With Every Breath

by Beverly Bird

  "One thing I do remember. You wasn’t no nine-month baby, miss. Cassie and I came back here a few months before you were born. Everybody said Annabel was due in July. Then, along about the end of April, there you were. I saw you with her in the market, and you weren’t no preemie, girl."

  Maddie felt as though she had been kicked in the stomach. "No. You’re wrong," she said warily. "My birthday’s July 5."

  Mildred’s smile turned triumphant. "Guess somebody’s been lying to you, then. And I’ll tell you something else. Before I went to Jonesport with my husband, Annabel Cawley wasn’t even spending a bit of time with Beacher Brogan at all, if you get my meaning."

  Maddie swayed. Joe caught her arm. "Let’s go," he said shortly.

  They spilled out into the parking lot. "I don’t believe this," Maddie said, dazed.

  "We’ll check it out. Pile in, sport," he said to Josh. He buckled him into the seat belt himself. Maddie seemed temporarily incapable of it.

  "How?" Maddie asked, shaken, when they were back in the truck. "How can we check?"

  "We’ll call county records."

  "Why? Why would Aunt Susan lie about that?"

  "We don’t know that she did." But as he drove, he began getting a feeling of tension at the back of his neck. "Remember what I told you about Mildred. She could be making it up. Didn’t you ever see your own birth certificate?"

  Maddie shook her head helplessly. "Not that I remember. That’s weird, isn’t it?"

  Yeah, he thought. "You probably wouldn’t have wanted to think about it before," he reasoned slowly. "So you let yourself overlook it. But what about when you registered for school? When you registered to vote? What about when you got married?"

  She thought about it, pressing her hands to her temples. Then she shook her head. "I just ... I don’t actually remember." And, she realized, those things had happened after she’d moved to Florida. Selective blocking? Shutting out anything to do with her birth, her parents? Hiding came the unbidden answer.

  They went back to the town house and Josh went upstairs to watch TV again. Maddie fought off the urge to pace the family room. Joe leaned against the kitchen counter, watching her, talking on the cordless phone. Once he asked exactly what year she had been born.

  He finally put the phone down and came toward her. He watched her for a long time, a strange look on his face. Maddie knew what he was going to say.

  "I hate to break it to you, babe, but Mildred was right. You were born on April twenty-fifth." He paused, scrubbing his jaw again. "And Beacher and Annabel were married on November thirtieth."

  "I don’t believe this!" She was rubbing her arms hard, as though against a chill. Joe thought she might take her skin clear off if she kept it up. He caught her hands.

  "Well, so what?" she went on defensively. "So they fooled around before they were married." Except Mildred had said they hadn’t been seeing each other when she’d left the island to have Cassie, she thought sickly.

  But, she thought, what did Mildred know? To hear Joe tell it, the woman had been busy playing around on her own during that time.

  "It’s no big deal," she bit out, but even she knew she was being too emphatic about it. Joe sat down in the chair and tugged on her hand to drop her into his lap again.

  "You need furniture," she snapped.

  "Nah. I like this."

  "Oh, Joe." She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on.

  He gazed steadily up at the starfish picture. "I think," he said after a moment, "after everything we’ve heard today, that that Beacher Brogan probably wasn’t your father."

  Her heart jumped, but it was something she’d been thinking herself. She nodded.

  "So many lies," she whispered, overwhelmed, then she closed her eyes. "Oh, Aunt Susan."

  He stroked her back with that idle, comforting touch again.

  "So, did he kill my mother?" Maddie asked.

  "Could be."

  "But you still don’t believe it."

  He lifted one shoulder in a careful shrug.

  "Because if he killed my mother and just left the island, if that’s what I saw, if he’s living in California now," she went on slowly, "then there’s no reason why anyone would want to scare me away from here before I remembered that. There’s no reason that that someone would be so pissed off as to kill Rick because they found him by mistake."

  His gaze came back to her appraisingly. And then a commotion started downstairs.

  "Now what the hell?" Joe muttered.

