Embers (51 page)

I wish I could tell you how much I want you. It isn't a matter of choice any more. I have none; and neither, I think, do you. When you returned my kiss under the willow tree, that's when I knew.

I will have you, Margaret; plan on it. I don't know when or where or how. I'll have you, or no man will. Is this madness? Blame it on the moon.

G.C.

The letter. The smoking gun.

Meg remembered Orel Tremblay's version of the last harrowing moments
that
he'd spent with Margaret Mary Atw
ells just before the evacuation.  How
she'd begged for his protection; how she'd waved a letter from Gordon Camplin in his face and tried to get him to read it. Why
hadn't
Tremblay read it, that ass? If
only he'
d taken the
time!

But there had
been no time. Camplin had burst on the scene before Tremblay had had the chance. Not only that, but Camplin had been composed and persuasive, whereas Margaret Mary Atwells had not. You didn't have to be a brain surgeon to understand that most people preferred reason to hysteria. Orel Tremblay had deferred to Gordon Camplin, and Meg couldn't — entirely — blame him. But once Tremblay had seen the black-and-blue marks on Margaret Atwells's arm, surely he should've gone after Camplin instead of letting her be dragged back to Eagle's Nest.

Damn Tremblay.
Fussing over saving the dollhouse from the flames, when all along
...

Meg shuddered and shook herself free of the scene that had begun to reshape itself in her soul; she couldn't relive it twice in one night. And yet, what
could
she do? Not sleep, certainly. Not now. She snatched up the letter, locked the shed, and ran out to her car, then changed her mind and ran back to the shed.

Meg couldn't leave the nursemaid doll lying there like that, discarded and undressed. She slipped the doll's clothes back over its head and placed the doll gently back in the nursery. Then, on a grim impulse, she took an armoire from a guest bedroom and jammed it up against the little nursery door.

I'm losing it,
she decided when once again she was in her car.
If I don't resolve this soon, I'll probably go the rest of the way out of my mind. And then who
'll
see to it that Terry gets through school, and Dad remembers his blood-pressure pills, and the
Inn
Between pays its taxes on time?

She drove to Tom's cabin with the air conditioning on, even though the sun was down. The East Coast heat wave had pushed north all the way to
Maine
, leaving the residents of
Mount
Desert
gasping for breath. Meg wondered whether the heat wasn't melting her brain. Maybe all she needed was an air-conditioner and she
—
and the wax dolls
—
would be fine.

Meg drove much too fast over Tom's potholed drive and pulled up in front of his cabin. His lights were on, which hardly mattered; Meg would've enjoyed dragging him out of bed to show him the letter. He was a cop, he wanted proof, she had the proof. She banged loudly on the cabin door, the kind of pounding that state troopers give a door before they knock it down altogether.

She heard his voice before the door opened. "For God'
s sake, Meg, hold on  ...
"

So he'd checked and knew who it was. Naturally. City cops didn't throw their doors open casually. It was more evidence of the chasm that divided them.
She
would've yelled, "C'mon in; it's open."

When he did open the door, he was shirtless and belting his pants. "Too hot,"
he said with a shrug
. "What's up
?"  Obviously he could see
from her face that it wasn't a social call.

"I've got the proof that he raped her," Meg said flatly. She whipped out the letter from the pocket of her skirt and waved it in front of him. "You remember the letter my grandmother tried to show Orel Tremblay? This is it. I found it, no kidding, in a secret compartment in the dollhouse. Read it, Lieutenant. I'll wait."

She gave it to him, then watched in bitter triumph as he took it over to one of the two dim lamps in the room. He held it under the muslin shade and read through it quickly. The light fell in a soft halo over his torso and she noted, quite without thinking about it, that he was more muscular than a person convalescing from a gunshot had any right to be.

She folded her arms and waited for the shock, the surprise, the sheepish acknowledgment that she'd been right and he'd been wrong.

He handed her the letter, then took up a T-shirt from the back of the couch and put it on. "She kissed him back," he said.

Meg blinked. "'She kissed him back?' You read the whole letter, and that's what you got out of it? 'She kissed him back'?"

"It's a love letter," Tom said evenly. "Apparently it was written because he'd had some encouragement from your grandmother."

"Encouragement!" Meg said, choking on the word. "My grandmother
spurned
him! Repeatedly!"

"Not under the willow tree, she didn't. Unless you think he's lying."

"Of
course
he's lying!" But even Meg didn't believe that. "He was deluded, that's what he was! Deluded and obsessed."

"I agree he was obsessed."

"Then why can't you agree he raped her?" Meg cried. This was incredible. Meg understood
—
really understood, for the first time in her life
—
how a woman must feel who staggers into a police station crying rape.

"This letter doesn't prove she was raped."

"It was the next goddamned step!"

"A jury couldn't be sure."

"Damn
the jury!" Meg said, furious in her frustration.
"This isn't about our system of jurisprudence! This is about my grandmother! She was raped by Gordon Camplin, over and over again! I had a
...
a vision
...
I didn't
want
to have it, I
didn't
. 
He was demonic
...
insane," Meg said, breaking down into jagged, jittery incoherence. "And he
...
he
...
wouldn't
...
stop
...
until
...
she p-passed out
...
oh, God
...
oh,
God
...
and not even then
...
Because
...
because she woke up, she knew
...
oh, God."

