Zeke stretched his legs to the fire. Maggie curled hers beneath her, making herself as small as she knew how. It would have been comical to see him wearing her clothes and fuzzy socks had he not taken her phone…Cal’s gun…the knives.
Silence hung like a mist, filling every crevice of the room. The only sound, besides the hissing and popping of the fire, was the sound of Zeke sipping his coffee until Maggie finally swallowed and said, “I’m listening.” Her coffee sat untouched on the table beside her.
Zeke turned to her, grinning, holding the mug close to his chin. “I like that about you, Margaret Raines. You’re a calming presence, a capable woman.” He took another sip. “And you make a fine cup of coffee. I looked for a wedding ring in the bedroom and didn’t find one. But you have children.” His eyes searched hers. “Are you divorced or widowed?”
Maggie didn’t know what to say. How could he do that? Talk like they met at a coffee shop. On an arranged date. What is this? Her eyes watered against her will.
Zeke saw it and winced. “Oh, Maggie, don’t cry. That’ll kill me! I like you.”
She shook her head, questions looming large. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
He looked behind him, grabbed a box of tissues off the table and handed them to her. “I’m trying to figure out the same thing, Maggie Dearest. What are you doing here?”
It didn’t feel safe to be transparent. Maggie stared at him, mute, as a long tentacle of silence curled in the air between them.
“I understand,” said Zeke finally. “I haven’t gained your trust.”
“Where’s my cell phone?” Maggie’s voice wasn’t much more than a croak. Fear, like age, tightened the vocal cords.
Zeke reached behind the sofa cushion to his back and pulled out her phone. “You mean this? Someone named Cal sent you a message while you were outside. Is there a code?” He looked down at the cell phone as if he’d never seen one before, as if it were a marvel.
Without thinking Maggie lunged. Whether she was going for the phone or his throat she couldn’t have said. But her hands never made it. Zeke grabbed her arms and pushed her back on the sofa. He was on top of her now, pinning her hands down with his elbows.
* * *
Canon tossed in his sleep. Straining. His brow knotted, slick with sweat. He was younger…a deputy…knocking on Ollie’s door, snow falling around him.
Now he was pounding. “Ollie!” Canon tried the door. It was open. He found Ollie in the bedroom, beer cans scattered over a nightstand and rug.
Canon lifted the old man’s head in his arms. Then the dream turned to Rita—it was Rita that Canon held now, her head flailing like Ollie’s to the side, her straw hat fallen to the ground. But she wasn’t drunk.
Pulled weeds littered the grass around her. Canon could still smell the upturned soil.
* * *
Fear spread through Maggie’s body like a grease fire. She didn’t know this man, Zeke, and suddenly couldn’t see her future. Was this to be her final night? Lord, don’t make Robbie and Cal suffer this, too. Don’t make them bear my death.
Tom would be sorry. Served him right.
Zeke’s low laugh in her ear sent another unwelcome shiver down her spine. This time it settled above her tailbone. “You’re a quick one.” He put his head mere inches from her own. “I don’t want to hurt you, Maggie. Not after you’ve been so good to me.”
Confusion bubbled hot inside her, and sudden rage at being pinned down. Maggie strained to free her hands, but Zeke held them in a vice-grip.
Could she kill this man? Could she do it to save her own life?
Probably not.
Tears of frustration scratched the sides of her cheeks.
But can he kill me?
Maggie didn’t want to force the answer. She squeezed her eyes shut to stop the tears—to keep from having to meet Zeke’s eyes. She’d already noted how blue they were and was furious with herself for noticing. And his teeth were brilliant white, although those on the bottom overlapped. And he could use a shave.
She felt him shift his weight, then he was wiping her tears with one of his hands. Did a man bother to wipe a woman’s tears if he was planning to kill her?
Maggie’s eyes flew open. “Who are you?” she whispered. The vocal cords were really folds. Enough air had to push up and out between the folds to cause a vibration for a voice to work.
