Embers

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "How's Lisa doing, by the way?" Meg asked as she slipped the pearl teardrops from her ears. She'd forgotten completely that they were there; now she looked at them with a sudden mix of fear and fascination. They were the ones, all right: the "trinkets" that Gordon Camplin had given their grandmother. No wonder he hadn't been able to take his eyes off Meg earlier.

  "Oh, Lisa's doing all right. Better than I am," Allie said with a glum look.

  Meg looked up sharply from her reverie. "Meaning?"

  "Meaning nothing special," Allie said tiredly. "I have not had a drink — even though everyone around me seems to be awash in alcohol. But ... I'm getting discouraged, Meg," Allie said, lowering her head in complete dejection. "Tom and I should be so much further along than we are. I love him so much more than he loves me. I wish he'd just ... catch up. We have such a great thing going ..."

  Meg put down the teardrops and looked at her sister. When she was four years old, Allie had drooped her head in just that way and said, "I wish Mommy would stop being dead. I wish she would come back and be with us, and then we could take care of her heart so it would keep working."

  And Meg had been forced to tell her, "Mommy can't stop being dead, Allie. It's too late to fix her heart." Allie had cried on Meg's breast in wrenching, forlorn sobs, until Meg thought both their hearts would break, hers and Allie's.

  Meg couldn't go through that again; couldn't say, "It's too late to fix Tom's heart." So she went up to her sister and rubbed her back in broad, reassuring circles and said, "You're too impatient."

  Allie said nothing at first. And then, in a voice as even as steady rain, she said, "You meant what you said to Bobby, didn't you. That there's not going to be any marriage."

  "That isn't what I meant at all," said Meg quickly. "I meant ... I had to say something like that ... Bobby was in a dangerous mood —"

  "Oh, please. Bobby?" Allie said, dismissing the idea. She shook her head. "That couldn't have been the reason. You know something that I don't, Meg. And I deserve to hear it. Tom's told you he doesn't care for me; is that it?"

  "No! No, he's never said that! He's told me that he thinks you're fond of him. That's all he's told me."

  "You're kidding!" Allie said, her eyes lighting up with sudden hope. "That's as far as he's figured things out? He merely thinks I'm merely fond? Meg, I've done everything but rip off my underwear and say 'Take me, I'm yours.' Fond? Is he kidding?"

  Meg shrugged unhappily.

  Allie laughed, relieved. "I guess I haven't been aggressive enough. I thought I was. Well, okay — I will rip off my underwear the next time I see him."

  "Now that would be really dumb," Meg said quickly. "You never want to seem too eager with a man."

  "In general, yes. But if I played hard-to-get with Tom Wyler, I'd have as much chance of landing him as ... as Comfort — or you! No; we're in a relationship — he said so himself. All it needs is a little shove."

  "Allie, y'know ... relationships ... I read somewhere that sixty-one percent of U.S. women think they're in a steady relationship, but only twenty-eight percent of men do. Doesn't that tell you something?"

  "Yeah — that men are masters of denial," said Allie, scrambling from her sister's bed with a new spring in her step. "Thanks, Meg," she added, giving her a quick squeeze on the way out. She stopped and turned at the door. "When I get back from Chicago, I'm hitting Tom Wyler with everything I've got."

  Meg, dismayed, began pulling her slip over her head, mostly to hide her emotions. When she heard Allie cry out her name she yanked the slip the rest of the way off in one sharp pull. "What?" she asked, startled, as Allie ran back to her.

  Allie took Meg by the hips and turned her toward the light. She touched a spot in the small of Meg's back. "How'd you do this to yourself?"

  Puzzled, Meg twisted around to look, then turned to the dresser mirror for help. There she saw a black-and-blue mark, dark and ugly and the size of a fist, in the middle of her back.

  At gargoyle height.

  Chapter 17

  By Tuesday Allie was in Chicago, gathering job offers like strawberries in June, happily rearranging her life to fit smoothly around Tom's.

  In the meantime, Meg's own well-ordered universe seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Besides the visions, besides the ransacking, besides the constant bills and the crumbling inn, there was this: Meg wanted the love of her sister's life for herself.

