Up Island Harbor

Book 1: Up Island Novel

by Jean Stone

Genres: Friendship

Synopsis

For fans of Debbie Macomber and Elin Hilderbrand, a new series of heartwarming beach-read novels set in a picturesque fishing village on Martha’s Vineyard, with all the seaside charm and small-town heart that readers expect from Jean Stone’s previous Vineyard novels, and a new cast of characters for readers to fall in love with.

The quaint, historic fishing village of Menemsha is a side of Martha’s Vineyard that tourists don’t always see. Maddie Clarke’s late mother was born on the Vineyard, and Maddie hazily recalls childhood visits to her Grandma Nancy’s cottage above Menemsha Harbor. Now divorced with a teenage son, Maddie is awaiting news of a tenureship at her Massachusetts college when a letter arrives that could change everything . . .

It turns out Grandma Nancy didn’t die long ago, as Maddie believed. In fact, Nancy just passed away at 89—and left Maddie her gray-shingled cottage. Maddie intends her visit to Martha’s Vineyard to be a brief one, just long enough to settle the estate and sell the cottage. But on arriving in Menemsha, she finds far more than memories . . .
 
There are other family secrets waiting to be uncovered, and a Native American heritage Maddie knew nothing about. Most surprising of all, there is the glimmer of a very different future—a chance to connect with her people and find herself, and perhaps find love, on this beautiful, celebrated island . . .
 
Praise for Jean Stone’s Vineyard Novels

“Filled with heart. . . . Perfect for long summer days. For fans of DebbieMacomber or Elin Hilderbrand.” —Booklist

“Lie down on the couch, put a pillow under your head and enjoy the ride.” —The Vineyard Gazette

“Filled with themes of compassion, understanding, and forgiveness. . . . Highly recommended.” —Fresh Fiction
 

Release date: March 26, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

An ice cream shack sat at the foot of the hill at Menemsha Harbor. It had the same kind of silver-colored shingles that Grandma Nancy’s cottage had, the same white trim. It also had a white wood window that Mr. Fuller pulled down into a shelf every morning at eleven o’clock, a quiet announcement that he was open for business.

“You know the rules,” Grandma whispered. “A double-dip vanilla and strawberry cone if you help me shuck corn for dinner.” It was a small cone, not as big as “double-dip” made it sound, but Maddie always remembered the tasty treat from the last summer she’d been there, racing down the hill as fast as her five-year-old, skinny little legs could go.

As memories went, that was the most vivid one she had of Martha’s Vineyard, of the tiny fishing village called Menemsha that Grandma once told her meant “still water,” where old wooden boats were moored in the harbor every afternoon, having chugged out to the Atlantic Ocean before dawn, way earlier than Maddie roused from the small cot in the house where her mother grew up. Her mother’s name was Hannah. Until Maddie had opened the letter that arrived last week, she’d forgotten that her grandmother’s name was Nancy. Nancy Clieg. Unlike Hannah, Grandma Nancy had been alive until two and a half weeks ago, four decades after the summer when Maddie had her last double-dip.

Standing at the top of the slope in front of the cottage whose shingles had visibly tarnished, Maddie pulled an envelope from her purse and read the letter for the umpteenth time since it showed up in her office mailbox at the college in Green Hills, Massachusetts. Green Hills was in Berkshire County (often just called the Berkshires); it was as far north-west as one could go in the whole state. Martha’s Vineyard, however, was as far southeast as one could go, not counting Nantucket. In between, Massachusetts had a lot of people, something like seven million. One of them was named Brandon J. Morgan, Esq., an attorney with an office on Marlborough Street, Boston. According to the return address, he also had a place on North Road in Chilmark. Chilmark was on the Vineyard. The village of Menemsha and its harbor were part of Chilmark. And so there she was.

The letter had stunned her.

Flicking her gaze from the letter down to the harbor now, where the sun’s rays of mid-July danced on the water, Maddie could not disagree. Nor could she tell if the place had changed since she’d been five, though the pleasure boats seemed larger and more streamlined. The commercial fishing boats, however, appeared unaltered, with riggings of tall poles supported by taut cables that reached upward, creating a crisscross pattern against the cloudless sky like a game of pick-up sticks splayed on a blue canvas. But even from this distance, as Maddie studied the boats, she could tell that their wooden hulls and decks seemed weather worn and in need of paint. Like her, they were noticeably older.

