Beyond Midnight

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Joan rose up on tiptoe, trying for the same vantage over the café curtains that Norah had. In heels, Joan was able to manage an inch or two over five feet, but today she was wearing sandals. She was short. Her two best friends were tall. It made her peppery sometimes.

  "Norah, would you mind?" Joan asked in a dangerously mild voice. "They're my binoculars, after all."

  She reached for them but Norah shooed her away with her elbow, the way she might a pesky terrier. Maddie stepped in, as she always did, to keep the peace. She took the binoculars.

  "All right, you two clowns. Have a little dignity."

  With Norah, dignity was always in short supply. She proved it now by nodding slyly toward the lighthouse. "Check it out—if you're not too prim."

  Probably she'd used the exact same line on half the men she'd dated; Norah had no reason to be shy. With her knockout figure, creamy skin, red, red hair and full red lips, she was the kind of woman who made men take off their wedding rings and hide them in their hip pockets.

  But Maddie was not, and never would be, Norah.

  "Why are you being such a pain, Nor?"

  "You're abnormal, you know that? Anyone else would look. Prim, prim, prim."

  With an angry, heavy sigh, Maddie accepted the binoculars and aimed them in the general direction of the lighthouse. Her sense of dread ran deep. She did not want to gape at the man and did not want, most of all, to gape at the woman. What was the point? It would be like staring into her own grave.

  "Yes. I see him. Yes. He looks like on TV." She held the binoculars out to Norah. "Happy now?"

  "What about the woman? What do you think?"

  "I didn't see any woman," said Maddie, grateful that a billowing bed sheet hid all but a pair of slender ankles from view.

  "No, she's there, Maddie. I can see her now, even without the binoculars. Look again," Joan urged.

  It was going to be so much worse than Maddie thought. She sighed and tried to seem bored, then took the glasses back for another look. This time she was spared nothing. A slender woman of medium height was facing squarely in their direction, laughing. The wind was lifting her blunt-cut hair away from her face and plastering her pale blue sundress against her lithe body. She was the picture of vitality and high spirits. And the sight of her filled Maddie with relief.

  "It's obviously his sister," she said.

  "Ah, his sister. Wait—how would you know?" Norah demanded.

  She walks the way he does... throws her head back when she laughs the way he does... does that jingle-change thing in her pocket the way he does. Who else could she be?

  Maddie spun a plausible lie. "I overheard it in the post office yesterday. I remember now."

  "I don't believe it. She's half his age."

  "I doubt it."

  The two were five years apart. But the sister looked young for her years, and the brother carried thoughts of war and savagery with him everywhere he went. Joan was right: he looked burned out. Maddie could see it in the apathetic lift of his shoulders after the woman said something. It was such a tired-looking shrug.

  Norah was watching Maddie more carefully now. She folded her forearms across her implanted breasts and splayed her red-tipped fingers on her upper arms. "What else did you manage to ... overhear, in the post office?" The question dripped with skepticism.

  Maddie met her friend's steady gaze with one almost as good. "That was pretty much it. It was crowded. You know how little the lobby is. They took the conversation outside."

  "Who were they? Man? Woman? Did you recognize them from town?"

  "Two women, as I recall. I didn't bother turning around to see who. As I've said, I'm not really interested."

  Norah cocked her head. Her lined lips curled into a faint smile. Her eyes, the color of water found nowhere in New England, narrowed. "Really."

  "Okay, they're getting into the Jeep!" Joan cried. "Now what?"

  "We follow 'em. Let's go!"

  Maddie stared agape as the two made a dash for the half-open Dutch door that led to the seashelled drive of the Cape Cod cottage. "Are you out of your minds? What do you hope to accomplish?"

  Norah slapped the enormous glove-soft carryall she'd slung over her shoulder. "I have a camera," she said on her way out.

  "You're going to photograph them?"

  "If we don't, the paparazzi will!"

  She had her Mercedes in gear before Joan was able to snap her seat belt shut. The top of the convertible was down, of course, the better for Norah to be seen. Maddie watched, boggled, as the two took off in a cloud of dust, Norah pumping her fist in a war whoop the whole time.

