Little Death by the Sea (14 page)

“Oh, Gerry, how awful. Poor Maggie.”

Gerry tore his gaze away from his daughter
and looked at his wife.

“Maybe you were right, Darla. Maybe this job
isn’t such a good thing.”

Darla searched his face and tried to smile
encouragingly.

4

That night, Maggie lay on the guest bed in
her parent’s house and stared up at the white ceiling. Tiny,
fluorescent stars blinked back in a faint constellation painted on
the ceiling. Maggie had never noticed them before.

She had talked to Gerry that morning, she had
talked twice more with Detective Burton, she had looked into her
parents’ eyes as they tried to understand when she told them of
Elise’s murder earlier that evening. She had held her father’s hand
and watched him nod seriously as if she were warning him that the
Dow Jones might plummet soon. She had watched her mother weep
again, nod understandingly as to why Maggie hadn’t called when
she’d discovered Elise, and slam down a hard, impenetrable wall
between them—pushing aside years of love and kisses and shared
secrets.

After all the talking, Maggie had cried.
Alone and without hope. She cried for her sister, who had finally
come home, for the impetuous artist, the wayward daughter, the
recalcitrant single mother. But most of all, for the sister who’d
known her so little but who had, in her way, loved her.

Maggie stared up at the ceiling dusted with
its map of Pegasus and Orion and cried.

The next day, Maggie sat and observed the
child who was perched nonchalantly on a dark velvet hassock with
long, looping fringe. The little girl’s feet swayed against the
soft hanging cords as if they felt good against her bare skin. Her
eyes held Maggie’s unflinchingly. Nicole sat in the middle of the
Newberry living room, a light and cheery place which captured the
sun’s needles of light and spun them into prisms and rectangles of
luminescence. Long patches of sun were placed as carefully around
the room as if an interior designer had ordered them. Maggie felt
almost at peace in this room. She continued to watch the child on
the cushion. Almost.

Nicole’s face, as usual, gave nothing away.
Her eyes, large and implacable, met Maggie’s gaze easily.

“And so, how has Nicole been?” Maggie’s voice
was light, her eyes pinning the girl in relentless scrutiny.
“Everyone’s been sort of upset today.”

The child returned her stare.

“
Grandmére
is very unhappy right now.
Comprenez-vous? Trés triste
?”

“And it’s me who’s done it, you see.” Maggie
reached over to pat out a wrinkle in Nicole’s cotton corduroy
jumper. The child did not move. “Aunt Maggie has made
Grandmére
and
Grandpapa trés triste
. I wonder, do you
give a shit that
Grandmere
and
Grandpapa
are
trés
triste
?” Maggie smiled sadly at the girl who simply continued
to swing her small bare feet into the fringe of the ottoman.

Who is this child
? Maggie wondered.
Will she never come out of the warm little burrow in her mind
and join the rest of us? Is where ever she is, so nice and safe
that we will never know her?
Maggie felt a pressure of added
weight settle about her shoulders as she looked into the blank,
cold eyes of the girl. She leaned over and touched Nicole’s
baby-soft cheek and thought, for an instant, that the eyes
flickered in response.
Am I angry at you, little one
? Maggie
was surprised as soon as the thought hit her—
was it true?
Why
?

Maggie removed her hand.

Was it because Maggie loved Elspeth so much
that she couldn’t imagine anyone else rejecting what she had to
offer as a mother? Or was it because Nicole seemed to be doing
exactly what Elise had always done before her? Which was to reject
the two people that Maggie had held most dear. And the anger that
Maggie had felt at Elise for turning away from them, for hurting
them, was revisited on Nicole, who seemed, in her own way, to be
doing exactly the same thing.

“Darling?”

Maggie turned from the child to see her
mother enter the room and her heart ripped at the sight of her.
Elspeth had had a hard night. Her beautiful face was weary and
lined.

“I’m here, Mother. Can I help do
something?”

Her mother moved into the room in a way that
reminded Maggie of someone gliding up to a dance partner in
expectation of a waltz. Elspeth stood next to the couch, her hands
folded calmly on the back of it. She was wearing a blue silk shift
with no jewelry. Her hair looked impeccable, as if she’d spent some
time with it that morning.

