When the Stars Sang Page 3

  She was adjusting the extension ladder when the front door opened and the screen door slapped again.

  “You’re up early, Molly Cooper,” said Olivia, also in fuzzy slippers and a red-and-black-checked flannel bathrobe, but with her silver hair in a short bowl cut. A leather eyeglass keeper was looped around her neck, with her glasses bumping against her heavy bosom.

  “Not so early.” Molly said from up on the ladder where she was sliding a new shingle into place. “Already been up to Maisie’s place.”

  “Why?” both sisters asked in unison.

  “Her granddaughter’s come. Claims she’s going to live there.”

  “Really?” Olivia rounded on her sister. “Lou, we must go and pay her a visit.”

  “I wouldn’t bother,” Molly said, though her voice was muffled by the nails she held between her lips. “She won’t last.”

  “What makes you say that?” Louisa asked.

  Molly shrugged as she tapped the nails into place, being careful not to split the shingle. Louisa and Olivia waited until the nails were out of her mouth. “Just a feeling. She’s not an islander. Bet you at the first big blow, she’ll pack up and wait for the ferry to take her back wherever she came from.”

  “But she’s one of ours,” Olivia said. “She used to come and spend summers here.”

  “Ages ago,” said Molly, now prying out another broken shingle. “Where’s she been? Where’ve any of them been? Never came to see Maisie, did they?”

  “Well, after the boy died…” said Olivia.

  “Molly has a point, Ollie,” said Louisa. “Maisie was alone. They should have come. None of them did.”

  “Maisie had us,” Olivia said stoutly, snugging the flannel collar of her robe under her chin. “Let’s get baking, sister. Then we’ll take Daddy to see the girl. It’s a nice day. He’d enjoy the ride.”

  The sisters had just started inside when Louisa stopped. “What was her name, Ollie?”

  Olivia frowned. “Kathy? No, that’s not right.”

  Molly pulled a nail out of her mouth. “Kathleen.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Remember, Ollie? Little Katie.”

  “No,” said Molly. “Kathleen. Made that very clear.”

  “Oh, phtt,” Olivia said with a flap of her hands. “Maisie always called her Katie to us.”

  Molly opened her mouth to argue, but the screen door slapped shut, cutting her off. She shook her head and reached for another shingle. “Good luck with that.”

  THOUGH THE SUN HAD warmed the air outside, the house had a definite chill. Sheltered as it was by the trees, even though they were starting to lose their leaves, it was cold and still and musty inside.

  It looked exactly as Kathleen remembered. There in the living room was Nanna’s rocking chair, by the fireplace. A big, overstuffed chair sat near one window with an equally overstuffed ottoman. Both sagged in the middle now. It had been Kathleen’s favorite reading chair. On the fireplace mantel was an old clock, still and silent now. Inside the little door on the back, she recalled, was the key for winding it.

  She went from room to room, opening the windows to let in fresh air. Most of them stuck, and it took a little wiggling and a lot of pounding with the heel of her hand to get them to lift.

  A thick layer of dust coated everything. She found a closet off the kitchen with buckets and rags and mops and brooms. She pulled the string attached to the light bulb. Nothing. It hadn’t occurred to her that she might not even have electricity. She stood on tiptoe and twisted the bulb a little further into the socket. This time when she pulled the string, the bulb lit. She heaved a sigh of relief and turned to the ancient turquoise refrigerator. Holding her breath, she opened it to find it cold. The small freezer above held two aluminum ice trays that were frozen solid.

  The kitchen faucet, when she turned the handle, coughed and sputtered. Below her, she heard the hum of a pump. A moment later, an asthmatic stream of water gurgled through the pipes. Rusty at first, the water soon ran clear.

  She filled a bucket with soapy water and set about wiping down all the counters and woodwork. She quickly warmed up and stripped off her vest. With her T-shirt sleeves pushed up to her elbows, she scrubbed and rinsed, working her way through the kitchen.

  She muttered as she worked, carrying on a one-sided conversation in which she told Molly Cooper off.

