With Every Breath

by Beverly Bird

  "You seen her yet yourself?" Hector persisted.

  "Matter of fact, I did." And she was hardly the Brogan girl any longer. She was all grown-up, and she had some spunk to call her own. She hadn’t let Cassie dance all over her. And she had pushed past him out that door like a terrier, teeth bared, just waiting for some excuse to snap, no matter that she was snapping at a pit bull.

  "Anything else?" he asked Hector, dragging his mind off her.

  "Gina called."

  Joe snarled.

  "She’s says it’s the tenth of the month, so where’s the money?"

  What he’d like to do, Joe thought, was cram every dollar of support down her throat. "I’ll take care of it later. I’m going to stop over at the diner for some lunch. See you in an hour."

  He hung up the handset again and hit the accelerator

  a little harder. Something like wildflowers lingered in his nostrils.

  And he couldn’t help but wonder what in the hell had she come back for and why?

  Cassie waited until the CIPD Pathfinder was out of sight, then she hurried back to the phone and called the diner. Mama still worked there, waiting tables, though less and less these days when her arthritis kicked up. Along with her social security, it was just barely enough to keep her going. Cassie paid her rent, too, for use of the attic bedroom that had been hers for as long as she could remember. She had always lived there, but suddenly, after thirty-four years, Mama decided that she should pay for the luxury.

  Mildred Diehl picked up the phone on the first ring, which was bad news, too. It meant that her boss was making her sit on the register today. And that meant no tips, so Cassie would get stuck buying the groceries.

  Still, the delicious gossip she had to impart wouldn’t let her scowl for long.

  "She was here, Mama," she blurted. "Not more than five minutes ago. And she doesn’t remember. She didn’t even remember her own house!"

  "Yup," Mildred answered. "She was driving a gray foreign car. I saw her in the market before I came in to work. That kid seem all right to you?"

  Cassie thought about it, nonplussed. "Well, I guess. He didn’t say much."

  "She was a nervous wreck," Mildred went on. "Still don’t seem in possession of all her marbles, if you get my meaning. And I was wondering how come she’s got a kid when her name’s still Brogan." Women with kids

  and without husbands were a source of particular interest and chagrin to Mama.

  "Well, she’s famous or some such thing," Cassie said finally. "Maybe she kept her maiden name because of that." She’d heard of women doing that sort of thing, although Cassie had always figured that if she ever got herself a husband, she’d take everything she was entitled to, including his name.

  Mildred harrumphed. "Don’t know what she’s famous for," she answered. "I never heard of her. Not for anything else but what happened up there on The Wick, anyways."

  "She takes pictures, Mama." Cassie sighed. "I told you that. Remember, I showed you a long time ago when they were in that magazine."

  "Yeah, well, I got to go."

  Cassie slammed the phone down. It irritated her immensely that Mama had seen Madeline Brogan even before she had.

  She pushed back from the desk and plucked her keys from the drawer. Her boss would be out to lunch for another half an hour yet. In the meantime, Cassie could think of at least one other person who would be interested in Maddie Brogan’s return, someone who would be very interested to know that Joe Gallen had gotten there almost before the woman had turned up.

  Cassie flipped the closed sign on the office door and went to find his ex-wife.

  It was a quarter past eight before Joe called it a day and a night. In the hours that had passed since lunch, they’d had a call that a Wick kid was eating donuts at the market without paying for them, a drunk and disorderly up at the Sandbar, and a broken arm at the jungle gym over at the school. And he’d gotten no less than twenty-three

  calls regarding the return of Madeline Brogan.

  Joe knew for a fact that after she’d left the realty office, she tracked back to the liquor store to buy a bottle of cabernet. It had cost her $5.99, plus tax. Then she had gone directly to that house and hadn’t been seen since. At least half the calls had been speculation about what she might be doing in there.

  Joe kind of wondered himself.

  He limped halfway to the Pathfinder in the city hall parking lot before he swung around again—at least as much as his knee would let him swing. He went back inside and caught Lou Paul digging in his desk drawer for something. The man looked up at him, startled and sheepish.

  "Forget something, boss?"

  Joe grunted noncommittally.

  He passed his own office and went to the back of the building, down the stairs into the basement. Six years before, when he had taken over, he had convinced the city commissioners to computerize the police department. But the Brogans had died—or disappeared—in 1972, so their file would still be downstairs.

  It took him nearly half an hour to dig it up, and it was nine o’clock by the time he got home to his waterfront condo.

  Joe had not been a typically stupid kid when the Vikes had drafted him. He had not rushed out to buy a Mercedes and twelve sets of gold chains to drape around his neck. Not his style, anyway. And it had been a good thing, because his football career had been regrettably short as the result of a nasty knee injury that had cut his speed roughly in half. A slow wide-out was an out-of-work wide-out.

  But even while he’d been playing, he’d pretty much known that sooner or later he would end up coming back to the island. And he’d known that working the

  boats like everyone else would drive him nuts in good, short order. So he’d invested well enough that he could get by pretty comfortably on a civil service paycheck, even after Gina had gotten through with him.

