by Susan Wiggs
Cameron pocketed the token. They called both Derek and Crystal again and got no answer. Cameron drank a slug of milk straight from the carton, then offered some to Sean, who declined.
He didn’t like the unfamiliar feeling in his gut. It was a cold, hard squeeze, brief and intense, like a fist of ice. He said nothing to Cameron. No point in worrying the kid.
He took a stroll through the downstairs, checking out the house. This had been Derek’s world for more than a decade. It seemed strange that Sean had never been here. He’d been too busy chasing prize money and easy women half a world away, and hadn’t bothered to come back even for a visit. There was a big living room and a long hallway where, Sean imagined, Derek had obsessively practiced his putts. The dining room had a table and chairs and a tall glass cabinet that was practically empty, probably because it had once held Derek’s favorite trophies. Sean shook his head, thinking about his brother, feeling love and admiration and envy all in the same heavy wave.
“You don’t have to stay,” Cameron told him. “I can handle the girls.”
“That makes one of us, then,” Sean said. “I’ll stick around until we figure out where your mother went.”
Darkness crept down and shadows crowded into the corners of the large, empty rooms. Sean switched on a couple of lamps. The tense quiet in the house was broken when Cameron turned on the radio, tuning it to a hip-hop station.
A few minutes later, a car pulled up, headlights swishing across the living room walls. Sean’s gut turned watery with relief. Crystal might not be thrilled to see him, but that was too damned bad. He had a few choice words for her.
His relief evaporated when he saw that the visitor was Jane Coombs, lugging a red-faced Ashley and an overstuffed diaper bag. Sean liked Derek’s girlfriend well enough, he supposed, though he barely knew her. At the moment she wasn’t looking to be liked. She had that tight-lipped don’t-mess-with-me expression people wore when their last nerve was about to snap.
“Oh, hi, Sean,” she said, clearly surprised to see him. “I can’t believe Crystal stood up her own kid like this. Anyway, here you go.” She dumped the baby into his arms. The two-year-old regarded him with apprehension.
“Have you heard from Derek?” Sean asked, shifting the baby awkwardly.
“Not a word. We must’ve all got our signals crossed. Listen, I’m grotesquely late,” Jane continued, “so I need to hurry.” Spying Cameron, she said, “Come and get the car seat, will you? God, thanks, you’re a lifesaver.”
When Ashley saw her brother, she squealed with delight and reached for him. “Cam! Cam!”
“Yeah, I’ll be right back,” he said, and followed Jane out to her car.
When the baby realized he was walking away, she arched her back and let out a wail that penetrated like an armor piercing bullet.
“Hey, now,” said Sean, his chest filling up with panic. “It’ll be all right. He’s coming back.”
She thrashed her head from side to side and cried harder. Her tiny fists alternately clutched Sean’s shirt and pummeled him. He was reminded of the creature in Alien popping from the stomach of an unsuspecting man. What the hell was it with babies? he wondered feverishly. They were like another life form to him, a dangerous and sinister one at that. She was loud and smelled funky, too. He suspected Jane, in all her self-important rush, had not bothered to check the kid’s diaper.
It felt like an eternity before Cameron returned with the car seat. The second Ashley spotted him, she quit yelling and lurched toward him, nearly leaping out of Sean’s arms. He clutched the writhing little body to keep her from falling, then quickly handed her over. “I don’t think she likes me.”
“Naw, she’s just cranky. Probably tired and hungry, aren’t you, sugar bear?” Cameron jiggled her on his hip. “I’ll go get her something to eat.”
“’Nana. Want a ’nana,” Ashley chortled good-naturedly as he set her down and led her into the kitchen. In a heartbeat, she’d turned from the Tasmanian Devil into an angel. How did she do that so quickly?
A moment later, Charlie came barreling in through the front door, a towheaded dynamo.
“Uncle Sean!”
He caught her up in his arms. Her wiry limbs felt surprisingly strong, and something—her hair or skin—had a bubblegum smell. This was more his speed, a niece who actually liked him. “Hey, short stuff. How you doing?”
