Man With A Message

“About your plans for the gold,” he said. “Aren’t you all going home for the summer?”

“Yeah, but Ashley doesn’t have parents, you know. She just has a guardian and he’s pretty old. She never gets to stay home with him. He sends her on trips with people she doesn’t know and she hates it. They think she doesn’t know, but he’s going to die pretty soon.”

When Cam looked down at him, not sure what to say to that, Brian added with a shrug, “We hear the teachers talking. She’s going to have to go live with somebody else. My mom’s a movie star.”

Cam had difficulty focusing on the plumbing and the conversation. “No kidding?”

“No. She’s very pretty, but she’s always on a movie set somewhere far away and I stay with the housekeeper. Pete and Repeat’s mom and dad are stunt people and they’re working with my mom in a movie right now. In Mongolia.”

“Pete and Repeat?”

“The twins.”

“Ah.”

“They’re really Pete and Philip, but their dad calls ’em ‘Pete and Repeat.’ Now everyone does. Their dad jumps off cliffs and out of airplanes and over waterfalls. Their mom once jumped out of a building on fire! I mean she was on fire. ’Course, the building probably was, too, or she wouldn’t have been. She had a special suit on so she wouldn’t get burned. Cool, huh?”

“I’m not sure I’d want to be on fire, even in a special suit.”

“Jessie and her sisters’ mom wants to take them to New York with her to visit a friend of hers. So they don’t want to go home for the summer, either.”

“Jessie and her sisters are those four dark-haired little girls who all look alike?”

“Yeah, only they get smaller and smaller. Like those toy things that fit into each other. You know?”

Cam had to grin at him. The kid had such an interesting little mind. “Yeah, I know. But what’s wrong with meeting their mom’s friend? New York’s a very exciting place.”

“He’s a guy.”

“Well, so are we. Is that bad?”

Brian seemed to like being considered a guy. Cam had to remind him to hold up the light.

“It’s because their mom likes him and they don’t want another dad.”

“What happened to the first one?”

“He and their mom got divorced.”

“Ah. That’s too bad.”

There was a moment’s silence, then Brian announced, “I don’t have one.”

“What? A father?”

“Yeah. I never had one. And he didn’t die and my mom’s not divorced. I mean, he’s probably somewhere, but he’s not my dad.”

Cam nodded empathetically, catching the significance of that detail from the boy’s tone of voice. Brian wanted to adjust to that fact but still hadn’t.

“I had a father,” Cam said, carefully applying pressure to the wrench. “But he was drunk a lot and most of the time it was like I didn’t have one.”

“Did he beat you up?”

“No. Most of the time he didn’t remember I was there.”

“Did you have a cool mom?”

Cam wasn’t sure how far to carry this empathy. He wanted Brian to know he wasn’t alone in an unfair world, but he wasn’t sure what it would serve to tell Brian it could get worse than he knew.

“No,” he replied simply. “She was gone most of the time.”

His mother had been out of jail only three weeks when she and a male friend had been picked up for armed robbery. Cam and his siblings had had the misfortune of being with her at home at the time, their father passed out on the sofa, beer cans and a bottle of whiskey beside him.

With their mother going to jail and their father deemed unfit to raise them, he and his siblings had been placed in foster care. He’d argued zealously that he’d taken care of himself and his brother and sister most of his life—that all the other times his mother had gone to jail his father had also turned up drunk and Cam was the one who had cooked and done laundry and gotten himself, Josh and Barbara off to school.

No one had cared about that. Their grandfather had died, their grandmother was in a nursing home and the three Trent children were placed together in foster care with a middle-aged couple who lived in the heart of the city.

Deprived of the choice of how to live his life, Cam became bent on destroying it. Fortunately, he’d been caught with a few of his friends holding up a restaurant while the owner was closing. A few months in juvenile hall had turned him around. Foster care seemed like heaven after that.

“My mom’s always in another country ’cause of the acting thing,” Brian said. “What’d yours do?”

“Ah…” He had to think to recollect what had identified her place in his life besides the drugs and the jail time. “She worked in a furniture factory.”

“She drink, too?”

Cam was so surprised by the question that he stopped what he was doing to focus on the boy.

Brian shrugged. “It’s a statistic that a lot of people who drink do it with a husband or wife or boyfriend.”

