by John Saul
As if he’d read her mind, the police chief grinned up at Alicia from the chair upon which he was perched, tipped so far back the chair threatened to fall over, his feet propped comfortably on his desk. “Hope you don’t want anyone busted today, Alicia. Even if I wanted to, I don’t see how I could make it to Beaufort through this.”
Alicia shook her head. “It’s Jennifer,” she said, glancing at Hempstead’s deputy, Frank Weaver, who was sitting at an adjacent desk. She turned back to Hempstead, imploring now. “I can’t find her, and I’m worried. I—well, I’m almost certain something’s happened to her.”
Hempstead’s feet dropped to the floor and he brought his chair upright as he leaned forward, the twinkle in his eyes gone. “What do you mean, ‘happened’?” he asked.
“I—I don’t know,” Alicia stammered. She perched nervously on the edge of the chair opposite Hempstead, then speaking slowly and choosing her words carefully, tried to explain exactly what had happened. Even as she told him, she realized that she sounded more like a dithering worrier than a legitimately concerned parent. Still, Hempstead listened patiently, and when Alicia was finished, he glanced at the clock. It was barely six P.M.
“So she was due home by two-thirty?”
Alicia nodded.
“And you went looking for her around three, is that right?” Once again Alicia nodded.
“Been home since then?” Will Hempstead asked, his voice dry. “Or given a call?”
Alicia’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Of course I have, Will. I’m not a fool, and you know it. I’ve called home from everywhere I’ve been, and Jennifer’s not there.”
Hempstead glanced out the window at the raging storm. “Well, if she got caught out in this, she could have holed up most anywhere—” he began, but Alicia shook her head.
“I don’t believe that. She was already late before the storm even started. And that’s not like Jennifer, Will. She’s always on time, always exactly where she’s supposed to be.” Her voice had taken on a nervous shrillness, which she struggled to control. Finally she met Hempstead’s eyes. “If you want to know the truth,” she said, “I’m afraid something might have happened to her out at Sea Oaks.”
“Sea Oaks?” Hempstead asked, and though he kept his voice neutral, Alicia could see a shadow come over his eyes. “I’m not sure I’m following you, Alicia.”
Alicia ran her fingers impatiently through the wet strands of her graying hair, pushing a few wisps that had fallen over her forehead back into place. “I’m talking about Marguerite,” she said, her eyes locking on Hempstead’s once more. There wasn’t anyone in town who didn’t know Will Hempstead had once been in love with Marguerite Devereaux, and a lot of people still thought he carried a torch for her. “She—well, when I was talking to her, she looked very strange.”
“Strange?” Hempstead asked, his voice suddenly cool. “Just what do you mean by ‘strange’?”
“N-Not anything she said,” Alicia replied. “At least I didn’t think so—not at first. But she was wearing a dress that was so old it must have been her mother’s.” She tried to describe how Marguerite had looked, but finally shook her head. “I can’t really tell you. She—well, she looked like she was dressed up for some kind of part.”
“But what did she say?” Hempstead pressed.
Alicia bit her lip. “Not much, really. Just that Jennifer hadn’t been there, but that she was supposed to be there tomorrow. She said she was having some kind of recital or something and—”
“And you thought that was strange?” Hempstead interrupted, his voice clearly reflecting his doubt. “For Christ’s sake, Alicia, she’s a dance teacher. She has recitals all the time. How many times have you been out there for them? Five? Ten? Dozens?”
Alicia sighed heavily. “I know all that, Will. But, well, this was different. For one thing, Jennifer never mentioned a recital to me, and she would have if there’d been one scheduled. She wouldn’t have wanted to miss it, and she didn’t say anything when I suggested we go up to Charleston to see my brother for a couple of days.”
“And that’s all?” Hempstead asked.
Alicia shifted uncomfortably. “And there’s Muriel Fletcher,” she breathed, this time unable to meet Hempstead’s eyes when she spoke.
