*

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Chapter 22: Eddie Thomson

            A knock at the door pulls Teresa out of her past.  She saves the chapter and shuts down the laptop before thumping downstairs.  Lord Braithewaite, dressed in a well-tailored suit, is standing on the doorstep. He holds a monogrammed leather briefcase in one hand, and with the other he removes a bowler hat from his head.  Teresa imagines for a wild moment that she has stepped into the bank scene from the movie Mary Poppins.

            “May I come in?” he asks.

            “Of course.”  Teresa gestures him inside, then rushes to clear a space on the sofa.  She sits in a chair opposite him.

            “I hope I haven’t disturbed your work,” he begins.

            “Not at all.  It was time for a break.”

            “Miss Salerno, I cannot tell you how important the document and the jewelry are to my family.  My curator friend in London confirmed the authenticity of the contents of the packet.  He is keeping the confession to see if he can discern the missing parts using all that fancy technology he has in his laboratory.”  He clears his throat and adjusts his shirt collar.

            Teresa opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it.  Lord Braithewaite is about to give a prepared speech.

            “Miss Salerno, my family and I wish to express our gratitude for your honesty and goodwill by offering you free lodging at the Manor for as long as you choose to stay.  I’ve spoken to Miss Micklewhite already.”

            “Why, Lord Braithewaite, that is most generous of you.”  Teresa hesitates, then says, “I do have a request, though.  When your friend completes his work with the confession, may I see the results?”

            “Well, hmmm, I don’t see why not.  I’m off to Kent to visit my nephew’s family, but I’ll give you a ring when I hear anything.  How is that?”

            “That’s fine.  Thank you.”

            At the door, Lord Braithewaite replaces his hat and walks away with a brisk, purposeful stride.  Teresa shakes her head and smiles at his transformation from the grubby gardener in a smashed hat to this ever-so-proper aristocrat.

            Teresa spends the afternoon touring a miniature pony farm near Exmoor.  She takes photographs of the shaggy, dog-sized horses and their shy foals.  Part of her feels appalled that humans take pride in distorting the majestic horse in this way.  She is almost ashamed to be so charmed by the tiny ponies.

            Visiting the farm with Teresa is a busload of nursing home residents.  Some are being pushed around in wheelchairs; some struggle over the uneven ground with walkers.  Teresa sees their wrinkled faces beaming as goats nuzzle their hands for treats.  One old woman in a wheelchair shrieks with laughter because a goat is chewing on her shoelaces.

            A sign proclaiming “Carriage Museum–this way” points to a huge barn.  Inside, Teresa finds a display of carriages and carts.  She saunters along in the dim shafts of light sprinkled with dust motes, peering at the cards in plastic frames that describe each vehicle.  In front of a heavy cart made of thick planks, she stops with a sharp drawing in of her breath.  Fumbling in her backpack for her camera, Teresa photographs the words:

                        Wagon–Circa 1790

                        Smugglers carried goods away from wrecked ships using sturdy carts like the one displayed here.

                        –donated by Lord Morris Braithewaite, Manor House, Mantecombe, Devonshire

            By the time Teresa returns to Mantecombe, it is almost seven o’clock.  The sky is still light as she enters the White Horse pub, but there is a brooding line of roiling clouds at the edge of the horizon and the wind is gusting.  Teresa orders a glass of dark ale and fish and chips.  The stained corner table where she sits exudes the odors of years of beer and smoke.  When the barman brings over her basket of steaming fried cod and potatoes, Teresa says, “Is Eddie Thomson here?”

            “That old grunion?”  The barman glances around at the handful of men seated in the pub. “Not here yet.  I’ll give you the nod when he comes in.”

            Teresa looks at her meal, grins, and shakes her head.  She can’t believe she’s eating this food.  Unhealthy it may be, but she loves the greasy, crisp fries, especially doused in vinegar.  Teresa does not need the barman’s wave to know Eddie Thomson when the fellow rolls into the pub.  He’s a crab of a man, hunched and grizzled.  With white hair and a scraggly, tobacco-stained beard, he’s dressed in an indefinable garment of an indefinable age and color.  Teresa rises and taps him on the shoulder.

