The Edge of Forever

by Bretton, Barbara

  “Not a bit.” Meg stood up. She knew an exit line when she stumbled over one.

  “You clearly have no eye, darling” Hunt took a closer look at the cover. “Look at those biceps, the triceps, that chest. Our Mr. Alessio could have been the model.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Hunt, but he’s not the model. He’s the author.” She folded the quilt neatly and placed it over the arm of the sofa where she’d found it.

  “No need to get waspish.” Hunt looked genuinely wounded. “I promise not to intrude on your territory.”

  Meg took a deep breath. “He’s not my territory,” she said calmly, “and you wouldn’t be intruding.” She took the book from him and placed it on the piano bench. “Joe Alessio really is Angelique Moreau.”

  “Well, well, well.” Hunt seemed quite enchanted with that bit of news. His eyes, which matched the blue of his jumpsuit, twinkled. “How fascinating.”

  “Don’t go getting any ideas,” Meg warned, for Hunt had spent the morning imparting details about his love life. “He may write under a female name but that’s as far as it goes.”

  Hunt allowed his lanky body to droop in a parody of profound disappointment. “You’re a hard woman. I think you enjoy breaking my heart.”

  She gave him a playful sock in the arm. “You have no heart to break,” she said with a grin. “You’re wedded to your art, and you know it.”

  Hunt didn’t deny it. “I’m in the mood for a stroll through my plaster paradise,” he said, plunging his bony hands into the pockets of his jumpsuit. “Still want the complete tour?”

  Meg glanced at the clock on the mantel; there was at least an hour until Joe would come down to start working on the annotated history of the KCC. Hunt had shown her some of his works in progress earlier that morning, and the taste had only whetted her appetite for more.

  “Can I take some pictures?” She was already deciding on lenses and filters and shutter speed.

  “For publication?”

  “Just for me,” she said, trying to ignore Hunt’s disappointed expression. It’s my way of keeping a journal.” In the last year she’d shot literally hundreds of rolls of film in her effort to record life in all its forms and had done nothing with any of it save making prints to stash away in a dark closet.

  “You’re not Samuel Pepys, my dear,” Hunt said archly. “We creative types do have to earn a living. Or had you forgotten?”

  “Why do you think I drive a limo?”

  Meg escaped to the hall closet where she’d stashed her camera equipment the night before. Not once since she’d put aside her ambitions for a career in photographic art had she felt guilty about her decision. Now, less than twenty-four hours after arriving at Lakeland House, she found herself feeling defensive, apologetic, and totally unworthy of her place in Anna’s heart.

  The beautiful old house nearly crackled with creative energy. Hunt’s unbridled genius, Joe’s intense concentration, and her own sharp need to define life in visual terms had the air sizzling with dreams. Danger was all around, both in her strong attraction to Joe and in the restlessness that was building inside her.

  She slipped into an old brown leather jacket, slung her camera over her shoulder, and fled to the relative safety of the backyard where Huntington Kendall IV and his imaginary village awaited immortality on film.

  #

  Joe gave up trying to sleep around four-thirty. He’d tossed and turned and done everything short of self-hypnosis to trick himself into sleeping, but his mind refused to let his body drift away. Scraps of dialogue for Margarita and her pirate lover, pieces of description from remembered trips to Riviera hideaways, and visions of Meg all vied for his attention until he finally gave up all pretense of sleep and got up.

  He took a cold shower, dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a fisherman’s sweater, and went downstairs.

  Meg wasn’t in the library where he’d expected to find her or in the study where he’d left her. A copy of Against All Odds was face-down on the piano bench, and he couldn’t resist the urge to see what point in the amorous adventures of Eryk and Isobel she’s reached. Millions of people read and enjoyed his novels, and that fact had never given him the slight pause. He’d been hailed a brilliant storyteller, lambasted as a soft-core porn artist; he had received mountains of mail from fans and foes alike and managed to take it all in stride. He probed deeply into a woman’s heart and exposed the hidden layers of a man’s psyche. His detailed descriptions of lovemaking came happily from his own experiences. The dangers of revealing himself to readers took a distant second to creating a believable, emotionally honest book.

