Don't Scream Page 2

  “Hi! Hi!” Jeremy calls out, clambering off Brynn’s lap and waving frantically as the postal carrier arrives at the steps.

  Brynn sees old Mr. Chase look up disapprovingly from the chrysanthemums he’s planting over by the driveway of his meticulous yard next door. He isn’t particularly fond of kids.

  “Hi, buddy. Where’s your partner in crime today?” Arnie asks, sorting through a cluster of envelopes and catalogues in his hand.

  “Caleb started kindergarten this morning, Arnie, can you believe it?” Brynn watches Jeremy bend over to study a big black ant parading along the sidewalk.

  “Bug!” Jeremy shrieks. “Bug!”

  “Jeremy, no.” Brynn reaches down to stop him before he can crush the ant with his bare foot. “The outdoors is the bug’s house, remember? We don’t hurt him when we’re visiting his house. That isn’t nice.”

  “But if the bug visits your house, it’s a different story, eh, Mrs. Saddler?” Arnie asks with a wink as he hands her a stack of mail. He smashes a fist into his palm to mimic some hapless insect’s demise.

  Brynn laughs. “Exactly.”

  “So kindergarten already, huh?” Arnie asks. “Time sure flies, doesn’t it? Next thing you know, your kids will be all grown up and gone, like my girls are.”

  “By then, I’ll probably be grateful for the peace and quiet.”

  “No,” Arnie says with a sad smile, “you’ll wish these years back.”

  And Brynn is wistful once again.

  I want another baby.

  Not necessarily a daughter, no matter what countless random strangers say.

  “Going to try again for a girl?” people like to ask when they spot Brynn with her two boys in the supermarket, the library, the park. The worst offenders are mothers of pretty little blue-eyed blondes wearing frilly dresses and ribbons and bows—women who assume that any mother of two brown-haired, brown-eyed boys with perpetual juice mustaches and skinned knees must be secretly envious.

  Not Brynn.

  She grew up a tomboy with older brothers. As a ten-year-old she almost drowned trying to out-swim them in rough surf off the Cape. By high school she was a champion swimmer and beach lifeguard. She was also the only varsity cheerleader who implicitly understood football and basketball and would have preferred playing to bouncing around on the sidelines.

  She’s perfectly comfortable living in an all-male household. In fact, having survived the overflowing Zeta Delta Kappa house back in her college days, she won’t complain if she never again shares a roof with another female.

  So a third son would be just fine with her. Gender doesn’t matter, she just wants—no, longs for—another child.

  She tried to convince Garth over the summer. Her husband’s initial response: If memory serves, you were the one who begged me to convince the doctor to tie your tubes after you delivered Jeremy.

  She pointed out that she came up with that idea—which, thank God, the doctor refused to accommodate—mere moments after enduring a fourteen-hour labor, but before she cradled her second son in her arms.

  “Bye! Bye!” Jeremy calls as Arnie heads back down the walk to continue his daily rounds.

  “See you later, buddy. And don’t run toward the street again, okay? People drive like maniacs around here lately. You never know when someone is going to come barreling around a corner and…” Arnie once again slams his fist into his palm, shakes his head sadly, and asks Brynn, “Did you hear what happened to Millie Dubinski yesterday?”

  “Millie Dubinski…Oh, you mean the lady who used to work at the deli?”

  Arnie nods. “She was out for her early-morning walk, and some crazy driver ran her down. Poor thing had just stepped into the crosswalk on Fourth Street. Died on the spot.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. Hit and run. No witnesses. Probably some college kid.”

  Brynn says nothing to that.

  Arnie, like many Cedar Crest old-timers, has little patience for the five thousand Stonebridge College students who invade the town every September.

  “So you stay away from the street, buddy,” Arnie warns Jeremy again with a grandfatherly pat on his head. “You hear?”

  Jeremy replies, “Street! Bus!”

  Arnie chuckles. “Your big brother should be along any second now.”

  Yes, he should…But there’s still no sign of the bus.

  Brynn waves to Arnie as he retreats down the walk toward the Chases’ house.

