With Her Last Breath

by Cait London

  His head went back as though he’d taken a slap, and those eyes narrowed, his nose flaring slightly. He nodded and then closed the door after him.

  Scout tilted her head and whined softly, pinning her eyes on the closed door.

  “You’re so easy. I’m the one who pays for your vet bills and dog food. There’s this thing called loyalty, you know,” Maggie grumbled as she opened the cardboard box and placed the framed photos of her family on the dresser. She ran a fingertip over the one with her sister and herself, grinning into the camera, arms looped around each other.

  In another photo, Glenda’s young sons, Seth and Cody, just six and three, had sat on their mother’s lap, each kissing her cheek…and a slice of pain went through Maggie. She missed her nephews, missed seeing them grow. She wanted them in her arms, safe and alive and warm.

  But they reminded her too much of Glenda, and she couldn’t bear to see them. Travis, their father, was a good, loving man, remarried now to a woman who loved the boys. At times, Maggie had seen his shielded look at her, taking in the pale complexion and sleek reddish brown hair that had matched Glenda’s. Maggie was only a reminder to everyone of the pain in their past and the uncertainty of her place in their future.

  Her hand automatically went to hold the small locket at her throat; it held a picture of her sister, who was always with her, always in her heart. The chain Maggie had chosen was perhaps too heavy for the locket, but she didn’t want to lose this part of her sister—Glenda….

  “Not a sound from Maggie,” Rosa Alessandro said at eight o’clock as she prepared to go upstairs to her own apartment, leaving the younger members of the family to deal with the restaurant’s closing and the balancing of receipts. Like a mother checking on her children at bedtime, Rosa placed her hands on her generous hips. She surveyed the restaurant, eyeing each red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, the candles in the empty wine bottles, the chunky shakers of crushed red pepper and cheese. Vic Damone’s crooning over the sound system added to the Italian-style setting.

  In the off-season, the restaurant had regular, steady customers, year-round residents who knew where they could get good food and warmth. Right now, a few couples sat at the round wooden tables, a tired family in a large booth where the baby was fussing. Newlyweds who had been holed up at the harbor’s hotel snuggled in another booth. They were so busy with each other that they didn’t mind waiting for the takeout order that Nick’s oldest brother, Tony, was preparing in the kitchen. Because Tony’s wedding anniversary was tomorrow, he was likely to be too generous.

  The dark wood of the tables and booths shone with years of varnish and use and held three generations of warm, good memories. The main dining room was enough for the off-season crowd, which held a high percentage of relatives. The other smaller rooms would be opened during summer season for overflow and parties.

  An active, early sixty-year-old, Nick’s mother had raised three sons and moved with the ease of a younger woman. She wanted to travel when possible, and the large house that Nick had grown up in was now filled with his brother Tony’s family. Hair that was once dark now held waving fingers of gray that slid into a neat bun at her nape. Despite her usually happy temperament, her husband and her sons knew when she meant business.

  Rosa watched Nick roll silverware into red-and-white-checkered napkins. She automatically moved in to help him. “Maggie is a poor little bird, so quiet. She’s so stiff in my arms. You’d think she never had been hugged. So what if she has a dog in the apartment? It looks like a good dog and she looks like she needs a friend. You boys always needed Benny when you felt bad. Nick, you’ll see that the tablecloths are washed tonight, okay? The stack of clean ones in the back room is getting low.”

  “Go on up, Mom. It’s a slow night.” Nick had grown up in this restaurant, listening to stories on his grandfather’s knee and twisting spaghetti onto a fork. He had hoped his children would do the same things, but that wasn’t going to be.

  “Did you finish bottling wine today?” she asked. “You shouldn’t come here after working so hard at your own business.”

  “We’re done bottling. The vines are pruned and looking good. The vines are breaking dormancy. The trellises are all strong, posts and wire, and the vines have been tied. We’ll be thinning blooms in another five or six weeks, then if we don’t get another frost, we’ll be picking nice fat grapes by the end of September. You remember how good my wine is when you think about buying more,” he teased.