Cam was sure that was true but he wondered how the boy knew. “Who told you that?”

“My mom’s in rehab a lot.” It seemed to be something he had accepted. “It happened one time in the summer, and the housekeeper took me to visit her. We had to sit in at this meeting about families of substance abusers.”

Cam had never known the politically correct term because there’d been no one to take him to meetings.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re going out to the truck. Remember to keep your hands off the switches.”

“We going to the shop or something?” Brian asked excitedly, taking the lead with the flashlight.

“No. I’ve got pipe in the truck.”

They reached the third stair from the bottom and Brian leaped down, the carpet squishing as he landed. “So, is it cool to be a plumber?”

Cam could feel his soaked shoes and socks and jeans and smiled into the darkness. “Oh, it’s way cool.”

CHAPTER THREE

MARIAH’S SISTER WAS BESIDE herself with worry when she arrived at the emergency room. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed, swiping a white curtain aside to come to Mariah’s side. “Are you all right?”

Mariah sat up, fine except for pain in the bump at the back of her head. She explained briefly about Brian’s search for gold and the resulting deluge.

Parker shook her head sympathetically. “That kid’s going to blow up the world one day.”

Mariah sighed. “He’s the sweetest boy, but I’m going to have to build a cage around him for the safety of the other children.”

“And you. Do you have a concussion?”

“Just a mild one. The doctor’s worried, though, because I passed out.”

“You passed out? Did you stop breathing?”

“I’m not sure. I dreamed…” She put a hand to her throat as she recalled a drowning sensation, as if she was falling into a well, unable to draw in air. “Someone gave me…mouth-to-mouth,” she explained, remembering with abrupt clarity her grave disappointment when the face bent over her wasn’t Ben’s but that of some stranger’s.

Some stranger she’d just kissed with the desperate need she’d never revealed to anyone.

Someone whose eyes said that he’d felt that need in her.

Bitter disappointment over the loss of her babies, the loss of her marriage, the loss of her mask of stoic courage, had all required that she punch his lights out.

“Oh, God!” She put a hand to her face and groaned.

“Nurse!” Parker shouted.

“Sh!” Mariah lowered her hand and placed it over Parker’s mouth. “I’m fine! I just…just remembered something.”

“What? You looked as though you were going to slide right off onto the floor.”

“I…I was just thinking about the cleanup at the dorm.” Mariah frowned apologetically. “I’m sorry, Parker, but the doctor won’t let me go home tonight if there isn’t someone to watch me. Can you take me home with you, just for tonight?”

“Of course! It’ll be fun. I just made carrot cookies.”

Mariah tried to look pleased at that. As much as she loved her sister, she had very different opinions about what defined a comfortable environment. Parker was a naturalist, earth-mother sort of woman; Mariah’s approach to life was much more traditional.

Parker had a heart of gold, but her sofa was a red vinyl banquette from a Japanese restaurant, and two hammocks suspended from the ceiling constituted her bedroom.

All of a sudden Parker smiled. “Who gave you mouth-to-mouth?”

Mariah closed her eyes again, shuddering as she recalled her poor display of gratitude. His face had been familiar, but she couldn’t quite put a name to him. “I think I’ve seen him at school, or around somewhere….” And then she sat up as it hit her. In the kitchen at the Manor, talking to the man in charge of the renovation.

“He’s part of the construction staff at school,” she said.

Parker’s smile waned. “I was hoping he was young and handsome.”

Mariah was confused. “He was young. And if you like that rough look, he’s handsome.”

Now Parker appeared confused. “But I have regular appointments for all the Ripley Construction guys, and the youngest one’s in his late forties. Three brothers and two brothers-in-law.”

“Guys who work construction,” Mariah asked in disbelief, “get massages?”

Parker shifted her weight impatiently. “Well, of course they do. Massage is very sensible. They sling around heavy stuff all day long, reach and bend. It’s very forward-thinking of their boss to see that they have weekly appointments.”

“This man was probably in his early to middle thirties,” Mariah insisted. “And…” Her attention drifted for a moment as she recalled waking up and looking into his eyes—a soft hazel. “His eyes were hazel.”

“Cam Trent?” Parker said, suddenly animated again. “The plumber? I know he’s the plumber on the job because my office is near Whitcomb’s Wonders. I’ve gotten to know all the guys a bit.”

