Dreadful Sorry (15 page)

"Okay. Good luck. Good-bye!" The van pulled away from the curb. Molly started up Cotton Lane. After a few minutes she heard the sharp, low hoot of the ferry's horn. She hesitated outside the blue gate of the library's garden. What if she had another vision? This time Paulette wouldn't be there to pull her out of it. Maybe it would be best to go home.

Get a grip!
She reminded herself sternly of her resolution of the night before. Knowledge was power, after all; that's what Jen always told her. After a moment she opened the gate and walked toward the door.

A bell tinkled as Molly stepped inside. The library was small. There were two rooms, one facing the front garden, one looking out onto the back, where the rock wall rose steeply only a few feet from the house. There was a staircase leading up, and the sign at the foot said Reference Books and Children's Books, with an arrow angled upward. Molly thought the back room might once have been a kitchen. She could see from the doorway a large brick fireplace filled in with bookshelves and hooks hanging down from the beams where dried herbs or smoked fish once might have hung.

An old woman, presumably the librarian, sat at a table in the back room reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee. She was small-boned, with a hooked nose that was an excellent perch for her thick glasses. A shock of white hair framed her face.

She looked up when she saw Molly. "Well, a library patron at this hour of the morning? I don't get many people in here these days. Nobody reads anymore. Sit in front of the box all the time." She adjusted her glasses. "A real shame. Now, young lady, you shall have a cup of coffee."

"Oh, thanks," murmured Molly, though she didn't particularly like coffee. She walked through the front room, glancing at the framed photographs of old fishing boats that lined the walls above the bookcases. "Most librarians don't let people have food around books."

"First patron always gets a cup," the woman said. "After that, all food and drink is off limits." She poured Molly a cup of coffee from a blue spotted pot. "You don't look like the sort of girl who would spill it. Are you?"

"I'll be very careful." Molly took the cup with both hands.

The old woman peered up at Molly. "Don't live here, do you? One of our new tourists, is that it?"

"Actually, I am living here, but just for the summer," she said. "My father and stepmother bought the big house on the headland. I'm helping them renovate it. The rest of the year I live in Ohio with my mother." Molly took a sip of the bitter black brew. "I'm Molly Teague."

"Well, welcome to Hibben, Molly Teague," the woman said. "If you like books, I'm glad to know you. My name's Miss Wilkins, Grace Wilkins. I've been the librarian here ever since the town's had a library. Some folks might say I
am
the library! Your father must be that tall man with the little red-headed wife. I haven't met them myself yet—but the talk is that they're a very nice couple and aim to bring us some more tourists when they get their inn going, isn't that right? I've seen them around town. Heard your dad has a trussed-up ankle now. Poor fellow. He won't be getting up on any more ladders for a while, I suppose. But it's good you've come to help out. About time someone fixed up the old Holloway House." She lifted her glasses to peer at Molly through clouded eyes, then settled them back on the bridge of her beaked nose.

Molly stood as though frozen, two names the old woman had spoken echoing in her ears: Wilkins. And Holloway. Names from the past. Not
her
past but Clementine's.

"I've come to do some research," she began. "Do you have any books on local history?"

"All there are, probably." Grace Wilkins gave her a curious look. "Not too many folks are interested in Hibben's history unless they live up here. Now, which period of Hibben's history? We go back all the way to the Abnaki Indians. 'People of the dawn land,' that's what their name meant. Their descendants still live around these parts—the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes. Or did you want something later? Did you know that originally Maine was part of Massachusetts? Before the Revolutionary War, that is. It was separated from Massachusetts by New Hampshire—still is, of course—and was almost entirely virgin forest. The coast wasn't settled until the 1770s, and even then there weren't any big towns, just little fishing outposts. We're pretty far north up here, you know. The southern end was settled first. We didn't become a state until 1820."

Molly interrupted this history lesson with a smile. "I was really hoping to learn more about the Holloway House."

"Now, let's see." Miss Wilkins slowly set down her cup and moved from the table toward the front room. "We have a nice little collection of Civil War narratives from Hibben boys who fought and lived to tell of it. Abelard Holloway fought and died. He lived in your house. Maine was always a free state, did you know that? We never did hold with slavery up here."

