A Charmed Place (12 page)

He sounded to himself like a schoolboy summoned to the principal's office as he said to the director, "Stuart said you wanted to see me."

Woodbine's answer was pleasant, even jovial. "Yes, that's right, Michael. How goes the battle?"

"You tell me," said Michael, refusing to be condescended to. He saw the computer printout opened on the desk and had no doubt that it contained the results of the morning's work. Woodbine had a remote hookup in a small closet adjacent to his office.

"Today was
... interesting," the director suggested, tapping the printout and hedging his answer.

If he was disappointed, he was far too good an actor to show it. Tall and fit, with a chiseled, handsome face topped by a mane of wavy silver hair, Dr. Geoffrey Woodbine had always struck Michael as the perfect candidate to play a patriarch on a daytime soap.

"Interesting how?" Michael prompted, after a pause that went on a heartbeat too long. He hated that, hated the way he always leaped headlong into that trap.

Woodbine was candid. "It won't surprise you that the results today were
... well... less than we had hoped. After all, the test was administered by computer. You and I both know that remote viewing depends very much on your being able to key on to a target. A human being administering the test makes a viable target, whether I'm doing the testing or someone else is. You can't be expected to score as well when that connection is severed in favor of a machine."

Michael couldn't understand it. "I felt right on top of it today, Geoff. How much off last week's results was I?"

"It's irrelevant, I'm telling you," the director said impatiently. "The important thing is, I've managed to make our friends from
Washington
understand that they've just thrown a massive bureaucratic wrench in the project."

He scanned the printout in front of him with obvious distaste, then looked up. His eyes, movie star blue, looked troubled. "You know, we're so close
... so close. If those idiots hadn't tacked on this contingency," he said, smacking the printout with the back of his hand, "we'd have moved on to the next phase of testing today."

"But they're paying the bills," Michael acknowledged.

The director didn't need reminding. "Let me worry about that, Michael," he said coolly. "They have some excellent data in their hands right now, and once we deep-six these ludicrous results, we'll be back on track. I have no doubt, none at all, that the funding will be renewed next month."

Michael wanted to know what the next phase of testing was, but he knew better than to ask. It would taint the credibility of the project if he were to be told. In any case, he almost didn't care. As long as they were done with the little red light. The director got up from his desk and put his hand on Michael's shoulder, guiding him with reassuring words to the door.

"They're anxious, Michael. Extremely anxious." He low
ered his voice and murmured, "
They have something definite, something important, in mind for you. They need to know about you—and all of our test subjects, but really, you're the one who's front and center now. The thing is, they need to be convinced beyond a doubt. We're almost there, Michael! Almost there!"

His voice betrayed a passion that Michael had not heard before. But the director quickly dropped back into cordiality and asked, as he always did, after Michael's family. Were they coming along, after the tragedy?

"
Without the press hounding them at every turn, they seem okay," Michael answered, still bitter over the way reporters had ridden roughshod over his daughter's feelings.

Woodbine shook his head. "That was a nasty crime, nasty. So Tracey's back to normal?"

"All things considered," Michael said halfheartedly.

"Good. I'm glad to hear it." He paused, then said, "I have a reason for asking, as you well know."

Michael did know. The Institute had received funding, this time from a private source, to study children with apparent psychic abilities in an effort to find out the effect that popular culture had on those abilities. But first the Institute had to line up a few children with psychic abilities.

Months ago, Woodbine had suggested a preliminary interview with Tracey. Then, and on two other occasions, Michael
had refused. Now he was forced to do so again.

"I don't see my daughter as possessing any special powers," Michael said carefully. He had no desire to alienate Woodbine, but he had even less desire to deliver Tracey as a subject for testing. Who would be in the viewing room, anyway? The thought of strange men observing his little girl through a one-way window gave Michael the creeps.

Urging his case, Woodbine said, "Surely you realize that gifts like yours run in families."

"Not in my family," Michael said flatly. "I saw no evidence of it in my mother, and I never heard it said of my father. We've been all through this, Geoffrey," he added, edgy now in his exhaustion. All he wanted was to get out of there.

"You're right, you're right," said Woodbine, slapping him on his shoulder in farewell. "But I want you to think about it. At least let me do a preliminary interview. If I could just—''

"I said can we drop it, Geoff?"

Woodbine pulled up short. "Of course," he answered with a cool nod of dismissal. He turned back to his office, and Michael, still bothered by the apparently disappointing results of the morning's testing, headed for the lobby to sign out.

It wasn't until he was back in his car that he remembered, out of the blue, his phone call to Maddie on the day before.

Maddie with Hawke! A surge of ugly, devouring jealousy rolled over him. How had he managed to put the thought of them together out of his mind all day? Obviously he'd been distracted, first by the nightmare, then by the test, then by Woodbine's pressure tactics. But all that was behind him for the moment, and the realization that Daniel Hawke was living in the lighthouse just a stone's throw from Maddie began to eat at him in earnest.

Michael clamped his jaw tight. He decided that he must be pretty damned good at remote viewing after all, because he could picture, vividly, Maddie and Hawke together in her country kitchen.

Vividly.

"Hot, hazy, and humid, right through the Fourth—perfect!" said Joan, zapping the TV on Norah's granite counter into silence.

She lifted the designer tea kettle off the Viking range and poured boiling water over a tea bag nestled in a china mug. "Of course, the high rollers won't be drawn unless the fireworks are spectacular," she told her two friends. "Which poses a problem. All we have is eight thousand dollars in the kitty, and for what we want, the Domenico Brothers would need thirty-five—and that's with a discount because one of them just married Trixie's cousin."

