by Gloria Repp
“I think so, thanks to your map.”
She could tell that he had something more to ask. “Do you have time,” he said, “to come see the den I’m making for Macbeth?”
“I’d like that. How about late tomorrow afternoon?” She and Aunt Lin should be back by then.
He grinned. “Four o’clock? Wear hiking boots if you have them. I’ll come get you.”
Now that they had a cable connection, Madeleine spent the evening downloading information about the museum and looking at the next module for her course. Rolls. She chose Vienna rolls from the list and researched different types of leavening for the required paper. A short one this time.
The next morning dawned gray, with sullen clouds hanging low, and something about the wind muttering through the pines made her feel unsettled. Or maybe it was the thought of going to Millville and looking at all that glass.
Normally, she wouldn’t mind. But old Jersey glass reminded her of Kent because of the way he carried on and on about his book. Please, let’s not clutter this day with Kent.
The glass museum was more extensive than anything she’d imagined. Room after room displayed collections: Early American Glass; Nineteenth Century Art Glass; Cut Glass; Art Nouveau Glass, and more.
Aunt Lin’s main interest was the New Jersey gallery, so she took photos and Madeleine made notes. A very old, green, flat-sided bottle seemed familiar, and an aquamarine vase looked identical to one in the dining room. Henrietta’s hoarding may have resulted in some genuine antiques.
Finally Aunt Lin said, “I’ve seen enough glass for a while. How about lunch? One of my favorite restaurants is down Route 49, not too far from here.”
The Mullica Place looked as if it had once been a mansion, and its antique furnishings complemented the expensive menu. When they’d finished their apple cobbler, Aunt Lin put down her fork with a sigh. “Just as good as I remembered. Now I’m ready to shop.”
The gift shop had the same refined atmosphere as the restaurant, with polished wood shelves that displayed books, pottery, and hand-blown glass. “Beautiful colors,” Aunt Lin said. “I’d love to get some of these for props—the magazine cover, you know—but look at the prices!”
“We have plenty of candlesticks and bottles,” Madeleine said. “And dozens of vases. Maybe they would give the effect you want.”
“You’re right.”
They paused in front of a sign: WOODCRAFT—SOUTH JERSEY ARTISTS. Among the wooden toys and candle holders was a trio of duck decoys.
“Decoys?” Aunt Lin picked up a mallard hen. “Look at the detail on those feathers.” She turned it over. “And it’s signed.”
The blocky initials, PC, were burned into the wood. The price was $215.00.
Her aunt shrugged. “I don’t know who PC is, but he’s expensive.”
“Probably because it’s signed,” Madeleine said. “And it’s worn. Must be old.” She picked up each of the other decoys. “Neither of these are signed, and they’re only $100. I can see why.”
They were neatly painted, but they didn’t have the meticulous detail of the PC decoy.
Aunt Lin held onto the mallard hen. “Let me think about our Americana cover. Colors. Hmm.” She half-closed her eyes. “We’ve got four, but five would be better. How about this hen? Her colors will fit, and she’ll make a pair with the drake.”
“She’s definitely the best,” Madeleine said. “But at that price?”
Her aunt laughed. “She’s a necessity. I’ll put this bit of pottery back.” She glanced at her watch. “Let’s go.”
As they drove north, her aunt was silent, probably thinking her endless magazine thoughts, and Madeleine took another look at their new decoy. Who had carved it? Who had shot over it? Who had sold it into the careless hands of a dealer?
They swept up the highway, past small houses, strip malls, and billboards, and finally entered the green solitude of the pines.
By the time they reached the Manor, it was early afternoon. “I think I’ll try a conference call,” Aunt Lin said, and disappeared into her office.
Madeleine set the new decoy on the kitchen table and studied it. What would Dan’l think of this? She’d take him some cookies, and maybe he could tell her something about PC.
At the sight of her, Dan’l’s rosy face wrinkled with pleasure. He started to thank her for the cookies, but halted, staring at the decoy.
