Embers (42 page)

The selection pleased him: he gave her a quirky smile that blended equal parts of sophistication, street smarts, sexiness, and naïveté. And she thought,
How could anyone have let this man go?

"
One dance,
"
Meg said weakly.
"
A fair trade.
"
But she knew that one dance would be all it took.

He took her in his arms.

After weeks of having to settle for stolen glances and glancing touches, Meg felt overwhelmed by the intimacy of actual contact. This was it, her one moment of pure, permitted ecstasy. In a trance she swayed with him to the delicious, sensuous strains of the Cole Porter tune, played in a slow and sultry tempo. They moved a little in this direction, a little in that; there was no particular rhyme or reason to what they were doing, only a kind of seamless flow.

I tried so
...
hard to resist
.

The line hung in the air after the lyric moved on. No one was trying harder to resist than Meg, no one. But it was a hopeless struggle. She felt his cheek against her hair and his heart beating against hers, and she thought,
How can this be wrong when it feels so right?

He didn
'
t say a word, and neither did she. Speech had become as irrelevant as the rain that had begun drumming softly on the tent over their heads. None of it
—
the flowers, the lights, the other dancers
—
mattered at all. There was only Tom, and her, and the insinuating, implicating strains of the music. She didn
'
t even feel the need, any longer, to confess to him that she loved him: her body was saying it for her, in the way it pressed so willingly against his.

When the dance was done, he tilted her face toward his and claimed the kiss that she had managed to deny him on the porch of the Inn Between. His mouth on hers felt shockingly intimate; he knew exactly what he wanted and took it, ignoring the fact that they were standing in the middle of a dance floor.

It
'
s not really a kiss,
she insisted to herself, despite the fact that he was deepening it.
It
'
s because of the night, and the music, and my thin silk dress. It
'
s not a kiss,
she insisted, answering the electrifying strokes of his tongue on hers.
It
'
s only
a token, a gesture, of what can'
t be.

But she had become liquid, all hot and sliding, and when he finally released her from the kiss that wasn
'
t really a kiss, she had to steady herself with her hands on his chest.

He lowered his mouth to hers for one, last, glancing caress, as if he
'
d missed some tiny crumb of desire that she
'
d left there.

"
I
'
m
...
afraid to look,
"
she murmured, tracing the pattern on his tie.
"
Is there anyone else on this dance floor?
"

"
Ah-h-h. No.
"
He slipped his arm back around her waist and said,
"
The band
'
s taking a break. Do you think if I signed my pension over to them, they
'
d keep on playing?
"

"
Please
...
we can
'
t just stand here,
"
she wailed, edging him off the floor.

"
You dance beautifully,
"
he said as they wandered back into the crush of guests.

"
We hardly moved,
"
she said, distracted. She was looking for her sister.

"
You dance beautifully,
"
he said again.
"
Almost as well as you kiss.
"

She looked up at him in an agony of remorse and put her hand over his mouth.
"
That never happened,
"
she said.
"
None of it. Please. For me.
"

He took her hand away and shook his head.
"
I can
'
t act that charade, Meg. Not for all the kingdoms on earth.
"

"
Don
'
t do it for kingdoms!
"
she said in a low and urgent voice.
"
Do it for me.
"

"
Meg!
"
he said, obviously frustrated with her cat
-and-
mouse antics.
"
You can
'
t deny what
'
s happening.
"

"
Oh, yes, I
can
,
"
she said, wrenching away from him and fleeing from the tent.

****

"
Thanks for the lift, Mr. Markstrom. I don
'
t know what I would
'
ve done if you hadn
'
t been leaving just then.
"

Not that
Meg had
let the poor guy have a choice.
"
I guess it was the wine that gave me this horrible headache,
"
she said, following up on her original lie.
"
How lucky that I saw you on your way out.
"

Her rumply ex-principal said,
"
Good to talk to you again, Meggie. And I want you to think seriously about those extension courses. You always were a real fine student.
"

"
I will,
"
she said as she slammed the door on his vintage Skylark.

She stood on the sidewalk in front of the Inn Between, reluctant to go inside. A reading light burned bright in the sitting room. Her father, dozing in front of the television, would want to know all about the good time his little girl had enjoyed after years of going without a real date.

But Meg was in no mood to share. Cradling the memory of the kiss the way she would a newly cut rose, she strolled over rain-washed bricks to the back shed, with every wistful intention of reliving the dance at least six times before she went to bed.

But it was not to be.