  She sat at the kitchen table on Tuesday morning beside a hamper full of dirty laundry and a counter stacked with breakfast dishes, willing Tom Wyler to come to her. She thought of Allie, then plucked out the thought the way she would a thorn in her thumb, and went back to thoughts of Tom, willing him to come. She lowered her head into her folded arms: Come to me.

  She wanted him near. She wanted to have him take her in his arms again, to feel his shaved cheek, to taste his mouth on hers. He was all she could think of. A day without him — she'd just gone through one — was like a day without water. She was restless with the fever of him, aching for the sight of him, utterly smitten by his smile, his voice, the irony in his sense of humor. She loved everything about him, from the way he said her name to the way he stroked Coughdrop's ears and the coon cat's throat.

  And he was good with kids. It would all be easier, if only he weren't so good with kids. Timmy had adored him from day one. Even Terry was sliding under his spell. (On the night of the so-called backfire she'd seen Tom slip down the street and return with the boy plastered in chocolate ice cream.)

  Then, too, the picnic: She could hardly help noticing that Mandy's baby, a hopelessly colicky thing, had quieted at once when Mandy laid the infant in his arms: some men had that touch. There was a stillness about Tom, an inner strength, that Meg felt sure he didn't know he possessed. He was everything she never knew she was looking for. She loved him.

  And Allie too.

  The sound of a car pulling up in front of the Inn Between made Meg wipe her eyes hurriedly. She knew the pitch of the engine, the slam of the door. Tom had come to her, as somehow she knew he must.

  She yanked a pillowcase from the laundry basket and blew her nose in it, and raked her hands through her tangled hair. But then she thought, What does it matter? and slumped back in her chair, her heart bound tight in barbed wire, her head strangely free to measure the pain.

  Tom came round to the back door and walked into the kitchen without knocking. She thought he looked haggard: his khakis looked slept in, and he had bags under his eyes. But his manner was deliberately cheerful as he said, "I'm feeling frisky today. How do you feel about attacking the trails of Acadia? I've commandeered two mountain bikes."

  He was leaning into the counter, casual and offhand; but his eyes were burning bright, and there was an edge in his voice.

  She matched the forced lightness in his tone. "In July? That's like asking Santa to leave his shop in late November. You go ahead. Once the fog burns off it'll be a beautiful day for a bike ride."

  "You don't want me to go back without seeing Acadia up close and personal, do you? Your beloved Acadia?"

  There was a taunt in his voice that she decided to ignore. "You can see it up close on your own," she said evenly, folding her arms on the table.

  "But what about the flora? What about the fauna? How will I learn their names?"

  "You won't need to know them in Chicago," she said, trying to keep the bitterness out.

  He dropped his bantering tone. "This isn't about Chicago, Meg. This is about now."

  Meg let out a sigh of utter frustration and dropped her head onto her arms again. She couldn't play this game with him. She could scarcely bear to hear the sound of his voice. When she lifted her head, he was still there, which surprised her; she was convinced that she'd summoned him in a vision.

  "Why have you come?" she whispered, near despair.

  He leaned across from her, his hands splayed on the table. In a voice ripped by emotion, he said, "I couldn't not come. God. Don't you see? I had no choice."
<
br />   It was true. "I know," she said miserably. "I know." She stood up, almost in a trance, and said, "I'll tell Comfort."

  She found her in the bathroom, woozy from morning sickness. "I'm going out for a while," Meg said, nearly oblivious to her sister-in-law's state.

  Dismayed, Comfort said, "You are?"

  "Let the machine take the calls," Meg said, and she left her.

  The new chambermaid, a bouncy college girl, intercepted Meg in the hail. "The people in room four just checked out, and, like, they took the key. Can I have the spare to get in?"

  "They had the spare. I'll see to it later."

  "But what about the new arriv —"

  Meg brushed past the girl as if she were a drunken panhandler and went outside.

  Lloyd was climbing into the cab of his truck. "Tell Comfort I'm goin' to Ellsworth to pick up some drywall," he said.

