Embers

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Yes, Mother," Becky said in an exaggerated way.

  Obviously her girlfriends were near the phone: Helen heard giggling. Becky said good-bye and Helen, reassured, was left waiting for her medicine.

  Aunt Mary came bearing a galleried brass tray on which a bowl of kapusniak sat like a queen's coronet. Helen made herself sit up straight to receive the tray across her lap, then took the round-shaped spoon, part of the old set her aunt had foisted on her when she moved in, and skimmed a bit of clear liquid into it. "Here goes nothing," she said with a game smile.

  Aunt Mary sat perched on the edge of one of the corduroy chairs and shook her head. "You look so pale. I don't know ... maybe you need more protein. Say what you will about czarnina, it's high in that, at least. It would put some color in those cheeks."

  "Don't even think about it," said Helen, shuddering. The one time her aunt had made a batch of czarnina, a neighbor had called the police.

  "She was overreacting," said Aunt Mary, reading Helen's mind.

  Helen grimaced. "Well, what do you expect when you throw a quart of blood in a vat of water? It doesn't smell like anything normal."

  Aunt Mary gave a little tuck to her single long gray braid and said with great dignity, "I'm glad your uncle Tadeusz isn't here to hear you say that about Polish cuisine. He'd be very hurt."

  And so, obviously, was Aunt Mary. Her pale brown eyes were glazed over in tears and her rather small, once pretty mouth was trembling in distress.

  "I'm sorry," Helen said at once, closing her eyes. "It's this stupid, stupid headache. I wish it would go away."

  "Maybe that's what I should do," her aunt said, pushing herself up from the chair with a sigh. She gave the bowl of soup an appraising look, then shifted her gaze to her suffering niece. "Eat it," she said, and then she left.

  Helen, feeling honor-bound, finished the serving and then lay back down, closed her eyes, and dreamed of ducks being hunted, their quacks dissolving into panting sounds as hunters with bloodied hands wrung their necks.

  She woke with a start at the sound of the front door opening.

  "Mom!" yelled Becky up the stairs. "It's me! How're you feeling?"

  Helen sat up, groggy and tentative. "I'm down here, Becky. And I'm feeling. . . better," she said, surprised and pleased that the headache had retreated, if ever so slightly.

  Becky came in—mercifully free of shopping bags—and Helen smiled a greeting. "I guess that last decongestant kicked in," she explained. "What time is it?"

  "Eight-thirty. So what's going on?" asked Becky, flopping tiredly into one of the corduroy chairs. Obviously she expected her mother to answer "Nothin' much."

  But the death of Linda Byrne was uppermost in Helen's mind. She related the call that Russell had taken, then said, "I feel unbelievably bad about it."

  "Yeah.. . I can see. I'm surprised you didn't notice something in the obituaries," Becky added. "You always read them."

  "Ah, but not this week," Helen realized. "It's been so crazy, I've hardly had time to scan the headlines."

  She went to the butler's pantry and fished out the week's copies of the Evening News from the iron recycle rack, then dumped them in a pile on the claw-footed, round oak table in the center of the kitchen. She pulled the chain on the stained-glass lamp above the table, throwing light that was more quaint than bright across the walls and high ceiling of the carefully restored room.

  Becky came in with the big brass tray and left it on one of the marble counters—Helen's one indulgence when they redid the kitchen—and pulled out a carved-back oak chair.

  "Why do you want to look her up, anyway?" Becky asked, dropping her chin onto the cupped palms of her hands. "Isn't that a little ghoulish?"

  "When you're older, you'll understand," Helen said, flipping through Monday's obituaries without success. She picked up Tuesday's paper and went straight to the deaths, then sucked in her breath. "Here it is. It's true, then," she added rather stupidly.

  She read the headline aloud—" 'Linda Byrne, thirty-two; former art teacher' "—and then scanned the rest. "Born in Geneva ... graduated from Wellesley with a degree in art; taught at Boston College before she was married ... member of a couple of art societies ... survived by her husband ... one child ... a mother and two brothers in Geneva ... a couple of nieces and nephews. Huh. It's not much to go on."

  "What do you mean, 'to go on'?"