“Whitcomb’s what?”

“Wonders. Guys who can do anything.” Parker hugged her as if to congratulate her. “He’s gorgeous! And smart. He’s getting an MBA from Amherst. Wants to be a developer. Addy told me all about him.”

Parker was so enthusiastic that Mariah had to put a stop to her sister’s considerations of romance immediately. “Well, he’s not going to want anything to do with me. I hit him.”

“You what?” Parker was as horrified as Mariah had hoped.

“I hit him. When I woke up, he was half lying on me, kissing me—or so I thought. By the time I realized he was just…well…I’d already hit him.” She wasn’t being entirely honest, but it was all her sister had to know for now.

The doctor reappeared with a bottle of painkillers on the chance that her headache worsened.

Parker took them from him and introduced herself.

The doctor held up two fingers and asked Mariah how many she saw. When she answered correctly, he asked her name. He listed three items, then asked her to repeat them. She did.

He told Parker to wake her every four hours to test her awareness. “If she seems confused or uncertain, bring her back in.”

Parker drove home to her duplex across the street from the grade school. She held Mariah’s arm solicitously as they walked from the car to the front door.

“How’s the head?” she inquired as she unlocked the door.

“A little woozy,” Mariah admitted, “but not awful.”

The lock gave, and Parker pushed the door open and reached in to flip on a light. Sheer fabric festooned the living room, leading from a ring in the middle of the ceiling and catching in drapery loops in each corner of the room. Large, colorful pillows lay strewn around the Japanese-restaurant banquette—her sister’s creative approach to a “conversation area.” A filigreed cage held a fat aromatic candle, which Parker went to light as Mariah eased herself onto the banquette.

“Lavender and chamomile for serenity,” Parker said as the wick caught flame. “In fact, if we mixed chamomile with oil of basil, it’d probably be better for you than whatever’s in here.” She rattled the bottle of painkillers. “But I’ll get you water for your pill, and I’m sure you’ll feel better before you know it.”

Mariah wanted to believe that. Much as she loved her sister’s company, she always felt as if she was in purdah with the rest of the harem when she came here, waiting for the sultan to make his nightly choice of woman.

“I know you hate the hammocks.” Parker’s voice drifted back to the living room as she disappeared into the kitchen. She returned with a glass of water and the bottle of pills. “So we’ll sleep down here. You can have the couch and I’ll use the beanbag. Want a cookie?”

“No, thanks.” Mariah sat up to take her pill, then handed back the water. “There’s no reason for you to stay downstairs, Parker. I’ll be fine.”

“No, you might need me.” She put the glass and pills on the low table and sat beside Mariah. “This happens so seldom that I hate to miss it. You’re usually the one who rescues me.”

Mariah stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned sideways onto Parker’s shoulder. “A little financial help now and then hardly constitutes rescue.” Mariah had sent her sister money when her first husband had run out on her and left her owing back rent and many overdue bills. Parker’s second husband had supported a mistress on the side with money Parker made waiting tables while she went to school to learn massage. He, too, had abandoned her when the mistress’s former boyfriend came looking for him.

“You have to make better choices in men, though,” Mariah said sleepily. “Stop supporting them and find someone who’ll work with you for a change.”

Parker put an arm around her and sighed. “I know. It’s just that all that sunshine and harmony we got from Mom and Dad really sank in with me. You were more resistant. You’re probably a throw-back to Grandma Prudie, who loved them both but was convinced they were crazy.”

Grandma Prudie had been their father’s mother, an Iowa farmwife who related to the earth, all right, but only because it bestowed the fruits of an individual’s labor. She thought her son and his wife’s belief in the earth’s unqualified bounty, in man’s intrinsic goodness and life’s promised good fortune were poppycock. And she’d said so many times before she died.

Mariah had loved her parents’ generous natures and their obvious delight in everything, but she’d never been able to understand such innocence in functioning adults. Until she’d finally grasped that—whether deliberate or simply naive—it brought them aid from everyone. Neighbors admired their sunny dispositions and gave them things—firewood, a side of beef, help with bills—so that they could maintain a lifestyle everyone else knew better than to expect. This had confused Mariah for a long time, until she concluded that it was still proof of man’s basic goodness—his willingness to support in a friend what he knew he couldn’t have for himself.

