Embers

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Buster! Dammit, Buster! Come back here!" It was a woman's voice, high and musical and totally without authority.

  Jane didn't dare take her eyes off the panting beast, who seemed to be regarding her as he would a smallish partridge. It was only after the woman — pretty, twenty, and dressed in jeans and a bomber's jacket — grabbed the dog's collar with both hands, that Jane allowed herself to sit up. The collar, which looked pretty much like a large man's belt, seemed sturdy enough, but Jane wasn't so sure about the woman. She looked as fragile as stemware.

  "He's just a puppy; he won't hurt you," the girl said with an apologetic grin.

  "That's what they all say," Jane said with a shaky laugh, wiping the drooly sleeve of her jacket on the grass. She stood up.

  "I'm Cissy Hanlin, by the way," the pretty blonde said, not daring to let go of Buster's collar. "I live next door."

  Jane introduced herself, and Cissy explained that she'd always wanted a dog but her husband didn't like animals but now they were separated and so the first thing she did was get a dog, a big dog, because she felt safer being so all alone and it was so lucky that she discovered Buster, who was a cross — ould Jane tell? — between a black Lab and a Saint Bernard or at least that's what the waitresses who brought him to the shelter before they left the island after summer was over said.

  She paused, at last, for breath.

  Jane said, "Yep. He looks like a black Saint Bernard."

  At this point Buster's tail was wagging furiously, landing with quick hard thumps on the back of Jane's thighs. It did not seem possible that an act of friendliness could inflict so much pain. The interlude ended abruptly when a squirrel — dumber or braver than most — scampered across the lawn not far from them. Buster took off in loping pursuit, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, his paws ripping out consecutive mounds of earth.

  He crashed through a rhododendron, breaking off several branches, and plowed over an azalea before fetching up at the trunk of one of the huge hollies that blocked Jane's front door. His bark, like the Hound of the Baskervilles', came straight from hell. From somewhere high, high in the holly tree, the squirrel twitted him.

  "Silly puppy," Cissy cried. She turned to Jane with a helpless shrug. "I can't seem to get him to stay."

  And I can't seem to get you to go, Jane thought, surveying the damage. She smiled weakly, her thoughts turning to stockade fences, and said, "Maybe it's just a phase."

  Cissy rolled her eyes and said, "I wish. Well, it's nice that you're going to be around for a little while; I get so bored by myself. If you need help with anything, just shout," she added, and began whistling her dog away from the tree.

  Eventually Buster came and dragged Cissy off, and Jane was able to unload the car. Her plan was to spend the next week cleaning, seeing to critical repairs, and talking to realtors (once she'd deodorized the place a bit) about listing the house in spring.

  But first things first, she thought, taking down a jelly jar glass, which she wiped clean with her shirt. She took the rum and the glass into the fireplace room and poured a tot for herself.

  Then she lifted the glass to the fireplace, the focal point of the room, and said, "Aunt Sylvia — thank you. I don't deserve this, but I thank you. I'll make this place pretty, and someone with children will live here and love it, and you and I will somehow share in their joy."

  She tossed off the glass, and the odd-tasting rum shot through her winter-chilled body like a ball of flame. Her aunt had visited Bermuda once, and brought back the rum, and that's the only kind she drank for the rest of her life. (Jane used to smuggle a flask into the nursing home, and the two would sneak a tiny ceremonial drink together before she left for the night.)

  The thought that there would be no more smuggling hit Jane hard; she poured another ounce, this time for her aunt, and sipped it as she wandered around the room, pausing to stroke a worn chair cover, taking a moment to scan the titles of the books on their shelves. How sad, she thought, that there were no framed photographs of loved ones anywhere in the room, not even of Sylvia's cats. All Jane saw was a charcoal sketch of a young woman in a plain gown, with a coal-skuttle bonnet lying on the floor beside her. A nineteenth-century Quaker, Jane decided, and an unhappy one at that.