  "Someone’s knocking." Maddie eased off his lap as the doorbell started up, too.

  "Somebody’s tearing my goddamned door down."

  He went down the stairs slowly, one hand braced against the wall, and she realized that his knee was still bothering him badly. She was halfway down behind him when he opened the door angrily, and Angus rushed inside.

  In the split second it took for Joe to turn around in disbelief, the big man barreled past him and had Maddie in a bear hug. She got lost in his arms, the smell of old fish and older perspiration enveloping her. He was trembling.

  "Angus, Angus—it’s okay. I’m okay." She patted his shoulder and found Joe’s eyes a little wildly.

  "Looked all over. Went everywhere!" Angus was out of breath.

  "I’m fine," she gasped. "Look! Let me go, and you’ll see! I’m fine."

  "Nobody hurt you."

  "Nobody hurt me."

  "And nobody’s going to," Joe snapped, coming up the steps to ease them apart. "I’m watching out for her, Angus. Everything’s okay."

  Angus’s big face fell into despair. "I would have done that. I would have watched out for you."

  Joe rolled his eyes and limped past them up the stairs again. Maddie thought she heard him muttering something about moving to the goddamned mainland after all.

  Chapter 30

  Angus sat on the raised hearth, his big knees thrusting up, his hands clasped together between them. He still seemed tense, as though he would leap up and out the door at the slightest provocation.

  Maddie took the chair, and Joe hovered unhappily near the breakfast bar. Josh came downstairs to look at all of them bemusedly, as though amazed that so many people he liked should be in the same place at the same time. He finally decided that it was better than TV, and settled down next to Angus, shooting little looks at him out of the comer of his eye.

  "Your man is gone," Angus said finally, solemnly.

  Maddie flinched, hating it when he referred to Rick that way, but with Josh present, it wasn’t easy to correct him again.

  "That’s good," Angus went on.

  Maddie flicked another glance at Josh. "It’s sad."

  "So what’s up, Angus?" Joe asked finally. "How come you were looking for Maddie?"

  Angus answered without taking his eyes off her. "I thought you got gone, too. You and your boy. I thought he hurt you."

  "Rick?" Joe asked, and something in his voice alerted her again that he wasn’t feeling quite as lazy as his posture might indicate.

  "Anybody," Angus responded.

  "Like who?" Joe demanded, giving up all pretense of idleness, striding into the family room.

  "Anybody," Angus repeated stubbornly.

  "Goddamnit," Joe muttered.

  "Who else would want to hurt me, Angus?" Maddie tried. "Do you know of anyone else who would want to hurt me besides Rick?"

  "Your man."

  "Besides him."

  "Anybody."

  Joe bit off another curse and stalked from the room.

  Maddie tried again. This was a chance she hadn’t expected, an avenue she hadn’t thought of. "Joe thinks someone other than my ... my man is trying to scare me, Angus. We think someone besides him followed me into the marshes. Joe wants to catch whoever it is before he can do anything bad to me or Josh. Maybe you saw someone around the house that night who shouldn’t have been there."

  He seemed to think about it hard. "Your man." He nodded sagely. "He’s gone."

&
nbsp; "Where were you that night, Angus?" Joe asked suddenly.

  Maddie jumped and looked over her shoulder. She hadn’t heard him come back into the room.

  "I visited. She said it was okay. She said she wasn’t mad."

  "I know. I was there. Where’d you go when you left?"

  Once again his big face twisted into a frown as he thought about it. "I got food."

  "Fish? From the docks? Did you leave The Wick?" "No. Meatballs. Miz Jones left them out."

  Joe rubbed tension out of the back of his neck. It was plausible. Hell, it was probable. He knew people left food out for Angus all the time, leftovers old enough to have otherwise gone into the garbage. The poor guy’s Christmas feast tended to come on New Year’s.

  It was all in the phrasing, he thought. Angus always took things literally. He had the nagging feeling that if he just asked the right question, he would get the right answer, and all the dark comers would fill with light.

  "So when you were coming back from Miz Jones’s, did you happen to look at Maddie’s house?" he asked carefully.

