Embers

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Oh! Allie's not here —"

  The phone rang and Meg answered it, holding the door open for the detective and motioning him inside.

  The caller, sounding urgent, was Orel Tremblay's nurse.

  Would Meg please come around at once? Mr. Tremblay was in a dangerous state of agitation and refusing medication. Apparently he wanted to finish some business he'd begun with Meg a few days earlier. Could she come? At once?

  "I can't, right now," Meg said, distressed. "I don't have a car. Can it wait another —"

  "I'll drive you," Tom volunteered, without knowing whether it was to the corner or to Alaska.

  Meg whispered to him, "It isn't far. Thanks."

  She hung up, and not many minutes later they were pulling into the drive of Orel Tremblay's neglected house. The weather was gray and still and cool, a twilight time between sun and rain. Meg was struck anew by the forlornness of the place; Tom, too, seemed oppressed by the scene.

  "Shall I wait in the car?" he asked.

  "Yes — no. I'd rather you came in, if he lets you," she said. "After all, you're used to this sort of thing."

  Tom cocked his head at her. "What sort of thing?"

  "Well — disorderly conduct. What if he has to be subdued?"

  "Heck, and me without my baseball bat," Tom said dryly.

  "I didn't mean anything by that," Meg said apologetically as they walked up the steps. "I had no idea city cops were so thin-skinned."

  "We get that way after we've been spit on a thousand times."

  She looked at him, shocked.

  "Forget it," he said. "Probably you babysat for the police chief's kids."

  "How did you know that?"

  "Call it a hunch."

  They were at the door, which was opened instantly. A different, younger nurse than the one Meg had seen on her first visit stood before them, looking relieved that they had come. Behind her was Orel Tremblay, crouched over his aluminum walker like an angry gray squirrel. The nurse was right; he was very upset.

  He stared at Tom in surprise. "Gahdammit, who the hell are you?" he demanded.

  Meg introduced him. "He's my ride, Mr. Tremblay," she explained.

  "Ah, never mind," said the old man impatiently. "Get in here, both of you. I don't have time to be sorting you out."

  He turned and began working his walker toward the room that held the dollhouse. He moved in a kind of frantic slow motion; Meg sensed that he was using up a precious last hoard of energy, something he'd been saving under his mattress for a day like this. The young nurse stayed behind him, all the while mugging incomprehensible warnings to Meg and Tom.

  At the door to the dollhouse room, Orel Tremblay dismissed the nurse, flipped on the light, and shuffled inside, with Meg and Tom bringing up the rear. When Tremblay threw the switch that lit the dollhouse from inside, Tom permitted himself to look impressed.

  He lifted one of the dolls, beautifully dressed in a velvet gown of hunter green, for a closer look.

  "Don't touch!" the old man said, scandalized.

  Tom smiled an apology and put the doll back gently.

  As for Meg, she was deliberately keeping away from the dollhouse, reluctant to be caught in its spell again. Since her first visit she'd thought many times about the house. But her fascination kept rolling into a brick wall of unease, and each time, she would turn her thoughts in some other direction.

  The dollhouse was an exact replica of the house in which her grandmother had burned to death. That was an undeniable fact, and it spoiled the charming plaything for Meg. So she studied the dusty venetian blinds instead as she waited for the old man to tell her why she'd come.

  Tremblay had settled into an armchair placed strategically for the best view of the dollhouse. He was calmer now, but whether that was because he was gazing at his beloved miniature or because Meg had finally come to see him, Meg didn't know.

  Tremblay held up a palsied hand to his visitors, warning them not to say a word. A stillness as thick and heavy as a Maine fog fell over the room as Meg and Tom waited to hear what he had to say.

  "Margaret Mary Atwells!" Tremblay said abruptly.

  Meg jumped in her chair.

  "This is your story, long overdue."

  Chapter 5

  "Margaret Atwells used to bring the two Camplin kids over to the carpenter's shop whenever the weather was wet," Tremblay began. "The boy — James was five at the time — took it on himself to oversee my repairs to the dollhouse. I can see him still, strutting around it like some pint-sized lord of the manor.

