A Charmed Place (41 page)

She arrived at the lighthouse in time to see the contractors taking the ladder down by the light of their truck's headlights. Dan hailed her as she came near. He was still exhilarated—and drenched with sweat.

"We had a change in the game plan," he explained. "Matt was walking across the roof after supper and poked his leg through another hole, this one from rot. Lucky for us, the guys had extra material in the truck."

"You could use a good hose-down," she said, wrinkling her nose as she lifted a lock of his dripping hair.

He laughed. "Yeah, I'll shower and then come over to
Rosedale
later. I have a few things more to do inside, and after that the house and tower are in God's hands."

Another gust, this one sharper than any of the others, flattened his sweat-stained tank top against his chest. Maddie felt the wind at her back and told herself that she'd
experienced
far worse, but a feeling of dread had her locked in its grip.

"I don't like this, Dan. I don't know if it's me or Dot, but something feels wrong. This doesn't feel like a garden-variety tropical storm."

"We'll see what the weather update has to say. Hey! You two want a beer before you go?'' he asked the other men.

Young and muscular, the men decided to pass in favor of a local hangout. Dan tipped them a hundred dollars and they threw their big-wheeled truck into a U-turn, deftly avoiding Dan's Jeep as they took off at regulation contractors' speed of ninety miles an hour.

"Look at 'em," Dan said, grinning. "They worked twice as hard as I did, and now they're gonna go off and party all night. Geez, I wish I was young again.
We
could party all night."

Maddie shook her head. "I'm telling you, this doesn't feel like that kind of storm."

Something in her voice made Dan say quietly, "Turn on the radio, then. It's time
for an update
."

The NOAA forecast was a surprise to Dan but not to her: a sharp increase in the average wind speed, a sharp drop in barometric pressure, and a shift in direction which, if the eye came ashore as predicted, would put
Sandy
Point
in the dangerous semicircle of what was now Hurricane Dot.

"Whoa, Cassandra," Dan said lightly, "see if I make fun of
you
again."

"They're going to want us to evacuate," said Maddie. "I've been through this before."

"Are you going to?"

"I don't think so," she confessed. "It's still a minimal hurricane. The house is very sturdy, and it has a low profile.
Cape Cod
houses are designed the way they are for a reason."

"And Dot's the reason?" he said in a gentle pun, then added more seriously, "Are you sure you want to stay? I waited out a typhoon once in
Bangladesh
, Maddie. It scared the pants off me."

"I know, but
... somehow I just don't want to evacuate this time." She knew what the reason was—proximity to a phone—but she was too embarrassed to tell Dan that.

"Okay," he said with a smile. "But make the popcorn early, just in case we lose juice."

He kissed her lightly and they parted company. By the time Maddie made it back to
Rosedale
, the gusts were coming at quicker intervals—those labor pains again. If Dot were actually about to have a baby, they'd be putting her toothbrush in the suitcase and thinking about calling a cab.

Inside the cottage, Maddie hooked both screen doors to keep them from ripping off their hinges later, but she kept the inside doors wide open to allow a breeze to move through. She had another reason for keeping them open as long as she could. The truth was, she got claustrophobic whenever the south windows were boarded up; it felt too much like an entombment.

Maddie set thick candles on fat stands in several of the rooms and put matches next to the hurricane lamps. The flashlights were handy, the rechargeable batteries topped off. All she had to do now was wait.

And wait. Despite her deep conviction that the storm would be a bad one, the wind stayed fairly steady for the next hour or so. The gusts, when they came, no longer seemed like premonitions. They were simply welcome relief from the muggy stillness of the boarded-up rooms.

In the meantime, Maddie was going just a little bit stir- crazy.

She would have liked to call Claire or George or her mother, but she had no real excuse for doing so; everything was depressingly under control. She'd already talked with Tracey. It was a strained conversation, to be sure. Maddie had suggested that they put off any discussion of Friday night until Tracey came home the next day; the girl was more than willing to do that. Maddie had talked with Joan, too. Joan was riding out the storm at Norah's house. She'd talked with most of her neighbors, many of whom had chosen to stay in their homes. There was literally no one left to talk to, nothing left to do.

Except wait. And so Maddie wandered from one room to another, returning to the cable weather station every few minutes to see if there were new developments. The message to the
Cape
was the same: batten down and then get out. Maddie glared at the weatherman. "Easy for you to say," she muttered.

And then came the news that the big bridges on the
Cape
had been shut down. She was glad to hear it, grateful to have an end to her second-guessing the evacuation option.

Finally the phone rang, and she picked it up eagerly. It was Dan, and he sounded tense. "Maddie—I'll be over later. There's a sailboat aground a hundred yards out; we're gonna see if we can get them off. I gotta go."

"Be careful!" she said, and then he was gone.

One more reason to pace. Although she'd wanted Dot to come ashore and get it over with, now Maddie prayed that the hurricane would sit out there long enough for Dan to complete his mission and come home safe to her. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Was it possible for the ones she loved, to be any more scattered to the wind?

She listened with growing dismay as the gusts blended into one long howl. Finally, unable to bear any more inaction, she slipped into a foul-weather jacket and was on her way out the back door when the phone rang. She pounced on it, expecting it to be Dan.

It was Michael—the one person she had absolutely no interest in talking to.

"Tracey and I had a long, serious talk today," he said, ignoring the impatience in her voice. "I know it's late to call, but by tomorrow you'll be too distracted fussing over your trampled garden to listen to what I have to say. Is lover-boy there?"

He was trying to hurt her. It seemed bizzarely inappropriate with a hurricane bearing down. She considered simply hanging up on him, but she didn't dare, so she said in measured tones, "What is it, Michael? What do you want?"