“I feel that my life’s been very blessed,” Parker continued, “and that I have a lot of blessings to return. So I try to help those in need.”

Mariah yawned. “Yeah, well, some people are just in want, Parker, not need. It’s noble to help, but not to let yourself be used.”

“I know. I’m off men for a while. How ’bout you?”

“I’m off them forever.”

“That isn’t healthy. You want children.”

Mariah sat up to frown at her. “Park, have you missed the last year of my life? I’m not going to have children.”

Parker took advantage of the moment to place a pillow on the banquette and reach into a bamboo shelf for a folded afghan. She pointed Mariah to the pillow and covered her with the crocheted blanket.

“I know you’re not going to give birth to them, but there are other ways to get them. Just because Ben wouldn’t do it doesn’t mean you can’t do it on your own.”

Mariah was about to shake her head, then decided that would not be a good idea. She simply placed it on the pillow, instead. “I don’t want them anymore. It’s just all too much trouble. Children should have two parents, and men are just too determined to form a dynasty, you know?”

“Well, Ben was. But that doesn’t mean they all are.” Parker’s voice suddenly changed tone from grave to excited. “And a gorgeous plumber has just breathed life back into you! It could be fate has plans for him to give you more than simply oxygen.”

Mariah groaned and leaned deeper into the pillow. “Park,” she said, her sleepy voice muffled. “Don’t even start.”

She drifted off to her sister’s reply: “Sometimes, Mariah, fate moves whether we’re ready or not.”

HANK WHITCOMB HAD ARRIVED to work with the cleanup crew. Cam met him in front of the carriage house while carrying his tools back to his truck. He’d long ago walked Brian to the Lightfoot ladies’ residence on the other side of the campus, where they’d taken all the other children when the water cleanup had proved too noisy and disruptive for them to stay. It was 2:00 a.m.

Talking with him was a small, very pregnant dark-haired woman with a camera around her neck and pad and pen in the hand she held up to stifle a yawn. She was Haley Megrath, Hank’s sister, and publisher of the Maple Hill Mirror.

She and Hank came to his truck as he set his tools down on the drive.

“Hi, Cam,” Haley said with another yawn as she walked past him toward the steps. “You’d think people could have their crises during the day, when plumbers and reporters are awake, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, you would. Maybe the Mirror could launch a campaign toward that end.”

She waved and kept walking. “I’ll see what I can do. ’Night, guys.”

“I’ll wait for you and follow you home,” Hank called after her.

She turned at the top. “I’m fine. Go home to Jackie.”

“I’ll buy you a mocha at the Breakfast Barn on the way.”

She grinned. “Okay. Who cares about Jackie.” She blew him a kiss and disappeared inside.

Hank opened the lid of the truck’s toolbox for Cam. “One of our more dramatic messes,” he said with a laugh. “Hey, Freddy!” He patted the back window as Fred’s head appeared. The dog was barking excitedly. Hank leaned an elbow on the side of the truck as Cam put away his tools. “I hear you rescued Mariah Mercer from drowning.”

Cam shook his head. “That’s a little overstated. Brian—one of the kids—held her head out of the water. I just carried her to a bed.”

“Where you gave her mouth-to-mouth and she French-kissed you.”

Cam frowned. “No, she didn’t.”

“Yes, she did. Ashley told me.” Hank grinned. “She’s thrilled about it. She adores Mariah and thinks it’d be wonderful if she could find a husband.”

Cam gave Hank a shove out of his way as he dropped pipes into the back. “Yeah, well, I don’t think Mariah Mercer has designs on me. After she kissed me, she slugged me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Probably a reaction to the bump on the head, or something. No big deal.”

“So I can tell my mother you’re still on the market?”

Cam opened the passenger side of the cab to let Fred out, the gesture half practical, half vengeful. The dog leaped on him elatedly, then went right to Hank, who always had treats in his pockets. Fred backed Hank up to the side of the truck, his paws on his chest, alternately kissing him and barking a demand for treats.

Pinned to the truck, Hank reached into a pants pocket. “How big is this guy going to get?” he asked, quickly putting a biscuit in the dog’s mouth. “He doesn’t beg—he just mugs you for what he wants!”

