She could tell by the hesitation in his voice that Detective Bailey was choosing his words carefully.
"It's been my experience," he said, "that coincidences don't happen as often as people would like to believe. I've also learned that people don't necessarily tell their families everything that's on their m—"
"Oh, but my father would tell my mother if he were meeting someone," Maddie said, interrupting. "Really he would! They were very close; they shared everything. You must've seen that in your investigation. He and my mother loved one another deeply."
Sarah Timmons had loved her husband so much, in fact, that she still hadn't come down to Rosedale cottage from Sudbury. She'd pleaded a summer cold, but Maddie knew better. Her mother was still drifting aimlessly in her grief, like a boat without oars.
Maddie had hated telling her mother about the note. Believing that Edward Timmons was a victim of random violence had been hard enough. Being told that he had an actual appointment with his slayer had sent Sarah on a whole new downward spiral of grief. The idea that her husband may have kept secrets from her was bound to be even more unthinkable.
"You're not saying that my father was having an assignation with some woman, I hope," Maddie said bluntly. It was the only secret she could think of: an illicit one.
The detective let out a wry chuckle and said, "Believe me, Mrs. Regan, a man wouldn't need to write that down. No, my thinking is that your father made the appointment at least a week in advance—the note didn't say 'Tuesday,' after all, it said a date. Edward Timmons was retired, so he wasn't the one with the full calendar. It must have been the person he was meeting. A busy person. A professional, probably."
But Maddie had another thought. "You said he was meeting a person. What if he were planning simply to be at a place? A morning recital, maybe, or a lecture. He often attended those."
"He wouldn't have mentioned that to your mother?"
"Oh," said Maddie, crestfallen. "Yes. In all likelihood."
"My gut tells me it was a person."
Your gut hasn't found out a thing, she thought with a flash of bitterness.
"What's next, in that case?" she asked him, trying to subdue her frustration. Detective Bailey was a hard-boiled sweetheart of a family man with four kids. He knew more than most what it meant to have a parent ripped away from the hearth.
The detective blew air through his nose and said, "I have a call out to your dad's primary care physician. It's a long shot, but it's conceivable that your father had arranged an appointment at ten in the morning on the sixth that he didn't want any of you to know about."
A terminal illness? It didn't seem possible. "Wouldn't the doctor or his staff have come forward with that information?"
"They might not have made the connection. He would have cautioned them against calling your home, and when he didn't show, they wouldn't have followed up."
She turned the idea over. "At least it would account for the note," she said, nodding her head. It amazed her to realize that she was actually rooting for a scenario in which her father may have had cancer.
She said, "If it's all right with you—I know you don't have the resources to devote to this case anymore—I'm going to try to find out what events were scheduled in and around Cambridge at ten o'clock that day."
"If he was planning to be in Cambridge," the detective reminded her.
"That's right," she said, taken down another peg in her determination. "We don't even know that." Damn the note!
"Mrs. Regan," the detective said, suddenly earnest, "I want you to know there's not a day goes by that I don't think about this case. I'm always open to new angles, and—"
"Oh, I'm sorry; I have another call," said Maddie, expecting to hear that Tracey was ready for a ride home. "Can you hold?"
But they were done for the moment. The detective hung up and Maddie punched in the new caller. It was Michael, phoning about the note. Had she heard anything?
"You really are psychic," Maddie said, hardly surprised. Michael had always had the peculiar ability to clue in on a subject that interested him. When they were dating, he often picked up the phone just as she was calling his number. She used to interpret it as proof of his love. Now she knew better. It was a trait he possessed, like being double-jointed. It didn't prove love at all.
She told him about the phone call she'd just had, all except her own insistence that her father wasn't having an affair, which was too ludicrous to bother mentioning.
And yet in the next breath, Michael had her wondering again.
He said, "Do you suppose—you're not going to like this suggestion, but—do you suppose your father may have thought he had a sexually transmitted disease?''