"Tracey, that's all; I want Tracey."

"But you already ha—"

She realized then that he wasn't talking about the weekend, or spring break, or the week between Christmas and New Year's. He was talking about tomorrow and the next day and the next. Stunned, she pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down on it, still in her yellow slicker, and tried to clear her brain of every other thought but him.

"What exactly do you have in mind?" she said, pressing the palm of her hand over her left ear to drown out the wind.

He made a tisking sound and said, "See? I told you you never listened. Tracey. Can I say it any clearer than that?
Tracey.
T-r-a-c-e-y. You know—the daughter that you and I created in an act of passion? Or wasn't it passion, Maddie? Were you faking it all those years—hmmm?"

She tried to shut out the lascivious sneer in his voice. "Why are you doing this, Michael? Why?"

"Why am I doing what? Behaving like a concerned father? Isn't it obvious? Because you're
a whoring
slut, that's why."

"Michael!
"

"Don't get prim with me
! You were faking it, weren't you? You were waiting for
him
. All those years I didn't have a clue that you were waiting for him. What a fool I was. Oh, yeah, I can admit it now. I was a fool. Standing meekly at the door after you threw me out
... standing there hat in hand, waiting to be let back in again. Taking whatever crumbs you threw at me. Ohh, you made me want you
... that was your revenge, wasn't it? Making me want you. Holding me at arm's length and leading me on, leading me on
..
.."

"I wasn't leading you on, Michael," she said, beating back a wave of nausea. "I wasn't. I wanted us to be civil for Tracey's sake. If you misread that, I'm sorry. Truly I am."

He seemed not to hear her. "How was it on the beach that night, hmm? Good? Was it good? Was he good? How were you? Were you good? Were you good together? You didn't hold anything back from him, I'm willing to bet. Not if you had to have it on a beach.
We
never had it on a beach. How come, Maddie?"

He didn't want answers; he wanted only to rant.

Maddie said, "
Please, can I talk to Tracey now? Just for a minute." She was terrified that he'd done something to her.

"When I'm done!" he snapped. He laughed softly and said, "You shock me, Maddie, really you do. On a beach! Prim and proper Maddie Timmons Regan. Timid Timmons, romping bare-assed on a beach. Your mother's not too happy with you, did you know that? Ah, of course you did. She told me she made that very clear to you. We were over there this afternoon, Tracey and I—did you know that? Sarah and I had a long talk, a
long
talk, when Tracey was at a neighbor's. Sarah's not happy with you at
all."

A terrific gust of wind slammed the house, rattling the kitchen windows. Maddie turned away from them, trying to focus on Michael and not on the storm, trying to make out his nearly incoherent muttering. It was a futile effort: she could hardly hear him over the pounding of her heart.

"My mother's entitled to her own opinion," Maddie said, just to say something.

It seemed to snap him back to a semblance of rationality. "Yes, she is entitled, isn't she. And your mother's opinion is—ta-dah!—that under the circumstances, Tracey belongs with me. Now ain't that a hoot? She thinks I'm a better parent than you—for the time being, anyway. With all due modesty, I would have to agree. I'm friendly, well mannered, and presentable. I'm not running around—anymore. I've got money and I don't need to work. I adore my kid and she—well, let's face it, Maddie. She prefers living with me. A court pays attention to stuff like that."

A court!

"You can't do that, Michael!" Maddie cried.

"Why not? You did it to me. See how it feels, hmm?"

"Tracey would never want that," she said vehemently.

"Aw, a mother in denial—is there anything sadder?" Michael said, oozing with sympathy. "I admit, Tracey was a little confused about her own power. But I explained to her that fathers got custody all the time nowadays, and that she was old enough to have a say. And now that she knows her grandmother's going to back me up—and that she can go there whenever she wants—she's a lot less nervous about the whole thing."

"Bring her back right now, Michael. Bring her back or I'll have the police at your doorstep so fast—''

"Don't threaten me!"

"Let me talk to her.
Now."

There was a pause. He ended it by saying, "You know, I think I'll do that. Go ahead—alienate her once and for all. Threaten to have the police drag her from her father's hearth. Hold the specter of psychiatric evaluation over her head. She'd like that, I know. Yeah, talk to her, Maddie. Finish this off nice and clean. Hold on; I'll just go wake her up—"

"Michael, wait!"

Maddie was shivering under the oilskin jacket, even as the sweat trickled between her breasts. She felt faint, she felt enraged, she felt completely unequal to the sudden challenge to her role as custodial parent. Even as she felt all of those things, she felt something else: a conviction, deep inside, that Michael was negotiating. What did he want? To screw her on the beach and even the score? Whatever it was, it was bound to be cruel and humiliating. Nothing less would satisfy him.

"I'm waiting," he reminded her, almost amiably. "Do you plan to tell me what I'm waiting for?"

Not me, please, not me
, she thought. "What will it take," she asked him humbly, "for you to give up this fight?"

The pause this time was much longer.

Finally she heard him l
et out a long, thoughtful sigh.

"What will it take?" he mused. "Obviously not money. Hmm. What will it take," he said again. "Well, you could always come back to me. Tracey would have both her parents then. Problem solved. But frankly? I don't think so. You'd make my life hell, wouldn't you, my darling. Let's think of something else."

He was so incredibly sick. She had to get Tracey away from him.

"Hey, here's a thought!" he said with perverted brightness. "Blow off Daniel Hawke! No, wait, let me rephrase that," he added with a merry chuckle. "Tell him—firmly is best—to get the hell out of your life. Without Hawke around, I think I'd feel—we'd all feel—that Tracey's environment was much more wholesome."