Twilight

  “Mary?” I called out, when I was nearly finished.

  The answer yodeled back from somewhere nearby in the woods. “Over here, Jenny!”

  “Could you help me a minute?” I shouted back.

  Rustling from the direction of the dry creek bed announced her arrival. “What can I do?”

  “Sorry to interrupt your picnic.”

  “I’m eating so slowly you’d think I had all day.” She smiled at me, and I saw gratitude mixed in. “It’s so relaxing being out here, much nicer than gobbling something at my desk as I usually do.”

  “Or eating creamed chicken at a banquet?”

  She grimaced in agreement. I told her what I wanted, and she promptly went and stood in the narrow area of grassy verge between the woods and the highway. I wanted to indicate how little space there was for a margin of safety before a hiker or biker stepped or ran or rode out onto the asphalt, and I needed a human body to do that. In the time it took to point and shoot three times from three different angles, I was all finished, and I released Mary to the rest of her sandwich.

  She surprised me by coming back before I’d even had time to complete the task of removing the roll of film from my camera and placing it back in its little gray plastic tub.

  I looked up. “That was quick.”

  Mary looked chagrined. “Squirrel stole the other half of my sandwich.”

  “Oh, no!” But I had to laugh. “I’m sorry.”

  She, good-natured soul that she always was, laughed, too. “Nobody takes my sandwiches off my desk.”

  “I should think not.” I mock-shuddered, teasing her. “Who’d want them? It looked disgusting. Did you catch the thief in the act?”

  She shook her head. “Didn’t even leave me the cellophane.”

  Mary led our way back along the trail to city hall. As I watched her smooth stride, I thought what a graceful woman she was in so many ways. Before we parted—she to attend a water board hearing, and I to head home—she said, “If I’d been mayor then, this trail never would have gone through Port Frederick. It would have stopped at one edge of town and started up again at the other.”

  I asked her why.

  “Because it bothered me then and it still bugs me about how the railroad, the state, the county, the city, we all broke our contracts—legal or moral—with those people who owned land along the trail. It seems to me the very least that people ought to be able to expect from their government is that we’ll keep our promises to them. The very least.”

  Uneasiness rolled through my stomach.

  Hearing Mary, I sensed how important it was that she win at least one more term. Ardyth Kennedy, in charge of our hometown? With crooked Pete Falwell as the power behind her? No. I only hoped I wouldn’t personally cause that nightmare to spring into life.

  “It’s a wonderful trail,” Mary was saying, and we both gazed back where we’d been. We’d had it all to ourselves—except for the egg-salad-loving squirrel. A couple of times I had looked back, thinking I heard the noise of another hiker about to overtake us. But no one had, and so we’d been able to talk in complete, outdoor privacy. “I’ve nothing against it, per se. It’s just that it was built on stolen land, that’s all.”

  We eyed one another.

  “That’s all,” I echoed ruefully.

  During our hike, the wind had changed direction, coming now from the east, blowing the wood smoke away, bringing a sharp, salty moisture from the sea beyond the city. In another month, it would be snow.

  I hugged her in farewell. “Stay warm.”

  The mayor laughed. “No problem.”

  From the open door of my car, I yelled one last thing at her: “Hey, Mayor! Ever heard of the Ghost of God’s Highway?”

  “Hear of him?” she called back. “He steals things all the time from out of our cars! I should have warned you to lock yours! If I ever catch him, he’s a dead man!”

  “Mary! A ghost already is a dead man!”

  She was laughing as she waved me off.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t have any more work to do on the festival that day; only that I could do most of it from home. Ah, the joys of self-employment. One quick stop at the drugstore to leave off my film for overnight development, followed by a race through Judy’s House—“Did it get here?” “No, Jenny.” “Everybody doing okay?” “Yes, Jenny.” “Anybody need anything I can get for you?” “Not right now, Jenny, thanks.” “No crises?” “Not a one.” “Are you sure there’s nothing—” “Good-bye, Jenny!”—and off I toodled home in my little white Miata convertible, top up, briefcase full of tasks, body full of aches, head full of worry, heart basically quite happy, soul content.

