A Charmed Place

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  A pitchfork. He drew a handle on it, bold and big, and tore the sheet from the pad, then placed it face down in the plastic bin on the table. He pressed his buzzer; he was into it now. Next?

  Almost immediately, the buzzer from the experimental room signaled him again. He repeated the process but tried to slow down, to push less, to let the images come at their own pace.

  Something in a bathroom. A sink? A towel? A toilet! Toilet humor! He could hear Tracey saying it: "Ee-yew! How totally gross!"

  How totally Pentagon.

  ****

  The fog that was lurking offshore all day rolled in sometime after supper, wrapping its clammy arms around Rosedale and its garden.

  Inside the cottage, Maddie and Dan had finished turning the rooms inside out in their search for the address book, and were focused instead on the computer disks in the plastic storage case marked "backup." Dan was at his laptop, methodically examining each and every file on each and every disk. It was slow, tedious work, but Dan had the discipline—and the computer background—to keep at it.

  Maddie, on the other hand, had little to do. She felt frustrated, but also subdued: the fog had dampened her mood much more than the failure to find the missing address book. Without an immediate goal, she found herself wandering from window to window, staring into nothingness, occasionally pinching off a spent bloom from the pink geraniums rioting in the window boxes.

  She gazed into the fog where the lighthouse should have been and said pensively, "If the tower were lit, I'd feel better somehow."

  "How long has it been?" asked Dan, tapping commands into the keyboard.

  "Oh, gosh—I was, let me think, Tracey's age when the Coast Guard decommissioned it. I guess there wasn't enough boat traffic to justify the operating expense. We were all so sad the day they dismantled the lamp, boarded up the house, and moved out. My dad took pictures—hey, I'd forgotten about those! I could've used them for my talk."

  "I'd like to see them sometime."

  "I'll drag out the albums; I packed them away to go back to my mother's. Anyway, eventually Mr. Mendoza bought the lighthouse at auction for a pittance. He lived in it for a few years with his family, then moved out and began renting it for the season."

  "Lucky for me."

  She turned back to him with a smile. "And me."

  But her mood continued its slow slide into melancholy. It was the fog, Maddie decided. It was so completely capable of swallowing things whole: boats ... beaches ... houses ... gardens ....

  Children. "Do you think it's foggy north of Boston?" she asked after a while.

  Dan looked up from his computer and saw her face. "Why don't you call her and ask how it went?" he said softly.

  It sounded like such a reasonable suggestion.

  She shook her head. "It doesn't work that way. On their weekends, you have to trust ... to seem to trust, anyway. You don't just call."

  "Hell, I would," he said, tapping on the keyboard. He frowned at something, then tapped some more.

  "You mean, because she could be in trouble?" Maddie asked. It wasn't what he meant at all. She knew that, but she wanted to be reassured.

  He looked up again, infinitely patient with the mother side of her. "Call her because you miss her, not because you're worried."

  "The last thing she wants to hear."

  "No—the second last," he pointed out.

  She had to laugh at that one. "Actually, I can be just as devious as a fourteen-year-old. I told her to call me if she got in early."

  "So if she doesn't call—"

  "It means she got in late. I'm assuming that if she is late, she'll call anyway and say she forgot to call earlier. Not the best scenario, but at least I'll know she's home and safe."

  Dan hesitated, then said, "Michael would let her get away with that?"

  Maddie shivered, then closed the window behind her. "I know he wants to win the war for Tracey's affections," she said.

  "Are you at war over them?"

  "No. But he thinks we are. That's what matters." She wandered instinctively to the painted mantelpiece, where an array of framed family photographs was lined up—even one with Michael.

  "Why must she be so devoted to Michael?" Maddie asked plaintively, picking up the photo of Michael and Tracey at her eighth-grade graduation. "It makes me feel like such a skunk."

  "Maybe that's why."

  Shaking her head, she tucked the frame behind another one so that Michael's face didn't show. "You think she uses him to get back at me. She doesn't. They've always been close. No, the problem with Tracey is our divorce. And I have to take responsibility for that."

