Suddenly

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Nah. They had nothing to hide. They knew Norman was just doin’ his job. Poor guy. I half hoped for him that he’d come up with something exciting.”

  “Like what?” Peter asked against the rim of his beer.

  “Like Mara had something kinky going on with someone in town. Like that person knocked her out and left her in the car with the engine running.”

  Peter choked. He coughed, cleared his throat, then shook his head. “Coroner ruled that out. There wasn’t a single bruise on her body.”

  “I know that, Pete, but where’s your imagination?”

  “I’m a doctor. I’m not into imagining ugly manners of death.”

  Charlie sighed. “All I’m saying is that Norman could have used the excitement. Hell, we all could have used it. This town is pretty quiet.” He looked up. “Hey, Donny. Go on back. I’ll be along.”

  Donny swatted Peter’s shoulder as he passed. Peter raised a hand in greeting.

  Charlie leaned forward. “So, tell me the truth. I swear I won’t tell anyone. Was she good?”

  “Who?”

  “It’s me. Charlie. I’m your big brother.”

  “Was who good?”

  Charlie sat back. “Okay. I can play the game. But I have to warn you that when old Henry Mills gets a couple under his belt, which is nearly every night right over on that barstool, he starts to talk. He says he used to drink with her and that when she was half-crocked she’d be talking about you. He says if there was any man in this town she loved, it was you.”

  “That’s flattering,” Peter said with a smile.

  “Was it true?”

  “She never said so to me.”

  “Not even in the heat of passion?”

  Peter didn’t answer. He figured that silence, coupled with a bored stare, was his best denial.

  Charlie offered a defeated, “I gotcha.” Beer in hand, he slid from his booth. “You’re one dull guy. I swear, if you weren’t my brother, I wouldn’t love you at all.”

  He gave Peter a fond nudge and walked toward his booth in back, leaving Peter in worse spirits than ever. Once, just once, he wanted a legitimate reason to hate his brothers. He waited for them to say something disparaging about his profession. He waited for them to call him a nerd, or blame him for misdiagnosing one of their friends’ kids, or criticize him because he wasn’t married. But they never did. They were good guys, all three of them, stagnant in their lives, but good guys. And he, with his academic accolades and his advanced degrees and the reverence of the townsfolk who loved putting one of their own on a pedestal—he was still bringing up the rear when it came to character.

  “Hi,” Lacey breathed, sliding into the booth. “Sorry I’m late. The most incredible thing happened to me when I left the estate. Jamie Cox was waiting by the gate, wanting to talk.”

  Peter relaxed. Jamie Cox was harmless, more an annoyance than anything else. He might own half the town, but he didn’t own Peter. “What did he want to talk about?”

  “Mara O’Neill.”

  Peter should have known. He couldn’t escape her.

  “And you,” Lacey went on. “He wanted to know whether you were going to pick up the fight against him where Mara left off. He said he got that impression when he saw you here, and I can see why he did. I remember what you said. I told Jamie that your points were valid. He argued that they weren’t and that they’d only get you into trouble.”

  “Was that a threat?” Peter asked.

  “I asked him that, and he denied it. Still, it sounded that way to me. I told him that as a doctor here, it was your responsibility to speak up when you felt that the well-being of the people was being compromised.”

  “What did he say then?”

  She smiled. “He asked me to repeat what I’d said. He hadn’t understood it. So I repeated myself. I’m not sure whether he understood it the second time, either, but he started to defend everything he was doing around town. He paints himself as the good guy and everyone else as the bad guy. You’re going to fight him, aren’t you?”

  Peter hadn’t really thought about it. Up until the week before, he hadn’t had to. Mara had appointed herself his opponent. “I don’t know.”

  “You have to,” Lacey said in alarm.

  “Why do I have to?”

  “Because someone has to, and you’re in a better position than anyone else to do it. You knew Mara. You knew what she stood for. You know that she was right.”

