Addison cocked her head. A lodge? Was it a coincidence? “I haven’t heard about it!”
Ralph and his wife were terribly pleased to inform Addison.
“There was this old hotel on the island. It burned down in 1995,” the wife explained.
“It was 1998, I think. And it didn’t burn all the way down,” Ralph said.
“Sure, but it’s condemned, or it’s been condemned over the years,” the wife said, trying to get the facts together. “In any case, there were always whispers about buried treasure beneath the hotel. Apparently, they always called it the White Treasure. That’s how it was known on the island. But the White family never knew about it. They always thought it was an old wives’ tale. Can you imagine living over the top of all that treasure and not knowing?”
“I don’t think they were called White, dear,” Ralph said.
“Maybe it was Whitley.” The wife shrugged.
“Maybe it was.” Ralph nodded.
Addison was speechless. “That’s quite a story,” she said.
“Does your husband know the Whitleys?” the wife asked.
“I’ll have to check with him,” Addison said. “I’m sure he does. On islands, everyone knows everyone.”
“It’s sort of like our town in Indiana!” Ralph wore a goofy smile.
Because Janie was too weak to help, Addison hauled their luggage to their room, showed them a list of restaurants and bars in the area, and told them to have a good night. Her thoughts raced around her head. She struggled to make sense of them.
Before she returned to her parents’ apartment, she pulled out her phone and googled the treasure at the White Oak Lodge.
Sure enough, Nina was being interviewed by a major news organization. They called her a “renowned anthropologist.” Addison remembered that Nina had been a professor at Princeton, that she’d been up for tenure, but her cheating anthropologist husband had gotten it instead. She remembered that her husband’s tenure, plus his affair, had been part of the reason Nina had escaped to Nantucket Island, why she’d decided to change her life. That, and her long-held suspicion that her brother Jack was still alive, that things that had always been told to her about the night of July 4, 1998, were lies.
Addison returned to her parents’ apartment, where she found Kennedy, Penelope, and Gavin leaning against the hallway wall, watching an iPad. Addison was too exhausted to limit their screen time right now. She padded past them, touching their heads gently, then found her slice of pumpkin pie on the coffee table and sat beside her father, Hugh, on the sofa to enjoy it. Her mother, Beth, was reading, her glasses pushed down to the tip of her nose, and her father continued to flick through channels. Addison felt outside of herself.
“How did it go?” her father asked.
“It was fine,” she said. “They’re from Indiana. Nice couple.”
“Indiana,” her father repeated, as though that meant anything to him.
“Could we check the news?” Addison asked, trying to sound casual.
“You want to watch a bunch of political mumbo-jumbo?” Her father raised his eyebrows but clicked over to the national news station, his finger still on the button to change it.
But there it was: the White Oak Lodge, up in flames. The photograph had been taken back in 1998 and made the damage to the old hotel look far worse than it actually was. If Addison remembered correctly, Charlotte and Nina had even spoken about refurbishing the old place and reopening it for a new generation of guests.
“That’s quite a conflagration,” her father said. “You think they burned it for insurance purposes?”
“No,” Addison was too quick to say.
Her father cleared his throat, as though he didn’t believe her, as though he thought she was too naive to know the truth about the world. And then the video of the White Oak Lodge shifted to show an older woman, maybe seventy, a gorgeous olive-skinned Italian in a regal black dress, with arched eyebrows and a dangerous glint in her eyes. The name beneath her read: Francesca Accetta. Jack’s mother. Jack’s gorgeous, Italian mother.
When she spoke English, her accent hinted at years in Italy, though her mastery of the language showed she cared how she was judged and seen. It took a moment for Addison to fully wrap her mind around what Francesca was saying.
She was imploring her son, Jack Whitmore, to return home. She was using his real name—Jack—rather than his false one, Seth. Addison was on her feet. She nearly let the plate of pie fall to the floor. Her mother and father gaped at her.
“What’s gotten into you?” her mother chirped. “Are you feeling all right?”
But just as soon as she’d come on, Francesca was taken off-screen again, and the news cut to a commercial. Addison made an excuse that she could hardly hear and took the restof her pie to the guest bedroom, where she sat on the made-up bed and stared at the wall, willing herself not to cry. This felt like the worst kind of proof. None of the Whitmores knew where Jack was, either. She didn’t know what to think about that. When she’d found the paperwork that had linked “Seth Green” to that house on Madequecham Beach, when she’d hired the investigator that had linked Seth to Charlotte Whitmore, she’d thought that she’d drag Seth back home within the span of a few weeks. But it had been months and months since his disappearance.
She wondered if something had happened to him. She wondered if whatever or whoever he’d been chasing had turned around and hurt him. “Oh, Seth,” she murmured, because she still struggled to call him by his true name in her head, “why didn’t you explain yourself? Why didn’t you trust me enough to carry your real name?” Tears streamed down her face.