  However, knowing that she was reveling in his public fantasies and private dreams threw him off balance. If he didn’t know better, he would say it made him vulnerable but he couldn’t wrap his brain around that possibility. His characters were vulnerable. He wasn’t.

  He put the book back down on the piano bench and was about to leave the room when a flash of blue outside the window caught his eye. Darkness was gathering and the backyard was bathed in half-light. Huntington Kendall IV was cradled in the arms of his robust Earth Mother statue that stood near the cluster of white birch trees and he looked like a slightly wacky cherub.

  Huntington flung his white silk scarf off his face and smiled, while Meg slithered along the leaf-littered ground snapping pictures like a woman on a mission. She rested her head on Earth Mother’s bare foot and took a shot of Huntington feigning sleep. Joe watched while she crawled under one chubby plaster leg and angled upward for a topsy-turvy shot of the creator. He fully enjoyed the view when she moved a few yards away to take a shot from a child’s perspective. Her battered leather jacket rode up, while her unbelted jeans rode down and the revealed expanse of smooth skin seemed as delectable as a ripe peach.

  He opened the French doors and stepped out into the yard. Huntington noticed him right away—Joe could tell by the slight lift of the younger man’s bushy red eyebrows—but Meg hadn’t a clue. Joe doubted a nuclear blast would have penetrated the creative fog she was obviously in. She kept up a running stream of commands, low voiced and urgent, that Huntington followed with amused resignation while Joe stood in the shadows and took it all in.,

  Whether or not Margarita Lindstrom knew it, photography meant a hell of a lot more to her than any hobby ever could.

  She stopped to change the film, and Joe stepped out of the shadows. “Isn’t it getting a little dark to take pictures?”

  Meg jumped as the sound of his voice broke the early-evening stillness. “Is it five o’clock already?”

  He walked toward her, enjoying the slightly unfocused expression in her dark eyes as she came slowly back to reality. “Ten after,” he said, nodding to Huntington, who observed them from his perch on Earth Mother’s shoulders.

  She fumbled with a tiny metal canister and popped an exposed roll of film inside “Sorry. If you give me a minute, I’ll head in.”

  “No rush.” He put out his hand to take some of her paraphernalia. “We’re not on a time clock.”

  If possible, her eyes grew darker, more unfathomable, than ever. “I guess not.”

  She handed Joe the canister and bent over to load a new roll into her Hasselblad. Her hair was parted down the middle and drawn smoothly back from her face into one intricate French braid that swung between her shoulder blades. Rather than a uniformly pale color, her hair was actually a mixture of flax and wheat, with shimmers of moonlight and sunshine that made it glimmer.

  “Well,” she said, slinging her camera back over her shoulder as she turned toward Huntington, “I guess that’s it. We’d better get to work.”

  “And here I thought you were already working, Meggie.”

  Joe’s attention was riveted suddenly to Huntington. Meggie? Hunt leaped down from the statue and met Joe’s eyes.

  “Meg is doing this for a fun, you realize,” Hunt said, watching Joe’s face carefully.

  “I know.” A ridiculous feeling of pleasure blossomed. Hi
s absurd request had been granted. Hunt was no longer calling her Margarita. “She told me.”

  Next to Joe, Meg shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m freezing.” She glanced briefly at Hunt, then Joe. “I’ll start the coffee, and we can get down to business.”

  Hunt, who had an appointment in town for dinner with an artist’s model named Ivan, ambled toward the garage where he kept his ancient van stashed. Joe followed Meg inside the house.

  “Thank you,” he said when they reached the kitchen.

  “For what?” She turned on the water to boil and took a coffee filter out of the drawer. Her expression was bland, unreadable.

  “For Margarita.”

  “My pleasure.” Her incredible mouth tilted in a half smile. “Besides, I’m not that fond of the name Margarita.” She took the tin of coffee from the refrigerator and put it down on the counter. “The fewer people who use it, the better.”

