Cal stared at Chloe in shock. "How have you managed to read the entirety of the island's history already?"
Chloe shrugged nonchalantly. "It wasn't a very long story. Besides, it wasn't the entire history. It was just a short history on John and Daniel Harper, the two brothers who first settled here." She tossed a pamphlet-styled book onto their bed as she started rifling through her suitcase, extracting a black swimsuit. She had picked the book up in the lobby area of the Candlewick when they had checked in. Maggie, the manager of the inn, had seen Chloe's interest in the book and had proceeded to rattle off random facts about the island and inn and its history as her staff checked the guests in. After surprising the lovely blonde with a sailing invitation to be fulfilled later in the week, Cal spent a few hours in a most enjoyable fashion with her, before she had slid off to the bathroom for a bubble bath to scrub off the salty sea spray from the boat ride over, incidentally reading a lot of island material while in there. Cal had heard more than his fair share of names, dates, places, facts, stories, etc. then he ever wanted to know.
Chloe's eyes lit up and Cal could practically see the wheels turning in her brain. "We should totally visit their graves. In this pamphlet," she pulled out a thin pamphlet from the small pile on the nightstand, "it tells where they are buried. Daniel had his brother's family exhumed from the graves he had dug for them and relocated to a family plot within the town's proper cemetery near the church. In fact, we can probably visit all the graves of the people mentioned in this book." She started flipping through the pages, making mental notes of names.
"Chloe, darling, I love you to death. I will do whatever you want on this island, but we came here for a wedding. Shouldn't we be reveling in life and the joining of this happy couple instead of obsessing over the dead?" He collapsed face-down on the bed in protest.
His girlfriend frowned at him, and he was tempted to retract his pleas when she hadn't answered him, but Chloe nodded her head in resignation. "I promise not to speak one more word about the Harper brothers and John Wakefield and all the tragic events that have happened here, and focus all of my attention on my dear friend, Trish, and her head-over-heels-in-love future husband, Henry, if you grant me this one request. Tonight, after dinner." He turned his head to look at her.
Cal pretended to hum and haw over it before he lifted his pinky finger up to her. "Pinky swear."
Chloe rolled her eyes. "That is so childish."
"And, yet, childishly binding. Now do it."
She glared at him in mock irritation before strangling his pinky finger with her own. She leaned over and kissed him, a smile playing around her lips. He grabbed her and pulled her towards him. Her feet lost friction on the ground and she toppled over onto him, where he kissed her many more times before they pulled back and just lay there.
"How did I get so lucky to have you in my life?" he whispered. He was lying on his side and she was lying against him with her head on the side of his stomach. He reached out to poke her nose and she smiled at him.
"Probably because you're one of the few people who doesn't treat me like a sex object." Her thoughts drifted back to the boat ride over earlier in the afternoon when Henry's best friend Sully had kept making passes at her. "What do you think about that Sully guy?"
Cal snorted. "He's going to treat you like a sex object." Chloe laughed as she softly punched his stomach.
"I know that, but I feel like we could have fun with this. He wasn't being subtle at all."
"I don't do threesomes."
Chloe punched him again in the stomach, this time a little harder, eliciting a groan from her human pillow. "That's disgusting," she replied. She sat up and Cal's best efforts to pull her back down on the bed were ignored.
"Seriously, though," Cal hollered from the bed—Chloe had disappeared back into the bathroom to change into her swimsuit. "You pinky swore that you wouldn't mention all those things for the rest of the week." He rolled over onto his back, his head hanging off the bed and pointed towards the bathroom and his feet pointed towards the pillows. The bathroom door opened and Chloe reappeared wearing her swimsuit.
"Whoa."
Chloe grinned as she grabbed a towel from off of the counter.
"You just bathed and now you're going to the pool? You know you're just going to have to shower again before the party tonight."
"Fine by me. Maybe I'll have some company next time," she said before skipping out the door. Cal hesitated a total of three minutes and forty-two seconds before he was flying out the door behind her.
::~*~::
"Um, Chloe, where are we going?" Cal stumbled along the forest path behind her. The sun was setting and Chloe had slipped away from the party, but not before making sure Cal had seen her. She was already out the front door and halfway down the lawn when he left the ballroom.
Tripping along through the growing darkness, Cal had a sneaking suspicion that he knew where they were headed. Leave it to Chloe to have done her homework. She stopped so abruptly, that he almost fell over her. Getting his bearings, as much as he could on a strange island, he saw that they had cut through the forest and approached the church and the cemetery from behind. A rusty, wrought iron fence surrounded the small plot of land. Chloe excitedly ran around to the small gate and quickly went through, Cal right behind her.
She grabbed his hand and pointed to one of the headstones. The moon was full enough that they could read the large names on the stones with no other light source. "Look, it's Catherine Willis. She was the first owner of the Candlewick when it became the Candlewick. The Candlewick was built as the large manor house that John Harper built for his family. Daniel inherited it after John's death and then it passed to the town after his death. Over the course of about forty years, the house changed ownership seven times with a wealthy gangster being the last owner before the Willis'. Shortly after the gangster was murdered while visiting Las Vegas, the house burned down, a few years passed before an outsider, David Willis, came to the island to buy the property with plans to rebuild it as a vacation spot for wealthy tourists. He rebuilt the exterior exactly as it had been before, but he redid the interior to make it appropriate for many guests. He died of consumption before the remodeling was complete and ownership passed to his daughter, Catherine, who finished his work and opened it to the public, christening it with the name Candlewick. It brought a lot of business to the town, causing rapid growth for the town." She glanced sideways at Cal. "You find this incredibly boring, don't you?"
He yawned. "Of course not. Whatever you find fascinating, I find fascinating." He yawned again.
Chloe giggled. "Well, what do you want to know? Ask me anything about the island that would interest you." She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him sweetly before pulling back.
"This is kind of creepy," he said. "We're in a graveyard."
"Come on, sweetie. Ask me anything."
He looked around as though seeking something that could give him a question to ask, just to satisfy Chloe. His eyes fell on a small cluster of headstones gathered under a large tree and, even from a distance, he could see the names on them. He looked back down at Chloe in his arms. He kissed the top of her head. "Did Daniel find his happily ever after?"
She looked up at him, puzzled. "Yeah, he actually did. Elizabeth became a widow twenty-three years after she married Joseph Johnson. Contrary to her last words to Daniel, she returned to Harper's Island to take up residence in her father's house as a widow. Their courtship resumed and they married within a year. It was a bittersweet time, as her father passed away a week after the vows were exchanged. I like to think he saw what his heart had longed to see and he had no more regrets. The daughter of his body married the son he had always longed for. They spent five blissful years together before illness claimed Elizabeth's life. Daniel died eight months later. They never did have any children, not even from her first marriage." Chloe's reverent tone of voice ceased and they stood in silence for several moments. "That was such an odd question."
"Not entirely odd," he replied, pointing to the cluster of graves. John and Rachel Harper were buried closest to the tree, their three children buried below them on the gently sloping hill. Daniel Harper and Elizabeth Johnson-Harper were buried at the base of the hill, their headstones belying their true love had been found at last.
::~*~::
A/N: Timeline for the epilogue: this entire chapter took place during the first episode of the show. The first part took place between Cal's sailing surprise for Chloe and the evening party and the second part took place after the party and before the late-night swim.