  "Didn’t go there."

  "I went to your shack for help, Angus," Maddie said suddenly. "You weren’t there. Maybe you saw something anywhere. Maybe it wasn’t near my house. Maybe it was somewhere else on The Wick."

  Joe looked at her sharply. It was the first he’d heard of that.

  "I was getting food," Angus repeated.

  Maddie groaned and sat back in the chair.

  "You can come home now," Angus went on. "It’s safe." Oh, it’s not, Angus, it’s not at all. "Soon," she said aloud, absently.

  "I’ll watch out for you. I’ll stay right on your porch again. You can give me a blanket. I won’t ever leave." "You can’t sit on my porch forever. Anyway, it’s okay. I’m safe here with Joe. "

  "You got to come home!"

  His shout startled Josh so badly the boy flew off the hearth. He stood for a moment, his eyes a little wild, unsure ... and then he darted to foe.

  Not me, but Joe, Maddie thought. What does that mean?

  She wasn’t even sure how she felt about it. Maybe there was even a swish-stir of jealousy in there somewhere, but then she gave Josh more credit. He’d been alarmed, and he’d gone to the biggest, strongest person he trusted. And he definitely trusted Joe.

  She looked at Angus again. The big man was nearly in tears.

  Before she could respond, Joe scooped Josh up and deposited him in her lap. He went to the hearth and sat down beside Angus, a deed of uncommon valor, Maddie thought, remembering the smell of being hugged by him. He clapped a hand down on Angus’s shoulder.

  "Look, there’s nothing we can do about that right now, pal. The guys from the county are handling this." At Angus’s blank look, he scrambled. "The important policemen, from the mainland. I’m not good enough."

  Maddie made a little, choked sound at that. He looked at her mildly, then turned back to Angus.

  "Anyway, the mainland guys say that nobody can go back in that house until they get all the evidence out. They’ll call me and tell me when it’s okay for Maddie to go home. And then I’ll bring her." No way in hell, he thought suddenly, and he knew in that moment that she wasn’t going anywhere. He was going to keep her right there. Her, and Josh, somehow.

  It was one hell of a concrete plan for a man who was having trouble looking into the future.

  When he spoke again, his voice sounded strange, strained, even to his own ears. "So anyway, everything’s cool. She’ll be home soon, as soon as the county guys say it’s okay."

  Angus looked at him doubtfully, unhappily.

  Josh squirmed. Maddie let him go, and he bounded back up the stairs again with one last wary look back at Angus. Angus stood up.

  "Okay," he said finally. "I’ll wait for you."

  "You let me know if you see anybody hanging around her house, okay?" Joe went on.

  "I haven’t seen nobody."

  Joe shrugged, the stiffness at the back of his neck worsening.

  "But I’ll keep watching. I’ll watch real hard."

  "Thanks, Angus," Maddie said softly. He gave her a beatific smile and lumbered down the stairs again.

  Joe saw him out. While they were gone, the living room seemed inordinately quiet.

  "Well," Maddie said finally when she heard Joe’s steps on the stairs again.

  "Jesus," he answered. "What did you do to that guy?" "Me?" Maddie was startled.

  He came to lean over her, a hand on either arm of the chair. "Lady, that man is head over heels in love with you." Maddie shook her head. "No, Joe, no. He’s just—" "His elevator is stuck in the basement," he interrupted. "He’s got an IQ of something like seventy, somewhere on the upper side of below normal. But he’s still forty-five years old or thereabouts, and if he doesn’t get a hard-on every time he looks at you, then at least he damned near swoons. I thought that the other night when you touched him."

  Maddie’s skin felt suddenly crawly. "That’s why you were so rude, why you pulled me away from him?"

  Joe straightened away from the chair. "Yeah." He paced to the glass doors, every other step hitching. She watched him force his weight onto his bad knee and winced for him.

  "It’s not such a bad thing, actually," he said at length. "He’ll keep an eye on the place because he thinks he’s doing it for you. Hell, he’d fly if you asked him to."