            “Mr. Thomson?”

            “Oh, Mr. Thomson, is it?  And what can Mr. Thomson do for you?”  he says, grinning to show teeth like black and yellow piano keys.  His breath sends Teresa back two steps. 

            “I’d like to ask you about local history.  Wreckers, actually.”

            “Wreckers, is it?”  He fixes her with watery, pale blue eyes.  “Buy me a pint and give me a minute, see, to collect me thoughts.”

            Teresa signals to the barman who pulls a pint of ale and hands the glass to Eddie.  Eddie drags a chair over to Teresa’s table and straddles it backward.

            “Are you hungry, Mr. Thomson?  Would you like some dinner?” she asks.

            “This here’s me dinner,” says Eddie, draining half the glass.

            Teresa explains to Eddie that she is researching local history, and that she is staying at the Manor House.  At the mention of the Manor House, Eddie draws back and cuts his eyes aside with a grimace.  “Aye, that there’s a history, all right,” he says after a long pause.

            “What can you tell me about wreckers?” Teresa asks as Eddie tips up the last of his ale. 

            “For that telling, I’ll need another pint,” Eddie grins.  He wipes drops from his mustache.

            When he is settled in with his new glass, Eddie begins.  “Now the coastal folks hereabouts have made a good commerce from the tales of wreckers and smugglers and pirates and all.  That Daffy Du Maurie and her Jamaica Inn and all.  It’s good for the tourist trade.  But I can’t say the locals were great wreckers.  Nay, I would say there never was deliberate wrecking.  As for the false lights, there’s no evidence that such criminality ever took place here.”  Teresa senses she’s being hustled; that this is the image the locals prefer to offer to outsiders.

            “Then the story of George Braithewaite putting out false lights and wrecking the ship his daughter was on—you think it is a fabrication?”  Teresa is surprised.  Obviously, Eddie hasn’t heard of the discovery of George’s confession.

            “Braithewaite?  Now that one’s a bird of a different color,” Eddie frowns, then gives her a wink and adds, “I’ll need another glass for that tale.”

            Teresa has never intentionally gotten someone drunk, but it is obvious to her that she is playing a game whose price is dark ale.  She signals to Tommy, the barman, and fetches Eddie his pint.

            “Me great-great–I don’t know how many greats–grandfather was Frederick Thomson.  He was with that Braithewaite fellow on the night the ship hit the rocks.  Some say George Braithewaite put out a false light, but as I heard the story, it was a storm that fetched the Maeve onto the rocks.”  Eddie stops for a swallow of ale.  His eyes are clouding; his nose is red and his words are blurring at the edges.

            “The tale gets gruesome now.  Are you sure you want to hear it?” he asks with a leer.

            “Quite sure.”

            “Frederick found that maid, Margaret, between rocks on the shore.  Her face was battered and bruised beyond recognition.  He thought surely she was dead.  She sported some few jewels, but her fingers were curled up so cold and stiff that Frederick couldn’t get them off.  George came over, took out his knife so as to cut off her hand to get at the bracelet and rings.  When he made the first cut across her wrist, she gave out a moan.  There was George, all affrighted, wrapping up her wrist in his kerchief, and her bleeding out her life, if she wasn’t to have lost it already.  He and Frederick carried her up to the cart and laid her amongst the casks.  They thought they might have a reward from her people if she lived.  If not, they’d give her back to the sea.”

            Eddie pauses to drink.  The pub is filling up with the evening crowd.  Three musicians are setting up their instruments on a platform in the back.  Teresa waits, hoping to hear Eddie out before the music begins.

            “George took himself off away to the Manor with his cart, but Frederick, my great-great, he went back to the beach for more wreck.  That’s when he heard the crying and he found the babe.”

            “Lucas?  Margaret’s baby boy?”  Teresa was aghast.  Could this be true?

            “Aye, the poor laddie’s legs was crushed.  He was alive, but barely.”

