Beyond Midnight

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Damn. Room five isn't made up. But I've got to get over to the Shop ‘n Save or there'll be nothing for afternoon tea today. Allie would you —"

  Allie looked at her older sister incredulously. "Meg, I'm exhausted; we were up all night. I was just going back to bed — why can't Comfort do it?" she demanded in the perfect pitch of a whiny twelve-year-old.

  Meg lowered her voice: "Because we only have an hour and Comfort will take an hour and a half."

  "What about Lloyd, then?"

  "Lloyd's working on the furnace. Possibly you don't know how upscale we've become. We're actually promising hot water in our ads nowadays."

  "Well, if I'd known you wanted me back in Bar Harbor just because you were one slave short, I might've thought twice —"

  "Yoo-hoo, Meg? And oh, my goodness, Allie!" Both sisters turned to see Julia Talmadge, the well-groomed owner of the well-groomed Elm Tree Inn, approaching them with a cheerful wave and a man in tow. It was the man who caught their attention. Tall, trim, good-looking, and thoroughly overdressed in corduroys and a heavy flannel shirt, he possessed something else that set him apart from the men of Bar Harbor: a cane.

  ****

  "So you're back, Allie. How are you, dear? You look fabulous — but then! Listen, dears, I want you to meet someone. This is Tom Wyler, all the way from Chicago. He'll be staying at the Elm Tree for the next month; however, there's been a dreadful mixup in the booking date. I don't have Mr. Wyler down until tomorrow."

  Eyeing the newly hung NO sign with obvious skepticism, she said, "You can do something for Mr. Wyler, can't you, dears? Just for tonight?"

  "Definitely!"

  "I'm sorry."

  The two sisters exchanged surprised and hostile glances. Julia stared at them both with dismay. Wyler indulged himself in a silent oath and re-adjusted his weight on the cane.

  "Meg, for Pete's sake! He can have room five."

  "Room five is taken, Allie. You know that."

  "But the callers wouldn't even give Comfort a Visa number!"

  "We promised them."

  "What about first come, first served?"

  "Now — dears — I didn't mean to make this awkward for you."

  "This isn't awkward, Julia. Meg is just being Meg. Can't you see, Meg, that this man is injured?" Allie asked, turning to him with a look that suggested she'd just made him a knight.

  Suddenly she did a double take. "Wait a minute — I've seen you recently."

  "Oh, I doubt it," Wyler said quickly.

  "Yes, I have. Wait, I know — the cover of Newsweek! You're on the cover of the Newsweek that's in my room!" she cried. "The one about violence in the streets!"

  Hell. Just his luck. "That's an old, old issue," he said irrelevantly.

  "Violence in the streets, or Newsweek?" the older sister asked dryly.

  Wyler lifted one eyebrow at her and said, "Both. But in any event —"

  The younger sister interrupted. "The cover was a collage of a murdered victim, some cops, and a gang. You were one of the good guys, weren't you? I never forget a face," she cried, pleased. "My God. What an amazing coincidence!"

  "That story was done four years ago," Wyler insisted, as if she had no right to dredge up ancient history. He'd been a sergeant then, and hungrier for recognition than he was now. "Anyway, maybe I'll just try the inn on the other side of you," he murmured.

  Allie was scandalized. "What! The Calico Cat? You can't stay at a place called the Calico Cat! It's just not ... appropriate," she decided instinctively.

  "Not to mention, there's a NO VACANCY sign hanging there, too, Mr. Wyler," Meg added.

  Julia was becoming impatient. "I'll call The Waves. Presumably they'll know whether they have a room or not."

  Wyler smiled thinly and said, "That's very kind; I —"

  "He will have my room, " said Allegra Atwells. She had the look, the tone, the absolute command of a high priestess at the altar. Everyone was impressed.

  Almost.

  "No. He won't."

  "Meg!" Allie said sharply. "I can do what I want. This is all about control, and you know it. " She turned to Wyler, who by now was weaving from the pain, and said, "I'll bunk down with my sister. Are you allergic to dogs? Oh, God, and cats, of course: I hope you don't mind sleeping with cats. We keep them out of the guest-side of the house, but they pretty much have the run of everything else. Just give me five minutes —"

  "Mr. Wyler, I'm sure you can appreciate the spirit in which my sister has made her offer, but it won't be possible. Her room is nothing more than a dressing closet; it has no private bath —"

  "Neither do our guest rooms!"