“I’m starving to death,” she said, clutching her stomach and reeling in his arms. “Where’s Mom?”
He set her down carefully, keeping his hands on her shoulders. “I’m going to be staying with you until your mom gets back.”
She gave him a look of skepticism, narrowing her eyes and twirling one pigtail with her finger. “Really?”
“Yeah. You got a problem with that?”
“Maybe I do.” She yelled with delight as he chased her to the kitchen.
There, the baby was happily cramming a chunk of banana into her mouth. Charlie helped herself to one. “Did you know monkeys peel bananas like this, from the bottom up?” She demonstrated.
“I guess that makes you a monkey.”
“I wish I was a monkey,” Charlie said.
“You look like one,” Cameron said.
Charlie stuck her tongue out at him.
“Monkey,” Ashley echoed around a mouthful of banana.
“Why do you wish you were a monkey?” asked Sean.
“Then I wouldn’t have to go to yucky, sucky school.”
“Sucky,” Ashley said.
Sean looked at Cameron. “Is she allowed to say that?”
“Probably not.”
Sean turned to Charlie. “Don’t say sucky.”
“Okay.” Charlie bit into her banana.
“Sucky,” Ashley said again.
“I’ll be right back.” Sean hurried out of the kitchen and went to the phone in the front hall. He picked up the handset and glared at it. What the hell was going on? This was starting to be truly…sucky. He wondered how long he should wait before getting seriously worried.
With a scowl, he dialed Derek’s cell phone. Derek always answered his phone, always checked his messages. When the voice mail clicked on, Sean said, “Hey, bro, it’s me. I’m here with your kids at Crystal’s house, and she’s not home. What’s going on? Call me.” He found Crystal’s number by the phone, got her voice mail and left a similar message. He wished, just briefly, that he knew her better. He wished he knew if she was the sort of woman who would temporarily forget her kids.
Now what? he wondered. He tried Maura. He didn’t know why. His girlfriend barely knew Derek and had never met Crystal and the kids. The people in his life didn’t know one another. His connections with family were disparate and shallow, something that had never occurred to him until now.
“Dr. Riley,” she answered with crisp efficiency. A fourth-year medical student, she was working at Portland’s Legacy West Hospital this year.
“Hey, Doc, it’s me.”
“Sean!” A smile brightened her voice. “What’s up?”
“I’m not sure. I’m with my brother Derek’s kids. There was some mix-up and their parents are MIA.”
“So call them and—”
“I can’t get hold of either one of them.”
“Well, then…look, I’m in the middle of rounds. And I’m staying in the city for a seminar, did I tell you that? Can I call you in a few?”
“Sure, whenever. Bye.” He had no idea what he expected her to do. She didn’t even know these kids. This sure as hell wasn’t her problem.
Ashley was yelling and banging something in the kitchen. Cameron had turned the radio up loud again.
Sean hit the caller ID button on the phone and looked at the display. The first came up Private, the second was “Coombs, Jane.” The next one was “Robinson, Lily.”
The schoolmarm, he thought. There was something vaguely familiar about the name. Maybe he’d met her before, though he doubted it. He tended not to hang out with schoolmarms, but
maybe that was about to change.
“Help me out here, Miss Robinson,” he muttered as he dialed the number.
chapter 7
Friday
7:30 p.m.
Lily sighed with contentment and snuggled down into her favorite overstuffed chair. There was a large bowl of popcorn and a glass of red wine on the table beside her. On the coffee table in front of her, a map of Italy lay spread out with the sinuous route of the Sorrentine Peninsula highlighted in yellow. The names of the towns, which she’d circled in red, came from story and legend—Positano, Amalfi, Ravello, Vietri Sul Mare.
Two more months, she thought. Then summer would be here and she’d go jetting off on an adventure she’d been dreaming about for half a year. She’d be all by herself, gloriously, blissfully alone.
Her colleagues at school thought it odd that she loved to travel solo, but for Lily, making her own way and answering to no one were her favorite parts of the adventure. Her annual summer trip was hugely important to her. It always had been. Travel gave her balance and perspective and made her feel like a different person. It occurred to her to wonder why she would want to be a different person, but she didn’t think too hard about that.