  Then, keeping one eye on Jeremy as he plucks a fuzzy white dandelion from the grass, she flips through the stack of mail in her hand. Bill, bill, something from Cedar Crest Travel…?

  Oh, right, that would be Garth’s plane ticket to Arizona for the sociology symposium next month.

  What else? Bill, credit card offer, bill…

  Hmm.

  Coming to a larger white envelope that looks like it must contain a greeting card, Brynn sees that it’s for her.

  But her name and address aren’t handwritten in ink. The envelope bears a printed label. It’s probably one of those time-share invitations, she decides, slipping her finger under the flap. Perpetually homesick for the sea, she was tempted to accept the one that came the other day—four inexpensive days at a beautiful oceanfront resort in Florida, and all they’d have had to do was listen to a sales pitch.

  Garth said no way. A nervous flier, he dreads the academic conferences he has to attend, other than the nearby Boston one last June, to which he drove.

  Of course he vetoed the Florida resort. But maybe—

  Brynn’s thought is interrupted by the unmistakable rumble of a large vehicle making the turn onto Tamarack Lane.

  “The bus, Jeremy! Caleb’s home!” she announces with relief, the mail tossed aside onto the step, forgotten as she hurries toward the curb to greet her son at last.

  “Here’s your mail, Ms. Fitzgerald.”

  “Thanks, Emily.” Fiona doesn’t look up from her computer screen or miss a beat as her manicured fingers fly along the keyboard. “Just put it down. I’ll get to it in a second. And be ready to go FedEx this cover letter and the contract to James Bingham’s office in Boston in about five minutes.”

  “James Bingham?”

  “Hello? The new client? The one with the multimillion-dollar telecommunications company?”

  The one who travels in the same Boston circles as Fiona’s friend Tildy, who introduced them in June…

  The one who happens to be New England’s most eligible bachelor.

  “Oh, right. The new client.” But Emily sounds as vacant as she probably looks.

  Fiona opts not to glance up, knowing the visual evidence of Emily’s cluelessness will just irritate her further.

  She sighs inwardly, wishing the damned building weren’t nonsmoking, because she desperately needs a cigarette.

  Stress. This is what she gets for hiring a college sophomore as the new part-time office assistant at her public relations firm. Emily is a pale wisp of a girl whose personality leaves much to be desired. Still, she showed up for the interview ten minutes early and appropriately dressed—neither of which she has done since she started the job.

  Fiona should have gone with someone more savvy, more professional…and older. At least, beyond school-age.

  Right…like whom?

  There’s not a large pool of applicants to choose from; Cedar Crest isn’t exactly crawling with upwardly mobile types. This is a college town—a tourist town as well during the summer, foliage, and ski seasons. The year-round population—mostly upper-middle-class families and a smattering of well-off retirees—provides precious few candidates willing to consider part-time clerical employment. And those who are willing prefer to work for Stonebridge College, with its benefits, higher pay, and college calendar.

  Fiona thinks wistfully of the lone exception: her former office manager, the folksy-yet-efficient Sharon. She moved to Albany at the end of August to be near her grandchildren and her newly divorced daughter, a choice Fiona quit
e vocally discouraged—and privately derided. The way Sharon went on and on about the tribulations facing her poor, poor daughter, you’d think raising a child and running a household without a man was a challenge equivalent to heading FEMA.

  Expertly juggling single motherhood and a household plus a full-time career, Fiona has little sympathy or patience for anyone who can’t seem to independently accomplish a fraction as much as she does in twice the time.

  Which is precisely why the future isn’t looking particularly bright for halting, clueless Emily of the granola-crunchy wardrobe and limp, flyaway hair.

  But I’ll worry about her later. Right now, there’s too much to do.

  Fiona rereads the letter she just composed, hits SAVE, then PRINT, and closes the document. There. Done.

  She notes the angle of the sun falling through the tall window beside her desk and realizes that it’s probably too late to eat lunch. Which is a shame, because she’s hungry. Breakfast was, as usual, black coffee chased by a sugar-free breath mint.

