A Charmed Place (5 page)

"Well, I'm glad she hasn't put all thoughts of me out in the recycle bin with my photographs."

"No way! She even has some wedding pictures, you know. A bunch! I found them in her room."

"Really. Now that's interesting. Huh."

"Dad?"

"Hmm?"

Tracey's voice dropped even lower. "I really need you to be here lately. I mean, Mom is just coming down on me so hard. The older I get, the more she comes down. Like, I wanted to go to Great Woods to see Jimmy Buffet with a bunch of other kids? They were mostly older, but Juliette's my age. And like, it was Jimmy Buffet, not Nine Inch Nails. Like, it would've been so... so..."

"Innocuous?"

"So innocent. She just won't trust me!"

"Never mind, honey. The next time he has a concert there, I'll take you myself. Promise."

"Yeah, but it won't be the—well, anyway, if it was up to you, I could've gone. Right?"

"Probably."

"Y'know, I bet I
still
wouldn't have a pierced navel if it wasn't for you."

"Hey, no one sees a navel. I say that's your own private business. Your mother overreacted on that one."

"She overreacts on everything, Dad! That's just it!"

"I know. I know."

"It really isn't fair. She's so uptight."

There was a grudge in his voice as he said, "Tell me something I don't know, honey."

"I mean, every time she uses the word 'teenage,' it always has something bad after it. Teenage drinking, teenage drugs,
teenage sex. She's always lecturing. I was taking off nail polish the other day? She starts nagging about not sniffing the remover. Sometimes I think she watches too much television. It's warping her brain."

Michael laughed and said to his daughter, "An interesting point of view."

"And she's been so weird since we got here. First she's in a sucky mood, then a good, then a sucky. I mean, she calls
me
temperamental. Da-ad! Do something!"

"All right. When I see your mother I'll—"

"Oh! Doorbell! It must be Mr. Chaves. I gotta go. Come over now, Dad, please please please!"

She hung up without waiting for his answer, confident, no doubt, that her dad was as good as on his way to Rosedale Cottage.

Michael let his hand ling
er on the receiver of the wall-
mounted phone; he was tempted to call his daughter back and caution her that he had to go through channels.

Channels! It was idiotic to have to ask Maddie for permission to see his own daughter. Four years of that crap had left him doubting his own competence as a father. All that bowing and scraping, just because some goddamned judge had decreed where and when he'd have access to his own child!

He frowned, then stepped around a huge hanging pot of ivy and scanned the cafe's checker-clothed tables. His back had been to the tables while he was talking with Tracey. Now he noticed that Trixie Roiters, Town Busybody, had stopped in for coffee. The woman had ears like an elephant; no way was he going to humiliate himself in front of her by calling Tracey back.

Piss on it
, he thought bitterly
. I can see my own daughter if I want to
. He made up his mind to go straight to the cottage.

By the time he arrived at
Rosedale
, Maddie was there, unloading groceries from her Taurus.

He pulled in behind her on the crunchy drive and emerged from his car with a smile. "So you went with the quahog shells after all."

Her return smile wasn't hostile, but it wasn't warm and fuzzy, either. Somehow he'd convinced himself that Maddie would be pleasantly surprised, rather than merely surprised, to see him.

"Hello, Michael," she said. "Are you in town on business, or on pleasure?"

"A little of both, actually. My tenant vacated the condo early. I had to come down to check it out and decide what to do about his deposit."

She nodded in sympathy. "Will you be able to rent it for July and August?"

"
Without a doubt. And they tell me summer rents
are out of sight
this year," he added with a grin. He looped his fingers through six of the heaviest plastic bags of groceries that lay sprawled in the back of the wagon and lifted them out with a grunt.

Hoisting several others, Maddie said, "In that case, I guess you'll be giving your tenant back his deposit."

Michael declined to tell her that he had no such plans. He followed her inside and stood in the kitchen while she unpacked, watching the play of sunlight on her hair, catching a scent of her perfume as she passed under his nose for another
bag of groceries to put away.

As always, their talk turned to Tracey. As always, he had to watch what he said. "I thought, since I was in town, that I'd take Trace out for a burger and a movie, if that's all right with you." Beg, grovel,
damn
the judge to hell.

Maddie was arranging cans of tomato products in a pyramid of big to small: whole, stewed, sauce, and paste. "Sure," she said. "What's playing? I haven't paid attention."

"Some Mel Gibson thing. She still likes Mel Gibson, doesn't she?" he asked, handing his ex-wife a couple of overlooked cans of plum tomatoes.

Maddie stepped down from the wood footstool and turned to him with an on-second-thought look on her face.

"It's a thriller, isn't it?" she said quietly. "They're always so violent."

"It's a shoot-'em-up cartoon, is all it amounts to," he answered, defending his choice.

"Bullets are bullets."

She was thinking of one bullet in particular, he could see.

"For God's sake—they use
blanks
in the movie, Maddie!"

The look in her eyes—stricken, combative, aloof—made him say quickly, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap."

"You never do."

"I'm sorry, honest."

Where the hell was Tracey ? He cocked his head, listening to the rush of water through the plumbing in the kitchen wall. "Still showering," he said with a look of wonder. "I can't believe your well doesn't run dry."

Maddie laughed and said, "The furnace was out. We had no hot water all morning. It turns out that a fuse shook loose above the boiler, but we needed a plumber to figure that out for us. It took him two seconds. Dad would've—anyway, Tracey was forced to go four extra hours without a shower. Naturally she needs to compensate."

They exchanged a wry look of commiseration. On this, at least, they were agreed: their little girl had a daunting standard of hygiene.

