A Charmed Place

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Get your butt out of bed and get on with your life. What're you waiting for? A special invitation?

  But still she lay, listening to the rain, trying to focus on the twenty years rather than those twenty weeks.

  Eventually Maddie was forced out of bed by the deep chime of the doorbell. She glanced at the clock: nine-thirty. Norah and Joan weren't due until lunchtime. Probably a couple of college kids, offering to clean house for the summer.

  She waited. The chimes sounded again. Would Tracey possibly rouse herself from sleep to get the door? Would any teenager, on a rainy Saturday morning?

  Grabbing a robe of daffodil yellow, Maddie made her way down the painted white stairs. She opened the door to see Trixie Roiters standing under a huge black umbrella and holding a Cruller's bakery box tied with a narrow red ribbon.

  The rain bounced on the umbrella and rolled off in a dozen different streams, but the sixty-five-year-old woman standing underneath was both cheerful and dry. A warm smile pushed plump cheeks nearer to her startlingly blue eyes as she said, "Oh, dear, still in bed? I wanted to catch you before you went out on errands, but ... should I come back another time?"

  "Hello, Mrs. Roiters. No, no, I should be up and about, anyway. I ... I thought I might be coming down with something, that's all. But I'm sure I'm fine. Come in."

  She accepted the bakery box with thanks as the older woman collapsed her umbrella, shook it free of rain, and dumped it in the Chinese porcelain stand near the paneled front door.

  "When does your mother arrive?" Mrs. Roiters asked as she followed Maddie into the kitchen. "I hope she's doing well," she added in a kindly voice.

  "She's coming along," said Maddie. "I plan to drive up to Sudbury next weekend for her. I need to drop by the university in any case, so it'll work out well. Coffee?"

  "Only if you have time, dear. Will your brother be coming to Sandy Point anytime soon? Or is Claire too far along?''

  "The baby's not due until September. I'm expecting George and Claire to arrive in time for the fireworks, the same as usual."

  "Good. Last year we hardly saw any of you."

  "Yes ... last year. But we're all hoping that this summer will be more normal."

  "It's bound to be," said Mrs. Roiters in her reassuring way. "And Tracey? How is she? I thought of her last September—starting prep school, meeting a whole new crowd, and having to deal with your awful tragedy all at the same time. Is she all right?"

  From anyone else, the endless questions might seem prying. But Trixie Roiters really did care. Underneath her curiosity was old-fashioned, neighborly concern. The woman was a fourth-generation Sandy Pointer, the official welcoming committee to every new year-round and summer resident alike. You simply couldn't not answer Trixie Roiters.

  Maddie sighed and filled a stoneware cup with coffee. "It was rough," she admitted. "You know how girls are at that age. They cringe if they're the center of any kind of negative attention, and it doesn't get much more negative than murder." She had to steel herself to say the word.

  Mrs. Roiters pressed three fingers into her cheek and shook her head. "Dreadful... dreadful. Well, it's behind you now."

  The cup was too full; coffee slopped over as Maddie set it before her guest. "But it's not behind us, really, is it?" she said softly. "It never can be."

  "Well, I know ... in the sense that they haven't found out who murdered your father, but ... I mean, time is passing. And time heals all wounds, so they say."

  "So they say." And damn them—they lied.

  Mrs. Roiters dipped her paper napkin in the saucer to siphon off the coffee puddle lolling there. "I don't suppose the investigation has turned up anything lately?"

  Maddie shook her head. In a flat voice, as though she were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, she said, "But the case is still open. Sometimes these things go on for years before the police catch a break. It hasn't been that long, really. Fourteen months. The investigating officer is very dedicated. He hasn't given up by any means."

  "Carjackings! I'm sorry I've lived long enough to see them. We may as well be living in the Old West. To tell the truth, I'd feel safer in a stagecoach than I do in my Buick."

  Maddie had to smile at the thought of Mrs. Roiters cowering in her Buick as she drove around the village. "But you live in Sandy Point, Mrs. Roiters. Most of us don't even lock our doors. I've summered here all my life, and I can't remember a single serious crime being committed."