  "Tell her yourself, Lloyd," Meg answered. She stepped around her openmouthed brother and went out to the front.

  A blue bike was mounted on the car rack of Tom's Cutlass. A red one was parked on the street.

  "So this is my getaway vehicle?" Meg asked in a light but shaky voice, trying the bike for size. The seat was adjusted perfectly.

  "Think of it as your magic carpet," Tom said, lifting the bike onto the rack. "We have food. We have drink. We have the whole day before us."

  "Only the morning," she said bleakly. "It can't possibly be more."

  He took her by her arm and led her to the car. "The morning, then. I'll take what I can get."

  They made a quick trip downtown to the police station, then wove their way through the town's one-way streets — past the fire station with its Forest Fire Danger dial sitting squarely on medium; past the gray stone post office from which Meg had sent so many Care packages to her sister during her college years; past the old Rodick House, crisp and white and with its black shutters set off by boxes of red geraniums; past good old, just-folks Jordan's, one of the few restaurants to stay open in winter for the locals; past the odd mix of shops, stores, and sweetly shabby houses that Meg knew like the back of her hand — and finally past the street where she'd lived her whole life.

  Five minutes, to cruise from one end of her world to the other.

  Meg directed Tom over the Park Loop Road to the Jordan Pond House where they parked the car, then unloaded the bikes and walked them the short distance to the start of the trail. They paused before an exquisite stone gatehouse, commissioned — like the fifty miles of carriage roads that crisscrossed the park — by John D. Rockefeller early in the century.

  "He's one of our local heroes," Meg explained. "You have to give the guy credit: he took one look into the future and decided to ban automobiles from the carriage trails. It makes all the difference. You can pedal all day and hardly run into another soul — if you know where to go."

  Tom leaned over the handlebars of her bike, slipped his hand behind her head, and kissed her. "Take me there," he said with an urgency that thrilled her. "Where no one else is. Show me your Acadia."

  "There isn't time," she answered, averting her lips from his.

  She meant it in the most profound way. Acadia did not reveal its secrets to the hit-and-run tourist. It had taken Meg a lifetime to learn them. Tom would have to come back at dusk for the nighthawks, at dawn for the beavers. He'd have to come in spring for the mayflowers, in fall for the witch hazel. He'd have to meander the swamps to see the purple loose-strife, and strike out along the rocky coast to glimpse the blue harebell. For him to see a harbor seal or a breaching whale this morning would be pure, blind luck.

  To see Meg's Acadia, he'd have to make a commitment to stay; there was no other way.

  Meg was never able afterward to recall anything between Tom's electric demand and their steep meander along the wooded descent of the stream to the Cobblestone Bridge. About all she remembered was that magic carpets came in twenty-one speeds.

  When they reached the picturesque bridge, they got off their bikes and leaned over the stone wall, lingering over the loveliness of the burbling stream below.

  "This bridge is the only one in the Park that's built with cobbled stones," Meg said dreamily, dropping a pebble into the rushing water.

  When she looked up at Tom she could see that he didn't care if the bridge was made of cobblestones or crepe paper. He was watching her with a look so ... intense, that she had to look away.

  Meg herself rarely carried a camera, but today she would've given anything to have one. She couldn't trust her memory to be able to recreate the look in his eyes in years to come. Without a photo, how could she possibly remember that he had a tiny scar that ran along the edge of his left eyebrow? Tiny scars were so easy to forget. And the two or three freckles, barely visible through his tan; you didn't expect freckles on a homicide lieutenant's nose. Those, too, would fade with the memory of him.

  "Should we keep going?" she asked in a voice faint with emotion.

  "As long and as far as we can," Tom answered.

  ****

  He couldn't take his eyes off Meg. He wanted her more than ever. She knew it — it was written all over her beautiful, flushed face — and what was more, he knew she felt the same way about him. But they needed a place where they could make their feelings clear, and so he'd hit on the idea of Acadia. It was hardly neutral territory, but it was a hell of a lot more neutral than the kitchen of the Inn Between.

