"Well, what did you think I was going to do? Keep on wallpapering this place for the rest of my life, waiting for you?"
"You? Wait? Your idea of waiting is letting the A&P doors swing open instead of crashing through the glass. Let's face it, lady. Patient, you're not."
"I would wait!" she shot back. "I would wait if I knew what I was waiting for! But you can't run from me fast enough. Tell me — what would I be waiting for? You to save up your courage?"
"Me to save up my money, you twit! Don't you listen, ever? I'm teetering on Chapter 11! Let me try it one more time: I can't afford you. Your mother sees it plain enough. Why are you so blind? I couldn't afford Celeste, and I can't afford you. Period."
"Oh, this is too Victorian for words!" she said, contempt vying with the faintest glimmer of hope. "I'd be willing to struggle right along with you, but you — were you planning to save up until you could afford to feed a proper family? By then I'll be too old to actually have a proper family!"
When she thought about it later, she realized that right there was where she'd lost the war. She'd belittled his old-fashioned values; she'd demonstrated spectacular impatience; and she'd grabbed the reins right out of his hands. Not to mention, she sounded like a clinging maniac.
Still, she could have lived with the episode if Mac had just said something before he walked out; if he had called her a jerk, or a pie-eyed optimist; anything but nothing. Now she had to live with that awful sentence hanging in the air between them, her exit line off the island: By then I'll be too old to have a proper family.
Jane was still in her robe and pajamas, her hair uncombed, her eyes red from crying, when the knock on the door came the next morning. She knew who it was: Phillip Harrow, come for his signed agreement. She dragged herself to the door like someone nursing a massive hangover.
Phillip looked surprised and puzzled. "I'm sorry," he said, all but smacking his head in remorse. "I've got our time wrong."
"No," she said with a sigh. "Come in." She motioned to him to take a seat in one of the wicker chairs in the redone front room. "I just had a bad night, that's all."
"I'm sorry to hear that. Nothing that can't be fixed, I hope."
"Not this time," she said, aching from her thoroughly broken heart. "You've come for the agreement, Phillip. There it is." She pointed to the unstamped envelope still lying on the half-round table near the front door. "But I won't be selling Lilac Cottage to you."
He gave her a cautious, puzzled smile. "True enough; you'll be selling it to my aunt and uncle."
She took the chair opposite his. "Not to them, and not to you. I'm so sorry, Phillip; I feel like such an awful fool. I know that you've got to find a place quickly for your relations, and I know that the cottage would be perfect for them in some ways. But I'm just not ready to sell yet. My emotions are a mess right now," she said disconsolately, trying not to weep.
But the tears ran down anyway. Phillip, looking disconcerted, reached into his pocket and handed her a clean linen handkerchief. "I understand," he said awkwardly. "You've grown attached to the place. You need a little more time."
"And even if I were going to sell," she admitted, "it couldn't be to you. Mac would never forgive me."
"Mac! What has Mac's forgiveness got to do with all this?" Phillip asked, surprised.
She blew her nose and pulled herself together. "He's obsessed with his access problem. I guess he ... prefers that you not be holding all the cards," she said diplomatically.
Phillip shook his head thoughtfully. "I can't blame him. The prospect would terrify me if I were in his boots. Okay. Then how about this? A written assurance that if I ever get control of Bing's property — and I don't have the least desire for it anymore — that Mac will have right of way over it. Would that ease us over this hurdle?"
"I'm sure it would help," she said, forcing a smile. But she was dismayed. Now she would have to sell.
"There you are, then. We'll just put everything on hold until I've spoken with my attorney. Hold on to the agreement, Jane," he said, standing up and giving her a friendly, beseeching smile. "These guys charge three hundred bucks an hour to run off new ones."
As they were moving toward the door, Phillip hesitated, then said, "One thing I think you should know. Technically, you can't reject an offer if it's for cash and unconditional. Not that my aunt and uncle would press where they weren't wanted. But someone else might. And if Mac told you he didn't like the color of the buyer's eyes ... well ... "
He shrugged, then added, "He just won't forgive, will he? He just won't forget."
