Chapter Four

Diary of Evelyn Chadwick Wildes

October 19, 1866

My dressing table has arrived almost a year after my wedding day. Father had the gift shipped all the way from New Hampshire and, even here in the North, far removed from musket crack and cannon fire, the war disrupted commerce.

The chestnut dressing table and matching armoire plus a fine chair for the sitting room upholstered in scarlet silk damask have finally taken their places in our new home…but my husband has not.

The war has ended. The conflict is over. Others have returned. Many of them sightless or lacking limbs or even sealed in plain pine caskets. They’ve all returned.

Except for my own Avery….

He promised me ’til death. He promised me always.

∗ ∗ ∗

Maddy’s stepfather wanted Gracie’s ashes interred with her mother’s in Boston. The funeral service was a blur. So many faces and names she didn’t recognize and wouldn’t remember because her life had been separate from her stepsister’s for so long. She spoke when spoken to, hopefully in coherent sentences, but she didn’t absorb names or faces.

One man stood apart from the crowd.

Silent.

Dressed in a dark suit and a tailored dress coat, unexpectedly fine and with no trace of a hat or a badge, Sheriff Constantine didn’t bow his head. He watched. Whether he was watching her or absorbing every detail about the crowd by the marble columbarium, she couldn’t be sure.

Maddy only knew he was there, a tall lean presence that seemed to anchor her feet to the cold, damp ground.

Didn’t killers attend the funerals of their victims? Was Constantine here looking for a suspect, or did he have much darker motivations himself?

Because of the man at the edge of her perceptions, she remembered to breathe oxygen into her lungs and release it—in, out, in, out—when otherwise the horrible nightmare of laying Gracie to rest might have claimed her, too.

Turning her to ash.

Closing her into the marble vault that already held her mother’s remains.

Claustrophobia of that imagined space threatened. It squeezed her heart, causing her chest to fight her efforts to breathe.

Because of Constantine’s presence, she was able to witness them place the marble capstone. Then she was able to walk away.

He watched her. She had to be strong. She had to cope. She didn’t know why his opinion of her mattered. It just did. Was it self-preservation or pride? As long as she continued to place one foot in front of the other, she proved she was not the next victim and she proved her worth.

When the internment ceremony was over Maddy moved toward Constantine. She stopped half a dozen paces away from his side. She acknowledged his presence by meeting his eyes. There, surrounded by crypts with the long length of the marble columbarium behind her, their gazes locked.

It wasn’t the time or the place, but she suddenly remembered his kiss—the taste of espresso and the flick of his tongue. The sheriff’s lips parted and his color deepened. She wondered if he, too, remembered the taste of her as they stood in the cemetery’s chill.

The crowd dispersed around them as they stood silent, immobile, but flushed. Maddy could feel the heat in her own cheeks against Boston’s cool autumnal air. Her heartbeat sounded deep in her ears.

But then, just as she would have taken another step in his direction, just as Constantine opened his lips to speak or to urge her closer, the deputy with the sad eyes interrupted. She’d learned since that day when Gracie was found that his name was Tom McCall. She hadn’t noticed him until he detached from the thinning crowd to speak. She started when he appeared at the sheriff’s side.

“We’d better head back. We’ve got the planning session with the Historical Society about the security measures they plan to take for the Harvest Gala,” McCall said.

It sounded too loud and too brisk. A mundane statement too real, intruding on a fantasy moment that had probably been all in her head but sultry just the same.

Constantine coughed, cleared his throat and nodded at Maddy, the barest hint of a tilted chin, but the wave of hair that fell over his forehead made the gesture more…more expressive, move vulnerable, almost like a confession for what had seemed to pass between them. The wave of hair relaxed when he wouldn’t.

“Thank you for coming,” Maddy said softly.

The sheriff had been turning away, but he paused in his deputy’s wake. He looked at her again.

“You should stay here. In Boston,” he said.

Maddy looked back at the vault filled with nothing but ashes.

“There’s nothing for me here,” she said.

“Sheriff…” the deputy urged impatiently, already holding on to the door of the big SUV, but Constantine ignored him. He reversed his direction and came toward Maddy with his usual determined stride.

She put her hands deep in the pockets of her wool coat as the sheriff stopped directly in her path, only a foot away. The tumble of hair on his forehead was close enough to touch and brush back from his handsome face…which she couldn’t allow herself to do.

“Are you driving back tonight?” he asked.

It was the simplest of questions but for some reason the word tonight sounded intimate and low.

“Yes,” Maddy said. “Mrs. Jesham asked me to help with the flowers for the Gala several months ago. I’m meeting the event planner tomorrow.”

