Embers

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Wyler and Terry dragged the dinghy onto the pebbly beach and tipped it on its side, spilling out the water that had leaked into it so freely.

  "This isn't a dinghy," Wyler said. "It's a colander."

  No smile. Obviously the bonding after the cherry-bomb incident hadn't been permanent. Sighing, Wyler decided to tackle the issue head on.

  "I understand how you feel, you know," he said quietly.

  Terry rolled the dinghy the rest of the way over. "Yeah, right." He lifted up the bow and waited with downcast eyes for Wyler to pick up the stern.

  "I mean it. I almost drowned when I was a kid. I'm not even sure the water was over my head. It was in a pond. A nice little pond where the water was warm."

  "Yeah, you were probably three years old or something."

  "I was almost your age," Wyler said, fudging a bit. He lifted the stern with an exaggerated oof and the two of them muscled the dinghy over to some nearby bushes. "I don't really know why I lost it, but I did. I guess it was the feel of seaweed around my ankles. I just started grabbing at it, to get it off, and I swallowed some water and started thrashing around. I just ... lost it."

  Terry took the dinghy painter and knotted it around a branch. "Yeah, but then you prob'ly swam back to shore. Am I right?"

  "Nope. I passed out. They told me some guy fished me out and gave me artificial respiration."

  "No kidding? I didn't pass out."

  "You kept your head above water," Wyler agreed. "But this is what I wanted you to know: ever since that day, for most of my life, I've been afraid of water. Until today."

  "No kidding?"

  "I'm telling you. And it was so dumb, because I only thought I was afraid. I wasted a lot of good swimming holes."

  The boy frowned and said, "You shouldn't be telling me this, admitting that you were — you know — chicken."

  Wyler shrugged. "I don't know about that. The way I look at it, it takes a certain amount of courage to admit you were scared."

  Terry thought about it a moment. "Yeah. If you're a cop, especially."

  The two of them started back toward the house. Terry said, "So you think my brother won't think less of me after today?"

  Tom put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "Not if you don't try to fake how you felt out there," he said as they made their way up the right of way.

  "Man, I thought I was gonna die."

  "Yeah. I know the feeling."

  Chapter 15

  The next day Meg divided her time equally between searching her heart and searching for the right earrings.

  Emotionally, she was a basket case. She'd become so jealous of her sister that when Allie was around, she had to look away. It was too painful to compare Allie's sparkling, violet eyes with her own everyday hazel ones; too traumatic to compare Allie's lithe and elegant body with her own distressingly sturdy one. Her sister's laugh had become intolerable; her sister's hug, a bruising encounter. Allie liked to hum, and Meg used to love to hear her do it. Now her sister's hum sounded like the annoying buzz of a mosquito.

  It wasn't just because Allie was more beautiful than Meg; after all, Allie'd been that way all of her life. And it wasn't because Tom Wyler was in love with Allie — because Meg was more and more certain that he was not. No, Meg was jealous of her sister because Allie had the luxury of loving a man with all her heart and soul. Meg didn't have that luxury, and she was utterly miserable without it. What woman wouldn't be?

  And meanwhile, Meg had fallen into a complete, ridiculous tizzy over earrings. In the morning she'd agreed to wear the ones Allie had offered her, a pair of braided gold hoops. By evening, Meg had changed her mind again. She'd wear the only jewelry her grandmother had left behind, a pair of very ordinary but somehow pleasing pearl teardrops. Allie's gold hoops had been a present from Bobby Beaufort, the leader of the pack of her high school boyfriends. As for the teardrops, no one could remember if they were from Meg's grandfather or from a Cracker Jack box.

  "Oh, Meggie, the gold hoops — truly," said Allie as the two sisters stood together in front of the full-length mirror in the hail bathroom. "They're perfect. And they really are pretty. I still can't believe that Bobby Beaufort picked them out."

  Allie was dressed in her service uniform — perfectly tailored black pants and a white shirt — and was tucking her sister's hair into an old-fashioned roll that lay softly on her neck, an idea that Allie had stolen from a photograph of Margaret Mary Atwells. She'd teased droopy ringlets to fall gracefully in front of Meg's ears and had done her sister's makeup so artfully that Meg was scarcely aware that she wore any. The dress of pale lavender silk that Allie had originally bought for herself — and that looked like a designer parachute on her — fit Meg perfectly, sliding off her hips into a soft, mid-calf flare.