  Oh, well, just a few more hours until dinner.

  Maybe more than a few, she amends, remembering that Ashley has an after-school playdate with a friend whose mother is keeping her for dinner and bringing the girls to their gymnastics class afterward. So Fiona doesn’t have to be home until eight.

  “Emily!” she calls, and swivels her leather desk chair toward the adjacent antique console. “Come here, please.”

  Plucking the paper from the printer, she scans it briefly, signs it with a flourish, and clips it to the prepared contract.

  “Emily!” she calls again, frustrated.

  The girl appears, looking flustered, in the graceful doorway that once divided the pair of formal Victorian parlors that now are the reception area and Fiona’s office.

  “Sorry…I was, uh, wiping up something I spilled.”

  Fiona groans. “What was it? And where did it spill?”

  Please let her say water…and on the floor by the Poland Spring cooler.

  “Coffee…on my desk.”

  Terrific.

  “Did you get it on any papers?”

  “Just a couple of pages of the Jackson proposal…I’m sure they’ll dry.”

  Fiona exhales through puffed cheeks and forces herself to count to three. Then she thrusts the Bingham contract and cover letter at her assistant. “Here, take this over to Mail Boxes Etc. for FedEx delivery first thing in the morning. Then come right back and deal with your desk. You need to toss the Jackson proposal and print it out again.”

  “The whole thing? But…Only a few pages got wet. That would be a waste of paper.”

  This is what you get for hiring a tree hugger, Fiona tells herself, wondering why she didn’t consider membership in the campus environmentalist club as a red flag on Emily’s resume.

  “You need to reprint the whole thing,” she snaps.

  She swivels her chair to face her desk again as her assistant obediently retreats with the contract.

  Today’s stack of mail is a few inches high, as usual. Fiona begins sorting it efficiently into piles: trade information, client queries, bills…personal?

  Yes, personal.

  She examines the large rectangular white envelope that looks like a greeting card or invitation. The printed label is addressed not to Fiona Fitzgerald Public Relations, but to Ms. Fiona Fitzgerald. It’s postmarked right here in Cedar Crest.

  That’s unusual. Her personal correspondence invariably goes to her home several blocks away from this converted Victorian office building on Main Street.

  Then again, her home address has been unlisted, as a safety measure, ever since she got divorced and started dating again. A single woman just can’t be too careful these days.

  Fiona is curious about the contents of the envelope—but not curious enough to interrupt sorting the remaining mail and open it. One doesn’t get as far as she has by being easily sidetracked from the task at hand.

  Self-discipline. That’s what it’s all about.

  Anyway, she’s seen enough junk mail disguised as personal correspondence that she should probably just toss the card into the garbage can unopened.

  But she’ll probably open it. Later, when she has a chance. Just in case it really is a greeting card, or an invitation. Fiona doesn’t receive many of those these days, unless they’re business-related.

  She was a shrewd negotiator in the divorce—she got their two-story, 2,000-square-foot Tudor home and all the furniture, plus the BMW, full custody of Ashley, and shared use of the vacation cabin up in the mountains.

  Patrick got the Jeep, parental visitation rights…

  And the friends.

  She probably shouldn’t have been surprised that everyone in their old social circle—both husbands and wives—chose to align themselves with Pat. Her ex is easily the most affable guy in town—when it comes to everything and everyone but Fiona, that is.

  Theirs was a bitter divorce. She had hoped they could at least be civil—as much for Ashley’s sake as for her own. This is a small town, she doesn’t care to have their marital disaster aired for public opinion. Yet even now, two years after the papers were signed, Pat has very little to say to her—and too much to say through the local grapevine.

  The lines are clearly drawn, and it’s lonely on Fiona’s side.

  Even her own parents are once again all but estranged from her. Staunch Catholics, they were devastated by her divorce and abandoned her in a time when she really could have used their support.

  Oh, well. She still has Brynn, even if they don’t have a lot in common these days—or much time for each other.

  That doesn’t matter. They’ll always be sisters—just bonded by friendship rather than by blood.

