The Forever Stone (2 page)

The wipers swished back and forth across her windshield, clearing portholes in the sluicing rain.

Runn-ing a-way. Runn-ing a-way.

Madeleine gripped the steering wheel. No, she was hurrying towards a new life. She was going to share her aunt’s Great Adventure and find one of her own. Did she have the courage to make it happen?

She shifted gears and sent her red Grand Am past a lumbering truck.

First, get rid of the emotional baggage—the grief and the fearful memories. Leave them behind. She had to.

Second, do a fantastic job for Aunt Lin and save every penny she earned. The time she’d spent studying art and working at the antique store would come in handy.

Third, take one of those baking courses she’d been dreaming about.

The rain became a fine mist, and veils of fog rolled down from the Virginia hills. She changed lanes to join the slower traffic, watching for tail lights ahead of her.

Had it been like this for Brenn when he’d driven off the road into the fog? Why had her husband been up on the Parkway at that time of night, anyway? No one knew, and she hadn’t wanted to find out.

The trunk of a glistening white Cadillac—an older model—appeared directly in front of her. No lights. Foolhardy.

Just as she had been, to marry Brenn in the first place.

Jettison
those regrets. She’d always savored that word, with its Anglo-French roots. It implied a difficult action: heart-breaking, perhaps, but needful to save your life.

The Cadillac’s lights flashed red, and she slammed on her brakes.

Her car slid forward, tires squealing, ricocheted off the Cadillac’s bumper, screeched along the guard rail, and stopped.

Warning lights glared on the dashboard. The engine had died.

She bent over the steering wheel, pounded it. Not this. Not now.

The Cadillac had disappeared—such a massive car wouldn’t have felt much—and she was enclosed in the fog with her dread. She ran a quick internal check. Nothing hurt. She opened her door, cautiously because of the cars streaming past, gingerly because of her legs. They were shaking.

She edged around to the front of the car, her cute little red car that gave her such delight.

The bumper was mangled, of course. Fender dented. Paint badly scratched. A strip of trim scuffed into fragments.

She stepped to the guard rail, shuddered at the red streaks along its dull gray length, and turned again to her car. The big question: could she still drive it?

A car was backing along the shoulder, a white whale in the sea of fog.

Her jaw clenched. He hadn’t come to help.

She scurried to her car and reached inside for her purse. He’d want insurance information and who knows what else. She should stand in front, make sure he saw the damage.

The man marched toward her, suit coat flapping, gray hair bristling. Didn’t even glance at her car. “What’s your problem, lady?” The snarl was worse than shouting.

His gaze raked across her, from the loose dark hair to the T-shirt and jeans she’d worn for comfort. “Little girl like you shouldn’t even be driving this highway. If you were my daughter, I’d take you over my knee.”

He licked his lips, and she knew his thoughts weren’t the least bit fatherly.

Anger pulled her spine rigid, lifting her chin high.

He stepped closer. She pulled out her cell phone. “I can call the police. You didn’t have your lights on.”

His face hardened. “No witnesses,” he said in a clipped voice that was very sure of itself. “And I don’t intend to wait around for the Commonwealth of Virginia to send out the troops. Call a tow truck and thank your lucky stars I didn’t report you.”

He swung back to his car, and she watched him go with relief and hatred, wishing for something to throw at the expensively tailored back. She memorized his license plate—New York—but knew she wouldn’t use it. She didn’t want to wait around either, not here in the fog with predators afoot and cars racing past.

Stiffly, she climbed back inside. Please, not a tow truck. Maybe . . . maybe . . .  She eased the car forward, winced at a scraping sound, and edged away from the guard rail. Something was dragging.

As soon as she was free of the rail, she got out to check. Part of the red trim hung askew. Ruined. She kicked at it, reached down, and ripped it off the car. She stared at the torn, wet, dirty piece of plastic, and her anger drained away, leaving a sickly residue of weakness.

She threw the strip over the rail, and the fog swallowed it up. She climbed into the car, drank from her water bottle, and tried to collect her thoughts.

No thoughts? Fine.

Now she drove with single-minded caution, every sense alert for the tiniest noise from her car. As the miles passed, her tension seeped away, and the scene began to replay in her mind. Thank your lucky stars, he’d said.

Such arrogance. Most likely a lawyer or a doctor.

Cousin Willa, who believed in signs and portents, would have taken his comment to heart. A warning, Madeleine! Rethink your rash decision. Turn back!

Even before this happened, she’d left late, missed an exit, and almost run out of gas.

She let the car coast. Okay, think about it.
Running-away. Buck-up. Marry-George. So-proud-of-you . . .
One thing for sure: she wasn’t going back.

The fog lifted, and she set the cruise control with hands that still shook.

“Pull yourself together.” She said it aloud, her voice stern and hopeful, realized that she was quoting her mother, and frowned. Jettison that too. Leave it all behind.

She steadied her hands on the wheel, consciously relaxing her shoulders.

Better pay attention: Baltimore coming up. Still a long way to “that Jersey wilderness” as her mother called it. But Aunt Lin’s castle was waiting for her. She could see it now—one of those mansions filled with history and lovely old furniture and perhaps a few valuable antiques.

Dusk was beginning to settle over the trees by the time she could start looking for Tabernacle, the town her aunt had mentioned. This must be it, judging from a brightly-lit restaurant that called itself the Tabernacle Grille.  

Once past Tabernacle, pine trees that were thin as flag poles crowded close to the highway with nothing but darkness behind them. Her aunt had said to turn off as soon as she passed a lake—this one? Okay. What about that sign? Pritchard’s Gun Club. Not on the map.

Go past an old cranberry bog, and when the road forked . . . Where was the cranberry bog?

