Embers (60 page)

"You know about that?"

Bobby shrugged again. "Word gets around. She shouldn't mess with them types, y' know. They're all a little wacko
— because they're so desperate to hang on to what they've got, y' know? They want things done their way or no way."

Wyler nodded. Despite himself, he was beginning to take a shine to Bobby. He was turning out to be just another kid in need of a shave and a high school diploma. He seemed smarter, more reflective than most: too bad he was hiding those brains under a red bandanna.

"Believe me," Bobby said, still ruminating. "I know. You live in a schizo town like this
—
rich, poor, hardly no one in between
—
you learn which ones to avoid. Gordon Camplin's one tough buzzard. Friend of mine was doing some carpentry for him
—
wahn't even my buddy's gig; he was workin' for someone else
—
and Camplin went and got him fired."

"Didn't like the look of him?" Wyler suggested.

"You got it. Wife's the same way. I had this job in Ellsworth before I went out west. Franklin Foreign Auto, you heard of it? They do good work. Anyway, that summer, Dorothea Camplin brings in her Mercedes for a tune-up. Her granddaughter shows up at the same time, in her Lexus, to take the old lady back home. Well, the granddaughter's comin' on to me the way them richbitches do, and I don't mind. We're fooling' around, talking', no big deal."

Bobby sipped his beer, smiling at the memory. He was a good-looking hulk; Wyler could understand why
richb
itches came on to him.

"At some point I look up," Bobby went on, "and there's old Dorothea, giving' me the evil eye. Scared the
shit
out of me. Less than a week later I'm walking along the road at dusk, and I recognize her Mercedes in oncoming traffic. She veers
— purposely, I'll bet my life on it
—
and clips me with her outside mirror. Just about breaks my arm. I'm tellin' you
—
you don't mess with those people," he repeated, toasting his glass to them.

Wyler hardly heard the moral of the story. His mind was suddenly in overdrive, racing past the useless pieces of information that had littered Meg's case from the start, zeroing in on the one bit that mattered, a line from Gordon Camplin's letter to Margaret Mary Atwells:

God help me f I am caught writing it.

Wyler had slid right over it, focusing where Meg had told him to focus: on Gordon Camplin's threat in the last paragraph. What an
idiot
he'd been.

"I mean, here's a wom
an once slapped her twenty-one-
year-old grandson in front of half the town for using the
F
word in public," Bobby was saying with a wry smile. "Where does that leave
me
on the true-value scale? Somewhere between the grandson and just above a deerfly, I figure."

What had his brain been
doing,
while Meg was waving the letter in front of him? Figuring out whether her bra unhooked in the front or in the back, that was what. God, what an
idiot.

In a panic, Wyler looked around for a phone: occupied. "Bobby, look—I gotta go," he said. "Catch you later." He threw a
fiver
on the bar and took off, praying to God that Meg was at the Inn Between.

****

Dorothea Camplin was in her terraced rose garden, humming a ditty to herself, when her Cuban gardener arrived carrying a galvanized bucket filled with foul-smelling, dark- stained water.

"Here you are, señora. All the butts since we are at Tea Kettle. I am sorry
—
not so many as other summers. I am trying to cut back. My cousin, in
Havana
? He has, how you call, the cancer of the throat. Larrin
...
lar
...
"

"Laryngeal cancer, Manuel," Dorothea said, stirring the tobacco-infested mixture with a twig. "Yes. That doesn't surprise me. Tobacco is poison; that's why it does such a good job on our aphids. How many cigars did he smoke a day?"

"His wife say, too many. Eight, ten.
Puros
fuertes,"
Manuel murmured, shaking his head. "Strong, strong, cigars, the Cubans."

"Ten! Heavens!" Mrs. Camplin said, shocked. "Much too many. I'm glad you're cutting back, Manuel. I want you to live a long life, in good health."

"
Gracias, señ
ora.
You wish something more
...
?"

"No, no, you go and enjoy yourself. I'll see you back here on Monday. Don't forget to leave the gates open for Mrs. Hazard."

The gardener nodded and left. Mrs. Camplin peered into the bucket and sighed, then went into the house. She came out carrying a plastic kitchen caddy containing a pair of yellow rubber gloves, a small bottle colored ruby red and stoppered with a cork, a fine-mesh tea strainer, a Pyrex glass measuring cup; and a pretty, crystal vial of amber-colored oil.

She put the caddy on the ground next to the galvanized bucket, then knelt in front of them on a gardening pad. She slipped on the rubber gloves, picked up the Pyrex cup, and dipped it gingerly into the galvanized bucket, filling it with the murky, tobacco-shreddy liquid. The ruby-red bottle had a wide base; it stood without tipping on the mulched ground as she held the tea strainer over its neck, then poured the bottle two-thirds full from the measuring cup of tobacco liquid.

After that she untwisted the cap of the amber oil, passed it back and forth under her nose with a dreamy smile, and decanted some of its contents into the little red bottle. She held the red bottle up to her nose and grimaced, then, with a worried frown, poured the rest of the fragrant amber oil into the tobacco mixture. Once again she sniffed the red bottle, thought about it, sniffed one more time, and, with a considering nod
—
as if she'd finally got the sweet-sour balance for a stir-fry exactly right
—
popped the cork back in.

After that Mrs. Camplin reloaded the caddy and carried it back to the house. She had a tray of fresh-baked brownies to frost before her guest arrived.

****

The only vehicle that Tom Wyler found at the Inn Between was Lloyd's rusted pickup. Lloyd himself was in the graveled parking area, which had been
turned into a kind of disaster-
relief station. There were pans of oil-soaked Speedy-dry that looked not too different from pee-soaked kitty litter; wet oil-absorbent pads
and blankets; and three twenty-
five-gallon drums filled with rescued fuel oil.