  Ouch. So much for some of his more recent, real-world fantasies. He gathered up spoons, mugs, and a chocolate cake some kind benefactor had thoughtfully left in the refrigerator.

  He picked up the tray of food. “The library?”

  Meg nodded and grabbed some paper napkins from the kitchen table. “I set everything up in there this morning.”

  She pushed open the heavy library door and Joe preceded her inside. Both Anna’s desk and the main table were littered with enormous stacks of papers and photographs, so he deposited the tray on a small pine side table near the bar. “You’re very organized,” he observed, gesturing toward the sharpened pencils and fresh new notepads stacked at the edge of the desk.

  She smiled. “Disgusting, isn’t it?”

  “Unusual for a creative type,” he said, pouring them each some coffee.

  Meg took a mug from him and cupped her hands around it. “I think we’ve been over this territory before. How about we get down to work, Alessio?”

  Alessio knew when he was up against a brick wall. “Good idea,” he said.

  He could wait.

  Even a brick wall could tumble in a month.

  #

  “He wears blue eye shadow?”

  Meg shifted the phone from right ear to left and laughed at the unconcealed note of surprise in Elysse’s voice. “Sometimes mauve,” she said. “Depends on what he’s wearing that day.”

  “This isn’t at all what I’d expected to hear.” Elysse had managed to wait six days before she succumbed to curiosity on Sunday afternoon and called for a day-by-day report of Meg’s first week at Lakeland House with Angelique Moreau aka Joe Alessio.

  “I know what you expected to hear, Lowell. All you can think of is the fifty dollars you think you’re going to win.”

  “I’ve already spent it,” Elysse admitted. “I thought the firelight and scent of pine would have worked their magic by now.”

  If it weren’t for Huntington’s presence at Lakeland, Meg had little doubt their magic would have worked, but she refrained from saying that to Elysse. The woman was too perceptive.

  “What can I say? There’s been no magic and no romance.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Positive.”

  On the other end, Elysse sighed. “There’s still three more weeks. I haven’t give up hope.”

  “The eternal optimist.”

  “Just don’t spend that fifty-dollar bill yet, Lindstrom. I intend to be vindicated before this is over.”

  Meg laughed at the thought of her eminently practical and logical best friend whose Ph.D. hid the soul of a wild romantic. Elysse had wanted to know all the details of the first week at Lakeland House, and as Meg filled her in, she realized just how well she and Joe worked together.

  In just two days they had catalogued seventeen essayists who had been associated with the Colony and developed full biographies, complete with quotes, for the five most important ones. By yesterday morning, they had already moved into tracking down all the novelists, Joe included, who had been part of Lakeland.

  Their days acquired a rhythm that began with the breakfast Meg fixed each morning and flowed through hours of work right up until the dinners that had become Joe’s specialty. Patrick had popped over twice for drinks, and Hunt had taken to spending a good deal of his free time with the two of them, talking sometimes and silently drawing at others, and in a way Meg was glad because his presence forestalled any more of those probing, intensely personal questions Joe was prone to asking.

  She was already falling beneath the spell of creative seduction that Lakeland House had always cast over her. The number of rolls of film she’d shot in just seven days was a testament to that. Using the darkroom in the basement had thrilled her as much as a trip to Paris would thrill someone else. A part of herself she’d long denied was coming back to life and she was equal parts excited and terrified. If Joe were to add his own potent charm to the mix, she wasn’t fool enough to think she’d last more than five minutes before she fell into his arms.

  It was Sunday before they knew it. They were well ahead of schedule and had decided to treat themselves to a morning of work and an afternoon of play. Lakeland House was quiet. The housekeeping service that had disrupted everything the day before was gone now, and even Huntington Kendall wasn’t around. He had holed himself up in his studio, finishing the third in a planned series of four sculptures depicting laborers at their work. He hoped to at least have the fourth sculpture in the early stages before he left the Colony the following Saturday.

