Scott was mollified, as he was intended to be, and left the office knowing he had let himself be handled, but at a loss as to what to do about it. He just couldn’t picture Doc Machalvie stalking Theo with a baseball bat.
Later that evening, Knox’s wife Anne Marie was awakened, still high and very drunk, by her husband, who dragged her out of bed, and then dressed her in the clothes she’d worn earlier in the day.
“Where we goin’?” she asked him, repeatedly, but he just hummed to himself and would not answer.
He slung her up over his shoulder, carried her to the garage, heaved her not so gently onto the backseat of his car, and shut the door. Cradled in the soft, warm leather, she allowed herself to drift, listening to the classical music Knox always played when he drove.
Maybe he was taking her to rehab again, she thought. It hadn’t been too bad; the spa part had been relaxing, and she had lost some weight. She felt dizzy but not sick, which was exactly the feeling she liked best, most often followed by unconsciousness or sex, although sometimes she’d wake to find both seemed to have happened without her remembering.
She lost track of time as he drove, but she was conscious of the curves in the road, and the swaying motion of the car lulled her to sleep in the warm, leather cocoon. She woke up to a sudden blast of cold air upon her lightly clad body, and it was enough of a shock to her system to sober her up a tiny bit. Knox hauled her out of the back seat, leaned her back against the side of the car, and then lightly slapped her face until she protested.
“Pay attention to me,” he said. “I’m getting out here and you have to drive yourself home.”
Anne Marie looked around; they seemed to be parked on the side of Pine Mountain Road, the nose of the car pointed downhill. It was dark, snow was pouring down, and Knox seemed to be insisting she drive somewhere. He pressed the keys into her hand and walked away to where she could see another car was waiting farther up the road, facing in the opposite direction.
“Hey!” she yelled, and the effort caused her to slip and fall into the snow bank created by the snowplows.
“Shit!” she shrieked. “Knox! Come help me up, ya big jerk!”
She heard the other car pull away, going uphill, toward Glencora. She struggled out of the snow bank and stumbled against the car.
“Knox!” she screamed after the disappearing taillights, “I can’t drive; I’m drunk!”
This struck her as really funny, and she laughed out loud before saying more quietly, “I am so screwed.”
She had dropped the keys when she fell, and now had to scrabble in the darkness on her hands and knees, feeling around with rapidly numbing fingers until she finally found them in the snow. She let herself in the driver’s side of the car, shivering uncontrollably, covered in wet snow from where she’d fallen. She started the car and turned up the heater, almost falling asleep as soon as she was warm.
“No, no, no, no,” she told herself then, pinching her arms. “Must stay awake.”
She glanced in the rear view mirror as a car passed her, but it wasn’t Knox. It had been a familiar car, but whose?
“Jerk,” she said to the rearview mirror, although Knox was long gone.
What kind of crazy game was he playing? She closed one eye to try to halve the double vision plaguing her and when that didn’t work, shook her head, trying to clear it, which only made her dizzier. She was sensible enough to know she couldn’t stay there with the heater running. She’d run out of gas eventually and freeze to death.
“All right,” she said out loud, and pressed the satellite assistance button, but nothing happened.
“Bastard,” she said, thinking Knox must not have paid the bill. She looked for her purse to get her cell phone, but her purse wasn’t in the car.
“Son of a bitch,” she said, rubbing her eyes in an attempt to get them to focus.
She considered her options, now that she realized the jerk was not coming back for her, and no one knew where she was. Snow alternating with freezing rain was falling, and Anne Marie knew it was only a matter of time before the road became dangerously icy. She put the car in drive.
“I can do this,” she said. “Leave me on the side of the road, will you? I’ll show you.”
She pulled the car off the narrow shoulder and began her descent of Pine Mountain.
After a long day of running around chasing leads but not getting very far, Scott called Maggie to see if he could come over, and she told him to come up the back way to her apartment. She was cleaning, she said, and when he got there, she was scrubbing the bathroom floor. She took off her rubber gloves and put the kettle on in the kitchen, while he brought her up to date, sitting at her kitchen table. Once seated with a pot of tea and two mugs between them, she looked at the photocopy of the threat in the card, and shook her head at the image of the young boys, including her brother Sean.
