam was confused for half a second but then realized why he was speaking strangely. He must be near Roxy. “Roger that,” she said. “Just call me when you can.”

Cam’s stomach was growling as she headed back to Birdie’s. She realized that she hadn’t actually eaten yet. She had only gotten coffee and a mimosa down before she had sprung out of the house on her mission. As she walked and tried to untangle her knotted thoughts, she was grateful for the cold air stinging her cheeks. It felt clarifying. She felt sure, dead sure, that Ada had written Stormy of Silver Cove and that Marshall had taken credit for it. But would the code in the cookbook, along with the two different handwriting styles in the manuscript, be enough to prove it? Cam couldn’t wait to talk to Miles to see what he thought.

And her hangry thoughts darkened as she considered how annoyed Izzy had looked when Cam left the house. Izzy was used to getting what she wanted, whatever it was. A priceless sculpture? It was hers. Credit for someone else’s work? Just a matter of writing a big enough check. Cam’s anger was coming to a slow boil.

When she arrived at Birdie’s, she was surprised to find a sleek black sedan parked out front with a driver sitting inside. Whatever was going on, Cam knew that it was Izzy-related. No one else in Silver Cove drove anything so posh. Maybe her publicist was visiting? She steeled herself for whatever was coming.

Cam found Izzy alone in the kitchen. She was wearing her coat and throwing a few things into a vast, quilted Chanel tote.

“Are you leaving already?” Cam asked.

“No,” Izzy answered, fishing out her dark glasses and popping them on with impatience. “We are. The car’s waiting to take us to the airport, and the jet will be ready when we get there to take us back to New York.”

“But I thought we weren’t leaving until tomorrow,” Cam said, confused.

“Change of plans,” Izzy said. “There’s too much going on here. Why don’t you hurry up and grab your things? I’ll be waiting in the car.” Apparently registering the stunned expression on Cam’s face, she said, “What is it? Okay, fine, I’ll pay you for an extra week’s work. Whatever. Let’s just get out of here. You can tell Avery and Birdie goodbye for me.”

As the screen door slammed behind Izzy, the anger Cam had been feeling suddenly caught fire, like grease to a gas burner. Who was she, Izzy Jones, to blow into Silver Cove and just expect that she could get her way if she threw around enough money? And not just get her way, Cam fumed, but get away with taking credit for other people’s work? Was Izzy any better, really, than Marshall Merriweather?

Okay, sure, Izzy at least paid the people whose work she appropriated. The memoir and lifestyle books that had been written for her, the social media accounts that she allegedly handled herself but actually took a small team, even the cool online playlists of songs that she regularly “curated”—those were all just business arrangements. But still they meant that Izzy was in the business of passing off her employees’ creativity and hustle as her own. Cam would bet that even that long, silky blond hair wasn’t actually her own either.

Cam was part of the problem, she knew. Her own career—her comfortable existence, even—had been built on that very system. It was the definition of being a ghostwriter, never putting her own name out there, letting other people pay her for that silence. And for so long, she had been okay with that. She had told herself that she preferred it that way. But after learning about what had happened to Ada—the poor woman was so mad about having her writing stolen from her that she literally came back from the dead to fix it—Cam was seeing things in a new light.

Ghostwriting no longer felt like a comfort. It felt like erasure. What if she died tomorrow, like Ada had? What would she leave behind? All those people who had made her recipes—maybe they had cooked them for their families, shared them with friends, made them their signature dishes at cookouts and birthday dinners—they would never know her.