Embers

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "What do I care if the land is flat or pointy?" demanded Allie. "The Great Outdoors has always been your thing, Meg, not mine."

  "What about us? What about your family?" asked Meg, whirling around on her sister. Her heart was pounding violently in her breast.

  When you love someone.

  Allie was silent, obviously uncomfortable with the turn in the conversation.

  Meg got herself under control and said softly, "What if he doesn't love you?"

  "He does," her sister answered, just as softly. "That's not the issue."

  "He — oh. I didn't know that," Meg said, stunned.

  It was as if someone had set off a stick of dynamite on the linoleum beneath her. She watched in slow motion as tables and chairs, pots and pans, the bottle of Joy and the pink Brillo pad all seemed to lift up and away and float back down again, in bits and pieces around her head.

  "So it's all settled ... between you?"

  "It's not completely settled," said Allie with a proud lift of her head.

  Suddenly it was Meg and not the kitchen furnishings that seemed to be floating upward. "Oh! Well."

  "Shhht!" said Allie, glancing out the window above the sink. "Here he comes! I'll die if he catches us at this again!"

  Chapter 13

  Meg thought Tom looked depressingly cheerful and handsome. Maybe it was the wild Hawaiian shirt he was wearing; it was a charmingly absurd change of pace for him. And his sandy hair was getting truly shaggy, adding to the laid-back look. Homicide cop? He looked more like a volleyball star.

  Meg said briskly, "Mornin', Lieutenant," and went back to the fridge for yet another round of eggs.

  "Tom Wyler," Allie said, comically shading her eyes with her hand, "where did you get that shirt? Not at L. L. Bean's, I can tell you that." She herself was dressed in pure white, her color of choice on hot days.

  "This is a gen-yew-ine Acapulco Hawaiian shirt," Tom said with an ironic little tug on its front placket. "The real thing. My sergeant brought it back with him after an R&R trip down there. Acapulco's one of the department's hot spots."

  "So why are you in Bar Harbor?" muttered Meg as she dredged through the utensil drawer for the egg separator.

  "Why, indeed," she heard him say behind her. It was a question that she realized she'd have to know the answer to, sooner or later.

  "I called that realtor you told me about," he said to Allie. "I've had to call a roofer, too. The tenants told me the bedroom ceiling leaks so badly, they've been forced to store the double bed in the garage and put in two singles, with a bucket between them to catch the rain."

  "That's awful," said Allie with real feeling.

  Meg glanced up at her sister, who was blushing an attractive shade of rosy pink. It didn't seem fair: every emotion that Allie Atwells had ever felt, from anger to embarrassment, only made her look more beautiful. Couldn't she get puffy when she cried, or laugh in shrill tones, or bloat up before her period? Couldn't Allegra Atwells be counted on to do anything ugly?

  "Meggie!" cried Allie in her damnably enchanting voice. She pointed to the bowl in Meg's hands. "The lady wanted her French toast made with all whites, not all yolks."

  Meg stared into the bowl of creamy yellow yolks she'd been whisking so furiously. "I knew that," she said abruptly, and put the bowl in the refrigerator as if she had a plan.

  The reality was, she had no plan — for the yolks, for Allie, or for Tom Wyler. She knew what she didn't want: she didn't want Tom and Allie in that cabin alone together. In a single bed or in a double. Beyond that, she could not say. "Serve the damn crêpes, Allie," she said with an evil scowl. "The natives surely are getting restless out there."

  "Tsk, tsk," her sister mocked in a cheerful voice. "Smile, smile, smile!" She scooped up a plate of crêpes and glided theatrically out of the room.

  "Are you eating here today, Lieutenant?" Meg asked, whisking the right part of the eggs at last.

  "Why do I think that's not an invitation?" he answered as he came up behind her.

  She forced herself not to turn around; he was far too close.

  One look into his eyes and she'd be lost. "You know you're always welcome," she made herself say.

  "That's not the feeling I got last night —"

  Allie glided back into the kitchen with an empty plate in each hand. She whirled around in front of them both and batted her heavily lashed eyes at Tom. "Just practicing my serving technique for the Fourth of July dance," she said in an outrageously sultry voice.