"No," she said forlornly. "That's not his way."
****
A little later Jane cleaned up and walked into town on her usual rounds. First she went to the post office, where she mailed a birthday card to her sister, and then she went a few steps farther to The Hub, the news store that served as the heartbeat of the town. She browsed through the latest magazine arrivals and bought her weekly copy of the Inquirer — the Inky, as it was affectionately known on the island. After that she bought a bouquet of bridal wreath and some loose-leafed lettuce from the local produce truck parked on the cobblestones in front of The Hub.
Many of the year-round trades people now knew Jane by name; she knew some of them well enough to ask about their children. And there was another, subtler way that told Jane she was beginning to belong: she was able to separate the year-rounders from the summer residents, the summer residents from the day-trippers who'd poured off the first boat of the day and were swarming over Main Street.
Jane lingered in front of The Hub in the perfect June sunshine, scanning the crowd idly, looking for familiar faces. She found one that she held dear: Uncle Easy was sitting on the slatted bench outside The Hub, flanked by his niece, his gnarled hands folded over a cane he kept wedged between his feet. Jane had visited him at his house a few days earlier; in the bright sun he looked older, paler, thinner. But he was still Uncle Easy: sharp as a tack and independent as a hog on ice.
"What the hell have you done to my nephew?" he demanded to know when Jane sat down beside him. "He drove us downtown today; I ain't seen him this foul since the darkest days of his divorce. I reason it's woman trouble, and you're the woman, and you're the trouble."
Jane stammered something dumb, and Uncle Easy said, "What's all this about you've got a buyer for Lilac Cottage? 'Zat so?" She nodded and he leaned on his cane and whispered, "It's Harrow, ain't it?"
Jane nodded again.
"I knew it." He shook his head. "Well, you can't sell to him."
"If he meets my terms, I have no choice."
"Raise the price."
"Then no one else will buy it either. You understand that your nephew is insisting I take the offer?"
"Sounds about right. Mac's cut off his nose once or twice before in his life."
"What should I do? What can I do? We had an awful fight over it."
"Better to be quarreling than lonesome."
She laughed ruefully and kissed the old man's sunken cheek. "I'll keep you posted, Uncle Easy."
****
That evening Jane nestled the Belle Amour and the rugosa roses in a delicate halo of bridal wreath and placed the vase on the table in front of the Empire sofa in the fireplace room. Then she poured herself a very decent- sized brandy and took out the latest book in her soon-to- be-useless library of horticulture. It included a section on budding roses. She sat down with high hopes. How hard could it be?
She read the section through, sipping brandy and sniffing roses as she went. The scent of the roses together was heavenly — so to speak. But it didn't seem particularly erotic. Maybe Mac was right; maybe they'd been destined for bed with or without help. Jane considered the possibility that she was more flaky than psychic, but put it aside. She hadn't been wrong once about Judith and Ben. She knew it, and now Mac knew it.
But she wasn't too sure about the merits of her grafting plan. She wasn't too sure about anything right now. The brandy-induced fuzzin
ess she was feeling was a poor substitute for the truly mystical experience she'd had with Mac the night before. It made her melancholy even to compare them.
Jane closed the gardening book, and her eyes, and laid her head on the back of the sofa. "Dammit ... dammit ... dammit," she whispered through a rolling tear or two, and fell asleep.
An hour later she woke up with a ferocious crick in her neck. "Ah ... geez," she said, wincing and rubbing the area to bring back the circulation. "Talk about your days of wine and roses."
She dragged herself to bed, thoroughly disgusted by her self-pitying mood. Everything that anyone had ever said about being in love was true, except that the highs were higher, and the lows were the pits. She collapsed on her bed, fully clothed.
The pits.
She slept hard, drugged by the brandy, unbothered by dreams, until she woke with a start. Someone was in the house. Her eyes were wide open now. It was a moonless night; the house should have been black. But a pale glimmer, the merest hint of light, seemed to be mounting the stairs from below.