  "— and I'm sure you'll be more comfortable at the Waves or somewhere else."

  "There won't be anywhere else. If we're full, everyone's full," said Allie with embarrassing candor.

  "Please forgive my sister, Mr. Wyler," Meg said through set teeth. "She hasn't had her nap."

  "Meg," murmured Allie in a voice soft and hurt and low. "Is this how it's going to be all summer?"

  Meg opened her mouth to say something, and then stopped. She turned to Wyler with a grim look. Apparently she thought it was all his fault. "If you could give us half an hour," she said stiffly.

  Wyler looked at Allegra for her reaction. She was beaming. He took that to mean he had a room ... her room ... some room. "Thanks," he said, sweeping both sisters up in the same grateful glance. "I'll keep out of everyone's way."

  Flushed with victory, Allie turned suddenly shy and dropped her look from his. "It will be our pleasure," she said in a devastatingly old-fashioned way. She slipped her arm around her older sister and squeezed her affectionately as they walked toward their house, leaving the detective feeling like a loose ball that had been fumbled, recovered, and run into the end zone for a touchdown.

  He pivoted awkwardly on his cane and began heading back to the Elm Tree Inn with Julia Talmadge.

  "There. You see? All's well that ends well, Mr. Wyler."

  Wyler murmured something polite in agreement.

  In the meantime he was thinking that he'd never seen anyone so beautiful in his life. Allegra Atwells was drop-dead, knock-down, stop-traffic gorgeous.

  Her face was so disturbingly beautiful that he'd scarcely paid attention to her body. Her body, he remembered only vaguely — that it was tall and sexy and that she carried herself like a queen.

  Too bad she was a spoiled brat.

  "How did you hurt your leg, Mr. Wyler?" asked Julia Talmadge without a trace of nosiness in her voice. She might have been asking him how he took his morning coffee.

  "Gunshot," he said curtly, hoping by his tone to nip further inquiries in the bud.

  "Oh, yes; a hunting accident. We see a fair amount of that up here," she said pleasantly. Obviously she made no connection between him and the old Newsweek article. If only Allie Atwells were so dense.

  ****

  "Do you remember Orel Tremblay, Allie?"

  Meg, back from the Shop ‘n Save, was scrubbing a guest bath with Ajax while her sister was changing bedding in room 5 across the hall. Meg's voice, cheerfully puzzled, rang out above the flush of the toilet. "Remember? The old recluse in the little cottage up the hill behind Pete's Bike Rentals? We used to see him grocery shopping sometimes. He always wore that red-and-black-checked deerstalker's hat, even in summer."

  "I guess," her sister answered vaguely. "What about him?"

  Meg came out of the bath with an armload of used towels. "He wrote me the strangest letter.

  Here. Read it. " She turned and cocked one hip so that Allie could lift the envelope that jutted from the pocket of her khakis.

  Allie looked at the address, written in a shaky hand, and extracted the letter. Aloud she read,

  Dear Mrs. Hazard,

  It's real urgent I see you right away. Wednesday would be good but not before eleven nor after six. You could say it's a matter of life and death. The nurse will let you in. Please make the time. I used to hear you were an uprig
ht woman.

  Yours,

  Orel V. Tremblay

  "For goodness' sake," Allie said, frowning. "Are you going?"

  Meg dumped the linen into a plastic hamper and shrugged. "He claims it's a matter of life and death," she said ironically. "Do I have a choice?"

  At that moment Tom Wyler showed up in the doorway with a hopeful look on his face. Both sisters greeted him in the same breath, one with less enthusiasm than the other.

  "I hope I'm not too early," he said, glancing around the still unmade room. Your handyman sent me up here."

  "That was our brother Lloyd. Your room — my room, that is — is all set," Allie said warmly. "It's upstairs and to your left. Come on. I'll help you with your bags."

  "Hold on, I hear Terry," said Meg, sticking her head out the hall and flagging down an eleven year-old boy in full trot. She steered him into the room. "Take Mr. Wyler's things into Allie's room, will you, honey?"

