With Every Breath

by Beverly Bird

  The cars began rolling off the boat, and Maddie fell into line behind them. They drove onto a paved road that curved around to the north. She realized that the island was only three blocks wide. She could see water at either end of each side street. She knew from looking at a map that it really was shaped like a candle, with the boat cove at the handle, complete with a spit of land at the top that looked almost like a flame. But a flat image on paper hadn’t really given her a clear perspective. She hadn’t expected the land to be so narrow. It wasn’t long, either. Before she could blink, they came up on a small business district.

  She slid the Volvo into the first available parking space she came to. They had passed a diner a little way back, just at the point where the road had turned. It was a place out of middle-American history, with plenty of shiny aluminum, and red-and-white-striped awnings. She saw a school on a side street to her left, small and square, white with a blue roof. A post office and the city hall sat directly in front of it. There was a Methodist church next to them, and a spattering of retail stores to her right.

  "Come on," she said to Josh. "Let’s bundle up and take a look around."

  He got out after her, taking her warning literally. Though his coat was already zipped, he clutched the front of it as though the cold, buffeting wind might wrench it open again.

  Maddie bit her lip and smiled. She loved him so much. Sometimes it was stunning, overpowering, at least for her. A grin from him, a childish reflex, or one of his old bursts of delighted laughter, and its full force would slam into her out of nowhere, almost robbing her of breath.

  She took his hand, and they started up the street side by side. They came to a liquor store first, then a drugstore, then a market. Farther up on the next block she saw a sidewalk cafe, its outdoor patio already barren of tables and abandoned for the winter. There was an art gallery beside that.

  They hurried into the market. She piled their cart with enough staples and necessities to last them weeks, and when she was aiming it back toward the cash register, she realized that Josh was no longer beside her.

  A new feeling of pressure hit her chest, and it was agony. Maddie whipped around. Her palms had gone damp, and her hands felt like ice. There was an elderly woman behind her.

  "Have you seen—" Maddie gasped and got her breath under control. "A small boy in a bright blue parka?"

  "He’s in the next aisle," the woman snapped. "You should keep a better eye on him. Parents have responsibilities."

  Maddie’s heart lurched and plunged. She looked at the woman wildly for a split second, then she ran around into the next aisle. Josh was in front of a shelf that was laden with cereal bars and instant breakfast mixes.

  Maddie took a deep breath and made herself approach him calmly. "Made for a k-kid on the go?" she teased.

  Josh looked up at her and held out a box of Pop-Tarts.

  "Oh ... I g-got some already. But not grape. Sure, we can g-get them, too." Breathe, she instructed herself, slowly, evenly, get calm.

  She led Josh back to their cart, her knees still wobbling. Not your fault. Not then, not now, she reminded herself. He was a boy, still a perfectly normal boy in so many ways, inclined to wander off occasionally.

  Inclined to trust his father.

  Four weeks of counseling hadn’t gotten Josh to speak again, but it had taught her that. Intellectually. The deep, irrational guilt over what had happened to him was something else again.

  They finally made it to the cashier, and Maddie began unloading their cart. "Can you tell me where Welcome Realty is?" she asked, keeping one comer of one eye on Josh. He was studying the magazine rack. The sourfaced, elderly woman was right behind him.

  "Four blocks north, take a right," the cashier told her. "It’s up on the Beach Road."

  Maddie paid for the groceries and only when they

  were outside again did she remember that their car was a good block away.

  Once, a lifetime ago it seemed now, she would have left Josh standing guard over the groceries. She would have jogged the short distance and brought the car back to him. Now she swerved the cart and they walked to the next block together.

  A few minutes later they found the realty office. It was in a beautifully restored Cape Cod on the beach.

  "Something tells me," she said to Josh, parking out front, "that our rental house isn’t going to be quite this grand." She had learned quickly that real estate on the island was dear. She had thought that housing cost a lot in Fort Lauderdale until she had begun corresponding with Cassie Diehl of Welcome Realty. Fort Lauderdale was still more expensive, but Fort Lauderdale was Florida. Candle Island was just a jumble of rocks and sand off the coast of a very cold place.