  Dan took off his reading glasses and tossed them on the desk. "Stop it, Maddie," he said quietly. "Stop beating yourself up over Michael's infidelities. He's a womanizer. I've seen the type a million times. It doesn't mean he's evil; he just doesn't belong in a marriage, that's all."

  Her sigh dissolved into a shiver as she said, "How come I couldn't figure that out before I said yes?"

  Dan thought about saying something, but stopped himself.

  She knew what it was. "You were going to say that you could've told me that, right?"

  Dan shrugged. "He's always had a roving eye."

  "I guess I didn't want to know," Maddie admitted. "I never told my family about his flings, Dan. It was easy to tell you—but not them. It was none of their business, for one thing. And besides, it was too humiliating. All I told them was that we had irreconcilable differences. My mother is much too well mannered to have asked what they were, but I know she thinks I rushed into an unnecessary divorce. It's part of the ongoing friction between us," she said glumly. "No one wanted that divorce except me."

  Dan got up from the desk and came over to her, encircling her from behind. "You're cold," he said, rubbing her upper arms. "Why don't I make us a little fire? We can curl up on the couch and spin devious strategies while you wait for Tracey to call."

  "No, let me make the fire," she told him. "It'll give me something to do. You can finish up that disk so you don't lose your place."

  "Deal." Dan reached for a framed snapshot, taken by Maddie's father, of a grinning Tracey proudly displaying a hefty bass that she'd caught in Maine.

  "Something about her reminds me of you," Dan told her. "It's hard to pin down."

  "Miss Teen Rebel? Are you serious? The bass is more like me than she is."

  "No, really, she's not the rebel you think she is," he said, propping the photo back up. "You set strict standards for her, right?"

  "Tracey seems to think so."

  "Then she's got nothing to rebel against. Maddie, I know all about rebellion. People think it's a reaction against authority. It's not. There was absolutely no one in authority over me when I was a kid. If I wanted something, I took it. If I didn't have it, I wanted it. And I got away with it for a long time. I've thought about this a lot: I was anti-authority because I resented the fact that authority existed, but not for me. I didn't want anyone else to have what I couldn't."

  Maddie turned around in his arms to face him. "Excuse me? You were jealous of people who felt answerable to authority?"

  "Uh-huh. Kinda makes you wonder, don't it?"

  "Okay, Doctor Freud," she said, slipping her arms up behind his neck. "What about Tracey, in that case?"

  "She's in a phase, not a lifestyle. Tracey's just feeling her way. It might be a different way from yours, but she'll get there just fine. You're doing your part; that's all you can do." He kissed her forehead. "How about getting that fire going? I won't be long."

  Maddie left him to his computer and went out through the mudshed, unhooking the woodbag from a nail as she went.

  She picked her way through thick fog to a woodcrib that was filled to the top with seasoned firewood: it could get cold and clammy on the Cape during all but the dog days of summer, so fires were a year-round treat.

  After filling the bag with the smallest pieces of the split wood, she retraced her steps down the pea stone path
to the house. The Cape Cod cottage, with its shuttered dormers and soft lights shining through multipaned windows, looked especially cozy snugged down in the fog. As always, Maddie felt a surge of affection for the quaint and tattered shingled cottage; she'd never known a summer without it, and hopefully never would.

  Will they let us stay? she wondered. Surely the rift would heal. Families really were like trees. Branches died, others broke off, still others grew to replace the ones that were gone. Through it all, though, a tree stayed a tree. Maddie could not—she would not—give up the belief that her family would remain a family.

  She dumped the bag on the hearth in the cozy parlor that the family somehow squeezed into on summer birthdays and anniversaries. Dan, still at the mission-style desk that Maddie had dragged home years earlier from a yard sale, peered at her over his half glasses.

  "I've found a file of personal letters your dad wrote," he said. "Nothing as private as a diary or anything, but—do you want me looking through them?"