  She walked up to the framed sketch, which was hanging in a quiet corner of the room. All in all, it wasn't badly done. Perhaps it was her aunt's work. Sylvia Merchant had enjoyed dabbling with charcoal and pastels, although her subjects had generally come from the garden. Jane looked more closely and saw that she was right: In the corner of the drawing were the initials SM

  Jane took the frame from the wall and walked over to a window with it. There was evidence of erasure, as if her aunt had struggled to capture an exact degree of unhappiness in the young woman's face. And what unhappiness! Her brows were tilted upward and toward one another; tears rolled down her face. Her full mouth was partly opened, as if she were imploring someone, while her hands were curled tightly around one another in obvious distress. As for her long dark gown, it hung a little too closely to her body to be historically correct. Like the curls that ringed her brow, the clinging garment gave the woman a voluptuous air that was at odds with the modest intents of Quaker fashion.

  Jane shivered, deeply moved by the subject's distress. The drawing had the immediacy and power of a photograph. Well done, Aunt Sylvia, she thought, hanging the sketch back up on its hook. You should have done figures more often. She wondered who'd posed for her aunt. An island girl? Or had Sylvia merely copied someone else's work? But no; the sketch had too much emotion in it. Jane looked around the room, half expecting to find a companion sketch, this one of the brute who was causing the Quaker woman such pain. But there was nothing else.

  She finished her rum and put the bottle away. There was work to be done — and in the next several hours she found out just how much, when the contractors dropped by one by one with their estimates.

  The roofer looked things over, frowned, and said, "Five thousand dollars."

  The electrician looked things over, laughed, and said, "Five thousand dollars."

  The plumber shook his head and said, "Torch it."

  By the end of the day Jane was bloodied but unbowed. Okay, so the house isn't perfect, she admitted as she boiled some tea water in a pot that looked as if it had a questionable past. But at least now she had heat — in most of the rooms, anyway; and water — even though it was flowing through lead pipes; and as for the roof, well, it wasn't supposed to rain for a day or two.

  But now it was one in the morning; it was time to drag herself back to the Jared Coffin House. She sipped her Earl Grey tea tiredly, eyeing the Empire sofa in the room. Tomorrow she would definitely sleep here. She simply couldn't afford not to. She went around turning off the lights, aware that she hadn't even allowed herself the diversion of going through the boxes and closets. Today it was all Lysol and Tilex; maybe tomorrow she could relax and poke around a bit.

  And tomorrow she would pick up a book on interpreting tarot cards before she packed away the deliberate arrangement that had been left sitting on the game table. That, she was determined to do.

  She was just switching off the red ginger-jar lamp in the fireplace room when she heard the unmuffied roar of the dark green pickup turn in from the road again and race past her house. Buster, next door, heard it too and began woofing maniacally. The pickup had passed in and out at least half a dozen times in the course of the day, setting off the beast each time, and now it was one in the morning and they were both still hard at it.

  What's going on? she wondered, disturbed by the implications. Short hops, in and out .... The only other time she'd noticed a travel pattern like that was when she was in college: the guy in the house across the street used to zip in and out all day and night, and eventually he was arrested for dealing drugs.

  Terrific. She was beginning to think just like her mother. Surely there must be some everyday explanation. The man was probably ... probably ....
<
br />   But she couldn't come up with an everyday explanation.

  Buy Beloved

  TIME AFTER TIME Sample

  Antoinette Stockenberg

  "As hilarious as it is heart-tugging ... a rollicking great read."

  --I'll Take Romance

  In Gilded-Age Newport, an upstairs-downstairs romance between a well-born son and a humble maid is cut short of marriage. A hundred years later, the descendants of that ill-fated union seem destined to repeat history. Or not.

  Chapter 1

  Liz Coppersmith and her friend Victoria raised their wineglasses to the brooding mansion on the other side of the chain-link fence.

  "Not a bad neighborhood," said Victoria, the taller, more whimsically dressed of the two. She dropped into a plastic lawn chair, shook out her red permed curls, and straightened the folds of her star-print sundress. "You'll do lots of business over there," she predicted, "or my name's not Victoria."

