Embers (55 page)

"She can't mean that, Lloyd. You must've misunderstood her," she said faintly.

"No, she was pretty clear about it," he said unhappily. "Meggie
—
is there some real feelin' between you and Tom? We have to know," he repeated.

Dazed, Meg only said, "Why, Lloyd? Why do you have to know? Can't I have one little part of my life that I call my own?" She peeked around the corner at her sister, half expecting Allie to be sitting up in bed, ready to shoo her away. But Allie was lying on her back with her eyes closed, exactly as Meg had left her.

Shaking and dazed, Meg began to walk away. In her mind one thought overwhelmed all others:
Whatever Allie wants.

After a few steps Meg turned and said to her brother, "Since you seem to have to know: there will never be feeling between Tom and me again."

She left the car at the hospital and walked home in a state of shock. The last week had been a series of nonstop shocks, but this one was leaving her numbest of all. For Allie to reject her so publicly
...
for her to do it so
quickly,
in her first lucid moment
...
it was devastating. If Allie had waited until she'd actually seen Meg; or if she'd got to talking with Lloyd, and Meg's name had come up
...
But to do it first thing
... i
t was crushing, and a measure of how deeply Meg had hurt her sister.

Meg turned onto
Main Street
and walked in a straight line, oblivious of the crowds of tourists and shoppers that bumped around her, and didn't stop until she more or less hit water. She was at the town pier. She walked out to the end of it
— aware, vaguely, that she was in the company of hundreds of happy day-trippers
—
and looked over the edge. It was high tide: the water was dark and murky and stirred up by the wakes of passing boats. She stayed leaning over the dock railing for a long time, convinced she was going to be sick, not daring to risk walking the rest of the way to the Inn Between.

Eventually a fog rolled in and it got clammy, and Meg turned reluctantly in the direction of the house where she'd been born and raised, the house that no longer seemed her home.

She stepped into a different kitchen from the one she'd left. Comfort was there, cooking supper. She'd obviously heard about Meg's banishment, because she made a big, busy production of straining the spaghetti and didn't ask Meg where she'd been. Her father was in the sitting room, looking haggard and watching network news with limp attention; he looked up and with a forced smile said, "I just got back. She's coming around all right."

Meg asked humbly, "Did she say I could see her?"

The smile faded. "I'm sorry, Meggie." Everett Atwells looked suddenly too old and frail to witness such a gaping rift in his close-knit family. "I'll tell you what. You go with Comfort after dinner. Maybe when she sees you
...
" His voice trailed off, unconvinced.

Obviously they'd all figured out what had happened and had no idea what to do about it. Plan A would've been to go to Meg and ask her. There was no Plan B.

The phone rang. Terry jumped up from his baseball cards to answer it. He dragged the phone to Meg and said, disappointed, "Don't worry, it isn't Tom."

So the twins knew, too. It was the story of Meg's life: that she had no life. Not of her own, anyway. She sighed and said hello.

"Meg? It's Dorothea."

"Who?"

"My dear, Dorothea Camplin. Why didn't you
tell
me you were a granddaughter of my nursemaid?" she said in her no- nonsense way. "I had no idea. It explains your curious interest in Eagle's Nest. I don't blame you a bit for asking, dear. Of
course
you'd want to know. You should have come straight out about it."

The interview seemed so long ago, Meg could hardly remember it. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Camplin. I know I said I'd be back to photograph the garden. But my sister was in an accident—"

Mrs. Camplin gasped. "Oh! Wait. Allison? No, Allegra, it was
—
Allegra Atwells! I read about it in the
Times
and never made the connection. How stupid of me! I'm so sorry to be bothering you at a time like this
—"

"Not at all. In fact, the news today was
...
was very good. My sister's going to be all right. It was a little touch-and-go at first. Anyway, now that she won't be needing me as
...
um
...
much
...
" Meg said, her lip beginning to quiver, "I'll be
...
"

She paused to regroup. "Well! I'll be over tomorrow if it stays overcast, and if that's all right with you. Otherwise, the next gray day."

They agreed to that plan and Meg rang off. Dinner came and went in excrutiating silence, and after that Meg packed up her pride in a basket of flowers and went with Comfort to try to see Allie again.

When they got to the hospital, Lloyd didn't look hopeful, and Meg didn't hope. She let Comfort go in ahead to intercede for her, but Comfort came out of Allie's room shortly afterward looking downcast.

"Gosh," Meg said with bravado cheerfulness, "I feel like a skunk at a garden party."

The worst of it was, Lloyd and Comfort seemed to
agree with her.
They didn't say so, of course. Comfort even put her arms around Meg and said, "Give her time." But no one said that Allie was being outrageous, because she wasn't. For the second time that day, Meg was being forced to walk away from everything she held dear and into a twilight zone as disorienting as the thick fog that lay in wait outside.

Oddly, she felt less traumatized after this visit than the last one. Earlier, she'd had to endure the initial shock of rejection as well as the uncertainty of whether Allie was really lucid. Now Meg could be sure: Allie was not going to forgive the betrayal anytime soon.

So where do I go from here?
she wondered as she made her way back through the brooding fog. Not to Tom. He was the only one she wanted to see, the only one who understood. But it would be the death knell to her relationship with Allie if Meg went running to him now. Besides, he wasn't exactly beating a path back to her door. She tried not to think about the slap in the face and the cruel words that had preceeded it.
Your guilt is making you vicious,
he'd said, and he was right.

She couldn't think about him now: not with sorrow, not with longing, not at all.