  The episode bordered on the surreal: an educated, beautiful forty-year-old woman and an even more educated thirty- eight-year-old one, tracking down a media celebrity like two hound dogs after some felon in the bayou. All they needed was Maddie in the rumble seat and there they'd be: Three perfect Stooges.

  She closed the lower half of the Dutch door, and then, because she felt a sudden and entirely irrational chill, closed the upper half. June meant nothing on the Cape. June could go from warm and wonderful to bone-chilling cold in the blink of an eye.

  June had done just that.

  Buy A Charmed Place

  Embers Sample Chapter

  Antoinette Stockenberg

  "A deft blend of mystery and romance … sure to win more kudos"

  --Publishers Weekly

  To Meg Hazard, it seemed like a good idea at the time: squeezing her extended family into the back rooms of their rambling Victorian home and converting the rest of the house into a Bed and Breakfast in the coastal town of Bar Harbor, Maine. Paying guests are most welcome, but the arrival of a Chicago cop on medical leave turns out to be both good news and bad news for Meg and the Inn Between.

  Chapter 1

  Meg Hazard, shivering in the predawn chill, pulled the blanket up around her shoulders and said, "Money isn't everything, Allie."

  Her sister laughed derisively. "Oh, come on." She threw her head back in a way that profiled her long neck and thick black hair to perfection. "The only ones who say that are those who have it and those who don't. And I say, both sides are lying through their teeth." She pulled her knees up closer to her chest. "God, it's cold up here. Was it this cold when we were kids?"

  "Of course. We're on top of a mountain. In Maine. In June. You know the saying: In Maine there are two seasons —"

  "— winter and August. Mmm. I do know. Which is another reason I'll take a job anywhere but here. You can't make any real money in Maine, and meanwhile you freeze your buns off trying."

  Meg smiled and held one end of her blanket open. "Park your buns under the blanket with me, then. I told you to bring something warm."

  She glanced around at the dozens of tourists sharing the rocky summit with them. Some were murmuring; some were silent. All were waiting. "The sun will be up in precisely — four minutes," Meg said, peering at her watch.

  The two sisters huddled together under the pale pink sky, their breaths mingling, their minds in tune.

  "Tell me why, exactly, I let you talk me into this again?" Allie asked.

  Meg laughed softly and said, "I was just thinking about that. You were five and I was seventeen when I brought you up here the first time. You were so excited, you forgot your Thermos of hot chocolate. I had to drive us back for it —"

  "— and Dad woke up and said we were crazy and if Mom were alive she'd give us what for —"

  "— and then, when we finally got up here, you were mad because we weren't the only ones on Cadillac Mountain, so how could we possibly be the first ones in the whole U.S. to see the sun that day?"

  "You told me we would be, Meg. I distinctly remember."

  "So you stood up and told all the other tourists to please close their eyes because you wanted to be first."

  Allegra Atwells looked away with the same roguish smile that had melted every single male heart that had ever come within fifty feet of it.

  And then sh
e threw off her blanket, stood up, and shouted at the top of her lungs: "Would everyone please close their eyes so that I can finally be the first one to see the sun rise in the United States? I'm from Bar Harbor, folks. I live here."

  Virtually every tourist there turned in surprise to gape at her. Meg groaned and buried her face in her hands, and when she looked up again, a thin sliver of bright gold had popped up into the now blood-red sky, casting the first of its rays across Frenchman's Bay below.

  Allie Atwells had probably got her wish.

  "Twenty-five, and still the same," Meg said, leaning back on the palms of her hands and looking up at her sister with a kind of rueful admiration.

  Allie stood defiantly on the rocky outcrop with her hands on her hips. The rising wind whipped her long black hair across her face and pressed the white shirt she wore against her shapely breasts. Her face — even in the early morning sun, even without makeup, even after an all-nighter spent deep in gossip — was cover-girl gorgeous, the kind that modeling agencies would kill to represent.

  "Of course I'm still the same! How can I be anything else?" Allie said, throwing her arms up melodramatically. "I've been stuck in this god- forsaken corner of the country all my life. I haven't been anywhere, done anything, met anyone ... Thanks to your nagging, I've done nothing but work and study, work and study, work and study."