  "I suppose you're right. After all, your father was nowhere near here when he—"

  "Yes," said Maddie quickly. The veil came down again. "Nowhere near."

  Maddie refused to go into all that again. The details of the murder had unfolded in agonizing bits and pieces, and it seemed to her that for the last year and two months, she'd had to talk about it—at times like these—in similar bits and pieces: her dad's brand new Accord, discovered in the Norfolk parking lot of the Boston T; the continuing nightmare of his disappearance; the eventual discovery of his body in the ditch off a winding country road nearby; the relentless lack of clues. The discovery of the crime had dragged on, and the mystery of it was dragging on still.

  Suddenly Mrs. Roiters pulled out a Kleenex, dabbed at her baggy eyes, and blew her nose loudly. "I'm sorry, dear. I got such a vivid picture of him at Town Meeting, arguing against that developer. It came on me sudden. He was such a good speaker. I always said, he should've run for office."

  "He always told the truth," Maddie said simply. "He never played politics. I imagine he would've made a terrible official."

  "He was a good man. You must miss him."

  Maddie nodded. After a minute she made herself say, "The cardamom cake is wonderful. I wish I had their recipe."

  She may as well have been chewing on a handful of Turns. It didn't seem possible that her mood this morning could get any lower, but there it went—sliding, sliding into a deeper pit.

  Mrs. Roiters cleared her throat and said, "You know, I have a reason for barging in on you so soon after your arrival, Maddie. Ordinarily I would work things out for myself, but this case is a little tricky ... he's a little tricky."

  "Who is?"

  "Dan Hawke. I've heard that he wants to keep a real low profile this summer, and that's fine, but ... well, you can see that I would need an interview with him for the Crier. Just a little one would do. What kind of credibility would the Crier have if I ignored his stay here? He's a high-profile visitor."

  Maddie refrained from pointing out that the Sandy Point Crier was regarded by the summer colonists with more affection than respect and said faintly, "I don't see where I fit in."

  "I've heard," Mrs. Roiters said with an oddly tender smile, "that you once knew him."

  Maddie blinked. "Whoever gave you that idea?"

  "Oh," said the older woman, bobbing her head from side to side, "you know how people talk."

  People talked? But who could possibly have known? He'd only stayed in Sandy Point for two weeks. He'd been just another college kid, part of a summer painting crew. Maddie had talked to him in front of the lighthouse a total of three times. They hadn't started dating until they were at Lowell College, and even then she'd kept it secret. Her mother would not have approved of a man like Daniel Hawke.

  Twenty years ago. It was downright scary to think that someone could've remembered them talking in front of the lighthouse an entire generation earlier.

  She tried to phrase an acceptable lie. "Mrs. Roiters, I don't know who told you that Dan Hawke and I are friends, but we're not."

  It didn't work. Mrs. Roiters sighed and said, "You know, I'm not surprised. He travels; he's famous. Friends like that have a tendency to get out of touch."

  Maddie shook her head doggedly. "It wasn't a question of getting out of touch. He is not my friend. He never was my friend."

  Things had roared along too fast to have paused at friendship.

  "I don't blame you in the least for being hurt, dear. He has no right to have a swelled head just because someo
ne began aiming a camera at him. It happens all the time, I suppose. But frankly, I'm disappointed. I assumed he was better than that."

  "No, that isn't what—"

  "Mom, I really don't want to stay in the attic bedroom this summer. I know there's bats in the other half."

  Her daughter was up. And running.

  "Hello, Tracey!" said Mrs. Roiters in an overly cheerful way. "My goodness, how you've grown!" she added as she sliced a second, more generous chunk of coffee cake for herself. "You must be taller than anyone else in your class."

  Reddening, the girl mumbled, " 'Lo, Mrs. Roiters," and turned back to her mother. "Why can't someone else take that room this year?" she said in a petulant, sleepy croak. "I was up all night, listening to stuff. Why do I always have to be the one who gets stuck with the worst of everything? Dad says—"

  "Honey, why don't we talk about that later? We have a visitor right now," Maddie said in mild reproach.

