"We do too," Caroline said, "but only because we missed you."

"O, star of wonder, star of light, star with royal beauty bright, westward leading, still proceeding, guide us to Thy perfect light."

"Good heavens, Brandon!" Gracie put a loving hand on her son's arm. "You're as off-key as our old piano."

"And he sings so loud." Evelyn-still in the red taffeta Christmas dress she'd worn to the Christmas Eve service at Harvest Chapel-sat on top of the piano bench, alongside two-year-old Zachary and Jason. "Mom and I think he sounds like Smokey Bear, especially at church. It's kind of embarra.s.sing sometimes."

"Hey!" Brandon grinned as he glared at mother, daughter, and wife. "At least I sing. And I know the words too. That's more than a lot of guys."

"Just don't sing on the football field," his wife Stacy said, slipping an arm around his waist. "Your team will tease you from now until doomsday."

"And these kids of ours will be upset if Santa Claus doesn't come tonight, so off with you now." Brandon lifted the twins down from the piano bench. Evelyn jumped off and wrapped her arms around her grandmother. "Did you put cookies out especially for Santa?" he asked.

"Lots and lots of cookies." Evelyn ran across the room and held up the fancy plate. "And Aunt Sam promised to put a gla.s.s of milk out before she goes to bed. She says Santa likes it best when it's ice-cold."

"Just like your dad." Stacy winked at Brandon. "Come on now, let's get upstairs and get into your pajamas. Daddy'll be up in a little bit to say good night."

Max ran up the stairs with the little ones, yipping once or twice, no doubt having been stepped on or squeezed too tightly by one child or another.

"It's been a lovely night," Sam said, when the parlor was quiet. "But I for one can't wait until morning."

"Mom's still a kid at heart," Jamie said, slinging an arm around Sam. "She likes to find her stocking filled with goodies, and if I don't keep an eye out, she'll unwrap presents on the sly and then rewrap them again."

"I really do hate to wait until Christmas morning," Sam smiled. "I think I learned the unwrap and rewrap trick from Caroline."

"Okay, I admit it. I was never much good at waiting either. Tomorrow morning's going to be so much fun."

"But we've already received the best Christmas present possible," Gracie said, looking around the room, not just at her son and daughter, but at the beautiful inn. "The chance to buy this old place, and then not have it fall down around us." Everyone laughed.

They talked around the piano until Brandon went into the dining room for a cup of hot cider. Gracie followed after him.

"I have to read The Night Before Christmas to the kids," he said to Gracie as he ladled the steaming cider into a cup.

"Your dad always read it to you and Paige when you climbed into bed on Christmas Eve." She pulled down another mug and held it out.

"It's a tradition I wanted to keep."

"Maybe we can start a new tradition, with you and the family coming here each Christmas. We have plenty of room, and the ocean's right outside. I would have loved staying at a place like this when you and Paige were young."

"I didn't expect it to be even half this nice." Brandon filled her cup with cider and handed it back to Gracie. "You kept telling me that it was a ramshackle old dump."

"I don't think my words were ever that appalling."

"Pretty close, Mom. You told us Aunt Caroline was crazy to want to buy the place and even crazier to think she could fix it up."

"Maybe I overreacted. I like things neat and orderly, and the inn was anything but that when we first saw it."

"But you didn't see anything good about it."

"I did, though. Didn't I tell you about the garden, about the flowers and how much your father would have loved getting his hands in the soil?"

Brandon shook his head. "No, Mom, you didn't. Honestly, you made it sound like you hated the place and just wanted to come home."

Gracie couldn't believe she'd given that impression to Brandon, but maybe she had. Six months ago she had wanted nothing to do with the inn. "I really wanted to see the inn through Caroline's eyes. She saw nothing but beauty; I saw nothing but work. I guess I let that influence everything I said to you."

Brandon chuckled. "So you're telling me now that you really love this place and you don't mind being here?"

"I don't exactly want to give up my home, but I do like being here. Caroline and Sam would love for me to live here permanently, and when you stop to think about it, it isn't all that fair for me to leave and let them do all the work." She leaned back against the counter and took a sip of the cider. It was sweet and spicy, warming her as it went down.

"But what about the kids? Evelyn would be devastated if you weren't around all the time."

"I love them. You know that. It's just that-oh, I don't want to hurt you, Brandon. But"-she didn't want to say it, but it was high time Brandon knew the truth-"I guess I'm tired of feeling taken advantage of. Last summer I wanted to stay longer, but you and Stacy needed me. You said I just had to come home. Then the same thing happened this past fall. Remember? You told me Evelyn needed a Halloween costume, and you went on and on about cornucopias and school projects at the harvest festival."

Brandon placed his mug on the counter. "I told you those things so you'd have an excuse to leave here. I knew you'd stay if Aunt Caroline and Aunt Sam asked you to, whether you wanted to or not."

