Three Times a Charm

by Jean Stone

  “Well,” he said at last, “it looks as if both our New Years are more interesting than we thought they’d be.”

  Elaine raised her glass of iced tea. “To love and romance and prosperity and peace.”

  He raised his glass as well. “And to second chances,” he added, “no matter how or when or why they come into our lives.”

  They didn’t know whether or not John Benson was alive or dead. They didn’t know if he’d been kidnapped or killed or if he’d left Irene of his own free will, not hers.

  Jo said the whole thing seemed too painfully close to what she’d gone through with Brian the night that he’d gone off to the men’s room in a restaurant and never returned. One difference, however, Sarah reminded Jo, was that Irene had called for help and Jo had suffered on her own.

  Jo said something about the pot calling the kettle black, and Sarah picked up the faux white fur that she planned to show the Pittsfield couple and tossed it across the room at her. For two women who weren’t sisters, Jo and Sarah had each perfected the same flaw of keeping the world at an emotional distance.

  At three o’clock, with still no further word on John, the Pittsfield couple—Allison and Dave—arrived. Jo and Sarah tried to be gracious and excited, while keeping focused on the clock. Surely Andrew and Elaine would be back any minute. Surely Lily would return from her whatever with Frank. Until then, Sarah showed her designs for the wedding gown in white velvet trimmed in the faux fur. She reviewed her ideas for golden hearts (which Allison said she would prefer in red) and snowy Cupid decorations. Then Jo jotted down the menu—as requested by the bride—of buttered rum and burgers and a heart-shaped, red-frosted cake.

  “And a tent,” Dave said. “A big, white tent, with kerosene heaters if you can get them.” He grinned a wide grin, pleased, perhaps, that he had contributed.

  “I know our wedding might seem common to you,” Allison said, “compared to the glamorous ones you do.” Then she took Dave’s hand and held it with love as yet unspoiled. “But we’re ordinary people. With just ordinary friends.”

  Jo smiled and said that the women of Second Chances were ordinary too, though Sarah wondered if she still qualified with a mother like Laura Carrington.

  As the couple rose to leave at five, their heads filled with details and decisions to be made, the bride-to-be touched the faux fur one last time. “This will be fabulous,” she said. “I’ll feel like a movie star. And we’ll pick the perfect photographer to capture the whole thing forever on video. Then he can make it into a movie we’ll watch when we’re old.”

  It was an offhand comment but went right to Sarah’s soul.

  Movies.

  On video.

  Captured forever.

  Sarah said a fast good-bye to the happy couple, then told Jo to keep her posted on John’s disappearance. Without explanation, she threw on her coat and dashed out the back door.

  Once inside her truck, Sarah said a quick prayer to the spirit of Glisi, asking for more courage than she’d ever known. Then she turned the ignition, clicked the shift to “Drive,” and headed west toward Route 7, toward the strip mall where she’d often brought her son so he could rent Nintendo games and movie DVDs.

  14

  Laura Carrington never thought she would have done it. Over the years, Sutter had become like a son to her—a child she hadn’t raised but had watched grow to a young man, then to an adult. She’d taken selfish pleasure from the ways he managed her endowment to the reservation, had cheered the day his own son was born, and wept with him the day his wife left, and the day his mother, Little Tree, died.

  She’d thought their relationship helped to compensate for the child she’d been forced to give away. He might have been enough if she hadn’t watched the late, late news that night, if she hadn’t seen the silver hair clip holding up that shining hair. If Sutter hadn’t been trying to convince her to do this, to find Sarah, for the past twenty years.

  The truth was, Laura did not seek her out sooner because she did not want to interrupt Sarah’s good life. She did not want to try to undo what had been done, or hurt other people, or ignite a scandal, even though today few people might care. She did not think Sarah would want to bother with her.

  Now, however, none of that seemed important.

  Turning back the black construction-paper pages of an old picture album, she studied the small black-and-white photographs framed by narrow white borders with scalloped edges all around. The corners had been inserted into black paper triangles that she had moistened with a tiny sponge and affixed into the album over four decades ago.