  Tracey acted, of course, as if she'd been slapped. Her eyebrows, pale and unshaped, slanted upward in a tragic way, and her cheeks puffed out from the force of her sigh. She gave her mother a burning, stricken look—and waited.

  She was so very good at it. In the last year or so, Tracey had perfected sullenness to an art form. She was convinced she was ugly—and when she assumed that infuriating look, Maddie was tempted to agree.

  As with most teenagers, Tracey's hormones were running wild. The growth spurt was only the tip of the iceberg. Her skin had begun to flare up, which made her give up chocolate and soon all food altogether. Getting her to eat was a constant battle in any case; she'd become obsessed with her weight. She should've had braces a year ago, but a year ago, they were all too busy avoiding the press. After seeing herself on page one with her face twisted in grief, Tracey had begged her mother to wait on the braces. They were still waiting.

  "All right," Maddie said at last. "Take your grandmother's room. She's been complaining about the stairs anyway. I'll clear out the study for her to use if—when—she comes down from Sudbury."

  Tracey said reproachfully, "Too bad you had to wait 'til I unpacked." With a brooding look, she dragged herself out of the kitchen.

  She was somewhere in the hall when Mrs. Roiters said with affection, "She's so tall. And her nose, oh dear, it's still too big for her face, isn't it? You see it so often in girls her age."

  Maddie heard her daughter's pace quicken on the checkerboard floor of the hall and then the tragic stomping of feet up the stairs.

  After a disastrously long pause, Mrs. Roiters added, "Still, once she gets through that ugly-duckling phase, she's going to be a real beauty. She'll have her father's good looks—blond and loose and elegant. You'll see."

  This is going to set Tracey's therapy back half a year, thought Maddie, wincing inside. Not that it mattered. Counseling didn't seem to be helping at all. The murder of her grandfather fourteen months ago had delivered the knockout blow to Tracey's innocence—but Maddie's divorce from Michael, three years before that, had delivered the first hard punch.

  Dear God, what are we doing to our children? she asked herself with a shudder, not for the first time. She rallied to her daughter's defense. "I remember when I was a teenager. It was a homely, awkward time."

  "My dear, I remember when you were a teenager, and I thought you were wonderful: a regular young lady, even then. Very well brought up. Enterprising, too. I can see you still, walking half a dozen dogs at a time for the summer folks. And you always cleaned up after. Very nice. Children today, well, they're not the same."

  Mrs. Roiters cast a longing glance in the general direction of the coffee cake, then sighed and stood up. "So when do you think would be a good time?'' she asked Maddie.

  "To—?"

  "Take a walk over to the lighthouse," said the irrepressible woman. "If you truly don't want me to come with you, I suppose you can just give him my card and plead my case for me. Tell him I only need half an hour. An hour at most. Maybe two. No, better not say two."

  From the back of the rush-seated chair she unhooked her purse, then fished around in it. The card that she handed Maddie said

  The Sandy Point Crier

  Trixie Roiters, Editor & Publisher

  All the News That's Fit to Print—

  And Some That Isn't

  "He's here to write a tell-all memoir, you know," she told Maddie in an undertone. "I understand that Ted Turner, among others, is going to be taking it on the chin. And Mr. Hawke will have something very interesting to say about Walter Cronkite ... "

  Maddie was agape. "Who on earth is telling you all this?"

  Mrs. Roiters flicked a wrist at Maddie and said, "That's confidential, dear; you know that."

  A smile, a hug, and she was off, leaving an amazed Maddie to wonder whether Sandy Point had been infiltrated by the C.I.A.

  Who was the source of all the gossip? Who knew both about her past with Daniel Hawke and the chapter headings of his memoirs, for pity's sake? Maddie racked her brain, trying to remember who could have seen her, a college freshman, clamming on the beach in front of the lighthouse those two or three times.

  Jimmy Gordon saw her. She remembered envying the local quahogger as he waved, then raked in quahogs by the bushel from his work skiff while she poked laboriously at every airhole on the beach, struggling to gather a decent quota so that her dad could make chowder for the Labor Day picnic.

  Would Jimmy even have noticed when Dan Hawke first wandered down from the lighthouse during a break from whitewashing it, saw her Lowell College sweatshirt, and chatted her up?