  The boy, dressed in torn jeans and Keds, fastened two piercing blue eyes on Wyler, looked him up and looked him down, and said, "Why? You sleepin' with my aunt Allie, mister?"

  Everyone rushed to say no at the same time. The boy gave an indifferent shrug and ran downstairs for Wyler's bag.

  "They grow up so fast nowadays," Meg said wryly to the detective.

  "I know; I have one of my own," Wyler remarked in the same wry tone. He began the painful journey up one more flight.

  Allie fell back on the half-made bed and threw her arms out wide. "Married!" she wailed. "How could he?"

  "For Pete's sake, Allie," her sister said. "What's the big deal? You've just met the man."

  Allie rolled her head toward her sister. "So? Can't I be attracted to him?"

  "You're attracted to him because he's hurt," Meg said flatly. "He can't chase after you the way the rest of them do — not yet, anyway."

  "Not true. I'm attracted to him because of the look in his eyes, so sad and tired and fed up with the world. And because — don't you laugh — because he was on the cover of Newsweek. I mean, don't you think that's fate? What are the odds that a four-year-old magazine would be lying around in my room with him on the cover?"

  "What are the odds that you've actually read the article inside?" Meg said, grabbing her sister by the ankle and half puffing her off the bed.

  "I scanned it. There's not much about him; just an angry quote of his about children doing violence to children. Don't you think he's good-looking?"

  Meg scowled at a new water ring on the mahogany dresser. "Yeah, I guess," she said, distressed by the ugly stain.

  "I'll just go see if he needs anything," Allie said, bounding up from the bed.

  Meg held on to her sister's shirt. "Not until you're done here. Why do you always make me play the evil stepsister?"

  "Because," said Allie, wriggling out of her grasp with a grin, "you were born to the role."

  Buy Embers

  Emily's Ghost Sample Chapter

  Antoinette Stockenberg

  RITA award winner.

  A showdown between a U.S. Senator (with a house on Martha's Vineyard) who believes in ghosts and a reporter who doesn't. What could possibly go wrong?

  Chapter 1

  Emily Bowditch threw down her notes in disgust.

  "Can you believe this? The United States is gazillions of dollars in debt, and Senator Arthur Lee Alden III wants funding for intergalactic communication. Can you believe this?"

  No one in the newsroom paid any attention to her; everyone was on deadline. Emily turned her monitor on and began setting up a new file.

  "Not to worry, E.T.," she muttered to no one in particular. "If the senator gets his funding, pretty soon you will be able to phone home."

  The minutes ticked by. Her hands flew over the keyboard; her muttering became more indignant. "Of all the hopeless wastes of taxpayers' money ... of all the liberal spendthrifts ... of all the misdirected ... serendipitous ... irrational ... downright weird ...."

  Stan Cooper looked up annoyed from his computer screen. "What’re you going on about?" He swiveled his chair to face Emily and reached for his coffee mug. "Tell me now and get it over with, for God's sake, so I can get back to work."

  The irritation in his voice didn't bother Emily at all. She assumed that all forty-eight year old bachelor newsmen came that way. "It's Senator Alden."

  Stan's eyelids flickered. "Yeah? What about him?"

  "I've just got hold of a letter he wrote urging the National Science Foundation to fund a heck of a lot more psychic research than they've been doing. I didn't know they were doing any," she said through gritted teeth. "And now, apparently, they're going to do more."

  "How much more?" Stan asked. His voice was low and still, the way it got whenever he talked about Senator Alden.

  Emily shook her head. "It doesn't say." She fished her copy of the letter from a school of papers on her desk and read from it aloud. "'We urge you' -- blah, blah, here it is -- 'to allocate substantially greater sums for psychic research which, among other benefits, can have far-reaching ramifications for both our domestic and foreign intelligence'."

  Stan's laugh was short and derisive. "FBI. CIA. Yeah. Rumors have been going around for years that they've been fooling around with psi." Stan drained the dregs of his coffee and made a wry face. "So how you gonna handle the story?"

  Emily sighed. "I'm sure the Chief'll want me to play it straight; he respects the senator too much to feel any moral outrage here."

  "No problem," Stan said with a deadly smile. "Between you and me we have more than enough."

  "Well, it is outrageous!"

