Embers

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  The reception committee consisted of Camplin's ex-wife Dorothea, chairwoman of the event; a couple of officials of the Children's Charity; and the owners of Fairlawn. Meg introduced herself and shook hands down the line, exchanging pleasantries: delighted to come; a wonderful place; such a good cause; enchantingly done. Tom was right behind her, presumably offering variations on her themes.

  They'd arrived at the height of the crush, which was a blessing; Meg had half expected Dorothea Camplin to buttonhole her and demand to know what the hell she was doing mucking up the family name. But Dorothea was far too much of a socialite to give Meg more than a cursory smile as she scanned the guests behind her for more familiar faces. A guest or two later, Meg heard her say, "Helen! You must see my garden before the Japanese Iris are done."

  Meg and Tom were bumped out into a drawing room of dark-paneled and chandeliered elegance, where large round tables covered in damask offered a tempting array of hors d'oeuvres.

  Allie showed up thirty seconds later balancing a tray of her own. "Madame?" she said to her sister, prodding her with the tray. "Voulez-vous du saumon fume?"

  "Allie, what are you talking about?" Meg said in a low mutter. "And where's Gordon Camplin? I don't want him seeing me first."

  Allie giggled and said, "One of the girls from Quebec is going around voulez-vous-ing everybody, so I thought I'd try it. She says I have a terrific accent. I really should be on the stage. As for old Gordy, don't worry about him. I saw him go into the library with the owner a minute ago."

  Allie turned to Tom and lowered her gaze in that semi-shy way she had that made men want to ravish her. "You look awfully dapper tonight, Mr. Gatsby," she said.

  Allie's spirits were as high as Meg's were low. "Okay, give me one of these things," Meg said abruptly. "And then circulate, for goodness' sake, or people will notice."

  "Meg!" her sister murmured, stricken. "Let me have some fun."

  Chastened, Meg said, "I'm sorry. I just want to get this over with. I'd give anything to be home right now."

  "And I," her sister said softly, "would give anything to be you right now."

  She left them together, leaving Meg more wretched than before.

  The buzz of polite talk around them had become a clamor as the room filled with hungry guests who went straight for the table with the shrimp. From a huge tent that had been set up next to the house, Meg heard a band strike up a tune — no dancing, obviously, would take place on the beautiful parquet floors of the mansion.

  Echoing her thoughts, Tom said softly, "I hear music. Will you dance with me?"

  He might as well have said, "Will you make wild, abandoned love with me right now, on the floor?"

  Meg was truly scandalized. She couldn't dance with him — couldn't. If she let herself be taken in his arms ... if she let herself breathe in the scent of him ... if she let herself come one millimeter closer to him than she was right now

  "Don't ask me that," she said in agony. "I can't —"

  She turned away from him and found herself face-to-face with Gordon Camplin.

  If Meg was hoping for something dramatic in the way of a reaction from Camplin, she got her wish. When he saw her, Camplin gasped and put his hand to his breast in oh-dear-God fashion, stopping dead in his tracks.

  Guilty! Meg decided on the spot. For a minute she thought she'd given him a heart attack, which would've been the simplest thing; but no, he recovered and, still not taking his eyes off her, he walked up to her uncertainly.

  "Please ... excuse me ... don't I know you?" he asked in an utterly baffled, distressingly gentle voice. The Archbishop of Canterbury might have used that tone with her. Incredible.

  "We've never met, Mr. Camplin," she said grimly. "I'm Margaret Mary Atwells Hazard," she said, deliberately echoing her grandmother's name. Her eyes glittered with pride and cool fury. So this was the man. Normally Meg's handshake was firm, but she was so filled with loathing at the thought that his well-kept hand had worked with evil design on her grandmother's body that she let her own hand lie limp in his, and then withdrew it.

  "Ah. Atwells. Yes ... of course. I should've made the connection. Your — I suppose she would be, grandmother? — worked at Eagle's Nest one season."

  "The season," Meg said, refusing to let him get away with polite vagaries.

  "Yes, in '47. A terrible time. Tragic ... utterly tragic. I have nightmares still. We all do, the old-timers in town."