“Ah,” Hempstead grunted. “I was wondering when you were going to come to that.” He leaned forward now. “Look, Alicia, I know everything that Muriel’s been saying about Mary-Beth, and I’m telling you, there’s not a shred of evidence to back her up. If you want, you can look at the coroner’s report yourself. All we can tell for certain is that she drowned, and that she banged her head on something. But it could have been anything, Alicia. Most likely she smashed her head on a rock when she got swept off the road. But—”
“But you’re not going to do anything,” Alicia finished for him. “That’s what it boils down to, isn’t it, Will?”
Hempstead shrugged helplessly. “What do you want me to do, Alicia? Jennifer’s only been gone a few hours. Hell, she hasn’t even missed dinner yet! Legally, I can’t even take a missing-person report till day after tomorrow.” He nodded toward the window. “And you don’t really expect me to try to go out to Sea Oaks in that, do you?” The windows rattled as a gust of wind buffeted the building, and Hempstead turned back to face Alicia. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The best thing you can do is go home and start calling everyone you know. The odds are Jennifer lost track of time, and when she realized she was late, she holed up somewhere. Hell, she’s probably been trying to call you all afternoon.”
Alicia took a deep breath, then stood up. “All right,” she said, struggling against the anger rising within her. “I’ll go home. But I know how you feel about Marguerite Devereaux, Will. Everybody in town does. And just because you’re in love with her, it doesn’t mean she couldn’t have done something.” Picking up her purse, she left the office. When she was gone, Hempstead turned to Frank Weaver.
“I don’t know,” Hempstead sighed. “What’s the town coming to when people start thinkin’ someone like Marguerite could hurt anybody?”
“So what are you going to do?” Weaver asked.
“Check around, I guess. Won’t hurt to go talk to a few people—see if I can figure out what happened to Jenny. But I’m sure not going to try to go out to the island in this mess. Even if I wanted to, I’m not sure I could make it.”
Then, shrugging into a bright yellow slicker, he followed Alicia Mayhew out into the storm.
“Isn’t this nice?” Marguerite asked as she settled herself into a chair at one end of the long dining room table. Julie and Jeff were seated on either side of her, the best silver and china in the house carefully arrayed at each place. The storm was howling outside, and the evening was almost as dark as night. But the chandelier above the dining room table glowed brightly, and the old Waterford crystal on the table seemed to come alive with refracted light.
“How come there’s no place for Dad?” Jeff demanded, but when he spoke, he kept his eyes on his sister.
“I already told you,” Marguerite said, her voice taking on the trace of an edge. “Since he’s not home now, I don’t think we can count on him coming home. After all,” she added, “we wouldn’t want the same thing to happen to him that happened to your mother, would we?”
Jeff’s eyes widened, and even Julie flinched. “But why hasn’t he called?” Julie asked. “If he couldn’t get back, he’d call us, wouldn’t he?”
“Perhaps the phones went out,” Marguerite suggested. Instantly Jeff slid off his chair and ran through the living room to the foyer, where he picked up the phone.
“It works,” Jeff called. “I’m gonna call the police.”
“The police!” Marguerite exclaimed. “For Heaven’s—” But before she could finish her sentence, a bolt of lightning struck, instantly followed by a crash of thunder so loud it shook the house. Jeff dropped the phone and jumped back, and then, as the thunder faded away, the lights suddenly went out and the h
ouse was plunged into near blackness.
In the dining room Julie ran to a window and peered out. A moment later another bolt of lightning shot across the sky and she could see what had happened.
Halfway down the drive a tree, smoke still drifting from its top, had fallen across the power lines. “It’s not going to come back on,” she told her aunt. “The lines are down, and there’s a tree lying across the driveway.”
Marguerite took a deep breath. “Very well,” she said. “It certainly isn’t anything for us to get upset about. We have plenty of candles.”
“The phone doesn’t work now, either,” Jeff said as he came back to the dining room. He looked at his sister with frightened eyes. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to go on with our dinner,” Marguerite stated. She found a box of matches on the sideboard and began lighting the candles in the twin candelabra on the table. A few seconds later the room was bright again, this time with the warm glimmer of the candles.