She laughed. Thankfully, no one would recognize her today based on how she’d looked back then, when she often dressed in her favorite white T-shirt that Grandma had embroidered with a big sequined star. She usually wore it with bright pink shorts that had a drawstring at the waist, which she often fidgeted with as she shifted from one bare foot to the other, waiting her turn at Mr. Fuller’s ice cream shack. Her eyes were blue (like the sky and like her father’s), and her hair was thick and straight, which it still was, though it now looked more charcoal than the shiny onyx of her youth. These days, she kept it trimmed just above her shoulders because an assistant professor needed to look, well, professorial, especially since she was on tenure track, competing with two others for the coveted position. Another big change was that each summer that little Maddie had come to the island, she rarely wore shoes. Which also would not be appropriate for a middle-aged, New England divorcée despite the non–dress code of the twenty-first century.

Glancing down at her short-sleeved, ivory knit top, her mid-calf, faded black skirt, and her everyday tan canvas sandals, it was obvious that, haircut aside, sometime between ages five and forty-five, she’d become disinterested in how she looked. It was obvious that, yes, Maddie, too, was weatherworn. And a bit less vibrant.

“Just a little,” she said aloud, then went back to her reading.

The last part hit Maddie’s heart with a thwack. How could she have remembered that her grandmother had loved her when all of this felt so . . . perplexing? Perhaps the attorney did not know the rest of the story.

She read on.

As she folded the letter, her nostalgic mood started to dissipate. How could she have lost something—someone—she hadn’t known she still had?

Stuffing the letter back into the envelope, she paused for a moment, then plucked out a brass key that hung from a metal chain and was accompanied by a fluorescent tag imprinted: “Shirley’s Hardware, Vineyard Haven.” The key was shiny and looked almost new, as if it had never been used, as if Grandma never locked her house. Maddie was glad she’d called the attorney’s phone number in Chilmark right away; his assistant scheduled a meeting for ten o’clock Monday. Tomorrow. There was no sense dragging this out when Maddie had her career to tend to, including one more article to write and try to get published before the tenure committee made its decision. She’d done the research; the outline, then the writing, should be easy. If she were a die-hard optimist.

Gingerly navigating three flat granite rocks that served as steps to the front entrance, she opened the screen door and inserted the key into the lock on the heavy inside door, which, like the fishing boats, could do with a new coat of paint. It took a few tries for the tumblers to come to attention; then, using her shoulder, she delivered a determined shove that sprung the rusty hinges open.

She was greeted by strong scents of must and dust; she blinked to adjust her vision to the near darkness. Then she tiptoed into the room. It was hot and humid—“muggy” she thought Grandma Nancy would have called it—and eased into the past, which, childhood memories aside, Maddie refused to allow to divert her future. She’d worked too hard toward achieving her goal in Green Hills; there was no room left in her life for a rundown cottage on an island she barely remembered.

She made it into the living room. Suddenly, the shadow of a small critter streaked across the wide plank floor. Maddie squealed, as if she were five again. Glad no one was there to hear her overreact, she prayed it was only a tiny mouse, though it had seemed bigger. Maybe it was merely a dust ball that blew in on the ocean breeze. Sure, she thought with a snicker.

Fumbling through her purse, she quickly flicked on the flashlight app of her phone. By then, however, the invader was apparently gone.

She sighed.

Assuming that the electricity had been turned off, she swung the light beam around the room; it landed on a pair of old gingham curtains that sagged from an ancient rod. She walked over, pulled the curtains apart, and unlatched the pair of windows they’d been covering. Then she raised the slightly rotting wood sashes and invited the sunshine and salt air inside.

That done, she wove her way through a maze of furnishings, boxes, and stacks of what looked like magazines, and went toward the opposite end of the room—a galley-like kitchen—where she pushed matching gingham curtains apart. Then she opened two small windows over the chipped enamel sink, a single window on the back door, and one on the sidewall behind an unpolished square wooden table, where a single chair sat, as if waiting for Grandma.

Maddie moved back to the center of the room that stretched from one end to the other, kitchen to living room, living room to kitchen, with no walls between. The sparse furnishings looked vaguely familiar, though the place seemed smaller than she remembered.

In the center of the living room, a threadbare plaid sofa faced a stone fireplace; a matching chair was tucked into a corner and offered views of both inside the cottage and out to the front yard. What looked like a handwoven lap blanket was draped over the back of the chair. Had her grandmother often sat there, watching the world of Martha’s Vineyard float by?

