A Month at the Shore

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Miss Widdich nodded in wordless agreement, and he said more gently, "So the other, more plausible assumption is that Sylvia was blackmailing you because she was your illegitimate daughter."

  She bowed her head on the word "daughter," and Ken felt a thrill of electricity fly from her to him that was downright hair-raising. He'd always made light of the local rumors that Maya Widdich was a practicing witch. The name, the hair, the black clothing; her seclusion and her quaint obsession with herbs—it was all a bit too over the top for him. He had a sense that women of Wicca were somehow more everyday about it. He pictured them in sweats and sneakers and buying day-old bread at the supermarket, just like everyone else.

  Now, suddenly, he wasn't so sure. The hairs that had decided to stand up on the back of his neck were slow to ease down.

  "Do you want to tell me about it?"

  Without looking up, she shook her head, but he pressed on anyway. "We both know that 1987 wasn't 1957. Surely no one would have held it against you that you'd had to give up a baby for adoption, once they'd found out." He wanted to add, "Especially you," but he settled for saying, "It's hard for me to understand why you gave in to Sylvia's blackmail threat. I'm puzzled by that."

  "It wasn't about simple blackmail," she muttered.

  "What was it, then?" he asked softly.

  Maybe it was his sympathetic tone, maybe it was his candor that broke down her reserve, but she said in an unexpected growl, "It was the way that I gave her up!"

  Something in her voice had Ken imagining the infamous scene in Rosemary's Baby. Goosebumps rolled over him in waves as he said, "How do you mean?"

  Again she shook her head. He waited. She hugged herself as if she were cold. There was a fringed wine-colored throw on the back of a nearby armchair that Ken considered fetching for her, but something made him hold back. If she were shaky enough and miserable enough, she might just tell the truth.

  Suddenly her head came up sharply and she fixed Ken with as penetrating a look as he'd ever had in his life. It shot into him like an arrow and lodged squarely in his throat. He was dizzy from the force of it, angry from the power of it, and something else: aware. Instinctively and against all rational thought, he understood that this was a woman who had dabbled in black art. Maybe she was now reformed, maybe she'd put away her psychic gifts—but she had strengths, still, to be reckoned with.

  Without preamble, she began her tale.

  "My grandmother was a midwife. She's the one who delivered the baby and cut the cord. But she was old and in failing health ... often disoriented," Miss Widdich murmured.

  "Three days after the baby was born, I wrapped her puny little body in towels, and I put her in a cardboard box. Then I folded the flaps over it. It was November, in northern Saskatchewan. You can imagine. I put on my grandmother's coat and hat, and I wrapped a scarf around my face, and then I set the box upright in my grandmother's shopping cart. I wanted people to think I was a homeless person as I wheeled the cart to a nearby convent. It wasn't far to go, and that was a good thing, because I was very weak. I was fifteen."

  Ken blinked. Running through the math, he calculated that in that case, Miss Widdich would have to be in her early fifties at best. She looked in her seventies.

  "You're surprised," she remarked, narrowing her eyes over a thin, acerbic smile. And then she continued.

  "I laid the box on the step by the back door. I was afraid to ring the bell, so I waited across the alley behind a car. I thought maybe someone would just ... divine that she was there. They were nuns, weren't they? If they were any good," she said with a sniff, "they would have known. But no one came."

  She went on with her account, speaking in a low voice that was calm and devoid of emotion. "It was quiet in the alley. The baby was quiet. I wondered if maybe she had died. But then she began to cry, softly at first, more of a whimper. Still no one came. It began to snow, heavily. I could see the snow getting inside the hole between the overlapping flaps. She cried more loudly then, and for a long time. Finally someone opened the door. It was a very young nun, hardly more than my own age; she had a bag of garbage that she was taking out.

  "She heard the baby crying, and in her shock, she dropped the bag of garbage on the step. I remember seeing coffee grounds spill out onto the white snow and wondering how it was that nuns got to drink coffee; I thought their diet was bread and water. The nun didn't even open the flaps to look; she just lifted the box and went inside with it."