"Abelard Holloway?" asked Molly, following her to the shelves. "Was he the one who built it? Is there a book of family history or something I could take out?"

"You are eager, aren't you?" Miss Wilkins laughed. She turned back to sit at the table. "You don't need books when you've got Grace Wilkins still with a tongue in her old head." Somehow her tone sounded wistful to Molly. Miss Wilkins leaned toward Molly. "I once knew that old house quite well. Go on. Sit down and ask away."

What could she ask Miss Wilkins without revealing the confusing visions and dreams? She'd start with something simple, basic: "Who built the house? And when?"

"It was a man named Aloysius Holloway," Miss Wilkins said promptly. "Funny name, but there you go. He built it back in the fifties—the
eighteen-fifties,
that is. He was the son of a village fishing family who took himself off to New York and got a job in the shipping industry before the Civil War." Her voice lost its wistful tone as she warmed to her subject. "Aloysius came back to Hibben a rich man and built himself that big house. People didn't like it—they thought he wanted to build up there to have farther to look down his nose at them here in the village. And probably it was true. The Holloways always did think highly of themselves, I can tell you that. Too good for the villagers." Now the sadness in her tone was back again. She paused. Molly was just about to ask another question, when Miss Wilkins continued briskly.

"Aloysius had magic fingers, though, when it came to making money. He soon owned most of the fishing vessels in the village and had the men, who had previously worked independently, working for him. They didn't like him much, but he was fair, and he offered them more money working for him than they made running their own little boats. Half of Hibben's income came from lobsters, even then. He sure did know how to run a business, and he groomed his son to follow in his footsteps."

"So there was only one son!" exclaimed Molly, relieved but at the same time sorry to hear there had not been nearly a dozen little ones with names all starting with the letter A. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to find proof that her visions were accurate—or proof that she'd made them up. Which would be more comforting?

"No, there were two sons—Abelard and Wallace. But Abelard, as I said, died in the Civil War. Somewhere in Virginia, I think. And poor Aloysius never got over the grief. He hadn't been particularly fond of his second son, thought the boy was stupid. But in the end he brought that young man into the fishing business in Abelard's place. And Wallace tried, I'll grant you that, to be all that his father wanted. But he never really had the knack."

"Wallace!" exclaimed Molly.

"That's right. Not such an odd name this time, eh?" When Molly shook her head, Miss Wilkins continued, "After old Aloysius died, Wallace took over the fishing fleets. He had his father's gift for making money but none of his sense of fairness. He sneered at the villagers and didn't bother to hide it. Nor did his wife. She alienated a lot of the folks down here in the village with all her high-and-mighty airs. Between them they had everybody mad at them, one way or another, and yet many of the families worked for the fishing fleet. My own pa did, in fact."

Molly heard her heart pounding in her ears and wondered whether Miss Wilkins could hear it, too. "And—his wife? Do you happen to know what Wallace's wife was called?"

"Ethel, it was. Ethel Holloway," nodded Miss Wilkins. "Had a huge passel of kids. Almost a dozen of them there were, and all with names beginning with A—maybe it was Wallace's weak attempt to honor his father's name without actually saddling them with the name Aloysius. People had bigger families in those days, you know. Ethel Holloway was always very weak, though, and the twelth pregnancy killed her."

Miss Wilkins paused and removed her glasses to peer at Molly. "What's the matter, dear?"

"
Uh
. . . I'm okay. Just—well, nothing," Molly stuttered. She held her hands tightly together in her lap so Miss Wilkins would not notice their tremble.

This is incredible. It's impossible.
She wanted to leave but felt glued to her chair. She wished desperately that her mother would storm in and drag her out, away from all the illogical, incomprehensible, unbearably bizarre facts spilling from the librarian's lips. But she urged Miss Wilkins on. "What more do you know about the family?"

