Keepsake (56 page)
"You don't have an address or phone number, of course."
Both parents shook their heads. Millie said softly, "The number on the card she gave us isn't in service."
"Do you have any idea where she's been living? City? State?
Country,
for chrissake?" He couldn't help it; anger was flowing like hot lava from him, scorching his bystander parents in the process.
Millie bowed her head and murmured, "Jim remembers something about
Miami
. I thought she said
Memphis
. Is that any help?"
Sam sighed. "What about her car? What was she driving? Where were the plates from?"
"Jim didn't walk outside at the end, but her car was blue. It had a big carpeted trunk, I know that," said Millie. "I was nervous about the engraving getting damaged or stolen, but it looked real safe there."
Not pausing to observe the irony, Sam asked, "Did you see any evidence of luggage in her car? Trunks, suitcases, clothes on hangers?"
"No, not r—oh, wait. There was a duffel bag on the back seat. You know, like a sailor would use? I thought it looked a little sporty for
Eden
, because she's so very feminine. Maybe it belonged to someone else."
Just what we need; an accomplice.
Sam said, "Did
Eden
allude to anyone else? Maybe a man she's seeing?"
Surprising, how it smarted to ask that.
His mother said, "No. She didn't talk about anyone. We were commenting on that afterward. We think maybe she still has feelings
....
Well, anyway. No."
"Okay, apparently we're at a dead end, then," Sam decided, disgusted by the realization.
Amazingly, his mother seemed determined to believe the best instead of facing the worst. "It's probably taking longer than she thought to get the appraisal, that's all. She said it was a very important piece of art and that appraisals take a little while, you know. I wouldn't have raised all this hullabaloo at all, except Jim insisted we tell you."
She threw an accusing look at her husband, who said slowly, plaintively, "One of them mortgage people come by yesterday, Sam. How do the bastards know?"
"Dad, don't you dare take out a loan from those shysters," said Sam angrily. "Don't you dare. I'll take care of the bills until this gets cleared up."
"We have enough money," his mother insisted.
Yeah, right.
"I'd like to stay here tonight," he said, surprising his
parents. "Maybe you'll remember something."
Sam's plan was to canvas the neighbors the next morning and question them about
Eden
's car. The working-class neighborhood was fairly close-knit, full of porch-sitters with easy views through chain-link fences. Maybe someone had been sitting on a stoop and had recognized
Eden
from the old days; maybe they'd be able to recall a license. It was going to be humiliating, going door to door in search of
Eden
. Sam dreaded it, and yet he was flat out of any other ideas.
Until three
a.m
. That's when he bolted upright in the spindle bed that his father had painted Superman-blue shortly after they had taken him in.
Phone calls.
He clung to the possibility until he dropped off to sleep, and in the morning, over waffles and O.J., he said to his parents, "Did
Eden
make any long-distance phone calls while she was here?"
His mother, misinterpreting, said, "Well, yes. She would have used her calling card,
normally
, only there was some kind of problem with it. She said that she'd square up
w
ith us after we got the phone bill."
"All
right,"
he said, making a victory fist. "Now we're getting somewhere." It wasn't like
Eden
to be so careless; but then, the risk of a call being remembered was relatively small. "Has the bill come in?"
"Yesterday." Picking up on his enthusiasm, his mother hurried over to the Formica counter and brought the unopened bill to him. "I haven't even—"
Sam took his knife, still all buttery, and slid it under the flap. Heart hammering, he scanned the toll calls on it. There were half a dozen made to the same number—his mother's sister—and one to
Martha's Vineyard
.
Sam punched in the number and reached someone at a gallery called the Flying Horses.
He hung up. A faint glimmer of a smile, the first in twelve hours or so, hovered at the edges of his lips. He got up from the breakfast table and dropped a kiss on top of his mother's gray hair. "She didn't take off for
Germany
with it," he said. "That's something, at least."
Next stop:
Martha's Vineyard
.
Sample Chapter
Antoinette Stockenberg
"Buy this book! A truly fantastic read!"
--
Suzanne Barr
,
Gulf
Coast
Woman
USA
TODAY
bestselling author Antoinette Stockenberg delivers an original and wonderfully romantic story of two people -- college lovers separated for twenty years -- who have the chance to be happy together at last.
But family, friends, an ex-husband, a teenaged daughter and an unsolved murder seem destined to keep the lovers star-crossed, until Dan takes up residence in the Cape Cod lighthouse, with Maddie's rose-covered cottage just a short walk away ...
Chapter 1
"
He'd look perfect tied to my bedposts," Norah
murmured
.
Joan lifted the binoculars from her friend's grip and focused them on the lighthouse at the tip of the windswept peninsula. After a minute, she said, "They'd better be pretty strong bedposts."
She held out the binoculars to Maddie Regan, who, as always, was the first to show up at Rosedale, her family's summer cottage on the
Cape
. "Here, Maddie. Have a look."
"Thank you, no," said Maddie, walking away from the kitchen window with her box of books. "Unlike the two of you, I happen to have a life."
Norah arched one perfectl
y shaped eyebrow. "Well, la-di-
da. Doing what? Spending another summer on the
Cape
, watching the beach erode? Get with the program, Maddie. Women our age have to keep their eyes open. Especially women our age in Dulltown."
Maddie managed a wry smile and said, "There's nothing wrong with
Sandy
Point
. It's where I want to be every year come June. It's where I want a teenage daughter to be. It's quiet; it's safe; it's—"
"Dull. Let's face it. It's
dull.