  Meg considered breaking the plates over her sister's head and knocking her out altogether to slow her down, but restrained herself.

  "The dance is why I'm here, Cinderella," Tom said to Allie. "Guess what I have two of, in the pocket of my shirt?"

  "You're kidding," Allie said, comprehending at once. She dropped the dishes on the counter and made a mad dash for the tickets sticking out from his shirt pocket.

  She plucked out the two invitations with great melodrama — Meg had never before realized how irritating her sister could be — and squealed, "How did you get them? You didn't actually pay for them?"

  "Connections, child; connections. I knew you wanted to go —"

  "With Meg! On business!" cried Allie with a tragic look. "Not with you, for pleasure. Oh, this is too bad —"

  "Don't be silly, Allie," said Meg, noticing too late that she'd overbrowned the damn egg whites. Sick to death of the French-toast project, she flopped the ill-fated bread on an unwarmed plate and said grimly, "I'll take this out to her. Personally."

  On her way out of the kitchen, she turned to Tom. "As for my sister," she said, "of course she'll go with you. I'll fade in with the rest of the help. Between us we ought to be able to come up with something on Camplin."

  "Camplin? What's he got to do with —?"

  Allie sucked in her breath and said, "Ayyy ... haven't quite filled you in on all the details, Tom."

  Meg turned to her sister with a ferocious look. "Well, fill him, in that case," she said, and stomped away from these people she hated with food she hated for a guest she hated. She wanted Tom involved, and if it took Allie to get him there, then so be it.

  When she came back it was to see Tom and Allie with their heads together. Allie said, "We've decided —"

  "She's decided."

  "— not to do it your way, Meg. Everybody knows that most of the waitressing during high season is done by college kids. You should go with Tom and act, like, well, you're on a date. I'll go as the help." She kindly refrained from stating the obvious: that Meg was too old to pass for a college kid.

  For a moment Meg was speechless. Then she turned to Tom. "You can't possibly have agreed to this," she said.

  "Actually, I think that the two of you should take the tickets and leave me out of this," he said amiably.

  Allie was scandalized. "How would it look, us walking in arm-in-arm like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford?"

  The image popped indelibly into Meg's mind. "Hysterical," she said promptly. "Let's do it."

  Both sisters burst into laughter, leaving Tom looking first at one, then the other, in bewilderment.

  "This means ... you two are going together?"

  "Of course not," Meg said, still smiling. "Allie's absolutely right. We couldn't possibly."

  She turned back to her sister. "But I don't have a thing to wear."

  "What about that fancy green dress?"

  "You've got to be kidding. I haven't worn that in five years." It hasn't fit me in seven, she added to herself.

  Allie pursed her lips, deep in thought. Then she snapped her fingers and cried, "Wait! That gorgeous silk thing that I bought on sale! I haven't had it altered yet. It'd be perfect for you. That lavender shade would look better on you than me, anyway."

  "Oh, that one," said Meg, her eyes shining. "That is pretty."

  "We'll try it on right after breakfast," Allie said excitedly. "How much more time here?" She looked at her watch. "Ten more minutes. Oh, the hell with it. Let's c
lose up shop."

  "Al-lee," her sister warned.

  Allie rolled her eyes and took up the coffee carafe. "All right, all right. I'll do the hospitality thing," she said with a jumpy, impatient sigh. "And, Tom?"

  He was leaning against the counter, in that ridiculous shirt, with his arms folded across his chest, monitoring their excitement with a bemused look. "Yo," he said, smiling.

  "Uncle Billy's Fourth of July picnic is all day Saturday, so you won't be able to run around for a tux then. If there's nothing left to rent in town, you may have to go to Bangor — unless! You happened to bring one with you?"

  Tom said, "A tuxedo?"

  For some reason he looked at Meg. She remembered the look long, long after that morning in the kitchen. It was a look filled with indulgence, good humor, and plain, sheer amazement.

  "No, Allie," he said, his voice filled with a delicious sense of irony. "I meant to pack it but, dadgum, I forgot."

