A Charmed Place by Antoinette Stockenberg

the note. Had she heard anything?
    "You really are psychic," Maddie said, hardly surprised. Michael had always had the peculiar ability to clue in on a subject that interested him. When they were dating, he often picked up the phone just as she was calling his number. She used to interpret it as proof of his love. Now she knew better. It was a trait he possessed, like being double-jointed. It didn't prove love at all.
    She told him about the phone call she'd just had, all except her own insistence that her father wasn't having an affair, which was too ludicrous to bother mentioning.
    And yet in the next breath, Michael had her wondering again.
    He said, "Do you suppose—you're not going to like this suggestion, but—do you suppose your father may have thought he had a sexually transmitted disease?''
    "Michael! You knew him. How can you possibly suggest that?"
    "No, you're right, you're right. It's a dumb idea." He backtracked into safer territory and tried to put a positive spin on the whole affair.
    " It sounds as if Bailey thinks the note could be perfectly innocent," he said. "Maybe not income tax, but something just as legitimate."
    "I didn't get that feeling at all," Maddie argued. "I think he sees a definite connection between the note and the murder of my father."
    "There you go again, Maddie," Michael said, irritated now. "Looking for goblins where there are none."
    "And there you go again, trying to pretend that all's right with the world. All isn't right , Michael. Take off those rose- colored glasses, would you for once?" she snapped.
    "Maddie, you're out of control on this. I know how hard it is to have an unsolved c rime lying around like an unex ploded grenade, but—"
    "Someone's here," she said, relieved to hear knocking at the kitchen door. "I have to go."
    "Maddie, don't hang up," he pleaded. "It's probably the paper boy or something. I'll wait."
    The knocking resumed. "Look, I—oh, all right. Hold on."
    She slammed the receiver on the counter and marched over to the big Dutch door, feeling as if they were all walking around with their hands slapped over their ears.
    We want to know; we don't want to know, she decided, swinging open the top of the two-part door.
    Swinging it open to Daniel Hawke.
    Twenty years. She stood there. Twenty years. Her heart lurched violently in her chest and began a wild knocking. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Daniel Hawke. He was there. Close enough to touch. Her eyes stung with tears. She felt a surge of deep, wrenching distress, a pain so deep that it made it hard to breathe. She tried to say something again, and failed.
    She tried again.
    "Why ...?"
    The wonder in his face seemed to mirror her own. It was as if he had no idea why he was standing there. And yet there he was. His brown eyes were as deep, as luminous, as intense as ever she remembered them. It astonished her that she remembered every little thing about his face: the wide, straight eyebrows; the sharply defined, aquiline nose; the broad space above his upper lip just crying out for a mustache; the stubble beneath his lower lip that never seemed to hook up with a razor blade. His cheeks were as hollow, his hair as unruly, as twenty years earlier. Time had left lines, especially around his eyes, and time had left scars: a small nick in the left eyebrow; a ragged line like a thin arrow across his cheekbone, pointing toward the nick.
    He was there. Daniel Hawke. He was there.
    "Maddie. Hello."
    His voice, too, was the same. Deeper, softer, but the same.
    "I heard you were in town, Daniel," she said, and immediately she cringed at how inane it sounded; she wanted to sound clever. She tried a smile and cringed at that, too. She knew the smile was crooked and trembly, and she wanted to look beautiful.
    Clever and beautiful and young. And she was none of those things.
    They both began to say something: he, to explain; she, to query. And then they stopped at the same time, and chuckled the