  "Sometimes I'd let his younger sister play with a few of the less valuable pieces — the maid dolls and their beds and bureaus and such. She was too young to play with such finely made things, of course, but Margaret was very fond of the girl, and I hated to put myself in the way of her pleasure.

  "But never mind. The point is, because of them Margaret spent many a soggy afternoon in the carpenter's shop, and I got to know her some. Or so I thought."

  ‘‘But —''

  "But what?" Tremblay said, turning to Meg in annoyance.

  "That was in ‘47. Everyone knows we had a drought in ‘47."

  "Not in spring," Tremblay snapped. "Spring was one long gully washer."

  Chastised, Meg sat back and let Orel Tremblay resume his tale.

  "It was in July that the weather turned bone-dry," he said, "which is the way it stayed right into the fall. So I didn't see much of Margaret anymore, except in passing. One day in August I was doing some carpentry on the south piazza of the main house. The children were napping in a hammock nearby, and Margaret wandered over to chat. I remember thinking she had something she wanted to say, only she couldn't quite make the plunge. She kept bringing the talk around to Gordon Camplin, the children's father.

  "What did I think of him? she asked. Was he a good man at heart? Did the rest of the staff ever speak ill of him? Being sleep-out help the way she was, she had little contact with the others, except for the cook. I found her manner queer. Here she's working for the man for four months ...

  "‘You ought to know,' I says. And she answers — I'll never forget this — she says, ‘I do know' in the saddest, most downtrodden way. Like someone told her she had cancer.

  "That's when I began to wonder. Whenever I saw her after that, she looked sad ... distressed. The next time Margaret brought up the subject of Gordon Camplin, it was late September. Most of the big houses were closed down, except for the ones that were being kept open through huntin' season. It was shaping up to be the best Indian Summer anyone could remember. Wonderful color and warm days — but eerie, like it was too good. Everyone was worried about a fire, y'see.

  "All the Camplins were staying on, for different reasons. Old Mrs. Camplin, she stayed almost year round. She was fierce about the big house, bein' as it was a wedding present from her husband.

  "Her son Gordon, he liked nothing more than to hunt — unless it was to gamble. Gordon was a keen bettin' man. That didn't sit well with his wife Dorothea; she was a very proper Christian. Very proper.

  "Old Mrs. Camplin didn't approve of her son's gamblin', either. It was common talk that the two women — the mother and the wife — stayed on just to make sure Gordon didn't bet away the farm, so to speak.

  "Anyway, when Margaret come to me the second time about Gordon Camplin, she was in a state of deep agitation. She told me that Gordon Camplin had fallen madly in love with her, and she didn't know what to do. She couldn't tell her own husband, and she was afraid to tell Camplin's wife Dorothea."

  This was news to Meg. "Camplin! But you said you were the one in love with my grandmother!" she blurted.

  Tremblay gave her a biting look. "That ain't the point. Margaret couldn't afford to give up her job as nursemaid — I believe your grandfather was unemployed yet again — and she wanted my advice."

  "What did you tell her?" Meg asked.

  "That she was mistaken. God help me, that's what I told her," Tremblay admitted in a low voice.
>
  He tried to defend himself. "You have to understand: Gordon Camplin was a very wealthy, very powerful man, a force in Bar Harbor. He still is," he added bitterly. "What good, I asked Margaret, would be gained by her going into a pink stink? There'd never been any talk of him bein' a canoodler; no one would've believed her. There was only the gambling weakness, and as you know, Gordon Camplin could — and can — cover his debts."

  He turned away from Meg's troubled face and appealed to Tom. "You're a man; you understand. Some have power; some are powerless. It's the way of the world."

  Tom neither agreed nor disagreed, which was about par for the course. But Meg saw a flicker of anger in his blue-gray eyes. He wouldn't have let Meg's grandmother stay on, she decided. If he had loved her, he would've defended her.

  Tremblay resumed. "I told Margaret she was imagining things ... that it was my fault, confessin' my own devotion to her; that now she was seein' an admirer behind every potted palm. I told her not to jeopardize her career by saying or doing nothin' foolish. I told her ... to stay put." He sucked in a long, shuddering breath. "And she did."

