Embers (49 page)

"Allie will be on display shortly," said Meg, annoyed with her uncle in more ways than she could count.

He gave her an evil look and added, "Whereas her sister, here, is just about the most
aggravatin'."

Tom Wyler took the opportunity to mutter, "I'll second that."

Lloyd had arrived through the kitchen, clearly in a good mood. Meg heard Comfort yelp the way wives yelp when liberties are being taken, and heard Lloyd's low laugh of amusement. Still smiling, he strolled right into the middle of an awkward lull that was hanging over the sitting room like a big wet cloud.

"Hey, Uncle Billy, whaddya think?" he asked in his usual Down East greeting.

"I think damn, that's what I think!" Uncle Billy answered, sulking.

Because he didn't say it in his usual hearty way, Lloyd became immediately cautious. He looked to his sister for a clue. Meg gave him a tight-lipped smile. Everett Atwells showed up hard on his son's heels, also in a good mood — his usual mood — and was introduced to Mr. Peterson. Right after that Comfort came in to take away the cracker plate and tell them shyly, "Supper's about ready."

It was obvious that Allie didn't have the heart to make an appearance. With a reproachful look at Tom, Meg said, "My sister won't be joining us after all, Mr. Peterson."

"She's been in a decline," Uncle Billy explained in a grave voice.

"Oh
...
I'm so sorry," said Mr. Peterson.

"It's nothing terminal," Meg said icily.

"Her heart's broke," blurted Lloyd.

"Hearts can't break," said Terry caustically.

"Yes they can," said his twin. "That's what happened to Great-Grampa when Great-Gramma burned. Isn't that right, Grampa?"

"Burned?" said Mr. Peterson faintly.

"In the Great Fire," Meg explained. "It's part of the history — the provenance, isn't that what you collectors call it? — of the dollhouse, which is a replica of one of the grand
Bar Harbor
cottages that burned in 1947. Surely my uncle told you that? Doesn't that add to the value?" she asked in bitterly ironic tones.

"I didn't know someone died. I'm sorry," murmured Mr. Peterson, clearly uncomfortable.

"That doesn't make the dollhouse cursed, though," Timmy said earnestly. "Even though we've had awful things happen to us ever since we got it."

"Not so much awful as unexplainable," his twin brother elaborated. "Like one night everything in the dollhouse got thrown around every which way. As if a poltergeist lived there."

"How did
you
know that?" Meg said, scandalized.

"I saw you putting everything back," Terry said.

"What were
you
doing up at that hour?" his grandfather asked.

"Does that add to the value, a curse?" Lloyd wondered.

"Of course it does," said Uncle Billy. "Notoriety has a
definite
dollar value."

Meg glanced around the sitting room. There was a certain bizarre feel to the conversation that she would've normally shared with Allie. But Allie wasn'
t there. As for Tom,
it was true that he was following the talk with that wry, amused look that set her heart singing, but
as far as Meg was concerned, he was the tenth plate at the table. No more, no less.

She looked away from him and began a friendly conversation with her father, who had absolutely no idea what anyone was talking about.

"We're selling, then?" Everett Atwells said in a whisper to his daughter. "I thought we weren't."

Meg whispered back, "We're not selling, Dad. This is just to humor Uncle Billy."

Just her luck that all the other conversations tailed off at the same time, leaving her remark hanging in midair like a pair of ratty underpants alone on a clothesline. Embarrassed, Meg fell back into hostile silence.

The hell with it,
she decided.
I've had it up to here with them.
She let her glance drift around the room, from Uncle Billy's red suspenders to Mr. Peterson's wing-tip shoes to the cross-stitch sampler — Allie's one and only attempt at needlework — that Meg had got tired of waiting for and had hung on the wall unfinished: HOME SWEET HO, it read.

Only once did she risk glancing at Tom. He had taken the overstuffed chair that was tucked in a corner of the sitting room — the gunfighter's chair, her father liked to call it — and was watching Meg with an intensity that seemed to set her on fire. This was nothing like the bland, disinterested detective's look he reserved for group occasions. This was personal. This was white-hot. He was as focused as a laser beam, and he was focused on her. She looked away, in danger of a meltdown.

And so they sat, Meg and all the men in her life, while she waited for Comfort to call people in to eat so that supper could finally be over with and all the men in her life would go away. But it was Allie who showed up first.

"Allie! How's your headache?" Meg said, covering for what she assumed would be her sister's glum mood.

Allie laughed gaily and said, "You know I never get headaches. Uncle Billy!
Comment ça va?"
she asked in her most cosmopolitan tone. "And
this
must be Mr. Peterson. It's an honor to meet you, sir," she said, taking his hand. "I understand you're an expert in your field. You won't be disappointed with the dollhouse, I promise you. It's a treasure."

She turned to Tom with a smile of radiant confidence. "Tom! You were able to come after all! It's good to see you looking so well. Don't let me forget: I still have three novels of yours. Well, everyone? Shall we go in?"

She slipped her arm through Tom's, surprising everyone, especially Tom, and led the company into the dining room. Meg went in behind Terry, who pinched his twin brother's arm and whispered, "I
told
you hearts can't break."

But Meg could see into her sister's heart, and it was breaking. The more Allie laughed and joked and entertained them all, the more Meg was convinced of it. Allie was behaving exactly as Meg had wished: too proud to grieve. But once or twice in the course of dinner, Meg caught Allie stealing a glance at Tom. That was when her mask slipped, and Meg could see the pain.