Brandon's words stunned Gracie. "You mean you contrived all those reasons for me to come home?"

"Not exactly contrived. They were real reasons, but Stacy and I can handle things on our own. After Dad died, we did it so you'd feel needed."

Gracie laughed. "I did feel needed." Her eyes traced the grain on the hardwood floor. They hadn't been taking advantage of her. They tried to keep her busy and give her a purpose. And they had done that for her. "Thank you."

"But once you came here, well . . ." Brandon thrust his fingers through his hair. "Obviously, we read the situation wrong."

"No, you didn't." Gracie put a hand on her son's cheek. "You did it so I wouldn't have to make the hard decisions on my own. You wanted me to be happy, and I didn't have a clue what I really wanted. I still don't."

"So you don't want to come here for good?"

"I'm not sure." She took another sip of her cider and looked around the kitchen. The cabinets were worn but cozy. The new counter was a gorgeous flecked granite. The hardwood floors gleamed under a fresh coat of varnish.

She and her sisters had done this, the three of them. And they'd done it together.

What are you up to in here? Escaping the noise in the parlor?" Sam asked Jamie. Jamie was holed up in the library late Christmas afternoon. William and Hannah's postcards were spread out on the desk in front of her. "I thought we'd all agreed to put the postcards behind us. You already turned in your paper about whaling myths."

"Got an A too." Jamie laughed. "But don't tell me that you haven't thought about them."

"I haven't had time to think about them or anything other than getting the inn up and ready to run."

"Well, I have."

"And what have you found? Anything?" Sam pulled a chair up next to her daughter and sat down.

Jamie moved the postcards around on the desk, putting the pictures in a different order. She continued to stare at the cards.

"It seems like I've been working on my thesis forever," she said. "When you're talking myth and legend in American history, there's a lot to cover."

"Such as?"

"I've been thinking about the dollar bill."

Sam c.o.c.ked an eyebrow at her daughter.

"You know, there are all these repeated references to the number thirteen. That's the number of steps in the unfinished pyramid, the number of stars in the constellation over the eagle's head, the number of arrows in the eagle's claw, and the stripes on its shield. No one is sure why that number is repeated so many times, but there are conspiracy theories about why the images are like that. Is there any truth to these theories? No one really knows."

"Okay." Sam nodded. "What does that have to do with Hannah and William?"

"I'm not all that sure," Jamie said, rearranging the cards again. "But as I worked on my thesis, I thought about how it doesn't matter if they're true or not, because either way, the fact that they exist influences the way we think about the images. I haven't looked at a dollar bill the same way since my professor pointed out all the thirteens. And I started wondering if we'd let the myths and legends we heard about Hannah influence our thinking. We heard she was a thief. We heard she'd disappeared. We heard she was buried in a secret room in the inn. We heard she was a spendthrift who squandered her husband's money. That's all just legend. In my cla.s.ses, I've learned that when you're looking into a legend, you should always start with what you know for sure. And the only proof we had of anything was that William-whoever he was-sent Hannah postcards with cryptic messages on them."

"Cryptic messages that lead us absolutely nowhere."

"But if there is some way to find out what really happened, it will be here, in these postcards. I've been thinking ever since I was here in the fall that we need to look more closely at them. I'm more convinced than ever that there's some secret code hidden in them."

"Once intrigued, always intrigued."

Sam looked up to see Gracie and Caroline walk into the room, shutting the library door behind them, and effectively silencing the sound of video games and remote control vehicles racing around the parlor's hardwood floors.

"That certainly doesn't mean I've solved anything, but . . ." Jamie pulled Hannah's hymnal out from beneath a stack of papers. "I got to thinking about the verses William had written on the postcards. At first I thought they sounded like they came from the Bible, and then I realized they're stanzas from hymns. Not just any old hymns, but ones from Hannah's hymnal."

"Are you sure?" Caroline sat on the edge of the desk.

"Look at this card," Jamie said, lifting a postcard bearing William's sketch of Nantucket's famous Old Mill. "It reads: 'Come, Lord, Thy love alone can raise in us the heavenly flame; Then shall our lips resound Thy praise, Our hearts adore Thy name.'"

"It's pretty," Caroline said, "but-"

"I found the hymn it's from. It's 'The Desire of All Nations.' In Hannah's hymnal, that's hymn number sixty-four, page twenty-five, stanza two."

"And?" Sam asked. She wasn't sure where Jamie was going with this.

"It's a convoluted puzzle, Mom, but look at the date on the postcard. June first. It probably took two, maybe three days at the most for the postcard to travel from Boston to Nantucket, which would mean it arrived on June third, or maybe fourth. I'm guessing the hymn number-sixty-four-signified the date."

Caroline, too, looked baffled. "That's a big stretch, Jamie, if you're saying that number sixty-four stands for the sixth month and the fourth day."