She loved seeing new places and making new friends. Crystal always asked her what was wrong with the old ones. Nothing, Lily thought, except that sometimes they made you do exhausting emotional work. Lily was good at a lot of things, but not at nurturing the deep, sometimes painful bonds of true intimacy. Life simply hadn’t prepared her for that. She could understand the heart of a child, could find ways to inspire and teach, but she’d never been capable of taking a headlong plunge into lifelong commitment. Some people, she had long ago decided, were not cut out for the dizzying, dangerous adventure of loving someone until it hurt.
That didn’t mean she was immune to the occasional pang of yearning. Maybe she’d even have a romantic fling this summer. A flirtation, free of complications and commitments. It was supposed to be easy to do in Italy. At the end of summer, she would return to Comfort refreshed and ready to greet a new crop of students.
This, the cycle of school year and summer, was the rhythm of her life, and it made perfect sense to her. She had only to look at her own family to know she was right. Following a tragedy that was both shrouded in mystery and publicly recorded, her parents had spent their entire marriage making each other miserable. They were still at it to this day.
Lily had taken the lesson to heart and plotted out her life carefully. Her younger sister, Violet, had taken the opposite route, opting for an early marriage and two kids, a husband who earned too little money and a large rental house in Tigard they couldn’t afford.
By comparison, Lily had a job she loved, a small but comfortable place of her own and the freedom to do as she pleased. She meant to keep her life this way, quiet and safe.
You’re all alone, said an inner voice.
She ignored the voice, which sounded remarkably like Crystal, and sipped her wine as she read an article about a ceramics shop in Ravello where Hillary Clinton and Dustin Hoffman ordered their dishes. After a while, she set aside the map and glanced at the clock. Her usual Friday night routine was a movie at the Echo Ridge Pavilion, but the rain had started up again, and she didn’t feel like going out.
A guilty pleasure video, then, she thought, perusing her DVD collection. That was another advantage to being a free agent. If she had a man in her life, she probably wouldn’t be choosing something like Steel Magnolias or Two Moon Junction. To her knowledge, no man in history had ever willingly sat through Sense and Sensibility.
She narrowed her choices down to Under the Tuscan Sun, which would get her in the mood for Italy, and Bull Durham, about a sexually liberated schoolteacher getting it on with Kevin Costner in his prime. She thought about his famous speech about kisses that last for three weeks, and the decision was made.
As she was watching the opening credits, the phone rang. “Great timing,” she muttered, but stopped the disc and went to get the phone. Crystal, probably, calling to talk about Charlie.
Just the thought brought a heaviness to Lily’s heart. Ordinarily, school and personal matters were kept strictly separate, but in this case, they intersected. Her best friend, and her best friend’s precious daughter.
It seemed to amuse Charlie that she knew her teacher outside of school. The little girl usually got a secret smile on her face when she called Lily “Miss Robinson,” but she never took advantage of her intimate knowledge of her teacher’s personal life. In school, Charlie tried not to draw attention to herself at all. Which was why this current habit of stealing was so alarming.
“Hello?”
“Uh, yeah. Is this Miss Robinson?” The male voice was deep and strong, completely unfamiliar.
“I’m afraid I don’t accept solicitation calls,” she said crisply, and started to put down the phone.
“I’m not—wait. This is about Crystal Holloway.”
Lily frowned and cradled the receiver against her cheek. Was Crystal seeing someone? Last time they talked about it, Crystal said she was swearing off men once and for all. “I blame men for all my troubles,” she’d said dramatically, not long ago.
“Don’t you mean one man specifically?” Lily had asked.
“No, actually.” Crystal hadn’t elaborated.
“Who is this?” Lily asked the caller.
“Sean Maguire. I’m Charlie’s uncle.”
Ah, yes, Lily thought. The fabled Uncle Sean, one of Charlie’s favorite topics for show-and-tell. Since he’d moved back to town, Charlie had related several overly long stories about him, but the main point always got lost in translation. Hero worship was usually the topic.