“I’m not sure. I guess some Labs get to a hundred pounds or more. Jimmy didn’t tell me that when he sold him to me.” Jimmy Elliott was a fireman and another of Whitcomb’s Wonders.

Treat in his mouth, Fred ran off around the side of the carriage house.

“You must be beat,” Hank said. “You have a class in the morning?”

“In the afternoon. I’ll be fine. I’m a little wired, actually. Letty brought us coffee and I don’t think she bothered to grind the beans.”

Hank took a key out of his jacket pocket and offered it to Hank. “Why don’t you go take a look at the lake house,” he suggested. “You and Fred can even sleep there if you don’t want to go back home tonight.”

Cam tried to push the key away. “Hank, I appreciate the offer to buy your house. There’s not a place in town I’d like better. But I keep telling you—I don’t have the cash.”

Hank nodded. They’d argued this before. “We’ll find a way to keep the payments way down.”

Hank had married Jackie Fortin, the mayor of Maple Hill, a brief two months ago. In doing so, he’d acquired two little girls, ages seven and eleven, and infant twin boys. He’d bought the big house on the lake as a bachelor, but now found that the old family home Jackie occupied was closer to school for the girls, and closer to city hall for Jackie and for Hank, since the office of Whitcomb’s Wonders was located in its basement.

Cam had mentioned once at a party Hank had held how ideal he thought the house was, how warm and welcoming after his cramped apartment behind the fire station.

“We’ll put a balloon payment at the end,” Hank said, “and by then you’ll be a well-known developer. Since you have plans to save our colonial charm rather than replace it with malls and movie-plexes, you’ll be popular and make big bucks.”

“That’s a little optimistic.”

“It never hurts to think positive.” Hank took his hand and slapped the key into it. “Even though that hasn’t been your experience in the past. You have control now. You’re not dependent upon neglectful parents, and you don’t have to worry about a selfish wife. Do what you want to do.”

Cam was touched by his concern and grateful for his support. “You’re pretty philosophical for a NASA engineer-turned-electrician. You didn’t get zapped tonight while standing in all that water, did you?”

“No.” Hank grinned and braced his stance as Fred came running back to them. “I’m charged on life, pal…charged on life. Oof! Go look at the house. Fred needs room to run. And someday you’ll want to think about getting married again and having children.”

Well, he was right about Fred needing room to run, anyway. Cam closed the dog in the car, said good-night to Hank and the cleaning crew still working, waved at Haley, who photographed them, then headed for home. But somewhere along the way he took a turn toward Maple Hill Lake and Hank’s house on the less-populated far side of it.

He pulled off the road onto a private drive that led through a high hedge, and into the driveway of the two-story split-level. He would look through it as Hank suggested, get the notion of buying it out of his system. Then he could just settle down, keep working and going to school so that he could finally achieve the goal for which he’d come here. He wanted an MBA behind him before he bought the old Chandler Mill outside of town and turned it into office space and apartments.

He’d talked to Evan Braga about it, and he thought the idea was sound. Braga was another of Hank’s men who did painting and wallpapering, and sold real estate on the side. He’d been a cop in Boston and had come to Maple Hill for the same reason Cam had—to start over. He hadn’t said why and Cam hadn’t asked.

Anyway…if he was going to buy a house in Maple Hill, it should be one of the classic salt boxes or Georgians that were such a part of the area’s history.

But he loved this house. From the moment he’d arrived at Hank’s party all those months ago, he’d felt as if the house had a heartbeat.

He let himself in and flipped on the light in the front room. Fred stayed right beside him intimidated by the new surroundings. As Cam walked from room to room, he became aware of details he hadn’t noticed before. The master bedroom had a fireplace that was also open to the bathroom, which had two sinks and vanities, a sunken tub and greenery growing all around it. It was probably what a Roman bath would have looked like. He could imagine lying in the tub after a particularly grueling and dirty day in the pipes, and being warmed by a real fire. Here was a tendency toward hedonism he didn’t even realize he had. Each of the three bedrooms upstairs had a private bath.

He walked back downstairs to look around outside and Fred went wild, running through the tall grass that rimmed the lake, chasing imaginary quarry in the dark. He stopped to sniff the air and bark his delight to the woods across the road.