A Charmed Place (10 page)

"He wouldn't have mentioned that to your mother?"

"Oh," said Maddie, crestfallen. "Yes. In all likelihood."

"My gut tells me it was a person."

Your gut hasn't found out a thing
, she thought with a flash of bitterness.

"What's next, in that case?" she asked him, trying to subdue her frustration. Detective Bailey was a hard-boiled sweetheart of a family man with four kids. He knew more than most what it meant to have a parent ripped away from the hearth.

The detective blew air through his nose and said, "I have a call out to your dad's primary care physician. It's a long shot, but it's conceivable that your father had arranged an appointment at ten in the morning on the sixth that he didn't want any of you to know about."

A terminal illness? It didn't seem possible. "Wouldn't the doctor or his staff have come forward with that information?"

"They might not have made the connection. He would have cautioned them against calling your home, and when he didn't show, they wouldn't have followed up."

She turned the idea over. "At least it would account for the note," she said, nodding her head. It amazed her to realize that she was actually rooting for a scenario in which her father may have had cancer.

She said, "If it's all right with you—I know you don't have the resources to devote to this case anymore—I'm going to try to find out what events were scheduled in and around
Cambridge
at ten o'clock that day."

"If he was planning to be in
Cambridge
," the detective reminded her.

"That's right," she said, taken down another peg in her determination. "We don't even know that." Damn the note!

"Mrs. Regan," the detective said, suddenly earnest, "I want you to know there's not a day goes by that I don't think about this case. I'm always open to new angles, and—"

"Oh, I'm sorry; I have another call," said Maddie, expecting to hear that Tracey was ready for a ride home. "Can you hold?"

But they were done for the moment. The detective hung up and Maddie punched in the new caller. It was Michael, phoning about the note. Had she heard anything?

"You really are psychic," Maddie said, hardly surprised. Michael had always had the peculiar ability to clue in on a subject that interested him. When they were dating, he often picked up the phone just as she was calling his number. She used to interpret it as proof of his love. Now she knew better. It was a trait he possessed, like being double-jointed. It didn't prove love at all.

She told him about the phone call she'd just had, all except her own insistence that her father wasn't having an affair, which was too ludicrous to bother mentioning.

And yet in the next breath, Michael had her wondering again.

He said, "Do you suppose—you're not going to like this suggestion, but—do you suppose your father may have thought he had a sexually transmitted disease?''

"Michael! You knew him. How can you possibly suggest that?"

"No, you're right, you're right. It's a dumb idea." He backtracked into safer territory and tried to put a positive spin on the whole affair.

"
It sounds as if Bailey thinks the note could be perfectly innocent," he said. "Maybe not income tax, but something just as legitimate."

"I didn't get that feeling at all," Maddie argued. "I think he sees a definite connection between the note and the murder of my father."

"There you go again, Maddie," Michael said, irritated now. "Looking for goblins where there are none."

"And there
you
go again, trying to pretend that all's right with the world. All isn't right
, Michael. Take off those rose-
colored glasses, would you for once?" she snapped.

"Maddie, you're out of control on this. I know how hard it is to have an unsolved c
rime lying around like an unex
ploded grenade, but—"

"Someone's here," she said, relieved to hear knocking at the kitchen door. "I have to go."

"Maddie, don't hang up," he pleaded. "It's probably the paper boy or something. I'll wait."

The knocking resumed. "Look, I—oh, all right. Hold on."

She slammed the receiver on the counter and marched over to the big Dutch door, feeling as if they were all walking around with their hands slapped over their ears.

We want to know; we don't want to know, she decided, swinging open the top of the two-part door.

Swinging it open to Daniel Hawke.

Twenty years. She stood there. Twenty years. Her heart lurched violently in her chest and began a wild knocking. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Daniel Hawke. He was there. Close enough to touch. Her eyes stung with tears. She felt a surge of deep, wrenching distress, a pain so deep that it made it hard to breathe. She tried to say something again, and failed.

She tried again.

"Why
...?"

The wonder in his face seemed to mirror her own. It was as if he had no idea why he was standing there. And yet there he was. His brown eyes were as deep, as luminous, as intense as ever she remembered them. It astonished her that she remembered every little thing about his face: the wide, straight eyebrows; the sharply defined, aquiline nose; the broad space above his upper lip just crying out for a mustache; the stubble beneath his lower lip that never seemed to hook up with a razor blade. His cheeks were as hollow, his hair as unruly, as twenty years earlier. Time had left lines, especially around his eyes, and time had left scars: a small nick in the left eyebrow; a ragged line like a thin arrow across his cheekbone, pointing toward the nick.

He was there. Daniel Hawke. He was there.

"Maddie. Hello."

His voice, too, was the same. Deeper, softer, but the same.

"I heard you were in town, Daniel," she said, and immediately she cringed at how inane it sounded; she wanted to sound clever. She tried a smile and cringed at that, too. She knew the smile was crooked and trembly, and she wanted to look beautiful.

Clever and beautiful and young. And she was none of those things.

They both began to say something: he, to explain; she, to query. And then they stopped at the same time, and chuckled the same ghastly, bleak chuckle.

She recovered first. "Yes?" She sounded almost shrill to herself as she said it, as if he were holding a gun aimed at her belly.

He held up a Pyrex measuring cup. "Sugar?" he said, with a loopy, sickly smile. "Do you have any to spare?"