  "Hmm?" Helen looked up in a daze. "Did I say that?"

  "Mom. Get a grip," said Becky, laughing. She slid the paper over to her side of the table and studied the obituary. "Y'know, I think I've seen this name Nathaniel Byrne somewhere," she added, tapping her multi-ringed fingers on the page.

  "The husband? Can't say I have," Helen decided.

  "Yeah ... wait ... somewhere in the house ... I know!" Becky dashed out of the kitchen, went flying up the stairs, stomped across Helen's tiny but efficient home office overhead, and came roaring down again.

  "Ta-dah! 'Nathaniel Byrne, Mutual Fund Manager of the Year,'" Becky said, holding up an investment magazine that Helen subscribed to but never had time to read.

  "If he's the same Nathaniel Byrne," said Helen. She took the magazine and studied the cover of the magazine. "And anyway, since when are you interested in mutual funds?"

  "Who cares about those? He's what caught my eye when I dumped the mail on your desk. It was like, when you walk into a supermarket and you see Brad Pitt's picture on the cover of People? It was like that. You can't help but look."

  She was right. The Fund Manager of the Year was a dark-haired, steely eyed, square-chinned, unsmiling male who wasn't the least bit shy about looking straight into the camera and daring it to expose his inner self. His brows were thick and straight, his hair, attractively unruly. He was wearing a heavy wool shirt, khakis, and work boots and was sitting on a massive tree stump in an autumn setting, with his thighs pulled up to his chest and his arms slung loosely across the knees. A gold band adorned his left ring finger and, if Helen wasn't mistaken, that was a Rolex on his left wrist. He was the kind of man that women described as intense rather than hunky.

  Near the tree stump was a woodpile with an ax leaning against it. Helen took in the man, took in the setting, and shook her head. "Wrong guy. The Byrne I heard about is a workaholic who ignores his family, flies his own plane, and is never at home. He wouldn't have the time or inclination to chop wood. Besides, look at his boots. They're brand-new."

  "Mom, you are so naive," Becky said, rolling her eyes. "The ax and shoes are just props. If he's Fund Manager of the Year, obviously he can afford to get his wood split and stacked. Look him up, look him up," she urged. "See if they say he's from Salem."

  Helen did as she was told. The cover article was long, and it finished up, as all such pieces do, with a few scraps of biographical information. "For goodness' sake," Helen said. "You're right. It says he lives on a 'prestigious street in Salem.'"

  "Oh, like he's gonna live on a slummy one? What else? Let me read it."

  "When I'm done," said Helen, pulling the cover away from her daughter's pesty, hovering grip. She read aloud:

  "Byrne and his wife, Linda Bellingame Byrne, to whom he's been married for eight years, have one three-year-old daughter and another child on the way. Mrs. Byrne, an art historian who lectures occasionally in the area, abandoned a professorship at Boston College when her husband began putting in eighty-hour weeks after his promotion to manager of the Columbus Fund. in the five years since then, they have taken no vacations.

  "'Nathaniel Byrne has made a lot of money for a lot of investors,' Mrs. Byrne told us. 'After the new baby's born, I'm hoping that they let the poor man have a week or two off now and then,' she said with a teasing smile at her husband.

  "So she was pregnant," Helen mused. "How sad." She added, "It's funny that the article lets her have the last word."

  Becky, meanwhile, was impressed. "This is so cool. You know this guy, Mom!"

  "Number one, I don't know him," Helen reminded her
daughter. "And number two, there's nothing cool about it. The timing of this is tragic."

  With the ruthless indifference of youth, Becky shrugged and said, "It sounds like Linda Byrne wouldn't've been all that impressed by an article about him anyway."

  "Rebecca! A little less cynicism, please."

  Brought up short by her mother's sharpness, Becky defended herself. "I only said what you just told me, Mom. Why are you taking this so seriously?"

  "I don't know," said Helen, staring at the man on the cover.

  What she did know was that her headache had retreated even further. She lifted her hand to the back of her head, just to make sure her head was still there. Yep. And hardly any pain.

  Well, for Pete's sake, she thought with a bemused smile. Was it the soup, the pill—or the sight of his face?

