A Charmed Place (32 page)

"I know you're okay with Joan," Maddie said, slipping out of his arms and getting him a beer. "Is it Norah who bugs you?"

He accepted the can from her and popped the lid. "She assumes," he said with a shrug.

Maddie laughed and said, "Still your same old sociable self, I see. I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I found Norah waiting in your bedroom right before the fireworks. She was wearing a little—a very little—red dress and I think she had plans that involved bedposts."

Again he shrugged. "As I said: she assumes."

Maddie slipped her arms around his waist and snuggled close. "I can't believe this," she murmured, inhaling the scent of him. "I can't believe you're really, really mine."

Dan put the beer on the counter and wrapped his arms around her. He cradled the back of her head, rubbing it absently, tenderly, as he presse
d her cl
ose and kissed the top of her hair. "Believe it, Maddie," he said. "Yours, and no other's."

It was heaven, being held by him and with the echo of his promise floating through her head. Maddie had no desire for anything else, anyone else, just then. She sighed heavily and tried to lock the moment in her memory, because she knew that when she was old and at the end of her span, this would be a remembrance she'd return to again and again, and again. Her heart welled up from this new, profoundly deep awareness. "I love you, Daniel Hawke," she whispered. "I truly do."

"Then be my wife," he said, tipping her chin upward. "Because without you, I can't, anymore. Maddie, be my wife."

"Dan
.
..."

When first they'd been together, neither had ever spoken of marriage. It wasn't cool; Dan had big plans; she had vague fears. And then without warning came the protest crisis and they found themselves being swept downstream on the rapids of trauma, ending up on opposite shores. It took two decades for him to find her again. But he had. Miracles did happen.

"Yes," she said. "Yes."

Could they be happy? Would the Fates allow it? Would her family? Maddie had no answer to those questions, so she simply swept them from her mind.

"I have no ring," he whispered, kissing the finger that should've been wearing one now.

She smiled and said, "I can't imagine you in a jewelry store. You've probably never been in one in your life."

"Sad but true. We'll go together."

She knew that there would be no mother's trinket or grandmother's gold wedding band to pass down. When she'd asked him about his family, he'd simply said, "Gone. A while ago."

Had he tried to find them? Yes, he'd told her. But he'd been too late.

A new ring, then, for an old love. It was oddly fitting.

He kissed her softly, sealing his pledge, and then let out a baffled laugh. "I'm new at this. How do we make our intentions known? Wedding banns? Town crier?"

"Who needs a town crier? We've got Lillian."

"Ah, the countess. I forgot." Smiling, he let his arms fall lower and caught Maddie under the curve of her buttocks, pulling her closer to him. "How's this for an inspired thought? We spend the night at the lighthouse," he suggested with a look she remembered well.

"That's almost a perfect idea," she answered, "except
..."

She explained her nervousness over Claire's condition and Dan agreed immediately that leaving her would not be wise. He added, "I'll bring up the boxes myself while I'm here. Maybe by then your two pals will have come and gone and I'll be able to sneak into your room. You may recall that I'm pretty good at that."

"The sorority house! Oh, Dan—we were so
young,"
she said, astonished that they weren't still.

"Young, shmung. You're much more beautiful now."

"Stop," she said, blushing. "Before you go completely over the top."

"I mean it." He bent his head in a playful lunge for her throat. "I vant you," he said in his best vampire voice, backing her against the refrigerator. "And when we finally do manage to get into a bed—wherever the hell it is—I'm going to lick you until you're a whimpering puddle of lust."

Maddie arched her neck, exposing it to him. "Go on, I dare you."

"That's not what I—well, okay," he said, chuckling, and took her up on her dare, alternately nibbling and licking her neck, and, in between, muttering cheerful thoughts about belfries and coffins. The electric surge that initially shot through Maddie dissolved into a series of giggles as she tried to fend him off with little success. They were tangled up like two paper clips when the doorbell rang, ending the comedy of seduction.

"I suppose it was too much to hope that they'd step directly from the cab to her car," Dan said with a sigh as he tucked his T-shirt back into his pants.

"Love me, love my shoe," Maddie told him, yanking his shirt back out again on her way to answer the bell. She felt a little disheveled herself as she opened the door.

Apparently it showed. Joan and Norah took one look at her, and then Norah stuck out her hand and said, "On second thought, I want my cab fare back. Twenty-five bucks, please."

"Put it on my tab," Maddie said, grinning.

Joan was making little hops, trying to see over Maddie's shoulder. "Aren't you going to let us in?"

"I am not." Maddie thought about telling them the news, but the news was still too new; she wanted to savor it alone with Dan. She promised to call them tomorrow and slammed the door as politely as she could in their faces.

She went back to the kitchen, which was empty. Her first thought was that maybe Dan had fled to the lighthouse, but then she noticed the basement light on. She found him at the workbench, where he'd piled half a dozen boxes of her father's books and papers and had begun the process of going through them.

He looked up as she turned the corner on the wood stairs. "What color was it?
Burgundy
, you said? What size?"

From vampire lover to Sherlock Holmes in two minutes flat: the transformation took her by surprise. Immediately she fell in with his more somber mood. "I'd say five by eight. It was bound in flat plastic spirals, I think. Old, but not that old. The police went through my dad's study, and then I kept an eye out for it as I packed all this away. I don't see how we could've missed it."

"Did you look behind the drawers of his desk? Behind the bookcases in his study?"

"
We had to take out the drawers to move the desk, but no, not behind the bookcases."

