The Map in the Attic

by Jolyn Sharp

“Lady, I do mind, and it’s none of your business no how.” The goateed man gave Mary Beth a hard stare, then spat on the ground and continued on, leaving Mary Beth, for once, speechless and feeling not in charge.

  Annie sidled up to Mary Beth and slipped her arm in hers. “Come on,” she urged gently. “We’re late for our lunch.” Mary Beth let Annie lead her in the opposite direction, toward where her car was parked on the street. Annie threw a parting glance over her shoulder, expecting to see the back of the goateed man, but instead she saw him leaning against another car, watching her. When she met his eyes, he gave her a lazy salute and a nod, as if to say, “I know who you are.”

  ****

  The “color intervention” had done wonders for the Coynes’ tiny apartment. When Annie and Mary Beth arrived, Laura Coyne had a new tablecloth spread over the Formica kitchen table, hiding its somewhat rusty legs. The clown cookie jar was set on the counter so it was the first thing that greeted you when you entered the kitchen.

  Laura had been inspired to do some thrift shopping, and she had picked up a tiered cut-glass tray on which she’d arranged cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches cut into triangles on the middle tier, with grapes and cheese on top, and cupcakes on the bottom for dessert. At the same thrift shop, she’d also picked up a variety of small bud vases, which now dotted the kitchen with small clumps of wild pansies and Johnny jump-ups.

  Annie could see the delight on Mary Beth’s face when she saw the transformation of the apartment. It’s just what I needed to see too, she thought.

  “My cousin Eileen picked up the kids and took them to Boston, so while they’ve been away I’ve had a little time to fix up the place and to start to feel more at home,” Laura explained when the women were at the table. “It’s supposed to be a vacation for us as much as for the kids, but Eileen’s idea of a vacation is chamber music and museums. Megan will have a blast, but Martin I’m afraid is a little too young to sit still for a lot of cultural things. So far, though, she hasn’t sent him home early, so he must be behaving.”

  “I loved being the grand aunt to my niece—all the special things we could do together,” Mary Beth mused. Annie suppressed a little pang of regret for living so far away from her grandchildren.

  “And it has been a vacation for us too,” Laura went on. “Old friends of David’s from his fishing days dropped by when they heard about the fire and brought us a couple of lobsters and a big, old pot to boil them in.” She patted her stomach and laughed. “And the kids feel bad because they think we just die of boredom when they are away with Eileen.”

  “I didn’t know David had been a fisherman,” Mary Beth said.

  “Used to be. He’d go out for weeks at a time, but he gave that up when the kids came along. Doesn’t miss it one whit, he says.”

  Annie smiled and bit into her sandwich. Her taste buds were awakened with the infusion of dill and arugula, cream cheese, and cucumber. “Delicious, Laura!”

  Laura blushed. “Well, I hoped you’d like it. I’d love to do a luncheon for the whole Hook and Needle Club at one of your meetings.”

  “Lovely idea!” Mary Beth said. “Let’s wait until Megan can join us. The ladies are so eager to meet her.”

  Mary Beth and Laura started working out when the luncheon would be, but ran into a number of scheduling conflicts as Laura and David were meeting with contractors and filing permits and such to rebuild their home.

  “If, that is, we can ever get this ‘arson’ thing settled.” Laura sighed. “Chief Edwards and Chief Besham have been low-key about it, thank goodness. I don’t believe they think we would have set fire to our own house, but they can’t seem to figure out how it did happen. They say it started in the basement, but there’s no ‘obvious ignition source.’ I don’t see how it could have, myself; it’s just a crawl space down there.” She inhaled sharply. “Or was, I mean. Ah, me …” Laura flexed her hands; they’d been balled into fists as she spoke.

  “Dear, I know things are going to work out soon enough. The important thing is not to lose faith during the process. You have a lot of good people on your side.”