  "Too bad," said Allie, completely missing his tone. "Oh, well. The tickets do say black tie's optional. Isn't this great? A picnic and then a dance, with my two favorite people," she said, sweeping them both up in a wave of high-powered energy as she waltzed out of the kitchen with the last of the crêpes.

  Obviously it made no difference to Allie whether she was going as a guest or as a slave, just so long as she was part of the action.

  Tom chuckled and shook his head. He needed a shave; Meg could practically hear the rasp of his chin as he drew his fingers across it and said to her, "How about you? Ready to party?"

  Clearly the man was confusing his Cinderellas. Meg was ready for anything but partying. The weather forecast for the holiday weekend was perfect; the Inn Between was booked solid. Comfort was flat-out busy with Uncle Billy's annual picnic, so Meg was taking over her chores at the inn. In her spare time, she was trying to research the Bar Harbor Fire. Not to mention, now she'd have to run out and buy a pair of glass slippers.

  She shook her head. "Party? I can't remember the last time I went out to anything really fancy," she confessed. "Paul was never very happy on a dance floor. He felt a lot more comfortable at the helm of a boat."

  Tom winced and said, "I don't dance or sail. God knows where that puts me on the desirability scale."

  Right up there, Meg thought with a pained smile.

  "What kind of dancing do they do, nowadays?" Tom said, still without a trace of ego. "I know the twist is out."

  "The hustle, too. I think."

  "And what's contradancing, anyway?"

  They shrugged, and then they laughed: easy, comfortable, same-age laughter. After he left, Meg wrapped the memory of it around herself like a flannel robe. She knew that they didn't share the same background or lifestyle. She wasn't even sure they shared the same values. But one thing they had in common: a fascination and affection for Allegra Atwells. It was drawing them together — and it was just as surely keeping them apart.

  ****

  On Thursday, a satisfied couple at the Inn Between pressed fifty extra dollars into Meg's hands. The couple had come to Mount Desert Island expressly to see the grand perennial beds of Thuja Lodge, the wonderful old estate in nearby Northeast Harbor, and when they came back, Meg gave them tea and a tour of the far more humble but still delightful gardens of the Inn Between.

  "We had a daughter much like you," the old man, eyes glistening, said before they left. "She's gone now. We thank you very much."

  Fifty dollars was fifty dollars. It could've bought curtains or linens or a dried arrangement for the cherry table in the hall. But Meg had no dancing shoes to wear with Allie's lavender dress, and for the first time in a long time, she wanted to indulge herself. With the dress folded carefully in tissue, she drove to Ellsworth to find a pair of shoes to match. She didn't actually plan to use the shoes — not for dancing, anyway — but she had a sudden, fierce desire not to look like a bag lady.

  ****

  The search for shoes turned out to be a lot easier than the search for clues. By now Meg had read every account she could find of the fire of '47: books, newspapers, magazines, even an unpublished manuscript. She'd contacted the few people she knew — relatives of friends, friends of relatives — who had experienced the night of the Great Fire, on the pretext of doing a family history. But many of the people seemed reluctant to dwell on an event that had claimed her grandmother's life.

  The most damning clue she could find was in a local newspaper article that alluded to the cuts and scratches that the "courageous Mr. Camplin, bloody but unbowed," had endured on his face while battling on the fire line.

  Fire line, my foot, Meg thought as she stared at the crumbling newspaper article in the quiet basement room that housed the local historical society. How come no one else seems to've suffered facial cuts and scratches? For one brief moment she allowed herself to feel good about the fact that her grandmother had probably managed to inflict some pain, however fleeting, on her tormentor.

  But even those minor injuries had been turned to Camplin's advantage: the man had been touted as a hero all around town, a reputation that he enjoyed to this day.

  Meg managed to dredge up only one other clue in the hectic days before the picnic. She found it buried in the inside pages of a January 1948 issue of the local paper: a short paragraph, easily missed, stating that Gordon Camplin had donated to a New York public garden some marble statuary that had survived the fire at Eagle's Nest because, according to their owner, "they were associated with memories too painful to be borne."

  To the reporter the remark was straightforward enough, but not to Meg. Like everything else in the case — she had come to regard the death of her grandmother as a "case" — Camplin's comment seemed ambiguous. Which memories was he talking about?