He nodded absently as he continued searching quickly through the magazines, obviously not finding anything beyond tightly packed periodicals. "Your father could've folded a magazine closed over the address book and then put it away," he speculated, but he didn't sound hopeful.

"I'll look," she said. "You stack."

"Right."

Dan brought down a high counter stool from the kitchen for Maddie and fed her a steady supply of boxes as she forced herself, one more time, to rummage through the remains of her father's intellectual life. When Dan wasn't moving and packing, he searched other boxes of odds and ends from the study, not necessarily for the address book.

After an hour or so, Maddie took a break to check on Claire, sleeping peacefully, and then brewed some coffee for Dan and her. They sipped as they searched, speaking in half sentences and unfinished phrases, the way they used to, without having to explain their thoughts in detail. The basement—unfinished, poorly lit, dusty and cluttered—made it easier to focus on the job at hand. It was not the place to think thoughts of love or to give in to melancholy musings. It was a place, simply, in which to get the job done and then get out.

Dan was on his last box when he said, "Huh!" and held up a covered plastic tray filled with floppy disks. "Someone has a computer?"

"Oh, that," Maddie said, looking up. "Does the label say 'backup' ?'' Da
n nodded, and she explained. "
The police took the original disks and my dad's PC and then read the disks, looking for evidence. I don't know who actually did it; apparently one of the homicide detectives is a computer geek. They didn't find anything incriminating, so they gave it all back to my mother. My dad must've left the backup disks here the summer before."

"I have a laptop," Dan said. "Mind if I run through some of these?"

"Why should I mind?" she asked, yawning. Dan had been reading freely from her father's longhand work all evening.

He shrugged and said, "It could be awkward to find, say, a diary of his most secret thoughts."

"Dan—my dad had no secrets," she said firmly. "He was aboveboard and blunt to a fault. It used to make my mother crazy; she's no big fan of letting it all hang out."

"Now you tell me," Dan said with a wry grin. He stood up and stretched, bumping his fist into the joists above his head. "Well, I'll go check behind those bookcases now—"

"Oh, no-o-o," Maddie said, slumping forward melodramatically. "Can't that one wait until morning? We've been
so
good."

Dan walked over to her and slid his hands under the back of her hair, rubbing his thumbs into the base of her neck and drawing away some of the tightness that had pooled there. Maddie sighed and let her eyelids droop down, shutting out the dreary light overhead. She might have been lulled into sleep where she sat if it weren't for the sound of a car pulling into the drive alongside the basement window.

"That's George's Acura," she said, snapping to attention. "What's he doing here?"

"Maybe Claire called him after all," Dan suggested.

It was too late—she was too tired—for another confrontation. She considered throwing a tarp over Dan, but he saw the panic in her eyes and warned her off with a look. "Steady, girl. You can do this."

He was too calm by half. She didn't like it when he was too calm by half. It meant he was prepared to push back.

"Let's go upstairs!" she said, sliding off her stool. Anything to get Dan closer to an exit.

"He knows we're down here," Dan said, motioning her to stay where she was. "We're not breaking any laws."

"Technically? I'm not so sure. My father's stuff all belongs to my mother, after all."

Laws were not uppermost in Maddie's mind, in any case. Uppermost was the memory of George and Dan rolling around on a courtroom floor. It was the last spontaneous thing she'd ever seen George do, proof that his feelings ran bitter and deep. But Dan wasn't in handcuffs now, and there were no bailiffs to separate them. And in the meantime, what was all around them? Tools. Weapons, pure and simple—every last hammer and wrench on the pegboard.

Her mind was still picking through bloody scenarios as George descended to the basement. He saw Maddie, standing at the foot of the stairs and poised for flight. And he saw Dan, leaning back on the workbench with his arms folded across his chest.

He addressed his sister first. "You're getting pretty nervy, don't you think?"

Maddie decided to take
it as a compliment and said, "
Why, thank you, George. I have to work at it."

He's wearing his Armani, she thought. He won't risk ripping it. Nerves were one thing, a
two-
thousand dollar suit another.

George turned his surprisingly steely-eyed gaze on Dan. "Would you mind telling me what you're doing, poking through my father's effects?"

Dan's voice slowed to a streetwise drawl. "I reckon you've summed it up nicely."

"Let me rephrase, then," George said in lawyerly tones. "Why are you poking through my father's effects?"

Irritated, Maddie said, "We're looking for clues, George, what do you think? That this is our idea of a hot date?"

He resented their ganging up on him; she could see it in the way his cheeks reddened and his jaw clamped shut. Poor George. His grandstanding days were definitely behind him. He was thicker in the middle, thinner on the top, richer all around. He was going to be a father soon. He was too successful to make a fool of himself; Maddie could see that now.

But that didn't mean he couldn't be huffy.

"I'd like you to leave now," he said, like a librarian ejecting the high school quarterback from the reading room. He all but pointed up the stairs.

Dan smiled and shoved himself away from the workbench with a lazy gesture, his dark eyes glinting with dangerous amusement. Maddie stepped back, giving him room. Dan's foot was on the bottom tread when he stopped and turned to say something to her.

George wasn't expecting it; he flinched, as if he were about to be hit, and both of them saw it. It was more humiliating for him than taking an actual punch.

Dan pretended to pretend he didn't notice. "You'll take care of it, then?" he asked Maddie.

She nodded, clueless, and then she realized he was referring to the box of disks. "First thing tomorrow," she promised. "Good night," she added with irrepressible cheer. They were going to be married. Married!

"Good night, Maddie
... George," said Dan pleasantly. He ascended the steps, worn down in the middle by generations of summer colonists, while Maddie resisted the urge to chase after him and pinch his tush.