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Wes wanted to make a joke about that. To suggest that Dr. Whitehead see through time to find the youthful and unimpaired version of Wes that still existed somewhere inside him.
Wes was still in the process of testing to see if he qualified for the brand-new drug Dr. Hamilton mentioned. When he was there, he couldn’t read Dr. Hamilton’s expressions enough to guess if he passed the tests or not. He wondered if not being able to read people as well was a part of his decline. He assumed so.
Perhaps because of the chaos at the Sunrise Cove, Wes was again plagued with nightmares. In them, he was a younger man still living at the Sheridan House with Anna. For some reason, he needed to talk to her and tell her something so desperately that it ate him up inside. But every time he entered a room to speak to her, she left through another exit, so he never saw anything more than the back of her head.
“I’m in here, Wes!” Anna called from every room. He chased her until he staggered to a halt on the back porch, putting his hands on his thighs to steady himself. Anna wore a white dress and stood at the far edge of the dock. She faced the Vineyard Sound. The wind swept through her long, thick hair and her dress, and she raised her hand to wave to someone. Wes reached out. He wanted to tell her to get away from the water, that it would kill her, but when he opened his mouth, he couldn’t speak.
Wes woke up with a gasp and pressed his hand to his chest. His pajamas were soaking wet with sweat. Bit by bit, the world came back to him. Beatrice was fast asleep, curved away from him. He was in the house they lived in together. Not the Sheridan House. Anna had been dead for nearly thirty years.
What had he wanted to ask Anna? What had he been so desperate to know?
Wes grabbed his ledger and tiptoed through the dark to sit at the kitchen table. He recorded everything he could of the nightmare. Maybe it would serve him someday. Perhaps he could share it with Dr. Hamilton, who would explain that the dream didn’t mean Wes was getting sicker. “All it means is you and your first wife have unfinished business,” Dr. Hamilton might say. And Wes could respond, “Tell me something I don’t know!” and laugh darkly.
* * *
Wes returned to the Sunrise Cove the following morning to meet Sam and Dr. Whitehead. Amanda had been up all night with the baby and couldn’t make it, but she sent numerous text messages about how to handle the situation from a legal standpoint. Wes hoped Sam would remember them. They’d already flown out of his head.
Dr. Whitehead had friends with him—other historians who specialized in this specific arena of history.
“And what arena of history is that exactly?” Wes asked.
Dr. Whitehead’s glasses glinted. He took a little too much time to speak, as though he wasn’t sure he wanted to share. “The Civil War.”
“That far back? Wow,” Sam said.
“That’s our assumption thus far,” Dr. Whitehead said. “The van is stocked with specialty equipment that will allow us to handle and test various items that have been kept in the room for more than one hundred years. It’s best not to bring anything into the light or out of that air. That environment is all those items have known.”
That made sense to Wes, he guessed. But as Dr. Whitehead and his historian friends headed downstairs, he burned with more questions. This was his family history. He had to know more.
“You don’t think it could have been part of the Underground Railroad, do you?” Sam muttered.
Wes’s adrenaline spiked. He hadn’t considered this. “Did the Railroad come this way?”
Sam removed his cell from his pocket and typed furiously. Wes would never maneuver his cell the way the younger generations did. His clumsy thumbs always hit the wrong buttons.
“Looks like it did,” Sam said, showing Wes a cartoon map that illustrated one of the paths of the Underground Railroad.
“We don’t know anything for sure yet,” Sam continued to mutter to his phone as he searched for more information. “But this is intriguing. Crazy intriguing. I have to talk to Amanda. See what she thinks.”
It certainly captivated Wes to consider that his family had been involved in the Underground Railroad. Everybody wanted to believe their families were good people; that they’d done the right thing in a historical context. Nobody sat well with themselves when their family had been slave owners or Nazis, even if it had nothing to do with them.
Wes tried to add up the years and figure out who had owned the property back in the 1860s. His grandfather had been born in the late 1880s; his grandfather’s grandfather had been born in the 1830s or 1840s. Maybe he could ask Susan about their genealogy. She kept a good record.
Natalie worked the front desk that morning, waiting for Wes to relieve her of her duties. “The guests won’t stop pestering me about what’s downstairs,” she said. “Like I look like someone who knows anything!”
Wes laughed and eyed the dark basement door. It looked like a cave.
“Did they say anything else this morning?” Natalie asked.
“They think it’s from the Civil War period,” Wes explained. He decided not to mention their speculation about the Underground Railroad. It excited him so much, and he didn’t want to be wrong.
“But don’t tell the guests it’s Civil War-related yet!” Sam hollered from the office next to the front desk. From where Wes stood, he could see Sam looking over paperwork, his head bent. If Wes tricked his mind for a split second, he could imagine that was himself back there. That he had paperwork to tend to, and Anna was coming back soon with their young girls. He shook his head of the image.
“It’s all fascinating,” Natalie said. “How many times have I been in that basement?”
“Think about how I feel,” Wes said. “I was practically raised here.”
The morning continued the way it had since the big discovery downstairs. Guests paraded past him and peppered him with questions. They called him “Indiana Jones.” They laughed with him about how “strange and fun” it all was. Wes felt boisterous and slightly manic. He sent guests all over the island for hikes and restaurant picks and beach walks, reminding them to put on sunscreen. “It’s not that warm out there yet, but the sun can bite you anyway.” He remembered his own girls’ sunburns and how they’d wept with pain.