  The subjects of the photos were unvaried:

  Joe Duncan standing by the entrance to an old gold mine.

  Laura standing by the same.

  Joe sitting on the ground under a sequoia, eating a picnic lunch.

  Laura doing the same.

  They were never in the same picture; they’d taken turns snapping each other. No one could have been along to witness their courtship or their love.

  She turned the page, the pages.

  Then she came to a photo of herself in a bathing suit, at the far side of Lake of the Spotted Deer. In the photo, Laura’s pregnancy was apparent. But though Joe had noticed her weight gain, he hadn’t yet known the reason why.

  “All the more of you to love,” he’d teased with his gentle laugh, then added, “But the studio won’t like it.”

  “Good,” she’d answered. “Then they will fire me and we can run away and live happily, happily ever after.”

  With a gentle finger, she touched the belly in the picture.

  Then she turned another page. It was blank and empty, the sheet brittle from unuse. The pages that followed were blank too.

  She stared at the paper. A tear dropped from her eye and splattered on the place where her dreams and life and her world had simply stopped.

  15

  Jo’s grandfather had died twelve, almost thirteen years ago. She had been living in Boston, already a successful public-relations specialist, mature and detached from her childhood home. Yet when her mother phoned to say that he was dead, Jo had crumpled onto her sofa, a weakened lump of sorrow, a little girl again who no longer would go fishing with her much-loved Grandpa Clarke.

  She remembered the pain she’d felt; if John Benson were dead, she didn’t want Cassie to find out from a news anchor on television. She didn’t want the child to face that kind of loss alone with Andrew still in Springfield. If John were only missing, that, too, might make the six o’clock news and probably would frighten Cassie. Jo couldn’t let either of those things happen to Andrew’s daughter. Not when she could be there to help.

  After Sarah was gone, Jo left a message for Lily, telling her what had happened. She dropped Andrew’s cell phone into her purse, then went directly to the cottage where Andrew and Cassie lived. Hopefully she wasn’t too late.

  Cassie was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes.

  “You must be the lady of the house,” Jo said when the girl let her inside.

  “That would be me,” Cassie replied, picking up the potato peeler once again. “Unless you’d like to give it a whirl?”

  There could be some difficulty in Jo and Andrew’s relationship if the dynamics shifted. Which female, Jo or Cassie, would play a larger role in his life? Where would his attentions be dutifully diverted any minute, any hour, any day?

  Jo knew she’d have to act slowly and always be aware of the trepidation there.

  “No thanks,” she said. “I hate to cook after working all day.”

  Cassie smiled and returned to her chore. “My dad’s not home yet,” she said.

  “He went to Springfield with Elaine,” Jo said. “She’s buying all kinds of things for her catering business. Your dad went with her to help.”

  “I know,” Cassie replied, plopping another potato into a pot. “He called from a restaurant where they stopped for lunch. He forgot his cell phone. He’s always doing that.”

  Well, of
course, Jo thought. With or without his cell phone, of course Andrew would have called Cassie to say he might be late. She wondered how long it would take to grasp the inner workings—and figure out the boundaries—of a relationship with someone else’s child.

  Taking the cell phone from her purse, Jo set it on the counter. “It’s one of the reasons I dropped by,” she said. “To return his property.”

  Cassie smiled and rolled her eyes.

  Jo took a step closer to the girl. “Cassie?” she asked. “Have you had the TV on?”

  The girl’s eyes flicked to the clock over the sink. It was a black plastic clock shaped like a cat, with round white eyes that moved back and forth and a pendulum of a tail that swung in synchrony. The hands read five ’til six.

  “I never turn it on until six,” she said. “Dad maintains that before six the news is usually bogus. I guess he’d be the one to know.”

  Jo laughed and hoped the laugh didn’t sound too forced.

  Then Cassie set the pot on the stove and wiped her hands. “We can watch it now, though, if you want. I’ll just get the remote.”

