Maggy's Child (23 page)

Maggy made a face, but other than that didn’t reply. What reply could she have made? If there had been any possible way to do it, she, too, would have flown to Nick so fast that no one would have seen her feet for the dust. But there was no way.

“I’ve got to go now. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay longer,
Tia.
”

“That’s all right, dear. I understand.”

She didn’t, not really, Maggy knew. Though Jorge had suspected that Maggy was not happy in her marriage, she had never told him even so much as a fraction of the truth. There was nothing he could do to help her, and she saw no point in upsetting him. He had so enjoyed the change in his financial circumstances that her marriage to Lyle had made possible. Even being able to afford a daily paper had been, for Jorge, something to savor. How could she have put a damper on his pleasure? The answer was, she couldn’t. And after Jorge’s death, she had never told
Tia
Gloria, either. The woman’s continued concern for
her was based on a sixth sense rather than any actual knowledge.

“I’ll try to come again soon.”

“I know you will. Maybe we can talk, the next time.”

Tia
Gloria stepped aside so that Maggy could pass through the doorway. As Maggy went quickly down the stairs, the older woman followed.

Nick’s low rumble mingled with other voices from the living room. Maggy breathed a sigh of relief as she slipped through the hall, past the living room doorway, to the relative safety of the kitchen.

“Are you sure you won’t change your mind about Nick?”
Tia
Gloria whispered with a jerk of her head in the direction of the living room.

“I’m sure,” Maggy said, kissing her soft cheek. “Give Horatio an extra peanut for me, would you?”

“Sure.”
Tia
Gloria followed her to the door. “You be careful, Magdalena, you hear? Maybe Jorge wasn’t just talking about your wrist.”

“I will. Bye.” With a wave, Maggy headed across the rocky beach toward the dock. She wanted to be safely on the river before Nick missed her. She had had all of him she could take for one night.

Tia
Gloria stood in the doorway until Maggy had
The Lady Dancer
under way. Chugging away from the dock, Maggy waved again at the small figure silhouetted against the light.
Tia
Gloria waved back, and then at last closed the door.

Maggy was surprised at how bereft she suddenly felt. She was all alone in a small boat on the river on a cold, dark night. Such a circumstance had never bothered her before, but it bothered her now. She was lonely and afraid.

Maybe that was because of the note. Though it was foolish, she could not help feeling her father’s presence when she thought of it. Was he truly looking out for her from the afterlife?
Tia
Gloria was firmly convinced that it
was so. Being around someone with such strong convictions could sway even the staunchest nonbeliever, and Maggy was never that. Her Catholic childhood had predisposed her to believe in all manner of otherworldly mysteries and miracles. And on some few occasions,
Tia
Gloria’s messages had hit the nail squarely on the head. Like the time when the note had read, “Sickness will strike your house,” and David had come down with chicken pox the next day. But, Maggy reminded herself, anything, from a cold suffered by Louella to Virginia’s heart trouble, could have qualified as sickness striking her house, thus fulfilling the prophecy. Or the time when the message had said, “Good news will come to you,” and Sarah had called to say that she had found Maggy’s diamond engagement ring on the sink in the bathroom of the guesthouse, when Maggy had been sweating bullets in case Lyle should notice that she had lost it. But again, that message had been vague enough that almost any positive event would have made it seem to come true. The notes were always vague, always ambiguous, and if she thought about it, did not this undermine their credibility most of all? If her father were truly watching out for her, and if he could see into her future from where he was, would he not write something like, “Don’t worry about the diamond, it’ll turn up?” Yes, he would. Of course he would.

Not that Maggy thought that
Tia
Gloria deliberately intended to mislead anyone with her forays into the spirit world.
Tia
Gloria sincerely believed that Jorge spoke through her pen. Intellectually Maggy knew better. But still some part of her, some gullible, yearning part, wanted to believe.

“Danger is at hand. Beware of harm …” Remembering the warning that Jorge had supposedly sent this time, Maggy felt a chill run down her spine. Danger was Nick, and harm was Lyle.… The thought popped into her mind as full-blown knowledge given to her on some intuitive level.

Hogwash. Poppycock. Bullpatties. But still, she shivered again, unable to help it. Then she scolded herself: how idiotic could she be, to give credence to such drivel? Maggy deliberately called to mind the fifteen-year-old palm reading that had told her that she would marry happily and have six children, five of them boys. She dredged up the memory of the tarot cards that had foretold a life lived far from the place of her birth. She thought back on a prediction based on the leaves left in the bottom of her teacup that had told her she would be divorced or widowed within the year—made seven years ago. None of them had come true.

Nonsense. It was all utter nonsense, and she knew it. She thought back over the further psychic misfires of
Tia
Gloria and her friends and thus almost managed to shake the mood of dread that threatened to overwhelm her.

Automatic writing, indeed. That was about as likely to happen as her ill-wish toward Lyle at the golf tournament had been likely to come true.

How foolish could she be? The answer was, pretty foolish, apparently. But still, despite her inner bravado, she could not totally shake the sense of foreboding that circled her looking for a weak spot in her defenses like a hungry beast hoping to home in for the kill. She steered
The Lady Dancer
toward Windermere and blamed her edginess on the dark spookiness of the river at night. Whose nerves wouldn’t be on edge, with a ghostly moon floating high overhead and a cold wind whipping white froth into the waves and showering her with icy spray? Who wouldn’t see ghosts and goblins in silvery-white clouds running before the moon, and in the shifting of the dappled moonlight on the water?

A less imaginative soul than she, that was for sure.