  "I agree."

  "I mean it, Stan. Our government is out of control, absolutely out of control. Our bridges are falling down, our sewers are disintegrating, our schools need overhauling and this guy calls for -- psychic research! Who needs psychic research? We need concrete; pipes; schoolrooms."

  Stan swiveled slowly around to face his computer, effectively ending the coffee break. "What an innocent you are," he said in a tired voice. "I suppose it comes from living and working in New Hampshire."

  Emily flushed. She'd met Stanley Cooper when he was on assignment in Manchester seven years earlier. She was a junior reporter then, really just a Gofer, and she'd been thoroughly awed by the hard-boiled political reporter from the Boston Journal. He liked what little she'd written, though, and when she took a job in New Bedford covering municipal affairs for the local paper, his name was on her list of references.

  Then, six months ago, she sent her resume to the Journal. Stanley Cooper interviewed her in depth, recommended her, and put her through her paces after she was hired. Later she learned the exact wording of his recommendation: "She'll be a royal pain in the butt. We need her."

  At twenty-eight Emily Bowditch was as much in awe of Stan Cooper as ever. She didn't think much of him as a man -- he drank, smoked, gambled, detested kids and didn't keep house -- but as a political writer he was without parallel. She'd do just about anything to impress him. Whenever he cut her down to size (which was often) she took it hard.

  She studied him in profile as he hunched over his keyboard, pecking fitfully. His clothes were shabby. His face was lined, unshaven, unhappy. He was thin, almost bony: he was suspicious of everything, probably including food. But he was brilliant, and Emily wanted desperately to make her mark with him.

  "Stan?" she ventured, risking his wrath. "I've been mulling over an idea for a story. I think it could be pretty good."

  "Hmmmn."

  "Maybe even sensational."

  "Hmmmn."

  "Do you want to hear about it?"

  "No. Just do it."

  That was it, the permission she wanted--more or less. She grabbed her tweed jacket and said, "I'll be at the library for the next couple of hours." But as she sprinted down the steps of the bland brick building that housed the Boston Journal, the thought occurred to her that her idea was cockamamie at best, and a pretty good reason for getting fired, at worst.

>   She spent the rest of the afternoon in the Boston Public Library, plowing through old copies of Etheric, a magazine devoted exclusively to psychic phenomena; a magazine that until that morning she had never known existed. She was working strictly on a hunch, and she wasn't sure what she'd find.

  When she'd called Senator Alden's office earlier in the day to confirm the existence of his letter to the National Science Foundation, she was put through to his aide, Jim Whitewood. In the process some signals had obviously been crossed. Mr. Whitewood had come on the line and, before she could say boo, said in a sharp voice, "How did you get hold of the letter? Are you from Etheric?"

  "What's Etheric?" Emily had asked, a little stupidly.

  "Who is this?" Mr. Whitewood had demanded.

  That's when she made the first of a series of snap judgments that later would come back to haunt her. She had said in response, "Hello? Hello? Oh darn, something's wrong with this phone," and hung up. She needed time, time to track down Etheric and see what or who had made Mr. Whitewood so press-shy.

  And so, with the bright May sun shining through the ceiling-high windows, warming the back of her neck under her straight dark hair, Emily thumbed drowsily through dozens of back issues of the fascinating and bizarre periodical, stopping every now and then to peruse an article that caught her fancy. At five-thirty, she sat up straight.

  "Bingo," she whispered softly to herself.

  In the Newsworthy column of a two-year old issue of Etheric was a photo of Senator Alden shaking the hand of his new aide, Jim Whitewood. Mr. Whitewood, who admitted to having "only modestly psychic powers," promised to "keep the lines of communication open between Senator Alden and those with genuine psychic ability."

  Only modestly psychic. That was like saying someone was only modestly around the bend.

  Emily hugged herself with joy. Her original plan suddenly got a little more cockamamie.

  ****

  Armed with a Xerox copy of the Etheric photo and caption, Emily cornered Stan Cooper alone in the Journal's smoking lounge the next morning. "Stan, I really need your input on this." She handed him the photo she'd found and watched him break into a contemptuous smile. "The magazine folded a little after this issue came out," she said. "It had no circulation to speak of, so I doubt if your average voter even knows about this."