  “I know that.” Laura smiled as she recovered her composure. “Would either of you like coffee with dessert? You’ve probably guessed that I worked in a bakery at one time. In college.” She stood and began to bustle about the kitchen, talking as if to distract herself. “And I considered—still do, in fact—going to culinary school. You know, if that’s one thing that’s come out of this mess, it’s that David and I had a long talk about dreams and what we’d like to do. David would like to own his own garage one day, and I dream about managing a little tea shop, with old-fashioned dishes and a simple menu of finger foods.”

  “And you can think of the Hook and Needle Club luncheon as building a customer base. I love it!” Mary Beth’s voice bounced around the tiny kitchen and changed the tenor of the conversation, but just for a minute.

  As Mary Beth and Annie waited for coffee, they happily sampled the cupcakes and cookies—applesauce ginger with lemon cream icing, and chocolate with orange mocha icing. As they ate, however, the worried crease on Laura’s brow began to reappear.

  Annie sensed that she still wanted to talk about the fire, so she ventured a question. “There’s more going on, isn’t there, than just the fire?”

  Laura looked up and tears welled up in her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “If only it were just the fire.” She dabbed her eyes with the corner of her napkin.

  “You see, David’s cousin … he showed up out of the blue in … February, I think it was. He wanted to borrow money. Then he didn’t think he should have to pay it back, something about David’s mother inheriting the house. Then he turned up again a few weeks ago, and he’s been coming back off and on, always wanting a place to stay. Thank goodness he wasn’t here when we had the fire. But now he claims that he should get a share of the insurance money—money that we haven’t even seen yet! We just don’t need any more drama right now.”

  Laura balled her hands into fists and then flexed them out again.

  “This cousin,” Annie asked. “Is he a dark-haired man with a goatee and tattoos on his arms?”

  “Lionel. Yes, that’s him. Ugh!”

  Annie shot Mary Beth a look, and Mary Beth nodded in return.

  “You don’t think he could have had something to do with starting the fire, do you?” Mary Beth asked. To Annie the question felt intrusive, though she had to admit to herself that she was thinking along the same lines.

  Laura stood up abruptly and started making coffee. It seemed to give her something to do. “I can’t believe Lionel would go that far. I don’t think he would mean us any real harm.” The emotion in her voice was obvious. “But Lionel is, well, careless and … well, he’s not my cousin; he’s David’s, and I try not to speak ill of his family. They’re a tight-knit bunch. Or had been. I think the cousins are starting to drift apart.”

  Laura brought over mugs—Annie recognized one that came from the yard-sale box—and cream and sugar. “What’s missing? Oh, spoons!” She turned away to grab some more flatware, and with her back to Annie and Mary Beth, Laura continued talking. “And some of his other family have been wonderful. Another cousin that we haven’t seen much lately has been very supportive. He bought the kids all new clothes. Shoes, backpacks … he said they shouldn’t have to look poor in front of the other kids.” She returned to the table with the spoons and sat down.

  Then she looked at them in confusion, “Did you say you wanted coffee?” They assured her that they had.

  ****

  Annie’s head was spinning by the time Mary Beth and Annie got back in the car and headed for home. She wanted to work her thoughts out with Mary Beth, but she was afraid that voicing her thoughts might somehow make the situation worse. She simply couldn’t believe that the Coynes could have set fire to their own house, and she was dismayed to hear that such an investigation was still proceeding.

  “Mary Beth …” Annie started to say, but h
er companion spoke simultaneously, and louder.

  “Annie,” she said. “Annie, we’ve got to help them get to the bottom of this!”

  “Them who?”

  “The Coynes, the police. Perhaps we should go right now to tell them about our suspicions about this cousin Lionel.”

  “But you already reported seeing him at the house after the fire.”

  “But I didn’t know who he was then!” Mary Beth quickly protested.

  Annie spoke as soothingly as she could. “No, but I would bet that Chief Edwards could put a name to the description you gave him, and since this Lionel hasn’t been arrested, we can assume that he had an alibi that checks out.”

  “Humpf,” Mary Beth said, mulling over what Annie said. “Humpf,” she repeated.