The fireplace stood on the outside wall near the chair; atop the mantel sat an odd-looking, purple-and-white half of a quahog shell that was scuffed and had a large crack; it hardly seemed like a memento that someone would have wanted to save. Next to the shell was a small, lopsided pottery bowl decorated with a childlike painting of a single daisy. But a larger item dominated the space: an acrylic-on-canvas depiction of Menemsha Beach at sunset.

Maddie recognized the painting. She knew if she stepped closer, she’d see the artist’s signature: Hannah Clieg. Her mother. For years, a similar canvas had stood on the mantel over the fireplace on Broadside Road in Green Hills, the home where Maddie was raised. One day, like her mother, the painting was gone. Her father must have stored it in the attic, as if that part of his life was long over. The image she studied now, however, was slightly different: her mother had added two silhouettes—a woman and a child—walking along the shoreline, holding hands. She’d probably captured that sweet sentiment after witnessing it one summer. Perhaps the figures had been tourists; Hannah had often painted them, always careful to disguise their faces.

Maybe, when her mother had been a young girl with an untrained eye, she’d also painted the daisy on the pottery bowl.

Rubbing her arms, Maddie was surprised that a chill had snuck into the room. There was so little she remembered about her mother—her beautiful mother who’d been killed in a car accident. Hit-and-run. It happened so long ago that Maddie rarely thought about her anymore. And yet . . .

She quickly tamped down her emotions, pushing them into a dark recess in her mind where she’d learned to push those kinds of things so she could keep moving, so scary feelings would not bog her down. After all, years ago she figured out that crying didn’t do any good; it wouldn’t bring her mother back. So she stiffened her upper lip now before foolish tears formed, and she continued to scan the cottage.

There wasn’t much to see: the place was hardly bigger than the entry hall of her ex-husband’s house that he shared with his silly society wife. Luckily, Maddie had had the good sense to get out of her brief marriage when their son, Rafe, was only three. By the time she and Owen had tied the traditional knot, her mother had been dead many years; her father, however, had continued to wear his sorrow like a nineteenth-century mourning shawl. Maddie had hoped that her marriage into a wealthy, well-known family in the Berkshires who would protect her (a laughable expectation) and provide her with security (the ultimate punch line) might help assuage her father’s grief.

She’d been wrong.

“Yoo-hoo!” A singsongy female voice that seemed more cheerful than necessary jerked Maddie back to the present.

A short, stocky woman stood outside the screen door. Her arms were cupped at her waist; she held a woven basket. She was smiling broadly.

“Are you Maddie?” Ms. Cheery asked.

“I am.”

The visitor looked thirtysomething. She had long light brown hair contained by a red bandanna; she was dressed in an outdated denim jumper and a butter yellow T-shirt. Her round face was absent of makeup; her cheeks were rosy, likely from the sun.

“I’m Lisa Jenkins. Your neighbor. My house is down the hill on the left.” She twitched her chin in that direction. “I saw your car in our lot, so I figured it was you.”

The “lot” was a small area halfway up the hill from the road where the driveway ended. It was barely big enough to park three cars. From there, a narrow sandy path led to Grandma Nancy’s cottage, which was just up the hill from where Maddie’s visitor named Lisa apparently lived.

“I ran into Evelyn—your attorney’s mother—at the post office yesterday. She said you were coming. I’m so sorry about Nancy, um, your grandmother.” She held out the basket; in it, an embroidered tea towel was wrapped around something shaped like a football. “This is one of her baskets. She made them out back in the big shed. They always sold out at the artisan fairs.” The young woman hastily jibber-jabbered, the way Maddie’s students often did. “Anyway, I didn’t know if any of her baskets are left. Just in case, I brought you this because you should have one. It’s yours to keep. She gave it to me for my birthday.” She took a short breath, then peeled back a corner of the cloth, revealing a loaf of bread nestled inside. “This is for you, too. I made it this morning.”

Maddie kind of remembered that Grandma Nancy was always busy with a project; one of them might have been making baskets. She opened the screen door.

“Please,” she said, “won’t you come in?”

Lisa shook her head. “No, thanks. I have errands to run while the tourists are still on the beach. It’s the only time there’s a hare’s chance of getting to up-island Cronig’s on a Sunday in summer.” Her face scrunched into a frown that revealed a few lines; her arms and hands looked very tan, the kind of tan one gets from working in a garden or mowing the yard, not from lazing on a beach towel. “I also wanted to tell you to please let me know if you hear too much noise from our place. My husband’s a lobsterman, so he works long hours, but we have a seven-year-old boy who likes to pretend he’s an action figure and a four-year-old girl who shrieks at nothing.”