Sean was now an attorney who worked as a trust officer and estate planner for a large national banking corporation in Pittsburgh. The way Maggie described it, Sean created hiding places for rich people to store their money so their heirs did not have to pay huge amounts of taxes, but Scott thought there was probably more to it.
Maggie insisted Scott needed to talk to Sean about the card and photo.
“We all thought he was probably out there the day it happened,” she said, frowning. “He and Brad were joined at the hip every day and night that summer. He said he spent the whole day working with Brian at the service station and Brian backed him up. The thing is, he never stepped foot in the station if he could help it, and he and Brian couldn’t stand each other. We all thought it was fishy, but neither of them would budge on the story.”
“It was the first time something really bad happened to one of us,” Scott said.
“After Brad died, Sean was so upset that Mom sent him out to Uncle Curtis’ farm for the rest of the summer. Hannah said he spent every day in the woods, and would come home filthy and starved at sunset. Everyone just left him alone to get over it.”
“We didn’t know what to say to him,” Scott said. “He didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”
“He got really serious afterward, and just worked his tail off in school; got a scholarship, graduated early, left us, and never looked back.”
“I hate to make him look back, but I have to.”
Maggie pushed her chair back, stood up, and stretched. Scott admired her, even dressed in sweats, but didn’t let her catch him doing so. She reached for the phone to call Sean, and even though the smile of pure affection and pleasure on her face when she got her brother on the phone only lasted a second or two, Scott was completely undone by it. He just had no resistance to this woman, no matter how many times she rejected him.
Maggie handed Scott the phone, and he told Sean about the card and photo. Sean said he was available Thursday morning if Scott wanted to talk.
After he hung up, Scott stood as if to leave, but she said, “Stick around, and as soon as I’m through cleaning, we’ll order a pizza.”
Scott could hardly believe his good luck. Instead of lounging around, Scott pitched in and mopped the kitchen for her while she took a shower. Afterward, he went to the front room to wait for the kitchen floor to dry. Maggie had multiple photograph albums and he went through them, ostensibly looking for pictures taken around the time Brad died, but also to look at pictures of Maggie.
The first album held photos of her grandparents and parents when they were young, and all her aunts, uncles, cousins, her three brothers, and Maggie up to the age of twelve or so. The photos of her father Fitz, taken before his accident, show a lively, robust man, much the size Patrick was now. He was pictured wrestling with his boys, working at the bakery, bowling with his league, standing with his arm around wife Bonnie, and holding baby Maggie as if she were a fragile china doll.
There were several photos of Uncle Ian and Aunt Delia’s son Liam, who died of leukemia as a child. His sister Claire was close in age to Maggie and Hannah. Maggie’
s Aunt Alice and Uncle Curtis were pictured with their four boys and scrawny little Hannah, who always seemed to have scraped knees and a dirty face.
The next album held photos taken after Fitz fell off a ladder while painting the trim on the second story of their house. Scott could remember him lying in the hospital bed they put in the front room after he first came home from the hospital. He looked like a pale, skinny ghost of his former self. Scott thought about how quiet the house was afterward.
There was a photo of sunburned pre-teen cousins Claire, Maggie, and Hannah, along with Caroline Eldridge, at a pajama party at Claire’s house, with Aunt Delia in the background, talking on the phone. Claire was tall and skinny with dark hair and bright blue eyes; Maggie was also tall and skinny, but covered in freckles, with her curly red hair in pigtails. Hannah was tiny and always looked like she was up to something.
There were several before-the-school-dance photos of her eldest brother Brian with his wife-to-be Ava, and Patrick with a varied collection of girls. There were plenty of Brian and Patrick in their football and baseball uniforms, trying to look macho with unfortunate haircuts. All the Fitzpatrick men were athletic, so every family get-together featured touch football in the yard, and there were several of those photos.