  I looked forward with a shiver of luxurious anticipation to having the house all to myself for a while before Geof got home. I planned to strip, soak, slip into my terry-cloth robe, pour a glass of wine, fix a snack, put Bach—or Bonnie Raitt—on the stereo, and spread out my papers at the kitchen table, with a phone beside me. Maybe, if I got lucky, my husband would take pity on me and offer to do all the cooking this evening.

  Insurance notwithstanding, life was good.

  If only I could have insured that.

  We live outside the city limits of Port Frederick, down a dirt and gravel road, in a stone and timber house with chimneys and a slate roof. It has a Germanic, old-world charm in its woody setting on its cliff beside the sea.

  I love our house, I am passionate for it.

  Geof found it for me, at a time when I desperately needed the shelter of its—and his—arms. Ever since, the property has been our hobby and our refuge.

  Tiredly—though I hoped a shower and food would revive me—I stashed the Miata in our detached garage and trudged up our back walk to our kitchen door.

  Which was open.

  Through the screen, I saw a black ski jacket draped over one of our kitchen chairs.

  “Oh, hell,” I said and limped in.

  The knee had started to throb again when the analgesics began to wear off, and by now it was a full-fledged, if relatively low-toned, drumbeat of pulsing pain. Maybe it was ice I needed, rather than the heat of a tub.

  In the kitchen, an empty half-gallon ice cream carton melted the last of my favorite mint-chocolate-chip into the sink where some of it lay congealed in brown puddles. There was a fork stuck down in the carton. For some reason, the poltergeist preferred to eat his ice cream with forks instead of spoons, and he never used a bowl. Maybe that was good—no dish to wash. No dish for us to wash.

  I put my own stuff down before I rinsed out the ice cream carton, and then put it in the trash. The fork went in the dishwasher. I poured myself a glass of water—instead of wine—to wash down two more pills and slipped off my shoes.

  “Ah,” I sighed. My calves felt tight from their hike, but it sure hadn’t helped much of the rest of me. You wouldn’t think—I thought—that a brief tumble to the cobblestones could wrack and ruin a body, but then the body in question wasn’t a kid anymore, or an athlete accustomed to being tossed to the ground, I wanted to shrug it all off, felt, in fact, like a baby for even complaining, but dammit, it hurt. I thought about Pete saying to Cleo so coolly, “Oh, she’s all right.” Well, I was, but it was unforgivable of him to be so much more concerned about the possibility that I would sue him. There were worse things I could have sued him for, if my own family would have let me pursue it.

  Tougher than I looked, was I?

  At the moment, that seemed in doubt.

  I looked across at the black ski jacket.

  Maybe I could slip upstairs without seeing the poltergeist, assuming he was still in the house. By the presence of the jacket, I assumed he was, though I wondered why I hadn’t seen his battered old BMW motorcycle in our driveway. Maybe he really wasn’t here. I brightened right up and started to shuffle toward the door that led into the rest of the house.

  “Thanks a lot, Jenny!”

  The deep, carrying voice of an angry young man came floating down the stairs to me.
On repetition, it sounded even closer.

  “Thanks a whole hell of a lot!”

  I kept quiet. Whatever was bugging David Mayer this time, maybe it would pass before he reached me. But no. Into the kitchen he barged, all six feet of muscle and bone and dark ponytail and teenage skin and furious hazel eyes of him. David slapped a Port Frederick Times down on the kitchen table and glared at me as if I’d crashed into his beloved motorcycle.

  “Is that this evening’s paper?” I inquired.

  “You’re damn right it is. You’ve read it, right?”

  “Read it? David, I just got home. I haven’t even looked at it.”

  I should have asked, “Why?” but I didn’t want to know.

