I hand the daybook to Carol. “This is what we found.”
“Actually, the dog found it.” Tucker is behind me, stirring sugar into his coffee. “I don’t think anyone would have spotted it otherwise. It’s a pretty cool object.”
Carol gently opens the book. “Imagine this being tucked away like that for all these years.”
“And you’ve read it?” Meghan takes the book from Carol, looks at me.
“I have, a lot of it.” I tell them as much as I know about Susannah from her book—about her having been a tenant in this house, a healer and widow. I open the journal to my favorite passages, pointing out the methodical way Susannah recorded the quotidian and the remarkable. And I read them this:
“‘Today I have encountered Doctor Bellingham along the Commons road. He is kind enough to have offered me a lift. And appalled when I gave him my new address.’”
Carol asks, “What was her ‘new address’? I thought she lived here.”
Now I feel like a storyteller winding up to the climax and I give in to a perverse need to keep them waiting. “Anyone want more coffee?”
“Just tell us.” Meghan holds her mug up for another splash.
I set the carafe on the table. “Jacob Baxter has evicted her because she can’t pay the rent. She’s in Dogtown.” I hear the present tense in my statement. Susannah is, for me, very much in the present.
The cousins suddenly wear the same expression of dismay, and for the first time, I can see that they share blood.
“He threw her out? A widow?” Meghan sits back in her chair, slaps the table. “What kind of a man was he?”
“It was more gentle than that, if you read her writing. From the get-go, once her husband was gone, she knew she couldn’t stay here. She wrote that it was a place meant for a family, and she had none. Baxter had five kids.”
“But Dogtown? That was considered a place of ill repute, wasn’t it?” Carol looks at Tucker as the historian in the room. “You know, witches and prostitutes?”
Meghan sniffs. “What else do you call an old impoverished woman but a witch or a whore?”
Tucker shakes his head. “No. By her time, the area was pretty much abandoned, so she must have holed up in one of the last houses standing.”
“She did, Goody Mallory’s place. Which is interesting, because she says the dog, the one that followed her home, belonged to Goody.”
“Was the cottage nice at least?” Carol looks embarrassed on her Baxter ancestor’s account and it’s painful to tell her that it wasn’t a “cottage,” but a hovel.
“She wrote that it stank. She called the stench a ‘miasma’ that penetrated everything. Even her clothes.”
“This Baxter sounds like a jerk.” Meghan tips the last of the coffee into her mug.
Our historian chimes in. “It was the way things were done. Most widows would have gone to live with one of their children, but I guess, from what you’ve told us, Rosie, she had no one.”
“She mentioned that her husband, Ben, had two sons from his first marriage, but neither of them offered to take her in. Besides, I think she was attached to Gloucester, to Cape Ann. She didn’t want to go back to Marshfield. She had a life here.”
Tucker walks his mug over to the sink. “Except that my ancestor, Doc Bellingham, was making it hard for her, horning in on her livelihood.”
I remember something from my last reading. “Tucker, I haven’t told you, but I found an entry where she wrote that Dr. Bellingham had asked her to help him with a case.”
“That’s good. Maybe he helped her out. But still. Ending up in Dogtown.”
I gently close the daybook and put it back in its archival box, close the cover, tie the black string that holds it shut in a neat bow. “She was a strong, independent woman who got treated pretty shabbily. She went from happily married to homeless, an outcast in her own town.” I’m looking at Meghan. I want my friend of the here and now to understand that this long-ago woman and I have certain things in common. “It may sound weird, but I relate to Susannah. We both have a solitary existence, a lack of accepting family. We are both victims of circumstances beyond our control. We both have a companion dog for comfort.” I stop before I get weepy. Shadow is back in the house and has dropped his chin onto my lap. I scratch behind his ears. I notice that Shark is getting the same treatment from Meghan. “But, you know, maybe Susannah found some solace. I mean, I’m in Dogtown, too, and”—I smile at Meghan, still amazed that she’s been my secret benefactor all this time—“it’s been really good for me.”
Meghan nods, puts her scarred hand on mine. “I was hoping that it would be.”
“And, in some ways, maybe there is something of Susannah in you, Meghan.”
“What?”
“Her strength in the face of adversity.”
There seems nothing left to do but go out and get lunch before Carol and Meghan have to head back to Connecticut. Meghan rides with me, Carol following so that they can get on the road right after.
“So, what do I do with it? The diary. Does the family want it?”
“Carol will survey the rest of them, but my guess is that we might want a copy of it, and the original can go to the library or the historical society.”
“I keep feeling like there must be another piece of it out there somewhere. I’d love to find it. Find out how the story ends.”
It’s a ten-minute ride to the Lobsta Land Restaurant, but I take my time around Grant Circle, never comfortable with rotaries at the best of times. It’s started raining in earnest now and I must need new wiper blades, because my windshield is all blurry. I have only minutes to ask Meghan my nosiest question. “What’s up with you and Marley?”