C
HAPTER
25
When Hugh had left, Thea immediately called her boss at Maggie’s diner and apologized again for missing work that morning. And then, she gave her notice, offering to stay for a week or two if necessary. But Jimmy had just laughed.
“No worries, Thea. I’ve got a list a mile long of kids wanting that job. I’ll have hired one by this evening.”
Satisfied she had done no great harm to Jimmy’s business, Thea set to cleaning the apartment with the intention of leaving it even more spotless than she had found it when she had moved in. After almost two hours of dusting, scrubbing, and vacuuming, she decided to take a break and went into the bedroom with the intention of a brief nap or a stroll through one of the magazines Alice had thoughtfully provided for her tenant. No sooner had she plopped down on the bed but there was a knock on the door. Without hesitation, Thea hurried from the bedroom and threw open the door.
She found Mark standing there.
Thea’s hand tightened on the doorknob. She began to think. She had heard Alice drive off about a half hour earlier, there was no one to hear her if she screamed, she had no weapon at hand ...
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Mark’s voice, with its affectations of class and education, was all too sickeningly familiar.
“No,” Thea said, with more force than she had thought she was capable of mustering. She had no weapon at hand but her own intelligence. . .
Mark shrugged. “Fine. How’ve you been, Thea?”
Thea slammed the door shut and locked it. She ran upstairs into Alice’s part of the house and out the front door to the yard where she might possibly be seen by a car passing down the road, where she might possibly be heard if she did shout for help.
A moment later, Mark came sauntering around the side of the house, hands in the pockets of jeans even Thea recognized as expensive—who paid for those, she wondered; certainly not her ex-husband—a grin on his carefully shaven face.
“There’s no need to run away, Thea,” he said, slowly moving ever closer to where she stood with her back to the house, her eyes darting to the road for signs of human life. “We were husband and wife. I’m hardly some stranger. I know you.”
And something about that smug grin and those ridiculously expensive jeans and that affected voice insinuating intimate knowledge served to infuriate Thea—and to make her want to burst out into crazy laughter. In that very moment, it had finally dawned on her that she was no longer the young woman Mark Marais had fooled into a travesty of a marriage.
Thea’s desire to laugh passed as quickly as it had come, but the anger remained, and with it came disdain. Mark was a lot shorter than she remembered him to be, thinner, too. His French was abysmal. He had no friends. He was frightened by bugs. Over time, Thea realized, she had made him into a powerful opponent, when in reality all he really was was a less-than-average example of a seriously flawed human being.
“You don’t know anything about me,” she said steadily.
“Oh, I think I know a few things,” he shot back with a wink.
“You disgust me. You need to leave right now.”
Mark laughed. “Or what? I’m not doing anything illegal, am I?”
“You’re trespassing. And I want you to leave. Now.”
“Going to call the cops on me again?”
“I don’t need to call anyone,” she said. “I can handle a pathetic little worm like you. Stealing money from innocent women. Beating them up. You’re not a worthy adversary for a baby, Mark. You’re not a man. A man doesn’t posture and threaten and lie and—”
Thea’s words died away as Mark made a rapid move toward her. She stood absolutely still, braced for an assault if one came, ready, if necessary, to fight.
But in the next half second, before Mark could strike, if that was indeed his intention, a blur of flying color passed before Thea’s eyes. It was Henrietta, moaning and shrieking, her fur standing up away from her body, making her look three times her actual size and her tail as big around as the thigh of a professional wrestler. Thea jumped back, her hands flying up to cover her ears against the violent aural assault. But she kept her eyes open as Henrietta launched herself onto Mark’s stomach and dug in. He roared and pushed at the cat but Henrietta wasn’t so easily dismissed. She sunk her teeth into Mark’s hands, first one, then the other, before twisting around and launching her body back onto the ground, where she crouched, snarling and hissing, her eyes slits of green fury.
Thea stood rooted to the ground, hands still over her ears, as Mark, blood dripping from beneath his torn shirt and from the jagged cuts on the backs of his hands, limped to his rental car, muttering what were probably vile, uninventive curses. With a spew of gravel, he tore out of the driveway, narrowly missing Alice, who was just returning home from wherever she had been.
Thea dropped her hands as Alice got out of her car and stared in the direction of Mark’s fleeing vehicle. Henrietta, her fur settling down by degrees, loped over and began to encircle Alice’s ankles, purring as if nothing nasty had just taken place.
“Who the hell was that?” Alice demanded.
Thea put her hand against her racing heart. “Just some old piece of trash I needed to get rid of,” she said. And then she began to laugh, a tiny bit hysterically.
Alice grinned. “Ah! Well, good for you.”
“You should have seen Henrietta. Are you sure she’s not part Satan? Or a lioness in disguise?”
“She might be either. I’m not saying.”
“Well, whatever you are, thank you, Henrietta. You came to my rescue twice today.”
The cat stopped her winding road around Alice’s ankles, gave Thea a thoughtful, assessing look, and shot off in the direction of the woods.
“You okay, kiddo?” Alice joined Thea and gave her shoulders a one-arm squeeze.
“I will be once my heart stops pounding. Alice, please tell me you have something really nice to wear out to dinner. I’ve never seen you in anything but jeans.”
“I’ve got nice stuff,” Alice answered, a bit defensively. “Why am I going out to dinner?”
Thea held out her left hand. “To celebrate my engagement to Hugh.”
Alice raised her arms over her head and whooped. “Hot damn, Thea, you did it!”
“So did he. And Alice? Thanks. For everything.”
“No problem. I’m a sucker for a happy ending.” She smiled down at Thea. “You’re going to be okay, you know.”