Maddie laughed. “It sounds like a lively household.”

“That’s one way of putting it. Plus, our place is about the same size as this one, so it’s kind of crowded.”

Lisa seemed nice enough, but Maddie knew there was no point in making friends where she wouldn’t be living. She examined the gift. “Well, thanks for the bread. Are you sure you don’t want the basket back?”

Lisa shook her head again. “No. Please. Keep it. And the towel. It was one of Nancy’s, too.” She gestured to Maddie’s phone. “You can turn off the flashlight. I reminded Evelyn to make sure the power was on for you.”

“Oh. Well. Thanks.” Maddie felt idiotic for not having tried to flip on a switch. She turned off the flashlight and slipped the phone into her pocket.

“No problem,” Lisa replied. Then, as she turned to descend the granite steps, she dropped her gaze to her footing. Suddenly, she stopped. “I found her, you know.”

Maddie blinked. “What?”

“I found Nancy after she fell. They figured that by then she’d been dead five or six hours.” She spoke robotically, as if her words had been choreographed.

A shiver wriggled up Maddie’s spine. “My grandmother fell?”

Lisa nodded.

“Is that how she died?” Then Maddie realized that the attorney hadn’t specified Nancy’s cause of death, only that she had “unfortunately passed away.”

The young woman nodded again. “Sorry. I thought you knew.”

Maddie drilled her gaze back to the granite steps. “This is where she fell? And lay dead for five or six hours?” She backed into the house.

“It was so sad,” Lisa continued. “I might have heard her if she’d yelled for help, but I guess it happened while I was at work. I’m an administrative assistant at the town hall.” She lowered her voice, then pointed to a sharp corner of the top granite slab. “She was right there. The police said it looked like she caught her foot on the edge. Lost her balance. Hit her head. At least, that’s what I heard at work.”

In spite of the background noise—boats in the harbor, traffic on the street, and people (and dogs) yipping everywhere, Maddie’s ears plugged up. Totally blocked. As if she’d gone deaf.

“Right here?” she asked again, as if she had misunderstood. Her gaze remained riveted on the steps. She tried, but failed, to picture her grandmother. She tightened her grip on the basket.

“I’m afraid so,” Lisa said.

Maddie wondered why on earth she’d assumed her grandmother had simply died in her sleep. Or in a nursing home, where she’d lingered for a while with a terminal disease. It never had occurred to her that Grandma Nancy had been lying on the ground at her own front door. Alone. For hours.

A small ache rose inside her. She lifted her eyes and considered the bread-baking neighbor. “It must have been awful for her. And for you, too. To have found her that way. I’m so sorry, Lisa.” It wasn’t the right time to admit that she hadn’t seen her grandmother in years and could hardly remember what she looked like. After Maddie’s mother died when Maddie was still five, her father said it was time to sever “those island ties,” because her grandmother lived too far away to maintain a connection. Which was easy to understand back in the age before cell phones, the internet, and godawful social media. When Maddie turned ten, she asked her father if she could visit Grandma. But he said the woman had been old and feeble and that she had died. Maddie hadn’t questioned him. Why would she have? She’d been too young to realize that, realistically, the woman would still have been too young to typically become feeble and die.

With a slow shrug, Lisa said, “I keep thinking she might have had a stroke or something before she fell. If you hear anything, will you let me know?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want to pry, but what with you being her only family, and, well . . . she was my friend.” She paused again, as if searching for words. “I know it probably was a freak accident. But if anyone knew her own turf it was Nancy. She might have been old, but she was as sure-footed as I am.”

“I’ll let you know if I learn anything,” Maddie said, half wondering if Lisa was trying to suggest that something sinister had occurred.

Lisa nodded and mumbled a few words about her husband coming home soon. Then she lifted an arm in a short wave and headed toward the path.

And Maddie remained standing in the doorway, gripping the woven basket by its wide handle, watching Lisa disappear through the tangled overgrowth of tall grass and beach roses that crept down to the harbor. And all Maddie could think of was that nothing could bring back the past. It could not bring back her mother; it could not bring back her grandmother, no matter how she had died. Or when. And the sooner Maddie got the cottage cleaned out and sold, the better.