  He didn’t like Lacey’s tone. He didn’t like her suggestion that she knew what he knew. He didn’t like her telling him what to do. “That doesn’t mean I have to take on her fights.”

  “But it’s the right thing to do,” Lacey pressed.

  “It may also be futile. Jamie Cox has a perfect legal right to do what he wants with his property. Sure, lower Tucker looks scummy, but that’s a matter of aesthetics. There’s nothing illegal—or unhealthy—about that.”

  “What about the old movie house? You said it was a fire trap.”

  “Jamie has a permit to keep it open, issued by none other than Tucker’s building commissioner.”

  She sat back, looking disappointed. “You said that there was a conflict of interest, since the commissioner lives in one of Jamie’s buildings.”

  It struck him that her disappointment was aimed at him. Angry, he leaned forward. “Look, Lacey, if you want to throw down the gauntlet, be my guest. You can fight Jamie Cox. You can take him to court, but it’ll cost money. Why do you think Mara didn’t do it?”

  “She died before she could.”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t want to spend the money.”

  “She didn’t have to. She had an ongoing working relationship with the public defenders in town. They would have gone to court for her. They’ll do it for you.”

  “Christ, that takes time and more energy than I have. I’m up to my ears in patients because Mara O’Neill decided to off herself, and you want me to take over her causes, too? Dream on.”

  Lacey didn’t respond. She frowned at a gouge in the table. Finally, in a quiet voice, she repeated, “It’s the right thing to do.”

  Peter swore. He knew that it was, but, damn it, he had enough on his mind without taking on Jamie Cox. He couldn’t believe that Mara had saddled him with that one, too. So now he looked somehow less of a man because he refused to fight her cockamamy wars.

  Struggling to contain his annoyance, he said, “I see patients from eight in the morning until five-thirty or six, and in between I squeeze in phone calls to parents, pharmacists, labs, radiologists, schoolteachers even, sometimes”—he glanced at his watch—“and in thirty minutes I have to address the Rotary Club two towns over. I think I do pretty well, with or without Mara’s noble causes. I’m more productive than most everyone else in this town. If that isn’t enough for you, what is?”

  “Peter, I wasn’t saying—”

  “You were.” He pushed himself out of the booth. “You were saying I’m not good enough. Well, fine. Go find someone who is. Better still, go back to the city. You want big-time philanthropists? You want diehard do-gooders? You sure as hell won’t find them in Tucker.”

  Disgusted, he stalked out of the Tavern. He didn’t care if Lacey did have to pay for his beer. If she thought so poorly of him already, a little more was of no account at all.

  nine

  PAIGE STOOD ON MARA’S FRONT PORCH ONLY until the realtor had backed her car from the drive-way. Then she reentered the house and went to work. She wasn’t up for it, but she didn’t have much of a choice. When one had a house to sell—when one hadn’t even put it on the market before a realtor approached saying that the new family in town was asking about it—one didn’t waffle. One tidied up the house, moved the furniture around a little, set the fireplace with the new birch logs the realtor suggested, and packed up anything and everything that was lying around loose.

  The fact that Paige wasn’t emotionally ready was secondary to practical considerations. Besides, she wasn’t
sure that emotionally she would ever be ready. Like Sami, Mara’s house was a little bit of Mara. Paige had known wonderful times within its walls. Selling it was final, another nail in the coffin, further proof that Mara was dead.

  One of the problems was that Mara, in death, had become a mystery as she hadn’t been in life. She was unfinished business. Paige couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  So maybe it was just as well that the realtor had forced the issue of selling the house. On her own, Paige might have postponed it forever.

  She had promised the realtor that the house would be sparkling clean and ready to show by nine o’clock the next morning, which gave her little time to waste and even less to change her mind. She was wearing a T-shirt and the cut-offs that she had changed into when she had come back from Mount Court. Now she called Jill and explained that she would be late, left Mara’s number, and told her to forward calls.