  “How’s it going?” Joe appeared in the doorway, carrying a huge sheaf of papers on essayists and journalists.

  “This is a lot like playing God,” Meg said, tossing one resume and an eight-by-ten glossy of a woman harpist on the reject pile. “I could get to like this feeling of power.”

  The afternoon sun slanted across the room and gathered in his deep green eyes. “You may not be so happy when we start working on the photographers.”

  She put down her pen and stretched her arms toward the ceiling. “I have no illusions about myself. I know I’m a footnote, nothing more.”

  Joe was sprawled on the rag rug near her chair. He slipped on the glasses he wore for detailed work. He reached for a folder that rested beneath a pile of books. “The Institute of Photography’s Rising Star Award, two years running; a photo spread in Ms. Magazine; credits with Lifestyles magazine; an invitation to exhibit at the VonWageman Gallery in Los Angeles.” He took off his glasses and gestured toward her. “Hardly a footnote.”

  “And hardly Pulitzer Prize material.” She stood and leaned over, massaging the small of her back. “It’s history, Joe. It’s from another time in my life.”

  He propped himself on one elbow and reached for the camera on top of the table to his right. “This isn’t history,” he said, cupping the intricate piece of machinery in the palm of his hand. “It’s practically an extension of your arm.”

  “Some people meditate, some take pictures.”

  “Come on, Lindstrom, who the hell are you kidding?” He gestured toward the papers scattered all around. “I have it here in black-and-white.”

  “Ancient history.”

  She grabbed her camera from him and placed it on the bookshelf. Damn Lakeland House and the energies that sizzled through the halls and into her subconscious. She leaned over Joe and took a look at his watch. “Quitting time,” she said. “We are now officially off the clock.”

  Joe gave her one of those looks that meant he knew she was trying to change the subject but he didn’t press his point. “Any plans for your afternoon off?”

  Meg, who had assumed they’d spend the time together, hesitated. “Well, I—“

  He grinned and removed his glasses again. “Want to spend it together?”

  Relief washed over her but she refused to acknowledge it. “I’ve always wanted to take the Cog Railway up Mount Washington. Unless, of course, you don’t have the nerve.”

  “Do you see what it’s doing out there?”

  Meg l
ooked out the window at the heavy curtain of rain that almost obliterated the yard from view.

  “Antiquing?” she asked. “Sightseeing?”

  “Let’s go into town,” he said.

  “For what? All they have is a supermarket and a drugstore.”

  “Ah, Margarita,” he said. “How unobservant you are. There’s a shop next to the bank that has the answer to all our problems.”

  “The butcher shop? I don’t think a steak can amuse us for an entire afternoon,” she said as he grabbed their jackets from the closet and tossed her the car keys. “Besides, I only do breakfast.”

  “Trust me, Margarita,” he said as he headed for the door. “Trust me.”

  Chapter Seven

  It ended the way it always ended—with honor overriding the petty concerns of individual people, with Humphrey Bogart looking deeply into Ingrid Bergman’s eyes before she boarded that plane and went out of his life forever.

  And, as always, it wiped Joe out.

  The wonderful store Joe had taken Meg to was Video King, a place stocked with enough movie tapes to satisfy even an avowed videophile like him. Meg’s eyes had widened at the selection of old movies, and he’d been horrified that she’d never experienced the pleasure of Casablanca or the charm of Indiscreet or the sexy thrill of Charade. Fully intending to rectify the alarming gaps in her movie knowledge, he’d piled up a stack of vintage films, then hustled her back to Lakeland House. There they poured some Cointreau, stretched out before the fire in the study and returned to a place he knew so well.

  Beside him, Meg cleared her throat. “Hand me a Kleenex.” Her voice was hoarse with tears. She was curled up on the floor next to him with her back leaning against his right side. She’d been there for the last two hours, and despite the fact that Casablanca was his all-time favorite movie, he’d been hard put to follow the star-crossed romance of Rick and Ilsa while the warmth of Meg’s body and the scent of her perfume was heating up his brain cells.