He took it into his hands. “Nice work,” he murmured, and turned it over. “By golly, I thought it looked familiar! I’ve got a PC too.”
He lifted a shoebox down from the cupboard and took out a decoy, a pintail duck, wrapped in tissue paper.
Wordless for once, he set it beside the mallard hen and sank into a chair. He turned them both over and compared the signatures. “Signed the same,” he muttered. “Sure looks the same.”
The color drained out of his face. “But see—this one of yours got more detail on the feathers. It’s not the same kind of duck, I know, but . . .”
Madeleine studied the mallard. Compared to Dan’l’s PC, was there something different about the eye?
She was about to mention it when he said, “Not my business, not at all.” He lurched to his feet, wrapped up his decoy, and put the box into the cupboard. “Just remembered,” he said, “I gotta go into town.” He spoke a little too quickly, and his eyes flickered away from hers.
Why were his hands shaking?
Out of pity, she said that she had to leave too. He didn’t walk her to the door this time, but he did say, as she left the kitchen, “Thank you, ma’am, for the cookies.”
Never mind. She couldn’t have stayed much longer or she’d have been late for Jude. But Dan’l had never acted this way before.
Aunt Lin was still in her office when she returned. Good. No more decoy talk. She’d hurry into old clothes and go to meet Jude. A hike and Jude’s friendly chatter—that’s what she needed.
Judging from the condition of his jeans, Jude had already been hard at work. A trowel jutted from his back pocket, and he carried an armful of pine logs. He started away from the Manor at a fast lope, soon turning off onto a different path.
The landscape was nothing new—pine trees and sand, invisible singing birds, but she felt her disquiet easing toward serenity.
The pines mingled with oaks and gave way to a stand of wide-set pines with low, gnarled branches. Jude hopped across a stream and glanced back at her with a smile. They’d left the path, but he seemed to know where he was going.
He headed into a grove of towering cedars, so thickly grown that their branches shuttered the light and chilled the air. “Cedar swamp,” he said. Moss floated like emerald rafts on the dark water, and a chickadee called from the shadows, singing that he was glad to be here.
Jude’s grin told her that he was glad too. He circled around the swampy pools.
“You know where we are?” he asked.
“Not at all.”
“Middle of nowhere, the best place for explorations.” His eyes sparkled. “You’d be amazed at the secrets in these woods.”
When they reached a small clearing, he paused with an air of having arrived at his destination. “I like this place,” he said. “I come here to think.” He walked toward a slope-sided depression, a mere dip in the sandy ground. Beside it stood a tree with yellow leaves that she didn’t recognize.
“Cellar hole,” Jude said. He gestured at the tree. “Walnut. They must have planted it by their house.”
An uneven series of flat stones, half-hidden by grass, stretched toward the hole. Someone’s front walk.
She gazed down the walk. What hopeful wife had watched her man set this into place? Had she lived to see the tree grow tall, to gather walnuts for a cake?
Jude pulled out his trowel and trotted toward a cluster of pines at the far edge of the clearing. He dropped the logs beside a teepee of branches built at the base of a rotting pine stump, and motioned her forward.
She knelt to look inside. He’d dug a h
ole, broad and deep, and carpeted it with pine needles.
“Pretty snug,” she said.
“Yeah. I hope we won’t have to bring him here, but if we do, he’ll like it. I just have to finish the entrance.”
After he’d arranged the rest of the logs in front of the den, he sat back on his heels. “I’ve got to tell you something,” he said in a troubled voice.
Great, he’d dropped out of school or robbed a bank or something.
He swiped at his face, leaving a dusty streak. “There’s a girl,” he said, and her worry faded. Girl trouble was easier to handle.
He reddened, as if he guessed her thoughts. “Not that kind of girl,” he said. “Stringy red hair. Skinny. She ran away from home.”
He got to his feet. “This needs a door, kind of hidden.”
He paced back and forth beside the cellar hole. “There used to be bricks here, but I never meddle with ruins. Some idiot stole them, I guess.”