“I think this is rather nice,” Marguerite said as she reseated herself. “It reminds me of when I was a girl. I remember once when I was your age, Julie. We had a storm just like this one, and the lights went out that night too. Mother and I sat here all by ourselves, eating our supper.”
Julie frowned uncertainly. “Where was Dad?” she asked. “Wasn’t he here?”
Marguerite’s eyes clouded, then she smiled thinly. “Oh, no,” she said. “By then he was gone. It was just Mother and me, and after dinner we went up to the ballroom.” She closed her eyes, and her voice took on a strange, lilting melody as she reminisced about the times so many years ago. “Mother was young then—younger than I am now. And she’d dance and dance, and I would watch. So beautiful—it was all so beautiful then, before …” Her voice trailed off. Jeff glanced uneasily at his sister.
“What’s wrong with her?” he whispered. “How come her eyes are shut?”
Marguerite’s eyes suddenly snapped open, and she turned to glare at Jeff. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, her voice rasping harshly. “Why aren’t you at school?”
The color suddenly drained from Jeff’s face and his eyes widened with fear.
“Th-There isn’t any school, Aunt Marguerite,” Julie said. “It’s summer vacation, remember?”
Marguerite didn’t seem to hear her. Instead, her eyes fixed balefully on Jeff. “I didn’t tell you to come here,” she hissed. “When I’m ready, I’ll send for you.”
Jeff slid off his chair, his whole body trembling with fright. Without saying a word, he fled from the room, charging up the stairs.
There was a long silence at the table, then Marguerite slowly turned, blinking, to look at Julie. “Where’s Jeff?” she asked. “Isn’t he going to finish his dinner?”
Julie stared at her aunt. “B-But you just told him you didn’t want him here.”
“Not want him?” Marguerite echoed. “But darling, of course I want him. He’s my little boy, isn’t he? Why wouldn’t I want him?”
Julie felt her heart skip a beat, and her throat tightened. “But you said … you wanted to know why he wasn’t in school.”
Marguerite paused, and once more her eyes clouded. Then her expression cleared. “But, of course,” she said. “He’s almost nine, isn’t he?”
Julie hesitated before nodding uncertainly. What was her aunt talking about?
“Then, of course, I’m right,” Marguerite went on. “It’s time for him to go, isn’t it? I shall have to send him away, and then things will be the way they’re supposed to be.” She smiled then, her eyes fixing on Julie. “After Jeff is gone, it will be just you and me, won’t it? Just the two of us, like it’s supposed to be.…”
Still smiling, as if enjoying some secret only she held the key to, Marguerite went on eating her supper.
Alicia Mayhew paced nervously in the living room of her small house on Macon Street. It was eight o’clock now, and still there was no sign of Jennifer.
She’d long since run out of people to call; indeed, she felt as if she’d talked to everyone in town. And all of them had said the same thing.
First there had been Marian Phillips, Charlene’s mother. “I don’t know about the other girls,” she’d said. “But after what happened out there the other day, Charlene says she’ll never go back to the island again, and I don’t really blame her.”
Paula Aaronson had gone further. “Apparently there was some kind of a problem yesterday at their lesson. Tammy-Jo said Marguerite was acting very strange. The girls left early yesterday, you know.”
“Left early?” Alicia had repeated. It was the first she’d heard of it. “But why?”
“I don’t know, really. Tammy-Jo simply said that Marguerite was, well, ‘weird’ was the word she used. Of course, Marguerite’s had a lot of shocks lately, and I suppose Tammy-Jo could have been exaggerating.”
“But what about the recital tomorrow?” Alicia had asked.
“Recital? Why, I don’t know. Just a moment.” There had been a long silence, and then Paul, had come back on the line. “Tammy-Jo doesn’t know anything about a recital, and she says if there is one, she isn’t going.”
“I see,” Alicia had breathed, then called up Diana Carter. But Allison’s mother had not heard anything about a recital. Nor had she seen Jenny.
Now, with no one left on her list, she reluctantly dialed the Fletchers’ number, and a moment later recognized Muriel Fletcher’s voice, sounding strained, coming over the line.