It was all such a mess. With the best intentions in the world, Meg had managed to screw up royally. She should'
ve been up-
front with Allie about her feelings from the start. This was her punishment, and it was about as punishing as life could get.

Meg went straight to bed, slept a sleep of black dread, and didn't wake up until she heard loud knocking on her bedroom door. She jumped out of bed fearing the worst.

It was Lloyd, up to his elbows in soot again.

"That furnace ain't worth a hole in the snow," he said, disgusted. "Inner jacket's rusted out. This is it, Meg; it's over. We got to get new. Either that, or drop dead a' the fumes. Not to mention the guests."

"You can't nurse it along?" she asked sleepily.

He shook his head. "Too dangerous."

"So of course there's no hot water," she said, not bothering to pose it as a question. "All right. Get a new one in here as fast as you can."

"With what? It ain't like we got the money. Or the credit."

"Let me worry about that," she said grimly.

Lloyd shrugged and left, and Meg, still in her nightgown, went straight to the desk in her closet office and dialed the number on the card that Peterson had given her. Enough was enough. No deathbed promise was worth a dozen lives.

"Mr. Peterson? Meg Hazard. I haven't heard from you, so I thought I'd call." She had neither the heart nor the time for chitchat and maneuvering, so she asked him outright, "Is it your sense that your client will be making an offer soon on the dollhouse?"

Peterson hemmed and hawed about the meaning of "soon." Meg pressed him. "By 'soon,' I mean in the next day or two. I don't mind admitting that I'm in a bit of a cash-flow bind. To that end, I'd be willing to negotiate very handsome terms for your collector."

"Now that's the thing," came Peterson's voice, oozing with sympathy. "These cash-flow binds. Aren't they awkward? My client seems to be in one of them right now. He's gone and made an offer on a wooden sailing yacht, which has been accepted, so for the moment, he's all set." Peterson added, "Apparently he prefers an antique that he can use and enjoy."

Meg was flabbergasted. "He couldn't decide between a dollhouse and a
yacht?
Isn't that a little arbitrary?"

Mr. Peterson chuckled. "To his way of thinking, they're both toys," he said pleasantly. "Toys of the same vintage, in fact."

"Can you at least tell me what you think the dollhouse is worth, ballpark?"

He didn't like giving Meg information she hadn't paid for; but in the end he took pity on her and gave her a figure that was more than twice the estimated cost of Allie's hospital bill. The roof, the furnace, the repairs—Meg could do them all and still have money left over.

"Be patient," he advised her, "and you'll get that price. It may take a year or two or even three, but you'll get it. Well— it's too bad things didn't work out," he said.

Yeah, sure,
she thought, hanging up.
What did he care? He got his fee either way. Now what?
She drummed her fingers nervously on her desk.
Now what now what now what?
The dollhouse had been her security blanket. In the back of her mind she'd been assuming she could cash it in any time she wanted, like a winning lottery ticket. Where would she find a buyer overnight?

"It only takes one," Peterson had said.

But who had time to wait for him?

Her eye fell on the complimentary calendar, the one with a different lighthouse for every month, that hung above her battered oak desk. Yes! BHS
—
Bar Harbor Savings. The Inn Between was mortgaged to the hilt, but the dollhouse wasn't. Surely she could secure a loan from a bank with it. It was insured. It was an asset. It had value and
then
some, if you counted the fact that it was haunted.
Yes!

For the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, Meg's spirits climbed above her ankles. Emotionally her life was an ongoing disaster, but if she could get a grip on the financial side of it
—
well, then, she'd have a grip on
something.

A
bank.
Why hadn't she thought of it before?
Yes!

****

"No."

"That's what they said? No?"

"They said it wouldn't be 'valid collateral.'"

Uncle Billy didn't bother hiding his disappointment. He poured himself another whiskey and gestured to Meg with the bottle; she shook her head. Comfort came in to take away the last of the dishes, and then Meg and her uncle were alone across the dining room table. It was time to do business.

Uncle Billy, comfortably stuffed with chicken pie, let out a discreet burp and said, "In a way, it don't surprise me. That Jenny Bowery has acted awful treetoppy since she landed that job in the loan department. Tryin' to prove she can be harder than a man, I expect. Still, it makes it sticky for you."

"Not sticky, Uncle Billy," Meg said quietly. "Desperate." His eyes glazed over, the way they did whenever the subject directly or indirectly came around to his money. "Now, don't be thinkin' desperate," he said. "There's always hope. I been talkin' up Peterson's visit all around town, hopin' to flush out a competing buyer. Hell, I even spread the word about the secret compartment; everyone loves a secret compartment."

Meg had told the family about the compartment but not about the letter, which Tom had mailed back to her without comment a couple of days after the blowup. "I can't
wait
for a buyer," she told her uncle, linking her hands in a prayerful pose on the oilcloth. "We need the money now. I have less than thirty days to pay for the new furnace. And we're losing business because of the roof: every time it rains, the fire alarm goes off. I had to give one family their money back the other morning."

Bill Atwells grunted and tossed back his whiskey with a sharp, practiced gesture, just the way Meg had seen him do thousands of times before; it reminded Meg of the way an umpire thumbs a player out of an inning.

He thunked the shot glass on the table a little unsteadily and said, "You wait. One of them summerin' richbitches is bound to come round to the shed and fall in love with the thing."

"I
can't
wait, Uncle Billy," Meg repeated. She took a deep breath and said, "I'd like you to lend me the money. You can keep the dollhouse as collateral until I pay you back. You'll have my permission to sell it whenever you wish."