  Jimmy wouldn't have noticed. Jimmy wouldn't have cared. And Jimmy certainly wouldn't have remembered if he had.

  Who else? The Lawsons? They were relentless busybodies and they had a view of the lighthouse. The Tilleys ... the Nichols ... the Wrights. Those were the only families still around from back then, and Maddie was willing to bet a whole bushel and a peck of clams that they'd seen nothing then, and had said nothing now.

  Could Dan have told his sister—if that's who she was—about Maddie and him and the disastrous event at Lowell College? It didn't seem likely; he guarded his personal life fiercely. Once, anyway.

  Unless ... was he trying to get some buzz going about the memoirs he was planning to write? In that case, he'd be more than happy to give Trixie Roiters an interview for her community rag. And Mrs. Roiters wouldn't need Maddie at all.

  She sat back down and reread the card.

  All the News That's Fit to Print—

  And Some That Isn't

  Too much. Because of Dan Hawke, Maddie had stopped watching CNN. Now she'd have to stop reading the charming, silly, folksy Crier as well. She broke off a corner of coffee cake and popped it into her mouth.

  It still tasted like Tums.

  Chapter 3

  By noon the rain had let up; by one, the sun was out. It was hard not to be happy in Rosedale Cottage when the windows were thrown open to the garden, and Maddie found herself humming a tune as she put on a hat and went wandering through her perennials, snipping and pruning and inhaling deeply from old world roses that tumbled over the knee-high picket fence.

  The heavy work—the weeding, the mulching, the early spring pruning—had already been done, compliments of a maniacal neighbor with too small a yard of his own to keep himself busy. All that remained for Maddie to do, basically, was to enjoy one of the prettiest gardens in Sandy Point.

  She brought out wonderfully beat-up rattan chairs and arranged them around a makeshift table fashioned from an old, round, ironbound shop shingle that she'd found years ago at a yard sale. The shop's name, HMS Bliss, was written in ornate script on a background of hunter green. When she'd first dragged it home to clean it up and attach short legs to it, her father had mocked her scavenging ways. But after she set it up, if the weather was fair, he'd invariably have his lunch on that shop shingle, and he always drank his tea there.

  It was an annual tradition with Maddie to wonder what kind of wares a shop c
alled HMS Bliss would carry. Chocolates? Nautical supplies? No matter. For now, the name fit her mood. And in her bliss, she was extravagant: she cut a huge armful of roses, whacking off whole branches of the floribundas, letting the tightly closed buds on them go to waste.

  No matter. Life was short.

  She was standing at the cedar potting table alongside the house, stripping the roses of their thorns, when Norah Mills roared up in her milk white Mercedes with Joan MacDonald hard on her heels in her dark blue Jeep. They were an hour and a half late, but Maddie didn't mind at all.

  Norah was first out of her car. The mood on her face did not match the mood of her T-shirt, which proclaimed, "Life's a Beach."

  "Maddie! Where the hell were you? We cooled our heels through two cocktails and a salad. Where were you? We called three times!"

  "Really? I guess I didn't hear the phone," Maddie confessed.

  "I guess you didn't want to hear the phone!"

  True enough. "I thought you two were coming here to pick me up."

  "That was Plan A," said Joan, freeing a pale pink rose to slip through her straw hat. She sniffed the rose and smiled, and her joy made her round face pretty. "Plan B was you'd come meet us in your own car, because you didn't want to go antiquing with us this afternoon. Remember?"

  Actually, Maddie had been too upset to remember much of anything yesterday, but she had no intention of admitting it. "I do remember now. Sorry about that. Are you both stuffed, or shall I make you something?"

  No one was stuffed, not on a salad, but Norah would wire her jaw shut with her own hands before she'd eat anything substantial. Thin and rich, that's what got Norah's respect. And Joan—Joan, who was neither thin nor rich—wanted Norah's respect, so she declined Maddie's offer as well.

  "We stopped by to drop off Joannie's Jeep, that's all," said Norah with a queenlike wave of her hand. "We'll come back for it later. Ciao."