"Whatta mess, huh?" Lloyd said as Wyler rolled down the window of his car.

"Where's Meg? Where is she?" Wyler said, not bothering to hide the urgency in his voice.

"Meg? I dunno. She left a little while ago with a camera bag and a tripod over her shoulder."

"Dammit!
Why'd you let her go?" Wyler said irrationally.

"Go where?"

Wyler threw the Cutlass into reverse and tore out of there, sending gravel flying into the wheelwell of his rented car. This was it, the ultimate nightmare of any cop: rushing to an ambush where the one you love is about to be ambushed.

Dorothea Camplin: old woman, old money, old values. If she could lock a rival in her husband's bedroom and leave her there to burn, if she could crush a peon like Bobby Beaufort for looking at her granddaughter the wrong way
...
then what the
hell
was she capable of doing to an amateur sleuth who was tiptoeing ever closer to a dangerous truth
—
that Dorothea Camplin was a psycho, a puritanical, possessive, murderous psycho.

If anything happens to Meg
...
if
one hair on her head is touched
.

****

Meg arrived exactly on time and was met at the open gates by Mrs. Camplin, wielding a pair of pruning shears. The old woman was standing fearlessly on the top step of a folding ladder, slashing through thick English ivy that had overgrown the wrought-iron lamp fixtures that served as finials atop the brick pillars that supported the heavy iron gates. A heap of long, cut-back ivy tendrils lay on the ground at the foot of the stepladder.

She waved cheerfully to Meg and said, "Go right on up to the house. I'm going to close the gates behind you; a couple of dogs have been just itching to get past me for the last little while. I'm blessed if I'll have them digging up my garden. Not before it's photographed, anyway," she said, laughing.

Meg waved an acknowledgment and drove slowly down the landscaped drive, enjoying the smells and sights of the superbly tended grounds. Huge clumps of pink cleome, unseasonably early, and tall stands of purple coneflower filled the sunny patches between the towering trees that lined the path to the house. Black-eyed Susan and bee balm and phlox
—
everything was at peak. The summer sweet, too, was in full bloom, filling the air with its delightfully cloying fragrance. How had she missed it all the day before?

Because I was upset then, and today I'm not,
Meg told herself. She'd replayed that last moment of yesterday's interview over and over and over in her mind, and she was convinced: Dorothea Camplin was about to lend Meg the money herself. The woman's exact words had been, "Maybe
I
can manage
"
—
something or other. What else, if not a loan?

Okay, so the money wasn't coming from Gordon Camplin, and okay, so it looked a little like a blackmail payment, even to Meg. Too bad. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Besides, Meg was going to pay off every cent, with interest. With any luck, she might even be able to hold on to the dollhouse
—
although she wasn't sure why that was important any longer. She had a profound feeling that the little house had done its work and that Gordon Camplin, despite his evil bravado, would never sleep soundly again. It was probably the best that Meg could hope for.

In the meantime, she had to keep on with this silly charade about a magazine piece on Dorothea Camplin's gardens. Maybe she'd actually write the thing and submit it. There were worse careers in life than doing articles on gardening.

With a sense that she was making progress at least on the financial front, Meg pulled up in front of the charming facade of
the absurdly modestly named
Tea Kettle Cottage and began unloading her equipment. Mrs. Camplin joined her and they walked together to the rose garden, the first and obvious "room" to be photographed.

"Your roses are so healthy,"
Meg said admiringly.

"Because I don't tolerate the ones that give me trouble," Mrs. Camplin said bluntly. "Over the years I've winnowed out all the prima donnas. You'll notice there are no red roses, for example; I've yet to find a fragrant one that'll stand up to the moods and rigors of
Maine
."

"That's all right," said Meg. "The pale ones will show better in this gray light. We could use a breeze, though," she added, swatting at a mosquito on her shoulder. "The bugs are
fierce
today."

"They nearly always are. Do you want something for them?"

"No, no, I'm fine. I try to avoid chemical repellants." Meg swatted her calf, and then the back of her knee. This was going to be misery; why hadn't she thought to rub herself with lemon balm before she came?

And why wasn't Dorothea Camplin talking
money?
She was acting as if yesterday had never happened. It was very disconcerting. Meg swatted again at her leg, irritated; this one had drawn blood.

"My dear,
you're being
eaten alive. Let me give you what
I
use; it's my own brew, completely organic." She held up her forearm under Meg's nose. "Smell," she commanded.

"Nice. Lily of the valley?"

"For fragrance. You set up and get started. I'll bring some of this out for you. And meanwhile, I'll brew us a pot of tea to wash down the brownies I made. We can have tea out here while we chat."

Chat. Good. They were going to chat. She
hadn't
forgotten, then. Meg grinned enthusiastically and began walking around the raised beds, looking for the best vantage point to begin shooting. She settled on a trio of pink-and-ivory multiflora roses just breaking into bloom. In the far background was the greenhouse attached to the silver-shingled cottage, an irresistible scene that was sure to excite the fancy of any gardener who saw it.
Yes.
Definitely, she'd do the article, and hopefully more.

She was shooting and swatting away when Mrs. Camplin returned with a gorgeous red bottle and handed it to her. "Use as much as you like; I can easily make more."

Meg pulled out the cork and laid it on a stone bench tucked in a little bend of the perennial border filled with clouds of baby's breath in fading bloom. Everywhere she looked, everything she touched, was beautiful, including the blown-glass, ruby-red bottle. She poured some of the golden liquid into the palm of her hand and rubbed it over her left arm and her legs, then switched and did her remaining arm.