A Charmed Place (16 page)

"Dan, no," she whispered, cutting him off at the knees. "Please don't."

Too soon. He knew that; he knew that, and yet he'd let himself be pulled along by his dick.

Shaking for another reason altogether now, he said lightly, "Don't what? I was going to ask if you've ever wondered how they get those model ships inside those little bottles."

Her laugh wasn't a laugh at all; it was a small sound of sorrow. "Thank you for bringing Tracey back
... and for not calling the police—"

"I'd never."

"And most of all, for letting me vent. I feel a little better now. It really does help to talk about it."

"Even with a no
n
parent?" he asked, his smile as mournful as her voice.

"Even."

"Well." He bobbed and shucked like a country boy, then said, "Good night, then."

"Good night."

She turned and walked resolutely away while he waited for a car half a mile down the road to go by before he crossed. He was watching her, watching the way she held her head up and kept her shoulders back just the way she always did. He knew her so well. He loved her so much.

Sweet dreams, Maddie. Dream, dream of me.

When he couldn't see her anymore, he struck off in the direction of the lighthouse. It was only then that he realized he hadn't thought about nicotine since finding the kids in the tower.

****

Maddie was in turmoil. Dragging Dan directly into a family crisis was so much more boorish than ignoring him as a neighbor. She was deeply grateful that he'd handled Tracey with a firm but discreet hand, but she was mortified that he'd had to deal with Tracey at all. And it wasn't fair to him. Was there anything more awkward than having to tell a former lover that her daughter was a disobedient little shit?

And worse: it felt natural talking with him about Tracey, easier, in some ways, than talking with Michael about her. With Michael, every time that Maddie admitted to either failure or frustration, it was one point to him. But Dan didn't have an agenda. He was nonjudgmental; at least, he acted that way.

Funny, how Michael's name never came up between them. Maddie had made the one quick allusion to her divorce, and Dan had let it go by. He never did trust Michael back in college, probably because Michael was a Boston Brahmin. But there were no I-told-you-so's just now, and Maddie was grateful to Dan for that as well.

Her thoughts veered back to Tracey's wrongdoing and then, after a moment of hurt and anger, veered right back to Dan again.

She remembered, out of the blue, her wedding. She still had no idea how Dan had found out about it. The sterling candlesticks from him had arrived from
London
beautifully wrapped and with a gracious note. After one shocked glance at his handwriting, Maddie had tossed the card. The candlesticks she donated to a charity auction. She'd felt guilty about doing that—he'd had so little money back then—so she'd sent him a thank you card with her formal signature and nothing else. It might as well have been a bill of lading.

And that was the sum total of their communication until now. Yet he knew about the divorce. Did he understand Michael well enough to know why it happened? She'd never been able to talk about Michael's faithlessness with anyone. But she could've talked about it tonight with Dan.

She could have walked to
Provincetown
and back with him—just for the pleasure of his company.

And the realization shocked her.

It was Tracey's fault. Tracey's little escapade had caused Maddie to drop her defenses. There had been no such distractions when Dan had walked over to
Rosedale
the other day for—for what? Maddie still didn't know. Whatever his motive, she had sent him packing. She'd been able to do that because she'd been able to focus on her hostility. Not so tonight.

Tracey.

She felt her blood pressure rise at the thought of the coming confrontation with her daughter. What was she going to do about Tracey? Punishment didn't work; scolding didn't help. She'd sat Tracey down, despite the child's bored looks, and tried as reasonably as possible to explain the dangers of drink, drugs, and sex. She'd even made a point of not villainizing marijuana. So what did Tracey turn around and do?

A number.

Maddie was so caught up in her thoughts that she didn't pay much attention to the dark sedan that drove down
Cranberry Lane
, except to get out of its way. But the car came back quickly; it was then that she recognized that it belonged to Julie's mother. Julie was in the front seat. Deborah sounded a friendly toot-toot on the horn and kept on going.

After tonight Maddie had to consider whether Julie was trying to pull a fast one by having her mother whisk her away. If so, the girl was only postponing the inevitable by about fifteen minutes.

Maddie found her daughter in her oversize pajama T-shirt, sitting cross-legged in bed with a book in her lap. Fuzzy Mr. James, looking cozy and well-loved, was snuggled on the pillow beside her. A glass of milk sat on the marble-topped nightstand by the white iron headboard. It was a scene right out of Normal Rockwell, and the heartache of it was, Tracey looked exactly right in it.

"Mr. Hawke told me what he found," Maddie said in her most authoritative voice. "Would you care to offer your side of the story?"

Tracey's face had a kind of puzzled innocence which tore at Maddie's resolve as she said at once, "I'm sorry, Mom. I know it was wrong."

Wow. If it was possible for a horror story to have a happy ending, then this was it. Maddie's emotions were a mess by then, anyway. Having her daughter apologize without being goaded made Maddie want to hug her till she burst.

She sat down on the same side of the bed as Mr. James, all too aware that Tracey might feel pressured if her mother got too close. Very calmly, she said, "Do you want to talk about why you did that?"

Tracey made an unhappy face and said, "It kind of just happened. I didn't know they were going to have that stuff with them."

"What did you plan to do in the lighthouse in that case? Sit around sharing a Pepsi?"

Too suspicious. Back off.

"Well
... by then I knew. But it was my first time with, with, um, marijuana, Mom. Honest."

"Did it bother you that you were going to try something that you're maybe too young to handle?" She threw in the "maybe" for Tracey's benefit.