Maddie left the front door open, intending to sweep out the dust and the sand and whatever else Nancy left behind at the time of her unexpected departure. With any luck, the fresh air would help cool off the place. Setting the basket on the counter, she removed the bread, wrapped the tea towel more tightly around it, and put it in the oven in case the streaking critter showed up again. She wondered if she should have asked Lisa for advice on rodent removal; it wasn’t something Maddie had ever dealt with in Green Hills, in the sunlit, second floor of a lovely Victorian home nestled among tall pine trees. The house was a former faculty residence on the campus of the college where her father, Professor Stephen Clarke, taught political science. If any mice dared to take up tenancy in the house, her father no doubt would have alerted the property manager without telling her. After all, he wasn’t given to making a fuss about much of anything.

When Maddie and Owen separated, her father suggested that she and Rafe move in with him. (Though technically retired now, the professor still taught a course or two and had been allowed to remain in the Victorian—seniority was paramount in the academic world.) It hadn’t taken long for Maddie to decide: her father was a good influence on his grandson, and she liked how he showed Rafe that, contrary to Owen’s belief, having a rich life didn’t have to mean having hefty financial investments. In any event, other than an occasional raccoon that Maddie heard rooting through the trash cans in the driveway when she was up late grading papers, her experience with critters was nil. Which was how she liked it.

Returning to her task at hand, she found a broom that must have seen better days, but, as the old saying went, “none of them were recent,” and surveyed the rest of the cottage. Two modest bedrooms. One bathroom, which she expected would be ancient but had been noticeably renovated. A sleek, walk-in shower now stood where an old claw-foot porcelain tub used to be. The old one hadn’t had a shower . . . the shower was outside, loosely enclosed by a makeshift stall of wood slats that were wide enough so people could peek between them. By mistake, Maddie once saw Grandma Nancy’s wrinkly backside through them; she’d quickly scampered away.

And then she remembered something else: the outdoor shower was tucked into an alcove of the house that was created when another room, tinier than the others, had been added behind her mother’s childhood room; like a fairy-tale portal, the room was accessed through a miniature door at the back of her mother’s bedroom closet. The secret place fit an old army cot, a nightstand, and a seaman’s chest that once belonged to Maddie’s great-grandfather and was where Grandma stored Maddie’s dolls, books, and a few toys. The room had a single, round window that opened like a porthole; Grandma said Maddie could fit through it in an emergency.

Closing her eyes, she could almost hear her mother’s sweet laughter and her gentle voice. “It’s your special place, honey. Grandma had it built just for you.”

By a man with long black hair in a ponytail, Maddie suddenly remembered. He’d banged his hammer day after day because he hadn’t been able to finish before Maddie and her mother arrived that summer. He was a nice man, though. Tall and skinny. And she’d never seen a ponytail on a man before, let alone one that reached halfway down his back. But she didn’t remember his name, if anyone had told her.

She laughed now, surprised that though she had few memories of those early years, she could picture the man with the ponytail who’d built her a room. It might have been the year before their last visit there, which meant Maddie would have been four. Grandma said they should call it Maddie’s Hobbit House.

“Hobbits are happy little people,” Grandma had explained. “Sometimes they live underground because they love to hide.” Maddie wasn’t sure what she had to hide from, but she loved the special space that Grandma—and the man with the ponytail—had built just for her.

Happy to have unleashed another memory, Maddie started down the hall now, toward the closet where the small door led to the room. Then her phone rang.

She stopped. As badly as she wanted to ignore the call, she realized it could be the attorney, trying to confirm their meeting for tomorrow.

But the caller was not Brandon J. Morgan; it was her son.

She decided not to answer. It was bad enough she’d lied to her father, saying she was going to visit friends in Boston. But Maddie never lied to her son. She was not, however, ready to tell Rafe what she was really doing. Or that his grandfather—the esteemed Stephen Clarke, PhD—had either lied to her decades ago, or someone had given him misinformation about her grandmother’s supposed death. Which was hard to believe, because what would have been the motive for either to have happened? But the timing had been rather convenient: he’d never told her Grandma was dead until Maddie said she wanted to see her again. Yes, she thought, she shouldn’t talk to Rafe yet. So, with her emotions now too raw for her liking, she set the phone on a table in the hallway and decided to change her clothes and go for a run. Like Rafe, Maddie’s Hobbit House would wait.

In the early days of her marriage, physical exertion became Maddie’s go-to way to put off doing boring, housewifely stuff she simply did not want to do. Owen’s shirts needed ironing? She looked for volunteer positions around town instead. Clean clothes should be folded? Browsing through the Clark Art Institute in nearby Williamstown seemed far more important. Kitchen floor needed scrubbing? Maybe after she’d run a mile or two—no sense staying inside and wasting a beautiful afternoon. Soon, running became her favorite way . . .