Beloved

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "With enough time and money, anything can be done," McKenzie said. He stepped down and around the trees, gauging the distance between the roots and the house. "It's iffy. I don't know that I can get a tree spade in there."

  "So how much would it cost for me to have them dug up and planted nearer the road?" she asked, pleased that the damn issue of his heritage, or whatever it was, could be resolved without bloodshed.

  "It's early in the season ... they're still dormant ... if you do it now, before the spring rush — say, five hundred dollars a tree."

  "Five? Oh. I can't afford that. Really." Her tone was calm, dignified, and final.

  He seemed, at last, to understand. "All right," he said after a pause. "Then what about this: I'll remove one of them, for nothing, and keep it to plant on my own property."

  "Done," she said at once, relieved to be finished with the subject. They shook hands on it — she was surprised by the calluses on his palm, and the way his hand engulfed her own — and he left after setting a tentative date to begin removal of the tree.

  "He's exhausting," Jane said after he was gone. She sat back on the sheet-covered Empire sofa with her eyes closed and her feet up on a milk crate, recovering from this latest military skirmish. She wondered whether McKenzie had been like that with his wife. Of course he had.

  We're all the enemy to him—every one of us who's had the misfortune to go to college or, God forbid, had parents who did.

  And yet, to see his hostility as town versus gown seemed oversimplified. Jane began to think it was subtler than that. Mac McKenzie wanted things kept just the way they happened to be when his mother gave birth to him: women in the kitchen, men in the field. He felt threatened by progress of any kind, whether it was the cutting down of trees, or a wife with a law degree.

  Granted, Jane didn't know him very well — he was the kind of man who would let only one or two people in his life do that — but if she had to guess, she'd say he put everyone he met in one of two camps: those who were out to preserve the world, and those who were out to rearrange it. Maybe that explained his obvious contempt for Phillip. He wouldn't think much of a developer.

  She tried to put McKenzie — and the headache he'd given her — behind her as she dragged herself back to work. Maybe she'd been going at the house too hard: twelve- hour days, almost three weeks without a break. She needed a night off, a little fun and laughter. She needed Bing.

  So after she couldn't push herself any longer, Jane wandered over to his house, at the risk of being mauled by Buster, to borrow some coffee from Cissy and to find out when her brother was due back on Nantucket.

  "Tomorrow," Cissy told her. "He called a couple of hours ago, hoping you'd be here. But I told him you never break away for anything but food and drink. And," she said, holding up a can of Folger's, "I was right."

  "Well, considering how hard I'm supposed to be working, the house doesn't seem to be getting anywhere," Jane said, discouraged.

  Buster came over with a sad-eyed, sympathetic look and laid his massive black head in her lap. She rubbed his floppy ears and sighed. "I think if someone walked in off the street right now and made an offer, any offer, on Lilac Cottage, I'd jump at it. Every time someone gives me an estimate for something, I go into shock," she said, thinking of McKenzie's tree-moving quote. "Condo dwellers are used to fixed-price living."

  Cissy snapped a Tupperware lid on a container she'd filled with ground coffee for Jane. "You're just tired, that's all. But the days are getting longer, and the coldest weather's over, and things will get better, you'll see."

  Jane remembered that McKenzie had given her the name of a contractor. "Can I use your phone while I'm here? Mine won't be installed until next week."

  Cissy said to go ahead, and Jane made a call to a pleasant and eager-sounding young man who said he'd be by the next day to look at the job.

  It was a quick call, but Cissy seemed to spend it staring at the big quartz clock that hung impressively on the opposite wall. Aware that the girl was carefully made up and dressed a little provocatively in tights, a short skirt, and a plunging Lycra top, Jane said, "Am I keeping you from something?" Lunch at the Espresso with her pals, was Jane's offhand thought.

  "Yes, you are!" Cissy blurted. "I'm in love!"

  Chapter 8

  "In love? Really?"