  Meg laughed. "And now here you are, six years, four apartments, two majors, and eleven part-time —"

  "Twelve," Allie said with a wry look. "You forget -- I worked for a week at the front desk of the Budgetel before you talked me into coming home for the summer."

  "I did that because finding a full-time job is a full-time job. Anyway, twelve part-time jobs later, and you have a degree. Think of it, Allie," Meg said, motioning to her to sit back down beside her. "A degree." She threw one arm around her sister and pressed her forehead to Allie's temple.

  "The first one in the family; we're all so proud of you."

  "Oh, Meg," the younger girl said modestly. "It's not as if it's from Cornell's hotel school. It's no big deal. I still have to start at a pathetic wage in an entry-level job. A degree doesn't make me any better than you or Lloyd. It only means I didn't marry young the way you two did."

  "Yeah, and I know why," Meg said with an ironic smile. "Because the minute you say yes to someone, ninety-nine other men are sure to cut their throats, and you can't bear the thought of all that blood on your hands."

  Allie's violet eyes turned a deeper shade of perfection. "That isn't why I've never married, Meg, you know that," she said in a soft voice. "I just haven't found the right one."

  Meg sighed heavily and said, "Whereas I, on the other hand, married my one and only suitor — and then lost him."

  Allie shook her head. "Paul wasn't the right one for you, Meg. You know he wasn't."

  Meg's brow twitched in a frown, but then suddenly she smiled and said: "Was too."

  "Was not."

  "Was too!"

  "Dammit, Meg!" Allie grabbed a short brown curl of her sister's hair and yanked it hard, then said in a voice endearingly wistful, "It's good to be back, Margaret Mary Atwells Hazard. I've missed you."

  "And I," said Meg softly, "have missed you too, Allie-cat."

  They sat there for a long moment without speaking, content to watch the kaleidoscope of reds and pinks that streaked across the morning sky. On a good morning — and this was one of them — the view of the sea from Cadillac Mountain went on forever.

  "Maybe you're right, Meg," Allie murmured at last. "Maybe money isn't everything."

  Meg nodded thoughtfully, then stood up and stretched. "Let's go home, kiddo. We've got work to do."

  ****

  Homicide Lieutenant Tom Wyler was stuck in a traffic jam as thick and wide as any he'd ever had to cut through back in Chicago. But at least there he had resources: a siren, a strobe, a hailer to warn people to get the hell out of his way. Here, creeping along the main drag through Ellsworth, Maine, he was just another tourist, without authority and without respect.

  And without air conditioning. In a burst of economic caution he'd decided on Rent-a-Wreck instead of Hertz or Avis at the airport. The three- year-old Cutlass they gave him ran perfectly fine; if it were, say, January, he'd have no complaint. But he was dressed for the Arctic, which is roughly where he thought Maine was, and with the midday sun beating down on a dark gray roof on a hot June day, he felt like complaining plenty.

  "Go heal somewhere else," his surgeon had advised him. "Away from the bloodshed. Somewhere cool, somewhere quiet, somewhere where every citizen isn't armed up to his goddamned teeth."

  Wyler was shell-shocked, and he knew it. He needed time to think, time to heal, time to decide whether he even wanted to go back to the bloody fray. So he'd chosen a small, very small, resort town with a reputation for quiet evenings and grand scenery. He didn't need theme parks, topless beaches, casino gambling, or all-night discos. All he needed, all he wanted, was a little peace and quiet.

  So why, having fled to this supposedly remote chunk of granite coast, was he feeling his blood pressure soar and his temples ache?

  Because this isn't what it was supposed to be, he realized, disappointed. Because he'd pictured the route to Bar Harbor as a quiet country road lined with gabled houses with big front porches, and laundry billowing from clotheslines out back. Instead, he found himself inching past a more familiar kind of Americana: Pizza Hut, Holiday Inn, Dairy Queen, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and McDonald's, all vying with one another for his tourist dollars — that is, if the fella on the curb selling Elvis-on-velvet paintings didn't get them first.

  Shit. He'd picked a tourist trap after all.

