The Chesapeake Bride: A Novel (11) (The Chesapeake Diaries) - Softcover

Mariah Stewart is the award-winning New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of numerous novels and several novellas and short stories. A native of Hightstown, New Jersey, she lives with her husband and two rambunctious rescue dogs amid the rolling hills of Chester County, Pennsylvania, where she savors country life and tends her gardens while she works on her next novel. Visit her website at MariahStewart.com, like her on Facebook at Facebook.com/AuthorMariahStewart, and follow her on Instagram @Mariah_Stewart_Books.

The Chesapeake Bride Chapter One

Owen Parker shortened the last leg of his morning run, going over instead of around the dune behind the Cannonball Island General Store. The calendar might say September, but the thermometer mimicked July. Even the slight breeze off the Chesapeake did little to cool him. Sweat caused his T-shirt to cling to his chest and his sunglasses to continually slide down the bridge of his nose. He’d had enough for one day.

His great-grandmother Ruby Carter stood on the back porch of the store and watched him approach, her hands on her hips. Her white hair was pulled back in a tidy bun at her nape, and she was dressed in one of her favorite uniforms: a white sleeveless blouse with a round collar and a cotton skirt that hit smack in the center of her calves. Today’s skirt was light summer green. Her other favorites were cotton-candy pink and a shade of lavender that precisely matched the color of the lilacs that grew around the back of the store in spring. While her height had diminished somewhat over her one hundred years, her back was still relatively straight and her voice strong. Her mind was as sharp as the proverbial tack. In her, the old island still lived, through her stories and through the speech patterns peculiar to Cannonball Island.

“You get much more sun, boy, you’ll be fried like a fritter ’fore too long,” she said as he crossed the driveway. “There’s sunscreen there on one of the shelves inside—use some once in a while.”

He smiled and kissed her on the cheek as he came up the steps. “I think it’s too late for sunscreen. I’ve been tan for months now. Since Costa Rica.”

“Don’t know why you have to be running off to foreign places all the time. Sun’s just as good here as there.”

“But it’s not always summer here, Gigi.”

“Summer be overrated. God made all four seasons for a reason.”

“What reason was that?” he teased.

“Do I look like God?” Ruby frowned. “Not mine to know what he be thinking. He has his plan and it’s not mine to question. Yours either.”

“Your garden’s still hanging in there.” He nodded in the direction of the fenced-in plot where she grew vegetables and her favorite flowers. “All those tall things still look pretty good.”

“Tall things be hollyhocks and dahlias.” She turned to look at her pretties and admired them. “My Harold loved dahlias. Used to buy him one every year for Father’s Day. Those sweet things you see growing out there—that big pink one and the smaller yellow ones—they be offshoots of offshoots of offshoots of the ones I bought him years ago. You know how to divide ’em, you can keep ’em forever.” She turned back to him. “Least for as long as you be on this earth. Can’t know for sure who you can count on to tend to such things after you be gone.”

“I’ll tend to your dahlias, Gigi. Just like you showed me. I’ll dig them up before the frost and I’ll wrap them in newspaper and put them in the shed, just like you do.”

“Order to do that, you have to be around, boy. You saying you be staying on the island from now on? That you be back for good?”

“No,” he said cautiously. “But I will plant your dahlias in the spring after the frost, and I’ll dig them up in the fall before it gets cold. I don’t have to be here full-time to do that.”

She stared at him, and for a moment he thought she was going to say something, but the moment passed. When a car pulled into the driveway, she turned to go back into the store to see to her customer. “Folks need to know where they belong, boy. Just like I told your sister. See how she’s heeded me.”

“Lis is marrying a local boy. Up until she fell in love with Alec, she had no intentions of ever coming back here to live. No matter how much you bugged her about it. Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you somehow made her fall in love with him.”

“Just ’cause you can sometimes know don’t mean you can make folks do your will.” She smacked him on the arm as she turned and went into the store. “You be living proof of that.”

Owen suppressed a smile and followed her. “I’m going to run upstairs and take a shower, Gigi.”

“That be the best idea you had since you woke up today.” She went into the front of the store, and he took the steps to the second floor, still smiling.

Until a year ago, Ruby lived over the store, which had been in her family for two hundred years. At one hundred years of age, though spry and lively, the time had come for her to eliminate taking that trip up and down the steps twice every day. The large storage area behind the store had been redesigned and renovated into her new living quarters—a sitting room, a modern kitchen, bath, and bedroom. Alec Jansen—engaged to Lis—had used his considerable carpentry skills to convert what had been empty, unused space into a comfortable, modern apartment.