Madeleine trailed after him. What about the girl?
They had reached the far side of the clearing when he said, “She’s hiding out in the woods—scared of getting caught. She was hungry, so I took her some food.”
The extra cookies? The chicken casserole?
He picked up a pair of knobby branches. “These’ll work.” Back at the den, he used them to form an inverted V and secured them with the logs.
“How old is she?” Madeleine asked. “Is she hurt?”
“Lots older than me. She sleeps all the time, like she’s real tired.”
Before she could ask any more, he got to his feet. “You don’t have to do anything. Maybe she’ll get well and go back home. I wasn’t even supposed to tell you. Just pray.”
He’d confided in her, but shouldn’t she report this? Why had the girl run away? Shouldn’t she find out?
“All right.” She wouldn’t interfere, not for now.
He pocketed his trowel with an air of finality and gave an ineffectual brush to the sand on his jeans. “Got to get home,” he said. “Or Gemma will give me another talk about responsibility and stuff.”
On the way back, he asked about a ride for tomorrow’s canoe trip, but he didn’t say anything more about the girl.
The cat was waiting for her on the porch, and she picked him up for a snuggle as she went inside. Aunt Lin had put a frozen casserole into the oven and set out fruit for a salad, so supper was well on its way.
Madeleine washed her hands, found a knife, and started cutting up an apple. “How did your phone conference turn out?” she asked.
“I’ll have to go back on Monday. That deadline is breathing down our necks, and we’ve got too much at stake.”
During supper, Madeleine tried to listen as her aunt talked about problems with the current issue, but the mental cupboard where she’d stashed Jude’s secret seemed to have a door that kept swinging open. And what about Dan'l and the PC decoy? Who was PC, anyway? She should have asked him.
She made cookies for the canoe trip—chocolate chip with nuts—and turtle muffins, but it was hard to forget the look she’d seen on Dan’l’s face.
By the time she finished, she was tired enough for bed. “Write in your journal,” she told herself. “And pray for Jude and that girl, as you promised. Stop thinking about decoys.”
She was drifting into sleep when the cat leaped onto the foot of her bed and begin grooming himself. By now, she knew the routine. First his legs, one after the other, then his back, his chest, his face. On and on and on.
Finally she sat up. “Macbeth! Can’t you do your laundry some other time?”
She stroked the long silken back, and a drowsy question circled again through her mind. Who was PC?
Now the answer came: Paul Clampton. The grandfather who taught Paula all she knew.
Madeleine turned on the lamp, slid out of bed, and carried the gift-shop decoy into the light. The expression in its eyes—familiar? The eye groove—deeper? It was hard to tell without Dan’l’s PC in front of her.
She studied the wings. There it was: Bria’s signature.
She turned the decoy over. The initials burned into the base, and the base itself, were soiled, as if it had been handled many times. The paint was scratched too, but such things could be counterfeited. Slowly she put it back onto the bureau and returned to bed.
Mac watched her, still licking a paw.
She turned out the light and gazed into the darkness. Who would falsify a signature like that? Who else but Paula’s distribution manager?
A cheap, shady operation . . . something her mother and Brenn would think was just fine.
Coldness touched her, the same chill that used to scrabble down her back when Brenn put a hand on her arm.
Brenn . . . fear . . . Kent.
“Lord,” she whispered. “Be my Rock and my Fortress. I’m . . . I’m afraid.”
She piled the pillows around her, pulled the blankets close. No more thoughts about the decoys or Kent.
Think about tomorrow’s canoe trip. Think about the canoe gliding weightless beneath her. Think about the water sliding, sliding, sliding past.
CHAPTER 15
Dad used to take his ruffians on canoe trips.
“When your life is out of control,” he’d say,
“it feels good to rule something,
even a frail bit of metal.”
. . . Maybe this trip will calm me too.
~Journal
The next morning, while Madeleine was loading her backpack with food, Aunt Lin returned from a run through the fog-hung trees. “Canoeing at dawn, are we?” she remarked. “Not a bad idea—it won’t be as crowded.”