Tracey stared at her book. "I was nervous, yeah," she admitted, fanning the corner pages.

"And excited?"

Tracey looked up. Her eyes, blue like Michael's but darkly lashed like Maddie's, searched her mother's face, trying to fathom a correct answer there.

"A little excited, maybe," she confessed.

"Well, there's no doubt about it. The first time for anything can seem nervous and exciting, especially when it's against the law. But—"

"But I didn't drink anything tonight," said Tracey, eager now to please.

Tonight? Maddie's heart sank. "This time, you mean? Have you drunk anything before?"

Please God, let her say no.

"Yes," she said with downcast eyes. "At a party once." She looked up again, and volunteered a time and place. "At Mark Menninger's birthday."

"That was during your father's weekend, wasn't it?"

Maddie saw a veil come down over those blue eyes. "I don't
... maybe. Yeah. I guess it was."

Maddie let it go at that for the moment. "You know, Mr. Hawke could've simply handed you all over to the police. Trespassing, underage drinking, illegal drugs. You broke a lot of laws at once tonight."

"Well, he's the one who left the door unlocked!"

"It's still trespassing, Tracey," Maddie reminded her without sarcasm. "I know I've said this so many times that you hardly hear it anymore, but truly, you can get into so much trouble drinking or doing drugs. I don't just mean with the law.

"I'm talking about when you lose control over your ability to make a decision," she went on. "Don't you know what
happens then? Someone else—someone who doesn't necessarily care about your best interests—is going to make your decisions for you. And that's not fair to you. You're too smart to put your future—maybe your life—in someone else's hands."

Tracey put down the book and picked up her teddy bear, idly pinning Mr. James's ears back against his head. She murmured, "I wasn't going to lose control, Mom. Honest, I wasn't."

"Honey, you have to trust me on this. When you drink or when you do drugs, you are not in control."

The girl yanked the bear up by his ears. "How do you know?"

How indeed? It wasn't the time to tell Tracey that Maddie—and Michael—and Dan—and just about everyone else she knew back then had at one time or another drunk to excess and experimented with pot.

So Maddie said simply, "I have a certain amount of experience, and I know people with even more experience than I have, and what I'm telling you is fact."

"All right," said Tracey with a shrug. "I won't do that anymore."

So that was that, for now. The trial appeared to be over. All that remained was the punishment.

Maddie grimaced apologetically and said, "You know you're going to have to be grounded for this."

"I figured," Tracey admitted.

"And I'm going to have to insist that you not see Kevin again. At least not for a while."

"Not see Kevin!" Tracey cried.

It came out as a shriek of pain. Immediately Maddie knew she'd struck a raw, raw nerve. "Tracey, you don't have
to act so shocked. If Kevin is
going to drink and smoke pot—''

"Mom, that's not fair! I said I was sorry! You're grounding me! Why do you have to keep the punishment going forever? That's not fair!"

"
Look, Kevin is too old for you—''

"He is not! He's fifteen!"

"He's an old fifteen—"

"Fifteen is fifteen! He doesn't even drive! How can he be too old?"

"It's not just the number of years. It's attitude... experience. He's an old fifteen; you're a young fourteen."

"Of
course
I'm a young fourteen! What do you expect? You treat me like a two-year-old!" she cried, sending Mr. James sailing across the room.

Maddie eyed the teddy bear on the edge of the braided rug. "That's because you have a t
endency to act like a two-year-
old," she said with a dangerous edge in her voice. She stood up, determined to leave while her temper was still in one piece.

For the rest of her life, Maddie wished that she'd walked out of the bedroom on the spot.

Because Tracey wasn't through. "Well, I'm just
about
grown-up, whether you like it or not! I've been in the papers, I've been on TV, and I know more about the homicide department than anyone else in school!"

And then came the final shot, straight for the heart: "And when I live with
Dad
instead of
you,
I'll be able to act my age for a change!"

"Live with your dad instead of me?" Maddie was almost afraid to say the words out loud.

She wanted to shout, "How dare you say that after I carried you in my womb and nursed you and went sleepless when you were sick and taught you to speak and sing and play and be kind and be fair and gave you birthday parties and sewed your torn clothes and helped you with homework and went to every one of your school events and drove you everywhere and never, ever stopped loving you even for one tiny second, even now, when you're trying your best to hurt me as deeply as you can—how dare you?"

But she settled for saying, "I don't think so."

"I can if I want to," Tracey said with a dark look. "You can't stop me. I'm old enough to choose who I want to live with and I want to live with Dad. He'll be home more than you anyway now that he doesn't have a job, and—"

"What do you mean, doesn't have a job? What're you talking about?"

Caught betraying a confidence, Tracey folded her arms across her rib cage and said defensively, "He quit. He said he doesn't need the money. He said he's just going to work on his paintings from now on, and other stuff. So he'd be better for me to stay with. Because at least he'd pay attention to me."

Maddie was flabbergasted. Michael hadn't said a thing about giving up his professorship. "You misunderstood him, Tracey. He must be thinking of taking a sabbatical for a year, that's all."

"He quit," she insisted. "He told me. He sent them a letter." Now that the cat was out of the bag, she became even more forthcoming. "Someone left him some money in their will and now he doesn't have to teach anymore."

An inheritance? Who coul
d've died? His great-uncle
Win
throp
?

"Dad said he's going to hire a maid. I wouldn't even have to clean my room!"

"Oh,
there's
a good reason to move in with someone," Maddie said sarcastically, though she realized that men did it all the time.