  Armed with a dustcloth, a can of furniture polish, a roll of paper toweling, a bottle of glass cleaner, and the vacuum that she had herself given Mara as a housewarming gift six years before, she set to work in the low orange glow of the evening sun, polishing the table in the front foyer, wiping down the mirror above it, polishing the swirling mahogany bannister, vacuuming the stair runner. She cleaned the front parlor in a similar manner, doing her best with furniture that Mara had collected much the way she had collected people. Just as she had always been drawn to the wounded, so the long leather sofa was an irregular with one discolored cushion, the woven carpet had a pattern that ran off the edge, and the coffee table was gouged in a way that only Mara’s magnanimous eye thought artistic.

  The back parlor was another story. The furnishings there were simple—a Shaker bench, two Windsor chairs, bookshelf upon bookshelf of planks stretched over bricks. Three things saved the room from being stark. The first was Mara’s cushion collection—a wild assortment of pillows bought in a wild assortment of places and clustered in masses to rival the softest, deepest sofa. Paige smiled at the memory of Mara’s wards running and jumping, tossing and turning, laughing hysterically right along with Mara.

  The second was her work bench, an old barn door with legs attached. It held books and magazines, mail—some opened, some not—and road maps, a basket of fabric scraps, a half-finished pillow, and an instruction book from the quilting class she had been taking.

  The third were the photographs that graced every free wall. They were ones Mara had taken and developed under Peter’s watchful eye, and whereas one would have expected the pictures to be of children, they weren’t. They were pictures of nature—trees, bridges, meadows, animals—each capturing a feeling that was every bit as intense as the emotion on a child’s face might have been.

  Given her druthers, Paige would have sealed off this room. The memory of Mara was nearly overpowering here, engulfing her with the same disbelief that she had felt so strongly during the first few days after Mara’s death. Then came sadness, because the mind knew what the heart still could not accept.

  Taking a breath and delving in, Paige cleared the desktop, spritzed it, wiped it down. After fanning several of the magazines on the table, she put the rest, along with the mail and the maps, in the trunk of her car. She arranged the quilting materials as artfully as she could, feeling all the while as though she were fashioning a tribute to Mara. She took even greater pains with the pillows, arranging them one way, then another, then a third when she felt that neither of the previous arrangements properly caught the spirit of Mara.

  And that was important. Paige had promised Mara on the day of the funeral that she would find a family that would love the house as she had, and she was determined to do it. If the realtor’s family disliked this room, they couldn’t have the house.

  Dusk arrived. She switched on lights, moved into the dining room, and began polishing its contents. Mara had bought the long table and chairs at an estate sale. The pomposity of them had amused her—or so she had always claimed. Now, rubbing a cloth over the cherrywood, Paige wondered if there hadn’t been a deeper attraction. She had seen a set like this before. She could have sworn it had been at the O’Neills’ house in Eugene.

  The sadness hit her in waves, occasionally so strong that she sank onto a chair until inertia proved worse. So she set a feverish pace in the kitchen. When she began to sweat, she tied up her hair with a piece of yarn from Mara’s basket, pulled her T-shirt free of her shorts, opened the window, and pushed on. When her muscles complained, she ignored them. She was willing to do most anything to blot out the sense of emptiness that seemed to have settled over her life.

  It didn’t make sense, that emptiness. Mara had been a vibrant part of her life for twenty years; that her death should leave a gap was understandable, but that the gap should be so large—and spreading—was unfair.

  She was cleaning the oven, scrubbing angrily, when the doorbell rang. It was just after ten. She wasn’t in the mood for guests, couldn’t begin to imagine who was there other than a neighbor curious about the lights. Traipsing through the hall to the front door, she switched on the outside light. A large form lurked beyond the wavy glass panel. Definitely a neighbor, she thought, picturing Duncan Fallon. He was the gatekeeper type and would be wanting to know who was in Mara’s house. Strange he hadn’t recognized her car.

  But it wasn’t Duncan. It was Noah Perrine. One look at him, and she groaned.

  “Bad time?” he asked in that soft voice of his.

