Embers

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Again, based on what?"

  "Based on ... based on ... she vacated the apartment without giving notice."

  Her sister didn't bother to respond to that. "The most obvious thing you could say is what we all think: that Eden is using her body to go after Dad's money. But so what? A lot of his friends have made the exact same deal, and it seems to suit them just fine."

  "But Dad's not like that!"

  "Holly," her sister said softly, "we don't know what Dad is like, deep down. No one does. Except Dad."

  Deflated, Holly answered, "You're right. I guess. But I still have to try."

  Chapter 2

  Sam Steadman was struggling through his third piece of lemon meringue pie, wondering what the hell was up. All evening long, his mother and his father had been exchanging dire glances across the dining room table of their New Bedford bungalow. Something was obviously on their minds, but every time that Sam asked what, his mother jumped up and said, "More pie!"

  Finally, too stuffed to move, Sam pushed his brown vinyl chair back on its casters and said, "Okay, you two: what's going on?"

  His mother smiled nervously. "Oh, it's nothin' that can't wait. It's late. You'll be wanting to get back home to Westport."

  "Is it money, ma?" he asked her bluntly. "Can you use some cash?" He hadn't been home in nearly a month; the medical bills must be getting away from them again.

  "Don't be silly," said his mother, reddening. She began to clear the table of cups and plates. "We don't want you to give us no money. It's not about money. It's about—"

  "Money," his father said flatly.

  Millie Steadman gave her husband a look that would have quelled a lesser man; but stroke or no stroke, big Jim Steadman was not about to be silenced. "Sooner or later, he has to know," he muttered to his wife. "We already waited too long as it is."

  Alarmed now, Sam said, "Ma, I'm beggin' you—"

  "Well, all right," Millie conceded, brushing crumbs into the palm of her hand. Without looking at Sam, she said, "It's about Eden."

  "Eden!" Sam's chest constricted, the way it always did on those rare occasions when her name was mentioned. "What about her?"

  "We don't like to bring her up, you being split up for so long now." She shook her head and gave him a look more sympathetic than critical, then took off on her favorite tangent.

  "I just can't understand why your marriage couldn't work. Eden adored you; anyone could see that. And you were so proud of her. It seemed like the perfect match. You're both so good-looking, you're both so smart. Your children, oh, my goodness, what children, you could have had—"

  "Ma, don't. Don't, or I swear ...."

  "I know, I know," Millie said, her dark eyes welling with tears. "You've told me many times. All right. I won't dwell."

  She sat back down in the chair at her husband's side. After his stroke, she had switched to that seat so that she could handfeed him during the devastating paralysis he had suffered. As he regained mobility, she had held his hand and helped him lift the forkful of potatoes, the spoonful of custard. Big Jim could feed himself now; but Millie still stayed close with a napkin.

  "Every once in a while," she said to Sam, "Eden drops by."

  "What! You've never said boo about this!"

  "Because look how you react. You get all squirrely. Anyway," she said, before Sam could respond to that, "Eden has been dropping by a couple of times a year just to say hi-how-are-you, and we always thought that was very nice of her. Sometimes, it's true, she was tight for cash. You know how it is when you're young and have car payments and rent and such. It's a tough situation."

  Sam groaned and said, "You didn't give her money, Ma. Tell me you didn't give her money."

  "Well, what if we did?" his mother answered defensively. "She used to be your wife. That made her our kin. You don't have to be blood relations to care about someone."

  Sam didn't dare ride roughshod over that argument. Millie and Jim Steadman had raised a series of foster kids before they'd taken in and eventually adopted Sam, and they loved every one of them as if they really were kin. They still stuck five bucks in their Christmas cards for each of the kids of those who kept in touch. Eden, however, wasn't a kid. She was a witch and a scam artist in a woman's very desirable body.

  He said bitterly, "You know, you may as well have taken that hard-earned dough of yours and thrown it down a toilet."

  It infuriated him to think that Eden had borrowed money from folks in need of it themselves. He wondered which of her many get-rich-quick schemes the cash had gone to finance. Maybe an afternoon's thrill at the tables at Foxwoods? The one thing he knew was that it didn't go to pay bills.

  "Wasn't much money, Sam," his father said. "Few hundred, here or—"

  "Well, there was that one time when she needed more than that," Millie admitted. "But Eden insisted on giving us a, whatddyacallit, a promissory note that time. She wouldn't take no for an answer, wouldn't even hear of it. I can show you the note!"

  Sam kept a lid on his anger. He said softly, "Even after Dad's stroke? She took money from you even then?"

  Please let the answer to that one be no. For whatever reason, he didn't want to think that Eden was capable of stealing from the infirm.

  His mother's answer was to smile lamely. Millie Steadman was a stout woman who, even in her seventies, had a big, life-affirming laugh. The woman never did anything lamely, least of all smile. Sam's heart sank.