  "Was my grandmother at all specific?" Meg asked, more gently than before. "About how Gordon Camplin was coming on to her?"

  Tremblay shook his head. "She did say that at first it was done more by way of innuendo. She said a woman knows these things, knows when a man is ... pressing."

  "And then what happened?" asked Meg, because she knew that the story did not end there.

  "For a while, not much. Life went on as before, except that Margaret cooled considerable toward me. Once, I got up the nerve to ask how things was between Camplin and her. She gimme a hard look and said, ‘I'm still here, aren't I?' But I didn't mind. She was still there. That's what counted.

  "In the meantime the drought worsened. I never saw nothin' like it, not in thirty years. The woods was mere tinder; the leaves still on the trees crumbled in your hands. Wells were going dry one after th'other.

  "Day after day we had hot, dry, hateful weather. By the middle of October there was a dozen Maine fires burnin'. Two days later, there was fifty. It was terrible, terrible. I remember when I first heard the news of Bar Harbor's fire. When news got out that a fire in Dolliver's Dump had carried over into the cranberry bog alongside it, I felt kind of ... queasy. Never mind that it wa'n't burning in the timber yet. They could not put it out in the bog. That said it all.

  "For three days, we waited and we watched. Everybody knew there were hotspots burning in the bog underground, that the fire wasn't really out. It was, how can I explain it, like watching a living thing, creeping and slithering and bubbling, a monster just biding its time.

  "And then, like that, it leaped from the bog into a growth of spruce and pine ... and with the wind northwest and brisk ... that monster burst into a roaring fireball, crowning forty, fifty feet above the trees. They rushed in two hundred reinforcements, but the men couldn't do a damn thing. They tried to make a stand in the open pastures of Hugh Kelly's farm. No luck. The barn caught fire, and then some dry slash left over from a logging operation. Right there is where they lost the war. They couldn't stop the fire; they couldn't direct it. All they could do was hope and pray that it'd fetch up against Eagle Lake.

  "But it didn't, and after that it was anyone's guess where the fire would head next: Somesville, Hull's Cove, Northeast Harbor; Bar Harbor itself. No one knew. It all depended on the wind. It was a terrible, terrible time, like a grievous punishment was about to be visited on someone, only no one knew who."

  Tremblay paused long enough to ask for a glass of water. Meg rushed out to get some, but the old man wouldn't wait. On her way back into the room she heard him say to Tom, "Some claimed later that Bar Harbor was doomed to suffer God's wrath because Bar Harbor was where the greed and money was — the bankers, the railroad men, the rubber tycoons. That's where the unseemly excess was; the selfish, money-grubbing arrogance."

  Tremblay looked up, his eyes burning bright with cynicism. "Don't you believe it," he said to them both in a croaking voice. "Rich man or poor, most of us behaved in the exact, same way: we all tried to save our precious things. You've heard the stories — the millionaire New Yorkers who chartered planes back to Bar Harbor to save their artwork; the common folk who covered the airport fields with fridges and couches and mattresses; the minister's wife who packed up her wedding pots — her wedding pots! — for a granddaughter not yet born. Things! That's all any of us thought about, me included. "

  He threw a complex look at the brightly lit dollhouse, sitting in inscrutable splendor in front of him, and shook his head. "That was my thing," he murmured with a lift of his chin toward it. "That was all I could think about."

  Meg handed him the glass of water and he drank it thirstily, as if he'd been fighting on a fire line. A bit of water dribbled down his whiskery chin; he wiped it with his sleeve.

  "I ain't sayin' this town didn't pull together, don't get me wrong. Why, there was acts of heroism that even now bring tears to my eyes. Neighbor helpin' neighbor, mistress helpin' servant, stranger helpin' stranger. It was wonderful. Well, you both are too young to know."

  "That's not true!" Meg said with spirit. "My father and his brother were among the early evacuees; they were in the caravan that went on for hundreds of cars. They've told us how they crept along on unlit roads with sparks and ash falling all around, and how they were afraid they were going to burn to death, and how all the while they didn't know where ... where —"

  "— their mother was," Tremblay finished with grim resolve. "Well, I know, and this is her story."

