1
“LeeAnn will never believe this without proof!” Annie Dawson positioned her digital camera to capture in pixels the bumper crop of vegetables spread before her—green beans, cucumbers, summer squash, and cherry tomatoes.
A few snapshots later she repositioned herself to include part of her home, Grey Gables, in additional photos. “There. Now she can’t protest that this vegetable patch was from someone else’s garden.”
Annie could hardly blame her daughter for the expected disbelief. Every day since planting the garden, she had anticipated something killing off the plants before harvesttime. This, indeed, had happened each time she had tried growing vegetables while raising her daughter in Texas. LeeAnn had taken to teasing her mother anytime they entered a home-and-garden store with, “Mom, just step away from the veggie seeds!” Who knew that moving to Stony Point, Maine, would make such a difference in her vegetable cultivation ability?
Just wait until you open the homemade pickles I send you, Annie thought, an impish grin lighting her face as she tucked the camera into a pocket of her jeans. Both hands on her hips, she surveyed the bounty, considering how to gather the day’s harvest.
A gentle breeze off the harbor at Stony Point teased the soft curls of her blonde-gray hair. Stony Point had become her hometown since the death of her grandmother, Elizabeth “Betsy” Holden, and Annie’s inheritance of Grey Gables, her grandparents’ Victorian home. The notoriously changeable Maine weather was serving up a fine August day on a sunbeam platter. But it would be wise to pick the vegetables before her adopted state decided to change the menu.
“That’s it!” Annie turned on a heel and strode toward the back door of the house. Pausing to stomp any loose dirt from her shoes, she hoped the harvest basket she had just remembered seeing in the attic was as large as she was thinking.
The screen door clicked behind her; a gray cat looked up from lapping water out of a bowl in the kitchen. The word lapping didn’t do justice to the dainty procedure, though. To Annie it always looked like Boots, Betsy’s cat that Annie had also inherited along with the Holden estate, merely lowered her head near the dish, and water droplets leapt nimbly onto her tongue. Not once had she ever seen water dripping from a whisker or found water on the floor. It wasn’t that Boots never caused some occasional mayhem, but water was never an element.
The cat stared at Annie as she crossed the kitchen on her way to the hallway. Annie paused only long enough to stoop down for a quick stroke on the top of Boots’s head. Before the cat could rise up on all fours, she had already moved past. “I’m on a mission, Boots! There will be time for play later.” Had she not been so focused, Annie might have felt the cat’s stare pierce her back like a Lilliputian spear.
Up two flights of stairs, Annie paused as she entered the attic, trying to remember where the harvest basket was perched. A vague impression urged her to the left along the wall, as much as the stacks of miscellany and furniture jumbled there allowed. “Ah, that’s right. I moved it when I came up for the garden stakes.” She took another step forward, looking for the battered side table on which she had placed it, but Annie halted with a jerk as her peripheral vision caught a glimpse of gray fur.
“No, no, no, Boots and I will not have more mice in our home,” she cried. “Grey Gables is not a hostel for roaming rodents.” Annie gingerly reached over to a nearby shelf to grab the cracked pottery bowl resting on it. Trying to stalk as much like her cat as possible, Annie flipped the bowl over to capture her prey as she came closer. She bent lower, preparing to spring forward before the mouse could run. Squinting, she placed the bowl on the floor near her feet.
“What on earth?” Annie said aloud.
As she bent closer, it became more obvious that whatever was on the floor was not living. And it was not a mouse. Pushing an old three-legged stool aside, Annie could see more of the wayward creature, which was actually … a purse. The strangest purse she’d ever seen.
Annie picked it up, surprised at the sleek softness of the fur. Its shape almost formed a circle. At the top, an interlacing pattern decorated a sterling silver clasp in serious need of polishing. Three tassels adorned the front. Opening the clasp, she peered inside and then reached in to pull out a number of silver bands. Annie held one of the bands up to the light. Corroded like the clasp, she could still tell the piece was etched with an intricate design. After setting the band on the stool, she examined the rest of the bands and found them to be three different sizes, but all were etched. Even with the bright summer light streaming in the eyebrow windows Annie could not discern what the lines of etching formed.