Zeke looked hurt. “I told you my name, Maggie.”
“I still don’t know who you are, or how you came to be on the porch.”
All at once he released her. She sat up and hugged the box of Kleenex on her end of the sofa. Zeke settled back on his side, still holding Maggie’s cell phone. “I notice you didn’t say ‘my’ porch. Is it still a rental?”
He knows this place? Maggie nodded.
“How long do you have it rented?”
She pressed her lips together, refusing to answer.
Zeke studied her several moments. Maggie glared back. She wouldn’t die or be cowed into answering his questions without a fight.
He was the first to crack. “Are you expecting someone?” Zeke held up the phone. “This ‘Cal’ person?”
“No!” The thought of Cal driving up to check on her sent an icy shiver through Maggie’s heart. “What did the text say?”
“It’s called a what? A text?”
How does he not know this?
Zeke studied the phone. “Is there a code to unlock it?”
Maggie stared at him.
“The code, Maggie. And I’ll read it to you.”
She took her time answering. “Zero eight, zero nine.”
An eyebrow lifted as he punched it in. “That’s not terribly original. Twins’ birthday?” She didn’t answer. “Your birthday?” She nodded. “How old are you, Maggie?”
“Fifty.”
Both of his eyebrows lifted this time. “I never would have guessed that. Was it special? Big party?”
Tears welled up again. “No. No party.” Just a bittersweet walk through the house I once lived in, to parcel out my things.
Zeke frowned. “Why not?”
Maggie studied him. He didn’t look like a killer, he looked like the guy next door—the good-hearted hippie who would help you get a snake out of your garage, or fix a leaking faucet.
Zeke crossed his arms and stared back at her with all the calm of a therapist. “Tell me about it.”
“You said you’d read me the text.”
“Patience, Maggie. I want to know what’s making you cry. It’s not me this time.”
Maggie pulled out a tissue and blew her nose. “This cannot be happening.” She finally took a gulp of her coffee. The warmth felt good sliding down her throat.
“Why are you sad, Maggie? What made you rent this cabin?”
So she told him. What else was she supposed to do? “I spent my birthday walking through my house to see what I was going to keep. Anything that didn’t have Tom’s mark on it.”
“And Tom is…”
“Tom was my husband.”
“How long?”
“Thirty years.”
“Why did it end?”
“He got his receptionist pregnant.”
Zeke winced. “So Cal is one of the twins? Boys?”
Maggie shook her head.
“Girl and a boy.” Zeke was quick. This did nothing to make her feel better. “How old is the receptionist?”
Maggie felt her forehead furrow. The answer sent a shame wash through her every time. “Twenty-six.”
Zeke’s breath caught. “Same age as the twins?” Then his face grew dark. “That bastard!”
Maggie looked up at him.
Zeke leaned forward. “I’d kill him if I thought it’d make you feel better, Maggie. But it wouldn’t. Trust me.” His face went darker still, his blue eyes icy.
I’d kill him if I thought it’d make you feel better, Maggie.
The words cracked back and forth in Maggie’s mind like an ice tray. She
remembered the day she sat on the sofa across from Tom and pictured him in a casket. Yes, in that single moment Maggie had wanted Tom to die. She had even wondered if she could do it.
But…Maggie didn’t wish Tom dead. Not anymore. She’d gone through the worst of it already…people knowing…the twins knowing. In the beginning, when she first learned about it, the thought of Tom’s death was simply kinder than the realization of his betrayal.
She felt Zeke watching her but didn’t say anything, the memory of that awful day replaying in her mind and heart, re-cracking open the wounds.
Finally Zeke said, as if he sensed what was going through her mind, “Tom is an A-one idiot, Maggie. But that’s no reflection on you.”
“You haven’t seen Bethany. She’s beautiful.”
“I’m looking at Maggie. She’s beautiful.”
Maggie rubbed her forehead, as if subliminally checking to see if she could still feel her own skin. This cannot be happening.