  Or maybe a bit of both, Fiona thinks with a shudder, remembering that awful night.

  “We’ll always remember…That fateful September…”

  How often in the past decade has she been haunted by the opening lines to the Zeta Delta Kappa song?

  Haunted, and taunted.

  Maybe Brynn is, too. But they don’t talk about it.

  Better to forget it ever happened and keep their friendship—their sisterhood—grounded in the present.

  Yes, Fiona has Brynn. She has a flesh-and-blood sister, too: Deirdre—or Dee, as she was called before she shed the childhood nickname, along with her ties to Cedar Crest and just about everyone in it.

  Deirdre might not possess Fiona’s type A energy, but she is literally Fiona’s other half—not just her identical twin but her mirror image. In genetic terms, that means the egg didn’t split until late in the embryonic stage. Any later, Fiona learned in a college biology class, and twins would be conjoined.

  For practical purposes, “mirror image” means that Fiona is left-handed while Deirdre is right-handed; Fiona’s auburn hair naturally parts on the right, Deirdre’s on the left. They have the same petite, waiflike figure, the same whiter-than-white, unblemished complexion, the same slanty green eyes.

  So close were they throughout their childhood that Fiona and Deirdre—Fee and Dee—might just as well have been literally joined at the hip.

  Not anymore.

  Fiona hasn’t seen her sister since she visited Deirdre at her home on St. John in the Virgin Islands to celebrate their twenty-ninth birthday almost a year ago.

  “What are we going to do for our thirtieth?” Deirdre asked as they said good-bye at the airport. “How about an Alaskan cruise?”

  Fiona countered with, “Why don’t you come to Cedar Crest and we’ll just drink a bottle of champagne, or two or three, together? I’ll buy you a plane ticket.”

  “You know I can’t plan that far ahead.”

  “You can, Dee…You just don’t like to.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, Antoinette will want to be with me on my birthday.”

  “So bring her,” Fiona suggested, as though her sister bringing her lesbian lover for a hometown visit is an everyday event.

  “Yeah, Mom and Dad would lo
ve that.”

  “Are you kidding? You think I’m planning on celebrating my birthday—our birthday—with them? They won’t even have to know you’re in town. You’d stay with me.”

  “Well, considering they told me never to darken their doorstep again, you know I wouldn’t stay with them.”

  “Does that mean I should go ahead and buy you a ticket? You and Antoinette?”

  “I can’t plan that now, Fee. I probably won’t even know until the day before what I feel like doing for my thirtieth birthday.”

  Thirty!

  Another looming milestone for Fiona.

  One Brynn is facing as well. And within the next month, too. Even Matilda.

  And Rachel…

  Rachel would have been thirty this year, too. In fact…

  Fiona’s eyes automatically go to her desk calendar.

  Today, she realizes, startled by the coincidence. Today would have been Rachel’s thirtieth birthday.

  Yes, she’s positive about the date. It’s indelibly imprinted on her brain.

  Rachel Lorent was born on September 7th…the same day she died.

  “What’s that, baby?”

  “Hmm?” Cassandra Ashford looks up to see her fiancé watching her with interest.

  She quickly tucks the greeting card and its envelope into the new issue of Essence, which arrived in the same batch of mail she picked up on their way into the condo just now.

  Alec Bennett tilts his head. “You have a secret admirer or something?”

  “A secret admirer?” Cassie forces a laugh as she shoves the magazine into her brown leather tote bag, still slung over her shoulder. “Why would you say that?”

  “Because you just hid that card in your magazine, that’s why. And now you’re trying to hide the magazine in your bag.” He reaches across the breakfast bar to playfully tug at the bag. “Is there something in there that you don’t want me to see?”

  “No!” she says quickly—too quickly—and pulls away.

  Alec raises an eyebrow and thoughtfully rubs his neatly trimmed black goatee. “Really.”

  “Really.” Cassie kicks off her white leather shoes and walks barefoot across the beige-colored carpet toward her bedroom, still carrying her bag.