She heard more shattered glass, and then the ear-splitting din of Bing's alarm system, the one that Cissy was always setting off accidentally. But then she remembered that Cissy was dead, and Phillip was alive and skulking.
And Lilac Cottage was burning down. She watched with stunned disbelief as smoke billowed out from the back of the house, her charming, magical, thoroughly accursed house. She fell back on the grass and closed her eyes. She couldn't watch.
A minute later Mac had her in his arms again. "Jane! My God. Jane!" he said, pulling her up by her shoulders.
She opened her eyes. "It's all right ... I'm okay. I'm okay. Oh, Mac — you were right; it was Phillip all along. If I could ... I'd kill him ... if I could," she said with limp fury.
He kissed the top of her head briefly and let her go, taking off on foot in the direction of Phillip's house. Jane tried to call him back, but his name came out a croak. The fire trucks arrived soon after that and the rescue team gave her oxygen while the firefighters took on the daunting task of saving an old wood house from total destruction. Jane sat in the rescue truck, sipping oxygen as if it were Nouveau Beaujolais, and watched, and waited.
And when it was over, she was left with half the house she had.
****
"If everything looks all right to you, Miss Drew, then just sign here."
It was hard to hold the pen; in her struggle with Phillip, Jane had wrenched her hand badly. It added to the grim satisfaction she took in signing the statement that would put the man behind bars. Between the criminal suits and the civil suits — her insurance company would hound him to the lowest circle of hell, she was told — Phillip Harrow would not be a bother to Mac, to her, or to anyone else for a long, long while.
She handed the sergeant his pen and said, "I don't understand how he thought he'd get the house if I was dead."
The officer shrugged. "He had evidence of your intent to sell. And a house often goes for less in an estate settlement. A burned-out one, even cheaper." He shrugged again, clearly uncomfortable with the conversation. After all, Phillip was an islander. Jane was not.
"Well, I really am grateful to Mr. McKenzie for ... for bringing him in." She half expected to hear that assault charges had been filed against Mac.
The sergeant nodded his agreement and said, "Mac's the guy when you want to get the job done." Wherever Mac was, at least he wasn't in the slammer.
So that was that. Jane had called her parents and told them the appalling news. Despite her reassurances, they cleared their calendars and said they'd be on the island the following night; she booked them a room along with hers at the Jared Coffin House.
Jane spent the rest of the day at the cottage, receiving condolences and picking over the wreckage, deciding which furniture was salvageable — nothing from the fireplace room — and packing what was left of her clothes for transport back to her condo in Connecticut. Everything smelled like smoke except for a load of laundry that was still in the basement washing machine; Jane took the time to hang the load on the line to dry.
Mrs. Adamont came by, properly scandalized. "It all looks so normal from the road, right down to your laundry flapping in the breeze," she said, shaken by what she saw inside. "This is not right. This is not what Nantucket is about," she said angrily.
Jane shrugged philosophically; the shock of it was wearing off, leaving a dull emptiness inside. "Every place has its dark side and demons. Even Nantucket."
Mrs. Adamont insisted that Jane come to stay with her, but Jane begged off. Billy was coming over for a preliminary assessment of the damage, and Jane once again was without a phone. And people were continuing to stop by to express their sorrow; she appreciated that, and wanted to be there for them.
And she was waiting for Mac. It seemed inconceivable to her that after all they'd been through, he wouldn't be by. No heart except a criminal heart was forged of such steel. But Billy came, and Billy went, and twilight fell, and still no Mac. She knew where he was; Billy had told her he was landscaping some new construction near the Quaker Burial Ground. But Mac couldn't very well plant in the dark. On the other hand, Jane couldn't see in the dark either, not without electricity. So she left.
****
All night long she was too depressed to sleep. At dawn she got up and put on the only clean outerwear she had, a long denim skirt and a gray collarless knit top, and struck out for the nearest beach. She'd taken to walking along the shore recently when she felt moody or out of sorts; there was something about the sound of the sea lapping at the sand that put her thoughts in perspective.
