With Every Breath (35 page)

Part of him was still muddled in how good it felt to wake up beside her. The other part was struggling with what she was saying.

He knew how Leslie would respond.

"Because you witnessed something God-rotten that last day."

But Maddie shook her head. "No. That’s not the kind of feeling it is. It doesn’t feel like a sharp, singular moment of something bad. It feels ..." She trailed off, thinking hard. "It feels pervasive. Like nothing I experienced those first nine years was any good. I can’t remember any of it, Joe. It’s not like I just blocked out that last day. And yet Tony Macari said she—my mother—used to take me to the mainland every weekend. To a hotel. I wonder if I would remember that place? Was I happy then? Tony said those were good times. Why don’t I remember my own house?"

He felt helpless, and he hated it. "I don’t know."

Maddie shuddered. "I don’t know either. But there was something more horrible about those people—my parents—than just that last day, Joe." She trailed off and shook her head. "Maybe they weren’t cold and callous. I know for sure now that I’m not, even if I can’t cry for Rick, even if I didn’t love him. I couldn’t be cold and feel... and feel like ... this."

Everything inside him went painfully still. He was half-terrified that she was going to say the L-word, halfagonized knowing that she probably wouldn’t. Not this woman. She was far too cautious, too careful. Too sincere. She wouldn’t say it until she was absolutely certain of it.

And he knew full well that admitting it to yourself was a whole hell of a lot different from actually speaking it aloud.

He waited. Maddie raked her hands through the sides

of her hair. "I do need to find out what it is ... was ... about them that makes me feel so bad inside," she went on. "Completely apart from the problem with Rick, I need to know now before I can ..." She shook her head, checking herself again. "It’s time now."

His heart thumped. So much unspoken, so much in her eyes. "Could be," he said cautiously, and they both knew he wasn’t necessarily talking about her parents.

"I need to find out what happened to them, what they were.
I need to know who came close enough to me in that house last week to practically touch me, to leave those flowers, who would hate me enough to kill that poor kitten. If it wasn’t Rick, then I can’t ignore this any longer." She looked at him, shuddering. "I need to know now, before not knowing taints everything good that I’ve finally found."

Chapter 28

If Maddie had been resigned to digging into her past on Tuesday, then on Wednesday, Joe thought she was positively driven.

By eight o’clock they had dressed and gathered in the kitchen. When Josh saw that they weren’t immediately going anywhere, he returned upstairs to Joe’s bedroom to watch TV for a little while. Maddie paused to look up the stairs after him, thinking that it was certainly indicative of something that in all the time she’d spent in that room so far, she’d never once noticed the television set.

She sipped more coffee and whipped back and forth, back and forth, down the center of the kitchen.

"Gonna have to work on that," Joe muttered.

She looked at him. "What?"

He motioned with his finger. "Zip, zip. It could drive a man crazy after a while."

Her heart skipped. By some unspoken agreement, neither of them had mentioned a future between them. It was both too soon, and too late. She got the feeling that they were both waiting for this to be over, and she

found she was content enough with that status quo. It gave its own kind of comfort.

Nothing ventured, nothing lost.

"I’m just trying to think," she explained, "and I think better when I’m moving."

"About which particular aspect of this mess?"

"Tony Macari."

"And the hotel."

"Joe, I want to go talk to him."

He drained his own coffee and put the mug in the sink. He’d started this, and he still thought it was a good idea, for reasons of her own safety, and for all the reasons she’d spoken of earlier. Yet his heart did an odd hitch-thump.

Fear. No, just worry, he corrected himself. For her. For what she would find out, for how she would handle it. And, if he was going to be completely honest, for himself, too. Because when this was over, he was going to have to grapple with a few of his own demons and come to some momentous decisions regarding his own life. The more steps they took to end this nightmare, the closer it brought him to that point.

Maddie finally went to collect Josh again. A few minutes later they were back in the Pathfinder, heading north. Today the sun looked cold. The sky was too blue. The sea beneath the bridge was rambunctious, like a child pushing to see how much it could get away with.