“I know. It’s going to take more work, but I’ve got my partner now.”
“Good. Hey, I think I’ll go put rollers in my hair!”
Thea smiled. “How about a snack before we get all dolled up?”
Alice led the way into the house. “Kiddo,” she said, “you read my mind. Hey, does Hugh have a single brother? I’ll take a cousin if he’s got one.”
E
PILOGUE
“I’m in the mood for some steamers. A big bucket of them.”
Hugh glanced briefly over at his wife sitting in the passenger seat. “I thought pregnant women weren’t supposed to eat seafood. Shellfish in particular.”
“That myth has been debunked. At least I think it has.”
“Are you sure you want to take a risk?”
Thea sighed, pretending annoyance, but what she really felt was deep gratitude for life having given her such a caring, if sometimes overly cautious, husband. “Okay,” she said, “if it makes you feel better, I’ll call my doctor and check before I order anything that came from the ocean.”
“Yes,” Hugh said with a smile, “thanks, it would make me feel better.”
It was the summer after that momentous one, the summer after the one in which Thea Foss and Hugh Landry found each other after far too many years apart. It was the first summer of their married life and Thea’s first summer—first any season!—of being pregnant. She was about four months along and due in late November. She was kind of hoping the baby would be born on Thanksgiving, which was her favorite holiday, but the only thing that really mattered was that he, or she, was healthy. Neither Hugh nor Thea wanted to know the baby’s sex beforehand. At least, each had declared as much. Thea had a sneaking suspicion that they were both going to break down before long and have a nice chat with Dr. Mathis.
“It was really nice of Alice to have us stay with her for the week,” Thea said as they drove past a crop of new summer cottage communities along Route 1 in Wells.
“She might not feel as generous with her home when the baby comes.”
“She likes babies. I think.”
“Liking babies is one thing,” Hugh said. “Graciously putting up with someone else’s baby screaming all night is something else entirely.”
“Our baby won’t be a screamer. He—or she—will be very polite.”
“You’re being delusional.”
“I know.”
Thea watched as the summer cottage communities gave way to picturesque bed-and-breakfast establishments and expensive hotels and resorts as they left Wells and entered Ogunquit. And she thought back to last summer and realized how vastly different— and better—her life had become in the space of about a week. First, she was alone and depressed and frightened of her own shadow. And then, she was not alone and no longer depressed and if not entirely courageous, then well on her way to being so.
She and Hugh had left Ogunquit together last August and within the space of a month they had planned a wedding. Though Hugh had suggested they marry in France, in the end they both agreed that it would be much more fair, i.e., affordable, to the most important guests—particularly the Fosses and Alice, who was to be Thea’s witness—if they married in New York. Which they did, at a lovely chapel in the Hudson River Valley. Thea wore the Napoleon miniature portrait Hugh had given her for her sixteenth birthday on a chain her mother had given her for the event. A honeymoon in Europe followed, taking the pair from Rome to Paris and then on to London. Only the demands of careers brought them home after almost a month abroad. Hugh returned to his office and when the spring semester opened, Thea began teaching at a small, academically rigorous high school in the upper reaches of Manhattan.
And then, Thea learned that she was pregnant and life really did seem magical, wondrous, amazing. After a brief run of morning sickness, her body seemed to settle down comfortably in its new job of building a new life.
“Anyway,” Hugh was saying, “I thought we wanted to buy a summer place of our own in Ogunquit. We can’t inflict a growing family on Alice forever. And your parents will want to spend some time with us, right?”
“And your parents ...”
“Most likely will not. Which is fine by me.”
As Hugh had predicted, the Landrys had voiced no objection to their elder son’s marriage to his high school girlfriend. Neither had they rejoiced. It seemed that what Hugh had told Thea was true—they had lost any real interest in Hugh’s life sometime before. All of their dynastic concerns had been transferred onto Hugh’s younger brother, Piers, who, it was rumored, was gearing up for a career in politics, something in which Hugh had never had the least interest.
“Did you bring the gifts for Henrietta?” Hugh asked.
“Of course. How could I ever forget my guardian angel? A bag of organic catnip, though I suspect Henrietta won’t care about the organic part, and a bag of pom-poms with bells inside. Though honestly, I never saw her playing with anything other than live creatures.”
“It’s the thought that counts.”
Yes, Thea thought, and I hope Henrietta knows just how thankful I am to her. The last Thea had seen or heard of her rotten ex-husband Mark Marais was the moment after Henrietta’s spectacular flying attack. Thea grinned at the memory of a bloody Mark racing for escape.
“Almost there,” Hugh said when they had passed through the heart of town and turned onto a smaller road that, after some twists and turns, would take them to Oak Street.
“Good, because I’m starved. Alice is bound to welcome us with a snack.”
She did. When Hugh and Thea pulled into the gravel driveway in front of Alice’s timber-framed house, the smell of freshly baked bread greeted them. As did Alice, who had been waiting on the tiny front porch for their arrival.
“The drive was okay, I hope,” she said after greetings and hugs were exchanged.
Hugh shrugged. “No worries. Except for Thea’s alarming hunger pains.”
“Ha ha. But before I eat, I’d love to say hello to Henrietta.”
As if on cue, the large, irascible calico strode from around the back of the house and made directly for Thea. She arched her back and wound herself around Thea’s right leg and then her left, and strode back the way she had come.
“That was unusually obliging of her,” Alice noted. “Now, come inside you two.”
Thea smiled. “Please tell me that’s cinnamon-raisin bread I smell.”
Alice put an arm around Hugh and one around Thea and ushered them up onto the porch. “And there’s plenty of butter to go with it,” she said.