But Meg was the only one who could see it. Allie was a perfect actress and a perfect hostess, an unbeatable combination for hiding her feelings. She had a funny story to tell for every job she'd ever held—from saddling a llama in a children's petting zoo to hypnotizing lobsters before she turned them into seafood salad at a dockside snack bar. Everyone laughed, including Meg, including Tom; Mr. Peterson was in stitches. Uncle Billy looked over at Meg every once in a while as if to say, "See? If you wanted to be useful,
this
is what you'd be like."

But Allie was
too
funny. Her laugh was
too
gay. Her dress, for that matter, was too red. Everything about her was right at the edge, maybe a little over the edge, and it frightened Meg.

Eventually Comfort said, as she always did on Wednesday, "More chicken pie, Uncle Billy?"

That was when something in Allie snapped. In a perfect imitation of her uncle, Allie boomed out, "Just a whiska, maybe," at the same time that he did, much to his chagrin. Then she jumped up and said
shrilly
to Meg, "You're right, Meggie. It's all so predictable!" And she rushed out of the room.

That pretty much put a damper on the supper. There was dessert, of course — peach pie and ice cream — but Tom begged off and Mr. Peterson mumbled something about an early flight. Uncle Billy, jumping in to save the sale, said,
"I'll
drive Tom home. Mr. Peterson, you stay and take all the time you need to look over the dollhouse. No hurry now. Meg, take him out to the shed. You got plenty a' light there? Comfort, you just wrap my pie to go. Give me Tom's piece, too, since he don't want it. I'll bring the car round front."

Tom said good-night to the rest of the family. Then, while Mr. Peterson freshened up, he corralled Meg in the hall.

He leaned one arm into the wall, blocking her from slipping past him. "Is this it?" he asked in a voice wound tight from the effort to sound casual. "Good-bye?"

She shrugged and looked away. "You're the one who passed on the pie."

He took her arm.
"Dammit,
Meg. I want a straight answer. For once!"

She forced herself to look in his eyes. "Okay. The straight answer is,
good-bye.
Again!"

"That's not an answer," he shot back. "That's a stall. You know this isn't good-bye. You know this isn't over. Why are you playing the martyr? What're you waiting for? Allie to get married? She's not the marrying kind. Not to me; not to anyone."

"How would you know what kind she is? Or me, for that matter? The only one who's not the marrying kind around here is
you,
Lieutenant. Which makes you a dime a dozen. So pack up your emotions where they'll be safe: in your suitcase. Go back to Chicago, Tom. Go back to your career; go back to your murders. Go back to your hell."

She glanced at her arm where he still held her, then gave him a withering look. "Even
I
know that that constitutes an assault," she said coldly.

Stunned by her fury, he released her.

Meg brushed past him, her eyes glazed over with tears, hating herself for having done that, hating him for having made her do it. She found Mr. Peterson and led him hurriedly out the back, her conversation with him dinned by the sound of the horn on Uncle Billy's Cadillac, hurrying Tom out of the Inn Between.

****

Right off the bat, Mr. Peterson was displeased to learn that the dollhouse was being stored in a shed that wasn't climate controlled. Once he saw the dollhouse itself, he shook his head and murmured, "This is not good."

Meg said defensively, "The insurance company said it was okay, as long as the shed is secure."

"That window is exposed to — the west? A hot afternoon sun beating down on the dollhouse? Weathering the paint; bleaching the fabrics and wallpaper inside? What were you thinking, Mrs. Hazard? And some of these dolls —oh, dear, oh, my — are
wax.
In a heat wave like this they could easily melt. Well," he said, shaking his head fatalistically. "Let's see what we have here."

He began a preliminary tour of the house, circling it without a word, holding a magnifying lens to it here and there to study its construction. Meg watched anxiously from the sidelines. She'd become as fiercely protective of the dollhouse as Orel Tremblay had been; she'd be crushed if any harm came to it on her watch.

"It was built way back in the Depression," she said, quietly proud.

"The oldest existing dollhouse dates back four and a half centuries," Peterson said, puncturing her boast.

"Yes, but this is an
exact
replica of a significant
Bar Harbor
cottage," Meg said, unwilling to yield superiority to any other dollhouse.

"The English commonly had dollhouses made of their country estates," Mr. Peterson said matter-of-factly.

"Yes, but this was made by the estate's own carpenters."

"That, too, is an English practice," he said, studying an alabaster table set for tea in the mistress's bedroom. "Was the original owner of any prominence?"

"The millionaire who commissioned it? He was a
New York
merchant, I think," Meg answered.

"Oh. Not an ambassador or playwright or newspaper publisher, then. Nothing to do with Campbell Soup? Ivory Soap?"

The man knew his
Bar Harbor
history. He picked up a tiny cream-colored serving dish and said, "Hmm. Leeds Ware," then put it back. Meg had no idea whether that was good or bad.

"Marie Antoinette had a dollhouse," he remarked, picking up a tiny woven basket from the kitchen. "Frederick, Prince of Wales, actually
built
dollhouses as a hobby. Queen Anne — still a princess at the time — gave a house, now quite famous, to her godchild Ann Sharp."

"I see what you're getting at," said Meg, annoyed by his condescending tone. "But this house has no alluring ownership associated with it."
Far from it,
she thought bitterly.

"Your uncle said it was a gift?" Mr. Peterson inquired with a bland look. "And that the benefactor has since passed away?"

"Yes. My grandmother worked as a nursemaid for a summer at Eagle's Nest, the mansion I spoke of. The owner of the dollhouse, who once worked there as well, gave it to me because of that
...
connection," she said, for lack of a better word.

"Recently?"

"Last month." She hated telling him that. It implied that she was in a hurry to sell, which was playing right into his hands. Meg didn't want to turn down an offer that was insulting; she wanted to turn down an offer that was impressive. For Mr. Tremblay's sake.

"You foresee no problems with probate, then?" he asked mildly.