It was a foggy morning in an easterly wind flow, not a good beach day: Jane saw one man, one dog, and that was about it. There was a time when she'd have preferred it that way, but today she felt the isolation deeply. Her sense of emptiness was profound: she was without a home, without a dream, without a man to love her. She had survived quite well without them before she came to Nantucket; she would have recommended her lifestyle to anyone. But things were different now. She'd fallen in love, and the love wasn't fulfilled. That, she hadn't planned on.
She walked on alone, the wind tugging and pulling like an impatient child at her skirt. The fog was lowering, bringing with it a mist so heavy it was nearly drizzle. She wrapped her arms around herself in the chill damp air, trying to keep warm, wondering what it was she could have done to make Mac commit himself to her.
She'd played hard to get; she'd played easy. She'd been spirited; she'd been humble. She'd fallen in love with his island, his land, his house, his people, his trees. She'd told him that money didn't matter, and neither did her parents' opinion. She even let him have the Napoleon. And yet here they were, sharing the same little rock in the universe, and still a world apart.
Somehow, she felt closer to Judith right now than to Mac. Judith had understood — the way a man could not — how paralyzing heartache could be for a woman. A man had to climb that mountain, build that bridge, run for office no matter how hard he was bleeding inside, if for no other reason than that other men expected him to do it. Not so, a woman. Her own sex was too sympathetic to her hurt.
What the hell, she thought, staring out at the sea, trying to rally herself back to the condo in Connecticut. I'll climb the mountain, build the bridge, run for office.
But the sea seemed to be saying something else. Without him? Why?
Why, indeed. Like Judith, Jane had no answer. She wandered onto the wet, hard sand, drawn by the seductive hiss of the water, and then waded into the edge of the sea itself. Her leather sandals became stained dark by the water; it fascinated her. She walked a few steps farther. The hem of her denim skirt turned dark and sluggish, floating at first, then gradually sinking. The sea was still very cold. It crept up her calves, inch by inch. Except that that wasn't true: It was Jane who was creeping, inch by inch, into the sea.
It must have felt this way for Judith, she thought with surprising detachment. Colder, though. How far before it was over? Did she walk in over her nose? Probably not; she wouldn't have to ... her gown would have got waterlogged before that and pulled her under... or the undercurrent ....
Suddenly Jane stumbled into a small hole on the sandy ocean floor; her right leg buckled and she dropped waist-high into a cold rush of water. Shocked by the icy sensation, she righted herself and turned to discover how far out she'd waded.
"My God." She fell into a panic that she was reenacting Judith's destiny step by ghastly step, and began racing for the shore. But one doesn't race through the sea, especially in heavy, billowing denim; the wade back to the beach was agonizingly slow. When Jane broke free from the water, she ran like a springer spaniel to high ground, her heart pounding madly from the effort to get there.
She wrung the excess water from the bottom of her skirt, shaking from her experience. She hadn't been so frightened since — since yesterday, she thought grimly. Since the ordeal by fire. And now, by water. Life on the island was getting a little too biblical for her taste.
The mo
re she thought about it, the angrier she got. If she and Mac had made a commitment to one another, Phillip would've abandoned his plans for an empire, and she would never have had to go brooding on this beach. In short: no fire, no water.
Jerk.
Jane left the beach and went back for her truck, then drove out to Lilac Cottage. In the gloomy fog the house looked forlorn and forsaken; she could hardly bear to look at it. She hurried around to the back door and found, sitting on her back stoop, a gallon-sized nursery pot filled with dirt and with a card stapled to its rim:
Plant this where you wish. It may not work.
It's late in the season.
Jane squatted down and brushed a little of the mounded dirt gently aside to find a small bud rubber-banded to the stem of another rose. Mac had budded Ben's rose onto Judith's. What had the police sergeant said? "Mac's the guy when you want to get the job done."