"Michael! You knew him. How can you possibly suggest that?"
"No, you're right, you're right. It's a dumb idea." He backtracked into safer territory and tried to put a positive spin on the whole affair.
"It sounds as if Bailey thinks the note could be perfectly innocent," he said. "Maybe not income tax, but something just as legitimate."
"I didn't get that feeling at all," Maddie argued. "I think he sees a definite connection between the note and the murder of my father."
"There you go again, Maddie," Michael said, irritated now. "Looking for goblins where there are none."
"And there you go again, trying to pretend that all's right with the world. All isn't right, Michael. Take off those rose-colored glasses, would you for once?" she snapped.
"Maddie, you're out of control on this. I know how hard it is to have an unsolved crime lying around like an unexploded grenade, but—"
"Someone's here," she said, relieved to hear knocking at the kitchen door. "I have to go."
"Maddie, don't hang up," he pleaded. "It's probably the paper boy or something. I'll wait."
The knocking resumed. "Look, I—oh, all right. Hold on."
She slammed the receiver on the counter and marched over to the big Dutch door, feeling as if they were all walking around with their hands slapped over their ears.
We want to know; we don't want to know, she decided, swinging open the top of the two-part door.
Swinging it open to Daniel Hawke.
Twenty years. She stood there. Twenty years. Her heart lurched violently in her chest and began a wild knocking. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Daniel Hawke. He was there. Close enough to touch. Her eyes stung with tears. She felt a surge of deep, wrenching distress, a pain so deep that it made it hard to breathe. She tried to say something again, and failed.
She tried again.
"Why ...?"
The wonder in his face seemed to mirror her own. It was as if he had no idea why he was standing there. And yet there he was. His brown eyes were as deep, as luminous, as intense as ever she remembered them. It astonished her that she remembered every little thing about his face: the wide, straight eyebrows; the sharply defined, aquiline nose; the broad space above his upper lip just crying out for a mustache; the stubble beneath his lower lip that never seemed to hook up with a razor blade. His cheeks were as hollow, his hair as unruly, as twenty years earlier. Time had left lines, especially around his eyes, and time had left scars: a small nick in the left eyebrow; a ragged line like a thin arrow across his cheekbone, pointing toward the nick.
He was there. Daniel Hawke. He was there.
"Maddie. Hello."
His voice, too, was the same. Deeper, softer, but the same.
"I heard you were in town, Daniel," she said, and immediately she cringed at how inane it sounded; she wanted to sound clever. She tried a smile and cringed at that, too. She knew the smile was crooked and trembly, and she wanted to look beautiful.
Clever and beautiful and young. And she was none of those things.
They both began to say something: he, to explain; she, to query. And then they stopped at the same time, and chuckled the same ghastly, bleak chuckle.
She recovered first. "Yes?" She sounded almost shrill to herself as she
said it, as if he were holding a gun aimed at her belly.
He held up a Pyrex measuring cup. "Sugar?" he said, with a loopy, sickly smile. "Do you have any to spare?"
She stared. Whatever it was he had come for—money, jewels, silver, sex, forgiveness—she did not expect it to be sugar.
"I don't understand," she said humbly. Her mind and her heart were in turmoil. It was much worse—the face-to-face meeting was so much worse—than in her most anguished dreams.
"Here, take it," he said, thrusting the cup into her hand. "I don't want the damn thing. I jus t... I had to ... I didn't know how ... Maddie. Maddie."
It was that second ' 'Maddie'' that was her undoing. A tear rolled down her cheek. "Why are you here?" she whispered. "Why?"
"Let me in," he said, his voice hoarse with emotion. "Maddie, let me in."
How could she? It was so much worse, so much worse: seeing him again, flogged by the years, lost years, years they'd never get back. And it was worse even than that. Despite the years, he looked so like himself that she was flung violently back to their last meeting. Her head began to ring with the sound of her own furious reproaches, hurled at him like so many javelins.
She remembered them all, every last one of them. Did he?