  "Yes!" Cissy said, hugging herself with quick little rocks of joy. "I can't tell you who it's with, he's forbidden me to say — he's a really private person — but he's just so wonderful and a fantastic lover and I never dreamed this could happen. You know how unhappy I was about being here all alone on the island and yet here he was, under my nose! I think I've been confused — emotionally — and he just seems to understand all of that so well! He's so deep. He takes everything so seriously. I think that's why before he met me he was so miserable. Oh, Jane, I'm so happy."

  "I can tell," said Jane, laughing at her sheer ebullience. Cissy looked truly radiant. She was young and hadn't yet learned how to dress with any sophistication, but it didn't matter at all. With her glowing cheeks and her hands dancing expressively and her voice ringing with happiness, she was the prettiest thing on the island and, very possibly, earth. It's true what they say, Jane decided. Everyone loves a lover.

  "You're not going to tell me who it is?" she asked, fishing shamelessly.

  Cissy shook her head resolutely.

  "He's not married, is he?"

  "Not anymore."

  "Ah, but what if Phillip finds out?" Jane teased, remembering Cissy's recent crush. "Won't he be jealous?"

  "Ohh-h," said Cissy with a distressed look; apparently she'd forgotten all about Phillip.

  "I was kidding. Don't worry about Phillip," Jane said softly. "Just follow your heart. Anything that makes you look this good can't be all bad."

  So much for my flu-symptom theory, Jane realized. Love at first sight looked pretty good. Dammit.

  "You haven't known him very long, I take it," Jane added, almost wistfully.

  Cissy whispered, "It seems like all my life." The words fluttered through the air like a butterfly in a garden, and Jane was left with a sense of awe and of great, great deprivation.

  ****

  That night Jane dreamed not of thorns and blood, but that she was eight years old again, on a sweet, warm summer's day on Nantucket. In the dream she was weaving a coronet out of daisies and purple clematis, but behind her she was hearing a sound, monotonous and droning. It was very bothersome; she couldn't concentrate on her task, although it seemed critical that she finish it. She tried and tried, but the relentless noise was making it impossible.

  Jane woke up. The relentless sound was of Buster, barking. Over and over again, the same pattern repeated itself: three woofs and a growl, three woofs and a growl. Bizarrely, it sounded like it was coming from deep in the house, in her basement. Jane lay there for a half-conscious moment, and when it didn't stop she dragged herself out of bed and put on her heavy chamois robe and camp shoes and staggered downstairs into the kitchen. She flipped on the basement light switch at the top of the missing stairs, then forced herself out into the night air, which was surprisingly mild, and around to the outside bulkhead doors.

  The doors were wide open.

  The doors had very definitely not been open that afternoon. She'd made a point of closing them, because the forecast had been for rain. The ground was wet but even in the dark she could see that the clouds were parting; the rain had come and gone. Jane crouched low and peeked down through the open inner door into the dimly lit basement. It was Buster, all right, on the loose again. When he heard his name, he stopped barking immediately, lowered his head, and came shuffling meekly toward her, his big tail wagging apologetically.

  "C'mere, boy," she said, reassuring him with some pats on his rump. "Whatsamatter? Racoons again? Is that who opened the doors? Yeah ... people say they're clever with their hands." She paused to consider what she was saying, and to whom she was saying it.

  Yikes. This plac
e is getting to you, Jane Drew.

  She circled the basement warily, keeping alert for just about anything — racoon, Wicky, snakes, owls, lions, tigers.

  Nothing would surprise her. The basement was small; the search did not take long. Jane found nothing, which somehow bothered her more than Wicky or snakes would have. She began to second-guess whether she'd left the bulkhead doors open, after all.

  She led Buster out of the basement, holding on to his collar so that he wouldn't run away — although for one evil second, she toyed with the idea of letting him loose to wake up McKenzie again. Obviously she couldn't take Buster over to Cissy in the middle of the night — Cissy might not even be home — so she brought the dog into the house and waited a moment to see if he'd settle down. He did, quite contentedly, in front of the fireplace.

  "How dumb can you get, dog? There's no fire. There's not even any wood." She laughed softly and turned to go and Buster, realizing his faux pas, got up and followed her sheepishly into her bedroom.

