With Every Breath (47 page)

for your sake. Anyway, Dave more or less ran into the same problems questioning him that we did. You know, you have to ask him just the right, precise question to get the answer you need."

"Mmmm," Maddie said quietly. "So he took the bodies to the cave that day, and the truck to the ferry, and when he came back, I was gone. I’d hidden in the pantry."

"But he didn’t look there. He figured you were out and about on The Wick someplace, so he locked the place up so you couldn’t get back inside. It was a bad place for you, he said. Your mother didn’t want you to stay there. He wanted you to come back to his shack." "And I blocked it all out," she said wonderingly. "Probably because of what Beacher did to you as much as anything," Joe mused. "That house was a bad place for you. I’d bet that’s why you felt like it was a pervasive wrongness, those whole first nine years of your life, like you said."

"I felt like there wasn’t any love," she whispered.

"I guess there wasn’t," he agreed baldly. "At least not in Beacher for you."

"God," she breathed. But her mother had loved her. She was finally coming to terms with that, and it was beginning to fill a deep hole inside her.

"As for the way you blocked the rest of it and stopped talking ... hell, that had to have been a piss-poor morning for you, babe," Joe went on. "You loved and trusted your mother, and she was dead in the blink of an eye. You loved and trusted Angus, then you watched him kill Beacher. All in all, I guess you’re pretty sane, all things considered."

She gave him a tight smile. "Thanks." She hesitated. "I finally called Aunt Susan this morning. She didn’t know much of this. She knew her brother had probably died, that in all likelihood my parents hadn’t just walked off and left me, but all she was really covering up was the fact that a man—Harry—had called her and asked her to come get me. He paid her to take care of me all those years and simply asked her to call him if I ever started remembering and asking questions. Harry told her that my birthday was in |uly. She found the discrepancy on my birth certificate, but she figured there was a reason he wanted me to think I was born in July, and he was paying her, so she went along with it and didn’t ask questions." "Harry wouldn’t have wanted her to think that maybe you weren’t her brother’s kid," Joe guessed. "Maybe she wouldn’t have taken you in if you weren’t a blood relative." "That’s what I figured." Maddie sighed. He looked tired. She stood up and reached for her purse. "I’ve got to pull Josh away from that TV in the waiting room. God knows what he’s watching. Then I’m going to run back to the motel and take a shower." She’d taken a room in a motor inn down the street for the duration.

"How is he?" Joe asked. "Still getting better?" They’d only let him in to see him once.

Maddie gave her first real smile. "Leslie thinks he might be able to go back to school soon."

"So you won’t have to sing him any more twisted nursery rhymes."

"Not unless he wants me to. And I certainly won’t ever sing that
one again."

Joe made a grunting sound. "I called Flannery Reed before you got here today. I had her look up how that song really goes."

Maddie went still. "And?"

"It’s supposed to be, ‘your mama
is by.’ Angus just changed that one word to buddy."

Maddie’s throat spasmed. "That was what he called us. Buddies. Oh, God, Joe. For a while there, for years, we were."

"Until you came back all grown-up and didn’t need him anymore. He couldn’t handle it, couldn’t adjust to the change."

She shook her head. "No, it went bad before that, I think. It went bad when he killed Beacher. He just loved me too much, and maybe my mother, too." She shook her head and started for the door again. "I’ll be back in about an hour. Oh, wait!"

She dug in her purse for the picture she’d taken out of the attic that day. "I’ve been meaning to show this to you, but at first you were off in woo-woo land with the drugs, and then I forgot."

Joe cracked half a grin. "Woo-woo land had a lot going for it." Except that she hadn’t been there. He took the picture she held out.

"One of yours from that morning?" he asked before he actually looked at it.

"No. I threw that film out, never even developed it. What was the sense? I found this one in the house, up in the attic, that day when I was taking pictures."

He looked down at it. "Your mother wasn’t a bad-looking chick."

"Be serious."

I am.

"Who are those other people?" she asked.

He pointed to a man with his hand on Annabel’s shoulder. "That’s Boo Cawley. He was your uncle. He died in ... I don’t know, around ’89, I think." He ran a finger over the man who had an arm around her waist and laughed. "That’s Mackie Peters. He lives about four doors up from your house on The Wick. And he’s still a lech, but now he’s an old one."

"What about the woman?" Maddie prompted. "The one there near the front."

"That’s—holy shit. That’s Mildred Diehl."

"That’s what I thought."

"I’ll be damned."

"What?"

"It was Beacher.
I’ll bet you good money it was Beacher."

Maddie’s heart squirmed. "So we’re on the same wavelength."

"If you’re thinking that Beacher was the one who knocked her up before her parents whooshed her off the island, then yeah, we are."

"More or less. Look at her hand. She’s sort of reaching for him."

"Yeah. So she went over to the mainland to have the kid, and sometime while she was gone, Beacher married Annabel. I guess she had quite a shock when she came home and found out."

"No wonder she hates me. No wonder she’s bitter." "Yeah," Joe said, "and she was one of the first to figure out that you weren’t Beacher’s kid."

"That could have just made it worse. She’d lost him to Annabel for no good reason."

"Well, I don’t guess she ever really had him," Joe said thoughtfully, "or he would have married her, and she wouldn’t have had to go to Jonesport to begin with."

"Not if her parents wouldn’t let her," Maddie said softly. "Beacher was from The Wick. Maybe there was enough prejudice back then that her parents would rather have made up a husband for her than have a real one who was ... I don’t know, inferior."

Joe shook his head. "So Cassie is Beacher’s kid. Ain’t that a hoot? Cassie Diehl has Wick blood. Too bad I’ll never be able to ride her for it."

"No," Maddie said quietly. "That would be cruel." "Especially right now, with her uninsured Ford at the

bottom of the ocean." Something horrible flicked over his face at the almost-mention of Gina.

