“I don’t know.”
“I can do it on my own if you want.”
Eleanor didn’t seem to like that suggestion either so Jess offered one more. “If you would like, we can save this room until later and start working through some of the empty bedrooms first.”
“Let’s do that,” Eleanor said with alacrity. “That way I can have Nate go through one more time to make sure he takes any of his father’s effects he might still want. He was here last night but only went through quickly. I would like to give him another chance.”
They would have to get around to this man cave eventually but Jess could wait. “All right. Why don’t you show me the other bedrooms and we can pick one to start.”
“Perfect,” Eleanor said.
Whitaker House was truly lovely. Built into the hillside, it featured large, airy rooms and stunning woodwork. Most rooms opened up to views of either the ocean or the surrounding forest of redwoods and coastal pine.
Eleanor had described the house as cluttered and dark but Jess didn’t see that. She saw a structure that had provided a home for multiple generations, where each had left a mark.
She would have loved to wander through every room admiring both the view and the contents but knew their time was limited.
“How long has this house been in your husband’s family?”
“Since it was built. Jack’s great-grandfather came from banking money back East and wanted to make his mark in California. He was a haphazard rancher at best, from what I understand. By the time Jack and I married, much of the surrounding land had been sold off over the years, leaving just these two acres, the main house and a few run-down guesthouses.”
“I didn’t notice any run-down guesthouses.”
“We tore one down years ago because it couldn’t be saved and Nathaniel fixed up the other one after he came back home with Sophie. Basically he completely rebuilt it, saving only the bones. We had plenty of room for them here, of course, and he lived here when she was little. When she started school, he felt like it was important that the two of them have their own place. It’s a darling house. No more than a thousand square feet but he’s done a great job with it.”
Where was Sophie’s mother? She wanted to ask but didn’t want to be nosy. She was here to help clean out Whitaker House, not pry into the business of the inhabitants, no matter how intriguing she might find them.
“It’s nice that you know all this history about your husband’s family.”
“Oh, we can trace back generations. My late mother-in-law was obsessed with Whitaker genealogy. On my own side, I can’t keep track past the great-grandparents.”
Jess couldn’t trace her family even that far. She knew her father had been orphaned young and her mother had run away from home to marry him when she was seventeen. Neither had ever talked about their parents much.
Maybe Rachel knew more than she did. Her sister had always been interested in that sort of thing.
Eleanor opened a door at the end of the hall. “This was Nathaniel’s bedroom. Let’s leave this one for now, too, so he can go through it one more time himself. I think he’s taken most of the mementos he might have wanted. His surfboards, favorite books, that sort of thing. What’s left are things he probably doesn’t mind leaving behind.”
Jess stood inside the door, scanning the room to mentally catalog the work ahead of her. It smelled like him, an outdoorsy mix of soap and cedar. Which was completely irrelevant to anything.
“He’s a surfer?” she asked. There was a gorgeous framed photograph of a surfer on the wall across from the bed, the figure tiny as it made its way through a huge translucent green curl of water.
“Yes. That’s him in high school when he went to Hawaii with some friends. He never competed, only for fun, but he was good enough to be on the professional circuit, if you ask me. Of course, I’m his doting mother. What else am I going to say?”
Eleanor gave a rueful smile that Jess couldn’t help returning.
“In some parts of California, the schools have surf teams but Cape Sanctuary is too small for that and the surfing isn’t all that great. After high school, Nathaniel was torn between moving to Southern California to pursue professional surfing or joining the military after high school. The military won.”
She had suspected he was ex-military. It wasn’t any one thing she could pinpoint, more his general bearing.
Yet one more reason, if she needed it, to ignore her unfortunate attraction to the man. She had nothing against the military in general. She had given years of her life to the army, after all. In that time she had known mostly good, honorable men and women who worked hard to uphold the ideals of their particular branch of the military.
But she had also been sexually harassed more than once and had even physically fought off a sergeant who wouldn’t take no for an answer and thought his higher rank allowed him to touch whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted. She had defended herself with a well-placed knee and an even better-placed warning that the asshole needed to keep his hands to himself around her and any other female recruits or she would personally make sure he received a dishonorable discharge.
She had spent too much of her life being an unwilling victim to her father’s emotional abuse and complete dominance in their family to tolerate male hegemony in any form.
“It’s probably for the best if we have, er, Nathaniel help us clean this out.”
Eleanor chuckled. “He won’t appreciate you calling him Nathaniel. No one does but me, now that his father’s gone. It’s been ‘Nate’ to just about everyone since he was in school.”
Jess forced a smile. “I’m the same way when people want to call me Jessica. It’s my name but Jessica ought to be wearing frilly dresses and have her hair perfectly curled. That’s never been me.”
“Isn’t it wonderful that our names do not always have to define us? Everyone called me Eleanor Roosevelt when I was a girl. I’ll admit, I might have become a bit more outspoken, with that sort of role model, but they were hard shoes to fill. Jack just called me Ellie.”
Her smile wobbled and Jess worried she might be on the brink of tears. She pretended to mark something on her checklist to give the other woman time to recover.
“All right,” she said. “We have ruled out the two rooms we’re not clearing out yet. While I am enjoying the tour and the history immensely, maybe you should point me in the direction of one we can start on.”
Eleanor’s laugh sounded shaky but no longer tearful. “You caught me. This is harder than I thought it would be. My whole life since I was twenty-five years old is wrapped up in this house. My husband’s entire life was wrapped up in it. Sifting through a legacy is hard. Now I understand why some people leave this until after they’re gone.”