Sheriff Constantine stepped closer and took her arm. Startled, she tried to pull back from the heat generated by his grasp even through the wool of her coat and the cashmere of her sweater dress beneath. Then she realized he was only helping her toward her van where it waited by the curb.

She allowed the gesture. She walked along beside him, her heeled dress boots clicking when they reached the sidewalk but still not making her as tall as the man at her side. She missed the uniform because of the line of professionalism it drew between them. In the suit, he was more of a man and less a position. He might be dangerous. He might be a killer. He might be dangerous even if he wasn’t a killer and that was what really scared her.

His intensity. His focus.

When he looked at her he seemed to see beneath her gardens and the meticulous care she took with her appearance, to her messy heart beneath. She’d been devastated by her mother’s death. Then even more scarred by her stepfather’s rejection. He’d never been violent with Gracie. But he had been violent with her. When the occasional shove had progressed to one startlingly vicious backhanded slap, she’d left. The specificity of his anger toward her and her alone had left her vulnerable and more isolated than she’d ever been. She’d lost her home and everything she’d ever loved when she’d had to walk away. Now she’d lost Gracie. On the outside, she tried very hard to be neat and polished. Underneath…well, underneath wasn’t so pretty.

Crazily, when they paused by the door of her van while he opened it, she thought about loosening his perfectly knotted tie.

“I know,” she interrupted as he opened his mouth to speak. “Be careful.”

“I was going to say ‘Be careful.’ I was also going to say that sometimes ‘careful’ isn’t enough in Scarlet Falls,” Sheriff Constantine said. “Don’t become lulled by gardens and galas, Maddy. There’s more to Scarlet Falls than meets the eye.”

Maddy climbed up behind the wheel and Constantine closed the door. William? Will? It was hard to think of him by those softer, more casual names. There was nothing soft or casual about the man who stepped back from her window as a light shower started to fall. He put his hands in the pockets of his tailored coat. As she drove away, she looked back at him standing lone and silent on the curb in the rain.

∗ ∗ ∗

Diary of Evelyn Chadwick Wildes

November 2, 1866

I spend hours in front of the mirror of my dressing table. Brushing my long dark hair is soothing. But then I notice that I’m old for a new bride. I was twenty-four when Avery asked for my hand. Well past my prime. I was thrilled when he began calling. He was handsome and sought after in spite of his lack of money. Now I wonder if the thrill I felt over his claiming kisses was one-sided. I know ours wasn’t a love match. He didn’t want to go off to war and leave his ailing mother alone. Mrs. Wildes passed away shortly after Avery marched away. Still, the Chadwick name will bring him fortune and prestige in a small town short of both commodities when he comes home. He was injured at Appomattox, but last I heard he is well-healed. Nursed back to health.

And still he doesn’t return.

∗ ∗ ∗

Maddy looked down at the brush in her fingers. She’d been lost in thought smoothing the red waves of her hair at the vanity for a long time. The “stray” cat who had begun to make himself at home with her each night rubbed against her legs. His tickling fur must have been what had woken her from her preoccupied thoughts.

“Gibbons,” Maddy said. She couldn’t help the urge to name the cat after his likely progenitor at the Historical Society. Really. They did look exactly alike.

She reached to pick up the large cat and cuddled him close. In the mirror, she saw he didn’t seem to mind, but the wavy glass might have been misleading. There were shadows there that didn’t actually exist in the room behind her when she turned to see. They were distortions in the mirror itself, no doubt caused by age.

Maddy’s blood suddenly went several degrees cooler as adrenaline rushed through her veins. A dried posy of forget-me-nots was once again wedged in the mirror’s frame. She reached for it with fingers that trembled. It came away easily.

She turned again to look at the room. Night had fallen while she brushed her hair. But the lamp’s glow lit the room well. Looking back at the mirror the reflected room was much darker with indistinct corners. The shadows behind her seemed to thicken.

Maddy leaned to open the drawer where she’d dropped the first posy before her imagination could take off with visions of a murderer stalking her with unwanted gifts of dried flowers. But when she opened the drawer and allowed the posy to fall from her fingers, the drawer was empty.

The first crushed posy of forget-me-nots was gone.

She hadn’t cleaned the drawer.

Someone had been in her house, but she couldn’t imagine what kind of subtle game the prowler had decided to play.

Maddy closed the drawer harder than necessary.

Suddenly, the cat squirmed. In its bid to be free, it claws scratched her arm. Maddy shivered because the blood on her arm seemed to well up much brighter in the mirror and the darkness in the glass seemed to spread toward it, drawn by the scarlet drops. She must have moved. The distortions in the antique mirror certainly couldn’t have shifted.

She dropped Gibbons and stood to follow his tail as it disappeared out of the room, but she glanced back at the wavy glass and an unexplained feeling of unease skittered down her spine.