  With the unbidden thought of her, Joe slammed his front door hard.

  He went directly upstairs into the kitchen. The condo was four floors and narrow enough—waterfront lots cost dearly—but the view from the master bedroom was incredible. The second floor had two bedrooms and two baths. The first floor—above the carport—was a long living-family-dining room with a kitchenette tucked against the south wall, just in front of the stairs that led up from the carport. Another flight angled back up over the kitchen area on the other side.

  He was proud of the place. He had built it—and the three adjoining condominiums—himself.

  He grabbed a beer, slammed the refrigerator door, and swigged, tilting his head back to swallow, studying the panels of the dropped ceiling for a moment. Then he looked at the file he still held in his hand.

  Skinny damned thing. Not much evidence. If there had ever been more, then Hector Marks had managed to obliterate it when he had fallen. The case had never been officially closed, but by the time Beacher’s sister had come north to collect the kid—roughly four months later—Dave had no longer been treating it as active. And the county boys had never gotten involved at all.

  Joe carried his beer and the file into the big main room. He dropped down into an overstuffed, overworn chair in front of the fireplace on the east wall, put his feet up on the hearth and the beer to his lips again. He drank and looked up over the mantel.

  He honest-to-God hadn’t realized, when he’d bought the print there, just who the photographer was. He hadn’t

  looked at the signature on it. He’d just liked it. He’d found it at an estate sale over on the mainland, and he’d only been at the sale because the woman he’d been trying to date at the time had wanted to go. He’d shocked himself as much as anyone else when he’d looked at that print and felt . . . cold inside, then hot, like someone had ripped open his chest to take a good long look at his heart, then photographed what they saw there.

  He had bought the picture without haggling. It had been his then-almost-girlfriend who had pointed out that the photographer had once lived on the Wick.

  Madeline Brogan.

&nb
sp; The print was haunting. Its ugliness sneaked up on a man, Joe thought. The photograph was of a little boy crouched in the sand. Foamy sea stretched and yearned toward his heels. He held a starfish, and he looked down upon it in abject wonder. But the starfish bled, dripping crimson through his fingers onto the otherwise perfect beach.

  The picture told anyone who cared to look that life might look just fine on the surface, pristine at first glance, but if you peeked underneath, you’d find some nasty stuff indeed. Joe knew that he had pretty much gone to Cassie’s office to get a good look at the woman whose mind could work like that, a woman who understood. He’d wanted to see if she appeared different somehow. He’d known that it wasn’t necessary to follow her car to Welcome Realty, that if he had just stayed in his truck, or at his desk, plenty of people would call in and tell him all about Maddie Brogan. But he’d gone anyway because he’d wanted to see her firsthand.

  He had been marginally disappointed. If there was torment in there anywhere, it didn’t show.

  It wasn’t in the soft, controlled way she moved, or

  the way her golden hair shifted and slid above her shoulders. Her face was lovely, unblemished by lingering nightmares, her jaw faintly square. There had been no torment in her thin, arched brows or in the clear blue-green eyes underneath them. If anything, it had shown only in her voice, in that hitching hesitation.

  The only time she’d sounded really steady, Joe thought, was when she had spoken to the boy.

  Pain spasmed in his chest. He took a hefty swig of beer.

  He finally flipped the Brogan file open, putting the new Maddie out of his mind. He thought of the old one, of the nine-year-old kid who had been in the house that day, and read.

  He’d heard all of it before. Not in one sitting, of course, but in a snippet of rumor here, a story retold there. There was nothing new in the file, but by the time he dropped it on the hearth, he remembered why Dave Bramnick had always been so totally convinced that Beacher Brogan had killed his wife and taken off.

  It was the doors.

  Dave’s notes had gone back to that again and again. Both the front and the back doors had been locked that day. No windows had been open or broken. Though one had been unlatched, there had been prints—the kid’s and Annabel’s—only on the inside. So it would seem that whoever had spilled all that blood had then let himself out and locked the place up nicely behind him.

  Beacher’s keys had never been found, though his truck had turned out to be up at the ferry lot.

  Joe scowled and rubbed his temples. He still wasn’t convinced that Dave was right.

  Harry Reiter, who ran the ferry, had said that the engine was down until nearly six o’clock that night.

  He’d only made one run to the mainland on May 8, and he’d sworn up and down on his Bible that Beacher Brogan hadn’t been on that ride. Of course, Beacher had been missing for three days before anybody had started wondering where he might be, and Dave had looked into it. Beacher had been a drinker, Joe remembered, and apparently a little lost time here or there hadn’t been unusual for him.

  But there were still too many unanswered questions. If Beacher was going to take off, why not take his truck with him? Why park it, go over to Jonesport on foot, then have to worry about transportation on the other side? To erase his tracks? Joe didn’t particularly remember the man, but somewhere along the line he’d gotten the impression that Beacher Brogan hadn’t been all that smart.