Zeke’s next words came to Maggie’s ears as through a tunnel. “And it’s more than her brown eyes and long hair and how good it felt to have her try to get this phone out of my hands. There’s a strong light in you, Margaret Raines. I could see it from a long way off.”
A dozen emotions fought for control of Maggie’s mind. She studied Zeke more closely than she’d allowed herself to previously. He was tall, fair-headed, his hair still drying from the bath. It was a little long and the cut reminded her of someone…Rick Springfield. He looked like a fair-haired Rick Springfield with a shag from the eighties, his eyes rimmed in thick brows and lashes.
Zeke’s age? Hard to tell. Younger than her, but older than the twins. Mid-to-late thirties?
Maggie went to a Rick Springfield concert once, when she was sixteen, in Nashville. Her friend got them seats near the stage. Maggie remembered being appalled at the screaming girls around her, right up until the moment she stood in her own seat and screamed alongside them.
“I’m sure it had more to do with brokenness than beauty anyway,” Zeke said. “His, not yours. That always seems to be the case.” He tapped his coffee mug with his finger, looking once again like a therapist.
* * *
Now Canon was in his patrol car. No Rita. No brown-haired woman. No killer dragging a body up a hill. No Ollie. No beer cans. Just the race of the pavement under his wheels as he sped down Highway 47, the words coming through the radio piercing him. Stand-off at the Handy-Mart at 159. Hostage situation. Sheriff on the scene.
Canon was only a deputy then.
As he took the final curve, going so fast the car came up off its wheels on the right side, the radio crackled with urgency: Shots fired! Shots fired!
For the third time that night, just as the Handy-Mart came into view, Canon woke in a shiver-inducing sweat.
* * *
As Maggie stared at the strange man on the other end of the sofa and fought to make sense of his words, something loosened inside her. She could feel it, like a worrisome thorn being slowly worked out from deep within her flesh.
Maggie had always been uptight. While she took pride in her ability to hold it all together, there were a few times, like that Rick Springfield concert, when she let herself give in fully to the moment. When she flung pride and reservation aside and stared down the fears of her most private demons. When she said, in essence, caution be damned.
From the moment Tom had gotten the words out, I need to talk to you, Maggie, I have some unwelcome news, as though she were one of his throat patients—the test results were back and she was the one with cancer, not him—Maggie screwed a tight lid on her heart.
Lord, don’t let Tom see me cry.
After that initial tidal wave in the car, Maggie thought she’d done an admirable job of tamping down her emotions. Keeping a brave front for the children. Avoiding going anywhere or being around anyone who might ask unwanted questions. What happened, Maggie?
She didn’t need looks of pity from her nearest friends…extended family…those glances people meant to be sympathetic but that she knew would only cause her to lose her composure when she got back to her car or newly leased, modern, sharply outfitted, cold and empty condo.
Maggie had tried to convince herself the clean lines of contemporary housing would do her good. But uncluttered and unfettered simply meant unattached. She wasn’t really a clean-line person. Maggie was old-fashioned at heart. She loved what a home represented, the shelter…the safety…its history. People lived their lives inside the walls of a home. That romanticism was what had drawn her to the cabin.
How awful for Zeke to say, I’d kill him if I thought it’d make you feel better, Maggie. And yet that’s exactly what she had wanted when Tom first told her. Yes! Kill him and kill Bethany, even it means the child dies, too. That child, after all, was the evidence of Tom’s betrayal.
But—oh, what a relief!—Maggie didn’t feel that way anymore.
“I don't hate Tom,” she said, staring into the pool of Zeke’s well-lashed eyes, as if she was realizing it for the first time, or…rediscovering it. As the words left her throat, she felt actual relief, a tangible burden lifted.
She felt her lips curling into a smile, Zeke’s outburst lying delicious in her ears. That bastard! Maggie giggled. Then she was doubled over on the sofa, laughing.
Tom is an A-one idiot, Maggie.
