Shore Lights (19 page)

 
FOR A SECOND Maddy didn't recognize the name. She was so deeply engrossed in trying to back herself out of the mess she'd made with the film clip that FireGuy's message languished in her in box with the offers of barn-yard frolics, work-at-home schemes, and six chain letters from one of her idiot cousins who really should know better.

She was about to reach for the phone and call her old office mate Stanley for help when FireGuy's subject line caught her eye.

“Oh, for God's sake,” she said irritably as she clicked on the message. “Give it up already. I won, you lost. It's over.”

She hit Send.

Live and learn. Another example of a nice guy morphing into a jerk without help from Industrial Light and Magic. All that talk about his perfect daughter and the hundred-year-old grandmother who just had to have that teapot under her Christmas tree, and it was just some kind of con to either snag the samovar or a quickie on the beach.

“Jerk,” Maddy said, exiting her e-mail program.

And she wasn't just talking about FireGuy.

 
“MY KIDS DON'T know how lucky they are,” Gina said as they waited for the school bus to deliver their kids to the corner of Main Street and Paradise Point Lane. “They still think they can do anything they set their minds to.”

“My kid thinks all she has to do is show up for a handful of ballet lessons, and she'll be playing Clara in
The Nutcracker
next Christmas.” Pat rolled her eyes skyward. “Wait until she finds out she can't dance.”

The laughter was loud but not unkind. They had all seen Pat's oldest at the last recital, a girl who invariably danced right when the rest of the chorus danced left.

If you stacked their unrealized dreams one atop the other, they would reach the tip of the steeple at Our Lady of Lourdes around the corner. Gina wanted to be the next Vidal Sassoon and Denise wanted to be Picasso. Delia sang Friday nights at Franco's-by-the-Sea and dreamed of being the next Diana Krall. All but Maddy had wanted children.

“What did you want to be?” Gina asked while they shivered against the fierce wind off the ocean. Once again the smell of snow was in the air, heavy with dampness and salt and promise.

Maddy busied herself adjusting Priscilla's tiny collar. “Me? I wanted to grow up to be Madonna. Same as every other girl in South Jersey.”

They laughed just the way they were supposed to, but Gina wasn't buying it.

“Really,” her cousin persisted. “What did you want to be? An actress? A dog trainer?” More laughter. Priscilla was beginning to get a reputation as a problem child. “I could tell you what every single one of us here daydreamed about and longed for, but when it comes to you, I haven't a clue.”

“Neither have I,” Maddy said, and for once there was no laughter. “I always wondered what I'd be when I grew up. The trouble is, I'm grown up and I'm still wondering.”

“Rose was always bragging about what a great accountant you are,” Pat offered, neatly sidestepping Denise's warning nudge.

“Nobody dreams about being a bean counter,” Maddy said.

“Come on,” said Denise, “admit it, Mad: you wanted to be a ballerina.”

Maddy assumed fifth position, which looked fairly comical in her L. L. Bean boots. If she had a quarter for every time well-placed laughter had saved her butt, she wouldn't have to work for her mother.

Pat launched into a story about her mercifully brief career as a receptionist at the Mangano Funeral Home, whose motto was “We help your loved ones rest well,” and before long nobody remembered that Maddy had never really answered Gina's question.

Give me another twenty or thirty years, Gina. I might have an answer for you by then
.

Conversation rose and fell with a rhythm born of familiarity. They knew each other's history. They knew who and when and how many times. They either were family, had been family, or would be family next time around. Only Maddy remained outside the circle. They loved her and she loved them, but they didn't know her. Maybe they never had. She had spent all of her summers growing up with her father and Irma in Oregon, far away from the beach parties and clambakes and sultry nights at Wildwood, sheltered from parental eyes.

And even now, they knew she wasn't here to stay, that this was just a resting place while she tried to figure out what to do next. Paradise Point was home to them in a way it never had been for Maddy and probably never could be. They never fought its hold on their hearts, while Maddy had been planning her escape almost from the day she was born.

The fifteen years she had spent on the other side of the country trying to fit in were only bits and pieces of gossip to her cousins, tidbits gleaned from scribbled postcards and conversations between their mothers and aunts. She had worked hard to lose her Jersey girl accent and her decidedly East Coast ways, but even after she had turned herself into the perfect Seattle citizen, she knew she would never really belong.

But her cousins didn't know that and neither did Rose. They thought she had fled to the West Coast, shedding her accent and outlook somewhere over the Rockies and never looking back.

She had wanted to love Seattle. She had wanted to settle in and feel her roots growing deep and long. She was her father's daughter, after all, and Bill was a man who couldn't be happy anywhere east of the Rockies. She had friends, a good job, a nice apartment. And for a long time she had Tom. A man whose history was happily entangled with the explosive growth of the Seattle economy and outlook. He opened doors to a Seattle Maddy hadn't known existed. She met the right people, some of the wrong people, and everyone in between, and still she felt as if she was only passing through.