  Liz had heard her say "or my name's not Victoria" a thousand times since they'd met five years ago in a grief-management group. And every time, Liz had to resist saying, "Your name isn't Victoria, damn it." Victoria's name was Judy Maroney, and if it weren't for her stubborn, persistent, rather amazing amnesia, Liz would be calling her Judy and not Tori at that very moment.

  "If I do get any work out of them, Tori, it'll be thanks to you. You found me a house in a perfect location."

  "I did, didn't I?" said Victoria, pleased with herself. "Call it intuition, but I was sure you'd like it, despite that unpromising ad in the paper. I mean — a four-room house? I have more bathrooms than that, and I live alone."

  They both glanced back at the sweet but plain two-story cottage that now belonged to Liz. It was exactly the kind of house that children invariably draw; all that was missing was a plume of Crayola smoke from the red-brick chimney.

  "It's no castle," Liz conceded. She tilted her head toward the intimidating mansion to the east. "But what the heck," she said with an ironic smile. "It's close enough."

  She went back to gazing through the chain-link fence at her neighbor. The grounds of the estate were magnificent, even for Newport. Ancient trees, presided over by an enormous copper beech, threw shimmering pools of shade over an expanse of well-kept grass. In the sunny openings between the trees were huge, wonderful shrubs — viburnums and hydrangeas and lush, towering rhododendrons. There were no flowers to speak of; only a green, understated elegance. It was like having her own private deer park — except without the deer — right in the heart of Newport.

  Too bad she was separated from it by a chain-link fence and barbed wire.

  Liz reached up and plucked a strand of the rusty wire as if it were a harp string. "This has been here a long time," she said.

  "If I were you," said Victoria, "I'd think about getting a tetanus shot." She frowned in disapproval. "Barbed wire. Who do they think they are, anyway?"

  "You mean, who do they think we are," Liz corrected. "Obviously they don't trust my side of the neighborhood." She took in her tiny cottage, the smallest house on a street of small houses. "And let's face it, why should they? We don't exactly radiate wealth and prosperity."

  "Never mind," said Victoria with an airy wave of her hand. "That will come. It's your karma. I had a vision."

  Liz laughed and said, "You and your crystal ball just might be right. After all, yesterday — the very day I moved in! — there I was, talking through this fence to their housekeeper. I suppose they sent her over here to make sure I wasn't in some prison-release program, but I liked her, even if she was a spy. Her name is Netta something, and she was as chatty as could be. Apparently her boss is some workaholic bachelor —"

  "Uh-oh. No business there," said Victoria, sipping her wine.

  "That's what I thought, too, at first." Liz raked her hair away from her face and cocked her head appraisingly at the Queen Anne-style mansion.

  "But then I found out that his parents stay at the estate — East Gate, it's called — every summer. It's been in the family since it was built, a hundred years ago. Besides the parents, there are a couple of semi-permanent guests staying there now as well. They must do some entertaining." Liz smiled and said, "Naturally I found a way to let it drop that I was an events planner."

  "Did the housekeeper even know what that was?" asked Victoria.

  "I made sure of it. I told her I design weddings, dinners, birthdays, dances, receptions, fund-raisers, charity events — the works."

  "In other words —"

  "I lied." Liz's deep brown eyes flashed with good humor. "Hey, if I told her I arranged kids' birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese, you think she'd have been impressed?"

  "You did what you had to do, Liz Coppersmith," agreed Victoria. "You planted the seed."

  "Yeah. That was the easy part. The hard part will be to provide references who're old enough to read and write."

  Victoria said, "If you need references, don't worry. I'll come up with references."

  And she would, too, because — unlike Liz — Victoria had money to buy anything she wanted.

  It wasn't always that way. Less than six years earlier, Victoria —Judy Maroney then — had crossed the Rhode Island border with her husband, two children, and not much more than high hopes that her husband's new job at the Newport Tourist and Convention Center would give her family more stability than he had at his old job in the defense industry. The family was eastbound on Route 95, just a few miles behind their moving van, when they were sideswiped by a drunk driver and ended up broadside to two lanes of eastbound traffic.