Then she was crying again. How long had it been since anyone had validated her? Or told her she was pretty? Too long. Not even the therapist, at one hundred dollars an hour. All the self-blaming…the embarrassment around friends…the pain in her children’s eyes that she knew she somehow caused without meaning to. Mothers were responsible for everything. Weren’t they?
In nearly five months, Maggie hadn’t allowed herself to feel. After that first awful night, she had hardly shed a tear. Why now? Why were the tears—mixed with laughter, no less—flowing out of her now?
“What did I do to make Tom stop loving me?” she whispered. So much so that he would seek solace in another woman’s arms—a woman hardly more than a girl—a girl no more than their daughter’s age.
Hurt pierced Maggie like a stab wound. She felt Zeke’s hand on her back.
But…what if it wasn’t Maggie’s fault? What if it had more to do with brokenness, like Zeke had suggested? Tom’s, not hers. What if she wasn’t the true source of the cancer? What if Tom was simply an ass?
“Poor Bethany,” mumbled Maggie, not realizing she’d spoken aloud. Poor child in that twenty-six-year-old’s womb.
Then she was back to fresh tears. I am the fool who first married Tom, the ass, and lived with him for thirty years. How long will it last for Bethany?
She shook her head at the thought. No…Tom wasn’t an ass. Not really. “He took no pleasure in hurting me,” she felt the need to explain to Zeke. “And he will pay for his indiscretion for the rest of his life. He has to carry that burden like a ball and chain.” I feel sorry for Tom. Part of her would always love him…and miss him.
Divorce was exhausting. Maggie hadn’t been prepared for that. While she might have looked on the surface like she was taking it all in stride, she had mentally run around this issue from every angle casting for some way not to be a victim or a failure in this story—her story! “Isn’t it my story?” she raised up and asked Zeke forcefully. “Don’t I get to say?”
He watched her with a bemused expression. She knew her comments weren’t making sense to him, but they made sense to her. Zeke held out the tissue box again. Maggie took one, then another.
Part of what had driven her back to writing was her need to resume control. Writing put her in the seat of command. Let her fly the plane. Didn’t it? First the twins grew up and left her. Then Tom pushed her out. Wouldn’t that lead anyone to fight for control?
“Death seemed kinder than divorce. That’s why I fantasized about how Tom would look in a coffin.” Maggie blew her nose. If death had separated them, like they claimed would be the case when they took their vows, Maggie could
have been mad at death instead of Tom. If death had been the perpetrator, Tom could not have chosen Bethany, and Maggie’s pride could have remained intact.
Tom is an idiot.
“Exactly!” Maggie slapped the sofa cushion—the kindest words she had heard in months. Zeke, a stranger who had pinned her arms to the sofa and wiped her tears, wasn’t looking at her like she was a thing to be pitied, but like she was a woman who had the right to feel her rage. A stranger seemed to realize this. A stranger, who had hidden the knives but who also said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Maggie rocked herself on the sofa until her emotions played out—fear, relief, pain, forgiveness, acceptance, then something like peace. Finally, she lay still knowing she was really alone in the cabin. But just as she started to doze off, she felt movement at the other end of the couch. She wasn’t alone. So she sat up, blew her nose again, and looked down the sofa at the man jerking her heart around with his remarks and unexplained presence.
“I’m having trouble wrapping my head around this…around you,” she said.
Zeke grinned, looking like innocence personified. “What’s to wrap your head around, sweetheart? A man showed up on your doorstep. He was in need. You helped him. He’s grateful. He’d like to do you more good than harm.”
Maggie studied him again, then said through swollen nasal passages, “Then why did you move the gun?”
“Because you moved it. I heard you click it open when I was in the tub. Didn’t want you to make any decisions you’d regret.”
“Where is it?”
He smiled. “Somewhere safe.”
“How do I know you won’t use it on me?”
“Maggie!” That look of hurt again.
She covered her face with her hands. “You’re confusing me, Zeke, and you know it!”
He didn’t say anything. The way he looked at her infuriated her suddenly. “What did the text say!” she yelled.
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