“You already know what I think,” Muriel told her, barely able to keep her voice under control. “And don’t tell me what Will Hempstead thinks, because I already know. But he’s in love with Marguerite, and always has been.”
“I know,” Alicia agreed. “But it just seems so unbelievable. To think that Marguerite might have—” She fell silent then, but Mrs. Fletcher finished her thought.
“That Marguerite might have killed her?” she asked, her voice trembling. “That’s what I thought at first. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder. Mary-Beth was impetuous, but she wasn’t stupid. If it hadn’t been safe to cross the causeway, she wouldn’t have tried. She’d have stayed on the island.”
“But why?” Alicia pressed. “Marguerite loved Mary-Beth. She loves all the girls—”
“Except that she’s changed,” Muriel said. “Will Hempstead won’t believe me, but it’s true. Mary-Beth was going to quit going to Marguerite’s classes, you know. She didn’t even wanted to go that day, but the rest of the girls talked her into it. And she and Marguerite had a fight, you know. She’d said she was quitting, and Marguerite tried to talk her out of it.”
Alicia felt a knot of fear forming in her stomach. Only that morning, before she’d left to go out to the island, Jennifer had talked about how the other girls were feeling.
“I don’t think I’d go back either, except it would hurt Miss Marguerite so much,” Alicia recalled her daughter saying. “But Tammy-Jo’s right. It isn’t as much fun as it used to be, and Miss Marguerite is more interested in Julie than she is in the rest of us.”
“Well, of course she is,” Alicia had observed. “Julie’s her niece, and she dances better than the rest of you.”
But now, remembering that conversation, an unbidden thought crept into the back of her mind.
What if Jennifer had changed her mind and told Marguerite she’d decided to quit the class?
No! She forced the thought away.
“If you ask me,” she heard Muriel Fletcher saying, “there’s been something strange about Marguerite ever since her mother died.”
“But she’s dealt with it so well,” Alicia replied.
“Which is exactly what I mean,” Muriel went on. “For Heaven’s sake, Alicia, Marguerite lived with that miserable woman her whole life, and for the last twenty years Helena treated Marguerite like dirt. You’d have thought she’d have been tickled pink when Helena died, even if she was her mother. But what did she do? First she acted as if nothi
ng had happened at all, and then I heard she started talking about how much she missed Helena and what a wonderful mother she’d been!”
“But that’s not so strange,” Alicia pleaded, her voice taking on a desperate note. “Lots of people do that.”
“Well, perhaps they do,” Muriel said, her voice crisp. “But all I know is that the more I think about it, the more certain I am that there is something very, very wrong with Marguerite Devereaux. And in my heart I’m absolutely certain she’s responsible for Mary-Beth’s death.”
Suddenly there was a flash of lightning and a crash of thunder, and then, as the lights in the house flickered, the phone went dead in Alicia Mayhew’s hand.
“Damn!” she swore out loud. “Damn, damn, damn!”
She rattled the hook on the phone for a moment, but already knew from long experience that the phone would be dead for the rest of the night. Indeed, they’d be lucky if the lights didn’t go out too. Finally, frustrated, she dropped the receiver back on the hook and went to the window to stare out into the raging storm.
The wind still seemed to be growing stronger, and the rain was coming down in torrents. If Jennifer was out there somewhere …
Then her eyes filled with tears as she realized that deep down inside, she didn’t truly believe that Jennifer was anywhere out in the storm.
Deep in her soul she was certain that Jennifer had, indeed, gone to Sea Oaks that morning.
And for some reason Alicia could not yet understand, she’d never left.
Alicia numbly dropped onto the sofa in her tiny living room and prepared herself to wait for whatever news might eventually come. And yet, even as she began her vigil, she already knew how it was going to end.
She was going to be told that her daughter—her beloved Jennifer—was dead.
“Noooo!”
She screamed the word out loud, a wail of despairing anguish. But even had the storm not been raging outside, there would still have been no one to hear her, for since Jennifer’s father had died ten years earlier, Jennifer had been all Alicia had in the world.