  Judy's husband, Paul, and their four-year-old son were killed instantly. Their daughter, Jessica, who would've been two in a week, had lived another forty-eight hours. Judy Maroney, behind the wheel, was saved, just barely, by the driver's-side airbag.

  And she could not forgive herself, both for being at the wheel and for surviving. That, at least, became Liz's theory. How else to explain the post-trauma amnesia that had no medical basis?

  Judy's mother-in-law, to whom Liz had once spoken, had a different theory. She believed that Judy, rejecting the unspeakable horror of her loss, had invented a new identity to get around having to face that abyss. Hence the single — and now legal — name "Victoria."

  Whatever the reason, Judy Maroney had for all practical purposes died in that crash. And the woman who replaced her — Victoria — had never once, to Liz or to anyone else, alluded to the accident. Tori was pleasant, she was friendly — by far the most cheerful member in the grief group — and she was totally amnesiac.

  The accident had resulted in a huge settlement for her. Money hadn't given Judy back her memory — it certainly hadn't given her back her family — but it had given the woman named Victoria lots of people willing to call themselves friends. Or references. Or whatever she wanted.

  "Hey, you," said Victoria behind her. "Have you heard a word I said?"

  Victoria had an almost spooky knack for knowing when Liz was focusing on her amnesia. Liz was forced to back up mentally, searching her brain for the last of her friend's lighthearted babble. "Of course I heard. You think I should give my house a name."

  "I really do. Houses sound more important when they have names. How about 'West Gate'? Or 'Harborview'? Or — I'm quoting you, now — 'Bigenuf'?"

  "I was talking about the mortgage, not the house," Liz said, laughing. She set her wineglass on a nearby stepstone and turned her attention yet again to the imposing mansion to the east. Since yesterday, it had held her in its thrall.

  Privilege. Tradition. Wealth. Elegance. Lineage. It was all there, on the other side of the barbed wire. Everything about it was the opposite of her own life. Liz had been born and raised in Newport's Fifth Ward, a working-class neighborhood of mostly Irish families that — until the yuppies began moving in recently — had changed little over the past century. Privilege in the Fifth Ward meant getting a parking place in front of your own house; tradition meant meeting with the same people every Friday night for a game
of cards.

  "Do you think I'm being too ambitious?" she suddenly asked Victoria. "Do you think I should work my way up through the Point and the Hill before I go after East Gate and the rest of the Bellevue Avenue crowd?"

  "Heck, no," Victoria said cheerfully. "This is Newport! The town has a long tradition of society-crashing. Where would the Vanderbilts be if they'd taken some slow-but-sure route?"

  Liz turned to her friend with a wry look. "I'm not trying to break into society, Tori. I just want to be able to make a little money off it once in a while."

  Victoria came up to Liz and put her arm around her. "And so you shall. You'll make tons of money. And you and your little girl will live happily ever after in a big house of your own. If that's what you want."

  Together they gazed at the shingled and stuccoed Queen Anne style mansion, sun-washed and golden in the evening light. After a moment Victoria said, "Where is Susy, by the way? With your folks?"

  Liz nodded. "She's been feeling ignored, what with the flurry of moving and all. My parents have her overnight."

  "Lucky for you they live in town."

  "Isn't it, though?"

  Liz was very aware that her friend's own parents were dead. Even if they'd still been alive, Victoria wouldn't know them. The amnesia was so bizarre, so sad, so complete. When Liz met Victoria in the grief group, she herself was on the ropes emotionally. For a while she convinced herself that as she pulled out of her numb state, Victoria would, too. Then she realized that being left by a husband — even learning there'd be no more children— didn't come close to losing one's whole family in a car crash.

  "You're doing it again," said Victoria. "Drifting."

  "Sorry. Did I tell you that someone in the mansion has two kids?" asked Liz. "I saw them playing outside. There's a little blond girl who's my Susy's age; I think her name is Caroline. And there's a two-year-old boy that the housekeeper has to chase after every minute."

  "You're thinking they'll be playmates for Susy?"