  They went inside. The office was clean, modem, with teal blue carpet and a gray velour sofa against one wall of the reception area. The sofa virtually whispered at Maddie to sink down into its lush cushions and make herself at home. She did, sighing at the warmth, patting the space beside her. Josh sat and pushed himself close to her side.

  A bell jingled over the door. Maddie looked up too quickly, too sharply, out of habit.

  The man who came in spared them only a glance. He walked past the desk and glanced down a hallway. Maddie noticed that he moved with an almost-imperceptible limp.

  "Cassie around?" he asked.

  "I. . . no. No one was here when we c-came in. Just a second ago."

  Her breath, borderline uncooperative since she’d lost

  Josh in the store, threatened to tangle yet again. Against all reason, the man intimidated her. Not, she thought, that it was hard to do that to a woman who’d once been so traumatized that she had stopped speaking for fourteen months, and who still, in stressful circumstances, could work up one hell of a stutter if she wasn’t careful.

  The man went back to the door. He looked out through the narrow pane at the top, and Maddie watched him. His jaw tightened as though putting weight on that right leg hurt him but he was damned and determined that he wasn’t going to favor it.

  Josh tugged on her sleeve.

  "What, baby?" She looked down at him quickly. He pointed to the magazines on the polished, cherry coffee table.

  Maddie picked one for him that seemed to contain lots of pictures, then she heard a drawer or door slam somewhere down the hallway. Footsteps followed the sound. She breathed a little easier. Someone was coming, putting an end to their time alone with the man at the door.

  She looked at him again out of the comer of her eye. He had one shoulder tucked against the doorjamb, and his hands were shoved into his jeans pockets. This time she figured out what it was about him that bothered her. It wasn’t familiarity, at least not in any conventional sense. It was more than that. She recognized something in him, something deep, prohibitive, even angry.

  He was not a good-looking man, she thought, impressions still tumbling in on her. He was dark, and his face was too hard. But something about him made a person look twice, almost as though to make absolutely certain that he wasn’t strikingly handsome.

  A woman finally cruised into the waiting room.

  Maddie turned her attention to her and disliked her on sight. She was inordinately thin. She had flame red hair that couldn’t possibly be her natural color. Her fingernails were artificial daggers. She seemed surprised to see the man.

  "Hey, Joe, what’s up?"

  Joe, Maddie thought. She watched him look around at the woman, moving nothing more than his head, then he made a short, thumb-jabbing motion at Maddie. "I can wait."

  The woman’s eyes followed his gesture. "Can I help you?"

  Maddie got to her feet. Josh lunged up along with her, pressing in close to her leg. Too many strangers, she thought, too new a place.

  "I’m Madeline Brogan. I . . . wrote, and called. I spoke to someone—"

  "You spoke to me," the woman answered peremptorily. "I’m Cassie Diehl. I’ve got you all set up."

  She moved behind the desk and pulled open a drawer. She extracted a file a
nd plucked a lease out, sliding it across the desk toward her.

  Maddie wanted to read it, to be sure that everything was as it should be. But Cassie was pushing a pen toward her, as though urging her to hurry. Maddie glanced back at the sofa.

  "I . . . I’ll just sit down over there with it for a moment, and then you can take care of this . . . gentleman." She forced herself to enunciate carefully. Please, I can’t get rattled now, not now. There was no real reason for it, and Josh would notice, would get even more nervous himself.

  "I said I can wait," the man answered in a deep growl.

  Josh’s hand stiffened in hers. Maddie nodded and

  looked down at the lease, glancing over it as fast as she could. They needed to get out of there. Josh needed to get out of there. The tension was all under the surface, but he clearly felt it, and he did not handle tension well these days at all.

  "Three months, right? And if I need it longer ..." "It’s been empty for eons," Cassie Diehl assured her. "No problem. I’m sure the owner will continue your lease."