“That’s what Nathan said.” Madeleine slipped cookies into a side pocket, muffins into another.
“You look like a teenager yourself, with your hair pulled into a ponytail like that.”
“I just don’t want it hanging in my face while I’m trying to paddle,” Madeleine said. But she did feel younger this morning.
By the time she neared Timothy’s store, the fog had thinned enough for her to distinguish the Martinera’s van and trailer. Three men were doing something with the canoes—Nathan, tall and slender; Remi, mid-sized; Howard, square-built. A huddle of teens waited on the sidewalk.
As she stepped out of the car, Connie shrieked, “Here she is!”
Were we just a little excited this morning?
Nathan glanced over with a smile of welcome. He must be glad, already, that he was canoeing with Jude.
“C’mon folks,” Howard said. “Let’s get on the road.”
He and Remi climbed into the front seats of the van, and the teens filled the back two benches. The front bench was open, so she sat there, and Nathan slid in beside her.
They hadn’t driven more than a couple of blocks when Connie said, “I’m starved.”
Madeleine looked back at her. “No breakfast?”
“Not much. Did you bring anything to eat, Mrs. Burke?”
“Connie!” exclaimed her sister’s outraged voice.
“Mom said she’s such a good cook and stuff, I didn’t think it would hurt to ask.”
“Muffins?” Madeleine said. “That’s all I’m willing to donate right now.”
“Hoo-rah!” Connie said. “What kind? Can I have two?”
Madeleine handed the bag to Nathan, on the aisle. “First it goes to the pilots, up front.”
After Howard and Remi had helped themselves, she leaned over to put the bag into Connie’s hands. “You may pass these around and serve yourself last. Jude made the cinnamon-walnut ones.”
Under cover of the resulting noise, she turned back to Nathan, saying, “That may hold them for a while.”
He grinned. “Don’t we get any?”
“Didn’t you eat breakfast either?”
“Hardly.”
“I’d thought you’d fry yourself half-a-dozen eggs and a couple of sausages, the big, greasy kind. Top it off with pancakes and toast.”
He cocked his head. �
�You’re a morning person, aren’t you?”
“No, but I’m starving. Even fried eggs sound good. Would you like a muffin? Or a hard-boiled egg?”
“You have your own stash? My happy day. Yes, please, to both. What kind of muffin is this?”
“Turtle.”
“For extra protein?”
“For superior energy. To appease your scientific mind, I will mention that the chocolate and pecans synergize with the caramel in the center, providing powerful antioxidants and minerals.”
“Superior indeed! And your muffins are named for those fast-moving turtles?”
She elbowed him. “From the candies that look like turtles. They freeze nicely, so I’m sure you have them in Alaska. The candies, I mean.”
“Mmm,” he said. A minute later he asked, “These eggs. What happened to them?”
“Do you like deviled eggs?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Then you’ll like these. I deviled the yolks and put the halves back together.”
“Mmm.” Even with his mouth full, he wore that mischievous look on his face. “What’s in the thermos?”
She lowered her voice. “Is your name Connie? Chai tea. And yes, I’ll share. You must have driven your teachers wild, starting with kindergarten. How far is it to the river?”
“At least two muffins farther.”
“So kind of you to lighten my pack.”
Mist hung over the water, and it was still cool enough for a jacket. The sun’s pale lemon disc rose higher, glinting on the frosty gunwales of their canoes and turning the maples to scarlet.
While they waited for the others, she and Remi paddled back and forth, learning each other’s cadence and paddling style. She had asked to sit in the bow, letting him steer, so she could keep an eye on Bonnie and Connie.
From the noise they were making, she might have to intervene sooner than she’d thought.
Finally all the canoes were in the water. Pumper and Fritz were allowed to go on ahead, as long as they stayed within shouting distance. She and Remi paddled behind the two girls, and Nathan and Jude came last.
Remi proved to be a good steersman, and they talked quietly as they passed banks that were thick with cedar and maple trees.