  “Like I can’t light a damned fire in the fireplace. Or can’t live without heat for a few days.” She slammed the toaster down after wiping the counter. “I’m sick and tired of people telling me what I can and can’t do.”

  It bugged her that Molly remembered her when she couldn’t remember Molly. But then, she’d tried hard not to remember. Here, in this place, the memories pushed their way in… Wind and pelting rain, standing in the wet with Nanna’s arm around her while the men, nearly every man on the island, put out in boats in the storm as the women gathered round, willing them all to return…

  Her eyes flew open at the sound of car tires crunching on the drive. Two car doors creaked open. Kathleen paused her cleaning and went to the front door.

  “Hello, dear!” said one of two old women who were getting out of a rusty Ford sedan.

  The smaller one carried something wrapped in a red and white gingham towel while the taller one who had driven reached into the back seat for a basket.

  “We heard you were here and had to come by to welcome you,” said the woman carrying the basket. “I’m Olivia Woodhouse and this is my sister Louisa.”

  “Maisie was our dear friend,” said Louisa, reaching the porch steps.

  Kathleen stepped down to take her elbow. “I remember you. Weren’t you the island schoolteacher?”

  Louisa beamed. “Yes, I was! Oh, how I loved teaching. It’s sweet of you to remember, Katie.”

  “Kathleen.”

  Olivia followed up the steps. “We brought you a few things, Katie. Figured you hadn’t gotten to the market yet.”

  Kathleen opened her mouth to correct the nickname again but gave up. “Oh, thank you.”

  She was about to invite them in, but Louisa opened the door and charged inside. Olivia did the same, leaving Kathleen to follow.

  In the kitchen, Louisa was unwrapping the gingham towel from around a fragrant loaf of bread, while Olivia opened the flap of her basket and pulled out butter, coffee, milk, eggs, and bacon.

  “Glass bottles of milk?” Kathleen asked, picking one up.

  “Oh, yes.” Olivia nodded. “You have a compost bin out back for egg shells, food scraps, coffee grounds, anything that can be composted.”

  “We all make a pledge to keep garbage to a minimum,” Louisa said, her hands clasped as if she were lecturing a class. “The market has big bins for everything that can be recycled, and one for what absolutely has to be thrown away. The ferry takes them and brings us empties.” She pointed at the milk. “Wash the empty bottles when you’re done and take them down the market. They get sent back to the dairy to sterilize and re-use.”

  “Can’t poison our own island with garbage if we want to live here,” Olivia said.

  Without asking, the sisters began putting everything away in the refrigerator that hummed along as if happy to have a purpose again.

  “Don’t put the eggs there, Lou,” said Olivia. “That’s where the butter goes.”

  “No, it isn’t. The butter goes here.”

  Kathleen stood by as they bickered about what went where.

  Olivia spied Kathleen’s cell phone sitting on the counter. “Those won’t work here, either, Katie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We never had one of those big antennas installed on the island.”

  “Ugly old things,” Louisa said with a shake of her head. “Ollie’s right, dear. You need to call in down John’s Market and they’ll get your phone hooked back up.”

  She pointed to the old black wall phone whose partially coiled cord was so stretched out it dragged on the floor.

  She turned in pl
ace. “We can help with this.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to—”

  “I’ll get the vacuum,” Olivia said, disappearing into the pantry that doubled as a kind of mudroom and led to a back porch. “Lou, did you bring Daddy in?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes! Katie,” Louisa said to Kathleen, “would you mind going out to the car and getting Daddy. He loves to go for a ride, but we don’t like to leave him there.”

  “Of course,” Kathleen said, hurrying outside, picturing a frail old man expiring in her drive. She became more frightened when she didn’t see any heads visible in either the front seat or the rear.

  “Jeez, don’t let him be dead,” she whispered as she peered into the empty front seat and then opened a back door.

  There, seat-belted securely, was a wooden box. She leaned in and read, Walter Woodhouse, carved into the box’s top. She nearly laughed out loud but clapped a hand over her mouth, certain Louisa and Olivia would disapprove.

