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“Just wait. Before long, you’ll be bigger and more grown-up. He won’t be able to block stairways then. He’s just taking advantage of your age. You’ll see. Just wait.”

It was going to be a long, painful wait, though. Pam knew that the instant Hillary dropped her at home and she ran inside to find a note for her from Patricia. She and John had already left.

“Darling, John is right,” the note read. “You really shouldn’t go skiing for the first time on such short notice. If you want to go that badly, John says he’ll take you himself another time. I’ve called the Claflins and explained. They understand. Laurie says she’ll call you when she gets home Sunday night. Don’t worry about the things you bought. I’ll have Marcy run down and return them next week. I hope you had fun with Hillary. Don’t wait up. I’ll be late. See you tomorrow.”

Pam crushed the paper in her hand. “No. No!
No!
” She yelled it a few more times before storming through the house. Hettie had long since left, and Raymond, the butler, was nowhere in sight, which was just as well. She didn’t want either of them. She wanted Marcy.

Following the smell of starch, she found her in the basement laundry room ironing shirts. “Do you know what he’s done?” she cried without preamble. “He canceled my trip! He convinced Mom that I shouldn’t go! Why did he do that, Marcy? What harm was it to him if I went? I don’t tell him what to do with his life. Why does he have to tell me? He won’t ever take me skiing. I don’t care what he told Mom, or what she said in the letter. He won’t ever take me skiing. He’s never taken me anywhere, and anyway, I wouldn’t want to go with him.” She stood for several seconds with her feet braced wide, breathing hard as she struggled to find a reason for the change in her plans. “Know why he didn’t want me to go today? Because he said no. That’s all. He said no when I first mentioned it, and he wants his word to be law. There was no one here to argue when Hillary and I went shopping. He’s a snake, Marcy! It isn’t fair!”

Marcy moved the iron slowly over the white collar that lay flat on the padded board. “Life isn’t, sometimes,” she said at last.

“Well, it should be,” Pam argued and turned back toward the stairs. “I’m calling my father. If he says I can go, I’m going.”

“Pammy?”

Pam paused with her hand on the wood rail. “What?”

Marcy just looked at her in a sad, sage way.

Dropping her hand from the rail, Pam slowly came down again. “I should. It would serve John right.”

“It would rile him.”

“That’s
his
problem.”

“No, it’s yours. If he gets angry, your mama will, too. Even if you go skiing, you got to be back here with them come Monday morning. You’ll pay for the fun then.”

But they both knew that was only one of the reasons Pam wouldn’t call Eugene. The other had to do with a twelve-year-old’s instincts about what would and would not help her parents’ foundering marriage. As always, thoughts of that set Pam’s stomach to churning, which in turn made her snappish.

“I don’t care. I want to go skiing.”

“Now you’re being stubborn.”

“So? If John can be, so can I!”

“But you’re better than him.”

“If that’s so, why is my mother with him much more than she’s with me?”

“B’cause he knows about the business. He’s your daddy’s assistant, kind of.”

“But I’m her daughter. I need her sometimes, too.” Her anger began to fade. In its place was worry. Slipping onto the stool by the ironing board, she said, “It’s awful, Marcy. Sometimes I say things to her, and she smiles and nods but she doesn’t hear me. I can be talking about school, and ten minutes later she’ll ask me how school is.”

“She loves you.”

“Maybe, but something’s happening.” She looked bleakly at the shirtsleeves Marcy was straightening. “Maybe they’ll get divorced.”

“They won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“B’cause your mama likes being married to your daddy.”

“You wouldn’t know that to hear her talk. It used to be that she was upset when Daddy was angry. She isn’t anymore.”

“She got used to it.”

But Pam had another reason. “She has John now. He probably convinces her that it’s better for Daddy to be in Maine, just like he convinced her that I shouldn’t go skiing. Why does she listen to him, Marcy?”

“B’cause he’s got the answers for the things she’s asking.”

“But why doesn’t she ask my father those things?”