"We have to talk," he said.
His words brought a startled laugh to her throat. "Don't you think that ship has sailed?"
"If it has, it's gone round the world and come home again," he said with a burning look.
But she stood her ground, refusing—unable—to open the door to him.
He reached over the lower half of the Dutch door and unlocked the door on her side, letting himself in. Maddie watched, mesmerized, as he did it. Dan Hawke: intense, impatient, undisciplined. Dan Hawke: leader of a ragtag band of student radicals. Dan Hawke: bad boy of the campus.
There wasn't a door built that could keep him out.
Now that he had gained access to her kitchen, some of the fierceness seemed to slide off him. "You look the same," he said. His gaze swept her from head to sandals and came back to rest on her face. "Like the girl next door."
"I am the girl next door."
He smiled at that. "I was counting on it when I signed the lease."
She pretended not to understand the implication. "Are you starting a second career in the Coast Guard?"
"No."
"Then a lighthouse is an odd choice of digs."
He gave her a raw look that instantly put her back on her guard. "You know why I'm here, Maddie."
"Actually, I've been wondering for a couple of weeks now," she shot back. Immediately, she wanted to retract the words.
"I know. I should've come over sooner. But you're rarely alone here. People seem to come and go constantly."
She said, "I have friends here. Family here." He wouldn't understand that. He was a lone wolf.
"I'm jealous of every one of them," he admitted.
That surprised her. Once when they were in bed together, he'd said, "You're all I need. Everyone else is clutter."
Except for his sister. He did admit to caring about her. But he claimed to have no use for his parents and no love for his other relations. She wondered whether he still felt that way.
"I can't imagine you being jealous that you're not surrounded by a crowd," she said without smiling. "It was never your style."
"No, that's not what I—" His face took on a sudden, puzzled frown. "Did you know your phone's off the hook?" he said, pointing to the counter.
Maddie whirled around. "Oh, my God." She snatched up the receiver and said, "Hello?"
She was amazed to see that her ex-husband was still on the line. "Who're you talking to, for God's sake?" he demanded to know.
Without thinking, she answered, "Dan Hawke."
There was a pause, and then Michael said, "Hawke? What the hell is he doing there?"
"He's staying in Sandy Point for the summer," she said, turning away from Dan Hawke in a laughable attempt at privacy. "It was in Trixie's newsletter."
"Who reads Trixie's newsletter? What's he doing in your house?"
She said grimly, "He came to borrow a cup of sugar, Michael." In a lower, grimmer voice she said, "Is it really any of your business?"
"Yes, it's my business! I don't want that bastard near my family."
"Michael, this is not the time!"
But Michael didn't agree. "Jesus, Maddie! I don't care if he's there selling Girl Scout cookies. The guy brought an unbelievable amount of pain down on your father, on all of you. How can you—? Let me talk to him. Put him on the phone."
"No, I won't do that. Good-bye, Michael."
"Wait, wait—where's he staying?" Michael got in.
"In the lighthouse," she answered grudgingly.
"The lighthouse! That's ballsy."
"If you say so. I really have to get off the phone. Tracey should've called by now."
"You have call waiting, Maddie. What's the problem?"
"Michael, please. Good-bye." She hung up, aware that once again she'd let Michael go too far, too long. All for Tracey's sake.
She was about to explain to Dan that she was expecting a call when the call she was expecting came mercifully through. Maddie took it while a bemused Dan Hawke, arms folded across his chest, leaned back on the Formica counter and waited patiently for her to finish.
She hung up and turned to him, grateful for the chance to cut and run. "I'm sorry. I have to pick my daughter up from the Bowl-a-rama," she said.
He broke into a grin. "The Bowl-a-rama! Is that joint still there?"
"It's candlepin now," Maddie said. She wanted to wipe the grin off his face; it was bowling her over.
"I remember knocking off from work with a couple of the guys and playing a few lanes while we had a beer or two. It was fairly seedy then. Have they added ferns and made it all gentrified? Like Annie's?"