Maddie thought that Tony’s house looked much less imposing in the daylight. She realized that a great deal of the difference had to do with the terror she’d been feeling as she’d come out of the dunes the other night to find it looming above her. A day and a half later it was just a house, big enough, attractive enough, but hardly as immense and significant as she’d thought then.

They went up the walkway, Josh between them, and

Joe rang the bell. They heard it echoing inside and waited long enough for a response that Joe wondered if Tony had gone back to the mainland.

The door finally opened. Tony looked momentarily surprised to find them there, then he just seemed wryly resigned. "Come in."

They crowded together into the foyer.

"Is this official business now?" he asked.

Joe hesitated. "Yeah," he answered at length. "More or less."

"Would hot chocolate be in order? Coffee?"

"Please," Maddie said.

They went into a yellow-and-white kitchen, where Tony made their drinks. Corian countertops swept around the room, along both walls, and topped a center island in the middle. Tony brought a pair of stools to the island, and Josh took his chocolate to look out at the inevitable deck outside the glass doors at the back of the room.

Tony brought them their coffee. She watched Joe brace his elbows on the island and got the feeling that he wanted to start this. It was in the tension across his shoulders, in the frown in his eyes as he looked around.

She knew him far too well to have known him such a short time.

"So where exactly were you when all this was going on Monday night?" Joe asked after a moment.

Tony looked amused. "I was right here. Obviously." "And before Maddie turned up?"

"You’re reaching, Chief Gallen," he said dryly. "Think about it, please. I could not possibly have been at Ms. Brogan’s place, assaulting her ex-husband, at the same time I was opening my door to let her in."

"Wouldn’t seem that way, would it?" Joe answered too idly. "Actually, my guess is that he was already pretty dead by the time you opened your door."

Tony hesitated, then nodded. "Touché. I was reading a prospectus for a development down in Lewiston just before Madeline knocked. I spoke to an associate on the telephone perhaps ten minutes before she arrived." "Where was the associate?"

"Lewiston."

"Long-distance, then. At least a toll call."

"That’s right, and it will appear in the telephone company records. I called him. It will also be on my bill."

Joe nodded. He sat up, taking the weight off his arms. "The thing is, what I’m thinking here is that somebody killed this guy maybe by accident. What I’m thinking is that somebody went over to that house looking for Maddie, and found Rick Graycie instead."

"Why would anybody be looking for Maddie?" Tony asked, and Maddie noticed his voice change and tense. She scowled at him.

"Oh, hell, I don’t know," Joe answered. "Maybe to urge her to leave Candle before anything came into her mind about those things that happened twenty-five years ago."

For the first time Tony really looked at her. "You don’t remember?"

"I thought that was pretty much common knowledge by now," she answered self-consciously.

Tony scowled. "You said something the other night about remembering my face. Your amazement at that, and your conviction, make sense now."

Maddie dived in. "There are things that seem familiar to me. Your face was one of them. But I have no memory at all of visiting the mainland with my mother, the way you mentioned."

His face softened noticeably. Maddie and Joe exchanged glances.

"The two of you would come over on the ten o’clock ferry," he explained. "Every Saturday morning until that last one."

Maddie nodded. She swallowed carefully. "What was she like?"

"Your mother? Annabel was beautiful."

Maddie felt her heart beginning to race, though she could think of no logical reason for it.

"You look very much like her, as a matter of fact," Tony went on. "You’re taller, but the hair is the same. Hers was that same dark golden color. And she had a laugh unlike anything I’ve heard before or since. It always reminded me of music."

"You loved her," Joe said suddenly. His voice was a bark, and Maddie twitched unconsciously.

"Few men didn’t," Tony said mildly. "She had that way about her. She had some sort of effect on everyone." "Did you ever act on it?" Joe demanded.

