A Northern Light(57)

There is one more Chester letter. It is our of order in the stack, dated earlier than the previous one. Maybe it will tell me what I want to know.





June 25, 1906

Dear Grace—



...Three of us fellows went up to the lake and camped in a small house that one of the boys owns. We had a dandy time even though there were no girls. We went in swimming in the afternoon, and the water was great. I went out in the canoe in the evening and wished you had been there...





I stop reading. All of Chester's good and dandy times, I realize, took place on a lake. In a canoe.

Earlier that day, when the men had brought Grace's body in, we all thought that her companion, Carl Grahm, had drowned, too, and that it would only be a matter of time until his body was found.

But there was no Carl Grahm. I couldn't find him anywhere. There was only Chester Gillette. And Chester Gillette could handle a boat. Chester Gillette could swim.

You have your answer now, don't you? I say to myself. That's what you get for prying.

But myself is not listening. She refuses to listen. She's picking up another letter and another and another, frantically looking for a different answer.

She feels sick, so sick she could vomit.

Because she thinks she knows why Chester brought Grace here.

And it wasn't to elope.





ico ? sa ? he ? dron


"And don't you ever go in a room by yourself with a strange man..."

"Yes, Pa."

"...no matter what the reason. Even if he says you're just to bring him a towel. Or a cup of tea."

"I won't, Pa."

"And you watch yourself around the help, too. Workmen and barkeeps and such."

"I'll be all right, Pa. The Morrisons run a respectable place."

"That may be, but any low-down jack with a few dollars in his pocket can take a room at a fancy hotel. Things ain't always what they seem, Mattie. You remember that. Just because a cat has her kittens in the oven, it don't make 'em biscuits."

Things are never what they seem, Pa, I thought. I used to think they were, but I was" wrong or stupid or blind or something. Old folks are forever complaining about their failing eyesight, but I think your vision gets better as you get older. Mine surely was.

I'd seen Miss Wilcox as a spinster teacher with a fondness for the mountains. She wasn't. She was Emily Baxter, a lady poet who'd run away from her husband. I'd seen Mr. Loomis as someone who was just being kind whenever he brought Emmie Hubbard eggs or milk. He wasn't. He was most likely the reason her three younger kids all had blond hair. I'd seen Royal Loomis as too fine to ever notice the likes of me, but now we were out driving together every night and he was going to buy me a ring. I'd seen my chances of working at one of the hotels as zero, but there I was, just two weeks before Decoration Day and the official start of the summer season, sitting next to my father in the buckboard on my way to the Glenmore. My mamma's old carpetbag—packed with my dictionary, a few other books from Miss Wilcox, my nightclothes, and two of Mamma's better skirts and waists that Abby had taken in for me—was on the floor between us, heavy as a hod of bricks.

Two days before, I'd gone into the barn to fetch Pleasant out and found him stiff and cold in his stall. No one knew why. He wasn't ailing. Pa said it was old age. He was upset when I told him. He couldn't be without a mule. He needed one to harrow the crops and deliver milk and pull stumps, but a good one cost about twenty dollars and he didn't have it. He was far too stubborn to borrow it, but old Ezra Rombaugh in Inlet, whose son and new daughter-in-law were working his land with their oxen, said he'd sell Pa his six-year-old for fourteen dollars and let him pay off the cost so much every week. That's when he decided I would go to the Glenmore. He didn't like the idea any more in May than he had in March, but he had no choice.

I should have been excited. I should have been beside myself. I'd wanted to go to the Glenmore for months, ever since Weaver and I first cooked up the idea over the winter. And I was finally going. But it felt bittersweet. I wasn't working to get myself to Barnard. I was working because Pa needed help to pay for the new mule.

My mamma once had a beautiful glass basket that my aunt Josie gave her. It was a deep indigo blue, with a braided handle and ruffled edges, and it had SOUVENIR OF CAPE MAY written on it. Mamma loved it. She'd kept it on a shelf in the parlor, but Lou took it down one day to play with it and dropped it on the floor. It smashed into a million pieces. Lawton thought maybe he could glue it back together. He tried, but it was too badly damaged. Mamma didn't throw the shards out, though. She put them into an old cigar box and kept them in the bureau in her bedroom. She would look at them every once in a while. She would hold a piece up to the window and watch the light come through it, then put the box away again. When I was younger, I never understood why she kept the broken pieces around, why she didn't just throw them out. Riding up the Big Moose Road with my pa that day, waiting for the Glenmore to come into view, I finally did.

After talking to Ezra Rombaugh, Pa had inquired at the hotel to see if they still had any positions vacant, and they did. I was sorry I couldn't work for Miss Wilcox anymore, but the Glenmore paid more and she was happy for me to go. She said my wages would more than cover the price of a train ticket to New York City. I hadn't the heart to tell her that I'd written Dean Gill to say I wasn't coming.