  "At the same price?"

  "That I can’t guarantee you."

  As though she had even a modicum of a choice, Maddie thought, signing. "What about utilities?"

  "Electric’s hooked up, and I called to have it turned on in your name like you asked. No phone, though. You’ll have to go all the way back to the mainland to get that." She sounded pleased.

  Why couldn’t she just have told me that on the phone last week, Maddie wondered angrily, before we ferried all the way over here? But arguing the point didn’t seem as important as leaving.

  Cassie slid a set of keys across toward her. "It’s number one hundred and ten on The Wick Road," she went on, and her voice changed again, going a little breathless. Maddie looked up at her, scowling.

  "I don’t know where that is."

  The woman was dumbfounded, then eager. "Really? Are you serious?"

  Maddie didn’t have to worry about stuttering anymore. Anger spurted through her sweetly and suddenly. "Why wouldn’t I be?"

  Cassie blinked. "I just—I didn’t—·"

  "What is the problem here?" Maddie demanded.

  "I—nothing. That’s everything."

  "Good. Then I need directions. As quickly and as

  concisely as you can give them to me, please, because my little boy has had a long day."

  The woman’s eyes flickered again at her tone. "Just go back to the boulevard and keep going straight north. It’ll take you to the bridge. When you get over onto The Wick, there’s only one road. It sort of loops all the way around the little island. Take it to the right, to the east side. The road goes up onto a bunch of rocks. When it dives again, you’ll see a house right there on your left. That’s one hundred and ten."

  Maddie stooped to pick Josh up, feeling a protective urge to hold him. She took the keys from Cassie’s desk and dropped them into her coat pocket. She threw a last wary look at Cassie.

  "Thanks," she said shortly, then she looked at the man, who was still blocking the door. "Excuse me."

  The man—Joe, she remembered—stepped away to give her room to pass. The little bell jingled behind her as she wrenched the door open with her free hand and hurried outside.

  Not a particularly welcoming bunch, Maddie thought. She could almost understand why her parents had flown the coop all those years ago. It just might have been nice if they had considered taking me with them.

  Chapter 2

  Joe Gallen watched Maddie run to her car, clutching the boy, the wind snatching at her coat. Then he looked back at Cassie.

  "Now what," he asked wearily, "did you want to go and do that for?"

  "Do what?" Cassie asked innocently.

  Joe watched her take a seat behind the reception desk with slow, practiced movements. The effort didn’t soften her up any. She was brittle and sharp-edged, and it went beyond the bony elbows and knees that seemed to draw the eye and stick out every which way. He crossed to her slowly, refusing to wince at the scurrying pain in his right knee.

  "A hundred rental units on the big island, and you put her up on the goddamned Wick?"

  Cassie examined her long, bloodred nails. "Well, she belongs up there. She’s one of them."

  Joe planted his palms on her desk. "That attitude went out with love beads and flower power." In fact, he thought, there were just as many half-million-dollar

  homes up there now as there were run-down cottages. Granted, the big houses were all on the side facing the distant mainland. The sea views were kinder there. High tide was less likely to send waves crashing into real estate, and the northeasterly gales were less likely to shatter glass. The ocean side—where Cassie had put the Brogan woman—was like another country. But a fair handful of the wealthy and the reclusive had found the western Wick to their liking in recent years.

  "Mama doesn’t think so," Cassie was saying. "She about fell off her chair when I told her who called me to rent a place a few weeks ago."

  Mildred would, he thought.

  "She said I ought to put her in that old house, just to see what comes of it."

  "You put her in that house?" He hadn’t realized it, hadn’t equated the number with the weathered old bungalow where it had all happened twenty-five years ago. "Jesus, are you nuts?"

  "Just helping you do your job, Joe."

  He muttered a curse and backed away from her desk. "So what did you want?" Cassie asked. "I bet you just wanted to get a look at her yourself."

  He had wanted to check the woman out, but not for the same intrusive reasons that would take Cassie to the telephone as soon as he left there. At least, not entirely.

