Embers (3 page)

"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 upright 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."

Orel Tremblay's house looked a little like Meg remembered the old man himself: tired, withdrawn, and frayed around the edges. The cottage was vinyl sided, like many
Maine
houses, but the gutters were rusted through and the top panel of the aluminum storm door was missing. The wood window boxes, sprouting weeds, were split and rotted. The front lawn had taken on the spontaneous look of a meadow; small swarms of insects hovered over it in the afternoon sun. The property looked dispirited, as if it had tried and tried again to brave the relentless onslaught of time and nature, and now it just didn't care anymore.

Meg knocked on the door. It was opened by a nurse who was clearly expecting her. The nurse led Meg past a living room filled with surprisingly good furniture and into a rugless bedroom fitted out with a hospital bed, a small bureau, a wood chair, a La-Z-Boy recliner, an aluminum walker, and a nightstand buried under bottles of medication.

Meg moved closer to the sleeping form on the bed. She hadn't seen Orel Tremblay in a year; it might have been ten. He was quite emaciated. His hair was thinner; whiter; longer. He hadn't shaved, or been shaved, in several days, which made him look homeless somehow. And yet his nightshirt was clean, and the bedding crisp and well turned down. He had a good nurse.

"Mr. Tremblay," whispered the nurse in a hovering voice. "Look: Here's that Mrs. Hazard you wanted so much to see."

The old man's eyes fluttered open. He made a querulous sound in his throat and turned to Meg, fixing her with a listless stare.

At last he spoke.

"My God," he said, shaking his head.
"You‘re the spittin' image of her."

"I'm Meg Hazard, Mr. Tremblay. I've seen you in town— although we've never officially met," she added. She spoke loudly, assuming that his senses were as frail as his body.

The nurse gave her a sharp look and whispered, "He can hear just fine, and he knows perfectly well who you are."

She ordered Meg to take the rush-seated chair, and then she left the room. Meg sat with a Raggedy Ann smile stitched to her face, waiting to hear what Orel Tremblay could possibly have to say that was a "matter of life and death."

But he only stared, as if her face, with its hazel eyes, full lips, and wreath of chestnut-brown hair, was not her face at all but something borrowed for the occasion.

"Who
am I the spitting image of?" Meg finally blurted out.

Orel Tremblay didn't answer the question directly. Instead he said in a slow, mournful ramble, "I seen you so many times
...
in the market
...
gassin' up your car
...
window-shoppin' on Cottage Street
...
and every time, every time
...
it give me such a start, I figured my heart would go, right then and there."

He lifted one of his hands — big, misshapen, arthritic hands — and rubbed his brow with the tips of his fingers, as if he were stroking a lamp of memories, calling forth the genie of time past.

"Even now," he said with a bitter sigh, "I have to pinch myself that you're not her. How could you be? She's dead; has been, this half a century."

He continued to speak with an effort; every word seemed to cost him. "The thing is, when I met your grandmother, she was your age — that would be, what, thirty-some?" In the same mournful voice he added, "She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw."

Meg smiled in disbelief, but the old man seemed not to notice. "I never loved another woman after your grandmother," he went on. "I never loved a single, other woman."

Loved
her? Since when? Who was he, and what in God's name did he have to do with her grandmother?

"I never knew my grandmother," she told him. "I guess you know she died in the Great Fire of ‘47."

"Of course I know it, gahdammit!" Orel Tremblay snapped. "Why d'you think I asked you here?"

Meg said testily, "I don't have any idea, Mr. Tremblay."

"True, true. How could you?" he muttered, fumbling with a control button on the side of his hospital-style bed. Slowly he raised himself into a semi-sitting position. After a deep breath or two, he reached over for a glass of water that stood on the bed table. The drink seemed to revive him: He was able td continue in a more civil tone, and his words flowed more easily.

"I'm old, and I'm dying, and I know it," he said, dismissing her sympathetic protest with a fluttery wave of his hand. "I don't own much," he went on. "Just a few sticks of furniture that I made — I was a cabinetmaker — and the equity in this house. And the chipper-shredder. And the dollhouse."

It was an odd list, but Meg let it pass; she was waiting, still, to see why she'd been summoned.