"That's exactly what I'm saying. That theory works on every postcard. On each postcard containing part of a hymn, I've compared the postcard's postmark date with the number of the hymn and the verse it's from. A postcard postmarked July 29 has a verse that comes from hymn number eighty-one, or August 1, just three days after the postcard was mailed. A postcard postmarked May 10 has a verse that comes from hymn number 513. There can't be that much coincidence, Mom. Those stanzas have to reflect the date William and Hannah were to meet."

"It does seem plausible," Caroline said, picking up one of the postcards. She frowned as she looked at the hymns. "But what about the time? Where is that reflected?"

"Page number and verse number," Jamie said matter-of-factly. "There are rarely more than four stanzas. 'Come, Lord, Thy love alone can raise' appears on page twenty-five and it's stanza two."

"And what time is twenty-five and two supposed to represent?" Gracie asked.

"My guess," Jamie stated, "is 2:52. Probably AM, not PM because if William and Hannah went to that much trouble to hide their meetings from her husband-or whoever-they'd want to meet in the middle of the night."

"Wouldn't Jedediah hear Hannah getting out of bed?" Gracie asked.

Jamie laughed. "I have two theories on that."

Caroline grinned. "Spit them out."

"Either Hannah and Jedediah slept in separate rooms, which very well could have been the case, or he wasn't home during the night."

"And where would he have been?" Sam asked.

"I can think of all sorts of theories. So could the three of you, if you put your mind to it. But they'd just be theories."

"But Jedediah died before a bunch of these were sent," Gracie said.

"Once he'd pa.s.sed away, she might have had to slip out at night to hide her liaisons from Jedediah's sons."

"Since we're talking theories here, how on earth could Hannah and William come up with these codes?" Sam asked. "He lived in Boston; she lived in Nantucket. It's not as if he would have sent her another postcard telling her how to hide a secret code."

"Maybe just like you, Mom, they liked puzzles. Maybe they knew each other as children or teens and created puzzles."

"It's all conjecture."

Jamie nodded. "Just like the theory on the dollar bill," she said. "No one knows if it's true, but someday, someone might find proof that it's correct."

Gracie laughed. "That is the most convoluted-"

"Maybe it is convoluted, Aunt Gracie, but I've looked at every other possibility, and that's the only thing I can come up with. And like I said, the postmarks and the verse numbers are constant."

"So-" Caroline flipped over the postcard in her hand. It showed a finely rendered pen-and-ink drawing of Brant Point Light. "Are we guessing the picture on the front is where they were supposed to meet?"

Jamie shrugged. "That seems the most likely option. It appears they're all right here on Nantucket."

No one said anything for a moment. Sam wasn't sure what to believe. It seemed impossible. But then, so much of what had happened this year seemed impossible, and yet here they were, all three Marris sisters together, reopening the Misty Harbor Inn. Finally, Sam spoke.

"This is quite an elaborate system they had for communicating. They must have really wanted to make sure no one figured out what they were up to."

"But it still doesn't tell us what happened to her," Gracie said. "We still don't know where she went when she disappeared."

"I suppose we can only hope and pray," Caroline said, "that something good happened to her when she disappeared. And that someday we'll figure out the truth about that too."

Caroline was in the garden with her sisters, tending flowers in the spring sunshine, willing them to bloom in time for their open house to introduce the inn to the community. The distinctive diesel whine of a delivery truck met their ears as it made its way over the sh.e.l.l-and-gravel drive.

The brand-new signs-one for the top of the steps leading up from the beach, one to hang at the front of the house-were scheduled to be delivered today, and the sisters dropped what they were doing and raced to the front of the inn.

Sam signed for the box, hands shaking with antic.i.p.ation. They thanked the driver, who'd become a regular face over the months, and set the box on the front steps. They used Gracie's flower clippers to cut the heavy tape.

"What if they're not right?" Gracie asked. "What if the paint is smudged or they misspelled Misty or Harbor or left one of the n's out of Inn?"

"Gracie," Sam said patiently, "we were sent a proof before they made the signs. This company has been making signs for a good hundred years. They'll be fine."

Quickly, they opened the box, anxious for what they would find. They tugged away the shrink-wrap and the paper surrounding the signs, and removed the one on top.

"Wow!" Sam exclaimed. "It's fabulous. Exactly what we wanted."

The oval sign was painted Nantucket blue and Main Street yellow to match the yellow of the inn and the blue of the door. The sign showed an open doorway, a symbol of welcome. Pink roses rambled around the entryway. It wasn't an exact depiction of what guests would see when they arrived, but it was close. It spelled out home and comfort, and that was exactly what the sisters were trying for. And off to one side was the long cherry red hood of an antique car. The words Misty Harbor Inn were at the top. At the very bottom: Est. 1852.

The date was a bit of a stretch. The inn itself was established a hundred years later, but the history of the Misty Harbor was important, and the sisters had wanted to give credit to the year the old mansion was built.