Meg's knees collapsed under her; Tom caught her on the way down and half carried her to the couch while Meg half resisted every step of the way.

"Don't touch me,
don't,"
she cried, trying to push him away, flailing at him. "How could you not believe me? How could you?"

"Meg
...
Meg
...
stop!" he said. He held her tightly by her arms and sat her down, then sat alongside her. "Listen to me. I do believe you."

"You don't! You said she encouraged him!" she said, hot tears of fury springing to her eyes.

"Shh
...
never mind
...
I do believe you," he repeated, gathering her in his arms and pulling her close.

"No!"
She gave him a last, wild, futile push and then collapsed on his chest in bitter, wracking sobs that lasted until it hurt too much to sob anymore. The whole time, Tom pressed her cheek close to his heart and buried his face in her hair and rocked her gently, murmuring soothing syllables with no meaning at all except of comfort. And Meg was aware, as she hadn't been for three decades of her life or more, that she needed those meaningless sounds the way she needed air and sleep and water. She had gone too long without someone's arms around her, someone who wanted nothing more than to soothe and comfort. Paul had never done that. With Paul, tears and fights had always, without fail, ended in sex.

After she calmed down, she lifted her head from Tom's chest and studied him through the last of her tears. She wanted so badly to have him completely on her side. "You called it a
love
letter," she said reproachfully, wiping her eyes.

He drew a long, deep breath and let it out in a haphazard sigh. "In its twisted way, it was," he said, obviously dreading her response.

But Meg had no fury left; only emptiness. "Is that what love is for men?" she asked dully. "Mindless possession?"

His laugh was sharp and bitter. "You're asking
me
that?"

She winced from his answer. There was so much anger and frustration in it. Meg knew that he wanted her; after
Acadia
, how could she not know? Nonetheless, she said, "Yes. I'm asking you."

He got up from the couch and walked over to the window, opened to the pitch-black dark of a woodlands night. After a long, long pause, he said, "Probably you're asking the wrong guy. I can tell you what love
isn't,"
he said without turning around. "Love isn't mindless sex. Mindless
sex
is mindless sex. Love is
—
"

He shook his head. "You're asking the wrong guy. I lived in a series of foster homes notable for the absence of love
— except for my last parents; they loved each other. But my foster father was diabetic and eventually lost both legs, and that's what the marriage became about, you know?

"I mean, they loved each other, but I don't think they had the time or the strength to say so. There were always too many little crises going on. Like the time my dad was weeding tomato plants in his postage stamp of a garden: he tumbled out of the chair headfirst into the plants, and that's where he stayed until my mother got back from the store. She weighed ninety-five pounds; it wasn't easy setting him right again.
That's
what their days were about. They sure weren't about mindless sex."

"But you were there to help her," Meg said, moved.

"Not exactly," he said wryly. He leaned his hands on the sill and peered into the darkness, listening. "I ran away from them at sixteen out of the goodness of my heart
—
because I didn't want to be another burden. I figured my mom could always get a neighbor to help fish my dad out of the tomato plants, but no neighbor was going to feed me or clothe me or buy me a car. At sixteen, your brain hasn't really kicked in yet," he added with a rueful laugh.

"By seventeen I'd wised up and came back. It was too late. My dad had died
—
heart attack. But I stayed on, finished high school, got a job, did the night school bit."

He turned around, sat back on the sill, and looked at Meg with a smile that broke her heart. "I can tell you all about what makes a great nurse and mother," he said softly, "but I'm not such an expert on the him-her thing."

Meg thought of his wife and bit her tongue. Uh-uh. It was none of her business.

"What about
Lydia
?" she blurted out.

He grimaced. "Ah; now
that
was definitely not mindless sex.
Lydia
always had my full attention. But I don't think
— looking back
—
that either of us really loved the other, not in the way you mean. Neither of us would sacrifice for the other," he admitted with a shamed look.

"So you've never seen, firsthand, a man in love with a woman?"

He seemed baffled by the question. "Well,
you
have. What about your father? What about Lloyd?"

"This isn't about me," she said gravely. "This is about you, about why you're not shocked by Gordon Camplin's letter."

"Because
nothing
shocks me anymore, Meg," he said tiredly. "Can't you understand that?" He sat back down and took her hands in his. "Look. A lawyer could take that letter and turn it into nothing more than a macho boast, worst case. He could stack the jury with women who'd get a
thrill
out of it, best case. All I'm saying is, it's not enough to convict, Meg. I wish it were."

She believed him. Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was a simple desire to be done with the whole thing, but she believed him. The letter would not be enough. She felt completely limp, as if someone had pulled the plug on her lifeblood. She thought of the nursemaid doll, safely barricaded in the upper floors of the dollhouse.

"Can I stay here?" she asked, dropping her head on the back of the couch and fixing her blank gaze on a dustweb above the door. "For a while?"

"Shoo-
ah
," he said in the Down East dialect that seemed to charm him so much. He sat down again and slipped one arm around her. "Sorry I can't offer you five-hundred-channel cable TV," he said. "Will my shoulder do?"