"I have a niece somewhere who's bound to show up the day the will gets read," Tremblay said, snorting with derision, "and that's about it. Now. Help me out of bed."

"Oh! Shouldn't I get the —"

"Daow,"
he said, shaking his head impatiently. "No need. Just muckle onto that walker and set it alongside. The other bedroom's within hailin' distance. I'll make it," he said grimly.

Meg helped the old man out of bed and into his slip-ons, and walked slowly alongside him as he shuffled behind his walker into the hall. The nurse popped her head through a doorway to see what her charge was up to, gave him a brisk, friendly smile, and retreated to another room. Meg and her host continued on their slow journey into the second bedroom.

At the doorway, Orel Tremblay paused and jerked his head toward the room within. "I'll go first," he said, suddenly eager. His voice was shaking with anticipation.

Meg waited as he preceded her, marveling that the frail, bent-over figure with the skinny calves and liver-spotted brow had once been passionately in love with her own grandmother.

She stepped through the doorway after him. The room was dark; its shades were drawn, and the venetian blinds were closed. Then Orel Tremblay turned on a lamp.

It threw dim, golden light over the most beautiful, the most exquisite, the biggest dollhouse Meg had ever seen, a masterpiece of gables, balconies, turrets, and chimneys, with many diamond-paned windows and stately French doors, the entire, wonderful structure sitting serenely atop a cherrywood table shaped to match its elaborate footprint. Orel Tremblay reached behind the dollhouse and threw another switch, and the whole weathered-shingle fantasy lit up from within like a Christmas tree.

Meg was breathless with pleasure. A low, awed sound escaped her throat, and nothing more; the words simply weren't there.

Orel Tremblay nodded his head vigorously. "Ain't it just?" he kept saying, his voice dancing for joy. "Ain't it?" He was watching her intently, savoring it again through her eyes.

Meg approached the superb miniature and peered through a tiny lattice-paned casement. Inside she saw a dining room furnished in stunning detail. The Chippendale-style table, the focal point of the room, was elaborately set for a formal dinner that would never be eaten. Everything, from the impossibly tiny gold flatware and crystal stemware to the thumbnail-size hand-painted platters — everything was incredibly complete and perfectly rendered to scale.

The silver chandelier with its half-inch candles; the sideboard covered with silver salvers; the Oriental rug, twelve inches long and nine inches wide, knotted from silken threads into a pattern of stunning complexity; the mauve brocade drapes, held back by tiny gold braid; even the bits of wood in the marble-manteled fireplace, kindling and log sized.

"This
...
is
magic,"
Meg whispered, finding her voice at last.

She peeped through another window: the library. Another fireplace, this one with a mantel of burnished mahogany, held a porcelain-faced clock and charming examples of chinoiserie: tiny twin red vases and a pair of lamps with bases of blue-patterned porcelain. A brassbound bellows less than two inches long looked as if it might actually be workable. Portraits the size of postage stamps hung from moldings on two of the walls; they were original oils. Two armchairs, covered in kid leather, filled up much of the room, which was cozy more than majestic. One wall was lined with books; it wouldn't have surprised Meg to learn that they had pages that turned and stories inside, written by best-selling authors of the day.

She peeked through a gabled window on the top floor. Inside was a maid's room, starkly plain, with an iron-frame bed, a small bureau, a commode, a mirror — and a maid. The maid, a porcelain-faced doll wearing a white cap and an apron over a black dress, was one of several in the garret rooms.

"When was the house built?" Meg asked. She had a tremendous sense that she'd seen it before, but whether in a newspaper or on television, she had no idea.

"The estate house — the real house that this is modeled after — was built in the 1880's. This miniature of it was built during the Great Depression,"
Orel
said. "To give the help something to do, y'see. I myself did some repairs on it later.
In 1947
,"
he added in an oddly meaningful tone.

He began lowering himself from his walker into a small armchair placed nearby. Meg broke out of her gaping reverie and hurried to assist him. After he was settled, she turned and stared at the dollhouse. It was so incredibly beautiful, and yet it was so incredibly
...
something else. Forlorn, maybe; and sad. It would never really be lived in, after all.