The bedrooms on the second floor above the store were mostly unused, except for the room Ruby had shared with Harold, which Lis, an artist, had taken over for her studio. The room Owen occupied was the same one he’d slept in when he visited as a boy. He knew some might find it strange that at thirty-eight he was living with his great-grandmother, but he couldn’t care less what anyone else thought about the arrangement. His masculinity was intact even though the old metal bed he slept in was still covered by the same white chenille spread from his childhood, and the walls remained painted in a light shade of blue. The upholstery on the chair that sat near the window was threadbare plaid, and the curtains hadn’t changed since he was in his teens, but Owen liked the familiarity of it all. After long periods of living elsewhere, it always soothed his soul to come back to this room where he’d spent so many happy times. It never occurred to him to stay anywhere else.

Owen had only been back on Cannonball Island for a few months, having spent the past couple of years here and there like the rolling stone he’d always been. There’d been Alaska and the fishing boat he’d worked on before he flew a mail plane for a few months until he tired of the cold. Next he headed for Australia, where a friend owned a cattle ranch, but mending fences and chasing cattle bored him, so he retreated to Costa Rica and spent time diving off a sunken ship, rumored to have been loaded with gold from the California mines, that had gone down in a storm in 1853. Owen had joined up with an old friend, Jared Chandler, whose salvage company had bid on the wreck and won the right to excavate it. Owen had spent a few months there before something had told him it was time to go home to Cannonball Island. He’d assumed that inner voice had been prompted by his sister’s reminder that Ruby had celebrated her one-hundredth birthday without him, and the terrifying thought that she might pass on before he’d spent time with her. Jared’s offering Owen work on a ship that had sunk in his home waters had made the decision a no-brainer—that and his sister’s impending marriage added up to Owen’s being homeward bound.

He’d thought of stopping in Arizona to visit his mother, Kathleen, on his way to the island, but she’d recently remarried—again—having found widowhood no more to her liking than her second husband had been. Apparently the third time for her was the charm, because she sounded happier than he could remember. Owen’d checked in with her but her calendar was full, she’d told him, with her stepgrandchildren’s events.

Who knew that stepbabies and toddlers trumped your own grown children?

Owen hadn’t minded, not really. His mom hadn’t had an easy time when his dad, Jack, was alive, and she was entitled to a happy life. Owen would never begrudge her that. He and his sister, Lisbeth—Lis—knew how unpredictable and unpleasant their father had been and the cloud they’d all lived under while he was alive.

Showered and dressed, Owen made his way downstairs, pausing on the landing to look out the window. A stone’s throw from the store on the opposite side of the road flowed the narrowest section of the Waring River. A mile farther and it widened where it reached the bay. He hadn’t had cause to think about its course until last week. Not until Jared had started asking questions had the river, its mouth, and its relationship to the bay become relevant.

“This diving job is going to be more complicated than I’d thought,” Jared had told Owen by phone late in the evening of the night before.

“Anytime you’re diving in the Chesapeake, it’s complicated,” Owen had replied. “Visibility is always an issue because the water is dark pretty much everywhere, plus it’s a route on the way to Baltimore Harbor, and there are all those crab and oyster fishermen to be worried about. You’re talking about diving off Cannonball Island in the bay waters, and—”

“That might be changing. Something’s come up.”

“Something like what?”

“Something like the Maryland Historical Society thinks there’s something down there that they might not want disturbed.”

“What are you talking about?” Owen had grown up on the island, and while old folks had been full of tales of the old days, he couldn’t recall a story about something in that area of the bay, and he said so.

“Not the bay,” Jared told him. “The Waring River. The mouth of the river in particular.”

“Start from the beginning.”

“As you know, a builder’s bought up as much of the unused land on the island as he could. His plans include building a dock in the river where his buyers can tie up their boats. They’re all ready to start dredging in the mouth of the river so it’s deep enough to allow for all those pretty yachts. So in the meantime, the state EPA has done some testing to determine how many houses could be built, how development would affect the bay and its natural resources, waste water, drainage, that sort of thing.”

“Right. All standard. My future brother-in-law is the environmental consultant for the builder, Deiter Construction.”

