Beloved (20 page)

"
Dog
on your doorstep,
"
Jane said, trying to maintain her fine sense of outrage.
"
Buster got loose and woke me up in the middle of the night. Here. He
'
s all yours.
"
She let the dog go and he went loping off to the kitchen.
"
What time did you get back?
"
she asked, a little hurt that Bing hadn
'
t stopped by, since he claimed to be so all-fired anxious to see her again.

"Oh ...
late,
"
he said vaguely.
"
Cissy
'
s dead to the world; I don
'
t know when she got in. Did you know she has a beau?
"
he asked with a wry look.
"
She won
'
t tell me who he is. I gather he
'
s no kid: she keeps referring to him as
'
quite mature
'
and
'
very manly.
'"

From out of nowhere the image of Mac McKenzie came rocketing into Jane
'
s consciousness.
McKenzie
—
with
Cissy? Was it possible? Surely not. And yet it certainly was one way to solve his easement problem: seduce a relative of the grantor. But he wouldn
'
t
...
he couldn
'
t
...
But who knew? For McKenzie the stakes were unbelievably high.

"Earth to Jane ..
. earth to Jane,
"
Bing said, tugging at a lock of her
un
combed hair.
"
Dinner tonight? At last?
"

Jane shook herself free of the speculation
—
it was too absurd, too calculated a thing for anyone to do
—
and said in a lighter mood,
"
I thought you
'
d never ask.
"

"
Great. I
'
ll pick you up at seven. You know, of course,
"
he added in a softer, more serious voice,
"
that you have no right to look so pretty at this ungodly hour.
"

Jane colored and said,
"
I
'
ll bet you say that to all the dogcatchers on the island,
"
and then she left, with his compliment still hovering sweetly in her ears. What was it about Bing? If any other man had said that, she
'
d have thought it was a line. But she believed Bing implicitly, even if he
was
a bachelor.

The morning was very fine, the warmest since her arrival on the island. A bird was singing some brand new song; Jane convinced herself that it was a harbinger of
warmth
, even though
spring
had
barely
begun. She
'
d heard that spring on
Nantucket
was a season of despair because it took so long to arrive, but today, at least, it was ahead of itself. Reluctant to go inside, she detoured to the burying ground, retracing her path through the downtrod grass from the day before, to visit Judith
'
s grave.

Somewhere she remembered reading that if a person was being harassed by a spirit, then all he had to do was confront the spirit and he, she, or it would be civil about the whole thing and go away. That would be easier to try now that Judith had a surname; Jane felt as though they
'
d been formally introduced at last.

She stood alongside the grave as if she and Judith were chatting in front of church on a Sunday morning and said,
"
Judith Brightman. I don
'
t know what
'
s going on. But you have my attention. Here I am. What is it you want?
"

Jane had no idea whether she was addressing the rose or the remains beneath it. She reached out and touched, ever so gingerly, the tip of the longest cane. Then she stood there for a long time, waiting for some sign.

"
All right,
"
she said at last,
"
if you don
'
t want to tell me.
"

She turned to go. But as she did she became aware that the dull ache in her shoulder had eased, just as it had the day before.
Brother. This is just too weird,
she thought.
Obviously I
'
m having a psychosomatic response to this rosebush.

She lifted her arm as if she were hailing a cab; for the first time since she
'
d suffered the scratch, her shoulder felt free of pain. She flapped her arm up and down half a dozen times, testing it, all the while keeping a self-conscious eye for the green pickup. There was no pain at all.

The sense of relief she felt was
extraordinary. Apparently she
'
d given herself a psychosomatic disease; and now, she
'
d pulled off a psychosomatic cure. She thought of confiding her thoughts to another person, but who? Her sister would laugh, her mother would worry, her father would scold. Bing? Bing might be sympathetic. He
'
d only smiled, after all, and hadn
'
t hooted outright when she told him about the bookcase and the spoon.

The bookcase and the spoon
—
and last night, the bulkhead doors. Those three events made up another mystery altogether. She felt sure of it. They were too
...
wor
ld
ly,
somehow. They didn
'
t seem related to the pain in her shoulder. Anyway, she could live with the occasional loud crash or bark in the night. What she couldn
'
t live with was being incapacitated.

As she turned away, mul
ling over her separate-but-not-
equal mysteries, she heard the sound of a tractor. It came from beyond the row of towering arborvitae that she knew separated McKenzie
'
s land from Phillip
's. So McKenzie was up. 
Of course he would be. She decided to walk over and see
his
property. She
'
d never been back there, and Bing had told her to be sure to see the place. Why not?