"Well, let's see. What
don't
I know?" Miss Wilkins shrugged. "Wallace's children were older than I was. I didn't know any of them well when I was a child, though later—well, never mind." She hesitated again, then shoved up her glasses and rushed on.

"I was born the same year Ethel Holloway died. I know that because the villagers talked for a long time about how 1912 was a bad year in the village. My own brother died in a boating accident that year—so I never knew him. I wasn't even three months old. He was my half-brother, really, the son of my pa and his first wife, who died when Hob was a baby."

Molly bit her lip to keep from crying out.
Hob!

"My pa married again when Hob was about twelve, and my ma tried to be the mother he never had. I was born quite a while later—my ma had a lot of trouble carrying a baby and there were three who died before I came along. Isn't that sad? My claim to fame is that I was born on April 14, 1912, the very day the
Titanic
sank. And poor Hob drowned in the cove just about two months later. Not a good year for people in boats, was it?" Miss Wilkins stood, her forehead creased in a frown. "Now, I know we have a good book about the
Titanic.
It's here someplace. Would you like to see it, dear?"

Molly took a deep breath. "Maybe another time." She tried gently to manuever Miss Wilkins back on track. "Can you tell me more about Hob? And the family in the Holloway House? What happened to them? Why don't they still live there?"

"Oh—yes," she said, sitting down again. "Well, the girls—there were four or five of them, I think—they all went to finishing school and then married into rich families in Bangor or down east. The boys were sent to boarding school in Boston. A few went on to college—Harvard, I think—and the others worked for their father's company until they got fed up with it and moved away from Hibben. All but Abner." She stopped and heaved a great sigh. "Oh, he was a challenge to his father, Abner was. Your basic pain in the you-know-what."

"Abner?" Molly winced. She remembered the piping young voice she had heard outside the study door.

"He was one of the younger children. Always running away from his governesses to come down here to the village. He liked the village children and loved the boats. When he was older and Wallace wanted to send him to boarding school like his brothers, Abner begged to stay home. He said he wanted nothing more in life than to stay in Hibben and be a fisherman!" Miss Wilkins laughed. "Of course, Wallace didn't like that idea at all. When Abner was sent off to school, he actually ran away and came home again. His father was livid, but the boy made such a fuss that in the end he was allowed to stay home with a private tutor." She smiled sourly. The light from the window caught her glasses and made them flash. "He escaped to the village every day as soon as his lessons were over, and soon he and I began keeping company." At Molly's blank expression, she elaborated. "Courting, really, I guess you could say. He said we'd marry when I turned sixteen."

"But wasn't he much older than you?" asked Molly. "If you weren't born until after his mother died—"

"Oh, he was about four and a half years older. But when I was fourteen and he was eighteen we pledged our lives to each other." Her lips tightened. "He gave me a ring that had been his mother's. He knew his father would never give him permission to marry into a village family—as if Wallace's own father hadn't been born right down here in the village!" She shook her head. "So we kept it our secret. By that time all the Holloway kids but Abner were off to school or married or working, and Wallace often went to Boston and Bangor to visit. Maybe he was lonely in that big house after his wife died. He started courting a wealthy Boston widow he had met through his eldest daughter's wealthy connections down there. When they married a year or so later, the woman wouldn't hear of moving away from the city to live in a place like Hibben, so Wallace closed up the house. Abner wanted to stay on alone, but Wallace insisted he move to Boston, too. Abner promised he would return for me when he was twenty-one. I would have been seventeen by then, and the perfect age for marrying." Her eyes behind the glasses looked moody. "Or at least I thought so then."

"Did Abner come back?"

Grace Wilkins shook her head. "He was a scoundrel. That's all I can say. I heard a year later that he had gone to sea as a merchant seaman. Left me, just plain left me with a broken heart." Her voice was wistful. "And I never found anyone else I cared to marry, although one or two asked me."

"I'm sorry," said Molly. "That must have been very hard for you."

"Oh, well, time heals all wounds, right?" Miss Wilkins shrugged. "That's what they always say. I wondered about him for years, picturing him off sailing the seven seas, having a high old time, while here I was cleaning the fish my dad brought home each day."