  All that was left to decide was the fate of the two pairs of earrings. Meg had a gold hoop in her left ear, a pearl teardrop in her right. She turned her head this way and that, amazed to see that she looked pretty in either one.

  "I think, the teardrops," Meg said at last, slipping off the gold hoop and handing it back to her sister.

  "I suppose you're right," said Allie through the hairpins clamped between her lips. "They're very old-fashioned, and so are you."

  Allie slipped the last hairpin into her sister's hair and stepped back to assess her work. "Yes!" she said, satisfied. "If I squint, you look exactly like Margaret Mary Atwells. What do you think? Will you get a rise out of Gordon Camplin tonight?"

  "There'll be a mob and I won't get within fifty feet of him," said Meg. She wanted to get a rise out of someone, all right; but it wasn't Gordon Camplin.

  "I don't know why I'm even going," Meg went on, becoming edgier by the minute. "I hate wearing pantyhose in July. This whole thing is pointless. It's too hot in here. Do you feel hot? God, I'm going into premature menopause. I knew this would happen. I just knew it. I'll be drenched in sweat. I'll ruin your dress ... or else it's the damned furnace. Lloyd's done something to the furnace. I'd better go see —"

  "Meg. Meg. You're out of control," said Allie, laughing and giving her sister a shake. "You look completely gorgeous, but out of control. Now calm down. We can't both be emotional at the same time. Someone has to have a cool head tonight."

  "I'm tired of being the grownup," Meg snapped. "You take over for a while."

  Allie ignored her. "I do love that color on you," she decided with a dreamy smile. "When I get married, you'll have to dress in lavender." She glanced at her watch and said, "Oh, wow, gotta go. I'll see you there later. You look perfect, Meggie. Nail him."

  At the last minute Allie remembered Bobby Beaufort's earrings on the dresser and impulsively put them on, then dashed out, leaving Meg with half an hour in which to pace and brood.

  By now their plan to shake up Gordon Camplin seemed truly laughable. It had been conceived out of desperation, because in all their search for clues, they'd found nothing to suggest that Camplin had ever been obsessed with their grandmother. The one bit of gossip that kept surfacing — that he'd had, and still had, a gambling obsession — seemed irrelevant. If anything, it suggested that Gordon Camplin would not bluff easily. Not that dressing up like Margaret Mary Atwells was much of a bluff.

  And Meg's belief that her grandmother would somehow point the way for her? Equally laughable. Granted, things had started out like gangbusters with the impromptu séance. But since then, the only truly intense premonition to plague Meg had come yesterday, before the picnic, and nothing even remotely supernatural had happened all day to justify it.

  Ah. But Terry had nearly drowned. If that wasn't worth a premonition, what was?

  But the boating mishap wasn't a supernatural event. It was about as physical an ordeal as anyone could hope to avoid. So what did this mean? That Meg was turning into some general-practitioner psychic? The village witch?

  One thing for sure: her premonitions had nothing to do with eating chili. If anything, her ability to see a threat behind every bush was a direct result of
the family's ongoing financial straits. She glanced at a couple of unopened bills she'd tossed on the dresser. Who wouldn't feel edgy when bills arrived twelve months a year, and the high season lasted for only two?

  Yes. That must be it. Money. Pure and simple. Everything in life came down to money. If only they had more of it, then everything would be resolved.

  Everything, except the mystery of her grandmother's death. And the emotional crisis her sister was hell-bent on provoking. And the steadily rising storm of emotions that was building in Meg's own heart.

  Meg caught a glimpse of her made-up image in the dresser mirror and turned away from it, pacing the length of her room the way she would a jail cell. She had no desire to wander around the house waiting for a date who'd had to be arm wrestled into taking her to the dance.

  She heard a car door slam and ran to the lace-curtained window that looked out on the street.

  "Tom," she whispered, just to hear the word on her lips.

  He looked up at her window just then, half convincing her that she'd actually called out his name. She jumped back from view, then ran to check her makeup — Allie's makeup — before the inevitable summons.