            “And?  What happened then?”  Teresa feels her own eyes must be wide as salad plates.  Eddie shoves himself backward out of his chair.

            “I’m off to the loo,” he says.  He sways across the pub floor to the men’s room.  Teresa can barely restrain herself from following him.  She bites at a hangnail and tears it down until her finger bleeds.  At last, Eddie lurches out of the men’s room door, but then he leans on the bar to chat with another regular.  He appears to have forgotten Teresa.  After several minutes, she gets up and coaxes him back to the table with another pint and a bowl of peanuts.

            “Now where was I?”  Eddie says.  He tries to crack open a peanut shell but his fingers are rubbery. 

            “Frederick Thomson found the baby and he was alive.”  Teresa takes a peanut and opens it for him.  She shells peanuts and hands them over as he continues.

            “So me great-great what-all granddad takes the boy to his mam, who’s a baby-catcher and a bit of a healer for the locals.”  He crunches on some peanuts while Teresa resists shaking his shoulders to make the story come out faster.

            “The babe lived, only his legs never healed up proper.  They was bent like two sickles.  Even so, you’d think that George Braithewaite would have been grateful.  You’d think he’d have taken his grandson in.  But he shunned the boy, refused to raise him.  Said he’d already killed his own daughter, and how could he face her son with such a great sin on his head.”

            “It does seem rather heartless, considering how he loved Margaret,” Teresa says, almost to herself.  She remembers the vivid dreams of the loving father with the pony.

            “Aye, he loved her, all right, but George Braithewaite was an odd one.  Me mam once told me she heard say that he had two families, a wife at the Manor, and another in Dorset.  The one wife died young and he brought in the other, smooth as glass.  Neighbors were gobsmacked, and gave them Braithewaites a wide berth.”

            “But what about the boy, Lucas?”

            “Ah, that’s the great family secret.  What happened to the boy?”  He leans forward and his breath is so foul that Teresa blinks several times.  “If I tell you the truth, you’ll not breathe a word?”

            “I can’t–” She is about to say she can’t promise silence, she’s a writer, but he interrupts.

            “The Thomsons, Frederick and his wife, took the babe in, bandy legs and all, and they raised him as their own.  Named him Jonah, since he survived the sea, you know.  He turned out a fine, clever fellow, too.  And me very own so many greats granddad.  Me granddad!”

            Eddie’s brows lower and he scowls.  “Aye, and I’m the rightful heir, you see.  The rightful heir to the Manor House.”  He sits up and slams his palm on the table.  Teresa jumps back and some others glance over at Eddie.

            Eddie points a gnarled finger at Teresa.  “If it weren’t for that lily-livered, slithery eel of a two-timing bigamist, George Braithewaite, I’d be living in comfort in me old age!”  Eddie pushes himself to his feet, stumbling sideways so he has to catch on to the chair.  “Mine!  It shoulda been mine!” he yells.

            One of the men at the bar stands and comes over to Eddie.  “‘S’allright, now, Eddie, me boy.  You’ve had enough for this evening.  Let’s get you home.”

            Teresa sinks down into the dark corner while the man helps Eddie out of the pub.  Her head is aching with the fright of his outburst and the thoughts that are swirling in disjointed words in her mind.  So Lucas lived.  And George Braithewaite did have two wives!  Slowly Teresa gets to her feet.  She pays the bill and drives back toward the Manor House.

            At the top of the hill, before turning into the drive, Teresa stops the car and crosses over to the edge of the bluff.  She can see the lights of the town, but a bank of billowing inky clouds obscures the moon and stars.  The wind swirls and buffets her.  She can just make out bursts of white water as the rising waves smash against the jagged rocks near the shore.  As the rain begins, Teresa scuttles back to her car.  This will be a wild storm tonight, she thinks.  I wonder if the cradle in Margaret’s room will move.

*

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Chapter 21: Scandal

            Cousin Alberto’s undoing was set in motion by a part-time dockworker named Juan Alvarez.  He came to the shipping office one morning when Angelina was looking over the accounts. 