  Whatever else he was, Gordon Camplin was not an old-timer. He might have passed his seventh decade, but he'd done it at a brisk jog, as Meg knew well. He had the kind of body that scientists predict may someday last to a hundred and thirty: spare, wiry, not too tall, without an unnecessary ounce of body fat. And he still had all his hair. She hated him for not being fat and gouty and in chronic pain. She thought of Orel Tremblay: only the good died hurting.

  Camplin looked expectantly at Tom, waiting for an introduction. Tom stuck out his hand and said, "Tom Wyler. Nice to meet you."

  "How do you do. Summer visitor?" Camplin asked.

  Tom nodded and said, "Half the summer, anyway."

  Camplin turned his attention back to Meg. Even she could see that he was trying hard not to stare, but without success. Good. Let him squirm.

  "I was just commenting on Bar Harbor's famous 'cottages,' " Tom said smoothly to Camplin. "Were you aware that there's a replica of the Eagle's Nest at the Inn Between?"

  "The Inn Between?" Camplin repeated with a blank frown. Apparently bed-and-breakfasts were not a subject for polite conversation among his set.

  "My father's house," Meg explained, well aware that Gordon Camplin had paid for a chunk of it. "We're running it as a bed-and-breakfast nowadays."

  "I see," Camplin said politely. "Yes," he said, addressing Tom's question. "Word around town is that the Atwells family were given a gift of the thing. By a carpenter who once worked for us, apparently. I don't remember the man at all, except that he saved my mother's dog on the day of the fire. I suppose my mother gave him the dollhouse out of gratitude. More likely, she didn't want the reminder of Eagle's Nest around her anymore. I can't remember. Frankly, I would've expected Tremblay to've sold the thing long ago. I can't imagine what good it was to him."

  It was a nice little speech, coherent and plausible and just a little too well prepared for Meg's taste. She glanced at Tom, hoping to read his expression. But he was doing his cop thing: his face had that bland, impassive look, as if he were waiting for a bus that wasn't due for half an hour.

  "My grandmother and Orel Tremblay became very close friends when they worked at Eagle's Nest," Meg said, hoping to provoke a reaction from Camplin. "Very close."

  "Perhaps that's why he left the dollhouse to you, then," Camplin said with a distracted smile.

  Clearly his interest in the dollhouse was running a distant second to Meg herself. He seemed not to be able to take his eyes away from her face. He'd look away, almost with a frown, but then he'd look back.

  "I hope you'll come by to see the dollhouse, Mr. Camplin. It's in museum condition," she added, appealing to his avarice.

  "Yes, I'll have to do that," he answered, staring.

  To Meg his fascination seemed practically morbid. She began to feel the same sense of revulsion that she'd felt when she'd unpacked the little teakwood bed. She began to tremble; her heart took off on a wild run for oblivion.

  Oh, God. It wasn't the most convenient time for one of her little premonitions. It was leaving her tongue-tied.

  Camplin had begun to excuse himself when Tom said in an offhand way, "What I'd like to know is, were there always rumors about the dollhouse being haunted?"

  "What?" asked Camplin sharply. Immediately he brought himself under control. "No, of course not. Absurd. What rumors?"

  Tom smiled blandly and said, "Oh, the usual thing. An unfortunate death ... the spirit roams the house ... except that in this case the house has burned to the ground so what's a poor soul to do? The next best thing, of course: hau
nt the replica."

  "That's preposterous," Camplin said angrily. "There were no 'unfortunate deaths' in the Eagle's Nest — not until Margaret Atwells's. As for haunted replicas, I wouldn't know. I haven't seen the dollhouse since 1947." His eyes glittered with outrage as he said, "If you'll excuse me ..." and walked away abruptly.

  Meg stared with loathing at his retreating figure. The depth of her hatred amazed her; it was as if she were hating him with someone else's emotion.

  Still shaking from the experience, she turned to Tom and said, "Nice goin', Lieutenant. Just when I had him hooked."

  "You were losing him," Tom said flatly. "I wanted to shake him up."

  "Which you did," Meg admitted. "He seemed to take the ghost rumor personally — as if you were accusing him of dumping raw sewage into the harbor or something. Do you think he's afraid of ghosts?"