There were only three snapshots of Ava and Brian’s wedding, but they were blurry and poorly developed. It had been a hasty affair, when Ava was just sixteen years old and Brian had been about to leave for college.
There were school and graduation photos, and all Hannah’s brothers’ weddings. There was one photo of Fitz, Ian, Curtis, and all their sons, standing out in front of Fitz’s house in their best suits on the day of Grandma Rose’s funeral. Rose had been the formidable Fitzpatrick matriarch, who famously did not get along with any of her daughters-in-law, and doted on her boys. In the photo Curtis and Ian were obviously holding up their brother Fitz between them.
There was one of Maggie’s brother Sean with his beat up Honda packed to the roof, leaving for college. There was one of Brian working at the service station with Uncle Curtis, and several of Hannah and Patrick working at the Rose and Thorn with Aunt Delia. There were only a couple photos of Maggie working at the bakery. She worked there alongside her grandmother, mother, and aunts for several years after her father had his accident, up until she bought the bookstore.
There were photos of Hannah’s husband Sam Campbell, at a party held just before he left for the Gulf, handsome and indestructible looking in his uniform, with his former high school sweetheart Linda by his side. The pictures of him afterward at his welcome home party showed a skeletal, haggard version of the same man. He looked smaller and much older, slumped in his wheelchair, with haunted, shadowed eyes. There was no girlfriend by his side then, just his brittle, bitter mother, who looked as if her expectations in life had been amputated along with her son’s lower limbs.
Scott skipped ahead, past photos of Sam working out with the high school wrestling team, sled riding with Patrick, Ed and himself, and going off to MIT. There were many shots of Hannah and Sam’s wedding, a much happier time, and then the farm, as family and friends helped them turn it into a place Sam could negotiate with his wheelchair.
There were several photos of Ava and Brian as young newlyweds in the huge run down Victorian house which later became the Rose Hill Bed and Breakfast. All the Fitzpatricks and their friends worked many long hours on the house, restoring it to the grand lady it had once been. There were snaps of Ava’s and Brian’s daughter Charlotte taken before their son Timmy was born. Ava was so photogenic there was no way to take a bad picture of her, and Brian always hammed it up for the camera. Charlotte was a miniature of her beautiful dark-eyed mother, and Timmy was just as red-headed as his father and Aunt Maggie.
Then there was Scott’s wedding. He looked so happy, as did Sharon. The only unhappy person pictured was his mother, who had red-rimmed eyes and a miserable look on her face. She had fainted during the service and had to be carried out.
There were photos taken during the time he was married, while Maggie and her boyfriend Gabe lived in the house up Possum Holler, and socialized with Scott and his wife Sharon.
‘We all look so young,’ he thought, although it had been only six years or so since the photos were taken.
Sharon looked pretty and sweet. Scott was working in Pendleton at that time, and Sharon was doing her best to make a home for them, built on dreams of a family he could not fulfill. He’d heard she was married with children now, and he sincerely wished her well, but they did not stay in touch. He was mostly sorry to have wasted even a few years of her life.
Scott looked at the photos of Gabe with his arms around a beaming Maggie, and felt an aching pain in his chest. After Gabe left and her house burned down, a light went out in Maggie, and although Scott occasionally saw it flicker, he knew she believed that with Gabe had gone her only chance for happiness. He studied Gabe’s face in the photos and felt conflicting feelings: sadness at losing a friend, anger at what his friend had done to someone he loved, and guilt for his part in it; but mostly regret, for there was plenty of hurt to go around.
Toward the end of the same album there were a few pictures of a New Year’s Eve party Maggie and Gabe had hosted, with everyone crowded in the living room, listening to some friends of Patrick’s playing the mandolin, fiddle, and tin whistle while Patrick played the drum badly but sang really well.