  "It gets a little complicated," she said. "The first thing you do, Sam, is you have to promise not to get mad. Or feel hurt. We couldn't tell you, all this time, because we were sworn to secrecy."

  "By Eden?"

  "Eden? She wasn't even born!"

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Start over, Mil," her husband said tiredly.

  "You're right, I'm making a mishmash of this," said Millie. "It's just I'm nervous, thinking about the possibilities. Because if it's gone, oh, Lord, if it's gone for good I don't know what we'll do."

  The panic on her face and in her voice made Sam sit up straight. Throughout the trauma of the stroke and its aftermath, Sam had never seen in his mother anything like panic. Concern, yes; anguish, definitely. But not panic.

  His mother took a deep breath, fixed her dark gaze on the Lady of Fatima print that hung opposite one of Sam's award-winning photographs, and started over.

  "Fifty-two years ago, my Uncle Henry left us an inheritance. I was his only niece," she explained, "and he liked Jim because Jim worked with his hands as a carpenter. Uncle Henry used to say that people who actually made things deserved more than people who made things happen, but that life didn't usually work that way. Anyway, he left us this ... this ..."

  She turned from the Lady of Fatima to her watchful husband, leaning helplessly, inexorably, to the left. "Is it okay if I say what it was, Jim?"

  "We been through all that," he said, nodding permission.

  "Okay. This engraving. It was an engraving. It was done by a man called Albrecht Durer. We looked him up. He died in 1528, so you know the engraving was old. It was of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It wasn't very large, about the size of a sheet of notebook paper, but it had a frame just like the one on your photograph of that fishing boat Sandra D. wrecked on a beach—you know, the one in the Whaling Museum that I like so much? That was really nice of you, donating that one to them. The frame must've cost you a pretty penny alone. Whenever we take visitors there, I always—"

  "Ma."

  "Yes, yes. Anyway, Uncle Henry's will specifically said that we weren't supposed to—let me just get this right—'divulge ownership.' We never did understand why. The lawyer couldn't tell us, and if I'm not mistaken, he wasn't supposed to divulge anything, either. I don't know if he ever did or not. I think he's dead now. We were confused by the whole thing, almost frightened. When we got the engraving home, we didn't know what to do with it. So we hid it in the attic."

  "The attic!"

  "Well, where did you expect
me to keep it? The people in it were practically naked. A couple of leaves—that was it!"

  "Ma, they're Adam and Eve. Clothes weren't invented yet."

  "I don't care who they are. How would that look, hanging something like that on the wall next to Our Lady? The attic is where we put it, and the attic is where it stayed."

  In a softer voice she added, "In his will, Uncle Henry referred to the engraving as our 'nest egg.' That's what we thought it was, all these years."

  Sam's knowledge of the sixteenth century artist was marginal, but he knew enough to realize that an engraving by Durer would be worth a considerable sum. He was afraid to pose the next question.

  "Where is it now?"

  His father grimaced and said, "There's your sixty-four thousand dollar question."

  "We were watching Antiques Roadshow," Millie went on. "You ever see it? I suppose not; you're not very big on television. My word, the money the stuff in your attic can be worth! They had this chair—it looked like a piece of junk and yet they said it might fetch thirty thousand dollars! You couldn't very well sit on it; it wouldn't hold a ten-pound puppy."

  When his mother felt self-conscious, she babbled. Sam knew that, and yet it was all he could do not to scream "Eden! For God's sake, tell me about Eden!"

  Instead he made himself say calmly, "So you saw—something? On the Antiques Roadshow?"

  "They had another engraving by this same man Durer," his mother said. She covered her face with her hands and said in a muffled voice, "And it was worth more than a hundred thousand dollars."

  That should have been good news to them. Great news. Oh, damn. Oh, hell.

  "What did Eden do with it?" Sam asked in a low and dangerous voice.

  His mother shook her head. "We don't know. We don't know. Your pa and I decided it was a sign, Eden popping in like that right after the Roadshow. We were still so excited. We told her all about it and showed her our Durer. We told her that we were faithful to Uncle Henry's wishes all these years, but that we surely needed to cash in our nest egg now if ever we did. We told her how amazed we were that it might be so valuable, but Eden wasn't surprised at all. She was so nice, so helpful ... she knows a lot about art, you know. She's a very smart woman."

  Sam's nod was grim. "I never said otherwise."

  "She offered to take the engraving to New York and have it appraised," Millie continued, wincing from the stress of telling her tale. "She said she knew people. Oh, we said, she shouldn't go to the trouble. We said, maybe Sam would know someone, too. After all, he's a professional photographer, we said. She said, 'If you tell Sam about the Durer, he's bound to insist that you hold on to it and take money from him instead.' Well, we couldn't argue with that, could we?"

  "When did she take it?"

  "Three weeks ago."