  Cassie moved so fast from the kitchen that Jo didn’t have a chance to react the way she would have wanted. “No!” she snapped, her voice too sharp, too harsh.

  Cassie stopped in the hallway. She turned back to Jo. Her eyes were questioning, her expression doubting.

  Jo shook her head. “Come here,” she said softly. “Please, come sit down with me.”

  The girl drew back. Her shoulders straightened. Her face tightened. She didn’t look as childlike as she had before. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is Dad okay?”

  “Oh, honey, yes,” Jo said. She went to Cassie and put her arm around her. “Your dad is fine.” She knew the fear that flashed in Cassie’s eyes, the kind of fear that had sliced Jo’s heart when her mother said that her father was gone, that he had left them, run away. That he was never going to come back. Jo cleared her throat. “But we received some news today that will upset him, I’m afraid.”

  “Is that the real reason you’re here?”

  “Well, yes. I wanted to be here when he got home.” Jo reasoned that if she were still eleven-almost-twelve, like Cassie, she wouldn’t want to think that a grown-up thought she couldn’t handle grown-up things.

  “But why aren’t you at Second Chances? Isn’t that where he’d go first?” She was a clever girl, Cassie Kennedy. The same way Jo had been.

  “I’m here because I wanted to see you. Because I was afraid you’d heard the news and might not want to be alone.”

  Her small brow wrinkled. Her freckles crunched together. “What news?”

  Jo drew in a breath. “It’s about John Benson, honey. Something has happened and he is…gone.” She used the same word Irene had uttered, because it was the only one she knew was certain.

  “Gone as in away?”

  Her calm demeanor reminded Jo that kids knew how to cushion what they didn’t want to hear. “I don’t know,” Jo said.

  Cassie chewed on her lower lip. “He’s dead?”

  Jo brushed a lock of hair from Cassie’s face. “We don’t know anything for sure, honey. Irene only said that he’s gone. Then we got disconnected.” She did not add that the disconnection might have simply been because Irene hung up.

  Cassie stood there in the hall. Her arms grew limp. Her head nodded. Her lower lip began to quiver.

  Jo drew her closer. “Honey,” she said, “I’m so sorry. But we don’t know the whole truth yet. For all we know he could have gone out for a walk and couldn’t find his way back to the hotel….” When Brian had left, no one but Jo had been around to wait, to wonder at his fate. No one but Jo, because he’d been disappearing in and out of people’s lives for far too many years and Jo was the only one left—not counting his parents or his brother, who couldn’t remember when they’d heard from him.

  “Oh, John’s dead, all right,” Cassie replied. “Why else would he be gone? Unless…maybe he was kidnapped.”

  Kidnapped? Jo had thought—hoped—Brian had been kidnapped way back when. It would have been so much easier to blame someone else for the fact that he was no longer there. “When your dad gets home, maybe he’ll know how we can find out.”

  Cassie nodded again, and then huge pools filled her turquoise eyes, and Jo wished with all her might that she’d not had to do this, that she’d not been the one to bring such upsetting news.

  Sarah positioned herself in front of the television. She sat on one of her favorite woven blankets that she’d brought from California, a vibrantly colored one that depicted the wind among the trees with a sacred fire of seven woods detailed at the center. (Had Sutter’s mother, Little Tree, woven this? she wondered, but could not remember. Should she mention it to him? Not that she would ever speak to him again. Not that she would have a need.) Spilling off the edges of the blanket were a dozen videos that she’d dumped onto the floor.

  The Secret of San Mateo.

  Midnight at Macy’s.

  Lavender and Lace.

  Others, including Gold Dust. All on VHS; apparently Laura Carrington nostalgia had not yet warranted redubbing onto DVD.

  She picked up the tape jacket. Could she really watch Gold Dust? She’d seen a few Laura Carrington films—who hadn’t?—back in her college days, when West Hope was poised for cable and the most exciting entertainment was a dose of the late show. The movies had been mostly thrillers, mysteries that required a sensuous leading lady who, more often than not, met up with an equally sexy man who wanted to help with her problem, but who took a backseat while she resolved things herself.