  “You make good wine. You should be making good babies…I saw Lorna in here earlier.”

  Nick frowned slightly as he remembered Lorna Smith-Ellis’s visit. An only child from wealthy parents, she was spoiled, twice divorced, and seemed deadly certain that she was going to have him. Maybe he was lonely, but he’d enjoyed the brief flirtation, the company of a woman, the way she smelled and moved and dressed. But sex with Lorna wasn’t in the mix. “We dated a little bit and that was it.”

  “I thought so. I don’t think she is a bad woman. Lorna has had to fight to get the love her father withheld—that evil, stingy man. She only knows that she has to win every challenge and you would be that…Your cousin, Vinnie, still wants her after all these years, after her two marriages. I see it in his eyes. They have something between them. I can feel it. But he doesn’t think he is good enough for her, a poor workingman wanting a rich, spoiled woman. And I wonder if you dated her a little to make him jealous. But still you are a man, and I know that you miss—”

  His mother didn’t finish, looking away. Nick understood that she ached for him. After twelve years, he still missed Alyssa. Would he ever ever stop seeing her crumpled on the pavement, after that motorcycle accident? Ever stop seeing the bloody stain that had been his child spread from her? Ever stop seeing her on life support?

  How could he forget? It was his fault—and he’d been the one to sign the release to stop the life support…that monitor’s little line going straight and flat and lifeless…

  His mother spoke quietly and leaned close to him. “See that your dad doesn’t eat any more meat. His cholesterol is up again. Do not let him put that hot bacon dressing on our spinach salad. I made him some nice munchies—celery and carrot sticks. Tell your brothers. They let him have his way too much.”

  Nick automatically lowered his head for his mother’s good-night kiss. The girl upstairs bothered him. The heavy watch on her wrist wasn’t feminine, it was functional, a stop watch, and she had a folded massage table in her pickup. From the way she’d run with her dog, she was in shape. And at first acquaintance, the dog had been protective. Maggie had resented his visit upstairs, and earlier there had been tears in her eyes, a contrast to her tough-loner attitude.

  Where was her family? And why was she so alone?

  Just then, he could have hugged her himself—but then the Alessandros were a hugging family.

  Dante, Nick’s divorced older brother, let out a burst of laughter as he refilled wineglasses for the Fergusons. Dante’s laughter concealed an ache shared by the Alessandros—he missed his three-year-old son, a boy now frightened of him. His ex-wife had used the boy for leverage in their divorce to hurt Dante. The aching need to recover his child was reflected in Dante’s expression each time he held a child. He feared placing his child in a free-for-all, revealing court battle. But when the time came, he would fight for his child.

  The Fergusons lifted their glasses in a toast and admired the meal before them. To round off their filetti al pepe verge, or beef fillets with green pepper, they’d chosen a Pinot Noir from Nick’s winery, aged just right in his underground cellar.

  Three years ago, a light frost had claimed a good portion of his grapes, but the wine from that year was passable, even good, mellowed in sturdy oak.

  Nick slid a bottle of last year’s bottled Chancellor into a brown sack, stuffed that into a larger white one with paper handles, and added an assortment of plastic forks, knives, and spoons with foil packages of Parmesan cheese. He handed the sack to Bobb
y, a young cousin who was home from college and working at the restaurant, clearing tables. “For the honeymooners.”

  On his way to the kitchen, Bobby passed Nick’s father, Anthony, and dismissing the difference in their ages, they did a playful you’re-in-my-way dance.

  Stooped a bit by age, Anthony had given his three sons their over six-foot height and broad-shouldered build. In his late sixties, with thick, black, waving hair and only a bit of gray, he enjoyed life. The slight bulge of his midsection said he enjoyed his family’s restaurant. “He also enjoyed teasing his wife. He winked at Nick as he passed, carrying plates of veal Parmesan. “Your mother works me like a slave all day long and then forgets that I am a red-hot lover by night.”