She slowed to a crawl. What did a cranberry bog look like?

The trees bordering the road had become impenetrable shadows, and the road itself gleamed white. Sand? This couldn’t be right. She swung into a U-turn.

Should she have waited until tomorrow and made an earlier start? No, she might have lost her nerve. Besides, Aunt Lin wanted her to come right away because of a crisis with her magazine, something about a photo shoot.

Back again, same road, same trees, but darker now. No cranberry bogs. Then the highway. Chatsworth coming up. “If you get to Chatsworth,” Aunt Lin said, “you’ve gone too far.”

How was she going to start this Great Adventure if she couldn’t even find the place? She pulled off the road and opened her cell phone.

Her aunt’s laugh was sympathetic. “I wondered. It’s easy to get lost around here.” She paused. “Let’s try something else. You found Tabernacle okay?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Go back to Tabernacle, and at the cross road, turn left. It goes on for a ways—quite a long ways—and then you come to Whitton Road. Turn left again, and you’ll see a store in an old house. That’s where I’ll meet you.”

Go back. She could do that.

At least this road was paved, except for the potholes, but it too was lined with miles and miles of dark trees. The pavement began to deteriorate, and just as she started worrying again, she saw scattered lights. Whitton Road? Yes, and here, with a jaunty dangling sign, was the store.

She decided against waiting in the car—let’s not be quite so timid—and started down the sidewalk. A pair of men came out of the store and turned the other way. The one with a paunch was talking about a new procedure for his patients.

He sounded like Uncle Ashton. Another doctor.

A large handwritten placard on the door greeted her:
OPEN! COME IN.
As she did so, a jingling bell announced her presence, much too loudly. She glanced at the counter to her left and ducked away from it, behind sleeping bags that were stacked like cans of corn. The stooped little man at the counter was being lectured by someone big and blond. Maybe he hadn’t noticed her.

In front of her was a shelf of books and a sign with red letters running uphill saying that they were a bargain at fifty cents each. She studied the motley assortment until the bell jingled and her aunt’s voice rang out.

“Timothy, hello! Have you seen my niece? Oh, there you are.”

Aunt Lin, her father’s much-younger sister, looked just as she remembered: elegant and bright-eyed, with ruffled dark hair. She gave Madeleine a quick hug and kept an arm around her, steering them both toward the counter. “Timothy, this is my niece, Madeleine Burke.”

The little man had a kindly look in his eyes. “Good evening, ma’am.” She sensed that he’d been watching her after all, and that he knew she’d wanted to stay out of sight.

The blond man, twice the size of old Timothy, leaned toward her with an affable smile. “Hi, there. I’m Kent.”

Aunt Lin smiled at him. “You’re both teachers,” she said, “so you’ve got something in common. Except now he’s writing a book. Would you believe it?”

The two of them laughed together with the ease of old friends.

A minute later, her aunt was bustling her out of the store. “Follow me,” she said. “It’s not far.”

A confusing series of turns, more trees pressing close, a long rutted sandy driveway, and here at last, the blocky outlines of a house. Aunt Lin’s castle.

“An historic residence,” she had called it. The house was so historic that before she could move in, she had to update the heating system, replace the roof, and renovate several rooms.

Her aunt drove into a wide clearing, and Madeleine parked beside her. She eased out of the car into silence that wrapped her round, a velvet, pine-scented silence reaching all the way to the stars. She inhaled, slowly, deeply, and let the cool air boost her spirits. The Great Adventure had begun.

Aunt Lin came to stand beside her. “It’s lovely out here, isn’t it?” She turned toward the house. “Not quite so lovely inside. Let’s get you settled.”

They each took a suitcase, and Madeleine followed her aunt to the porch, which was roofed with a sketchy collection of rafters and wide-spreading tree branches.

“I hope you weren’t expecting grandeur,” Aunt Lin said, key in hand. “Because what we’ve got is dust, mold, mildew, and some rather strange-looking stuff.” She had to put her shoulder to the door to open it, and a musty smell crept out of the darkness as if it had been searching for an exit.

Aunt Lin flicked on the overhead light. They stood in a foyer that led to a shadowed hall with doors opening off both sides.

“Welcome to Dumont Manor,” her aunt said, sounding apologetic. “What a pretentious name for this big old leaky box! But that’s what people around here call it.”

She switched on an electric heater and started down the hall. “I’m still trying to dry things out.” She paused at a door to their right. “I’ve salvaged a couple of rooms. I made these into a suite so I could have my office and darkroom together.”

At a doorway farther down, she said, “This is your room.” She turned on the ceiling light, stepped across the plum-colored carpet, and pulled the curtains shut. “It’s not luxurious, but you can fix it up any way you want.”

“It’s pretty,” Madeleine said. A modern desk and chair. An old-fashioned bed and matching bureau—walnut spool, American, mid-1800’s—the identification came automatically. Everything was polished to a shine and nicer than she’d expected.  

“We’ll have to share a bathroom,” Aunt Lin was saying, “but it’s new, so at least we’ll have plenty of hot water. Let me help with your luggage.”

A few minutes later, Madeleine’s suitcases were lined up next to the bureau. She set her book box on the desk beside a vase of red oak leaves mingled with pine. The arrangement was attractive, and she wanted to remark on it, but Aunt Lin was already out the door.

“Come see the kitchen,” she said, heading across the hall.

Madeleine followed, hoping she wouldn’t have to deal with a wood-burning stove, but to her relief, the kitchen had been remodeled with bisque-colored appliances and granite counter tops.

“You’ve done a great job,” Madeleine said. “I’m going to love working in here.”

Aunt Lin looked around the room with satisfaction. “It’s coming along. How about some tea?” She filled two mugs with water and slid them into the microwave.