When she reached the shed she saw at once that something was wrong. The hasp that held the lock, a chintzy piece of hardware, had been pried loose; the lock, useless, still hung from it. Inside, she could see that the overhead light was on and that, more importantly, so were the interior lights of the dollhouse. This was no case of some curious stranger strolling into an unlocked barn to peek at the toy he
'
d heard about in town. This was breaking, and this was entering.

Meg hung back, ready to run. But there were no sounds from the shed. No movements. Just bright light, spilling onto the glistening brick path that led to the shed. Meg stepped off the path and into the untamed privet that towered over one side of the structure. The branches shook rain all over her nonwashable silk dress. She winced
—
from the wet, and from the thought of the cleaning bill
—
and crept as near as she could to the window for a peek inside.

Nobody. Feeling bolder now but more fearful, Meg ran around to the door and entered.
It
'
s the desk,
she was convinced.
That little desk is worth the most, maybe thousands. That
'
s what they wanted.

She went directly to the dollhouse. What she saw shocked her: tornado-like upheaval of the entire contents, everything in every room, tossed and tumbled and in a heap. She staggered back; it was like being slamm
ed across the chest with a two-
by-four. The act was so viciously thorough, so thoroughly vicious, that she had to beat back a sense of nausea.

With shaking hands Meg began at once to right the little pieces. She was convinced that vital evidence had been destroyed or stolen and she was desperate to put things back the way they were so that she could assess the damage.

Very quickly she discovered that there wasn
'
t any. Pieces had been moved around and knocked about, yes; but nothing was missing, and virtually nothing had been broken. It seemed miraculous that such delicate and fragile furnishings could come through such a ransacking intact.

She tried to make sense of it all as she righted the chairs and reset the table. Two aspects of the incident seemed clear. Whoever did this valued the dollhouse and its contents too much to destroy them. Whoever did this was sending a message.

There was Joyce Fells. Clearly Joyce felt the dollhouse was hers by right. She
'
d done her best to suggest to Meg that the tiny replica of Eagle
'
s Nest carried some awful curse. Was Joyce hanging around town to carry it out? Maybe the ransacking was her crude attempt to spook Meg into selling the dollhouse at a rock-bottom price. Well, Meg didn
'
t believe in curses
—
despite Terry
'
s knock overboard
—
and she was not
about
to betray a deathbed promise by handing the dollhouse over to some badly dressed off-islander who
'
d think nothing of selling off the contents one by one. Joyce Fells could just take a hike.

Gordon Camplin? Absurd. He
'
d have taken a godawful chance, sneaking into the shed to wreak this havoc. On the other hand, he knew where the dollhouse was
—
and more importantly, where Meg was. He
had
left the dance early, and in a hurry. So the opportunity was there. But why would he do this?

Because he was searching for something, stupid. Something he did or did not find.
Meg had no idea where
that
conclusion had leapt out from; but it seemed to make a bizarre kind of sense.

Meg sighed and looked around for the hour hand of the grandfather clock and found i
t — hardly bigger than an eyelash
—
on the bottom step to the second floor. She wet her finger with the tip of her tongue and pressed it to the hour hand, then stood there without an idea in the world where to lay it down for safekeeping.

It
'
s the minuscule scale,
she decided, frustrated.
A person would have to be
Alice
in Wonderland
—
after the mushroom
— to adequately search the dollhouse for clues.
If, indeed, there were any clues.

Meg felt with all her heart that something in that tiny house was worth discovering. But whether it was her grandmother
'
s ghost or a clue to the killing, that she didn
'
t know.

She slid the hour hand carefully off the tip of her finger and onto a tiny silver tray designed to hold visitors
'
cards that would never be placed on it. It was all so sad, so unused, so fanciful. If only she could make it all
bigger.
She tugged idly at one of her grandmother
'
s earrings and sat back in her chair, too tired to finish putting everything right, too wired to leave what was left until the next day.

"
Tell me what to do.
"

Lately she
'
d tried to commune out loud with her grandmother. It seemed like the most direct approach. Never mind reading tarot cards or the innards of a chicken; Meg
'
s personality was too straightforward for that.
"T
ell me what to do
,"
she begged.

Her gaze drifted to the master bedroom. The carved teakwood bed was still upside-down, its mattress and linens caught in disarray underneath it. That room, of all the rooms, Meg simply had
no heart to set right.

How she hated that bed. She stared at it with loathing. Her reaction was irrational and visceral. That carved footboard
...
the gargoyle
'
s head was so badly placed
...
it hit you right in the small of the back when you were
forced
against it.

****

"
Mr. Camplin, please don
'
t offer them to me. I can
'
t accept them
—
"