“Well, in the process, they scanned the waters around the island and apparently found evidence of something at the mouth of the river that had not been seen before.”

“You mean a vessel of some sort?”

“Yeah. Maybe even more than one. They did some preliminary scanning, and it looks like there could be more than one. Like something sank at some point and landed on something else that was already down there. No telling what without diving and photographing, though, so that’s what we’re going to be doing.”

“Huh. In the morning, I’ll ask Ruby if she’s ever heard about something sinking in the river.”

“I guess if anyone local would know, she’d be the one. Is anyone on Cannonball Island older than Ruby?”

“Not that I know of.”

“We’ll be doing our first dive as soon as I can get one of our smaller boats up here. The one we brought is too big for the job we’re going to be doing. It would have been fine for working out closer to the channel. I’ll be taking this one back to my dad’s place in South Carolina, and I’ll bring back the Juliana. I should only be gone a few days. Call me if anything comes up that I should know about, and be ready for that first dive when I get back.”

“I’m ready when you are.”

Owen had hung up, but the implications of what Jared had told him kept him awake until after midnight. If a sunken vessel of any kind was found in the river, the builders’ construction timetable could be delayed until the vessel and whatever else might be down there had been identified and properly recorded. Depending on what they found, the dredging for the new dock could be scrapped indefinitely. The permits for the first new construction on Cannonball Island in over a hundred years could be put on hold.

Owen was still thinking about the phone call when he awoke that morning, wondering how the builder, Brian Deiter, was taking the news of the delay, assuming he’d already been told. Specifically, Owen was wondering what the project’s architect, the builder’s daughter, Cass Logan, would think.

The builder’s beautiful blond daughter had made it clear she was immune to Owen’s charm and good looks. Oh, she’d always been friendly enough in the past whenever they would run into each other, but she’d never hesitated to let him know she had absolutely no interest in him. Since he was unaccustomed to women ignoring him, Cass occupied a special place in his thoughts. He’d never walked away from a challenge.

He was still thinking about her, wondering what it was going to take to change her mind about him, while he stood on the landing and watched the sun glint off the river. He went down the remaining steps and peeked into the store. Finding Ruby busy with a customer, he went out to the porch and back to his favorite rocking chair.

A few minutes later, the door behind him opened, and he heard Ruby’s deliberate footfall as she stepped outside.

“You thinkin’ on settin’ all day?” Ruby Carter walked to the edge of the porch, her eyes narrowing as she challenged him with her stare.

“Maybe.” Owen flashed a smile and patted the arm of the chair next to his. “Sit with me for a bit?”

“Maybe for a bit.” Ruby sat. “Something on your mind?”

“Did you ever hear about any vessels sinking in or around the mouth of the river over on the southwest side of the island?”

Ruby established what she called her rocking rhythm before she responded. “Many a something gone down out there over time.”

“Like what?”

“Hard to know truth from tale, but it been said one of those merchant ships went down with some tea, back in the day. Before we came to the island.”

“You mean before the War of 1812, when the loyalists in St. Dennis were forced to leave and sent here to the island?”

“Way before that. Course, no one be living on the island then, nothing here but shrub pine and salt marsh. Townsfolk forced some to pack up and leave, thinking they’d die out here.” She smiled. “Showed them a thing or two.”

Ruby’s ancestors had been among those loyal to the crown of England when the War of 1812 broke out. When several of St. Dennis’s patriot sons had been conscripted by British warships, angry townsmen had forced the loyalists onto the uninhabited island across the sound. Somehow the exiles had survived despite having to build their shelters out of the small pines that grew there and having to subsist on what they could catch from the bay and raise in hastily planted gardens. Over time, a little colony was established, and those who thrived were proud of their rebellious heritage of having defied the odds.

“What was the story you heard about the merchant ship?” Owen sat back in his chair and waited.

“Well, I heard tell about a man from over to Virginia, owned some of those big ships. Brought tea and pottery and such from England—indentured servants, too—took back tobacco and wheat and whatever. The folks over to Annapolis decided they didn’t want English tea coming into Maryland—this was after the folks in Massachusetts threw all that tea up there into the water. When ships came in with tea, they sent them back to England. Some of the ships stayed in the harbor too long—they got burned with the cargo still aboard. ’Cept the indentured folks, a’course.” Ruby rocked, her eyes on the bay. “Seems one of them ships owned by this Virginia ...