"Is there anybody you don't wish well?"
Meg smiled apologetically. "Bobby used to live downstreet. I knew him when his feet couldn't reach the ground from our rope swing. It's hard to think of someone like that growing up to be psychotic. But his father split when he was still a kid, and his mother wasn't much of a role model either. She drank. She ran around. I guess Bobby couldn't have turned out any other way."
"That's not necessarily true," Tom said coolly.
Meg looked at Tom and realized at once what a stupid thing she'd said. His cheeks were flushed; his lips were set in a thin line of self-control. Tom Wyler had been shunted through a series of foster homes and had turned out pretty damn well, as far as Meg could see. Commanding officer of a homicide division in one of the biggest cities in the world, with a future that was bright with promise . .
"Every rule has an exception," Meg said, embarrassed. "I'm sorry."
"You have traditional notions. It's what makes you Meg Hazard."
She tried to get the subject away from him, away from her. She asked humbly, "Do you really think he's a threat?"
"Hard to say. What I saw just now wasn't exactly reassuring. How did Allie get here? Alone, or with someone?"
"Alone," Meg said. "On her bike. I think she expected to ride home with us."
"All right. Then that's our plan," he said with stoic resignation.
Meg hesitated. "Except that I ... I don't want to stay any longer," she confessed.
"Fine. We'll drag Allie out of here right now."
"That wouldn't be right," Meg said quickly. "She gave her word. You stay and wait for her. I'll catch a ride."
Tom looked at her, amazed, and then his patience exploded. "Are you nuts? What is it with you? Why do you keep throwing me in her company? Can't you see that I'm not interested?"
"I wasn't throwing you together," Meg said, backpedaling. "It's just that there's nothing more for me to do here. Gordon Camplin's already left, and I've managed to set up a gardening interview with his ex-wife," she said, bringing Tom up to speed on her latest scheme to learn something about the man.
"There's nothing left for me to do here," she repeated miserably, numb from her effort to avoid intimacy with Tom.
He shook his head, obviously exasperated by Meg's evasions. "You may have met your goals for the evening, lady, but I haven't." He took her by the wrist and started leading her toward the tent. "We're going dancing."
She hung back. "I can't, Tom. Really."
"You can. You will," he said grimly. "If I can stand around on my bad leg for you all night, you damn well can waltz around on two good ones for me."
He marched her into the tent, transformed into a fairyland of ferns and white flowers, and walked her onto the floor to the strains of "I've Got You Under My Skin."
The selection pleased him: he gave her a quirky smile that blended equal parts of sophistication, street smarts, sexiness, and naïveté. And she thought, How could anyone have let this man go?
"One dance," Meg said weakly. "A fair trade." But she knew that one dance would be all it took.
He took her in his arms.
After weeks of having to settle for stolen glances and glancing touches, Meg felt overwhelmed by the intimacy of actual contact. This was it, her one moment of pure, permitted ecstasy. In a trance she swayed with him to the delicious, sensuous strains of the Cole Porter tune, played in a slow and sultry tempo. They moved a little in this direction, a little in that; there was no particular rhyme or reason to what they were doing, only a kind of seamless flow.
I tried so ... hard to resist .
The line hung in the air after the lyric moved on. No one was trying harder to resist than Meg, no one. But it was a hopeless struggle. She felt his cheek against her hair and his heart beating against hers, and she thought, How can this be wrong when it feels so right?
He didn't say a word, and neither did she. Speech had become as irrelevant as the rain that had begun drumming softly on the tent over their heads. None of it — the flowers, the lights, the other dancers — mattered at all. There was only Tom, and her, and the insinuating, implicating strains of the music. She didn't even feel the need, any longer, to confess to him that she loved him: her body was saying it for her, in the way it pressed so willingly against his.
When the dance was done, he tilted her face toward his and claimed the kiss that she had managed to deny him on the porch of the Inn Between. His mouth on hers felt shockingly intimate; he knew exactly what he wanted and took it, ignoring the fact that they were standing in the middle of a dance floor.