  “Papa, don’t speak like that in front of the children,” Rosa admonished sternly as she made her way to the table with the small children. They were strangers; the young parents were tired and the baby was protesting, rubbing his small fists against his eyes. An expert with children, Rosa soon held the baby, who slept draped over her shoulder. From his mother’s expression, Nick knew she was recommending a good, reasonably priced motel up the street.

  Anthony visited with the veal Parmesan customers and the office supply store owners, and came back to watch Nick hang the clean wineglasses bottom-up on the overhead rack.

  “How’s the girl upstairs? I saw her go out, taking her dog for a walk. I told her that she could use the washer and dryer in the storeroom. She doesn’t say much. It’s a good dog and no mongrel, either. Something is wrong with the girl. I came in from the kitchen too quick while she was going out the back door. She didn’t see me, and she jumped, flattened back against the shelves. She’s scared, Nicholas. It’s a terrible thing when a woman is alone and scared.”

  And sad, looking as if she were haunted, Nick thought. When she answered the door the second time, those shimmering dark green eyes, the soft tremble of her lips belied her warning keep-away frown.

  Nick didn’t want to know about her shadows. He had enough of his own.

  Attuned to the dog’s tense movements in the bed beside her, Maggie awoke easily. Yet the dregs of the nightmare clung to her, the watery image of her father reaching out to her and then disappearing until only his hand could be seen beneath the waves, and then it was gone. Then another man’s face appeared—this man had had an affair with Glenda and had ruined her life. As Maggie surfaced, blurred images of Glenda, drugged and used, slid by her.

  “I don’t believe he tried to rape you,” Glenda has slurred in her drugged haze. “He said you flirted with him, and he’s only a man, after all. You’re just trying to take him away from me. You probably invited him there, to find you in that bathtub. And stop hounding me and his friends. They’re my friends, too. I like how I live and what I do. Brent is all that matters, and so what if he wants me to do favors for his friends. It’s nothing, because he loves me and you can’t stand that, can you, Miss Perfect High and Mighty?”

  Lying in the dark apartment above Alessandros Restaurant, Maggie’s fingers latched onto Scout’s pelt. “He’s not going to get you,” she whispered to Scout.

  The same man who had ruined Glenda’s life had hurt Scout…

  The dog stared at the apartment’s closed door while Maggie adjusted to her new surroundings, tearing herself again from the past.

  She would make a new start in the morning…she had to…

  At ten-thirty at night, muted sounds of a restaurant kitchen seemed almost reassuring. On the stairway, a man’s low, indistinguishable rumble blended with a woman’s softer tones. The wood steps creaked beneath their passing, and then opposite Maggie’s apartment, the Alessandros’ door opened and closed softly.

  A burst of male laughter carried up the stairs and then the sounds were muted again, and Scout settled her head on Maggie’s chest.

  “This is just temporary, Scout,” Maggie said firmly as she rubbed the dog’s ears. “If I can just pick up enough work to get some money, I’m going to get my own business and settle down. I’ve had enough of running. You’ll have your own fenced-in yard. I am going to make this work. Someone in this town has to care about their physical fitness, otherwise there wouldn’t be that small gym down the street. That’s all I’m qualified for, all I know.”

  She’d once lived her life for her ex-husband, believing in the dream world of working together, then having a family.

  She’d stopped crying a long time ago. The images and arguments were three years old and still painful: She’d been attacked by a man she hated, and Ryan hadn’t believed her. He didn’t want her to bring charges…the man was too important and could help them build their business…Her husband thought more of his own safety and business than he did of Maggie…

  Determined to rest for the job in front of her—getting clients and therefore money—Maggie turned on her side and wrapped her arm around Scout. The street lamps sent a soft glow into her second-floor apartment. It was only April, cool and fresh with spring and the scent of daffodils, and a new start. “We’re going to be just fine. I’m just not used to a big meal. I shouldn’t have eaten all that—it hit me hard and I fell asleep too early.”