  Miss Widdich paused, not so much to control her emotions, Ken thought, as for dramatic effect. "And that is the last I saw of my daughter until she tracked me down in Chepaquit."

  "How could you be certain that Sylvia was your daughter?"

  "She had my eyes," Miss Widdich said dryly.

  He had another thought. "Obviously you were never contacted by any adoption agency. How did Sylvia find you?"

  "There had been an investigation—obviously," she added with contempt. "Eventually it led to my grandmother, who was well-known in the area. By that time, she had no idea where I was, since by then I'd run off again. Sylvia had newspaper clippings with her; it was quite the story at the time. Armed with those few facts, she managed to find me. She was quite a clever girl," Miss Widdich said in a quiet and altogether unexpected boast.

  "Do you know where her father is?"

  "I have no idea. Prison, most likely."

  "Was she ever legally adopted?"

  "Naturally. After the newspaper articles, a line formed to take her. People are such idiots," she added, rubbing her temples as if her head hurt. "Sen ... timen ... tal idiots."

  She seemed to sway in place, and her speech was slowing down. Either exhaustion or alcohol was taking its toll. Ken had to repeat: "Do you know who ended up adopting her?"

  "Oh, some couple," she said. "But he died shortly afterward ... and his wife went to pieces ... and Sylvia ended up in a series of foster homes. In the last one, the man sexually abused her."

  "She told you all that?"

  "Oh, yes. She was here to hurt me back."

  "So the ten thousand dollars—"

  "That was nothing," Miss Widdich said, dismissing the notion with a wave of her hand. "I told you, she didn't come after me for money. She came to put me in a cardboard box of her own. To have complete control over me, over my destiny. That's why she came. To ruin me. She wanted revenge."

  Gone was the sadness; in its place was the kind of bitter resentment that only a controlling person being manipulated can know.

  "That had to be hard for you," Ken ventured, treading carefully now. "To have her threatening the life you'd made in Chepaquit."

  "She was enjoying herself," Miss Widdich said. "Bit by bit, she planned to make the town turn on me with contempt. She told me that; she wasn't secretive about her intentions. Ultimately, she wanted everyone to loathe me."

  Ken was thinking, What the hell difference would that make? We were all scared to death of you.

  Naturally she read his mind. She said simply, "I don't mind being feared—but I would never abide being scorned."

  "So what was the money about, then?"

  "It was given in a moment of panic," she confessed. And then she added with an odd kind of scrupulousness, "But it was not blackmail money. Blackmail is when someone demands money to keep quiet. Sylvia," she said grimly, "had no intention of keeping quiet."

  If he was waiting for Miss Widdich to say that she murdered her daughter and then buried her to prevent that from happening, then Ken was disappointed. The woman had nothing more to relate. She sat in stubborn silence until Ken said, "What will you do now?"

  "You mean, after you tell everyone what I've just said?" she asked with a wry look. "I'm not worried. What I did when I was a child of fifteen is just a colorful footnote to a much bigger story now. No one will care about what I did then."

  It offended him, that nonchalance. There was something heartless about evaluating your murdered daughter in terms of a media event. He thought of his own
mother, who would have moved—would still move—hell and high water for him. It boggled his mind to imagine Camille Barclay dumping him off in a cardboard box somewhere. Rich, poor, or in between, the thought would never have crossed her mind.

  He was angry, and it must have shown in his face, because Miss Widdich stood up so abruptly that she teetered. "You can go now," she ordered.

  "And if you do end up a suspect?" he said, somewhat malevolently.

  "Why would I be? I gave Sylvia money she would have needed, that's all. Any mother would do the same."

  Not exactly what Ken would call an outraged denial; but on the other hand, he didn't know of a single piece of evidence linking Miss Widdich to the actual murder. Laura's insistence that the woman had had the strength to drag and then bury a body was hardly incontrovertible proof. And of course Miss Widdich would deny everything she'd just told him. Ken had no doubt of that.