“B’cause he’s in Timiny Cove.”

“She could call him. If she wanted to, she could. I think it’s gotten so that she likes being with John more.”

“But she loves your daddy. There’s a difference.”

“They’re never together.”

“But when they are, it’s not so bad.” Marcy paused, pulled a cuff straight, pressed the iron down hard. “I’ve seen bad. I know.”

Pam remembered the screaming she’d heard. “At home?”

Marcy moved the iron back and forth over the cuff. Then she set it on its end and turned the cuff over.

“Marcy?” After another moment’s pause, she said, “Is it really bad in your house?”

The iron began moving on the reverse side of the cuff. “It’s bad.”

“How? What happens?”

After a pause, Marcy said, “They fight. Mama goes back and forth to the factory—”

“Why doesn’t she work at the mine?”

“B’cause that’s men’s work.”

“I could do it. Daddy’s shown me how. I could do it.”

“But you won’t, b’cause it’s men’s work.”

“I don’t believe that. If women can do what men do, they should be able to get the job. I’m going to be president of St. George Mining someday.”

“Did your daddy tell you that?”

“He tells me I can be what I want, and that’s what I want.”

“What about John?”

“What about him?”

“He’s already there. Won’t the company be his?”

“I’ll fire him. That’s the first thing I’ll do. The second will be to hire your mother. She can do sorting and matching.”

But Marcy was insistent. “Mama won’t do nothing different from what the other women do, and they don’t work at the mine. B’sides, she doesn’t mind the factory. She gets paid enough so there’s food on the table, even if there isn’t much left over for anything else.”

She paused then, and Pam was quiet, too. She could see the sadness on Marcy’s face, a face that didn’t usually reveal too much. What it told Pam now made her wonder just what Eugene had meant when he’d said that Marcy had seen the bare side of life.

“Is that what makes things so bad?” she asked cautiously. “Not having money for things?”

Still ironing, Marcy tipped her head to the side. “It’s one of the things.”

“What’s the other?”

“Him.”

“Your father?”

“He’s not my father. My father died in Korea. Mama married Jarvis a couple of years after that.”

“Is he Tommy and Lizzie’s father?”

She nodded. The iron hissed a breath of steam. “Wouldn’t know it. He hits them, too.”

“He spanks them?” Pam had never been spanked in her life. She’d been yelled at, but never spanked.

“Not spanks,” Marcy clarified. “Hits. Sometimes he’s drunk, sometimes he’s not. But when he does it, he does it hard.” She hauled back an arm in demonstration.
“Bam!”

Pam flinched. “Did he ever hit you that way?”

“Lots. That’s why your daddy took me to live here soon as I could leave school.”

Pam hadn’t known. She felt awful. “Oh, Marcy.”

“It was worst for Mama. I could run away from him, but Mama, she never did have so much strength after Lizzie was born. She’s all tired after work, and he wants somethin’ to eat. If she doesn’t get it for him fast enough . . .”

“He hits her?”

Marcy nodded. “And yells. And throws things sometimes clear across the room.” She snapped the shirt from the ironing board, shook it straight, and reached for a wire hanger. “That’s what bad is.”

So now Pam knew, and, as Marcy had intended, it made her feel less sorry for herself. Although there were arguments in her house, there wasn’t any hitting, yelling, or throwing. Patricia wanted dignity and peace nearly as much as prosperity.

Thinking about it that night, curled up in her bed, Pam had a lot to be grateful for. True, she hated John. But she loved her mother. And she adored Eugene, who was kind and gentle and wasn’t anything like Jarvis Willow. Maybe Marcy was right—maybe her parents weren’t going to get a divorce; maybe they were comfortable just living apart like they did.

None of her friends’ parents lived that way.