  "Damn you, Cassie," he muttered, going to the door again.

  "You got here pretty quick, Joe!" she called out, laughing shrilly. "Don’t act like you’re so much better than the rest of us!"

  He ignored her, going outside, closing the door carefully behind him because the urge to slam it was strong. His job, he thought, would be a lot easier if both she and her mother would pack their bags and leave the island.

  Joe had taken over for Dave Bramnick in 1991 as chief of police, after six years of working under him. At the old man’s retirement party down at the Sandbar, Dave had gotten reasonably soused and had talked about the Brogan thing for the first and only time, at least in Joe’s hearing. Dave was touchy about it, considering it his only real failure. Dave was also of the firm opinion that the case would never be closed.

  Beacher had gotten drunk, he’d said, done Annabel in, and taken off, but they’d never prove it. Annabel’s body had never turned up, despite the efforts of a fairsized search party. Beacher himself had vanished into thin air, too. There was only one person in the world who could tell anyone what had happened up there that day, and the last time Dave Bramnick had seen her, little Madeline Brogan wasn’t saying a word.

  Well, she was talking now, Joe thought, although he thought he had noticed a quick stutter-step there with some of her words. Oh, yeah, he had noticed, that she talked and she walked and she smelled just fine, like summer wildflowers.

  She’d looked right at him and hadn’t seemed to know him, though admittedly Joe had been some three grades ahead of her, and he didn’t remember much of her, either. But he was sure she hadn’t recognized Cassie, and they had been in the same grade. And she hadn’t batted an eye at having rented her old house.

  So she didn’t remember.

  Joe guessed that if something could rip the tongue right out of a kid’s mouth and render her mute, if she had seen something so God-rotten that day that it had done that to her, it was reasonable to assume that as an adult she would block it out. Consciously or unconsciously, it made sense that she would just lock the memories away in some place deep and distant inside.

  Joe knew all about God-rotten experiences and the things a person might do to bear them. What bothered him was that she didn’t seem to think her lack of memory or recognition was off kilter at all, at least not so far as he could
tell.

  I don't know where that is. I need directions.

  There was that, and the fact that Joe had always had a hunch, a gut feeling, that Dave Bramnick was wrong.

  Joe was of the opinion that both Beacher and Annabel had died that day. Which meant that two witnesses knew what had happened up there on The Wick. Their kid knew ... and so did their killer.

  Twenty-five years, Joe reflected. Not so long that it wasn’t reasonable to assume that that killer was still alive. Alive and most probably sweating bullets. Wondering if little Maddie could finally talk. If she would talk. And even when and if it became apparent to the general populace that she didn’t remember, Cassie Diehl had fixed it that so that people would have to wonder if sooner or later she would.

  He got into the city Pathfinder he’d left parked on the street and wheeled it around to head west on Ninth Street. Candle Island was a real quiet, boring place, and that was just the way Joe liked it. He didn’t need— didn’t want—Maddie Brogan’s memory erupting like snakes out of a pit, giving him trouble.

  He took the radio mouthpiece off the dashboard and buzzed in at the station. Hector Marks picked up.

  There was another thorn in Joe’s side, but at least with Hector there was a decisive and predictable end in sight. The weasel had six more months until mandatory retirement.

  "Anything going on?" he asked to the man’s greeting, then he winced.

  "That Brogan girl’s back," Hector said excitedly.

  "Yeah."

  "Jesus H. Christ, last time I saw her she was damned near buck naked and bloody from head to toe. I was with Dave that day, you know."

  Everybody knew. "Yeah," Joe said again.

  "Pete Caven saw her go into the market. He says she turned out to be a looker."

  "Mmm." Joe had been born and raised on the island, had left only to attend Penn State and to play pro football with the Minnesota Vikings. He had been gone, altogether, maybe seven years. It had been just long enough for him realize that the rest of the world wasn’t like this. It had been just enough that it still amazed him how a small group of people could thrive on gossip to the exclusion of common decency and taste and everything else.