Cottage on Gooseberry Bay: Charmed Summer by Kathi Daley (fb2 epub reader .TXT) 📕

Cottage on Gooseberry Bay:

Charmed Summer

by

Kathi Daley

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2021 by Katherine Daley

Version 1.0

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Gooseberry Bay

Halloween Moon

Thanksgiving Past

Gooseberry Christmas

Kiss ‘N Tell

Charmed Summer

A Summer Thing

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 1

“Ainsley Holloway?” a man wearing a dark brown uniform asked after he’d walked up to my cottage in Gooseberry Bay and knocked on the front door, and I’d answered.

“Yes. I’m Ainsley Holloway.”

“I have a delivery for you. I’ve been instructed to check your ID and to have you sign for it.”

“Delivery? What sort of delivery?”

The man held up an envelope. “I have this envelope and two large boxes, which I will carry up from the parking area once I’ve confirmed your ID and I have your signature.”

I hesitated for a moment since I wasn’t expecting a delivery. Being a private investigator, I tended to have a suspicious nature, which caused all sorts of weird scenarios to run through my mind up to and including a bomb in a box. I supposed I could decline to accept the delivery, but my curiosity got the better of me, so I showed the man my brand new Washington State driver’s license and then signed the receipt he presented.

He handed me the envelope and then turned to retrieve the boxes. Deciding to wait where I was, I looked down at the envelope which appeared to have been sent from a law office in Northern Italy. The packages must have come from Warren Cromwell, a man I supposed might be my closest living relative. I’d spoken to him on the phone two weeks ago, and he’d mentioned that he had some photos and mementos he felt I’d like to have.

Once the delivery man returned with the boxes, I instructed him to set them inside the cottage, near the front door. I grabbed my purse, tipped the man, and then stood perfectly still as I allowed a wave of emotion to wash over me.

Seven months ago, I’d come to Gooseberry Bay looking for answers to a past which no longer made sense. My father, a career cop turned private investigator after he retired, had been shot in the line of duty and eventually died as the result of his injury. After his death, while cleaning out his attic in preparation for the sale of his house, I’d found a photo of two little girls with a blond-haired woman on the porch of a house overlooking the sea. I didn’t recognize the porch or the house, but for some reason, once I’d found the photo, I’d begun to have dreams. Vivid dreams. Dreams that, over time, I decided were real memories.

Six months ago, I’d met Adam Winchester, the eldest of the Winchester brothers. As it turned out, Adam and his brother, Archie, owned the mansion where the photo had been taken. With Adam’s help, I’d been able to determine that the two little girls were, in fact, myself, who at the time had been known as Ava, and my sister, Avery. We also figured out that the woman with us was a distant relation by marriage to Adam and Archie, although neither had ever met her.

I slit the top of the envelope open to find a thick document, along with a handwritten note from Warren inside. My heart pounded, and my stomach knotted up as I read the note and considered the document. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath and willed myself to relax by counting backward from twenty.

As I counted, I let my mind take me back to five months ago when Adam had helped me weed through the hundreds of random photos and documents stored away in the mansion he and his brother had inherited after their parents had died. I knew our quest to figure out who I’d been and what might have happened to me after the photo on the porch had been taken was a longshot. Our hope had been that we’d find clues as to why the woman, who we eventually identified as Marilee Wentworth, spent part of the summer of nineteen ninety-five at Piney Point, with two children who we determined were my sister, Avery, and me. Finding even one clue had taken us hours and hours of working together in Adam’s suite at the mansion. It was time that I’d found to be both frustrating and hugely rewarding. The answers we sought had come to us slowly, and to this day, were incomplete, but during the long days and late nights we’d worked together, Adam and I had gotten to know one another and had forged a friendship.

When Adam made a trip overseas three months ago, he’d managed to track down the identity of my biological parents, a couple named Arthur and Adora Macalester. Before dying in a small plane crash in nineteen ninety-five, the couple lived on the family estate in Northern Italy with their two children, Ava (me), who was three at the time, and Avery, who was just one. The story of how the three-year-old orphan of a rich and influential European couple ended up being raised by a single cop living in Savanah, Georgia, is a long and complicated one that I’m still trying to unravel. Adam has been helping me with this endeavor, and so far, we’ve actually been able to figure out quite a lot.

After Arthur and Adora’s