  “Yeah.” Her heart was pounding—a delayed reaction to the surprise of the doorbell, she told herself. “I’m tired and dirty. I’m not up for sparring. Maybe another time?” Then she frowned. “How did you know I was here?”

  “Your baby-sitter.”

  “Did you stop by at the house?”

  He shook his head. “Called.”

  “Ah.” She nodded. It was a minute before it occurred to her to wonder why he had come, and then her eyes went wide. “Oh, God. Something happened—”

  “No,” he broke in. “Everything’s fine.”

  She pressed a hand to her chest. “I had a horrible image of—of—just a horrible image.” Pills, a car—her own imagination couldn’t match that of a teenager intent on self-destruction.

  But he repeated, “Everything’s fine.”

  “Thank God.” The doorknob steadied her. “So, were you just out driving around?” It was a nice enough night. He should have kept on driving.

  “Campus was oppressive. I had to get away.”

  “Oppressive? Mount Court?”

  “You aren’t the Head there.” He took a deep breath, something of a sigh that didn’t know where to go. “I get tired sometimes. That’s all. So I thought I’d drive around town, but the loneliness of that was as bad as it was at the school. It might have been nice to stop off and visit someone, but the locals I’ve met since I came here aren’t wild about Mount Court. I didn’t think they’d appreciate my dropping by.”

  “To tell you the truth,” she hinted, but he was looking beyond her into the house.

  “Glad to hear you have a baby-sitter. It wouldn’t be good for the little girl to be here this time of night. This was your friend’s home?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nice place.”

  Paige sighed. “The realtor thinks she has a buyer. She’s showing it in the morning. I’m getting it ready.” She glanced disaparagingly at her shirt and shorts, which were smudged and spotted. Self-conscious, she looked back up.

  “You wear it well,” he said with a crooked grin. “Can you take a break?”

  She shook her head. “Not if I want to finish in time to get a little sleep before work tomorrow.”

  “Just down the street for a hamburger?”

  Paige never ate hamburgers. Between the red meat and the fat, she figured most anything else would be better.

  But a hamburger sounded mighty good just then.

  Still, she shook her head. “I have a ways to go in the kitchen, and I haven’t even hit the second floor.”
Besides, she was a mess. She couldn’t go anywhere without a shower, much less anywhere with Noah Perrine. He made her nervous. He looked too good.

  “Let me help, then.”

  “Oh, no, that’s uncalled for.”

  “Four hands can do a hell of a lot more, faster than two.”

  “But—” She took a step back when he came inside.

  “Where should I start?”

  “But you look so nice,” she protested, feeling slightly overwhelmed. Noah Perrine was an academician, she told herself, but when she tried to picture him pushing papers around his desk, the image of the construction worker came instead. “You’ll ruin your clothes.”

  “We’re not talking feeding the pigs in a mud storm, here. I’ve cleaned house before. My clothes won’t be ruined.”

  “Really, Noah. I appreciate your offer, but—”

  “You have the guilt to work off,” he said, looking her in the eye.

  Her protest fizzled. His directness was sobering. “Yes,” she said quietly and with some surprise. She hadn’t pegged him for the insightful type. “How did you know?”

  “I lost a close friend once, too. It’s been six years, now.”

  “Was it suicide?”

  “In a way. Gin was his thing. He swore he never had more than one or two with dinner and explained away the occasional late night drunk driving citation as an aberration. I took him at his word until the night he drove into the back of an eighteen-wheeler at a toll booth, and then it was too late.”

  Paige couldn’t deny the analogy to her situation with Mara. “I should have done more for her while she was alive. I should have been more aware of her state of mind. I should have been able to help. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.” Flexing her back, she braced her hands on the tired muscles above her waist and ran her eye up the winding staircase. “This is all that’s left. And I feel guilty about that, too. I promised I’d have the place painted and get a new screen for the door and replace one of the shutters upstairs. But if the family that’s coming tomorrow loves the place and buys it, I won’t have time.”