Joan was Chairpers
on of the Committee for an Old-
Fashioned Fourth; sh
e should know. Maddie was vice-
chairperson. She'd signed on when Dan Hawke was still dodging bullets somewhere back in
Afghanistan
, and she was much too far along to bail out now. Besides, she wanted to do right by the town; they deserved a Rilly Good Shew, as Ed Sullivan would say. And Tracey seemed to get a kick out of her mom being almost in charge of the fireworks. Apparently it gave her serious clout with the boys in her crowd.

So Maddie planned to be on that beach by the lighthouse if it killed her. All she could do about Dan Hawke was hope and pray that he'd stay in his corner of the playground during the festivities.

"I think I can scrape up another thousand for us," she
volunteered. She'd just have to hit the phones a little harder.

"Not enough," said Norah, tapping a pencil on her kitchen table.

She chewed on her lower lip for a moment, then said, "Okay. Here's what we do. Put me down for two thousand. Tell the Brothers D. that they'll have ten more by the end of the week and the last fourteen before they light the first rocket. Tell them to make it big, make it bold, and make it red, white, and blue. No greens and no golds. We want to keep this as patriotic as possible. That way we'll draw the Republicans as well as the preservationists."

As glorious as it all sounded, Maddie felt obliged to sound a note of caution as they relocated with their coffee and tea to the deck of Norah's villa.

"Thirty-five thousand dollars is a huge amount of money for a town our size, Nor. Wouldn't we be better off putting it directly into the lighthouse foundation's coffers? It would help give us the jump start we need for the project."

Norah was spinning her Rolodex like a
Hollywood
agent with a mortgage to pay. "Maddie, Maddie, Maddie," she said, flipping through the B's, "don't you know yet that you have to spend money to raise money? Keith Barnett. Yes!" she said, yanking the card from the Rolodex spine and moving on to the C's.

Truly, the woman was a wonder. Peering over her shoulder, Maddie muttered, "Is there anyone in that thing who's poor?''

Norah laughed and said, "Sure: my cleaning woman; my pool man; my first husband."

"Since when is a veterinarian poor?" asked Joan, dunking her tea bag.

"Since the divorce," Norah said without looking up.

Shaking her head, Maddie went over to the wall of French doors and pressed a button, activating a massive roll-out awning to shade them from the rising sun. After that she settled in one of the deeply cushioned redwood chaises that were arranged facing the sweeping expanse of ocean that lay to the south of Norah's ivory-stuccoed, glass-walled, multilevel, multiwinged behemoth of a summer home, so totally at odds with the town's original and quite modest gray-shingled houses. Worse, she had started a trend: every new house to the west was as ostentatious as hers.

Five years earlier, Norah's third husband, Maximillian Mills, had built the house as a birthday present. Max was a very rich Texan who had neve
r quite connected with the low-
key sensibility of the Sandy Pointers. Max had wanted a palace for his new bride, and that's what Norah had got.

But the marriage went south and so did Max, to
Palm Beach
, where he felt more at ease among the cap-and-polo set. His fancy new pals spent their summers in the
Hamptons
, of course, so naturally Max did too. Norah, on the other hand, stayed faithful to her friends, opting to summer in sleepy, not- so-fancy
Sandy
Point
.

But that didn't mean she was thrilled about it.

She continued to flip through the alphabet of her Rolodex, muttering nonstop about her misery the whole time.

"This backwater hole
... we can't compete
... Nantucket's bound to do a better show
... Osterville, too
... Marion has money
... Marblehead has mansions
... we have squat
... no one's going to pledge
... hmm, my good friend Senator Haskins from Connecticut—would he kick in? Probably not. They have their own lighthouses to worry about
... ah, Billy Bob Jordan! Billy
Bob owes me; we'll pull him out
..."

Little by little the stack of cards piled up on the patio table's glass top as the Rolodex came full circle. In the meantime, Joan was happily leafing through her fireworks catalog (Maddie, who hadn't known there was such a thing, had already shown it to Tracey and her friends, pandering shamelessly for their good will).

While Norah flipped and Joan thumbed, Maddie reflected. She sat back on the chaise, cradling her coffee, breathing deep the combination of Starbucks and salt air. She smiled at the reassuring sight of Tracey and her girlfriend Julie sunbathing at the far end of Norah's beach—and wondered what was missing from the friendly, comfortable scene.

Well
... Maddie's father, for one thing. How much better, if he were perusing the science section of the Tuesday
Times
and enjoying his own coffee back at the cottage right now. A wistful sigh escaped her. She missed him.

She missed her mother, too. Sarah Timmons should be at the library right now, organizing the used book sale, not brooding alone in
Sudbury
.

And finally, painfully, ultimately—Dan Hawke. Was it possible to miss someone, not during the twenty years that he'd been out of your life, but after he showed up again?

It was. Her gaze slid to the east. She saw the white cone of the lighthouse, aglint in the morning light, practically daring her to walk along its sandy beach. Once, the morning walk would've been part of her daily regimen. No more. It was yet another part of her life that she'd had to shut down because of him.

I miss you. Damn you.

Out of sight, out of mind, went the old saying, and for twenty years it had proved more or less true. But after the scene in her kitchen, Maddie was being forced to deal not with the memory of Dan Hawke, but with the man himself: with the nick in his eyebrow, the scar on his cheek, the utterly electrifying way he said her name.

I miss you. Damn you. I miss you.

She closed her eyes and sighed deeply. The memory of him was one thing, the sight and scent and sound of him another thing altogether.