  "I hate using him," Maddie whispered almost to herself. "It’s ... cruel."

  "All’s fair in love and war, babe. And what we’ve got on our hands here is a silent war."

  "Cat and mouse."

  "Yeah." He came back to the chair. "So anyway, how about pizza and a movie to kill some time until Josh goes to bed?" He took her hand and pulled her out of the chair, and Maddie managed to smile.

  Much later, Joe watched the bedside clock unblinkingly as it flipped over to 3:11. It glowed green in the dark, like some kind of eerie watch guard.

  They’d ordered dinner from the Sandbar, then they’d eaten sitting Indian-style on his bed in front of the television. He had a fairly decent collection of movies, but Josh held sway and they watched Batman. At ten-thirty or so, he’d finally gone to his own room.

  His own room. Joe heard his thought echo around in his head, and felt something odd and full swell in his chest. It scared him somewhat less than it might have yesterday.

  They’d made love, slowly, then more heatedly and urgently. And once again they were ready and respectable if the boy should wander back in there. Maddie slept on her side, under the covers, her back to him, one hand, curled under her chin. She was wrapped in an ivory satin robe that had taken his breath from his throat and put it in various places of his body as soon as he’d seen it. And now he was lying there thinking that she was probably naked beneath it, while he wore jeans and lay

  on top of the bedspread again, and until that very moment, that very night, he’d never fully appreciated how uncomfortable it was to sleep in jeans.

  He groaned and sat up, throwing his legs over the side of the bed. Finally he got up and went into the walk-in closet, exchanging the jeans for a pair of sweats.

  He went downstairs to check on Josh.

  The kid was fine, snoring a little in the shallow, breathy way that kids did, and for a brief minute he thought of Lucy again. The old guilt was suddenly more vicious, dragging claws down his heart. He was happy, in spite of everything. It was the first time he’d felt this good since he had lost her, and she was dead, and it almost seemed blasphemous.

  Maybe, he thought, if he could save Josh, his own daughter would forgive him.

  If he couldn’t save Josh, he’d never be able to forgive himself.

  What kind of God would put something like this on a man twice in one lifetime?

  He stood in the hall, feeling odd and nervous. The back of his neck itched as it had off and on for days. He rubbed a hand over it and shrugged his shoulders to dislodge an invisible weight. He was still horny, and that was amazing in itself, but whatever w
as bothering him was more than that.

  He felt... skittish.

  He went downstairs and looked around the family room, peering out across the deck at the sea and the distant lights of the mainland. He went down one more flight and made sure the door was locked. The Pathfinder sat cold and idle in the carport, looking ghostly in the slanting moonlight.

  He finally went back to Maddie. When he stepped into the bedroom, she was sitting up.

  "I moved and you weren’t here," she murmured.

  That shook him up as much as anything had yet. It had only been a week, yet his absence had woken her. Something coiled inside him at her words, not so much hot as soft this time.

  Maddie wondered if it would ever leave her, that instinctual panic that leaped into her whenever she realized that no one was there when there ought to have been someone beside her.

  Joe sat down. She folded her legs Indian-style and scooted around a little to look at him.

  "I’ve been thinking."

  "You were sleeping."

  "Off and on. In between, I was thinking."

  His heart stalled, though he wasn’t sure why. Half of him was pretty sure she was dwelling on who was crazy enough, who wanted her off the island enough, to kill a man he bumped into in the process. The other half of him wondered if she had been thinking about them. "About what?" he asked neutrally.

  "About what you told Angus. Can I really not go back into the house yet?"

  There was something about her eyes that he didn’t like, even in the darkness.

  "You can’t move back in yet, no," he answered at length. "I guess we could walk through it."

  "I want to walk through it."

  "No goddamned way," he snapped. "By yourself? No way."

  "I don’t want to go to the house by myself, Joe. I just need to go inside by myself."

  "Why?" he demanded shortly.

  Her voice started to rise a little. "Because I could talk to these islanders until I’m blue in the face, but it’s not going to get me anywhere because all I’m doing is hearing