  Okay. So clue-wise, the findings didn't amount to much. Meg tried not to let it get her down but simply added the information to the copious notes that she was keeping, along with the photo album, in an old bureau that had stood in one corner of the shed for as long as anyone could remember. On the night before the picnic, with everyone off watching the fireworks, Meg took her cup of bergamot tea to the shed and tried to make sense of it all.

  The truth was, she'd been hoping for a little help from her grandmother, but Margaret Mary Atwells was clearly keeping her distance from her granddaughter. Since the night of her strange little fit, Meg had felt absolutely nothing that could qualify as a clairvoyant experience, unless she counted knowing where to find Timmy's misplaced book report as a psychic event.

  Still, Meg felt duty bound to do what she could to make herself available, as it were. So she hung around the dollhouse and fingered its dolls and furnishings now and then, imagining little scenarios that might have been played out by the inhabitants of the real Eagle's Nest.

  Nothing. Not even when she picked up the repulsive little carved-teak bed. No vibrations, no wobbly knees, and no trance -- self-induced or otherwise. Someone like Zenobia would no doubt say that Meg was symptom-free.

  It was very annoying.

  One way or another, Meg had accepted the psychic burden that had been dropped in her lap. She'd hardly even objected, because Meg had always believed that there was an existence beyond the one she could see and touch and feel. It was nothing she agonized over very often; the belief was just there, like breathing, like the beat of her heart.

  And now — nothing.

  Meg sighed and returned the dreadful little bed to the little master bedroom. She took one last look through the rooms of the dollhouse, half hoping to find a miniature note written by the nursemaid doll laying out the facts of her murder. But there was nothing on the Sheraton-style desk in the library except a tiny green leather-bound blotter and an even tinier gold pen.

  Meg had switched off the dollhouse's lights and was about to pull the string on the overhead bulb in the shed, when her father came by.

  "Just where I thought you'd be, Meggie," he said with an affectionate shake of his head. "Comfort's looking for you."

 
; "Okay, Dad, I was just going in," Meg said tiredly.

  "She wants to know should she make a sheet cake, maybe, for the picnic tomorrow. In case the kids don't want cobbler."

  "Too bad if they don't want cobbler," Meg snapped. "Everybody can't have everything he wants," she added. "Comfort can't stay up all night slaving over fifty different desserts. Enough is enough!"

  "Meg!" her father said in mild admonition. "Comfort don't mind. She's enjoyin' this the way she always does. Your uncle Bill's payin' for everything just like usual. Why be so hard on the kids?"

  "Because this year things are different, Dad," Meg said darkly.

  "No. This year you're different, girl. What's ailin' you, anyway? In the last few weeks your mood's gone from bad to worse."

  "It has not!" she argued. "I'm just the same. Nothing's changed. I've always been this bitchy."

  Everett Atwells looked at his daughter in the bleary light of the uncovered bulb and shook his balding head. "Never like this. Believe me, girl, I'm trying not to notice. You think I want a summer ruint by female emotions? But look at you. You snap, you mope, you sneak out to this shed every chance you get —"

  "That's because it's quiet here, Dad," she said petulantly. "I can think. I can't concentrate in my room; it faces the street," she said, whining about it for the first time. She'd rather have had a room that overlooked the garden, but she'd never had the heart to dislodge anyone to get it.

  "You weren't at the fireworks tonight."

  Meg, who knew that Allie and Tom had gone there with the twins, said, "You've seen one fireworks, you've seen 'em all."

  "Terry says you sit here scribblin'. What's that all about?"

  "Just collecting my thoughts, that's all. Terry should mind his own business," she added, turning out the light, hoping her father would take her suggestion personally. They stepped outside into the flower-filled night and Meg started on a brisk pace back to the house.

  But Everett Atwells, a man rarely stirred to action, was oddly determined tonight. He matched his daughter stride for stride. "And I'll tell you what else," he said, saving his best shot for last. "You're beginnin' to embarrass me around town. I was in Jordan's this mornin', havin' a cuppa coffee. First your cousin Mandy, then Pete Ardell come up to me and says, what's with all Meg's questions about Gordon Camplin."