  He had one last question for the inscrutable woman who, against all reason, could legitimately be called a mother. "What did you think of your daughter when she finally did find you?"

  "Sylvia? Arrogant—and yet she didn't love herself. Well, how could she? Look at her life."

  The girl's life was over. What Ken was looking at now was her death.

  Chapter 28

  The door to the house opened, and light from inside spilled onto the porch and out to the car where Laura sat in the shadows, jittery with impatience.

  She pounced on Ken as soon as he got in the car. "Well?"

  "Interesting. Very interesting."

  "You found out why Sylvia was blackmailing her?"

  "The lady denies it was blackmail money. Because Sylvia never demanded it."

  "So she gave her that money out of the goodness of her heart? Come on. Miss Widdich?"

  "Apparently it was the least she could do ... for her daughter."

  "Her—what?" That mind-boggling scenario wasn't anywhere on Laura's list of possibilities. "You got her to tell you that? How?"

  "First thing I did, I bound the two of them together."

  He started the car, then slung his arm behind Laura's seat and turned to peer over his shoulder down the unlit drive as he backed out. "I told her that the police had found the money and that, on a hunch, I went over the bank's records of withdrawals for around that time and came up with her name—but then I made up something about the bank being required to keep serial numbers on cash withdrawals of ten thousand dollars and over."

  The car dropped into an extra-big pothole and Ken interrupted himself with a healthy oath, then said, "After that, I took a flyer. I suggested the most outrageous thing I could think of: that Sylvia was her illegitimate daughter."

  "And she didn't deny it?"

  "Nope. To tell the truth, I think she's been expecting someone to step forward and accuse her of being Sylvia's mother. She seems pretty confident that no one will be able to make any more of a connection than that."

  "But we have to, Ken. We have to be able to make more of a connection! Was she grieving, do you think? If she were innocent, she would have been devastated when I told her earlier that it was Sylvia. I didn't see that."

  "She'd definitely been crying. Maybe if I were a woman, I would have been able to read her emotions more accurately, but—damn, I couldn't tell why she'd been crying. There were some really creepy vibrations going on in there. That is one strange woman. If she is innocent and she is grieving, she's buried it deep, despite those tears. I have to tell you, the whole experience threw me."

  Laura was touched by his honesty. How many men would have admitted to that? She said, "Snack has the same reaction to her that you do. It's only Corinne who thinks she's a sweet old lady."

  "She's in her early fifties, tops."

  "That may be the math, but she looks decades older than that."

  "Drugs? Illness? Grief, after all? Maybe some combination of them," Ken speculated.

  They were at the end of the drive. Before he pulled out onto the dark country road, he said, "Where to? I assume O'Doule's, to get your car?"

  "Your place," Laura said softly.

  Instantly, the air inside the car became charged in a whole new way. Ken let out a surprised half-sigh. He turned and stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers and then tucked her hair behind her ear. The gesture was as beguiling as it was electric.

  "Are you sure?" he said.

  "I've been sure for a while now. You?"

  He shrugged. "Twenty years, give or take."

  The smile in his voice enfolded her like warm honey. "You should have come after me, then," she teased.

  "I was a fool. I worked out instead."

  "And dated."

  "Well, sure. I was a fool, not a monk."

  He was irresistible. Funny and honest and smart and ... irresistible. She smiled and said, "Drive on, Jeeves. Before I change my mind. Again."

  "Too late for that," he promised in a voice that sent an entirely new kind of chill rippling down her back.

  He backed onto the pitch-black road and began heading east the short distance to Triple Oaks. Laura listened quietly as Ken recounted the entire conversation between Miss Widdich and him.

  The tension she was feeling between desire and dread was so keen that it hurt: a hard knot behind her breastbone told her that something, somewhere, somehow, had to be resolved. And soon. Or she would explode into a million bits and pieces of nothing at all.