  Having silenced Meg, he continued. "As I say, my concern was with the dollhouse. I'd worked on it on and off the better part of a year. My heart, my soul was in it, much more than anything I ever done on the big house. I don't know why. There was somethin' about it ... still is. Anyhow, I wanted to move it out of harm's way, but I couldn't, not by myself."

  Tremblay paused and studied their faces, as if he were having second thoughts about continuing. He clamped his jaw tight; but when he opened it again, the words came pouring out in a torrent of present tense.

  "So just after two," he said, "I go into Eagle's Nest for the last time. Things look as under control as they're gonna get, considerin' the circumstances. Old Mrs. Camplin is orderin' everyone about, including her daughter-in-law Dorothea. The old woman's two pugs are runnin' around yappin' and snappin' at the servants. I never do see Gordon Camplin. Margaret — she's dressed in deep lavender, and her hair is tied back in a loose and shining bundle — Margaret passes through the commotion with the two Camplin kids. The little girl is draggin' a blanket behind her on the floor. Margaret and me don't say nothin' to each other.

  "No one's free to give me a hand, so I go back, determined to move the dollhouse to safety myself, even if I break it tipping it on its side to get it through the door. Then come the seven blasts at four ten — the signal for Bar Harbor to evacuate. It sends me into a panic. For the first time, I really believe it's all up for Eagle's Nest and the outbuildings, including the carpenter shop. I gotta move fast.

  "So I take a two-by-four and smash out the windows of the shop with it, and then I take a sledge to the window frames. That opens a hole big enough to slide the dollhouse through, and onto the bed of the open truck that I've backed up to the window ledge.

  "My heart's poundin'. There's glass everywhere, and I can smell smoke through the knocked-out windows. The wind is howlin'; leaves are whistlin' right through the shop. I don't have much time. Nobody does. I've got the dollhouse half on, half off the worktable as I shimmy the thing back and forth, trying to slide it towards the truck; it was a gut buster, I can tell you. It's almost dark and the electric's out, of course; I'm doing everything by lamplight. That's when I see Margaret on the other side of the window.

  "She frightens me half to death. Her hair's undone, lifting and falling wildly in the wind. She has a look on her face of terror. I assume it's of the oncoming fire. I run to get the door fo
r her. She comes in and throws herself in my arms and I am in a state of shock.

  'He's tried to rape me,' she says. 'Please, you have to help me. I need to get away, to get to the police.'

  "'What!' says I. 'He's attacked you now?' It's plain I don't believe her. The timing seems downright comical. And she don't look what you call disheveled; except for her hair undone and the look in her eyes, she looks the way she did earlier in the day.

  "She pushes me away, she's furious at me. She reaches in her pocket and waves a letter in my face. ‘You still don't believe me!' she says. 'Read this, then, read this! It's a letter from Gordon. He's obsessed with me,' she says, 'that's what he is. He claims he's risked everything for me. And now he's threatening me: if he can't have me, he won't let anyone else have me, either! See for yourself!'

  "She tries to force the letter on me, but all I can think to say is, 'Where did he try this?'

  "'In the nursery, where else?' she says, as if the attacks were a regular thing.

  ‘What?' says I. 'With the children there?' It all seems so incredible to me. I don't know what to think, what to believe. And all the while I'm aware that the dollhouse is teetering, because she's leaning on it for support. I don't know what to do — save her, save the house, I don't know what.

  "While I'm standing there like a fool, there's a loud banging on the door. I run to open it: it's Gordon Camplin. He looks grim but steadylike. He's looking for Margaret Atwells, he tells me. Then he spies her, hanging back by the dollhouse.

  'Mrs. Atwells!' he cries. 'We've been looking all over for you! The household is packed up; everyone's ready to go. The last escape route off the island's been cut off by fire. We've been told to assemble in the Athletic Field. We may have to evacuate by boat. For God's sake, will you come? The children are hysterical without you.'

  "Meanwhile, I don't know who to believe. I look at him: calm, concerned, acting reasonable, trying to keep his large household together. And I look at Margaret: crying, angry, near incoherent. She don't come forward, but hangs back like a cornered thing.