So Jane climbed back in the pickup and headed out for the newly constructed house near the Quaker Burial Ground. The fog-turned-drizzle had now become drizzle-turned-rain. The sky was dark, angry; the wind plastered her wet skirt against her legs and drove stinging rain at her face and arms as she struck out over the grassy cemetery, trying to remember the location of the new house from when she'd walked there with Mac months ago. She sighted the house, away to the north, but there was no sign there of Mac's dark green truck.
Judith Brightman couldn't have felt more frustrated when she'd stood on that rolling earth a century and a half earlier.
"Jane! For God's sake!"
She turned and saw Mac; he'd stopped his truck in the middle of Vestal Street and was climbing over the stile, clearly convinced that Jane was mad.
"Stop!" she yelled back to him, holding out the palm of her hand; if he got too close she'd never be able to keep herself in control. "John McKenzie!" she cried. "I leave tomorrow. Listen to me!"
Her voice rose above the pounding rain, high and clear and true. "Since I came to this island, I've changed in ways I'd never have dreamed. I look at myself — and I don't know myself! I've learned things I never thought I wanted to know. I've forgotten things that never should have mattered in the first place.
"I've changed, Mac," she cried. "And still you punish me! No!" she said again when he began to speak. "You had your chance. You'll tell me about Philip again. I was desperately wrong about that, and now I'm desperately sorry," she said, her hands beseeching him expressively. "Still you punish me."
His hands were on his hips; he was as soaked through as she was, despite the fact that the rain had begun to tail off as the squall passed over. He wanted to defend himself, she could see that; there was injured outrage etched in his face. But he was holding his peace, abiding by her command, forcing himself to hear her through.
Jane had one last thing to say. She took half a dozen strides closer to him, pointing a finger at him as if she were judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney in his case. "You think you're an oak tree, Mac — so strong, so immutable. Well, you're not," she screamed angrily.
She gave him a dark, haunting look and swept a wet lock of hair away from her face. "You're a human being; that's all you are — and your time here is short, Mac McKenzie."
A sharp gust of wind, heralding a second squall, flattened the tops of the nearby trees, and was followed by a clap of thunder and a furious downpour. "I've changed, Mac," she shouted over the slanting, driving rain. "Now it's your turn."
Mac was facing the wind, taking the brunt of the squall like a ship facing it broadside. "I can't, Jane," he said hoarsely, averting his body from the squall's fury. "I can't. I've been too long in the making."
A white rip of lightning on the other side of the rise produced another clap of thunder, this time deafening. Jane jumped and Mac said loudly, "This is dangerous! Go back to your truck. Move!"
She turned and ran, hardly thinking to challenge him, and sat in her truck, wet and shivering, pounded by a line of black rain that drummed the metal all around her with a wild, frenzied beat while lightning flashed and thunder cracked repeatedly.
And when it was over, and the sky had lightened up again to Nantucket gray, she saw that Mac's truck had left, and she was alone.
****
When Jane's mother saw Lilac Cottage she cried, which Jane thought was very endearing of her. Gwendolyn Drew seemed more emotional these days, and Jane was becoming fonder of her because of it. Jane herself was pretty much all cried out and able to speak calmly, at least about Phillip and the fire. But she kept Mac to herself, like a secret horde of memories boxed up and ready for shipping to Connecticut, to sort out when she had more time.
Jane's father had never seen the before version of Lilac Cottage, so he was much less moved by the tragedy of the fire. Tragedy rarely moved Neal Drew in any case. He was a big believer in not dwelling on the past. As far as he was concerned, you took your hit or you took your winnings, and then you moved on.
So he stood there, this man who was so unstinting in his abilities, so stinting in his praise, and said to his daughter, "You let yourself get emotionally involved with a house."
"Yep. I did," Jane admitted as she idly peeled away a strip of blistered, charred wallpaper in the front room. "It was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done."
She turned and looked at her father. He was standing with his hands in his pockets in the middle of the room, a man of average height wearing modest clothes in an unassuming way. He was the kind of guy you'd walk right past in a bus station; yet she'd spent most of her life chasing down his approval.
