He was absolutely right. The long, winding drive in the spectacular T-Bird was joy enough. The little villages they passed through were as scenic as any postcard. The sun dipped down toward the horizon in the west, and the breeze in the open car smelled of fish, then flowers, then sea.
The restaurant was hardly more than a diner, a square of faded gray wood set on stilts in the water, across a rickety gangplank. The interior decoration ran to torn fishnets and battered lobster buoys.
Scarred tables dotted the equally scarred floor. The booths were designed to rip the hell out of panty hose. A dubious effort at romantic atmosphere was added by the painted tuna can and hurricane globe set in the center of each table. The candles globbed in the base of the cans were unlit. Today's menu was scrawled on a chalkboard hanging beside the open kitchen.
“We got lobster rolls, lobster salad and lobster lobster,” a waitress explained to an obviously frazzled family of four. “We got beer, we got milk, iced tea and soft drinks. There's French fries and coleslaw, and no ice cream 'cause the machine's not working. What'll you have?”
When she spotted Nathaniel, she abandoned her customers and gave him a hard punch in the chest. “Where you been, Captain?”
“Oh, out and about, Jule. Got me a taste for lobster roll.”
“You came to the right place.” The waitress, scarecrow-thin with a puff of steel gray hair, eyed Megan craftily. “So, who's this?”
“Megan O'Riley, her son Kevin. This is Julie Peterson. The best lobster cook on Mount Desert Island.”
“The new accountant from The Towers.” Julie gave a brisk nod. “Well, sit down, sit down. I'll fix you up when I get a minute.” She swiveled back to her other customers. “You make up your mind yet, or are you just going to sit and take the air?”
“The food's better than the service.” Nathaniel winked at Kevin as he led them to a booth. “You've just met one of the monuments of the island, Kevin. Mrs. Peterson's family has been trapping lobster and cooking them up for over a hundred years.”
“Wow.” He eyed the waitress, who, to almost-nine-year-old eyes, seemed old enough to have been handling that job personally for at least a century.
“I worked here some when I was a kid. Swabbing the decks.” And she'd been kind to him, Nathaniel remembered. Giving him ice or salve for his bruises, saying nothing.
“I thought you worked with Holt's family—” Megan began, then cursed herself when he lifted a brow at her. “Coco mentioned it.”
“I put in some time with the Bradfords.”
“Did you know Holt's grandfather?” Kevin wanted to know. “He's one of the ghosts.”
“Sure. He used to sit on the porch of the house where Alex and Jenny live now. Sometimes he'd walk up to the cliffs over by The Towers. Looking for Bianca.”
“Lilah says they walk there together now. I haven't seen them.” And it was a crushing disappointment. “Have you ever seen a ghost?”
“More than once.” Nathaniel ignored the stiff kick Megan gave him under the table. “In Cornwall, where the cliffs are deadly and the fogs roll in like something alive, I saw a woman standing, looking out to sea. She wore a cape with a hood, and there were tears in her eyes.”
Kevin was leaning forward now, rapt and eager.
“I started toward her, through the mist, and she turned. She was beautiful, and sad. 'Lost,' was what she said to me. 'He's lost. And so am I. Then she vanished. Like smoke.”
“Honest?” Kevin said in an awed whisper.
Honest wasn't the point, Nathaniel knew. The pull of the story was. “They called her the Captain's Lady, and legend is that her husband and his ship went down in a storm in the Irish Sea. Night after night while she lived, and long after, she walked the cliffs weeping for him.”
“Maybe you should be writing books, like Max,” Megan murmured, surprised and annoyed at the shiver that raced down her spine.
“Oh, he can spin a tale, Nate can.” Julie plopped two beers and a soft drink on the table. “Used to badger me about all the places he was going to see. Well, guess you saw them, didn't you, Captain?”
“Guess I did.” Nathaniel lifted the bottle to his lips. “But I never forgot you, darling.”
Julie gave another cackling laugh, punched his shoulder. “Sweet-talker,” she said, and shuffled off.
Megan studied her beer. “She didn't take our order.”
“She won't. She'll bring us what she wants us to have.” He took another pull of the beer. “Because she likes me. If you're not up for beer, I can charm her into switching it.”
“No, it's fine. I suppose you know a lot of people on the island, since you grew up here.”
“A few. I was gone a long time.”
“Nate sailed around the whole world. Twice.” Kevin slurped soda through his straw. “Through hurricanes and typhoons and everything.”
“It must have been exciting.” “It had its moments.”
“Do you miss it?”
“I sailed on another man's ship for more than fifteen years. Now I sail my own. Things change.” Nathaniel draped his arm over the back of the booth, “like you coming here.”
“We like it.” Kevin began to stab his straw in the ice. “Mom's boss in Oklahoma was a skinflint.”
“Kevin.”
“Granddad said so. And he didn't appreciate you. You were hiding your light under a bushel.” Kevin didn't know what that meant, but his grandmother had said so.
“Granddad's biased.” She smiled and ruffled her son's hair. “But we do like it here.”
“Eat hearty,” Julie ordered, and dropped three enormous platters on the table.
The long rolls of crusty bread were filled with chunks of lobster and flanked by a mound of coleslaw and a small mountain of French fries.
“Girl needs weight,” Julie proclaimed. “Boy, too. Didn't know you liked 'em skinny, Captain.”
“I like them any way I can get them,” Nathaniel corrected, which sent Julie off into another gale of laughter.
“We'll never eat all of this.” Megan stared, daunted, at her plate.
Nathaniel had already dug in. “Sure we will. So, have you looked over Fergus's book yet?”
“Not really.” Megan sampled the first bite. Whatever the atmosphere, the food was four-star. “I want to get the backlog caught up first. Since Shipshape's books were the worst, I dealt with them first. I still have to work on your second quarter, and The Retreat's.”
“Your mother's a practical woman, Kiev.”
“Yeah.” Kevin managed to swallow a giant bite of lobster roll. “Granddad says she needs to get out more.”
“Kevin.”
But the warning came too late. Nathaniel was already grinning. “Does he? What else does Granddad say?”
“She should live a little.” Kevin attacked his French fries with the singleminded determination of a child. “ 'Cause she's too young to hole up like a hermit.”
“Your granddad's a smart man.”
“Oh, yeah. He knows everything. He's got oil for blood and horses on the brain.”
“A quote from my mother,” Megan said dryly. “She knows everything, too.
But you were asking about Fergus's book.”
“Just wondered if it had scratched your curiosity.”
“Some. I thought I might take an hour or so at night to work on it.” “I don't think that's what your daddy meant by living a little, Meg.”
“Regardless.” She turned back to the safer topic of the account book. “Some of the pages are faded badly, but other than a few minor mistakes, the accounts are very accurate. Except for the last couple of pages, where there are just numbers without any logic.”
“Really. They don't add up?”
“They don't seem to, but I need to take a closer look.”
“Sometimes you miss more by looking too close.” Nathaniel winked at Julie as she set another round of drinks on the table. It was coffee for him this time. She knew that when he was driving he kept it to one beer. “I wouldn't mind taking a look at it.”