The Secret Staircase (A Wendover House Mystery Book 1) Read online

  The Secret Staircase

  by

  Melanie Jackson

  Version 1.2 – October, 2011

  Published by Brian Jackson at KDP

  Copyright © 2011 by Melanie Jackson

  Discover other titles by Melanie Jackson at www.melaniejackson.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Chapter 1

  Kelvin was dead to begin with. There is no doubt about that.

  No, I can’t do it. I can’t plagiarize Dickens. It’s a great beginning for this story though….

  Let’s try again.

  My Grandma Mac once told me that a malicious faerie had christened me in my cradle, giving me both brains and insight. Not a bad combination, you might think, but you probably weren’t born into a family that was as, shall we say, salt of the earth as mine. In my birth family, beauty and good nature were coin of the realm. My parents were simple. Trusting. Gullible. Apt to see life in shades of rainbow pastels when really the situation was very black and white. I was not that way.

  Not that I put too much weight on this particular matter now that I am grown and accept that beauty really is only skin deep and that insight and intelligence are useful to my chosen trade. But it had mattered very much when I was a child and certain most days that I was a changeling put on earth to look after my supposed parents.

  This story is in part a cautionary tale as well as a fable, so there must be a moral. Perhaps blood will tell or you can run but not hide. In any event, the sins of the fathers being what they are, when my grandmother had run away from her family and married a traveling man that they objected to, she changed the course of Wendover familial events and destinies. Wild blood entered the line and poisoned it—this is what my grandma said not long before she died. At the time I had thought she was speaking of my grandfather, but now I think perhaps she meant something else as well.

  I didn’t know Grandma’s traveling man, so this part of the tale is all second-hand telling, but I think it’s fairly accurate since my mother hadn’t the guile to lie about her father and Grandma Mac wouldn’t have bothered.

  Grandma was the primary breadwinner and the steady influence in her children’s lives. Once in a great while, my fly-by-night grandpa would breeze into town, bringing presents for his wife and daughters. He would have a drink or two, watch a little television, and then, once Grandma was asleep or away at her job, he would tell my mother tall tales about this subverted destiny of the high and mighty Wendovers who had thought themselves too good for him, and how he had saved my grandmother from a terrible fate. My mom, being gullible, came to think of my grandma as an unhappy princess kidnapped by the king of gypsies who had fallen in love with her and saved her from her cruel family by marrying her. It was my mother’s favorite bedtime story, made more precious because her own mother would never speak of the Wendovers. It was the extra-special secret she shared only with her mostly missing father.

  In turn, my mother told me the lost princess stories when I was a child. It was the only story she told me, and I came to think of myself as being lost too—a changeling, as I said. Or maybe cursed. Clearly I didn’t belong with my supposed birth family. They were fair and I was dark. My mother had sapphire blue eyes and I had nondescript gray. My parents were small and delicate, and I was tall and sturdy. Handsome, not pretty.

  Nor did I belong in that small town, with its small minds and small tolerance for smart girls who acted up in Sunday school and refused to join the choir. I longed to see the ocean and maybe to travel to foreign lands. I spent a lot of time looking at National Geographic at the library and feeling I belonged somewhere else.

  Perhaps, given Grandma’s hostility and reluctance to accept her familial destiny, it was fair that her parents’ predictions of a disastrous marriage were proven true, and that she should give birth to two very pretty but empty-headed children, neither of whom sought to make up for this deficit by marrying someone brighter or more sensible than they. Instead the sisters married for what they thought was love and for happiness, and more or less achieved it, though in very different ways.

  Fortunately, Holly and Emmett (my mom and dad preferred I use their first names) were both sweet tempered and easy going, so I was able to organize home as I liked and arranged for my education, in spite of their indifference to this matter. Grandma supported me in my desire for college, saving every spare penny she could for my tuition, hoping I would in turn help her at the newspaper when I graduated. Which I did. I couldn’t do otherwise when she needed assistance and would never have it from her own children.

  I never got the straight scoop on the Wendovers from either my grandmother or my mother. Grandpa, who turned out to be a con man and blackmailer as well as a snake-oil salesman, might have told me about them when I was older, but he had died under questionable circumstances not too long after Aunt Verena was born. My mom was only five at the time, so it is doubtful she knew any more about them than I did.

  Things were rough after Grandpa and his ill-gotten gains were no longer adding to the coffers. If anything should have driven my grandmother back to her family, it would have been this, but she stayed resolutely away from Maine, choosing to work as an editor/reporter at a small newspaper just outside Duluth. Though Grandpa Mac wasn’t a man to be proud of, my grandmother kept his name in preference to the one she was born with. Her maiden name, Wendover, was almost never spoken of after he died, and when it did come up in her presence, it was never said with affection. Especially when she spoke of her father, whom I came to think of as a Victorian-style tyrant, before forgetting him entirely during the turmoil of my teen years.