But there were some advantages to it. Like the tourmaline crystals Eugene had taught her to love, her life was dichroistic, glowing in one color, then the next as the light turned. When she was in Boston, she was the lady her mother wanted her to be. She went to a private school with her friends, took dancing lessons and piano lessons, went to Saturday morning classes at the museum, which she loved, ate at the best restaurants in town, and went to the ballet and the theater. There were times that she felt she was playing a game, but since she did it well, she didn’t mind—especially since she could then turn around and go to Timiny Cove, take the satin ribbon from her hair, put on jeans and a long shirt, and do all the fun things Patricia might not like.

She couldn’t imagine living in Timiny Cove without returning to Boston. Nor could she imagine it the other way around. Maine was her salvation. It was where Eugene was. It was where everyone knew her and liked her, and she knew and liked everyone. It was small, close, like family.

It was also where Cutter was.

Chapter 6

T
HERE HAD NEVER BEEN A TIME
when Cutter Reid hadn’t known the name St. George. He’d been born and raised in Timiny Cove, and though his father had been kicked off the company payroll soon after Cutter’s birth, St. George Mining was too visible a presence in town to be ignored. That wasn’t to say that Cutter respected it. He didn’t respect much of anything, and, being his father’s son and his own worst enemy, not much of anything respected him.

In 1965 Cutter was sixteen going on twenty-eight, if being street-wise counted for anything. His father had drunk himself to death when Cutter was nine, and his mother had whored her way into an adjacent grave soon after. From the age of thirteen, Cutter had fended for himself. He had worked at odd jobs until he quit or was fired, had gone to school only when the truant officer came looking, and had committed enough petty crimes to firmly establish himself as one tough kid. He’d spent more than his share of nights in the local jail and had managed to avoid a serious conviction only by the skin of his teeth.

That was why, when Eugene St. George tackled him in the trash alley behind Paquette’s Luncheonette, he wasn’t expecting an ounce of mercy. Having helped himself to the contents of the cash drawer at the gas station in the center of town, he suddenly found himself being chased not only by the attendant Judd Stuckey but by Eugene St. George, who had stopped for gas.

Cutter cursed himself for not recognizing the large, dark blue Lincoln, but it was raining so hard that visibility was next to nil, which was one of the reasons he figured he could get away with the heist. Even when Eugene caught sight of him and jumped from the car, he wasn’t concerned. He was younger and lighter than Eugene; he could outrun him. But one block into his escape he knew he was in trouble. March was mud season in Maine, and with the rain pouring down, footholds in the mired earth were precarious at best. Unable to stay on the pavement, which would have led him straight through the center of town and past dozens of pairs of curious eyes, he had to take the back paths. That was how he found himself sprawled face-down in the mud in the trash alley beneath Eugene’s large frame. He barely had time to catch his breath when he was hauled up by the collar.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doin’, boy?” Eugene roared. He was panting from the run, but the exertion hadn’t dulled his indignation.

Cutter wrenched his body to the right, a move that should have taken Eugene by surprise and secured his freedom, but it didn’t. Eugene hung on tight.

“Got him,” Judd gasped, coming around the corner at the fastest his gimpy left leg would allow. “Who—Cutter Reid, you no-good thug!”

Cutter wrenched to the left, but Eugene’s hand was like steel around the collar of his drenched jacket and shirt. Still he struggled, trying to head-butt his way free, and when that didn’t work, he kicked. But Eugene’s superior size and bulk—and cunning, it seemed—had him down in the mud again before Cutter knew what had happened. This time, a knee was pressed sharply to his groin, holding him still. Eugene fished inside Cutter’s soggy clothes and came up with the cash that Cutter would have denied he’d taken.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, the trash alley was suddenly filled with more people than it had seen in days. Most notable among them was Verne Walker, Timiny Cove’s police department.

One look at Cutter’s muddy face and he said wearily, “What’s he done this time?”

There was nothing weary in the way Judd held up the money Eugene had recovered. “He stole from me, the dirty rotten thief! You gotta do somethin’, Verne. He’s gettin’ bolder ’n’ bolder. Just walked in and took the money from the cash drawer. If it hadn’t been for Eugene, he’d a got away.”