The House on Blackberry Hill: Jewell Cove #1 (Jewel Cove)
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Authors: Donna Alward
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C
ONTENTS
Jewell Cove—and
The House on Blackberry Hill
—would never have come to be without some wonderful people nudging me forward from the sidelines.
Many thanks to Margrete and the staff at Prescott House for being lovely, for inviting me to visit so often, and for making me fall in love with the library.
For Julie Cohen, who inspired me by going before, and for being a wise writer and wonderful cheerleader.
To Barb Wallace and Fiona Harper, my bestest peeps who were with me every agonizing, self-doubt-soaked step of the way, and to Jenna Bayley-Burke, who has the pleasure of saying “I told you so.”
To Jenn Schober, for being my guru of Zen and positivity.
And especially to Darrell, for being so very patient for so very long.
C
HAPTER
1
Abby Foster didn’t want to like the town of Jewell Cove. It was just her bad luck, then, that the place appeared annoyingly cheerful and quaint; a postcard-perfect sea town on the Maine coast dotted with colorful buildings nestled above the pristine inlet of Penobscot Bay. In response to her irritation, she cranked up the radio and rolled down the window. The breeze blew her hair back from her face, and she gave her head a toss as she continued into the town, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel along with the music. She had to be here. She didn’t have to like it.
But she couldn’t put the trip off any longer. Something had to be done with the house. The estate was paying the taxes on the damned place but her aunt Marian’s lawyer kept pestering her about the condition of the property and what she was going to do about it. The constant correspondence made it impossible to pretend the house didn’t exist. So she finally put in for a deferred leave from her job as an elementary school teacher and decided to deal with the family mess once and for all.
Family, heh. Abby gave a short laugh to herself. Up until a year ago, she hadn’t realized she actually
had
any family. And if it weren’t for Ian Martin, Marian’s pesky lawyer, she’d happily ignore the connection altogether. It was easy to resent a family she’d never known—a family who could have reached out to her at any time over the last twenty-five years and hadn’t. Ever since she’d received the so-called happy news that she was practically an heiress, she’d refused to use her inheritance from her great-aunt Marian for anything. She considered it somehow tainted, like guilt money sent too late to make amends for past transgressions. Not that she knew what those transgressions were other than years of silence. Abby’s Gram had staunchly refused to talk about her childhood, and Marian certainly hadn’t reached out. All that Abby knew was that Gram had been raised by her grandparents, who’d died right before she’d gotten pregnant with Abby’s father. In many ways, it was like Gram’s life hadn’t existed before the Prescotts took her in.
Abby frowned and picked up the slip of paper with directions scrawled on it. Now that she was here they didn’t exactly seem to make sense. She couldn’t tell if she was facing south or east, the way the road twisted around. Why hadn’t she bought a GPS or even printed the directions out from Google?
Seeing a gas station up ahead, Abby made a sharp turn and pulled into the broken paved lot. Situated at the edge of town, the old-fashioned gas pumps and faded sign definitely had a “vintage” feel to them—if you considered rundown to be vintage. She needed to fill up with gas anyway, and she could ask for directions to Foster Lane. She blew out a breath. For Pete’s sake, there was even a road named after the family … a side of the family, she reminded herself bitterly, who’d apparently been as rich as Croesus and left the rest of them to be poor as church mice.
A grizzled man in a navy shirt came out of the shop, wiping his hands on a rag as she pulled up to the gas pump. “Afternoon,” he called out, and when he smiled, she saw he was missing a few teeth. Great.
“Hi, there,” she answered back pleasantly, determined to be friendly. Gram had always said you could catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and the smoother this went the faster she’d be out of here, leaving nothing more than a vapor trail. “Fill it up, please.”
“Sure thing,” he replied. He went to the pump and opened her gas cap. “Nova Scotia plate. On vacation?”
“Um … sort of.” She pasted on her biggest smile. “I was wondering, can you tell me how to get to Foster Lane? The directions I have aren’t very clear.”
The old man’s head snapped up. “Foster Lane? Only thing up there is the house on Blackberry Hill.”
A little zing of excitement that she didn’t expect coursed through her. “The House on Blackberry Hill” sounded positively poetic, and much more evocative than plain old Foster House. “Yes, that’s it. The Foster mansion, right?”
The pump clicked off and the man put the gas cap back on and came to her window. “No one’s lived in the Foster place for years. Not since Marian got sick and had to go to the home.” He pushed his cap back on his head. “Heard some distant family member inherited it, but we’ve never heard a whisper from him. It’s a wicked mess up there after being left so long.”
Unease settled on her again, erasing the tingle of anticipation she’d felt. How much of a mess was she walking into? Maybe this grand mansion was nothing but a derelict disaster after all. The joke would be on her, wouldn’t it, if she had inherited a rundown money pit. “Could you give me directions to it anyway?”