  My parents didn’t understand me or my educational ambitions, but were proud of my accomplishments, and we would probably still be enjoying a comfortable if uncomprehending relationship had my dad not decided to take the advice of a friend and try to improve a new fuel-injection system that blew both my parents to bits on the first test-drive when I was only a year out of college.

  My Aunt Verena is dead now too. Kicked in the head by a riding horse she was trying to “return to the wild,” if you can believe it. She was survived by her husband, Zach, but as my grandma had pointed out, Zach—unlike my naïve father—was a stranger to both truth and shame. He was, in addition to being a liar who always got caught in the act and was often in jail, kind of ugly. I am speaking in the physical sense though his soul was also far from shiny. His red face was clean shaven but he had a neck beard that ran straight into the pelts on his chest and back. It stuck up out of his shirt and he often looked like he was peering at you out of some kind of tall grass. As a kid I found this creepy. Actually I still find it creepy. I don’t see him anymore.

  Grandma Mac passed away two years ago, and since Verena and Zach had no children, I am all that is left of our little clan, the last descendant of the runaway princess and the gypsy king.

  That I possibly had kin somewhere else never occurred to me. The Wendover stories were largely forgotten in the daily grind of keeping the newspaper afloat, and somehow I had gotten the impression that Grandma was an only princess anyway, so there was no point imagining loving cousins somewhere in Maine. But one day a letter appeared in my mailbox announcing that I was the heir to the Wendover estate, which included a large house on a tiny island and some two hundred and fifty thousand do
llars in securities, bonds, and cash. The attorney and author of the letter, Harris Ladd, suggested that I should call his office when it was convenient and we could settle the details of the estate.

  I had taken over my grandmother’s job at the newspaper, which she had eventually been conned into buying once the first owner was bled dry and decided to retire to Arizona while he still had a shirt on his back. I was making little better than minimum wage for overtime labor while the swirling, sucking, almost bankrupt money pit of false hopes and shattered dreams swallowed most of the revenue it brought in on a good month—and more than that in a bad one—so it was convenient to call at once. After all, I needed a new car before winter and a mortgage if I was going to buy my apartment when it went condo and I was pretty sure I couldn’t get a conventional loan. The newspaper was hardly adequate collateral. These days the banks were like a school of fish. Ask for money and they scattered in terror. I didn’t really want to take on the debt anyway. Though I hated to admit it, since the paper had been my grandmother’s life work, it seemed to me that The Democrat wasn’t long for this world unless the town’s reading population tripled and the economy got a whole lot better and very quickly.

  The mild-voiced Mr. Ladd suggested I visit as soon as was possible—the estate would pay, of course.

  Go to Maine? Just pack up and go? Could I do that?

  I sat at my desk in the empty office and pondered my options. It was 104 degrees and sultry. My only fulltime staff reporter was on vacation getting a facelift, and our only photographer had just broken his leg carrying shingles up to his ex-wife’s leaking roof. This was a mixed blessing. Jack of the broken leg and I had tried dating, but he had been too caught up in post-divorce sorrow to be a good companion. Until the divorce, Jack had been the possessor of a sunny temperament which he shared with everyone. After the split, his sun had dimmed and he turned largely inward. A year in, I hoped that an invitation to dinner meant that he was healing, but I had broken off the social connection when I saw which way the ill wind blew. Things were now a little awkward at the office, so a break from each other seemed a good thing.

  There was no actual news to report to the wider world of Lakeside except the typical ghastly weather and, in spite of the excitement of the state fair, I was bored out of my skull. So I slapped together a small edition of the Albatross—er, I mean The Democrat—that was mainly ads for puppies and kittens and school supplies, with a few puff pieces about the fair’s prize-winning sheep and jellies. We usually do twelve pages. That week it was eight. I felt guilty, but I couldn’t help it if the social columns were short of weddings, christenings, and funerals. As you may have gathered, when I say that I own a newspaper, that it is a selective newspaper. We report social news like divorces, but without gory details. We print obituaries, but don’t mention anything embarrassing about the deceased. Births and weddings are always a favorite. National elections and scandals simply don’t exist. Nor does domestic violence, drug use, or drunk driving. There hasn’t been a local murder or any unsolved crime in years.

  Thanks to that curse of insight and intelligence, I knew better than to mess with Grandma’s business formula which had kept the paper in business, but I was slowly dying of boredom. It wasn’t that I couldn’t face coming to the office the next day. But what about the day after? And the day after that? How long could I do it and not go insane? Would I die at my desk as my grandma had?

  At the last minute, I also added a warning in one of the black-bordered boxes we use for obituaries that there had been a death in my family and that I needed to go to Maine for a few days so the next issue might be late. I fired up the ancient wide-format inkjet printer that also needed replacing with something newer, faster, and more reliable, loaded the paper roll, and then I hit the print button. After a moan of complaint, it began printing. Slowly.

  Duty done, I turned to the internet and started figuring out the logistics of travel. They were complicated.