  "Three weeks—? And you're first telling me now? This is unbelievable," Sam moaned. "Damn." He slammed his hand on the tabletop and stood up so suddenly that the chair fell over backward on the shag carpeting.

  "Oh, you're not going to get the way you get, are you, Sam? Oh, please don't. This is hard enough—"

  "Unbelievable!" Sam paced the small room in self-absorbed fury. Of all the low-life scams that Eden had pulled, this had to be the lowest. Eden could spot a mark a mile away, and his parents were as naive and trusting as they came.

  Which didn't go far to explain how he, the savvy and cynical Sam Steadman, could have fallen for her like a clown with big feet. What a fool he'd been! Fool, fool, asshole fool! If it hadn't been for him, his parents wouldn't be sitting at their dining room table in a state of financial terror.

  Fool!

  He got himself under control enough to ask, "How long had she planned the appraisal to take?"

  His mother shrugged. "She said she'd be in touch."

  "You don't have an address or phone number, of course."

  Both parents shook their heads. Millie said softly, "The number on the card she gave us isn't in service."

  "Do you have any idea where she's been living? City? State? Country, for chrissake?" He couldn't help it; anger was flowing like hot lava from him, scorching his bystander parents in the process.

  Millie bowed her head and murmured, "Jim remembers something about Miami. I thought she said Memphis. Is that any help?"

  Sam sighed. "What about her car? What was she driving? Where were the plates from?"

  "Jim didn't walk outside at the end, but her car was blue. It had a big carpeted trunk, I know that," said Millie. "I was nervous about the engraving getting damaged or stolen, but it looked real safe there."

  Not pausing to observe the irony, Sam asked, "Did you see any evidence of luggage in her car? Trunks, suitcases, clothes on hangers?"

  "No, not r—oh, wait. There was a duffel bag on the back seat. You know, like a sailor would use? I thought it looked a little sporty for Eden, because she's so very feminine. Maybe it belonged to someone else."

  Just what we need; an accomplice. Sam said, "Did Eden allude to anyone else? Maybe a man she's seeing?"

  Surprising, how it smarted to ask that.

  His mother said, "No. She didn't talk about anyone. We were commenting on that afterward. We think maybe she still has feelings .... Well, anyway. No."

  "Okay, apparently we're at a dead end, then," Sam decided, disgusted by the realization.

  Amazingly, his mother seemed determined to believe the best instead of facing the worst. "It's probably taking longer than she thought to get the appraisal, that's all. She said it was a very important piece of art and that appraisals take a little while, you know. I wouldn't have raised all this hullabaloo at all, except Jim insisted we tell you."

  She threw an accusing look at her husband, who said slowly, plaintively, "One of them mortgage people come by yesterday, Sam. How do the bastards know?"

  "Dad, don't you dare take out a loan from those shysters," said Sam angrily. "Don't you dare. I'll take care of the bills until this gets cleared up."

  "We have enough money," his mother insisted.

  Yeah, right.

  "I'd like to stay here tonight," he said, surprising his parents. "Maybe you'll remember something."

  Sam's plan was to canvas the neighbors the next morning and question them about Eden's car. The working-class neighborhood was fairly close-knit, full of porch-sitters with easy views through chain-link fences. Maybe someone had been sitting on a stoop and had recognized Eden from the old days; maybe they'd be able to recall a license. It was going to be humiliating, going door to door in search of Eden. Sam dreaded it, and yet he was flat out of any other ideas.

  Until three a.m. That's when he bolted upright in the spindle bed that his father had painted Superman-blue shortly after they had taken him in.

  Phone calls.

  He clung to the possibility until he dropped off to sleep, and in the morning, over waffles and O.J., he said to his parents, "Did Eden make any long-distance phone calls while she was here?"

  His mother, misinterpreting, said, "Well, yes. She would have used her calling card, normally, only there was some kind of problem with it. She said that she'd square up with us after we got the phone bill."

  "All right," he said, making a victory fist. "Now we're getting somewhere." It wasn't like Eden to be so careless; but then, the risk of a call being remembered was relatively small. "Has the bill come in?"

  "Yesterday." Picking up on his enthusiasm, his mother hurried over to the Formica counter and brought the unopened bill to him. "I haven't even—"

  Sam took his knife, still all buttery, and slid it under the flap. Heart hammering, he scanned the toll calls on it. There were half a dozen made to the same number—his mother's sister—and one to Martha's Vineyard.

  Sam punched in the number and reached someone at a gallery called the Flying Horses.

  He hung up. A faint glimmer of a smile, the first in twelve hours or so, hovered at the edges of his lips. He got up from the breakfast table and dropped a kiss on top of his mother's gray ha
ir. "She didn't take off for Germany with it," he said. "That's something, at least."

  Next stop: Martha's Vineyard.

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  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Embers

  Copyright © 1994 by Antoinette Stockenberg

  ISBN: 978-0-9834167-3-9