  “I think the more important question might be why. Why would someone want to burn down David Coyne’s house?”

  “Why indeed, why indeed?” Mary Beth’s voice was brought down to a whisper, and she drove the rest of the way back to Grey Gables with a pensive expression on her face.

  13

  “What was that?”

  Annie sat bolt upright in bed, gasping as her mind leaped in a single bound from deepest sleep to full alert. She groped with her left hand to shake Wayne awake as her wide-open eyes darted about the dark room. Even in the gloom, she could tell things weren’t right: The dim light was wrong, the loom and bulk of the shadows were strange. Her hand found only bedclothes. Where was …?

  Her whole body sagged. He was gone, of course. And she wasn’t home in Brookfield, but rather she was alone in the large bedroom of Grey Gables in Maine.

  She was pierced by the full force of the grief that had struck her when Wayne died, and she sat, clutching the empty sheets and blankets beside her, unconscious of her surroundings or the passing of time.

  Eventually she gave a small, rueful laugh. As far as she could remember, this was a cliché that they had never enacted in life: the wife waking the husband to demand he investigate some noise in the night. Of course, he would have done so to set her mind at rest, though what Wayne Dawson, that gentlest of men, would have done if he had actually encountered an intruder, Annie could not imagine.

  For a while after Wayne’s death, Annie had suffered from nightmares. She would wake from dreams in which something terrible was about to happen to her husband, only to realize afresh that something terrible had. But she’d not had such a dream in a long time now, and besides, it wasn’t a dream that woke her this time, she felt sure of that.

  So what had it been? Some noise, undoubtedly. This old house, exposed to the persistent coastal winds, was much more talkative than her house in Brookfield. It groaned and moaned and complained almost constantly. I’ll probably do much the same, Annie thought, when I reach a comparable age. But still, she had thought she’d grown accustomed to the house’s noises. She refocused on her senses, peering again into the gloom and listening intently. She heard nothing untoward.

  Slowly she began to relax. She laid her head back down and allowed her mind to drift, thinking of all she’d learned recently about needlework and the map.

  Then she heard a noise.

  Annie caught her breath and listened so intently she thought she could hear the draft of air in the room. She was already trying to tell herself that it was nothing, just another of the house’s complaints. But the other part of her mind knew this was not the case; whatever she’d heard, it was not one of the usual noises of the night.

  And then it came again.

  It was some sort of muffled thump. It was definitely coming from within the house, downstairs. She tried to imagine some cause other than a person moving about down there, but her adrenaline had already spiked in fight-or-flight, and she couldn’t concentrate. Her heart thumped in her chest and her breath came in short, shallow gasps. She lay paralyzed, torn between the two instinctual responses.

  This will not do, she admonished herself sternly. She forced herself to close her eyes and take some deep breaths. Then she considered her options.

  Call for help? She had no telephone extension upstairs, and her cell phone was also downstairs. Well, there is a lesson for the future, she thought.

  Hide upstairs? If the intruder were a burglar, he might or might not come upstairs, but she thought he probably would, seeking jewelry or cash, and he might find her. If the intruder meant her harm, he would search until he found her. In either case, if she were found hiding, she’d be in a defensively weak position. Besides, she wasn’t sure she had the nerve to just sit and wait. She felt the need to take some sort of action.

  Confront the intruder? Even if she had a weapon—and she couldn’t think of one that was handy—a confrontation would probably be more dangerous for her than for him. Backing a desperate person into a corner was never a good idea. But suppose she didn’t confront him directly, but just made a lot of noise coming down the stairs? She thought the chances were good that he would simply flee, given the chance. Unless he were there specifically to do her harm, but she couldn’t imagine who would want to do so.

  And what about flight? Perhaps she could sneak down the stairs and out the door herself, and then call the police from Alice’s. The danger was that she might surprise the intruder on her way out.