"And you never bothered showing it to a realtor first?" he was saying in his implicitly critical way.
"Not unless you count Phillip," she said. "Someone told me he had a broker's license."
"I do not count Phillip," Neal Drew said wryly. "All right, then. You'll leave this part to me. I have the name of a broker in town, very aggressive, with a terrific sales record; he can crunch numbers —"
"Absolutely not!" Jane snapped, amazed that her father still regarded her as an unprofitable subsidiary that needed restructuring. "I've already made up my mind on an agent. She's a decent and well-liked woman who cares as much about who buys a house as she does about the commission they'll pay. After the rebuilding, that's who I'll use. Period."
Jane was damned if she was going to stick Mac with another rotten neighbor.
"Jane, with that attitude — well, never mind," Neal said with a kindly pat. "You've been under a lot of stress"
"Stress, shmess! This has nothing to do with stress, Dad! This has everything to do with your trying to run my life to your standards!" She was taking Mac out on her father; she knew it, and she didn't care.
Neal was clearly taken aback. He gave his daughter a cool, hard stare and said, "Why did you have us come here, in that case?"
"To — because — I don't know!" she said hotly. "Maybe just for once to say ‘I'm sorry things didn't work out, kid.' How about that?"
Gwendolyn Drew rushed into the room, her radar screen obviously blipping madly, and said, "Hey, hey, you two! This is no time for one of your —"
"Unpleasantries?" Jane asked scathingly.
"—knock-down, drag-out fights," said her mother crisply. She slipped her arm around Jane and said to her, "Ignore him, Jane. He's just an old fart. And you, Neal Drew," she said sharply to her husband. "Why don't you make yourself helpful for once in your life? Get that fellow in here to start loading Jane's things into the van."
The two women took a short walk out to the little burying ground behind the house while Jane struggled to bring her emotions under control. It was a beautiful day, awash in sun and richly green, an impossible day to leave.
"You know," said Gwendolyn wistfully as they walked arm in arm, "I had begun to adjust very nicely to the thought of your living here. It has very real charm, this Nantucket of yours. And the air is clean and the people are nice ... and it's a safe place to raise children ...."
Jane winced in pain from her mother'
s well-intentioned words. "Bing never would've lived here year-round anyway, Mother," she said, assuming that her mother had got wind of Bing's intentions.
Gwendolyn Drew looked up at a hawk passing silently overhead. "That's not what he told me," she said quietly, shading her eyes with her hand. "He's in love with you, you know."
But Jane would not be drawn.
They were at Judith's grave, where a fresh mound of rich brown earth covered the rose cutting that Jane had planted there that morning.
Gwendolyn said innocently, "Do you ever wonder about the secrets that have gone to these graves?"
Jane smiled ruefully. "Mother, sometimes you can be positively hysterical." They stood over the grave in a moment of undeclared silence. Then Jane said softly, "No, I don't wonder, anymore."
She looked up automatically in the direction of Mac's house. No sign. Somehow — despite everything she knew about him — she found herself wondering why he didn't come charging down the lane in hot pursuit.
"We'd better get going," she said at last, looking away. "The boat won't wait."
"Jane — don't you want to talk about this?" Gwendolyn asked, distressed to see her daughter in such obvious pain.
"Not for a long, long time," Jane said. "And maybe not even then."
****
The five-thirty ferry to Hyannis was the busiest boat of the day. Both levels were filling fast with tired, happy passengers. Jane's salvaged personal possessions, too much for a plane, looked pathetically insignificant in the cargo hold of the boat. The new floral sundress she had on was literally the only wearable thing she owned.
Jane and her mother climbed the stairs and joined Neal Drew, who'd managed to claim a table where he sat comfortably immersed in his Wall Street JournaL He looked up at them over the rims of his tortoiseshell half-glasses.
"All aboard?" he said mildly.
It was obvious that he didn't know quite how to handle his daughter and was regrouping. Their speech had been polite and strained since Jane's blowup, with both of them waiting for the next misstep.
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