  He stretched out on the floor beside her bed, which was fine with Jane. So far she'd been trying hard to be blasé about the goings-on around Lilac Cottage; no doubt they were pranks by local kids. She even thought she knew who the ringleaders were: surely the two she'd seen at her aunt's wake. One thing was sure. Whether they were kids, adults, or phantoms, someone was trying to frighten her and doing a damn good job of it. That's where Buster came in handy. He might not be the brightest dog, but he had a bark fierce enough to peel paint from a picket.

  She pulled the covers up over her and turned onto her left side, favoring her right shoulder. It had been a long, strange day, and it didn't seem to want to end. She remembered that her shoulder hadn't hurt so much when she was by the grave, and that worried her. Her shoulder ....

  Judith Brightman?

  Jane sat bolt upright in her bed and Buster lifted his head, alert for he didn't know what. How did McKenzie know Judith's last name was Brightman? He'd tossed it off so casually that it hadn't sunk in at the time. The woman couldn't possibly have been a friend of his; the stone was too old. An ancestor, then? That'd be logical, except that if the burying ground were a family plot, there should have been a McKenzie tucked here or there — unless McKenzie's mother was an only heir, and his father had married into the family. Or maybe ....

  She slumped forward, hair drooping over her eyes. Who cared, anyway? Why was it so important to know who Judith — Brightman, Schmightman, whatever — was?

  Because she wants me to know, was Jane's sleepy, illogical thought. She hunkered back down and pulled the comforter over her aching shoulder. She won't let me forget.

  ****

  Jane awakened the next morning to the sound of heavy breathing. She opened her eyes to see Buster sitting next to her bed and panting happily, waiting to be fed for a job well done.

  "Okay, okay," she said, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and running her fingers sleepily through her tumbled hair. "What does something like you eat for breakfast? A roast pig?"

  She padded out to the kitchen and searched through her cupboards and fridge for something suitable, but the pickings were slim. Now that she looked at Buster, she wasn't even sure it was food he wanted. Maybe his morning constitutional? Was that why he was sitting by the door? Dogs were another subject she didn't know much about; her father had kept his family on the move too much for her ever to own anything more demanding than a turtle.

  She dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt and hauled Buster over to Bing's house. If Cissy wasn't up yet — too damn bad. She remembered McKenzie's black mood the day she met him and sympathized belatedly.

  After a little detour Jane got the dog to sit alongside her on the front steps. She rang the bell and waited. It was Bing who opened the door, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  "Hey hey!" he said with a surprised grin. "Treats on my doorstep!"

  "Dog on your doorstep," Jane said, trying to maintain her fine sense of outrage. "Buster got loose and woke me up in the middle of the night. Here. He's all yours." She let the dog go and he went loping off to the kitchen. "What time did you get back?" she asked, a little hurt that Bing hadn't stopped by, since he claimed to be so all-fired anxious to see her again.

  "Oh ... late," he said vaguely. "Cissy's dead to the world; I don't know when she got in. Did you know she has a beau?" he asked with a wry look. "She won't tell me who he is. I gather he's no kid: she keeps referring to him as 'quite mature' and 'very manly.'"

  From out of nowhere the image of Mac McKenzie came rocketing into Jane's consciousness. McKenzie — with Cissy? Was it possible? Surely not. And yet it certainly was one way to solve his easement problem: seduce a relative of the grantor. But he wouldn't ... he couldn't ... But who knew? For McKenzie the stakes were unbelievably high.

  "Earth to Jane ... earth to Jane," Bing said, tugging at a lock of her uncombed hair. "Dinner tonight? At last?"

  Jane shook herself free of the speculation — it was too absurd, too calculated a thing for anyone to do — and said in a lighter mood, "I thought you'd never ask."

  "Great. I'll pick you up at seven. You know, of course," he added in a softer, more serious voice, "that you have no right to look so pretty at this ungodly hour."

  Jane colored and said, "I'll bet you say that to all the dogcatchers on the island," and then she left, with his compliment still hovering sweetly in her ears. What was it about Bing? If any other man had said that, she'd have thought it was a line. But she believed Bing implicitly, even if he was a bachelor.