It's not really a kiss, she insisted to herself, despite the fact that he was deepening it. It's because of the night, and the music, and my thin silk dress. It's not a kiss, she insisted, answering the electrifying strokes of his tongue on hers. It's only a token, a gesture, of what can't be.
But she had become liquid, all hot and sliding, and when he finally released her from the kiss that wasn't really a kiss, she had to steady herself with her hands on his chest.
He lowered his mouth to hers for one, last, glancing caress, as if he'd missed some tiny crumb of desire that she'd left there.
"I'm ... afraid to look," she murmured, tracing the pattern on his tie. "Is there anyone else on this dance floor?"
"Ah-h-h. No." He slipped his arm back around her waist and said, "The band's taking a break. Do you think if I signed my pension over to them, they'd keep on playing?"
"Please ... we can't just stand here," she wailed, edging him off the floor.
"You dance beautifully," he said as they wandered back into the crush of guests.
"We hardly moved," she said, distracted. She was looking for her sister.
"You dance beautifully," he said again. "Almost as well as you kiss."
She looked up at him in an agony of remorse and put her hand over his mouth. "That never happened," she said. "None of it. Please. For me."
He took her hand away and shook his head. "I can't act that charade, Meg. Not for all the kingdoms on earth."
"Don't do it for kingdoms!" she said in a low and urgent voice. "Do it for me."
"Meg!" he said, obviously frustrated with her cat-and-mouse antics. "You can't deny what's happening."
"Oh, yes, I can," she said, wrenching away from him and fleeing from the tent.
****
"Thanks for the lift, Mr. Markstrom. I don't know what I would've done if you hadn't been leaving just then."
Not that Meg had let the poor guy have a choice. "I guess it was the wine that gave me this horrible headache," she said, following up on her original lie. "How lucky that I saw you on your way out."
Her rumply ex-principal said, "Good to talk to you again, Meggie. And I want you to think seriously about those extension courses. You always were a real fine student."
"I will," she said as she slammed the door on his vintage Skylark.
She stood on the sidewalk in front of the Inn Between, reluctant to go inside. A reading light burned bright in the sitting room. Her father, dozing in front of the television, would want to know all about the good time his little girl had enjoyed after years of going without a real date.
But Meg was in no mood to share. Cradling the memory of the kiss the way she would a newly cut rose, she strolled over rain-washed bricks to the back shed, with every wistful intention of reliving the dance at least six times before she went to bed.
But it was not to be.
When she reached the shed she saw at once that something was wrong. The hasp that held the lock, a chintzy piece of hardware, had been pried loose; the lock, useless, still hung from it. Inside, she could see that the overhead light was on and that, more importantly, so were the interior lights of the dollhouse. This was no case of some curious stranger strolling into an unlocked barn to peek at the toy he'd heard about in town. This was breaking, and this was entering.
Meg hung back, ready to run. But there were no sounds from the shed. No movements. Just brigh
t light, spilling onto the glistening brick path that led to the shed. Meg stepped off the path and into the untamed privet that towered over one side of the structure. The branches shook rain all over her nonwashable silk dress. She winced — from the wet, and from the thought of the cleaning bill — and crept as near as she could to the window for a peek inside.
Nobody. Feeling bolder now but more fearful, Meg ran around to the door and entered. It's the desk, she was convinced. That little desk is worth the most, maybe thousands. That's what they wanted.
She went directly to the dollhouse. What she saw shocked her: tornado-like upheaval of the entire contents, everything in every room, tossed and tumbled and in a heap. She staggered back; it was like being slammed across the chest with a two-by-four. The act was so viciously thorough, so thoroughly vicious, that she had to beat back a sense of nausea.
With shaking hands Meg began at once to right the little pieces. She was convinced that vital evidence had been destroyed or stolen and she was desperate to put things back the way they were so that she could assess the damage.
Very quickly she discovered that there wasn't any. Pieces had been moved around and knocked about, yes; but nothing was missing, and virtually nothing had been broken. It seemed miraculous that such delicate and fragile furnishings could come through such a ransacking intact.