  He picked up the newspaper and thrust it at me. Reluctantly, I took it, seeing that it was folded back to reveal something on the editorial page. Even before I saw the headline, my blood began to boil and my heart to sink, if such a thing is physiologically possible.

  JUDY, JUDY, JUDY.

  That was the headline.

  I groaned, slumped.

  Remember how Gary Grant made that line famous in the old movie? In print, like that, above an editorial, it looked like a reprimand. As indeed it was, I saw, as I read the damn thing. The Times was slapping my hands in print. All about how the insurance hadn’t come through for the festival, and about how many “civic and philanthropic hopes and dreams” were riding on said festival, and about how a certain “young foundation director and her all-female board of directors, including our Mayor,” appeared to have taken on much more than they could handle. You’d have thought I was seventeen instead of thirty-seven, and they made our board sound like an all-nude review, with Mary in the role of star stripper …

  And now, “sources suggested,” the same women of the Judy Foundation were even thinking of messing with God’s Highway, everybody’s favorite nature and hiking trail …

  How unfortunate, they implied, that in this great country of ours anyone, even persons with “possibly more money than sense,” could start a charitable foundation …

  And if we weren’t careful we would make Port Frederick the laughingstock of New England …

  “This won’t,” the paper closed, “be a case in which Port Frederick throws a festival and nobody comes. It could be much, much worse than that: We may find that everybody comes … but that we’ll have no festival to throw!”

  I continued looking down at the paper as I thought about it, rather than looking at David. I could, maybe, have anticipated this print attack, because Peter Falwell had extremely close and long-standing ties to the publisher’s family. But I could not have predicted David’s reaction to it.

  “That’s my Mom’s name.”

  I looked at him then and saw he was so angry he had tears in his eyes.

  “My Mom! You said if I let you name your foundation after her it would honor her memory. You said it was a respectful thing to do. You said”

  I let him rant on about what I’d said, not trying to defend myself. It was true. I had said those things, I’d meant them, I still did. We had, indeed, named the new foundation in honor of David’s late mother. Judy Mayer had lived a sad, injured, too short life that wasn’t strikingly different from the lives of altogether too many girls and women. I had asked David’s permission—asked it over and over to make sure, very sure that he agreed—to allow Judy’s name to become our symbol of hope for people who needed help. Under her name, we planned to offer what help we could to people—of either gender—who were suffering her fate of early abuse and early death. It was one of our admittedly lofty aims. He’d been hesitant about the idea at first, then clearly excited and proud.

  “Everybody will laugh at her now!” he railed at me.

  Actually, outside of Geof and me and David and my board of directors, nobody knew who “Judy” was, a relative anonymity I had suggested to David, even though he had at one point been so enthusiastic about the name idea that he had argued with me that we should call it the Judy Mayer Foundation. Now, although I was glad I’d won that argument, I didn’t want to say, “I told you so.” If anybody outside of our little group knew the real identity, it would be because David had told them. I wondered if he had—in a moment of pridefulness—and if that was, in part, what was fueling his distress.

  He had a right to be upset, I felt.

  It was his mother’s name they were mocking.

  Even if I hadn’t done anything to deserve the tongue-lashing, I knew David had to let his feelings loose on somebody, since he wasn’t quite mature enough yet to know what else to do with them. His longing for his mother—dead almost two years now—was also hidden between the lines of his rage. I could have used logic to stop him, could have said, “David, I double, triple-checked this out with you, and you gave your approval, you thought it was a great idea.” But it was my experience that you couldn’t apply logic to emotion, as if it were balm to a wound. Logic, for all its appeal, only served to make angry, hurt people feel even more betrayed.

  There was also the suddenly worrisome notion that maybe I had misled him. Perhaps he wasn’t old enough to make an important decision like that, maybe as the adult of the two of us, I was the one who should have known better.

  In my silence, David was getting all wound up to demand the removal of Judy’s name from our foundation—a nonpossibility at this juncture, in my view—when we both heard the Jeep crunch over the gravel and roll into the garage.