"I'd forgotten," she said, hurled back in time again. "Annie's used to be Anthony's Pizza back then. They had a great onion pizza; they—"
She brought herself up short. The one thing she did not want to do was to stroll down memory lane with him. It wasn't enough to peek behind the velvet curtains when you did that. You had to turn the rocks over, too. And she didn't want to look at dark things scurrying. Not now. Not ever. She had no more room for any more horror.
"I'm sorry," she said, looking away from him. She turned the cowardly act into a scan of the kitchen for her handbag. "I really have to go."
She found the bag next to the microwave. Scooping it up in a swoop onto her shoulder, she said as gaily as she could, "I guess you're right; it is a bit of a madhouse around here. My brother's arriving tonight with his family and I've got shopping to do. Please don't think I'm rude—"
"Not rude," he said, stepping between her and the door. "Afraid."
"Don't be asinine," she said flatly. Her cheeks burned from the dead-on accusation.
"You can't expect this to be the end of it, Maddie," he said in that urgently persuasive voice of his. Once it had rallied a band of idealists into doing wildly destructive things; she couldn't forget that.
"This is the end of it, Dan."
"I didn't come here just to pay my respects," he said, spitting out the word. "I came here to—"
"To what?" she cried. "To thrash it out, once and for all? Because you decided the time is right? You want me to drop everything—drop my life—and listen to what you in your accumulated wisdom have to say?" She let out a harsh and bitter laugh. "I don't think so."
It shocked her, the depth of her anger. She tried to brush past him through the wide door, but he grabbed her arm to hold her back. The act infuriated her; she yanked herself from his grip and jumped away, like a cat, and then lashed out at him.
"You want my forgiveness? Fine! All is forgiven. My father's dead now; the chapter's closed. There. Feel better? Were you haunted by the memory of what you did to him? Did you need my forgiveness to make your glorious life complete?"
Her voice dropped
to a menacing whisper as she said, "Oh, yes, I—we—forgive you. But if you want me to forget, then you can forget it, Daniel. It's not going to happen. Good-bye. Lock the door on your way out. There are crazy people out there."
Shaking with emotion, she forced herself to walk deliberately to her car. Without once looking at him, she backed the Taurus out of the drive, sending quahog shells flying in every direction.
Chapter 8
That night, he dreamed about her.
He dreamed that she was naked, and he had her in his arms. He was kissing her passionately, willing her to love him. But she was resisting; she kept telling him, "Don't you get it? It's over. It's over." At last she broke away, and she ran for the door. But he was faster than she was, and stronger. He slammed the door closed and locked it with a key that wasn't a key, but a rawhide dogbone. He could see outrage in her face as he turned and began to walk steadily toward her. She began to back away from him, not so much in fear as with revulsion. That infuriated him—and it turned him on.
He grabbed her and threw her across the bed, only it wasn't a bed, it was the top of the lighthouse tower, and as he plunged himself into her, the water around them kept rising. Only he didn't care; he kept driving himself into her, because he was convinced he could make her love him. And when the water level rose above her face she stopped crying, and he took that to mean she loved him. But the water kept rising; he could feel his mouth and nose go under, and he could feel the water filling his ears....
He called out, and his own voice woke him from the nightmare. He sat up in bed, convinced he was sitting on top of the light tower, and looked around in the hushed light of dawn. No, he was in his apartment, all right: the same two-bedroom flat, carved from a once-elegant rowhouse in Boston's Back Bay, that he'd lived in since Maddie threw him out four years ago.
The bedroom was a mess. His dirty clothes, weeks of them, were everywhere—draped over the chair, the bedposts, the closet doorknob. A red tie peeked out from one of the bedpillows. (When had he last worn a tie? He couldn't remember.) The blinds, broken on both windows, hung in the same cockeyed disarray that had recently prompted a neighbor to leave a note in his mailbox offering to buy him new ones.
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