Sam was there in his wheelchair, a silly hat on his head, with a drunk and disorderly Hannah sitting on his lap. Scott was cuddling Sharon on the loveseat, looking very cozy and happy. Brian and a very pregnant Ava were laughing and pointing at something just out of frame, probably Ed’s dog Goudy, who used to go everywhere with him and farted all the time. A couple of Hannah’s brothers and their wives were there. Scott thought he remembered their cousin Claire being there as well, along with her husband Pip, but they weren’t in any of the pictures.
Ed was behind the camera, as usual, a part of them but always apart, observing and recording. His wife Eve claimed to be too ill to come, but everyone knew the truth was she couldn’t stand to be around his friends, who didn’t seem to care enough about political issues or world affairs to argue passionately with her about them. She left Ed six weeks later on Valentine’s Day, and as the year progressed, the lives of several other people in the party photos fell apart as well. On this night however, everyone looked young and happy, and it seemed as if it would never be any different.
Photos of the blackened wreckage of Maggie’s house were the last in this album. It was late April but there was still snow on the ground. Scott, Ed, Brian, and Patrick were shoveling debris into a big dumpster, under the supervision of uncles Curtis and Ian. The sky was gray, the trees scorched, and everyone looked grim. There were no pictures of Maggie taken at that time, but Scott would never forget the grief stricken look in her eyes.
Maggie came out of the bathroom wearing jeans and a man’s flannel shirt, her hair hanging in dripping ringlets down her back. Scott felt the attraction between them like a thermal layer, surrounding them, connecting them. Her color was high, maybe from the shower, or maybe from the same thing he was feeling. She walked up behind his chair, leaned over it, and looked at the last page of the open photo album on his lap.
“I don’t look at them much,” she said. “Ava had Timmy a week later, and by summer Brian was gone, too.”
Scott couldn’t think of the right thing to say. He put the album aside, got up and hugged her. What was meant to be a comforting gesture quickly changed into something more. He looked in her eyes, and her pupils were large and dark. He looked at her mouth, and was drawn toward it; hypnotized by her fragrance, her warmth, and the closeness she was allowing him to experience. He could feel them drawing together in this sparking magnetic field they created between them, and he was more than willing to take advantage of this opportunity.
His cell phone rang and broke the spell. It was Skip, reporting Anne Marie Rodefeffer’s car had gone over
the side of Pine Mountain road.
The snowplow driver who reported the accident claimed it was a lucky thing he came along shortly after it happened.
“Otherwise, the sleet and snow would have covered up the skid marks within five minutes.”
Because of the treacherous road conditions, Maggie’s Uncle Curtis was already out on another wrecker call with two others waiting, so a wrecker from Glencora was employed to pull Knox’s Lincoln up out of the ravine. Anne Marie was unconscious but alive when they pulled her out.
“She didn’t have a coat on,” the wrecker operator told Scott. “No pocketbook and no ID. I got the name from the car registration.”
Knox, on a business trip to DC, was reportedly flying to Pittsburgh, where Anne Marie was being airlifted by helicopter. She had sustained multiple fractures, the emergency medical technicians suspected internal injuries as well, and her condition was considered critical.
Chapter Five – Tuesday
Maggie Fitzpatrick unlocked the front door of her bookstore, Little Bear Books, and pulled her café easel outside onto the recently shoveled and salted sidewalk. The bear design painted on the top of the easel looked like a chalk drawing, and matched the colorfully painted wooden sign that stretched across the top of her storefront windows. On the left hand side of the sign was the logo, a bear cub balancing a large open book on his little bear legs as he sat and appeared to read through big glasses perched on his cute little bear nose. “Little Bear Books” was written across the rest of the sign in a fairy tale font. It was all way too cutesy for Maggie’s taste, but tourists would buy anything she put the logo on, from mugs to t-shirts, so she kept it.
Benjamin, her best barista, had already been at work for half an hour when Maggie came downstairs and opened the bookstore. She liked Benjamin because he was reliable and easy to work with, besides being an excellent barista. But most of all, he didn’t talk her ear off first thing in the morning, when she was feeling grumpy. He picked up the bakery order, shoveled the sidewalks, performed all the opening procedures, and the café was ready for customers by 7:00 a.m., all without any irritating chit chat.
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