She tried to make sense of it all as she righted the chairs and reset the table. Two aspects of the incident seemed clear. Whoever did this valued the dollhouse and its contents too much to destroy them. Whoever did this was sending a message.
There was Joyce Fells. Clearly Joyce felt the dollhouse was hers by right. She'd done her best to suggest to Meg that the tiny replica of Eagle's Nest carried some awful curse. Was Joyce hanging around town to carry it out? Maybe the ransacking was her crude attempt to spook Meg into selling the dollhouse at a rock-bottom price. Well, Meg didn't believe in curses — despite Terry's knock overboard — and she was not about to betray a deathbed promise by handing the dollhouse over to some badly dressed off-islander who'd think nothing of selling off the contents one by one. Joyce Fells could just take a hike.
Gordon Camplin? Absurd. He'd have taken a godawful chance, sneaking into the shed to wreak this havoc. On the other hand, he knew where the dollhouse was — and more importantly, where Meg was. He had left the dance early, and in a hurry. So the opportunity was there. But why would he do this?
Because he was searching for something, stupid. Something he did or did not find. Meg had no idea where that conclusion had leapt out from; but it seemed to make a bizarre kind of sense.
Meg sighed and looked around for the hour hand of the grandfather clock and found it — hardly bigger than an eyelash — on the bottom step to the second floor. She wet her finger with the tip of her tongue and pressed it to the hour hand, then stood there without an idea in the world where to lay it down for safekeeping.
It's the minuscule scale, she decided, frustrated. A person would have to be Alice in Wonderland — after the mushroom — to adequately search the dollhouse for clues. If, indeed, there were any clues.
Meg felt with all her heart that something in that tiny house was worth discovering. But whether it was her grandmother's ghost or a clue to the killing, that she didn't know.
She slid the hour hand carefully off the tip of her finger and onto a tiny silver tray designed to hold visitors' cards that would never be placed on it. It was all so sad, so unused, so fanciful. If only she could make it all bigger. She tugged idly at one of her grandmother's earrings and sat back in her chair, too tired to finish putting everything right, too wired to leave what was left until the next day.
"Tell me what to do."
Lately she'd tried to commune out loud with her grandmother. It seemed like the most direct approach. Never mind reading tarot cards or the innards of a chicken; Meg's personality was too straightforward for that. "Tell me what to do," she begged.
Her gaze drifted to the master bedroom. The carved teakwood bed was still upside-down, its mattress and linens caught in disarray underneath it. That room, of all the rooms, Meg simply had no heart to set right.
How she hated that bed. She stared at it with loathing. Her reaction was irrational and visceral. That carved footboard ... the gargoyle's head was so badly placed ... it hit you right in the small of the back when you were forced against it.
****
"Mr. Camplin, please don't offer them to me. I can't accept them —"
"Of course you can, my dear. They're the merest trinkets, but they're rather pretty. I thought of you at once when I saw them in town. Let me put them on you."
"No ... I shouldn't even be here, in your rooms. You shouldn't have summoned me."
"Of course I should have. Who else? I bought these for you, not for the cook. Because you've been so good with the children."
"Oh ... the children ... yes ... I'm very fond of them."
"As they are of you. Now, come. Has a man never slipped a jewel through your ear before? Why do you keep backing away? I have only the simplest design, and that's to see you adorned in the way you ought to be. Really, you're too skittish by half. Ah, very well. Here, then. Open your hand. Take these. They're for you. And when you're in the privacy of your bedroom, slip them through your ears and think of me, and of how unfair you're being."
"Yes ... may I go now?"
"Yes, yes you may, Miss All-Innocence. But I warn you not to bedevil me with those complex looks tomorrow during the children's tea. And when you push young James on the swing, let me caution you: don't laugh your merry laugh, and don't — for God's sake, the one thing you must not do in front of me is — hold him close and whisper in his ear. Or you will send me over the edge, I promise you. These weeks ... since your arrival here ... have been absolute ... hell. You cannot expect me to endure much more ... than I have already."