"Get some sleep," she suggested, moving for the door again.

"Smuggle me back a Big Mac, would you?" He leaned back, closing his eyes again.

"Those things are loaded with fat and cholesterol and sodium."

"So humor me. I’m a cripple. If I don’t have a lung or a knee, I might as well blow my arteries all to hell, too."

"I’ll think about it." She smiled and left him. feeling soft inside.

foe opened one eye to watch her go. For the first few days, his temper had been foul simply because it had occurred to him that with all Candle’s mysteries solved, he no longer had any good excuse to keep her close, under his personal guard.

Then he’d realized that she was still hanging around anyway.

He fell asleep again, grinning to himself. Those decisions he was going to have to make were looking clearer and easier all the time.

By the time Joe got out of the hospital, Candle Island had another mystery. Somebody had burned down the old Brogan place on The Wick Road until it was nothing but ashes and cinders.

Rumors ran rampant. Some said that Tony Macari had done it for the insurance money. With a past such as that house had, it would be hard to rent out.

Leslie thought that Harry Reiter had probably done it, a symbolic gesture to truly end things. Dierdre had gone back to her house on the mainland, and Harry’s place on Candle had been empty ever since. Though he

still ran the ferry, he never stayed on the island side anymore.

There was a brief flurry of gossip about Harry and Annabel, but it died out almost as quickly as it started. That was old news. The biggest talk was of Gina and Angus. The system had finally taken Angus in, giving him care and shelter in a mental hospital on the mainland.

A few people thought that Maddie had burned down the house herself. Hector Marks thought it had been some gun-toting, inbred Englishman. Whenever anybody mentioned the fire to Joe Gallen, he just smiled. He guessed that Maddie and Josh would just have to stay with him a while longer.

On the day he was released from the hospital, Kenny Halverson brought the Pathfinder to the mainland. They all took the ferry back to Candle. Harry Reiter stood up on the pilothouse deck and waved at them briefly. He spoke only to offer Maddie some Dramamine, in that taciturn, almost-but-not-quite Candle Island accent.

When the ferry docked, Joe drove only as far as the diner. He pulled up there, pensive and thoughtful.

"What?" Maddie asked warily. "What’s the matter now?"

"There’s something I have to do. Leave me here and drop Kenny off at the station. Give me fifteen minutes and come back for me."

Maddie nodded slowly. There was something on his face that told her not to argue with him. "Sure. I’ll catch you later."

Joe limped the short distance from the diner to the southernmost beach of the big island. There was a small cemetery there.

Harry already had half a boatful and the engines were

rumbling as he threw off the lines to go back the other way. Joe saluted him in silent thanks. He’d tried to talk to him on the way over, but the man had made it clear that he didn’t want any maudlin gratitude over the blood he’d given him.

He watched Harry leave, then he went to the small grassy area on the other side of the road. He found the stone monument there shaped like a teddy bear.

Lucy Anna Gallen. Always beloved. Forever missed. 1989-1992.

His throat closed. He rubbed a hand over his jaw. He looked out at the water. Should he have known? Had he known?

She’d been three. Too old, probably, to just stop breathing and die in her sleep. But old Doc Mazur had declared it to be SIDS, and he’d signed the death certificate, and there’d never been an inquest or an autopsy.

Maybe I did know, Joe thought. Maybe that was why the guilt, that wretched guilt, had hounded him all this time. Maybe it was why he had let Gina torment him, why he had let her—in some small, warped measure— hold on to him all this time. Penance. Perhaps he had known, on some level, that Lucy had been too old to die of SIDS. And he had done nothing about it.

He had never asked for an autopsy, and he was pretty much the only one who could have done it. Even knowing what had really happened, he wondered what would have been the point. It wouldn’t have brought Lucy back. And he hadn’t wanted to get Gina professional help, hadn’t wanted to save her.

In some horrible place inside him, in a place that shamed him, he’d been perfectly willing to let her take her own life. Or to go on living in her own private hell, with all her intimate demons. He was only human, only a man, after all.

"I’m sorry," he said aloud, hoarsely, looking at the headstone again. "I’m so sorry, Lucy." He swallowed. Carefully. Hard.

"If I had known how crazy, how jealous she was, maybe I could have been more careful with her," he went on. "But maybe she would have done it to you anyway. Because what she expected ... oh, God, Lucy, I couldn’t give it to her. No man could. The pure devotion. The absolute attention. Sweetie, I’m not God. I guess you know that by now. And I would have tripped up somewhere along the line, even if I had known, even if I had tried
to keep your mom happy and not upset her. Something, anything, would have eventually driven her over the edge. As it was, all it took was my loving you. I loved you so goddamned much."

He rubbed the heel of his hand into his eye.

"That’s probably going to burn in my gut for the rest of my life. But if I hadn’t married her, you would never have lived at all. And while you lived, I gave you the best that I could. It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough."

On the other side of the road, the sea rushed and sighed.

"I’ll always be sorry that I didn’t fight for custody. I’ll always have to wonder if I could have saved you. Yeah, that’s going to eat at me forever. That’s my
hell. But I guess ... that’s really all I should be tearing myself up over. That was probably the only choice I could have made differently. I couldn’t not have loved you, Lucy, couldn’t not have shown it. Even if I’d known what it would do to you, what I was doing to her,
I couldn’t have stopped myself.

"So it’s over, and she’s gone, and I’m here. So." He took a deep breath and looked out at the sea again. "I can either call it a day and join you two, or I can finally put it behind me, start over, try my damnedest to do better the second time around. I can
put it behind me now. Because there really was very little I could have done. Not as long as I was just human. Not as long as I was just... a man."

And he thought that, with the wisdom of angels, Lucy Anna Gallen would probably understand.