  Buy Beyond Midnight

  EMILY'S GHOST Sample

  Antoinette Stockenberg

  RITA award winner.

  "Booksellers' recommended read."

  --Publishers Weekly

  A showdown between a U.S. Senator (with a house on Martha's Vineyard) who believes in ghosts and a reporter who doesn't. What could possibly go wrong?

  Chapter 1

  Emily Bowditch threw down her notes in disgust.

  "Can you believe this? The United States is gazillions of dollars in debt, and Senator Arthur Lee Alden III wants funding for intergalactic communication. Can you believe this?"

  No one in the newsroom paid any attention to her; everyone was on deadline. Emily turned her monitor on and began setting up a new file.

  "Not to worry, E.T.," she muttered to no one in particular. "If the senator gets his funding, pretty soon you will be able to phone home."

  The minutes ticked by. Her hands flew over the keyboard; her muttering became more indignant. "Of all the hopeless wastes of taxpayers' money ... of all the liberal spendthrifts ... of all the misdirected ... serendipitous ... irrational ... downright weird ...."

  Stan Cooper looked up annoyed from his computer screen. "What’re you going on about?" He swiveled his chair to face Emily and reached for his coffee mug. "Tell me now and get it over with, for God's sake, so I can get back to work."

  The irritation in his voice didn't bother Emily at all. She assumed that all forty-eight year old bachelor newsmen came that way. "It's Senator Alden."

  Stan's eyelids flickered. "Yeah? What about him?"

  "I've just got hold of a letter he wrote urging the National Science Foundation to fund a heck of a lot more psychic research than they've been doing. I didn't know they were doing any," she said through gritted teeth. "And now, apparently, they're going to do more."

  "How much more?" Stan asked. His voice was low and still, the way it got whenever he talked about Senator Alden.

  Emily shook her head. "It doesn't say." She fished her copy of the letter from a school of papers on her desk and read from it aloud. "'We urge you' -- blah, blah, here it is -- 'to allocate substantially greater sums for psychic research which, among other benefits, can have far-reaching ramifications for both our domestic and foreign intelligence'."

  Stan's laugh was short and derisive. "FBI. CIA. Yeah. Rumors have been going around for years that they've been fooling around with psi." Stan drained the dregs of his coffee and made a wry face. "So how you gonna handle the story?"

  Emily sighed. "I'm sure the Chief'll want me to play it straight; he respects the senator too much to feel any moral outrage here."

  "No problem," Stan said with a deadly smile. "Between you and me we have more than enough."

  "Well, it is outrageous!"

  "I agree."

  "I mean it, Stan. Our government is out of control, absolutely out of control. Our bridges are falling down, our sewers are disintegrating, our schools need overhauling and this guy calls for -- psychic research! Who needs psychic research? We need concrete; pipes; schoolrooms."

  Stan swiveled slowly around to face his computer, effectively ending the coffee break. "What an innocent you are," he said in a tired voice. "I suppose it comes from living and working in New Hampshire."

  Emily flushed. She'd met Stanley Cooper when he was on assignment in Manchester seven years earlier. She was a junior reporter then, really just a Gofer, and she'd been thoroughly awed by the hard-boiled political reporter from the Boston Journal. He liked what little she'd written, though, and when she took a job in New Bedford covering municipal affairs for the local paper, his name was on her list of references.

  Then, six months ago, she sent her resume to the Journal. Stanley Cooper interviewed her in depth, recommended her, and put her through her paces after she was hired. Later she learned the exact wording of his recommendation: "She'll be a royal pain in the butt. We need her."

  At twenty-eight Emily Bowditch was as much in awe of Stan Cooper as ever. She didn't think much of him as a man -- he drank, smoked, gambled, detested kids and didn't keep house -- but as a political writer he was without parallel. She'd do just about anything to impress him. Whenever he cut her down to size (which was often) she took it hard.

  She studied him in profile as he hunched over his keyboard, pecking fitfully. His clothes were shabby. His face was lined, unshaven, unhappy. He was thin, almost bony: he was suspicious of everything, probably including food. But he was brilliant, and Emily wanted desperately to make her mark with him.

  "Stan?" she ventured, risking his wrath. "I've been mulling over an idea for a story. I think it could be pretty good."