  Joe decided on another beer. He got up and went back to the kitchen, then made up his mind that he was going to keep a close, personal watch on cottage number 110 on The Wick Road. And it had not one damned thing to do with the photograph over his mantel. His curiosity no longer had anything to do with Maddie Brogan personally. It had everything to do with not wanting any trouble on the island that was under his protection. It had to do with wanting—needing—peace in whatever form he could find it.

  Joe had stayed on boring, petty Candle the previous six years for a reason. He had a strong wish for Maddie Brogan to do whatever it was that she had come to do and go home. But until she did, he thought it might be prudent to find out who paid her any visits at number 110 on The Wick Road. It might be in his best interest to know who, if anyone, was curious enough about her and her memory to go right up there and knock on her door.

  Chapter 3

  It was after nine o’clock before Maddie finally got Josh into bed. She’d let him skip his bath with the understanding that he’d go straight into the tub in the morning. It had been a long day for both of them, and she felt tired in a way that made even her thoughts feel sluggish.

  She wandered into the kitchen for the bottle of wine she’d bought earlier, pouring it into an old jelly glass she found in one of the cupboards. The house had come equipped and furnished, though not well. But it was functional enough, and they would only be there for a short while.

  Actually, she reflected, looking around, the only thing she really didn’t like was the kitchen. No dishwasher, but, of course, she was spoiled. No garbage disposal, no trash compactor. Back to basics, she thought. The essential appliances the house did have—the refrigerator and the stove—looked as old as the hills. They had been white once, but wore the lemon yellow tint that spoke of too many years of grime and grease and smoke. She had tried scrubbing them earlier and realized that the stain was ingrained.

  At least they seemed to work.

  She went back into the sparsely furnished living room at the front of the house. There was a sofa, a coffee table, and a very old television on a rickety stand. She would have to live with them as well. She had taken virtually nothing out of their house in Fort Lauderdale. She had left the lights and the television on an automatic timer. Anything else would have been like leaving a neon sign for Rick, telling him that they had run.

  Not, she thought, that he wouldn’t eventually figure it out. If he hung around for a while, he would realize that she and Josh never came home. But if he hung around, the cops would almost certainly catch him at it.

  Maddie sighed and took a moth-eaten afghan off the sofa. She wrapped it around her shoulders and stepped outside onto the deck. There was a rocker there, and she sat down, not warm but not really cold, either, sipping and holding the jelly glass between both hands.

  The deck ran all the way around the house. The view on three sides wasn’t much, just reeds and dunes and beach grass. But there at the front, looking out at the ocean across the road, it was spectacular. It was high tide, and the moonlight caught the plumes of spray as the sea battered the rocky shore.

  The water put up a continuous rush of sound. It sounded to Maddie like God was whispering, "Shhh."

  She hushed.

  She realized with not a little amazement that she felt pretty good. She had done something, she thought, had fought back, had protected Josh in the best way she knew how. He was right there with her, and she could touch him, love him, without fear of blinking and finding him gone again. Maybe, she thought, after a few

  weeks of safety, of peace, her pictures would even come back.

  Maybe.

  Little by little, the accumulated tension of the day— of the last several days—drained out of her. She would have to do something about a telephone the next day, she thought, but that was then.

  "Hello, hello."

  The voice shattered her quiet thoughts. Maddie came out of the rocker with a startled cry, tripping over the ends of the afghan.

  She looked wildly around at the darkness. She found the man who had spoken off to the left side of the house. Her pulse tripped with learned panic, but his arms were loose and unthreatening at his sides.

  "Hi," Maddie answered cautiously.

  "You came back. I’m glad."

  There was something about his voice. It was too . . . hearty, she thought, almost like a politician’s tone. It tried too hard. She moved over to the railing, where she could see him more clearly. His head was too big, and his lips seemed . . . rubbery. His complexion
was pockmarked, and his hair was the color of old dishwater, dirty and very thin.

  She realized that he was at least mildly mentally retarded. And suddenly, understanding that, Maddie remembered him. It came to her like the slow, spreading light filtering out the living room window just beside him. He was deficient, she remembered, and people—mostly children—tormented him because of it. But . . . yes, she thought, he had always been kind to her.

  It was her first real memory of anything on Candle, and she was inordinately relieved by it.

  "August?" she asked. "No . . . Angus!"

  His ugly face lit up. "They said you don’t remember, but I knew you wouldn’t do that to me. I’m glad." "Thanks." Then she frowned. "Who told you I didn’t remember?"

  Angus closed his eyes, obviously thinking. "I went down to the boats."

  Maddie nodded her encouragement.

  "I go there every day. To get the fish they don’t . . . they don’t wholesale." He gave the word triumphantly. "Oh."

  "Harry said you came. He brought you over."

  Harry must be that old man who had been standing up near the pilothouse on the ferry, she realized. She’d thought he’d been watching her, but she hadn’t spoken to him. She was amazed. She wondered how in the world had he recognized her after all that time?

  "Would you like to come up and sit down?" she invited.

  "Only one chair," Angus pointed out.

  "Yes, well, I could sit on the step." He began shaking his head emphatically. "Or you could," she added.