Maggy's Child (22 page)

The gaggle of guests stood back to let them pass, then followed them into the small living room.

“Bad boy!” A swoosh of wings behind them made them all duck. Horatio swooped toward Nick, wings flapping as he landed, claws extended, on Nick’s upflung arm.

“Would somebody please get this stupid bird off me?” Nick demanded as Maggy giggled uncontrollably. The rest of his audience was laughing, too, as the bird stalked down Nick’s arm toward his face. Nick cowered.
Tia
Gloria hurried to Horatio’s rescue.

“Come up,” she said, holding out two fingers to the bird. Horatio glared at Nick for a moment.

“Bad boy!” the bird said again, and then, in response to
Tia
Gloria’s admonishing fingers, he stepped onto her hand. With a cluck of sympathy for him, she turned and headed back toward the kitchen.

Maggy snickered. “And I thought
elephants
never forgot.” Nick, straightening, gave her a withering glance.

Tia
Gloria returned in a matter of minutes, and they continued on into the living room.

Ordinarily it was furnished comfortably, if not elegantly or expensively, with a brown tweed couch, matching leather recliners, an oval-shaped braided rug, early-American coffee and end tables, orange bean-jar lamps, and a TV. Tonight a large round table—the dining table that ordinarily occupied the far end of the room, Maggy realized—had been dragged to the center of the floor and draped with green felt. Around it were six chairs, each of which bore evidence of having been haphazardly pushed away from the gathering. In the center of the table a single short, thick candle in a glass globe guttered in its own tallow, casting a feeble yellow glow over the immediate area. The rest of the room was dark.

“We were trying to contact Dottie’s aunt,”
Tia
Gloria explained as she saw Nick cast a quizzical look at the setup.

“She’s put her jewelry somewhere, and I can’t find it,” one of the other women, presumably Dottie, complained. “Gloria’s been trying for three months, but Aunt Alice just won’t come through.”

“Your father has, though.”
Tia
Gloria beamed at Maggy. “He had to sneak away from your mother, who, I’m sorry to say, seems to be a very jealous wife. But he made it twice. The last time he left you a message.”

Nick looked slightly amused by this interchange. Maggy, who had not had twelve years to forget
Tia
Gloria’s easy interactions with the spirits, took the information in stride.

“Did he?” she replied as both she and Nick, gently but inexorably, were pushed side by side down onto the couch.

“Yes—oh, there it is. I knew I had it somewhere.”

Somewhere
turned out to be the front of the wood-burning stove, which fortunately was not in use at the moment.
Tia
Gloria triumphantly removed a white envelope that was affixed with a clip magnet to the iron door and handed it to Maggy. Her name was scrawled on the outside. When she tore it open, she found a yellow self-stick note folded in thirds, so that the note sealed itself. She opened that too.

“Your father writes you letters?” Nick’s question, muttered in Maggy’s ear as she smoothed out the paper, was both skeptical and amused.

“Automatic writing,” Maggy whispered back. “You know, where the medium sits down with paper and pencil and goes into a trance and the spirit uses the medium’s body as a conduit.
Papi
contacts me all the time.”

Nick rolled his eyes. Maggy read the note. “Magdalena,” it said. “Danger is at hand. Beware of harm …” The message was written in a black, spidery script that she knew for
Tia
Gloria’s automatic-writing hand. The last word—
harm
—trailed off until it was a barely legible scribble.

Despite years of dealing with
Tia’s
eccentricities, Maggy couldn’t help it: as she read the message through a second time, a chill ran down her spine. Folding the note in half, she stuck it in her pocket.

“Of course, he doesn’t say precisely what he means,”
Tia
Gloria said fretfully. “What harm should you beware of? I asked him if he could be a little clearer, but your mother was calling him and he had to go. Said he’d be in
mucho
trouble if she found him down here with me.”

“She shouldn’t be so jealous,” one of the women—Betty?—said, as if the subject was one that the group had discussed many times before.

“Women are always jealous,” Harvey muttered. From the less-than-loving looks the couple traded at that, and their identical last names, Maggy felt safe in assuming they were husband and wife.

“Only if they’re given cause,” Betty snapped.