  It turned out that my inheritance was on Little Goose Island, a small land mass with three houses and a shared dock. It was part of the town of Goosehead, which incorporated Great Goose, Goose Haven, and Little Goose islands. Harris Ladd’s offices were located on Great Goose, which is where we met four days later after I had traveled thirteen hours by jet, private plane, and water taxi, all ever decreasingly pleasant modes of travel. The regular ferry only docked on Tuesdays and Fridays, so it being a Wednesday I was out of luck. Hence the water taxi.

  There were stares but no offers of help or introduction from the two men on the dock in Great Goose, both of whom had faces that were a decent match for a frying pan and whom I suspected were brothers. As I mentioned, I am fairly tall and athletic looking; probably I seemed well able to carry my own small bag.

  The law office was small and squat, as was everything on the one main street, but was antique, built of stone, and on that sunny day, with wild flowers growing out of the cracks in the walls, absolutely charming. There wasn’t a single edifice that wasn’t charming on an unclouded day. I had a feeling though that in winter it was another matter. Of course, Minnesota does bleak with the best of them, but I suspected that all that gray water probably added another dimension to the feeling of isolation and cold. Oddly enough, I found this exciting rather than off-putting.

  Ladd himself was also antique and charming, and almost handsome, in the lean and battered way that some New England men have. Actually, he reminded me of the autographed picture of a young Will Rogers that Grandma Mac had hanging in her den. He was respectability made flesh. When he spoke it was with a slight accent that caused words ending in r sound more like ah.

  “Please, call me Harris,” he insisted. “Mr. Ladd is my father.” Fathah.

  This informality seemed impossible when he was wearing a bowtie and old-fashioned legless spectacles that clung to the bridge of his sloping nose, so I compromised by not calling him anything.

  We settled into the two armchairs on the visitor’s side of the desk and Mr. Ladd offered me tea, which I declined. He looked a bit concerned at my refusal and asked if I had had a rough crossing. I spend a little time on myself now that I am nearing forty. Not a lot of time, but I don’t come from that magical place where women look beautiful and refreshingly dewy without the aid of some moisturizer and blush, so cosmetic help here and there is necessary. But there is only so much that makeup and a hairbrush can do to repair the ravages of travel. I probably looked as tired as I felt.

  I gave in and accepted a cup of tea.

  Mr. Ladd was slow to come to business, but I was not perturbed. The chair was comfortable, the tea fragrant, and he would get to the matter in his own good time. There was no need to hurry him and make him think me rude when he seemed so very happy to see me. I gathered from his few words on the subject that finding me had been something akin to the labor of Hercules. Grandma had well and truly covered her tracks when she left Maine. I had only been located when Mr. Ladd began tracking down my grandfather instead. Once he discovered that Grandpa Mac was buried in Lakeside, the rest became fairly easy for a man interested in genealogy. A private eye couldn’t find me, but the Mormon genealogists could.

  Once Mr. Ladd began legal explanations, he spoke without hesitation. The will was straightforward, but the situation with the Wendover House and environs was not. It turns out that jurisdiction over Little Goose is in dispute. Canada and the United States both claim to own it, though neither claims it very hard and Harris Ladd described it as “an ongoing historical anomaly.” I looked it up later and here is what it says in The Treaty of Paris:

  And that all disputes which might arise in future on the subject of the boundaries of the said United States may be prevented, it is hereby agreed and declared, that the following are and shall be their boundaries, from the northwest angle of Nova Scotia, that angle which is formed by a line drawn due north from the source of St. Croix River to the highlands; . . . by a line to be drawn along the middle of the river Saint Croix, from its mouth in the B
ay of Fundy to its source, and from its source directly north to the aforesaid highlands which divide the rivers that fall into the Atlantic Ocean from those which fall into the river Saint Lawrence; comprehending all islands within twenty leagues of any part of the shores of the United States, and lying between lines to be drawn due east from the points where the aforesaid boundaries between Nova Scotia on the one part and East Florida on the other shall, respectively, touch the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic Ocean, excepting such islands as now are or heretofore have been within the limits of the said province of Nova Scotia.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Ladd explained, this left a few islands in uncertain circumstances.

  I asked who islanders paid inheritance and income taxes to, hoping we didn’t have to pay both countries, and he said that depended on where the citizen was employed. On Great Goose, the only resident paying taxes to Canada was the lighthouse keeper who worked for the Canadian Coast Guard.

  “We have a very able accountant here on Great Goose. Marge Holmes keeps abreast of events and will take care of you when you need help.”

  This sounded like he was assuming I would stay.

  “And if one needs the police or a doctor?” I asked, curious and unable to ignore what might be a good story for The Democrat. I was used to living in a small town, but we had a major city nearby. The thought of going to a three-house island was kind of like visiting the edge of the world.

  “We have an arrangement with the Haven police department—which is made up of Everett and Bryson Sands. And if you need a doctor, Hillary Abbott is your man—er, woman. She is also here on Great Goose.”

  “Is there any hope of selling the house?” I asked bluntly, bracing myself for bad news. The economy was hardly hearty in this part of the world and who in their right mind would want to live on an island with only two other houses?