  The morning was very fine, the warmest since her arrival on the island. A bird was singing some brand new song; Jane convinced herself that it was a harbinger of warmth, even though spring had barely begun. She'd heard that spring on Nantucket was a season of despair because it took so long to arrive, but today, at least, it was ahead of itself. Reluctant to go inside, she detoured to the burying ground, retracing her path through the downtrod grass from the day before, to visit Judith's grave.

  Somewhere she remembered reading that if a person was being harassed by a spirit, then all he had to do was confront the spirit and he, she, or it would be civil about the whole thing and go away. That would be easier to try now that Judith had a surname; Jane felt as though they'd been formally introduced at last.

  She stood alongside the grave as if she and Judith were chatting in front of church on a Sunday morning and said, "Judith Brightman. I don't know what's going on. But you have my attention. Here I am. What is it you want?"

  Jane had no idea whether she was addressing the rose or the remains beneath it. She reached out and touched, ever so gingerly, the tip of the longest cane. Then she stood there for a long time, waiting for some sign.

  "All right," she said at last, "if you don't want to tell me."

  She turned to go. But as she did she became aware that the dull ache in her shoulder had eased, just as it had the day before. Brother. This is just too weird, she thought. Obviously I'm having a psychosomatic response to this rosebush.

  She lifted her arm as if she were hailing a cab; for the first time since she'd suffered the scratch, her shoulder felt free of pain. She flapped her arm up and down half a dozen times, testing it, all the while keeping a self-conscious eye for the green pickup. There was no pain at all.

  The sense of relief she felt was extraordinary. Apparently she'd given herself a psychosomatic disease; and now, she'd pulled off a psychosomatic cure. She thought of confiding her thoughts to another person, but who? Her sister would laugh, her mother would worry, her father would scold. Bing? Bing might be sympathetic. He'd only smiled, after all, and hadn't hooted outright when she told him about the bookcase and the spoon.

  The bookcase and the spoon — and last night, the bulkhead doors. Those three events made up another mystery altogether. She felt sure of it. They were too ... worldly, somehow. They didn't seem related to the pain in her shoulder. Anyway, she could live with the occasional loud crash or bark in the night. What she couldn't l
ive with was being incapacitated.

  As she turned away, mulling over her separate-but-not-equal mysteries, she heard the sound of a tractor. It came from beyond the row of towering arborvitae that she knew separated McKenzie's land from Phillip's. So McKenzie was up. Of course he would be. She decided to walk over and see his property. She'd never been back there, and Bing had told her to be sure to see the place. Why not?

  The part of the lane where Jane began her trek belonged to McKenzie. To the left was the row of arborvitae, tall and green and quivering in the light southwest wind. To the right was a field of fir trees between four and eight feet tall: for the Christmas trade, she assumed. There were other evergreens being cultivated too, although she did not know their names.

  The lane turned muddier, and Jane had to pick her way around all the low spots that were pooled with water, but by now she was very curious about what was back there. The property seemed a perfect metaphor for the man: remote and forbidding. Jane was impressed by the vast amount of land McKenzie owned; it seemed almost tragic to her that he had no direct access to a road.

  Her running shoes were thick with mud by the time she emerged from the trees into a clearing where an old shingled farmhouse stood, surrounded by several smaller, equally weathered outbuildings. The whole place had a sad, not-quite-hopeless look to it. Jane walked up to the closest outbuilding and peeked through the dirty window.

  It was being used as an office: the walls were papered chaotically with slips and invoices, and the beat-up oak desk was buried under nursery catalogs and more papers. She walked around to the door. A small, handwritten sign taped to the inside of its window said WHOLESALE ONLY.

  A plastic-covered hoop house blocked Jane's view of the tractor, which she could hear moving back and forth. She headed for it with every intention of picking McKenzie's brain about Judith Brightman. How she was going to do this discreetly, she had no idea. She was busy trying out different openers in her mind when the tractor emerged. But the driver wasn't McKenzie; it was a young boy about ten or so — Mac McKenzie in a smaller package.