Then Will asked their cousin the question they had discussed. “How much longer are the bridge people going to let you keep your house?”
“Just as long as I can stave them off. The day they come to start tearing it down they’ll have to drag me out of it kicking and biting, I can tell you.” She accelerated the old car to prove that she meant this.
Even so a large black car overtook and passed them. The rush of its passing shook the smaller car. The blast of its horn made them all jump.
Cousin Mary Peter shook her fist at the disappearing rear end. “That’s the villain himself, that Bart Simes. He’s the one who had the bridge idea in the first place. Wangled poor old Ebbie Thaxter’s half of Eden Island away from him and now he wants the government to build him a bridge out to it so’s he can make lots of money from it. Talks of making Smuggler’s Cove out there into a lobster pound, having a marina to attract the yachting trade, and dear knows what all. He doesn’t care who gets trampled on. Tear down a fine house, ruin the loveliest island there is, it’s all the same to Bart.”
“But how can just one man get a bridge like that?” asked Will.
“Huh, by pretending there’s others that want it, that’s how. Bart got lots of the folks about, mostly the ones that owe him money, to sign a paper asking for the bridge.” In her bitterness, Cousin Mary Peter accelerated even more. The red speedometer needle vibrated angrily as it moved higher.
“I’ve always known Bart,” their cousin continued. “It seems we’ve been natural enemies from the first. In school he was top boy and I was top girl, and, if I do say so myself, sometimes I was top, period. We were always pitted against each other in everything from catching the biggest haddock to rowing the fastest to Eden Island. Now with this bridge ruckus I don’t speak to him if I can help it. Funny part of it is, he still phones over for medicine when he has the least little stomach-ache. Probably because I cost him less than a doctor.”
“Couldn’t you poison him?” asked Will with a croak so doleful that they all laughed.
“Now you’re talking,” said Cousin Mary Peter. In her glee she drove even faster. “That’s just what I’ll do—put a bit of arsenic in his next prescription.”
They rattled on over the rough roads. Suddenly the driver applied the brakes so abruptly that Will’s forehead bumped the windshield. “Drat it! Whoa, whoa,” she said as they stopped before a weathered shack. “I almost forgot, the Vances’ youngest is teething and kicking up. Will, dig me out that white bottle from the compartment.”
He found the bottle under a pile of candy wrappers. She hurried into the little house with the medicine.
“I hope she’s got something to mend a broken head,” he said, rubbing his bump.
“For a snapped neck, too,” said Lettie. She rotated her head to discover whether she still could. “Cousin Mary Peter is—well—sort of unusual, isn’t she?”
“Plain crazy is what my dad thinks,” said Jo, “to bury herself down here. He says she has all kinds of ability. But then he did have his heart set on that camping trip, so he wouldn’t approve of her now.”
Their cousin ran back to the car and on they swept.
The last few miles were traveled almost in silence. The passengers felt obliged to watch the road ahead as their cousin’s driving became more dashing. She swept around blind corners and tore up hills so sharp that chimneys appeared long before the houses beneath them. Except that politeness kept them from shrieking, it was like being on a roller coaster.
At long last Cousin Mary Peter said importantly, “At the top of the next rise you can look down and behold the ancestral mansion.”
She shot them up over the next crest and leaned forward in anticipation.
“Drat,” said Cousin Mary Peter. “Fog’s rolling in just the way it generally does when you want to impress strangers. Oh, drat.”
A swirling white mass like heavy smoke was swallowing houses and barns and dark, pointed spruce trees.
“If you look quick, you can see our chimneys,” she said, but even as she spoke the red bricks were drowned in a white tide of fog.
“Too bad,” said Lettie, because someone should.
The advancing fog engulfed them, too, and soon their view was limited to the edges of the road. Will turned to the back seat. For the first time the exchange of glances between the arriving cousins was three-way. They were in silent agreement to dislike this place. Cousin Mary Peter didn’t seem to know that they had come for a week’s trial; they must tell her tomorrow.
Today they wondered if they could endure a week in the old Tibbetts place.
CHAPTER TWO
THE “DOWN-WITH-BLACK-BART SOCIETY”
Somehow they couldn’t tell Cousin Mary Pete the next morning that they were to stay only a week.
For one thing, she talked eagerly of what they would do in the long summer ahead.
For another, the loveliness of the day made it hard to talk of leaving. The fog had swirled off to its home in the east and the world, so damp and dismal last night, was now bright and beautiful. The old Tibbetts homestead, they found, faced both sun and sea. Beyond it the harbor and bay sparkled blue with golden flecks. Inside the old house ceilings rippled with golden reflected light. A fresh breeze blew curtains back into the rooms and brought in a constant clamor of gulls and the slap-slap of waves against ledges.
Furthermore, the first smell of cooking bacon that twisted up the steep back stairs was so delicious that they forgot their resolve.
“How will you have your eggs?” was Cousin Mary Peter’s morning greeting as they trooped into the kitchen. “Since this is your first day, I stayed home to get your breakfast. That way I can show you the ropes. From tomorrow on you scrabble for breakfast yourselves. I’ve got Ebbie Thaxter in my shop to stave off customers.”
She waved them to places at the oilcloth-covered table. “After we eat I’ll give you the Tibbetts homestead Grand Tour, from top to bottom. On second thought, though, I’ll leave the attic for you to explore come foul weather, as it’s bound to. Now tell me, is sunnyside-up okay for your eggs?”
“Sunnyside-up,” was the cheerful chorus. It described more than the way they wanted their eggs: it showed their feelings about the day and the place.
In the middle of breakfast the back door opened. A grizzled, weather-beaten face under a wide-brimmed felt hat peered in. “Mary Pete,” the man asked, his jaws working as if he chewed a cud, “you want to come over to the shop a minute? Bart, he’s phoned up—”
“Drat, Ebbie, didn’t I tell you to take any messages that come?” Cousin Mary Peter rattled the stove lid and jabbed at the kitchen fire.
“Ayuh, so you did. But I’m more’n likely to get ’em all bolloxed up. Don’t want to be guilty o’causing you to poison your customers, do I? Bart, he did say suthing ’bout some more o’ that stomach sarse you fix him.”
“Oh, dear, wouldn’t I like to sarse him,” she answered. “He’s been off banqueting with some of his politician friends at the state capitol, I’ll be bound, trying to get them to back his everlasting bridge. He’s got himself a good case of indigestion in the process, I’ll warrant. Run back, Ebbie. Tell him I’ll get at the prescription for him just as soon as I can. And, oh, yes, this is Dora’s