For the first time, Tony seemed visibly angry. "No. I was a happily married man at the time."

"Happily married hasn’t always stopped men before." "It stopped me."

"So what was your relationship with her?"

Tony’s eyes assessed him. "We were friends, Chief. It was as pure and as simple as that. I cared for her, and she needed ... someone. Someone to talk to, I think, as much as anything, although we rarely discussed anything too personal. For all her laughter, there was always something sad about her eyes. I imagine that somewhere, at some point in time, there was a man she did love, and over the years I’ve come to decide that it probably wasn’t Beacher Brogan." He flashed an apologetic look at Maddie. "But it wasn’t me, either. Whoever it was, his loss saddened her. But she had grit. She went on without stumbling."

Maddie looked at Joe. "So maybe she was meeting

someone on the mainland, she suggested a little breathlessly. "Maybe I knew it, and it made me unhappy, and that’s why I don’t remember."

But both Joe and Tony shook their heads.

"I would have noticed something," Tony said. "She always devoted her time to you during those weekends. At Minnamini Hall."

"If she was meeting someone, she wouldn’t take her kid," Joe muttered, and something in his eyes shifted. Maddie knew he was thinking about the way they had spent the last two days dodging Josh’s awareness of what they were up to. Something quickened in her stomach.

"But I could have been a ... a foil," she pushed on. "If she took me along with her, then my father wouldn’t be suspicious."

"I don’t think so," Tony said again.

"Then what did we do over there?" she cried.

"You came to my store, and I gave you candy. We’d chat for a little while, then you’d go on down to the Hall. After that, I’d see you about town here or there, shopping and whatnot. Annabel would wave and smile." He was quiet for a moment, obviously lost in memory. "On Sunday morning you’d take the turnaround trip of the ten o’clock ferry to go home."

"Where’d she get that kind of money?" Joe demanded suddenly. "Annabel wasn’t rich. She was just like all the other Wick folks, like just about everybody else on Candle. They get by because their needs aren’t great. Minnamini Hall doesn’t fall into that price range. The last I heard—"

He broke off, remembering uncomfortably that he had taken the Jonesport almost-girlfriend there once at the very end, and it had turned into a fiasco.

"It starts at something like one hundred and seventy-five

a night," he went on awkwardly. "Even allowing for inflation, it would still have been dear back then." Maddie was too preoccupied to pick up on his discomfort. She nodded, scowling.

"I paid for it," Tony said abruptly, and his voice hardened as though daring them to make something of it.

"You
did?" Maddie repeated, shocked. "Why? Why would you do such a thing if you weren’t..." She trailed off, oddly unwilling to say it. Having an affair with her.

"Because she needed it. And because you needed it. The first couple of weekends she stayed at the motor inn. I changed that. I wanted to, and even then, I could afford it."

"What did your wife say about it?" Joe asked bluntly. Tony gave a tight smile. "She didn’t know."

Joe raised a brow.

"My company paid for it. My wife wouldn’t have understood. As you clearly don’t." He looked between them again. "It’s not human nature to do something for purely altruistic reasons. It does happen, however. And I did love her. She touched something inside me. I wanted to see her comfortable and happy."

"And you didn’t expect anything
in return?" Joe asked caustically.

"No. I did not."

Maddie felt herself going breathless again. "What about me? Why did you do it because of me?"

"You were often bruised. I suspected that Annabel was trying to get you away from a hostile situation, but I never asked, and she never said."

"Bruised?" Maddie repeated, reeling.

"On one occasion, I remember you had a black eye. Annabel did make mention of that. She said you’d had a tussle with one of your little friends. I’m not sure I believed it."

Something inside her quaked. "You’re thinking it was my father, aren’t you?" she guessed. Angus had said something like this, too, she realized despairingly. Your pa hit me. Hit you. What kind of bastard had the man been? "Why can’t I remember?" she cried suddenly.

Over by the deck, Josh jumped at her tone. Joe put a hand on her thigh, squeezing.