“Has Brownie left already?” Elspeth
asked.

“He left after breakfast. He had to get back
and do some stuff at his place. He’ll call later, he said.”

“I’m sorry I missed him this morning.”

“Is Dad...where’s Dad?” Maggie’s gaze flicked
behind her mother through the door to the hallway as if expecting
her father to walk through.

“He’s gone to the club this morning,
dear.”

“The club?”

“We deal with things differently,
Maggie...”

“Yeah, well, the police will want to talk to
him. And you too, Mother.”

“They said they’d call first.”

Boy, that’s sweet of them
. Maggie was
surprised. She hadn’t realized the police made appointments during
an investigation. She thought they just barged into your life and
started rifling through your things and asked you personal
questions and then accused you of all manner of things you’d never
even dreamed of doing before they put their case together and found
the bad guy.

“You’ve talked with them recently?” Elspeth
asked.

Maggie wasn’t sure her mother really needed
to hear all there was to tell.

“Detective Burton of Hom...of Homicide,” she
said, looking away. “He wasn’t very specific with me.” She
shrugged. “Probably didn’t think he needed to be.”

“I see.”

“Are you going to come in?” Maggie asked.

Elspeth shook her head and tried to
smile.

“I think I’ll read in my room today, darling,
if you don’t mind. Annie will be here shortly to look after Nicole.
How are you, ma petite?”

The child turned and looked at her
grandmother.

“What are your plans for the day,
Margaret?”

Maggie shrugged and felt suddenly very
tired.

“I don’t know. I might go back to my
apartment and pick up a few things. Detective Burton said I could.
They’ve got some people there, I guess, to help me. Then, I don’t
know.” She turned away and smoothed out the creases in her linen
trousers. They belonged to Elspeth. “Probably just come back here.
Maybe I’ll read for a while too.”

There was a brief silence before Elspeth
turned to leave.

“Mom, I’m so sorry I didn’t call you about
Elise.”

“I know, darling. It doesn’t matter.”

“I know it does. I don’t know how I can live
with myself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Maggie. There’s nothing
to be done for it anyway.” Her mother’s back seemed to stiffen
during the exchange as if her body couldn’t lie as easily as her
voice could. “Let’s not talk about it in front of Nicole.”

Frustrated, Maggie nearly blurted out that
they might as well make sure they were out of earshot of the couch
and the Tiffany lamp too. She caught herself and nodded miserably,
her eyes once again falling on Nicole Newberry.

“She doesn’t know,” Maggie spoke the question
flatly, knowing the answer.

“There doesn’t seem much point,” her mother
said. Maggie looked up at her with concern but Elspeth merely
smiled wanly and waved away her daughter’s disquiet.

“I’m off now. If you’ll stay with Nicole
until Annie comes.”

“Of course.”

“Dinner is at six, as usual.”

“Okay.”

Maggie watched her mother’s retreating back
and felt worse than before Elspeth had come downstairs. She looked
back over at Nicole who was also watching Elspeth’s departure.

“She’s very sad right now, Nicole.”

The little girl blinked once and looked at
Maggie.

Was it a malevolent look? Did she know Maggie
cheated her out of her one last chance to see her mother? Did she,
unencumbered by the love and duty that bound Maggie’s parents, feel
free to hate her aunt for her stupidity and selfishness? For surely
selfishness had been a major part of it, Maggie thought. The notion
of presenting Elise to her parents as if she were a beribboned
parcel had loomed dominant in Maggie’s daydreams. Why had she
agreed with Elise that she should hold off her parental homecoming?
Not because she’d been afraid of how her parents would receive a
bedraggled, bedrugged Elise. But because she had wanted them to
believe that she, Maggie, was giving Elise back to them. And
somehow, she felt that Nicole knew it, even if her mother and
father did not.