The part of the lane where Jane began her trek belonged to McKenzie. To the left was the row of arborvitae, tall and green and quivering in the light southwest wind. To the right was a field of fir trees between four and eight feet tall: for the Christmas trade, she assumed. There were other evergreens being cultivated too, although she did not know their names.

The lane turned muddier, and Jane had to pick her way around all the low spots that were pooled with water, but by now she was very curious about what was back there. The property seemed a perfect metaphor for the man: remote and forbidding. Jane was impressed by the vast amount of land McKenzie owned; it seemed almost tragic to her that he had no direct access to a road.

Her running shoes were thick with mud by the time she emerged from the trees into a clearing where an old shingled farmhouse stood, surrounded by several smaller, equally weathered outbuildings. The whole place had a sad, not-quite-hopeless look to it. Jane walked up to the closest outbuilding and peeked through the dirty window.

It was being used as an office: the walls were papered chaotically with slips and invoices, and the beat-up oak desk was buried under nursery catalogs and more papers. She walked around to the door. A small, handwritten sign taped to the inside of its window said
WHOLESALE ONLY.

A plastic-covered hoop house blocked Jane
'
s view of the tractor, which she could hear moving back and forth. She headed for it with every intention of picking McKenzie
'
s brain about Judith Brightman. How she was going to do this discreetly, she had no idea. She was busy trying out different openers in her mind when the tractor emerged. But the driver wasn
'
t McKenzie; it was a young boy about ten or so
—
Mac McKenzie in a smaller package.

He had the same thick, half-wild hair his father had, and as he drove the tractor toward her, she saw that he also had his father
'
s calm and inscrutable hazel eyes.
"
Hello,
"
she said, madly trying to remember
if she'd heard his name
.
"
I
'
m looking for Mac McKenzie.
"

The boy put the tractor in neutral and gazed down at her from his metal perch with a look of quiet pride.
I
'
m driving this machine,
his look said,
because I
'
m a guy and that
'
s what guys do.
"
Dad? He
'
s over in the house, making chowder,
"
said the boy, jerking his head in that direction. Jeremy
—
that was his name.

Jeremy put the tractor back in gear and rumbled off at three miles an hour or so, sneaking a look back at Jane to see if she was admiring his driving skill. Jane was standing there, paralyzed, thinking,
Now what? I can
'
t barge into a man
'
s kitchen and demand to learn all he knows about some dead person. Mother would say it just isn
'
t done.

"
Hey.
"
the boy yelled back over his shoulder.
"
It
'
s okay. Just knock on the door. Go through the wart
—
the little lean-to on the side,
"
he explained when she hesitated.

Now she felt stupid. Left with no choice but to follow through, Jane decided to knock and just, oh, double-check about when McKenzie was taking the holly.
Tomorrow, right? Fine.
Then she
'
d get the heck out of there. She fluffed up the few brain cells that were still working and stepped through the lean-to and knocked on the tongue-in- groove door with its single diamond-paned window.

"
C
'
mon in, it
'
s open,
"
came his shout from inside.

She pressed down on the door latch and stepped back in time two hundred years, into one of the most delightful country kitchens she
'
d ever seen, from the exposed beams laden with drying herbs, to the cavernous brick fireplace at one end.
  This one was the real thing.

McKenzie was in jeans and a plaid shirt, standing in his stockinged feet on wide-board floors at an enormous black stove, where he wa
s frying up a batch of onions
. He looked up, not at all surprised, as if it were her habit to drop in at seven-thirty in the morning on a weekend.

"
Hi,
"
she said.
"
Smells good.
"
She didn
'
t want him to think she was inviting herself to a breakfast of
fried
onions, so she added,
"
Jeremy said you were making chowder.
"
That
sounded as if she was trying to weasel her way into his son
'
s affections, so she said,
"
He looks just like you.
"
Since
that
sounded as if she was trying to score points with McKenzie, she just stopped talking altogether, gliding to a bumpy halt like a single-engine plane that
'
s lost power.

But McKenzie seemed not to notice her babbling. He was in a wonderfully mellow mood
—
for him
—
and actually seemed to want to chat.
"
Jerry
'
s a good kid,
"
he said as he crisscrossed a cleaver over stacked-up onion slices on a board.
"
This is the first time I
'
ve let him run the tractor himself. Without hovering, I mean,
"
he said with a smile.
"
It
'
s killing me not to run to the window every ten seconds. Has he plowed through the hoop house yet?
"