“Perhaps you’re in danger of suffering an accident.”
Tia
Gloria ignored the bickering pair to frown at Maggy. “Of course, Jorge left that message for you nearly a month ago. If you were going to have an accident, it might already have happened. They can’t see that far in the future, you know. Not infinitely, like a lot of people think, but just a few weeks.
Have
you had an accident?”

“She hurt her wrist,” Nick supplied. Maggy glanced at him, surprised. She had thought her small injury had barely registered on Nick.

“Did you, dear? How?”
Tia
Gloria focused on Maggy.

“I fell down some stairs,” Maggy answered, instinctively touching her bandaged wrist.

“I thought you tripped over a dog.” Nick’s voice was sharp.

Caught off guard, Maggy barely managed not to stutter.

“I did. I tripped over a dog, which caused me to fall down the stairs,” she said, recovering fast. She had forgotten what she had told Joan Sullivan at the party, and that
Nick had been listening. Damn him for having such a good memory and for being so quick to catch her up. Until now, no one had ever really paid attention to the stories she told to cover her injuries, so it hadn’t mattered if she’d occasionally mixed them up. But then, Nick cared.

“How awful!”
Tia
Gloria clucked. “Is it sprained? I hope you soaked it in camomile tea. That keeps it from swelling so badly, you know.”

“I did,” Maggy lied, because she feared that if she didn’t
Tia
Gloria would insist on soaking her wrist in tea there and then. “It’s fine, really. Nothing at all.”

“Which stairs did you fall down?” There was a casual note to Nick’s question that belied the lurking alertness in his eyes.

“The front ones, by the driveway.” It was always possible that Nick knew that Lyle wouldn’t permit animals inside the house. “A friend stopped by with an invitation that it was too late to mail, and when she left I ran up the stairs to put it on the table just inside the door. I didn’t realize the dogs had followed me, and when I turned around I tripped over one of them and fell down the stairs.”

“Which dog?”

“Seamus,” Maggy snapped, glaring at him. “Is there anything else you’d like to know?”

“Lots of things.” He smiled at her, a long, slow smile that alarmed her. Maggy got the feeling from that smile that he knew everything there was to know about the circumstances of her life—but of course that was idiocy. If Nick knew that, he would not, in a massive understatement, be sitting so calmly beside her on
Tia
Gloria’s couch. He had always had the knack for making her think he knew more than he did, so that she would confess her misdeeds, imagining that he already knew of them. And he didn’t. She had to remember that. He never did. Until she told him herself.

Well, this time she was not telling.

“Who wants tea?” The interruption, in the form of a sprightly question from the kitchen doorway, was welcome. Maggy turned away from Nick, relieved to be off the hook, as one of
Tia
Gloria’s friends—Lois?—carried in a tray crowded with a china teapot and cups.

“We’ll continue this very interesting conversation later,” Nick whispered meaningfully in Maggy’s ear as cups were passed out and tea was poured. She tensed, her fingers tightening over the handle of the delicate cup, causing a small amount of fragrant green tea to slosh into the saucer.

Then she realized what she had to do. Setting the cup and saucer down on the coffee table, she stood up.

“If you all will excuse me, I’m going to run upstairs for just a minute.”

As the sole bathroom was upstairs, this occasioned no comment. Maggy left the living room and climbed the narrow stairs to the second floor, where she headed straight for the bedroom that had been her father’s. Though
Tia
Gloria had lived with him, in every sense of the word, for years before his death, they had maintained separate bedrooms. Maggy had always supposed that one or the other of them was sensitive to the proprieties. Since Jorge’s death,
Tia
Gloria had informed her that her assumption was wrong: he had been afraid even then that Maggy’s mother was watching him from above, and thus decided to play it safe by not taking another woman into his bed on a permanent basis. And,
Tia
Gloria added, it turned out he had been right: his wife had been keeping an eye on him for all those years. Lucky for Jorge they hadn’t shared a room, or he would have caught hell in heaven. He caught enough of it as it was, over the mere fact of Gloria’s existence. Maggy’s mother—begging Maggy’s pardon—sounded to
Tia
like a jealous witch. It was a mystery to
Tia
how Jorge could love her so.