  Neutral or not, Acadia was magical; he was staggered by the beauty and solitude of the place. Wyler had never had any great fondness for the outdoors; his tastes ran to books and basketball, perfect escapes from blood and chaos.

  But this. The silence was awesome. No cars, no sirens, no boom boxes or gunshots; only the soft sound of the bike tires on the path, and the muted, majestic swish of fir trees swaying high over their heads. This was true enchantment. He was reluctant to speak, even to her, and break the spell.

  The piney smell of balsam filled his nostrils, filled his lungs. He took great, deep breaths of it as they rode side by side in dappled sunlight; it was a balm to his frazzled nerves after a night of tossing and turning. Two nights, really. Ever since the dance; ever since he'd taken her in his arms and kissed her ...

  Three nights. He'd forgotten the night of the picnic. No, wait, for more than that. The plain fact was, he hadn't slept well in a week. He'd been blaming the lumpy mattress in his cabin, and the bizarre woodland sounds he'd had to listen to all night. But the reason he wasn't sleeping well, the reason he might never sleep well again, was pedaling alongside him, and he wanted desperately to reach out and touch her hair.

  She was so quiet. He wondered whether he'd said something to offend her; but then she glanced over at him, and he knew that he had not. His heart swelled with emotion: he felt positively medieval, a knight on a horse, escorting his ladylove through ancient woods filled with unknown perils.

  Except — dope — she was escorting him. Without her he'd be lost on the zigzagging trails in no time. He had no map, no sense of direction, no idea where all of this was going. He shook his head, half bemused, half besotted by his situation. He hadn't been on a bike in twenty-five years, hadn't been under a tree in nearly as long.

  He and Lydia had lived in his condo, and even though she'd begged for a house with a yard, he wouldn't have any of it. Tools and grass were not his thing. In general, he believed that animals belonged outside and people inside. The condo association hadn't allowed pets, and his son, like Wyler himself, had spent his early years without them. It had taken up until now for Wyler to feel sorry for them both.

  His reverie was interrupted when Meg said, "Let's walk the bikes for a while."

  They walked their bikes at a leisurely pace while Meg pointed out various ferns, and clumps of bead lily, and little evergreens with pairs of pink bells called twinflowers. He saw a flash of yellow in the trees overhead: a magnolia warbler, Meg said at once, and then went on to lament the decline in migratory birds and wildflowers on the island in the last
few years. Wyler paid more attention than ever, fearing that whatever it was she was showing him might be gone forever the next time he passed through.

  And that was when it hit him with the full force of a blow to the gut: there probably wouldn't be a next time.

  He was due, overdue, at his career. The faxes and phone messages from the department had steadily increased — there had been three of them at the Bar Harbor station just now — and he didn't know how much longer he could keep his captain at bay.

  Convalescence from a gunshot was one thing; trying to use up, all at once, the years of vacation that he'd piled up was another scenario altogether. If he didn't go back soon, they'd be convinced he was having re-entry problems after the shootout — the kiss of death to his career.

  "Problems at the office?" she asked him out of the blue.

  How did she know that? Had she been intercepting his faxes in town? No, he realized; she was merely being her psychic self.

  "My boss thinks I'm stalling; that I'm a burnout case," he said, surprising himself with his candor.

  She looked taken aback. "I was just being facetious," she said. "Anyway, aren't you on vacation?" she added.

  "They don't like you to take too much of it," he said dryly.

  "Because?"

  "A good cop's not supposed to need it. You get out of the rhythm, out of the flow. And your case load goes all to hell." He added laconically, "It shows a lack of dedication."

  She'd been listening intently to his answer. "It does make sense," she admitted with a rueful shrug.

  If only Lydia had been so understanding.

  He said, "You got home all right the other night?" It was a fairly dumb question, but he wanted to bring the subject around to the dance, to the kiss.

  He was watching her for a reaction and he got a surprising one: her face clouded over into a dark frown.

  "Yes," she said, clearly troubled. "I went into the shed when I got back." She hesitated, then said, "Someone had broken into it. The dollhouse was ransacked."