When the doorbell sounded, it was so gentle
and musical that, for a moment, Maggie thought it was one of the
many house clocks pleasantly, unobtrusively heralding the hour.
Elspeth had a passion for clocks of all kinds and collected them to
the point where her husband had finally forced her to weed them out
of the house. It was true, Maggie thought as she got up from the
heavy Queen Anne’s arm chair to answer the door, Brymsley had begun
to resemble a large and noisy clockmaker’s shop a few years ago.
All the ticking and chiming and onerous hourly and quarter hourly
booming had nearly driven her poor father mad.

Maggie walked to the end of the sitting room
to where two pairs of French doors led out to the garden. Although
not the formal, main entrance to Brymsley, the garden entrance was
the closest portal to the driveway and so the one most commonly
used. Besides, Elspeth insisted that she liked the idea of visitors
enjoying her garden as they walked to the door. She thought it much
friendlier than the tedious, precision-manicured box hedges and
bricked path that led to the front of the house, with its massive
columns and imposing porticoes.

“A little bit of Tara goes a long way,” she
liked to tell her daughters. “The point is not to intimidate
people.”

“Just to have more money than them, that’s
all.”

Elise had never given her mother much
quarter.

Maggie peered through the panel sheers in the
door and, seeing nothing, she pulled open the doors and stepped
outside. Instantly, the warmth and humidity of the morning struck
her and made her catch her breath. The air conditioning had given
her goose bumps up her arms and legs but dissolved upon contact
with the moist Southern air. Maggie stepped out onto the flagstone
patio that curved in a crescent away from the French doors and out
toward her mother’s garden. Her eyes followed the natural line of
the garden which formed a cul de sac of flowering shrubs and
borders, a niche of peace and serenity. A small stone bench sat
nearly hidden among a cluster of spirea, forsythia and camellia.
Vines of thick, glossy English ivy snaked along the ground and up
and over the high drystone wall that contained and cozied the whole
garden. The fragrance from the nearby rose bushes—aggressively
lurching their way up a rickety trellis to the right of the French
doors—was light and sweet on the heavy Georgia air, air so
oppressive with heat that you could almost see it wafting around
you like thick curls of smoke.

Maggie scanned the garden, unconscious of the
fact that she was holding her breath. A blooming bush of American
Beauty roses shook slightly in the corner of her eye. She turned,
her hands still clutching the handles of the French doors, and saw
Laurent standing next to the bush of blood-red roses.

Chapter 9

1

Maggie stood quietly, her breath sucked out
of her. He was wearing a blue jersey with his hands tucked in the
pockets of his tan cotton trousers. His eyes smiled at her, tired
eyes, sympathetic eyes.

“
Zo
,” he said, softly. “I am
here.”

In a fluid moment, she released the door
handles and moved out onto the bricked, terrace steps. Laurent
caught her in his arms and lifted her off the ground. She wrapped
her arms around his thick, sunburned neck and lay her cheek against
his chest. For right now, she didn’t care to see his face, examine
his eyes, hear his story, or mark his changes. It was enough that
he’d finally come.

“
Ma petite
,” he murmured. He held her
very carefully for several moments and then set her down and looked
into her eyes. “I know it is very bad for you now,
cherie
,”
he said. He squeezed her tightly and kissed her on the ear.
“Laurent is here. It will be all right now,
comprends
? It
will be all right now.”

Maggie kept her hands firmly on his arms as
if afraid to let him go a second time. He was so looming, she had
the odd sensation that he blotted out the morning sun at the same
time he brought light into the garden.

“I can’t believe you’re here.” She said.
“After six months of no word, no letter. I mean, don’t they have
telephones in the south of France anymore?” She felt her heart
crumble into his hands as she looked at his handsome face, so
longed for, so well remembered, and loved. “It’s such a rich
place,” she finished weakly, “I’d assumed those would be the first
things they’d get.”

“I told you I would come,” he said, his eyes
probing her face, as if to memorize her features.

“Yeah, I guess you did. Look, where are you
staying?” Maggie asked, glancing behind her to see if Nicole were
still in the living room.

“I stay with you,
mais, bien sûr
!”
Laurent smiled at her and, involuntarily, she felt her heart expand
in her chest in an attempt to encompass her joy.
Bien
sûr
.

“How did you find me? How did you find
Brymsley?”