Far from offending Maggy, this pronouncement
amused her so that she had to hide a grin. To
Tia
Gloria, the spirits were as alive as her friends down the street. Such matter-of-fact conviction helped keep Maggy’s parents alive for her too.

There were twin bookcases in Jorge’s room, flanking the door. Jorge had built them himself. The bookcase on the left had a trick bottom shelf. If one lifted it up, one would find a small space between the shelf and the floor. Anyone looking at the shelf from the outside would not guess the existence of the extra space, because the baseboard molding, which had been carried on around the shelves as though they were original to the house, hid it. The space was only about nine inches wide by twenty-four inches long by three inches tall, but that was room enough for what Maggy had to hide. Quickly she lifted all the magazines off the bottom shelf—they were piled in flat stacks, with books, paperback mysteries, and true crime mostly, on the upper shelves. Then she pried up the shelf itself, not without some little effort since it was wedged in pretty tightly. But finally she got it up, and the hiding place was revealed.

It was empty, except for dust and an errant cobweb. Maggy had expected it to be. On her own,
Tia
Gloria would never use it, although she knew of its existence. Jorge had been the careful one, wary of burglars, stashing away small valuables whenever he left the house. Having lived so long in a public housing project, he could not quite get over the notion that a break-in was just a walk around the block away. No one ever was burglarized in the rural area where the Crooked House was located, but to Jorge that didn’t matter. What mattered was that they might be.

Tia
Gloria, on the other hand, had never bothered to hide her treasure trove of mostly costume jewelry even when she had lived in public housing. She’d never been robbed, either, probably because Horatio had been notorious in the projects. No burglar who knew of its existence
wanted to mess with the bird. Give ’em a snarling German shepherd anytime over a feathered devil with claws and beak who was known to attack those he disliked and could shriek for help and fly at the same time.

Maggy had often thought that if she were a burglar, she would have felt the same way. She knew Nick would have.

Unzipping her jacket, she removed the package with the pictures and tape and placed it inside the space. Then she replaced the shelf on top, wedging it down firmly. She was in the act of returning the magazines to the shelf when
Tia
Gloria appeared in the doorway.

“Don’t worry, nobody will find it there,”
Tia
Gloria said placidly.

“What?” Startled, Maggy glanced up, her hands dropping away from the just-replaced magazines.

“Whatever it is that you want to keep hidden, of course. Nobody knows about that compartment except you and Jorge and me, and Jorge and I aren’t telling.” She twinkled at Maggy. “So, you’re back with Nick? That’s as it should be. He is your other half, you know. You two belong together like—like bacon and eggs, pencils and erasers, oil and water …”

“Oil and water don’t mix,” Maggy said dryly, getting to her feet. “And neither do Nick and I anymore, except as old friends. I’m married, remember?”

“But the marriage is wrong for you,”
Tia
Gloria said, frowning. “All wrong. You should be with Nick. Now,
he
is handsome. Don’t tell me you don’t agree.”

“I agree.” Maggy zipped up her jacket.

“So?”

“So I have to go home now. Without Nick. If Lyle knew I was with him, he wouldn’t like it. He’s a little—jealous—of Nick. You can see why. As you said yourself, Nick is handsome, and Lyle is—older. So I want you to do me a favor.”

“Anything, dear.”

“Drive Nick home for me, would you please? He came with me in
The Lady Dancer
, but I’d rather leave without him. If Lyle found out I was with him—well, it wouldn’t be pleasant. Lyle can be—very possessive.”

“Mean as the devil, you mean,”
Tia
Gloria said darkly.

Maggy managed a laugh. “That, too,” she said, knowing that
Tia
Gloria had no idea how close to the truth her words were.

“Of course I’ll drive Nick home, if you want me to. But are you sure he is not going to be angry with you for leaving him here?”

“Probably.” Nick’s anger didn’t worry Maggy. She was not, and never had been, afraid of Nick. Nick would never hurt her … “Just tell him I had to go, would you please? He’ll understand why.”

“If I had a man like that wanting me, I would fly to him so fast that you wouldn’t see my feet for the dust.”