            “Senor Alberto owes me money,” he said.

            “He does?” said Angelina.  “Well, let’s have a look.  What day would that have been?”

            “September eighteenth.  We loaded three trucks to go to the Jersey factory and then we put the special crate onto his truck.”

            “Special crate?”

            “Si, you know.  The one that goes to the warehouse in Brooklyn.”

            “The warehouse in Brooklyn?”

            “Pero si, senora.  Sometimes I drive the truck myself,” said Juan.

            Angelina masked her astonishment.  Later she told me that this was the moment she knew that Alberto was carrying on some sort of illegal business.  To Juan she said, “Yes, of course, the warehouse in Brooklyn.  What is the address again?  So I don’t have to look it up?”  She flipped through the ledger as if searching for a page.  Juan told her.  Angelina paid him what he claimed he was owed, in cash, and watched him leave.  Then she called the police.

            The next morning, Salerno Enterprises made the headlines of every newspaper:

            Busted! Salerno Enterprises Traffics in Drugs

            In the warehouse, the police found hundreds of containers of olive oil.  Inside each container, plastic bags of heroin floated in our famous extra virgin cold-pressed olive oil.  When all the bags were collected, the police estimated their street value at over three million dollars.  Under the headline, Cousin Alberto’s mug shot accompanied a photograph of the officers opening the containers.  After Cousin Alberto was handcuffed and driven away, the police arrested Father as well.  He was released on bail the same afternoon.  Alberto was not allowed to post bail; the police were afraid his partners would kill him before the case ever got to court.

            When the cab from the airport dropped me in front of our apartment building, I pushed my way through a cluster of reporters.  I made it into the elevator before any of them realized who I was.  The atmosphere inside the apartment was thicker and heavier than it was after Junior died.  Angelina was at the office.  Father hunched in his reclining chair in the living room, an unlit cigar between his fingers.

            “Oh,” he said when he saw me, “you’re home.  Did you hear?  Your cousin has ruined us.  The Salerno name is mud.  No, worse than mud.  It’s slime.  It’s shit.”

            I’d had a long flight from Italy, with a five-hour layover in London.  I was bleary-eyed and feeling nauseous.  All I could reply was, “Yes, Father.  I’m sorry.”

            He didn’t seem to need more words than that.  He gave a grumbling cough, then turned his gaze to the wide window with the view of Central Park.  I dragged my suitcase down the hall to my old bedroom.  Without taking time to unpack, I lay down on the bed, pulled up the quilt and fell asleep.

            Angelina woke me in the late afternoon.  She’d been at the office all day, doing damage control.

            “How bad is it?” I asked, sitting up slowly.  Sometimes I could trick my stomach into remaining calm if I leaned back at an angle with pillows behind me. 

            Angelina shook her head.   “It’s bad.  Gristedes and some other high-end stores have canceled their orders.  They’re saying that Portuguese olive oil is cheaper.”

            “Are we going under?”

            “No.  It will be tough for a while, but I think the car dealerships and the rental properties will keep the business in the black until this blows over.”  Angelina patted my belly.  “But you, Teresa.  How are you?”

            “I’m OK.”

            “A little sick, maybe?  Tired all the time?”  She smiled.

            “Like I could sleep half the day and stare at the wall for the other half.”

            “So tell me,” she said, “who is the father?”

            I told Angelina about Giancarlo, how we met at an art gallery opening.  I showed her the only picture I had of him, leaning against a fountain with his curly hair rumpled, his head thrown back, his sensuous mouth laughing.  His arms were outstretched wide, as if he were embracing the world.

            “Mmmm, he’s very good-looking,” Angelina murmured.  “You will have a beautiful baby.”  She gazed at the photograph for another long moment, then handed it back to me.  “Actually, Teresa, I’m more worried about Anthony than the business.  The business has a good foundation.  It will survive.  But your father—he is so depressed.  No one in Italy will talk to him except Uncle Gio.  Gio says that if the state of New York doesn’t execute Alberto, he’ll fly over to New York and do it himself.”