  A minute later she heard the thumping of sneakers on the carpeted stairs, and Timmy's voice: "Anty Meg! You can come down now. He's finally here!"

  Meg groaned; it was all too mortifying. "I'll be there in a minute," she said loudly, as if all she had to do was finish painting a ceiling, and then she'd change and be right with him.

  After a decent interval she emerged from her room, heart pounding like a teenager's, head warning her to keep her eyes on the goal. The goal was to get a sense of Gordon Camplin's character; the goal was not to throw herself at Tom Wyler's feet. She stepped gingerly down the stairs, blushing furiously the whole way, trying to seem as if silk and high heels were as normal to wear as denim and gardener's clogs.

  At the bottom landing there was fresh humiliation: her father with his Instamatic, snapping away as she walked past him into the sitting room where Tom Wyler had been ushered in to wait.

  "It's not every day my little girl puts on a party dress," said Everett. Snap, snap, snap. "And now, Tom, you stand next to her and pin on the corsage. Oh. No corsage. Well, never mind. Just stand next to her, then." Snap, snap. "And after, we'll get in the whole family. While Meg looks nice. You do look nice, m'dear," he added. "Comfort!" he yelled. "Is Lloyd still down sulla? Timmy, go find your brother, on the double."

  "Dad, for heaven's sake. I've been married, I've been widowed. This isn't prom night; give it a rest, will you?" said Meg, ready to slide between the floor planks.

  She turned at last to Tom and said, "I'm sorry about this." Tom's laugh was low and intimate; the sound melted what was left of her resolve not to throw herself at his feet. "Don't be sorry; this is fun," he said. His blue-gray eyes danced with good humor, which somehow made her feel even more embarrassed.

  Comfort appeared, wiping her hands in a dishtowel. "Oh, my, Meg. Don't you look nice," she said, instant tears springing to her eyes. "It's been so long. Look, Lloyd," she said to her soot-covered husband when he appeared. "Don't she look nice?"

  Lloyd looked at his sister as if she'd been abducted by a cult of makeover artists. "Don't look like our Meg 't all," he said skeptically.

  Terry came bouncing in and fetched up hard in front of his aunt. "That's not your dress; that's from Anty Allie's closet."

  "What were you doing in Anty Allie's closet?" demanded Meg, fearing she'd have to add cross-dresser to the boy's criminal profile.

  "There's a nest of starlings in the rafters above," he said, taken aback by her vehemence. "You can hear 'em peeping."

  "Oh. Well —"

  "Everyone squeeze in together," said her father. "Don't worry about your dirty hands, Lloyd; they don't show. Meg, for pity's sake. Move in closer to Tom, will you? He won't bite. Terry, leave your brother alone. And no tongues. Now, Comfort; dry your eyes. Okay," he said, setting the camera on top of a tall plant stand he found handy for the purpose. "I'm pressing the remote. Everyone say cheese." He made a mincing dash for the other side of the camera.

  Snap.

  Meg kept that shot for years and years in a simple wood frame on her dresser. It seemed to her, when she studied it later in her life, that she could see the past and tell the future with it. It was all there, if only she'd thought to look: in Comfort's teary smile, in Lloyd's awkward stiffness, in Terry's poker face and Timmy's earnest one. In her father's pleased and childlike expression. In the way Meg hadn't been able to decide whether to look at the camera or at Tom, to see his reaction. In Tom's hands-in-his-pocket pose, amused and bemused.

  But the most telling point of all was that Allie wasn't in the shot. She was off doing Meg's dirty work, trusting Meg completely, happy that she could help carry out her sister's harebrained scheme to trip up a murderer.

  ****

  "You look very beautiful," Tom said as they walked together through deepening twilight to his car. "I didn't get a chance to say so inside."

  "Nobody gets a chance to say anything inside," Meg said lightly, trying to control the happy skipping of her heart. "We all talk at once and cancel each other out."

  "I'm glad things worked out this way," he added, glancing at her.

  "I'm —" She wanted to say, "I'm glad, too." But she thought of her sister, and the words wouldn't come, so she moved on to other things. "How's your cabin's working out?" she asked.

  "Oh — it's okay. A little rustic for a city boy like me." He got her door and Meg slipped into the front seat and waited for him. "I wanted to thank you again for yesterday," she said after he slid behind the wheel. "For saving Terry."