She stared. Whatever it was he had come for—money, jewels, silver, sex, forgiveness—she did not expect it to be sugar.

"I don't understand," she said humbly. Her mind and her heart were in turmoil. It was much worse—the face-to-face meeting was so much worse—than in her most anguished dreams.

"Here, take it," he said, thrusting the cup into her hand. "I don't want the damn thing. I jus
t... I had to
... I didn't know how
... Maddie.
Maddie."

It was that second ' 'Maddie'' that was her undoing. A tear rolled down her cheek. "Why are you here?" she whispered. "Why?"

"Let me in," he said, his voice hoarse with emotion. "Maddie, let me in."

How could she? It was so much worse, so much worse: seeing him again, flogged by the years, lost years, years they'd never get back. And it was worse even than that. Despite the years, he looked so like himself that she was flung violently back to their last meeting. Her head began to ring with the sound of her own furious reproaches, hurled at him like so many javelins.

She remembered them all, every last one of them. Did he?

"We have to talk," he said.

His words brought a startled laugh to her throat. "Don't you think that ship has sailed?"

"If it has, it's gone round the world and come home again," he said with a burning look.

But she stood her ground, refusing—unable—to open the door to him.

He reached over the lower half of the Dutch door and unlocked the door on her side, letting himself in. Maddie watched, mesmerized, as he did it. Dan Hawke: intense, impatient, undisciplined. Dan Hawke: leader of a ragtag band of student radicals. Dan Hawke: bad boy of the campus.

There wasn't a door built that could keep him out.

Now that he had gained access to her kitchen, some of the
fierceness seemed to slide off him. "You look the same," he said. His gaze swept her from head to sandals and came back to rest on her face. "Like the girl next door."

"I
am
the girl next door."

He smiled at that. "I was counting on it when I signed the lease."

She pretended not to understand the implication. "Are you starting a second career in the Coast Guard?"

"No."

"Then a lighthouse is an odd choice of digs."

He gave her a raw look that instantly put her back on her guard. "You know why I'm here, Maddie."

"Actually, I've been wondering for a couple of weeks now," she shot back. Immediately, she wanted to retract the words.

"I know. I should've come over sooner. But you're rarely alone here. People seem to come and go constantly."

She said, "I have friends here. Family here." He wouldn't understand that. He was a lone wolf.

"I'm jealous of every one of them," he admitted.

That surprised her. Once when they were in bed together, he'd said, "You're all I need. Everyone else is clutter."

Except for his sister. He did admit to caring about her. But he claimed to have no use for his parents and no love for his other relations. She wondered whether he still felt that way.

"I can't imagine you being jealous that you're not surrounded by a crowd," she said without smiling. "It was never your style."

"No, that's not what I—" His face took on a sudden, puzzled frown. "Did you know your phone's off the hook?" he said, pointing to the counter.

Maddie whirled around. "Oh, my God." She snatched up the receiver and said, "Hello?"

She was amazed to see that her ex-husband was still on the line. "Who're you talking to, for God's sake?" he demanded to know.

Without thinking, she answered, "Dan Hawke."

There was a pause, and then Michael said, "Hawke? What the hell is he doing there?"

"He's
staying in
Sandy
Point
for the summer," she said, turning away from Dan
Hawke
in a laughable attempt at privacy. "It was in Trixie's newsletter."

"Who reads Trixie's newsletter? What's he doing in your house?"

She said grimly, "
He came to borrow a cup of sugar, Michael." In a lower, grimmer voice she said, "Is it really any of your business?"

"Yes, it's my business! I don't want that bastard near my family."

"Michael, this is not the time!"

But Michael didn't agree. "Jesus, Maddie! I don't care if he's there selling Girl Scout cookies. The guy brought an unbelievable amount of pain down on your father, on all of you. How can you—? Let me talk to him. Put him on the phone."

"No, I won't do that. Good-bye, Michael."

"Wait, wait—where's he staying?" Michael got in.

"In the lighthouse," she answered grudgingly.

"The lighthouse! That's ballsy."

"If you say so. I really have to get off the phone. Tracey should've called by now."

"You have call waiting, Maddie. What's the problem?"

"Michael, please. Good-bye." She hung up, aware that once again she'd let Michael go too far, too long. All for Tracey's sake.

She was about to explain to Dan that she was expecting a call when the call she was expecting came mercifully through. Maddie took it while a bemused Dan Hawke, arms folded across his chest, leaned back on the Formica counter and waited patiently for her to finish.

She hung up and turned to him, grateful for the chance to cut and run. "I'm sorry. I have to pick my daughter up from the Bowl-a-rama," she said.

He broke into a grin. "The Bowl-a-rama! Is that joint still there?"

"It's candlepin now," Maddie said. She wanted to wipe the grin off his face; it was bowling her over.

"I remember knocking off from work with a couple of the guys and playing a few lanes while we had a beer or two. It was fairly seedy then. Have they added ferns and made it all gentrified? Like Annie's?"

"I'd forgotten," she said, hurled back in time again. "Annie's used to be Anthony's Pizza back then. They had a great onion pizza; they—"

She brought herself up short. The one thing she did not want to do was to stroll down memory lane with him. It wasn't enough to peek behind the velvet curtains when you did that. You had to turn the rocks over, too. And she didn't want to look at dark things scurrying. Not now. Not ever. She had no more room for any more horror.

"I'm sorry," she said, looking away from him. She turned the cowardly act into a scan of the kitchen for her handbag. "I really have to go."