A Wedding on Lilac Lane by Hope Ramsay (best book clubs .txt) 📕

“Surprise me, okay?”

“Right. But I promise that if it’s possible, we’re going to have a chocolate fountain.”

Mom laughed as she headed into the yarn shop, which made Ella feel good about herself. She didn’t want to blow Mom’s trust in her. Not only with the catering, but with the whole Dylan thing.

She headed up the street to the inn, a gnawing restlessness settling over her. She didn’t have anything to do this afternoon except obsess about the men in her life. Cody, who might show up unannounced at her front door, and Dylan, who’d made her body sing last night with the sweetest kind of music.

At moments like this, it was best to take out her violin and practice until she could clear her mind. Remembering Jackie’s request (or was it the ghost’s?), she took her violin out to the lawn and sat in the shade of the old oak tree and practiced a somewhat simplified version of the second movement of “Borodin’s String Quartet no. 2.”

She couldn’t do the piece justice. It required four voices. But it suited her mood. The movement, sometimes called “This Is My Beloved” because it had been turned into a song in the musical Kismet, was hopelessly romantic. In any event, Ashley’s guests would probably recognize this classical piece because of the musical, and she wanted to perfect it before next Saturday’s tea.

She’d been working on the arrangement for about an hour when Jackie came racing across the lawn, his penny whistle clutched in his fist. She had to hand it to the kid; he’d been practicing like a champ. And even though all that practicing was driving his mother nuts, it had also improved his whistling skills.

Ella had already told Ashley that she should explore music lessons for the boy because Jackie, like so many children first exposed to music, had developed a burning desire to learn. It was a little ironic for Ella to suggest this, given the way Mom had pushed her into music. But music had always been a part of her, despite Mom’s ambitions.

In fact, music had always been the one thing she could depend on. It could lift her up when she was down. It could fill her world. It could carry her away. It could calm her down. Music had never demanded anything she wasn’t willing to give to it. Nor had it ever abandoned her or disappointed her.

“Hey,” the kid said, rushing up to where she sat in a folding chair she’d purloined from the stash Ashley used for weddings. “I heard you practicing. You wanna hear the ‘Sailor’s Hornpipe’?”

“Sure.”

Jackie put the whistle to his lips and slowly played the first musical theme of the famous sailor’s song without a single mistake, which was impressive because the song required him to use more than one octave—a difficult thing on a penny whistle. Ella clapped. “Well done, Jackie.”

“There’s more to the song though,” he said. “I listened to it on YouTube. And I tried to play faster, but the whistle squeaks, especially on that one really high note.”

“It’s okay. You’ll get faster the more you practice.”

“Will you teach me the rest of it?”

“Sure.” She spent the next hour teaching the second theme to the boy. He had a remarkable memory and a good ear, which made learning the song fun. He hadn’t yet been exposed to the drudgery of having to learn musical notation. That would come later.

“You want to play it together?” she asked.

“Only if you go real slow.”

The kid amused her. He was such a sweet boy. “I promise. But if you make a mistake, don’t stop. That’s the trick of performing. Musicians make mistakes all the time.” She only wished someone had told her that when she was eight or nine.

She tucked the violin under her chin, and they played the first and second variations all the way through. When they got near the end, she said, “Keep going.” The kid went back to the first theme and played it again. They played like that over and over again, Ella gradually increasing the speed. In the last round, she started playing harmony to his whistle, and the hornpipe came to life along with a little light in Jackie’s eyes.

When they finished, a couple of the inn’s guests who had been sitting out on the lawn turned and applauded Jackie. He took a sweeping bow. The kid was a natural-born performer.

“That was fun,” he said. He looked off into the distance for a moment, his gaze focused on something Ella couldn’t see. “The captain says I could play whistle on his ship anytime.”

The boy’s gaze returned to Ella.

“The ghost was talking to you?” she asked. She’d felt nothing—no cold air, no shiver down her back, not one paranormal experience. Ella had to admit that Jackie’s odd fixation on the inn’s imaginary ghost was unsettling.

“Yeah. He hangs around the tree most of the time. He’s pretty lonely and sad,” Jackie said.

“Really?”

“Well, yeah. Think about it. He died trying to come back to Rose. He was in a hurry and ignored the hurricane that sank his ship. He’s responsible for all those pirates drowning in the inlet. And then the one survivor, Henri St. Pierre, fell in love with his girlfriend. That had to suck.”

“Wait…his first mate fell in love with Rose?”

“Yeah. Kind of a shocker. They had a baby together.”

“No. How do you know that?”

“We found Rose’s diary last year, and some stuff buried in the backyard.”

“Oh. Wow. Wait, does that mean all the Howlands and St. Pierres can trace their ancestry back to Rose?”

He nodded. “Yeah, Mom and Reverend St. Pierre are like seventeenth cousins or something. It was all hundreds of years ago.”

“So at least Rose had a happy ending, then?”

“I’m afraid not,” the kid said on a long sigh. “You know, Henri was black, and Rose was white, and it was 1716 or something like that.”

Oh wow. The tale was like one of those tragic Irish ballads. But really the captain’s misery, if indeed