  Geof was home.

  Instantly, David was stilled.

  He looked confused. Still hurt. Still furious with me. But now, the Man was home. Of all of the welcome miracles that could have occurred in our odd little household, it was increasingly clear to Geof and me that one miracle that really was occurring was that the kid desperately wanted—needed—the lieutenant’s respect.

  And he wouldn’t get that if he were caught verbal abusing the lieutenant’s wife.

  I could almost see the sequence of thoughts go through David’s mind. He shut up. Licked his lips. Sniffed. Touched his ponytail. Shifted his weight. Got his breathing calmed down.

  Avoided looking at me.

  7

  WHEN GEOF WALKED IN, I WAS BY THE SINK, FILLING A GLASS WITH water.

  “Hi, boys and girls,” he greeted us.

  “What are you doing home so early?” I asked him.

  He looked tired, I thought, but his smile came easily, for both David and me. He seemed pleased to see both of us, and to see us apparently at ease with one another. He didn’t answer my question, but he did come over to tilt my face up so he could kiss it. I returned it with a fervor that made him look into my eyes for a private moment.

  “Are you all right?” he asked me, too quietly for David to hear.

  For a moment, I thought he’d overheard the kid, after all.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Those bastards!” Geof said, at normal volume, looking as angry as David had earlier. And then I realized he’d seen the paper. That’s what he meant by asking me if I was all right. The sweetie. He’d come home because he was worried about me.

  “You must have called the office?”

  “They said you were here. Do you know that MATV is trying to reach you?”

  Our local television station, he meant.

  “It’ll be on the machine, probably.”

  “If it rings …”

  “I don’t want to talk to anyone yet, not until I figure out what to do about the editorial.”

  “How could those bastards do that? It’s their town, too. You’d think—”

  “That’s just it,” I said, looking into his eyes. “They do think it’s their town.”

  The kid was being suspiciously quiet through all this.

  I glanced over at him.

  Geof turned, including David in his attentions. “I’ve been cheatin’ on you, Dave.”

  “Goddammit,” David responded, but this time it was mock outrage. “You’ve been messin’ with my new game without me
. You said—”

  The cop grinned. “Policemen are not your friends. If it’s any consolation to you, I’m already stuck on the first level.”

  Of a computer game, he meant.

  It had become their meeting ground … in our dining room … at the computer Geof had sacrified to the cause of connecting with this haunted boy. The computer was now apparently permanently installed there, with all of its attendant wires and modem and printer and discs on our dining room table, with two chairs pulled close together in front of it for Geof and David. Geof had really clicked this time, with a Star Trek Twenty-Fifth Anniversary game. The kid was a fan of the TV series.

  Oh, well, it wasn’t as if we ever really needed the table for anything else, as we were so happy by ourselves we almost never had company or went anywhere unrelated to business, unless maybe to a movie.

  By ourselves …

  Somewhat wistfully, I watched the two tall, broad male backs disappear from the kitchen. I was tempted to feel a little left out. But then Geof appeared again in the doorway. “Did it arrive this afternoon?”

  I shook my head.

  David’s voice called Geof back into the dining room before he got a chance to start telling me what I should do about my insurance problem. Left out? At that moment, I felt downright grateful to the kid for stealing Geofs attention away from me.

  Sure enough, when I checked our telephone answering machine, there it was, along with commiserating, incensed messages from my poor beleaguered board members:

  “Jenny? This is Susan Bergalis at MATV. We’d like to get your response to the editorial in tonight’s paper. We can do it live tonight at six and run it again on tape for the eleven o’clock. Please call me as soon as possible!” She left her beeper number.

  I sighed, craving that hot bath, though my knee felt better.

  Susan was a young producer I knew—and liked—at the station. She was smart and fair, and since the festival was a constant source of news bits for her, I knew she thought it was great. We’d always gotten along fine. Which wouldn’t, I suspected, keep her from crucifying me if a story required it.