  Tom turned the key and said, "You've thanked me a thousand times already. Allie would've done something if I hadn't."

  "She wouldn't have had the strength to handle him. And besides ... I know you weren't crazy about jumping in," Meg said as delicately as she could.

  He laughed ruefully but didn't deny it. "There's a reason for that," he said.

  And then he told her the whole traumatic story of his near-drowning as a boy trapped in seaweed in a pond in Humboldt Park, and of his chance rescue.

  "It's funny how you picked up on my phobia and Allie didn't," he said in the same musing tone.

  "That's Allie all over," she said lightly. "She's always been blinded by —" Meg sucked in the word love before she said it.

  It hardly mattered. Tom sighed and said, "Yeah. Things have got a little tricky in that area. I think Allie's become, well, fond of me."

  Meg thought, Fond of you! She's picking out her wedding trousseau, you dope!

  "I get that impression, too," Meg said dryly. "Did you know that she's lined up two interviews in Chicago on Tuesday?"

  "God, no," he said, startled. "She hasn't said a word to me."

  "It must be a surprise, then. Don't tell her I told you."

  "Secrets? I'm not good at women's games," he said, irritation creeping into his voice.

  "Okay, fine. Tell her, then. It really doesn't matter."

  "Meg —"

  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she said, leaning her head back on the headrest. "I've been tense."

  "Because?"

  Oh hell, we're right back here again. "You know why."

  He looked at her sharply and said, "No, I don't know why. I can think of half a dozen reasons why you might be tense, not the least of which is this little dollhouse drama. But there's only one reason that would excite me, and that's the one, frankly, that I want to hear."

  He waited for Meg to speak.

  "Because ... because ... ." She sighed and closed her eyes, frustrated beyond measure that she couldn't just blurt out the truth about her feelings for him and be done with it.

  For a minute or so, neither of them spoke. Then, while her eyes were still closed, she felt the featherlight stroke of the back of his fingers on her cheek. It was an overwhelming moment for Meg. At any other time — in any other life — she would
have let that stroke lead to something. But not now. Not in this life. She bit her lip, determined not to betray her emotions.

  "Just how much does Allie mean to you?" he asked.

  "Everything," Meg said simply. She opened her eyes and stared ahead, unseeing. "Nothing comes before her."

  "It was a stupid question," Tom said, a hard edge creeping into his voice.

  But he wasn't willing to let it drop. A moment later, he said, "You're not doing her any favors by creating a dream-world for her to live in. Sooner or later, Allie's going to have to take a knock on the chin."

  "She's had her share of knocks — as you know," Meg said.

  "You know what I mean, Meg: I mean the fact that you spend your life trying to shape her life. She's not a kid anymore."

  "Everyone needs someone to lean on once in a while," Meg said defensively.

  "You've gone beyond moral support," Tom suggested. "I think you need her to need you more than she actually needs you.',

  "What kind of psychobabble is that?" Meg asked, surprised that he'd even tread on such hallowed ground. A bond between sisters ... he had no business tinkering with it.

  "I throw it out for what it's worth," he said with careful nonchalance. "At least think about it."

  Meg thoroughly resented his attempt to analyze her. She wasn't the one with a problem. Maybe he had a thing about water; maybe Allie had a thing about alcohol. But as far as Meg knew, she was phobia and addiction free.

  They were outside of town now, nearly at the granite pillars that marked the entrance to the winding drive that led to the Fairlawn estate. Meg had absolutely no enthusiasm for the evening before her. She glanced at Tom, whose handsome, chiseled profile seemed etched from the same granite as Fairlawn's pillars, and looked away. Three hours of torture: that was all that lay ahead.

  Tom turned into the drive, lined with trees threaded with thousands of sparkling white lights, and rolled to a stop in the portico of the grand shingle-style mansion. A valet opened Meg's door and helped her out, then accepted the keys from Tom and drove off to park his Cutlass. Tom offered his arm with barely a hint of irony to Meg and escorted her past potted corkscrew topiaries through the double oak doors, where they handed their tickets over to a sweet old lady sitting at a card table and marched up to the receiving line of Meg's first — and probably only — fling with Bar Harbor's Four Hundred.