It couldn't be Judith Brightman. With Judith, Jane had sensed only the purest form of passion. What she was feeling now was twisted passion, passion gnawing on its own entrails. If there was a force down there, it was undoubtedly an evil one. She got out of bed in her stockinged feet, circling around a squeaky board, determined to meet and defeat the evil once and for all. She felt a crazy kind of confidence, convinced that Judith would protect her: someone had to bud the rose, after all.
Jane skipped the third tread, the sixth, and the eighth; they all squeaked. At the bottom landing she stopped to listen. It was coming from the fireplace room, a wet and sloshy sound, a vaguely sickening sound. For one ludicrous moment Jane was afraid it might be Sylvia Merchant, come back to haunt her for selling Lilac Cottage. But the smell of kerosene dispelled that fear.
She peered around the corner into the fireplace room. A night-light had been plugged in, casting a dim, innocent illumination over the scene. Clever, she thought. A flashlight might arouse suspicion. Not that there was anyone around to be aroused.
"You bastard," she said calmly.
Phillip's back had been toward her while he held the old kerosene heater at an optimal angle and poured a steady stream of its contents onto Aunt Sylvia's poor, abused Oriental rug. When he heard Jane's voice, he jerked his head around, as if he'd been caught with his hand in the till. In a way, he had.
She flipped on the switch next to the door; the lamp on the gaming table came on, still dim but bright enough to show the repressed fury in Phillip's face. "Wouldn't you know it," he said with a grim smile. "You're a night person. That really is awkward."
"It was you all along," she said, hardly believing that she could have been so blind. "The missing spoon, the fallen bookcase, the muddy laundry. It was you, skulking around, picking on dumb innocent women. What awful form, Phillip. Really," she said in her mother's best voice.
"I disagree. I thought it was all nicely understated. Would you have preferred chicken blood smeared over the wicker?"
She watched in a trance of alertness as he stood the kerosene heater carefully back up and moved a bag of rags soaked with linseed oil closer to the carpet. It was her bag from the basement. He'd brought up her gallon container of turpentine, too, and a can of paint thinner. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the scenario he had planned. Cause of fire: spontaneous combustion. Cause of death: fire.
What a fool she was. She smiled bitterly and said, "You must have been ecstatic when a real ghost showed up to help you out."
"Ah, yes ... Judith. Cissy told me about her. It was almost too perfect. I only wish," he said with a sigh, "that I could have been there to see you two trying to videotape your overwrought imaginations. Priceless."
He stepped away from the soaked section of carpet and wiped his loafers carefully on a dry area. An image of him wiping mud from his shoes in Mac's kitchen on a dry night came rushing back to her. "You pulled the bolt from the railing on the footbridge. You did it just before you showed up at Uncle Easy's party."
"Now that was bad form," he admitted, a gleam of malice in his eyes. "In retrospect I ought to have phoned instead. I admit, my feelings were hurt at not being invited."
"You have no feelings, Phillip. Everyone I've met has either told me that or hinted at it, but I was just too blind to see."
"Yes ... you're easily dazzled, aren't you? Well, don't be too hard on yourself, Jane. Most people are suckers for smooth talk and good manners."
She saw two inches of envelope sticking out from his blazer pocket and said, "I see you've decided to let me twist your arm into buying Lilac Cottage."
He smiled, appreciating her sense of irony, and tapped the sales agreement with a gloved hand. "It's your fault, you know. You seemed so unsure. You forced my hand; I began to have no idea whether you'd ever make up your mind."
"I'm a Libra. What did you expect?"
"Anyway," he said, "I think the campaign has gone on long enough. I'll give you credit: You don't scare easily. Houses around here get dumped routinely over a squeaky door at night. I never expected you to last this long. Or to cost me this much."
"There is no aunt or uncle, of course," she said, taking a step back when he seemed to approach her. "How do you keep getting in here, incidentally?"
"Key," he said simply. "Sylvia Merchant gave me one many years ago. May I say how grateful I am that you never had the back lock changed?"