According to Crystal, Sean was cut from the same cloth as Derek, “only younger.”
Lily had the vaguest memories of him from the Holloways’ wedding. He had reminded her of Brad Pitt in his first movie, but that only made her dislike him more. “Never trust a pretty man,” Crystal had once told her.
“Hello?” His smooth, somewhat disturbing voice intruded on her thoughts.
“Mr. Maguire,” Lily said. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m not exactly sure.” There was a muffled sound, as though he was intimately cupping his hand around the mouthpiece. “I’m here at Crystal’s house, watching her kids. She’s not home yet.”
“I see.” What a loser, she thought. Couldn’t look after his own flesh and blood without calling for help. “And how can I help you?” she asked.
“I figured you might know where she is.” Tension crackled in his voice.
“Well, I don’t,” Lily said. “You should call her cell phone. I can give you her number, or you can get it from the kids—”
“I’ve been trying her cell phone all evening,” he broke in. “She doesn’t answer. Derek doesn’t answer his, either.”
Lily’s grip tightened on the receiver. She frowned, causing her glasses to inch down her nose. “That’s not like either of them.” With three kids and two households, both Crystal and Derek were vigilant about making sure they could be reached at all times. They had tormented each other through separation and divorce, but to their credit, they’d tried to shield the kids from the worst of it.
“I agree,” said the stranger.
“When was the last time you were in touch with them?”
“As near as I can tell, you were the last one to speak with them,” he said, and Lily wondered if she detected a hint of accusation in his voice. “Crystal forgot to pick up Cameron from the golf course and Charlie from her friend’s house. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
Now the phone felt damp and slick in Lily’s hand. “No. I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I see. Well, then.” He made an impatient sound, clearly about to hang up. “Thanks, I guess.”
Lily flashed on the notion of hanging up and going back to her movie. Finishing her wine and reading up on the Amalfi Coast. Now, however, that was no longer a possibilit
y. She would simply worry about Crystal and the kids all night.
“Why did you call me, Mr. Maguire?” she asked.
“I heard your message on the answering machine, so I figured you might know something.”
She wondered what Crystal would think of her ex-brother-in-law, in her home, listening to her messages. “Well, I don’t know where she is. Sorry.”
“All right. Just thought I’d ask. I have a night job, and I figured—never mind. I’ll call in and let them know I can’t make it.”
“Mr. Maguire—” Lily broke off when she realized he’d hung up. “Nice,” she muttered, setting down the phone. She paced back and forth, trying to decide what to do. A few minutes ago, this was her living room, her refuge, a cozy place filled with books and one shelf of framed photographs. A favorite shot of her and Crystal, laughing on the beach in front of Haystack Rock, caught her eye. Something was the matter, Lily knew it in her heart.
As she grabbed her purse and rummaged for her keys, she glanced in the hall tree mirror. “Nice,” she said again with an even more sarcastic inflection.
She was dressed for DVD night in heather-gray yoga pants and an oversize hockey jersey, which was the only thing of value left behind by Trent Atkins of the Portland Trailblazers. He hadn’t been a serious boyfriend, just someone she’d gone out with a few times. She couldn’t remember why a basketball player was in possession of a hockey jersey and decided she didn’t care.
She wore no makeup and her brown hair was caught back in a scrunchy. So what? she thought, pushing her feet into a pair of red rubber gardening clogs and donning a rain hat, thus completing the look. “Early frump” might be a good term for it.
Like that mattered, she thought, grabbing her raincoat and dashing out the door.
chapter 8
Friday
7:40 p.m.
Sean Maguire wasn’t pretty anymore, Lily observed the moment she opened the door. He was utterly, undeservedly, unjustly devastating. He was what the girls at school liked to call the whole package, in perfectly faded jeans that hugged his body, a golf shirt with the Echo Ridge logo, a lock of hair falling negligently over his brow and contrasting with the piercing blue of his eyes, a five o’clock shadow outlining the strong lines of his facial structure. He had a mouth that made her think about Kevin Costner’s Bull Durham speech, but at the moment, Maguire wasn’t smiling.