  "Of course," Maddie said as she laid the wood in a crisscross pattern on the iron grate. "I've decided that secrecy is a lot more destructive than candor. This is an investigation, after all." She glanced back at him. He still looked uncertain, so she said, "You have my leave to read the letters without guilt, sir."

  "I'll scan," he said.

  Maddie had arranged the logs and shoved a dozen sheets of crumpled newspaper under the wood when Dan said behind her, "Uhhh, this is interesting."

  "Really?" She struck the match and set it to the paper, then moved the folding brass fire screen back in front of the flames and turned to him. "What'd you find?"

  "A letter from your father, threatening to kill someone named Joyce."

  Chapter 25

  "Don't be silly," said Maddie, marching right over. "You're misinterpreting something."

  Dan swiveled the laptop a hundred and eighty degrees to face her, then tipped his oak chair back on its hind legs while she read.

  Joyce,

  You're cuckoo, you know that? But there's no law against being cuckoo. What amazes me is that you've become involved with Michael now. Where do you think this will go? Can you honestly see potential there? Are you merely naive, or just plain stupid?

  I suppose what you and Michael do is your business. But if it reverberates in any way on my daughter or my granddaughter, then it becomes my business. And I would sooner see you dead than that either of them is hurt. Remember that.

  The letter hit Maddie with the force of a bus.

  "But what does it mean?" she asked Dan.

  She read it again and looked at Dan again, begging him this time. "What does it mean?"

  He said, "Do yon know anyone cuckoo named Joyce?"

  "I don't know anyone cuckoo or sane named Joyce," she murmured, and meanwhile, something was clicking not so far down in her subconscious.

  I even forgave your father the one time ...

  The one time what? Her mother had blurted that much and no more in the middle of her angry litany of the family's sexual indiscretions. Maddie hadn't thought of it again until now.

  Oh, please, no. Not Dad, too.

  "I never knew anyone in the physics department named Joyce," she told Dan, distracted by the memory. "But it could've been a student, I guess."

  "You don't want it to be, I can see that," Dan told her.

  "I can't begin to tell you how much I don't," she admitted. She read through the letter again and shook her head, completely in denial. "This can't mean what I think it does."

  "What do you think it means?"

  "I can't even say it," she whispered, but she forced herself. "When he writes to her that she's involved with Michael now, doesn't it seem to imply that my father was involved with her first?"

  For a moment Dan said nothing, and then he asked, "Do you want to stop here? Pretend we never poked around in the disk?"

  She leveled an angry look at him. "No! I told you, no more running away from the truth! We follow this trail wherever it leads!"

  "I'm sorry, Maddie," Dan said softly. "I know this is hard for you."

  "Okay, whatever," Maddie said, squaring her shoulders back. Out of sheer tension, she began pacing the small parlor, back and forth in front of the merrily blazing fire.

  "The thing is, I only just found out something about my father that I never knew. You know that really horrible fight I had with my mother?"

  She told Dan that Sarah Timmons had upbraided them all for having loose morals and had included Edward Timmons in her tirade. "It never occurred to me to ask my mother what exactly she meant by that," Maddie said dryly.

  "You'd make a lousy reporter," Dan decided, bringing his chair upright with a thunk.

  "Probably. Between my upbringing and the way the press intruded in our lives after the murder. ... The thing is, it probably wasn't a real affair," Maddie said, veering back to defend her father. " 'That time,' my mother said. One time. Maybe my dad drank too much at a faculty party, or drove someone home and somehow ..."

  She stared briefly out at the fog, blinking back her disillusionment, then turned away and began to pace again.

  "I guess I can accept a one-time lapse on my father's part. But I can't believe that this woman went after my husband next." She stopped to read aloud from the computer display: What amazes me is that you've become involved with Michael now.

  "Not only involved, but she expected to land him!" Again Maddie read aloud: Can you honestly see potential there? "If she did see potential," Maddie said caustically, "then she was cuckoo."