  Suddenly Annie felt she could not sit still any longer. She didn’t feel confident about scaring the intruder off, so escaping the premises seemed the best option. She threw off her sheet and blanket, and cautiously placed her feet on the floor. She stood slowly, dreading a floorboard creak, and then froze at the sound of another muffled thump from downstairs. She felt her carefully cultivated calm dissolve in a fresh wave of adrenaline. It seemed to her that the sound had come from the dining room directly below her, but she strained to catch any evidence of someone stealthily climbing the stairs. Nothing.

  Releasing her held breath, Annie looked down at her flannel pajamas. She could pluck her robe from the chair as she passed by, but if she planned to sneak outside, she would need something for her feet. She sat back down on the bed and pulled on some sneakers without bothering with socks. She was moving more quickly now, perhaps too quickly, but her fright, which she had only temporarily stifled, was rising again and threatening to overwhelm her.

  She stepped to the chair for her heavy terry-cloth robe and almost panicked completely when one arm caught in the sleeve as she tried to draw it on. She tied the sash and then forced herself to move slowly toward the open door of the bedroom. She stood at the threshold, listening hard for any sound from the floor below. Her heart skipped at the merest creak, and the sound of her furnace coming on almost made her cry aloud, but she heard nothing that was definitely the sound of the intruder. Perhaps he’d already gone?

  Standing in the door, she suddenly felt very exposed, and she tried again to think of something in her bedroom that she might use as a weapon. Nothing came to mind. She paused a moment longer, fearing that once she took a step, she’d be unable to keep herself from bolting down the stairs. Then she moved forward cautiously.

  She was halfway to the top of the stairs when she heard the sound of stealthy footsteps that were not her own. She froze and listened. The intruder was moving along the downstairs hallway from the back of the house to the front. After he’d finished in the dining room, he must have moved back to the family room or the library, she thought. Would he have wasted any time in the kitchen? She certainly had nothing valuable there, but how would he have known? A hope flared in her heart: Perhaps he was heading toward the door! But no; is a burglar going to exit the house by the front door?

  She could no longer hear the footsteps. Had he stopped? Annie thought that he had turned into the living room, but she couldn’t be sure. If so, this put him closer to her route of escape. Her fright began to get the better of her. She was sure that he had almost finished ransacking the first floor and would soon be making his way to the second. If she didn’t hurry, she’d end up meeting him on the stairs! However long it took him to search t
he living room for valuables was the time she had to get down the stairs and out the door.

  She was moving again before she even realized it, stealing swiftly to the top of the stairs. Without pausing, she began to quickly descend. She’d intended to test each step on her way down, but fear was now driving out caution. As she descended, she kept eyes and ears fixed on the door to the living room. She could definitely hear him moving around in there now, though he was apparently taking care to be quiet. But the certainty that he was in the living room only further spurred her fear. If he stepped out of the room now, he would stand between her and the front door. She would have to turn and race down the hall to the back door, pursued by the intruder.

  Thoroughly frightened, she flew from the foot of the stairs to the front door. She’d forgotten that she would need to work the lock before she could open the door, but fortunately, her hands flew automatically to turn the handle and dead bolt. In the split second it took to unlock the door, she cast an involuntary glance into the living room, where she spied a dark shape at the far end that had just turned her way in apparent surprise.

  For a moment, time seemed to stop. She couldn’t make out features, but the man’s silhouette stood out against the light filtering through the window curtains. The shadowy figure stood slightly crouched, his head cocked to one side. She was sure he was staring at her. To Annie, he seemed like a cat ready to spring. She gasped, breaking the horrible silence of the frozen moment.

  And then she threw open the door and raced onto the porch, down the steps, and away from the house.

  ****

  Two hours later Annie sat with a mug of tea in Alice’s kitchen. The police cruiser in front of her own house no longer strobed its blue lights, but it was still parked there and the officers were still inside, checking the premises.

  “I should have just stayed and confronted him.” Annie had been second-guessing her actions almost since she had arrived.

  “That would have been foolish,” Alice repeated, beginning to sound impatient.