  Because she knew she couldn’t sleep easily now, Maggie eased out of bed and dug through her duffel bag, found a lavender-scented candle, and lit it. With her CD player’s earphones in place, she sat on the floor in yoga position and began a slow, relaxing meditation. She focused on the sonorous Asian tones of the woman, the bells tinkling lightly in the background…

  In the cluttered workroom of her tiny yellow house, Celeste Moonstar poured melted wax into stocky candle molds. Her shop, Journeys, was not quite as well inventoried as she would like for the approaching tourist season. She critically studied the red wax, disappointed that she had missed the delicate pink shade she wanted.

  But her mind had been elsewhere, on how she felt earlier, fingers of fear gripping her, holding her as she locked her shop’s door. She’d hurried for the safety of her home, and the fear seemed to slither after her.

  Celeste frowned as a stream of bloodred liquid wax ran down the side of the mold and spread on the counter. She listened to the tiny wind chimes on her porch and the scraping of a small branch on the window. As a psychic with some talent, she recognized the wary restlessness within her—as if her senses were about to tell her something.

  On the counter, the spilled wax hardened and lost its liquid shine as though fate had been cast and couldn’t be changed.

  Celeste ran her hand over it, testing the heat, and found the impression of her fingerprint. Not all the fingerprint had taken, just the half crescent that formed a long C. An eerie chill rose up her nape, and the flowing scarf around her throat seemed to tighten.

  She smiled tightly, dismissing whatever prowled in her mind. She was overworked, a little upset by the strange sensations she’d felt outside her shop, nothing more.

  The wind chimes tinkled again, and Celeste turned to her inventory. Sometimes the wind carried other’s sensations to her that she’d never know or experience. It was best to dismiss her uneasiness for now.

  At seven o’clock in the morning, Alessandros’ kitchen was busy again, and aromatic scents of bubbling sauces began coursing up the stairway. As Maggie came down, passing through the kitchen storeroom on her way out the back, two men were vehemently arguing the worth of making and packaging Alessandros’ own pasta against the commercial grade. On the family dining room table sat a battered pot of coffee, along with two plates of sweet rolls, and a number of half-full cups of coffee. A massive bundle of fresh herbs bundled in damp newspaper lay on the plastic tablecloth next to a menu that had been heavily marked with black pen. The sound of television’s morning news cruised over the spacious, homey room.

  In the customers’ dining room, Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore” provided another layer of sound, adding to the family’s energetic mixed exchange of Italian and English.

  Anthony waved to Maggie, bidding her to come to him. When she did, he wrapp
ed his arms around her, lifted her off the floor, and playfully waggled her. He kept his arm around her as he poured coffee into a new cup. “So you’re hungry this morning, huh? Sit. Have a sweet roll and some coffee.”

  Uneasy with the friendly familiarity, she moved away from him. “I’d better not. I’m still full from last night.”

  As soon as she could, Maggie was hitting a grocery store and stocking up on healthy food—celery and carrot sticks, black beans and lentils, and tofu and sunflower seeds.

  The sweet roll was oozing with frosting and smelled like fresh-baked cinnamony heaven. At one time, her weight had ballooned with fragrant comfort food; she’d eaten, but not to satisfy her hunger. Ryan’s disgust for her sexually had only added to her need for comfort food.

  “Have some coffee then.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t drink coffee.”

  He peered down at her. “You look healthy. What’s wrong with you? You don’t sleep so good, do you?”

  When had she ever slept through the night? Maggie avoided the question with a light smile. “I’d better take my dog for that run now. She’s been waiting. I need to pick up a few things. Is there a health food store in town?”

  He straightened and sniffed elegantly, clearly offended. “And just what’s wrong with the food at Alessandros Italian Restaurant?”

  In the end, to erase her offense, she ate the sweet roll and drank a glass of milk, and wished she could snuggle back into the comfortable bed upstairs.

  On her way out the back door, she held the screen door for a huge, beefy man with a friendly face and a mop of black, waving hair. The box in his arms held several white paper bundles. “I’m the butcher—Marco Alessandro. Got a fresh delivery here—veal, the best. Hold the door, will you?” he asked.