  An ember shot from a log with a loud pop, making her jump. "I mean, who is this Joyce?" she asked, raking a hand through her hair. "Some sexual predator? Did she have it in for our family? Was this her way of taking revenge on us? After all, my father and Michael are nothing alike; they couldn't both be her type."

  Dan said quietly, "And you're thinking that this Joyce is the one who actually murdered your father?"

  She turned the question around on him. "Is it possible?"

  "Physically? Yes. Your father was shot in his car, in the passenger seat. The murderer would've used his or her feet to push out his body. A woman could've done that as well as a man."

  Maddie stiffened at the matter-of-fact recital. Dan was a reporter, she knew, but still. She let out a little wounded sigh and Dan said instantly, "Maddie, maybe we should stop. I can't watch you as I do this; it's too painful. But I can't discuss a murder any other way. This isn't the place to speak in euphemisms."

  "I know, I know," she said in distress, making two fists and shaking them like baby rattles. She was determined to keep up with him as he forged ahead. "What do you think?"

  "Well, for starters," he said, turning the laptop screen to face him again, "if Michael was still your husband when this supposed affair between Joyce and him took place, it had to have been over four years ago. In which case, either this Joyce dropped Michael, or your dad was just blowing smoke when he made that threat."

  "Oh. Oh! How stupid of me! I never noticed when the letter was dated. That's what's important. When was it?"

  Dan shook his head. "No date. A whole batch of letters was apparently consolidated into one big file on the same day: March 20—a couple of weeks before April 6. Your dad seems to have skipped the date, inside address, and signature when he copied each letter into this master file, which is maddening. The letter before this, though, is a complaint about a roofing job."

  "That was six or seven years ago!"

  "And the letter after it is, let's see ... it's a request to Carnival Cruise Lines for a brochure," he said, looking up quickly at her.

  "They never went on that cruise," Maddie murmured. "They never got the chance."

  "All right," he said, sighing. "We can't confirm when the letter to Joyce was written. Not from this disk. Suppose we try to find the originals."

  "Oh, but they'd all be with—"

  "Your mother. You'll have to ask her. And, Maddie?"

  "Yes?" she said,
knowing what was coming next.

  "You'll have to ask her about Joyce, too, if you're serious about following this trail wherever it leads."

  "Oh, Dan ... no. I couldn't. That's incredibly personal."

  "So was taking your father's life," he said, glancing up at her with the first flash of impatience she'd seen. He was in reporter mode now; she could see it in the way his attention stayed on the computer screen as he continued scrolling through the file.

  "You're right," she conceded. Her mind raced ahead to the scene that would take place between her mother and her.

  "God ... my mother is screening my calls now through the answering machine—if it weren't for Claire, I wouldn't even know if she was dead or alive—and yet you want me to knock down her door and demand that she tell me all about Joyce."

  "Mm-hmm," he said, his gaze still locked on the screen.

  Maddie walked back to the desk, lifted the laptop out from under his fingertips, and started walking away with it.

  "Hey!"

  "This is a laptop computer. It's designed to work on a lap. The least you can do is move the lap in question closer to the fire. I'll curl up next to you, and we can read through the files together."

  The stern look on his face softened as he said, "Leave it to a woman to find a civilized way to fight crime."

  Maddie waved the computer in a sinuous ballet over the slipcovered sofa, and when Dan sank into the down-filled cushions, she laid the instrument on his lap and got up to stoke the fire. In the thirty seconds it took to do it, he was gone, lost in the digital halls and rooms of the small gray box.

  The fire could go out and the moon fall down the chimney; he wouldn't know. He was completely engrossed in the hunt. For Maddie, it was different. Part of her didn't want to find out any more than she already knew, because every revelation so far had brought pain.

  First there was the April 6 note, the first real indication they had that her father actually had an appointment with his murderer. Then, the news that he hadn't been in Cambridge at all, but in Natick. And now, Joyce. Who was this Joyce who preyed on two such different types of men? Did Maddie really want to know about Joyce? Did she want her mother to know more about Joyce?