  Ken said, "If those news clippings were still in the satchel with the money—and assuming they haven't turned into dust—the police will easily figure out that Sylvia was in Chepaquit to blackmail someone; they just won't know who the mother was. Even without my two cents, it wouldn't take them long to figure it out. For starters, you have two dozen customers with herbs named Sylvia sitting on kitchen windowsills as we speak."

  "And don't forget, I personally saw Miss Widdich's stricken reaction when Billy told us what he thought he'd seen that night."

  "Maybe so, but the police will take anything you say with a grain of salt," Ken warned. "In any case, none of it suggests anything except that she's Sylvia's birth mother."

  "I know," Laura said, sighing. "And nothing we know so far gets my brother off the hook, which is all that I'm praying for."

  Ken pulled into the drive of his stately house, looming large in the amber glow of twin brass porchlights. Laura got out of the car, then stood and stretched in place after her tense vigil back at Miss Widdich's house.

  It was a beautiful night, with a warm west wind, the kind of night that was made for magical journeys over the ocean and up through the stars. The fancy took hold of her, and as Ken approached her, she offered him a wistful proposal.

  "Maybe ... on the beach?"

  He laughed softly and shook his head.

  "Bad idea?" she asked, because she knew that Max would have thought so. All that sand.

  "Such a good idea, you have no idea," Ken said. He slid his fingers through her hair and pulled her close, his mouth searching and finding hers in a kiss so deep, so yearning, that when he released her, she felt exalted. Some kisses were explorations, and some were promises. This one was akin to a vow. She felt it in her heart, knew it in her soul.

  He reached inside the car to pull a blanket from the back seat, and he tossed it over his shoulder. The simple act, a New England ritual, filled her with such joy. They were going to the beach.

  Ken wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and she slid hers across the trim expanse of his lower back. Through the finely spun cotton of his polo shirt, she felt corded muscle, still a surprise to her. She had seen men strut who had so much less to strut; how delicious that she was being offered this man, in this exciting body. The realization of where they were headed—a blanket spread out under the stars—began flooding her with anticipation. And heat. Her awareness of him was so intense that it was making her light-headed, a unique experience for her.

  "I don't know anything!"

  "No problem; we'll work it out," he said, so
unding amused.

  She gasped. "Oh, Lord. Did I say that out loud?"

  "Or I'm telepathic."

  "I meant, not that I didn't know anything, just that I didn't know anything ... about this," she said, struggling to explain herself.

  Ken's voice was soft and low and sexy in his effort to help. "You mean, about making love under the stars?"

  "Well, that too," she said in ongoing frustration. She had never been as fluent in describing her feelings as some of her women friends back in Portland. When they all got together, she was always the quiet one. It was the curse, she supposed, of being born a Shore; with the exception of Corinne, no one in her family had ever seemed very good at expressing words of love.

  She tried again, because it was so important to her. She stopped on the path, in the middle of the stand of high- branched pines that separated the house from the beach and its ocean, and she took his hand in hers.

  "I mean about this," she said, laying his hand over the beat of her heart. "See how my heart is when I'm with you? Can you feel it? It lifts, I don't know how. But it does. That happens to Corinne, too, when she's with Gabe. I didn't quite believe her—maybe I was jealous—but now I do. And, I'm not jealous of her anymore."

  It was a dark night, and in the narrow grove, darker still. Even so, she could sense a melting tenderness in his expression as he dropped the blanket and then cradled her face with his hands. "Laura ... I want you. You, and no one else. I didn't even know I was hurting for you, not until I saw you come out of the house looking for Corinne that day. It was that immediate."

  A shaky laugh caught in her throat. "I remember it well. I was a muddy mess."

  "I wanted to kiss away every smudge on your face."

  "I wish you had. We've wasted so many days ... years. Oh, God. Years," she moaned, overwhelmed by the realization.

  "We'll make up for lost time, I promise you," he murmured, tracing the delicate outline of her ear with his lips. "I love you, Laura. I love you, I love you. Can you see yourself living out your life with a skinny geek from Chepaquit Elementary?"