"Yes, sir. No, sir."
****
Meg blinked, and then she blinked again.
My God. What was it? A vision? A dream too vividly imagined? No, she decided; not a dream. It was right there, in front of her, the whole scene, life-size, in three dimensions and Technicolor. She'd seen it all with crystal clarity, right down to the brass buttons on Gordon Camplin's double-breasted blazer and the sapphire ring on his middle finger—the same ring that he wore tonight, in fact.
A vision, then. Either the dollhouse had got big, or Meg had got small. One way or another she'd been there, watching a man who looked very much like the society photos Meg had unearthed in her research: suave, dapper, with slicked brown hair and a pencil-thin moustache. A man not at all used to hearing the word no.
But in the vision — if that was what it was — Margaret Atwells had appeared wearing a ho-hum dress in dark gray, with her hair pulled back severely in a bun. A nun would dress that way, or a librarian. For the life of her, Meg could not understand how her grandmother could ever have become an obsession of Gordon Camplin. Couldn't he have found a sexier servant to seduce? What was it about Margaret Atwells that had driven him "to the edge," as he claimed, in a few short weeks? The woman in Meg's vision had seemed so modest, so bewildered, so determined to avoid eye contact.
Ah. But what about the other Margaret Atwells — the one who apparently shot complex looks at Gordon Camplin during the children's tea, and laughed at young James's antics, and held him close and whispered in his ear? That Margaret Atwells was another woman altogether: alive, spontaneous, loving, playful.
Was she also seducible? Meg buried her face in her hands, trying to recapture the vision in her mind. Obviously Gordon Camplin had seen something in Margaret Atwells's face that Orel Tremblay — and now Meg — had not. Could her grandmother have been attracted to Camplin? Or at least intrigued by his attention? Could she even have been sending him signals without being aware of it?
Meg tried to recapture the expression on her grandmother's face, but all she could imagine was her own face, sending signals to Tom Wyler.
The issue of
Camplin's guilt had been a cut-and-dried one for Meg. Was she being fair to him? Was she taking into account a woman's emotions, which were rarely cut-and-dried? Meg herself was her own best example. She loved Allie as fiercely, as tenderly, as any mother could. But now — she was able to admit it freely — she also loved Tom Wyler. Any fool could see that those were incompatible loyalties.
It was too confusing. First the dance, and now this.
Meg had made a hopeless tangle of history and current events, and she was way too tired to try sorting it out tonight. She turned off the lights of the dollhouse and stood up to go. The shed could not be locked; she'd have to take a chance that whoever it was who'd ransacked the furnishings would not be back.
Call it a premonition, she thought grimly.
****
Meg was in her slip, hanging up the damp, wrinkly remains of her silk dress, when her sister stomped into the bedroom in a fine rage.
"All I can say is, I hope your night went better than mine," Allie said angrily. She was like a tulip closed up tight on a cold, wet day.
"Bobby made another scene?" asked Meg, alarmed. "I wish," said Allie, throwing herself on Meg's bed. "Tom would've taken him out and been my hero. No. What Tom did was offer a ride to two of the help. Why is he so damned chivalrous?"
"Don't be mean, Allie," said Meg, secretly elated. "It's not like we have a transit system."
"They live in Ellsworth, for God's sake. 'Oh, no problem,' he tells them. 'That's out my way.' So I get dropped off first. I hate midwesterners. They're too ... too ... nice."
"Allie, come on. The night could've ended in outright bloodshed," Meg said flatly. "All's well that ends well."
"Which reminds me. Do you have my earrings?"
Meg picked up the gold hoops from her dresser and dropped them in her sister's hand. "That wasn't very nice, what you did."
"Thanks." Allie fingered them thoughtfully and said, "I don't know what to do about Bobby. I thought we finally had an understanding. I thought he'd be way too embarrassed to show his face around me after the way he screwed up out west. Dammit! Lisa and her big mouth."
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