Puget Sound was beautiful, but it wasn't the Jersey shore. The harbors and seaside towns were quaint and picturesque, but they couldn't compare to the scrappy little survivor of a town where she had grown up. She missed the briny smell of the ocean creeping through her windows on sunny autumn mornings. When Hannah was still nursing, Maddy used to sit in a rocking chair near her bedroom window and watch the play of lights against the darkness of the water, and she would find herself longing for Paradise Point. By that time she knew that she would be raising Hannah alone, that once again the mystery of a happy family life had managed to give her the slip.

It wasn't as easy as she had believed it would be. If the one you loved didn't love you in the same way, with the same depth of emotion, if that person didn't share your hopes and dreams, you might as well get used to the fact that you were in it alone even if you kept right on believing in happy endings until he went off and found one of his own.

“Is Claire coming to pick up Billy Jr.?” Denise asked nobody in particular.

“Doesn't look like it.” Delia inclined her head toward the opposite side of the street. “Looks like Aidan's on school-bus duty again.”

He had just turned the corner from Church to Main, limping slightly but without the cane Maddy had seen him with that morning. He had a large brown envelope tucked under his arm.

“So he doesn't need his cane all the time,” she said to Denise as she untangled Priscilla's leash from around her ankles.

“No,” said Denise, her gaze assessing as she looked from Aidan across the street to Maddy. “It's been a long haul for him. He's lucky he can walk at all.”

Maddy watched him as he paused for a moment in front of the print shop, then disappeared inside. What would he be doing in a fancy print shop that specialized in frou-frou invitations and personalized stationery heavy on pink and fuchsia? Sure they had faxes and copy machines and scanners, but—

Wait a minute! Was it possible? Could Aidan O'Malley be
FireGuy
?

“WHAT'S WRONG?” DENISE asked.

“Did that dog of yours bite you?” Pat usually gave Priscilla a wide berth.

Maddy picked up Priscilla and thrust her at Denise. “Watch her,” she said. “And watch Hannah, too, if I'm not right back.”

She dashed across the street, dodging an oncoming Chrysler driven by an old lady who obviously didn't believe in stop signs. She hadn't grown up on Nancy Drews for nothing. The clues were all there. The one wonder was that it had taken her so long to add them all up.

He had a daughter who was both saint and scholar. He lived in Paradise Point. He even had an ancient grandmother.

She'd told FireGuy to scan the photo and e-mail it to her, and, less than an hour later, there was Aidan O'Malley leaning across the flower-strewn counter of Le Papier, talking to the lovely Olivia Wentworth, who had bought the shop—a former insurance office—with her divorce settlement. Olivia's dark eyes twinkled with amusement as she spoke with Aidan. Maddy couldn't see what Aidan's eyes were doing, but if body language was any indication, he was doing a fair bit of twinkling himself.

Not that it was any of Maddy's business.

The brown envelope she'd spied tucked under his arm was clutched to Olivia's voluptuous chest. The woman could make a manila envelope look like it held Victoria's secret.

Not that that was any of Maddy's business, either.

Olivia had moved down the shore from New Hope, Pennsylvania. She had sold her half of a thriving antique shop to her ex-husband, then plowed the proceeds into this high-priced paper boutique. Maddy had met Olivia last week at the December meeting of the Paradise Point Women Business Owners Association. Rose had insisted Maddy attend in her place and get to know some of the other entrepreneurs in town. Rose believed in the sisterhood of businesswomen, that together they could accomplish ten times more than they ever could toiling in isolation.

It seemed to Maddy that there was precious little isolation in Paradise Point and even less in the way of privacy, but, when it came to business, Rose was rarely wrong. Olivia was a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman of about forty who had apparently ignited an unprecedented explosion of interest in personalized stationery among the men in town.

Olivia glanced up and caught Maddy's eye. She actually looked happy to see Maddy, which meant that either there was nothing romantic going on between Olivia and Aidan or Olivia was one great tradeswoman.

“Hi, Maddy.” Olivia's smile was wide and bright. Gina claimed the divorce settlement had included a new smile and a boob job, but so far there was no proof of either. Olivia might just have been born lucky. “I'm afraid Rose's thank-you cards won't be ready until tomorrow afternoon.” She shrugged her shoulders and Maddy had to struggle to keep from staring as the shock waves animated her cleavage.

Aidan turned around and he smiled at Maddy. “How much longer until the bus pulls in?”

“Six minutes,” she said. “How's Claire?”

“Swollen like a chipmunk,” he said, blowing out his right cheek to illustrate. “She's zonked on Percoset.”

Olivia, who had been watching the two of them closely, cleared her throat. “Give me a minute,” she said to Aidan with a warm but businesslike smile. “This should scan beautifully.”

Maddy felt like high-fiving herself. She waited until Olivia disappeared into the rear office.

“I knew it,” she said.

“Knew what?”

“FireGuy.”

It took him a second but not much longer. “JerseyGirl?”

She didn't know whether to laugh or hit him over the head with a bar mitzvah invitation. “You're scanning the photo of the teapot.”

His shoulders were so wide they blocked her view of the artful arrangement of baby announcement cards on the counter. He hadn't seemed quite this huge outside.