She thought of Mac: of how he had insisted; how she'd resisted. "I did put locks on the windows," she said, as if that made her look less stupid. The fact was, it made her look more stupid.
Phillip had been jangling something in his pockets. When he brought out a silver lighter, Jane knew that it was time — as Mrs. Adamont liked to say — to fish or cut bait. "Phillip. Don't do this. You're not in that deep yet. Cissy's death was an accident."
He gave her a sharp look. "That's right. It was."
"But there's nothing accidental about arson, Phillip. Why would you do it, anyway — burn down the thing you want?"
He laughed out loud. "Because I don't want it, you idiot. I want the land underneath it. Have you ever looked at a land map? If I control your parcel and Bing's — and I will; Bing is shattered and ready to sell — then Mac will fall like a ripe apple into my lap. It'll be a superb property to develop: conservation land on two sides; unlimited ocean views; private, yet convenient. The mind reels at the possibilities."
It was a form of madness: developer's syndrome. Jane was shocked at the grandiose intensity of it. A hundred different things could thwart Phillip's plan; but all he saw was the end product. How he got there was irrelevant.
"Mac will never let you get away with this," she said, backing away another step. "Everyone knows you're bitter enemies. Everyone knows you're after him." She was thinking about the smoke alarm, above her head on the left, with its lid and battery hanging down uselessly. She was wondering if he had a gun.
"Who's bitter?" he said with a shrug. "I had Mac to dinner; he chose not to reciprocate. It's Mac who's bitter. An emotional man, McKenzie. A hopeless romantic." He put the lighter back in his pocket. "Now. Where shall we arrange you?"
And yes, he did bring out a gun: small, silver, fitting. Jane stared at it incredulously, unwilling to believe it had come to this. "Are you crazy? If you shoot me, no one'll believe the fire was an accident."
"Then don't make me shoot you," he said coolly.
Jane had no choice but to run for it. She made a break for the kitchen and the back door, stumbling in the dark, but he was right there behind her. She grabbed the doorknob with both hands and tried in her panic to pull it out of the door instead of turning it. It was all the time Phillip needed. He caught her in his arms in a violent grip that hurt her ribs and knocked the wind out of her. It was pointless to scream; she focused instead on fighting back. She freed one arm and grabbed his hair and raked her nails across his neck at the same time that she kicked him v
iciously in the knee. He let out an oath and pinned her flailing arm under his left arm as he switched the gun from his left hand to his right.
The blow to the back of her head made her see stars. Jane's last thought, as she crumpled in a heap to the floor, was that Judith Brightman wasn't pulling her share of the load.
Chapter 25
Kerosene tingled.
That was the sense she got as she lay half-conscious with her cheek lying on a carpet soaked in it. But the tingling passed, and her skin began to hurt, a burning sensation, or maybe that was from the flames roaring at the other end of the room; or the smoke, the black, billowing smoke.
She tried to lift her head; she really did not like the smell of kerosene, so unpleasant. And that reminded her, what about the roses? But it was too late, clearly too late ....
She managed to drag herself off the wet, stinking carpet just before she heard a "poof," like the sound that briquets soaked in fire starter make when a match is put to them. A friendly sound ... a summer sound ... a barbecue sound. She crawled a few steps farther, gasping for air, and then collapsed in the hall. There was no air in the hall, either. How odd, she thought. The world was running out of everything — oil, water, trees. And now air.
Barely conscious, she heard the shattering of glass and assumed it was from the fire, and then heard violent coughing and hacking, and assumed it was Phillip. He's come back to finish the job, she thought, angry with him for waiting until she'd fixed up Lilac Cottage before he burned it down.
But the voice that cried her name through the smoke wasn't Phillip's, and the arms that lifted her weren't his, either. And the gasping coughing in her ear — it was the sweetest sound she'd ever heard, the sound of church bells on a Sunday morning. The air when they got outside was even dearer, pure and clean and cool. She sucked a great, long draft of it, then exploded in painful spasms of coughing. Mac laid her down on a carpet of cool grass and immediately ran off and she thought, How typical.
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