He peered at her keenly. “Hey,
you
ain’t that relative, are ya? The one she left everything to?”
Abigail held in a sigh and tried to relax her shoulders. “That would be me. I’m Abigail Foster. Marian was my great-aunt.” It felt strange just saying the words.
He tilted his head and squinted at her. “You Iris’s blood, then? No one from Iris’s side’s set foot here since ’45.”
Her smile faltered at the reminder. She had to be here to do something about the house, but as she sat in her car, Abby realized that perfect strangers knew more about her family past than she did. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable feeling.
“The directions, please?”
He stepped back at her sharpish tone. “Sure, sure, right enough. Follow this road through town, then go another few miles and you’ll find Blackberry Hill Road off to your right, starting up the mountain. Foster Lane’s about halfway up, to the left.”
“Thank you so much.” She took some cash out of her wallet to pay for the gas and started her engine. But before she could drive away, the man—Bill, his shirt said—leaned his elbows on the window.
“You’re gonna want someone to have a look at the place, Ms. Foster. It’s going to need repairs for sure. I can give you some names…”
Abby forced a smile. “Maybe some other time, once I’ve had a chance to look around. But thanks for the directions, Bill. You’ve been a real help.”
He got the message and stood back, his lips pursed at the polite but clear indication that she wanted to be on her way. Abby lifted a hand in farewell as she pulled away from the pumps, knowing that she couldn’t hide forever. Sooner or later—probably sooner, once Bill started the proverbial ball rolling—the people of Jewell Cove would know that the Foster mansion and the bags of money that went with it all belonged to her. And if Abby knew anything about small towns, they’d all want to know what she planned to do with it; they’d all have suggestions and want their piece of the pie, wouldn’t they?
She rested her elbow along the open window as she slowed coming into town limits. She’d driven through fog until somewhere around the New Brunswick border, but now there was nothing but blue skies overhead as she crawled down Main Street.
Her first impression of the town had been that it reminded her of the seaside villages on Nova Scotia’s South Shore—a cheerful kaleidoscope of colorful homes and businesses above a small but vibrant harbor. That was fairly accurate, she realized, as fishing and pleasure boats bobbed on the surface of the cove. She slowed to watch a restored schooner slide effortlessly into the harbor to dock. The water glittered in the summer sun and the tangy scent of the sea filled her nostrils.
She paused at the one and only traffic light. The town looked like something off a brochure—complete with patriotic flags along storefronts and pots of cheerful geraniums, white petunias, and trailing lobelia. She snorted. Nothing was ever as perfect as it seemed on the outside. Especially innocent-looking, quaint towns with well-tended flower beds and wreaths on the doors and little girls in pigtails walking down the sidewalk eating cones of ice cream. Abby couldn’t help but think these little towns were painted so cheerfully as a form of defiance against the tragedy that always seemed to surround them. Fishermen lost at sea, that sort of thing. Resilience in the face of adversity. She’d seen enough of that growing up, moving from small town to small town.
Bill’s directions had been to follow Main Street to the end and turn on to Blackberry Hill Road, and from there up the mountain to Foster Lane. The only problem was Main Street didn’t end until it met the coastal highway again. She’d have to guess at how far a “couple of miles” was and hope she didn’t miss it.
She lifted her chin and let out a breath of relief as the sign for Blackberry Hill appeared. If she had her way, the house was going on the market and the sooner the better. She’d be free of this mess and could go back to Halifax with a clear conscience. No more nagging lawyer invading her e-mail and voice mail every few weeks.
She flicked on her blinker and made the turn.
* * *
Tom Arseneault put down the phone and sat back in his chair, his brow wrinkled in what was, lately, a constant state of worry.
Everyone said the economy was rebounding. He’d yet to see the proof. That was the second job he’d bid on that had gone under. A man needed to make a living and people simply weren’t spending. As it was, he was nearly finished with a basement reno project and the only thing on the immediate schedule was Jess Collins’s back deck at her shop. Seeing as Jess was family, Tom didn’t stand to make a lot of profit from that deal.
When the phone rang again he almost didn’t answer it. It seemed the only time it rang lately was to give him bad news. But on the third ring he couldn’t stand hearing the incessant chime of Beethoven’s Fifth—his assistant Cassidy’s attempt at office humor. The assistant who, at the moment, was taking yet another sick day. He picked up.
“Arseneault Contracting,” he said.
“Tom. It’s Meggie.”
His aunt. He relaxed in his chair and crossed an ankle over his knee. “Hey, Aunt Meggie. What can I do for you?”
Meggie didn’t waste time on pleasantries. “I have some news about Josh.”
His stomach clenched. His cousin Josh was still living in Hartford, but Tom wasn’t sure how long that was going to last. Josh’s wife, Erin, had been killed in action overseas on her last tour as an army medic. There wasn’t a lot of reason for Josh to stay in Hartford anymore.