  Sarah supposed the movies were the primitive attempts to promote women’s liberation.

  Laura’s earlier films had been westerns—good-guy bad-guy, cowboys and Indians, “them versus us,” her father had often kidded. It had been his way of making light of the prejudicial situation. Back then Sarah had no idea how closely the poison arrow struck to home, their home.

  She eyed the video of the film in which Laura and Sarah’s father had supposedly met and fallen so much in love.

  She studied the photo on the front, the image of the movie star staring up at a mountain, a look of longing in her big blue eyes, a thin cotton dress wrapped around her body. Her voluptuous body, Sarah supposed. Tall, but not as slender as Sarah’s. Curvy. Soft. Not angular; not, well, Cherokee.

  At first glance there was nothing the two shared, not the eyes, not the body, not the hair (like Sarah’s, Laura’s hair was abundant, but it was red). Still, there was something in the way she stood, something in the way she held her arms at her sides, as if giving herself over to the mountain before her, as if she were unafraid of life, if not the people in it.

  Could a mother and daughter be recognized by posture?

  DNA, Sarah thought. Of course. Today they could easily put this matter to rest by a few strands of hair or some spit in a cup. Then she’d know the truth once and for all.

  She turned over the video jacket and read the copy on the back.

  Johnnie Landers (Laura Carrington) needs to solve a mystery. Her estranged father has died in a gold-mining accident. But Johnnie—a struggling, refined widow who runs a dry-goods store to support her three young children—has come from San Francisco to the California mountains to stake her father’s claim and, more importantly, to find out if the accident had been murder instead. Also starring Rick Daniels as Blake Ashworth, the wealthy, British-bred rancher determined to win Johnnie’s heart; and Davis Peterson as Bounty McGee, the bungling guide hired by Ashworth to help him traverse the wilderness and keep track of Johnnie.

  Sarah recognized the irony that Johnnie Landers’s fictitious father had been killed in a gold-mining accident when Sarah’s real father had too, though it had been sixteen years later.

  She tossed down Gold Dust. She’d watch that one later, maybe after the others. Then she took a deep breath, said, “Here goes,” to Elton, picked up The Secret of San Mateo, and shoved it into the machi
ne, grateful that she’d kept the old VCR when Jason had tried to convince her to ditch it once they’d bought the DVD player.

  Men, she thought, sometimes were so stupid.

  She tucked the old, comfortable blanket warmly around her legs, clicked on the remote, and waited for the titles to appear.

  16

  Where were you when you heard blah blah blah? Andrew supposed that later he might wonder why it was that human beings became so fixated on shocking moments, why it was that tragedy became so easily branded into memory. Why it was that he, for one, knew so clearly where he was when he heard John Lennon had been shot, the Challenger had exploded, the Twin Towers had been hit; how it was that he knew those things so readily yet he could so easily forget to bring his cell phone with him when he went anywhere.

  He wasn’t sure what John Lennon had to do with cell phones, the former perhaps not having lived long enough to enjoy the latter. Later he’d make time to sort through those thoughts. But right now his feet were glued to the hardwood floor in his wonderful cottage, and Cassie was crying and Jo was holding his hand and suggesting he sit down because of the news she’d just told him.

  John Benson was gone.

  Andrew’s mentor.

  Andrew’s friend.

  Andrew’s boss from time to time, depending on where their careers had positioned them.

  John Benson, the man who’d been Andrew’s father when Andrew’s father had not.

  Dead or simply disappeared, the man was gone, and all Andrew could say was, “Oh, Christ,” and know it was one of those moments he always would remember.

  “Please, Andrew, come and sit down,” Jo said for the second or the third or the tenth time. “I’ll get some water.”

  He dismissed her with a wave, a wave that later he might worry had been too abrupt, as if Jo had caused John’s demise, as if she’d been the one at fault.