We aren't the
Hamptons
. We aren't the Vineyard. We aren't even
Newport
. There's nothing to do in
Sandy
Point
, and no one rich to do it with."
Joan, still focused on the peninsula, said, "This one could change your mind, Norah. No kidding. Wow. Killer aura.
He's standing in front of the lighthouse, looking out at the ocean. The wind's blowing his hair around. You can't mistake the guy. It really is him. Sure you don't want a peek, Maddie?"
Maddie shook her head and kept to her box of books.
Norah took Maddie's refusal personally. "You do understand our situation here? Three women, nada men—none worth bringing down from
Boston
, anyway? How are we going to network? This is turning into a serious dry spell, Maddie. I'm still separated. Joan's still single. And you're still—"
"All right, all right. Divorced," Maddie conceded. "But unlike you two,
not
dribbling with lust."
"Why should you be?" Norah shot back. "Your ex has a condo two miles away, and he's willing to bed you any time you want."
"But I don't want."
"I've never really understood that," Joan admitted. "Michael's always been so kind, so considerate to me."
"So considerate to
everyone
," said Norah with a caustic smile. She repossessed the binoculars from Joan and aimed them on her prey. "Nuts. He's gone. No, wait. Here he comes out of the lighthouse—with a basket of laundry. Good Lord. Dan Hawke is going to hang his own laundry. Dan Hawke!"
Joan, as usual, had a theory. "He's a war correspondent. He's probably used to washing his socks in some dead soldier's helmet."
"Joannie, the way you put things. Okay, here we go. First item out of the basket: jeans. I'd s
ay a thirty-four waist, thirty-
six, tops. How cute—he's holding the clothespins between his teeth. Oh, Maddie, you
should
look. He looks nothing like he does on TV."
Maddie dropped another box of books onto the kitchen table and began unlocking its cardboard flaps. "How would you know, Norah? You never watch CNN."
Without taking her focus away from the lighthouse, Norah said, "Now, now. Just because I sell shlock art for a living, it doesn't mean I don't watch CNN."
"Have you ever actually seen him in a broadcast from a war zone?"
Norah shrugged and said, "No. But it doesn't mean I don't watch CNN."
"Well, I watch it," Joan chimed in, "and I can tell you, the guy makes an impression. It isn't his tousled hair or his flak jacket; they all have that.
And he's not especially to-die-
for handsome. It's more his air of—I don't know—reluctance. As if he can't stand what he's doing but he does it anyway because somebody has to, and he can do it better."
"Bullshit," Norah argued. "War pays his bills."
Joan, less assured but more introspective than taller, thinner, richer, red-haired Norah, decided to dig in her heels. "He hates his work. I'll bet my house on it. He's come to
Sandy
Point
because he's burned out."
"Pillowcases," said Norah, looking up from her binoculars and flashing the other two women a knowing grin. "That's a good sign. He's only been renting for a couple of days. He must be fastidious."
"Fastidious!" Joan had another theory. "That's the last thing he'd be. War correspondents eat leaves and grass if they have to, and sleep in the crotches of trees."
"A waste," said Norah with a snort. "He should be sleeping in another kind of crotch altogether."
"Norah!"
Maddie said it too sharply for someone who wasn't supposed to be listening. She looked away. Norah was being outrageously—well—Norah. It didn't mean anything.
Norah seemed oblivious to the scolding. A second or two later, still gazing through the binoculars, she said, "One, two three, four, five, six hankies. How quaint: he uses handkerchiefs."
Joan had theories for that, too. "Of course he uses handkerchiefs. Do you really think he can buy purse-sized Kleenex in the
mountains of
Afghanistan
? Besides, they make good tourniquets."
Sh
e added in a thoughtful voice,
"
I remember one of his reports from
Chechnya
. Ther
e were half a dozen rebels huddl
ed around a campfire, trying to keep warm, and most were in rags. He wasn't wearing anything better. I suppose he bartered his jacket for information."
"Whatever." Obviously Norah wasn't listening. Her high cheekbones had become flushed with the first faint sign of her formidable temper. Maddie braced herself.
Norah turned to Maddie in a fed-up way and said, "You know what your problem is, Maddie Regan? You're too damned prim. You're too damned proper. And you're too damned passive."
She handed off the binoculars to Joan and launched into an all-too-familiar lecture. "You assume the Right One will just drop in your lap while you're sipping iced tea on your patio." She folded down one of the box flaps over Maddie's forearm, forcing her to pay attention. "And meanwhile life is passing you by. You've been divorced for four years, Maddie," she added, sounding extremely annoyed about it. "You're almost forty. What're you waiting for?"
Maddie reached into the box and pulled out a hardcover. "I'm waiting for this guy to make the
New York Times,"
she quipped, waving a
Jensen
novel in front of Norah. "He's vastly underrated."
Norah responded with a stony look, so Maddie gave her an honest answer. "I'm not waiting for the Right One
... or the Wrong One
... or anyone, Norah. I have my hands full with all the relationships—"
"None of them sexual!"
"—that I can handle at the moment."
Nudging the cardboard flap open again, Maddie lifted
Philip Roth's
Goodbye,
Columbus
out of the box, and
a novel
by
Orwell
, and Vonnegut's
Cat's Cradle.
This was the summer to
update
the Freshman survey
of
the modern novel
that she taught.
Morrison, Rushdie, maybe even King? Much more relevant.
She'd meant to
revamp the course
last summer, but last summer she was still caught up, along with the rest of her family, in shock. No one did much of anything last summer.