  His disappointment lasted right through Ellsworth and over the causeway onto Mount Desert Island. The island, too, was pretty developed. The road that fed into Bar Harbor was lined with campgrounds and cabin rentals and, eventually, big motels perched high on a ridge to his right, presumably with views of the ocean he knew was somewhere to his left. The motels must be what had replaced the string of Bar Harbor summer mansions that he'd read were lost in the Great Maine Fire of 1947.

  All in all, he wasn't impressed. Shifting his wounded, aching leg into a more comfortable position, he reflected on how thoroughly he'd failed to follow his surgeon's advice. He'd plunked down good money to spend at least half a summer in a place that wasn't cool, wasn't quiet, and as far as he could tell — judging from the number of gun shops he'd passed along the way — where every hunter-citizen was armed up to his goddamned teeth.

  ****

  "Unseasonable, ain't it, de-ah?" The mailman handed Meg a bundle of mail, pulled out a handkerchief from his hip pocket, and mopped his beaded brow.

  Meg put down her watering can and took the packet. "I don't mind," she said, stepping back to admire her new flower boxes. "Did you ever see a more charming geranium? Allie brought them up with her from Portland."

  "Awful pretty," agreed the mail carrier. "Pink do sit well with Dusty Miller. The blue lobelia's a nice touch. Flesh out a bit, them boxes be right as rain."

  The flower boxes, painted a dusty rose to match the shutters, were sitting on the veranda — after they began renting rooms, Meg made everyone stop calling it a porch — ready to be mounted under the big bay window of the Inn Between. The job was waiting for Everett Atwells, but as Meg poked through the mail packet she realized that it would have to wait a little longer.

  "Dad! Mail's here!"

  Everett Atwells ambled out from the side of the house, paint scraper in one hand, a hopeful smile on his craggy face. "You're right around this mornin', Desmond. Hot enough for ya?"

  The mailman lifted his chin in an upward nod of greeting. "Corn weather, without a doubt," he said, and went back to his rounds.

  Everett eased Fly Fishing Magazine out from among the bills in his daughter's hand. "Two minutes," he said with an apologetic wrinkle to his nose. "Then it's right back to the grindstone."

  Meg responded with a resign
ed sigh.

  Her father took that sigh personally. "Jeez-zus, you're a driver, woman."

  "Someone around here has to be," she said, running her hands distractedly through the straggles of her overlong hair. She reached in the pocket of her khakis and pulled out a rubber band. "High season is right around the corner, and look at this place," she said, yanking her hair back in a short and all-too-functional ponytail. "Between painting and papering, we have twice as much work as we have weeks."

  "The guests'll fall asleep just as easy starin' at stripes as they will at florals."

  "You know what I'm talking about, Dad." She pointed to the inn on the left. "Look at the Elm Tree Inn." She pointed to the inn on the right. "Look at the Calico Cat. They're perfect. Perfect! And then look at us," she said with a despairing sweep of her arm across the front of their big, rambling Victorian. The pale gray clapboards of the Inn Between were holding on to their paint, more or less, but the white trim — and there was white trim everywhere — was a sad and peely mess.

  "We ain't perfect," Everett allowed, squinting at the high, pointed turret that dominated the front of the house. "Yep," he said with a yank on his cap. "Definitely needs paint."

  "Oh, take your magazine and beat it," Meg said, shaking her head and resolving not to smile. "I'll pick on Lloyd instead."

  "Don't I know it?" Everett said with a wink. He ambled off without a care in the world toward a chair under the huge oak in the back of the yard. Meg sighed and flipped through the mail, plucking out the "Final Notice" the way she would some evil-looking weed from her garden. When she looked up again, her sister was standing on the front lawn next to the Inn Between's sign and hanging a NO in front of the VACANCY.

  "No kidding? On a Wednesday?" Meg broke into a big, relieved grin. "Maybe we're finally turning the corner on this bed-and-breakfast thing," she added as she bounded up the porch — the veranda — steps. "Who was it? A couple? A family?"

  Allie shrugged and yawned at the same time. "Comfort took the call. All I know is they're due in an hour."