His gaze drifted from Maddie's blue eyes to Maddie's blue jeans. She filled them out well. She had always filled them out well. He shifted his focus. If she saw him staring, she'd terminate the visit on the spot. He decided, arbitrarily, to admire a hand-thrown mug in the dishrack.

"Is that new?" he asked, pointing to it. He'd taught a pottery course or two before he began teaching painting, so the question was more or less reasonable.

Maddie lifted the green-glazed cup from the sink and swung it by its loop. "Is that a hint?" she asked with a wry look. "I was about to put on a pot."

"Yeah
... thanks. I could use some."

He pulled out one of the rush-seated chairs and sat down on it. He missed this. Missed the kitchen. Missed the way late-morning sun poured in, washing the pickled-pine cabinets and red country wallpaper in clear, bright light. Some kitchens—this kitchen—begged to be filled with family. He felt right, in this kitchen.

He drew an imaginary outline of
Maddie's face on the ta
bletop as she moved around the room on automatic, putting together Starbucks and Melitta. They shared that, too, he realized: a love of high-octane coffee.

While Maddie chatted on about the new head of her department, he decided that they shared—or had shared—a lot of things. Food, sex, a kid, college,
Sandy
Point
, sailing, books, most movies—they'd done them all in their fifteen years of marriage. Trouble was, he'd gone and done a little extra.

She should've been more forgiving. She's had lovestruck freshmen hanging on her every word in class, too. It comes with the territory. She knows that. Banging a student doesn't mean a thing. If she didn't know that, she should have.

For Pete's sake—he was an
art
professor.

Besides, that was over now. He'd lost his taste for wanton sex—maybe because now he was free to have all the wanton sex he wanted. Or maybe it was the headaches. They seemed to be coming more frequently now, and staying longer. Some days—especially if they'd kept him late at the lab the night before, testing him—he wanted nothing more than to go home, put up his feet, and close his eyes. It was all he could do to make it through his posted office hours, never mind making the effort to seduce a student during them.

Damned headaches. Seized by a dread of one of them returning, he rubbed his forehead with his fingers and grimaced, baring his teeth in the process.

"What's wrong, Michael?" she asked, watching him warily. "Headache again?"

"No, just the fear of one."

"You should see a doctor about them. You never used to get headaches. Maybe you need glasses."

"Come on—at my age?"

She smiled at that. "It's been known to happen, after forty."

"Well, it's not going to happen to me."

Her smile turned wary. "Michael, you can be so—"

"Spare me the 'immature' speech, please! I know it by heart."

She stiffened, as if he were a stranger who had stepped too quickly into an elevator she was taking, and then she walked deliberately out of the kitchen to the foot of the stairs.

"Tracey!" she called up. "Your father's here."

****

Michael Regan.

Christ, he hadn't changed. He was the same fair-haired preppie, straight out of a Lands' End catalog. Christ! Didn't that type ever age?

Hawke grabbed the binoculars from the bedroom desk and zeroed in on his old classmate. He was wrong: time had made at least some inroads. There was certain puffiness around the jowls, a certain thickness under the pale blue polo shirt. He felt a surge of petty satisfaction seeing it. Nonetheless, Michael Regan was the kind of man that a woman might say was "still good-looking."

Shit.

It gave Hawke no pleasure to watch Michael wave to Maddie, hold the door open for the girl, and get behind the wheel of the vintage Beemer.

Michael would be back. He had visitation rights, obviously, and he would be back. The good news was, Mike and Maddie were divorced. The bad news was, they had a family. They shared common ground.

Were
they divorced? The evidence said yes. H
awke had looked them up in an
on-line directory for
Sandy
Point
and found her still listed at
Cranberry Lane
, but him on
Overlook Road
. But whether they were divorced or not, his own mission would've been the same: a return to this sacred place, to where it all began.

Without thinking, Hawke swung the glasses from the Beemer to Maddie. At the same moment, she turned to stare in the direction of the lighthouse—it seemed to him, to stare at the second floor window of the keeper's house.

There she was in his field of view: close enough to touch. It gave Hawke a jolt; he put down the glasses and retreated farther into shadow. He had vowed not to use the binoculars on her. He had vowed to let her have at least an iota of privacy.

For now.

****

From the brick patio they had a perfect view of the setting sun. The scene was textbook
New England
: a faded sky dissolving into a cauldron of liquid amber behind a brooding sea. Overhead, half a dozen sea gulls arched, their graceful flight at odds with their shrill, warlike calls.

Between the sea gulls and the sea, between Maddie and the setting sun, stood the keeper's house and its attached lighthouse, topped by a darkened lantern that no longer warned mariners away from the shallow, treacherous run of coast.

Was Dan home? Maddie had no idea; she could see only a bit of the lighthouse itself from the patio, and not the keeper's house to which it was attached.

She fingered the condensation on the glass of her rum punch and tried to seem enthusiastic about Norah's latest find: a Tiffany bronze and favrile crocus lamp, poised on display in the middle of the HMS
Bliss
table. Norah owned a contemporary house on the water, sparingly furnished. But she collected Tiffanies the way some women collected Hummels, and she was especially pleased with this one.

Joan hadn't come back empty-handed, either. She held on her lap a Ruskin Pottery stoneware vase glazed in a mottled oatmeal color. It was plain, it was chipped, but it was something. She'd come back with something, and that's what mattered to her. She propped the vase on her knees, much the way she would a year-old baby, and made cooing sounds of pleasure while Norah held forth on the exploding value of Tiffany art.