  She reached in to unbuckle the seat belt. She’d never held anyone’s ashes before. Carrying the box well out in front of her as if it were a bomb that might explode, she brought it back into the house.

  “Oh, thank you, dear. Just set him down here in the sun,” said Louisa, who was now dusting the lampshades. “He always loved the sun on his face.”

  Kathleen set the box on a table in the sunlight as requested but, before she could say anything else, the vacuum roared to life as Olivia began cleaning the sofa and pillows. With a shrug, she went back to her bucket of water and started wiping down more of the woodwork around the windows.

  JENNY COOPER LOOKED UP from where she was chopping potatoes for soup as Molly clomped up the back steps to the kitchen door. She toed off her boots on the rug inside the door, leaving them to join all the others piled up there.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “I heard we got a new islander today.”

  Molly’s mouth twitched. News spread on Little Sister faster than gulls finding chum in the water. And they were usually just as noisy as they gossiped over whatever the news was. A loaf of orange cranberry bread sitting on the counter told her everything she needed to know.

  “So?” Jenny prompted when Molly didn’t say anything.

  “So, Maisie’s granddaughter thinks she’s going to live in Maisie’s house.”

  Jenny scraped the potato chunks from the cutting board into the pot. “Why wouldn’t she? Rebecca did her Passing this morning.”

  Molly went to the sink to scrub the grease and dirt of the day off her hands. An orange tabby jumped onto the counter and came over to bat her paw at the stream of water. “She hasn’t been here since she was a kid. Even then, she was a summerer. Never really lived here, did she?” She shook her head. “She won’t last. Had to order oil for her. Bet she won’t be here long enough to use it.”

  “You never know. That old place probably needs a lot of work.” Jenny slid her daughter a sidelong glance.

  “That’s enough, Minnow.” Molly turned the tap off, and the cat glared at her. She felt her mother watching her. “I’ve got better things to do.”

  “A house falling down does none of us any good.”

  Molly grabbed a towel. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “I know you will.” Jenny smiled and held out a peeled carrot. “What does she do for a living?”

  Molly accepted the carrot and munched on it. “No idea. She hadn’t even unpacked her car when I was there.”

  “What?” Jenny turned, another carrot in one hand and a knife in the other. “You didn’t offer to help her?”

  “What for? I told you, she won’t be here long enough to unpack.”

  “Molly Ahearn Cooper.” Jenny’s lips tightened into a thin line Molly knew only too well. “She probably has a million things to see to. You will take a pot of this soup to her when it’s ready. Poor girl will at least need a hot meal if there’s no furnace.”

  Molly opened her mouth to argue, but thought better of it. “Right.”

  She peered out at the sun setting low in the sky. “Is Dad down the marina?”

  “He had to take a boat to Big Sister today. Aidan was going to meet him over there and bring him home. They’ve been gone all day. No idea when they’ll be in.”

  Molly leaned against the kitchen counter. “Then Aidan doesn’t know.”

  Jenny’s lips pursed again. It was a moment before she said, “No. He doesn’t.”

  Molly threw what was left of her carrot into the sink. “Why the hell did she have to come here?”

  “She has as much right to be here as any of us,” Jenny said quietly.

  “Her being here is only going to dredge up the past.”

  Jenny chopped the remainder of Molly’s carrot. “The past has a way of doing that all on its own. It’s not her fault.”

  KATHLEEN SAT HUDDLED NEAR the hearth as dusk gave way to full night. Despite her indignant insistence that she could light a fire, it had taken a lot of old newspapers and several matches before the wood actually began to burn.

  The musty smell was gone from the house. In the dancing light of the fire, the floorboards gleamed, thanks to a good mopping and waxing by Olivia.

  The two sisters had spent nearly the entire day helping her get the house clean. Upstairs, the linens on the bed were freshly laundered, though she hadn’t been sure the washer would last through an entire wash cycle as it banged and groaned. The bathroom was scrubbed, and the kitchen fairly sparkled.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” she’d said as Louisa took a break to fry them all some eggs and bacon, followed by thick slices of their delicious orange cranberry bread.