  "Hmmmn."

  "Maybe even sensational."

  "Hmmmn."

  "Do you want to hear about it?"

  "No. Just do it."

  That was it, the permission she wanted--more or less. She grabbed her tweed jacket and said, "I'll be at the library for the next couple of hours." But as she sprinted down the steps of the bland brick building that housed the Boston Journal, the thought occurred to her that her idea was cockamamie at best, and a pretty good reason for getting fired, at worst.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon in the Boston Public Library, plowing through old copies of Etheric, a magazine devoted exclusively to psychic phenomena; a magazine that until that morning she had never known existed. She was working strictly on a hunch, and she wasn't sure what she'd find.

  When she'd called Senator Alden's office earlier in the day to confirm the existence of his letter to the National Science Foundation, she was put through to his aide, Jim Whitewood. In the process some signals had obviously been crossed. Mr. Whitewood had come on the line and, before she could say boo, said in a sharp voice, "How did you get hold of the letter? Are you from Etheric?"

  "What's Etheric?" Emily had asked, a little stupidly.

  "Who is this?" Mr. Whitewood had demanded.

  That's when she made the first of a series of snap judgments that later would come back to haunt her. She had said in response, "Hello? Hello? Oh darn, something's wrong with this phone," and hung up. She needed time, time to track down Etheric and see what or who had made Mr. Whitewood so press-shy.

  And so, with the bright May sun shining through the ceiling-high windows, warming the back of her neck under her straight dark hair, Emily thumbed drowsily through dozens of back issues of the fascinating and bizarre periodical, stopping every now and then to peruse an article that caught her fancy. At five-thirty, she sat up straight.

  "Bingo," she whispered softly to herself.

  In the Newsworthy column of a two-year old issue of Etheric was a photo of Senator Alden shaking the hand of his new aide, Jim Whitewood. Mr. Whitewood, who admitted to having "only modestly psychic powers," promised to "keep the lines of communication open between Senator Alden and those with genuine psychic ability."

  Only modestly psychic. That was like saying someone was only modestly around the bend.

  Emily hugged herself with joy. Her original plan suddenly got a little more cockamamie.

  ****

  Armed with a Xerox copy of the Etheric photo and caption,
Emily cornered Stan Cooper alone in the Journal's smoking lounge the next morning. "Stan, I really need your input on this." She handed him the photo she'd found and watched him break into a contemptuous smile. "The magazine folded a little after this issue came out," she said. "It had no circulation to speak of, so I doubt if your average voter even knows about this."

  With a flick of his wrist Stan let the sheet of paper float down to the floor. "Your average voter could care less," he said. "Your average voter is female and madly in love with Senator Alden."

  Emily scooped up the sheet and tucked it in her bag. "Says who?"

  "Ask anyone at a shopping mall. Lee Alden was a devoted husband for ten years. When his wife died in a car accident a couple of years ago there was talk he might not run again, that's how devastated he was. For a while he refused to appear socially at all." Stan lit a new cigarette from the stub of his last one, took a deep drag, and steered it out past his nose. "Lately he's begun to show up at an occasional charity function; but he arrives alone and early, and leaves in an hour. Every socialite in Massachusetts has tried to land him. Every female shopper in the state nourishes her own silly, secret hope."

  The measured tone in his voice had gradually turned bitter, so much so that Emily averted her eyes from the coldness she saw in his face. For the first time it occurred to her that Stan might not be objective when it came to Senator Arthur Lee Alden III. She couldn't imagine why.

  "Well, I think women are as well-informed and conscientious about whom they vote for as anyone," she said firmly. "But they have to have the information out in front where they can see it. They have to know this guy's a flake."

  "Oh, Christ, Emily, the man could get thrown in jail for life and they'd vote for him." He snubbed out his cigarette in irritation and stood up to leave. But at the door he turned suddenly and said, "What're you up to?"

  "Okay," she said, taking the plunge. "Originally I planned to call and say I was looking for a respected medium -- channeler, I guess I mean -- and ask if the senator could recommend anyone. Then I found Whitewood's open invitation in Etheric and I thought, why don't I just show up and say I have psychic powers? How far could I get?"