One day, John rose from his cozy house to take a cup of coffee down to the lakeshore, as he did every morning. But on that morning, a young woman was standing on the shore, looking out over the water. He hadn’t seen her before, but when she turned, she looked so familiar, he gasped aloud.
“Elizabeth?” he said, his voice a whisper.
She squinted at him. “No,” she said. “I’m Cecelia Brown.” She held out her hand. “You must be John Wharton.”
“And that’s the tale of Wharton,” Wyatt said. “And of my family.”
Tess was listening with her chin in her hands.
“So, what? Did they get married? Have children?”
“That’s how the story goes,” Wyatt said. “They had four kids. Two girls and two boys. John lived to a ripe old age and is wholly responsible for this town being here.”
“Wow,” Tess mused. “How cool to know that part of your family history. What an immense connection you must feel to this place.”
Wyatt took a sip of his drink. “Yes, I do. My whole family does. We’ve still got some furs from that time and other mementoes of his. Diaries, too. That’s how we know the story. Apparently, his children were unaware of . . .” Wyatt stopped, choosing his words carefully. “Unaware of the whole village disappearing.”
“That was in his diaries?”
Wyatt nodded. “Exactly. They weren’t found until a generation or so later. He didn’t talk about that part of his life to his family. He kept it hidden.”
Tess could understand that. Every family had secrets, things they’d rather not see the light of day. Many of those secrets involved family members who had simply vanished, left for whatever reason, were never heard from again, made new lives elsewhere, with new people, rejecting what—and who—they had for the allure of something new.
She thought of her uncle Grey’s sudden disappearance, decades earlier. Her dad never talked about it, never speculated where his brother might have gone, or why. It was like he was erased, not just from holidays or family gatherings, but from existence. The only picture Tess had ever seen of him wasn’t a picture at all. It was the painting, Picnic at Mermaid Cove, that hung above the fireplace at La Belle Vie. Now that she thought about it, she wondered why her father insisted that the family hold on to it, given that he never spoke of his brother. Perhaps it reminded him of gentler times.
Tess brought her thoughts back to the moment and smiled at this man across the table. “Do you believe it? The disappearing part, I mean. One person, sure. But a whole village?”
“I don’t know,” Wyatt admitted. “You know how these tales tend to get taller over time. But I do know that he believed it to his dying day.”
He took a sip of his drink and looked off into, perhaps, the past. “I’ve always been sort of torn about it. I’m a pretty practical-thinking person, so, you know . . . Shape-shifters. Enchantment. The whole thing disappearing like Brigadoon.”
“That doesn’t happen so often these days.” Tess smiled at him.
“Not every day, no,” Wyatt said. “I’ve speculated about it a lot over the years. I’ve thought that maybe Elizabeth left him—although that didn’t happen back then too much, either. Or she died suddenly. That’s the more likely explanation. In childbirth, perhaps. Or, I mean, this is a little darker, but maybe she was killed. Maybe he killed her. Then, when more people started coming to the area, maybe the village moved on, went deeper in the woods, to not be bothered by this new town that was springing up. He could have concocted a fantastical explanation. The bottom line is, we just don’t know. It just disappeared.”
“Like Brigadoon.” Tess smiled. “And Wharton has been enchanting people ever since.”
“True enough,” Wyatt said.
“Has your family always lived here?” Tess asked him. “Or did you come back to your roots more recently?”
“We’ve always been here,” Wyatt said. “Members of my family have lived other places, of course, but there’s always somebody in Wharton. It’s as though the whole place might disappear if one of us wasn’t here anchoring it down.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Something wasn’t right at La Belle Vie when Wyatt and Tess returned after their lunch. She had invited him in for a cup of tea and, immediately after walking through the door, Tess felt an itchy, hot veil of unease settle around them. It lurked in the air as they hung up their coats, prickling its way through her hair, down her neck, and into her spine. Storm was nowhere to be found. No greeting when they came inside. That alone made the hairs on Tess’s neck stand up.