  “It’s our pleasure,” Olivia said, shifting the box of their father’s ashes to a new window as the sun moved around the house. “Maisie would have done the same for us.”

  They regaled her with tales of their days growing up on the island, the three of them getting into all kinds of shenanigans as girls.

  Their stories had brought her grandmother to her in a way she’d nearly forgotten. Even the way they spoke, with a slight Irish lilt, reminded her of Nanna. She reached out to trace a finger over the faded embroidered upholstery on Nanna’s rocker, remembering her laugh, the way she always smelled of spring flowers.

  She hugged her knees to her chest, listening to the little noises of the house. She was alone, but it was funny… she had felt more alone growing up at home—her father away as often as he could arrange it on business trips; her mother, whether drunk or sober, shut away in her room. After she’d met Susannah, she’d clung to her, like a life preserver, afraid of what being alone might mean, but she’d begun to drown in that relationship the last few years as things got uglier and she realized nothing was going to change.

  Kathleen shut her eyes, willing those memories to stop, pushing them away.

  Headlights suddenly shone through the windows as tires crunched in the drive yet again. Kathleen got up and went to the front window. Pulling the curtain aside, she peered out to see a familiar SUV.

  She flipped on the light and opened the door as Molly stepped up onto the porch.

  “Hello,” Kathleen said.

  Molly looked different without her ball cap, her dark hair brushed back off her forehead to hang just shy of her shirt collar. She held up a stainless steel pot with a lid clamped on top. “My mother sent you some soup. She wasn’t sure you had anything hot to eat in the house.”

  “Thank you.”

  Kathleen stepped back to let her by. Molly strode past her to the kitchen, apparently familiar with the layout of the house. She set the pot on the stove.

  “You’ll want to warm that up.” Crooking a thumb at what remained of the loaf of bread, she said, “I see Miss Olivia and Miss Louisa have been here.”

  “Yes. They helped me clean the house. They’re really sweet.”

  “They are.” Molly glared at her as if she’d insulted them.

  Kathleen looked down at herself. “Is… is there something wrong?”
>
  “No.” Molly walked by and straight out to her vehicle. “Oil will be here next Monday,” she said over her shoulder.

  The engine roared as she turned the key.

  “Thank your mother for me,” Kathleen called. She wasn’t certain Molly had heard.

  As the SUV backed up, the headlights swept through the darkness. A pair of eyes glowed out of the bushes near the house.

  Kathleen nearly hollered for Molly again, but something made her stop. She reminded herself that she wasn’t helpless as Molly’s vehicle disappeared down the road.

  Everything was quiet. She stood still, listening. A faint whine came from the direction of the bushes. She had no idea what wildlife lived on the island. Foxes? Possums? Skunks?

  She went into the house to hunt for a flashlight, but by the time she got outside and aimed it into the bushes, the glowing eyes were gone.

  “Great.” She swept the flashlight’s beam back and forth. “Watch me have a skunk living under the house.”

  She shivered in the cold night air. Once inside, she locked the door and went to sample the soup.

  KATHLEEN WOKE EARLY, NEARLY every blanket she could find in the house piled on the bed so that she was weighed down as she curled up with the covers drawn over her head. Her breath helped warm her a little, but her feet were freezing, despite her socks. Outside, she heard gulls mewing.

  At last she gave up and braced herself as she crawled out from under the covers. She swore she saw a frosty puff of breath.

  “If it’s this cold just barely into October, what will December and January be like,” she said to the room, her teeth chattering as she dashed down the hall into the bathroom where an old-fashioned claw-foot tub stood with a shower curtain suspended by a ring.

  The black and white basketweave tiles on the floor shone from the scrubbing they’d received the day before.

  She turned on the tap in the shower, deciding not to take off her pj’s and socks until there was hot water to jump into. She sighed as the steamy spray chased away the chill. She washed her hair and soaped up, staying under the shower until the water was no longer hot.