  "I think he's afraid of gossip."

  "Yes," she said, all too aware of the risk she was running of being sued. "So what do we do now?" she asked, relieved that Tom was on the case at last.

  But apparently he wasn't. He said, "Now, you wait and you watch."

  "Wait? Watch? For what?"

  "For him to do something stupid."

  "And how long will that take? You'll be leaving soon —"

  Exasperated, Tom said, "So I'll be leaving soon. Who knows when soon is? I'm here now, dammit. Suppose we talk about now," he said, wrenching the subject back to him and her.

  "Yes ... all right," Meg said.

  It was obvious that he didn't want to talk about either the past or the future, and she didn't want to talk about the present. Clearly they had a problem.

  Meg murmured something about the powder room and excused herself. The truth was, she wanted time to regroup.

  Instead of a powder room, she found Dorothea Camplin. She was with two other silver-haired women on a balcony, where they were admiring a white clematis that had been trained up a trellis.

  Completely on impulse, Meg joined them. If the husband won't talk, maybe the ex-wife will, she decided.

  She admired the vine, then asked Dorothea Camplin an innocent question about pruning. That led the conversation from one clematis to another until Meg was able to say, without being too obnoxious, "I'm Meg Hazard, by the way. Of course I know of you and your legendary garden, Mrs. Camplin. And I wonder — would you be interested in being interviewed for a gardening piece I'm writing for Country Living?"

  Pay dirt. Mrs. Camplin preened and fluffed her feathers and did everything but offer money for the privilege of being interviewed for so prestigious a magazine. Meg wasn't quite being candid — she had no connection with the magazine and in fact had never written anything for publication besides the Inn Between's brochure — but that was tomorrow's problem.

  Eventually Meg excused herself and left the company. In the hall she found her sister, who grabbed her by her sleeve and said, "Where have you been? Camplin's getting away. I just saw him ask for his car to be brought around."

  "What am I supposed to do?" Meg asked. "Carjack it?"

  "Very funny. You talked with him for two minutes! That's two hundred dollars a minute. Even lawyers don't get that much," Allie said in a hiss.

  "I talked with him long enough to know with certainty that he did it."

  "Oh, yeah — like he confessed, I suppose."

  "He didn't have to. I could see it in the way he ... he looked at me," Meg said, coloring at the remembrance.

  Allie cocked her head and looked at her sister thoughtfully. "Oh? You got that look?"

  "I don't know how you get through life," Meg said softly. For the first time she felt real sympathy for her sister's gift, or curse, or whatever it was, of seductiveness.

  Meg looked back — Mrs. Camplin and her friends were returning from the balcony — and whispered to Allie, "Later." She began heading back to the drawing room, wondering what she could possibly allow herself to say to Tom.

  "Meg!" came a voice, deep and male and urgent, from behind her. She knew who it was before he asked the next question: "Where's Allie?"

  Meg turned and beheld him: tall, dark, and handsome, the bad boy of Bar Harbor.

  Bobby Beaufort.

  Chapter 16

  What're you doing here, Bobby?" Meg asked, horrified. The man was a loose cannon; he'd wreck everything.

  "I've got to talk to Allie," Bobby said, scowling. "Now."

  "She's working, Bobby. This is a bad time to visit." Meg spoke plainly because subtlety was lost on Bobby; he heard what he wanted to hear and did what he wanted to do. She remembered the day Allie sent him packing. The two were in high school. Allie had screamed — loud enough for everyone in Bar Harbor to hear — "I don't love you! I will never love you! Go away!" and Bobby had replied, "What're you trying to say?"

  The only reason he'd left the house at all was because Allie had thrown a plate at him and Comfort had come running into the room and promptly burst into tears, because her dishes weren't open stock.

  After that Bobby dropped out of high school and went west to make his fortune. If he made one, he must've spent it all, because six months ago he came back to Bar Harbor broke and angry and — people said — with a prison record.

  Right now he looked like a hungry tomcat on the prowl.

  "How on earth did you get in here?" Meg demanded.