Thus she tried to laugh at herself, as she made the crossing. Still, it was a relief to reach the dock, to tie
The Lady Dancer
up and get away from the river.

Going up to the house, she didn’t have to walk through
the woods. Instead she followed the road, and then the driveway.

By the time she reached the house, crept around back, and climbed back up to her window, she was feeling almost herself again. Tired, a little nostalgic, but normal.

Automatic writing, indeed … she even managed a rueful smile at the thought as she slithered through the casement window like a snake, to end up lying on the floor of her bedroom on her stomach.

“You stupid, lying little bitch! Where the hell have you been?” a voice growled out of the darkness not far above her head. Lyle’s. Maggy recognized it and was galvanized, scrambling to her hands and knees in a panic, eyes straining against the thick gloom of the room to see …

She never even made it up off her knees before he kicked her brutally in the ribs, and she went down.

T
he next morning Nick stood in a cold gray drizzle for almost two hours, but she didn’t come. The dogs remained in their kennels, unwalked. They were restless, two enormous rough-coated beasts stalking the confines of their runs, barking occasionally. Like him, they were growing impatient, waiting for her.

It wasn’t like her not to come. The information he had on that point was specific as hell: Mrs. Forrest always walked her dogs between six thirty and seven in the morning. His own experience bore that out.

So where was she?

He paced the woods, enumerating the things that could have delayed her. Perhaps she was merely sleeping in; after all, it was Sunday. Though from earliest childhood she had been a lark, not an owl, and she had not stayed out particularly late the night before, not if she had gone straight home, which he was willing to bet every hair on his head she had. He himself had gotten in no later than midnight, and that was after turning down
Tia
Gloria’s offer to drive him home and waiting for Link, summoned via car phone, to fetch him.

So exhaustion from her late night was out.

Maybe she was sick, though she had been fine just a few hours before. And Magdalena had always been healthy as a mule. No, he would lay odds she was not sick.

Maybe she was avoiding him.
was possible. More than possible, probable. After all, she’d run out on him, left him stranded at
Tia
Gloria’s. He wasn’t happy about it, and she would know it. She would also know that he was not so easily gotten rid of, and that he would be in the woods this morning waiting for her. But more than that, what might keep her away was the way they’d connected again, last night. Before he’d made the mistake of kissing her. Big mistake, that. Nick acknowledged it to himself with a grimace.

He hadn’t meant to do it. But she’d made him angry, and then there she’d been in his lap, and the temptation had been too great to resist. He’d been burning for the taste of her mouth, for the feel of her body against his, ever since he first laid eyes on her again in the Little Brown Cow. She had kissed him as if she felt the same. For him, the kiss had been mind-blowingly good—until she started to fight. He had scared her, no doubt about it. Scared her silly. But hell, who could have guessed that she would react to the touch of his hands and mouth like a cat with its tail caught in a door?

Magdalena had once been hot as a chili pepper for him. Who the hell had scared her of sex?

The answer was obvious, glaringly obvious, even if it made him boil with anger to consider it. Had Lyle Forrest, the sick son of a bitch, turned his perversions on Magdalena?

If Forrest had, he would kill him.

But Magdalena was a fighter, the fightingest woman he’d ever known. Pinch her ass and you’d get a punch in the nose for your trouble. Grab a tit and you’d lose the use of a couple of fingers for life. He couldn’t see her as a victim. Magdalena had too much fire, too much spirit, too much sheer guts, to be a victim.

At least, she did twelve years ago. Had something happened to her since?

But he was ready to swear that she hadn’t changed that much. Oh, there were differences, but they were all on
the outside. She might wear fancy clothes and talk with a soft, refined accent that he found alternately annoying and wildly sexy, but inside she was still the same fiery-natured little girl from the projects. The same spit-in-your-eye, curse-you-up-one-side-and-down-the-other hellion.

He’d back his Magdalena against half a dozen Lyle Forrests, any day.

What was keeping her inside the house?

He smoked a cigarette, swore, and smoked another one. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was nine thirty. Almost time for her to be leaving for church. She and old Lyle always went together, with his mother and their boy. Sort of a family tradition. Even as Nick pictured it, his mouth twisted into a sneer.

The image was as pretty as it was false. Magdalena didn’t belong in it.

She belonged with him.

It was hard to imagine Magdalena as an ice-water-veined Episcopalian, too, but that was what she had become. Because the Forrests had been Episcopalians since they had first dirtied their aristocratic boots on the shores of this country some three hundred years before. To be one of them, Magdalena had had to shed her Catholic skin.

He was starting to despise the Forrests collectively, instead of just hating Lyle.

He shifted his position so that he could watch the front door. The chauffeur drove up in the navy Rolls, right on schedule. The front door opened—and the mother emerged, leaning on her daughter’s arm. Lucy Drummond, the daughter’s name was. A big woman, she towered over her shrunken mother, holding her arm, helping her carefully down the stairs. Both women were dressed in their Sunday best, complete with hats. Two other, younger, women and a man emerged from the house in their wake. He recognized them only after a few seconds of careful scrutiny as Lucy’s husband, Hamilton Drummorid,
and their daughter Sarah. The fourth woman was Buffy McDermott, his date of the night before, shamelessly abandoned when he had left the party without a word.

Nick hunched his shoulders, stuck his hands in his pockets, and withdrew farther into the trees as he waited for Magdalena to join them.

The chauffeur got out of the car and came halfway up the stairs to take the old lady’s other arm. The mother was helped into the car, the women slid in after her, Hamilton Drummond joined the chauffeur in the front seat, and the door of the house shut with a moneyed click on them all. Seconds later, the Rolls pulled away.