  "How d'you think?" he said, looking around for Allie. "I charmed my way in." He turned back to Meg and flashed her a quick, devilish grin. No question about it, he looked like a hoodlum. But with his black hair, green eyes, and cleft chin, he was the best-looking hoodlum in town.

  "Bobby, for crying out loud. What's so urgent that you have to see my sister right here, this minute?"

  "I just got back from my cousin's," he said in a dangerous voice. "Lisa tells me Allie's about to do a very dumb thing: get married to a Chicago cop."

  "Lisa is jumping the gun," Meg said sharply. "There's not going to be any marriage. Now, please. Go home and —"

  "Hey." Bobby lifted his chin, addressing the laconic greeting to someone behind Meg.

  Meg turned around and winced. Allie was standing there with a look of outrage on her face. Why the outrage, Meg wasn't quite sure; there were too many possibilities.

  "The earrings look nice on you, Al," Bobby said. His jaw was set, the muscles working.

  Instantly Allie snatched the earrings off and held them out to him. "I don't want them. Here. Take them."

  "Don't be a jerk, Al. Put 'em back on."

  She dropped them in a cloisonné tray that sat on a windowsill. "I don't want you here, Bobby. I thought we agreed."

  "I want to know about the cop."

  "He's none of your business."

  "Every man you meet is my business. That's how it's always been."

  "Not this time. Bobby, grow up. We're not kids anymore. Look around you. Does this look like our tree house? Can't you tell the difference? I'm a woman now."

  "And I'm still all the man you need," he said in a voice that was little more than a primal growl.

  Allie looked him straight in the eye. "No. You're not," she said calmly. "Don't ever make that claim."

  Alarmed that things were careening out of control, Meg stepped between the childhood friends. She'd never considered Bobby Beaufort dangerous before. But Allie had never been in love before. "This is crazy, you two. Come on."

  "Stop fussing, Meg," Allie said without taking her eyes from Bobby's. "I can take care of myself."

  With B-movie timing, Tom Wyler chose that moment to saunter onto the set. Meg saw him approaching and shook her head at him warningly, which of course set Bobby Beaufort off.

  "This is the one?" he demanded as Tom strode up. Meg stepped in and slipped her arm around Tom's. "This is my date," she said with a majestic lift of her eyebrows.

  "Oh. Sorry," Bobby mumbled.

  Allie said, "Don't be dumb, Meg," and unhooked her sister's arm from Tom's. "Yes, Bobby. This is the one."

  Tom looked from Bobby
to Allie to Meg. "Am I missing part of this conversation?"

  "Just the boring part," Allie said with a toss of her head. "In any case, Bobby and I are done talking." She turned to go.

  Bobby grabbed Allie's forearm. "We're nowhere near done."

  Instantly Tom wrapped his hand around Bobby's wrist. Meg was sure Tom was going to say, "You heard the lady, pardner. Vamoose." She waited, mesmerized, to see who would throw the first punch.

  But the kitchen manager appeared just then, arms akimbo, and said briskly, "If you're going to stand around and socialize, Allegra, please just hand in your bowtie right now."

  Allie laughed out loud, then shook her arm free of Bobby's grip and walked away with a look of icy fury on her face.

  Bobby gave Tom a bitter, mocking look and stalked off toward the main entrance.

  That left Tom and Meg. "Well, that worked out pretty well," Tom remarked in his dry way.

  Meg felt obliged to explain. "Bobby's loved my sister from day one. He's not the only one in town, of course; but he's hung in there the longest. He truly believes they were born for each other."

  "Then he's deluded," Tom said. He made no effort to hide his dislike for the man.

  "Deluded or not, he won't go away. She's treated him — well, not like dirt; Allie doesn't treat anyone like dirt, but — with a certain amount of arrogance, you know? Because Allie has always wanted to get out of Maine, and Bobby is a Maine boy through and through. He went west for a while, but that was just to show Allie that he could be ambitious, too. All he did was get in trouble. And thrown in jail."

  "Surprise, surprise," said Tom wryly.

  Meg shrugged. "He wasn't true to himself. Maine is in his blood. This is where he should be. I've heard he's working as a mechanic again, that he wants his own business. I hope it works out for him."