Distracted and looking pale himself, my husband set his composing stick on the counter, removed his apron and draped it over the back of a chair, then sat down with us.
“Do you want some cold water, Maze?” I asked, noticing that Will was staring at me instead of at our daughter, his breathing a bit labored. “Or, I think we have some apple juice?”
“Water’s fine,” she said.
Tossing the crumpled bandage wrappers into the wastebasket under the sink, I poured a glass from the tap, dropped in ice cubes, and sat next to Maisie at the round oak pedestal table that centered our kitchen. “You’re safe now, all right?”
She nodded and took a drink.
“I’m confused,” I said, placing one of my hands on her uninjured arm. “It couldn’t have been my brother who gave you this. Your scream, it sounded like—can you say who did this to you?”
“He said you’ll know.”
Will and I looked at each other with even greater alarm, as part of what had happened suddenly became as clear as a shard of broken crystal. Slowly, quietly, I asked her to tell us once more what she saw, in whatever detail she could manage.
Maisie shifted in her seat, wincing, looking embarrassed. “He just, this man came out of nowhere. I was riding, saw the house lights up ahead. Then he was there, like that. I had to turn really hard to miss him, and I skidded and fell. I thought he was going to kill me.”
“Did he have a weapon?”
“No, I don’t know,” she said. “He just surprised me. Like in a nightmare. He had this weird white smiling face. I’m sorry I screamed.”
“Don’t be silly,” I consoled her, hiding my own horror as I smoothed aside a stray strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead and caught on her eyelashes. “Believe me, I would’ve screamed bloody murder too.”
Will was sitting rigid in his chair. Now he asked, “Did this man say anything to you, Maze? Was anybody with him?”
Gingerly wrapping her hands around the ice-chilled glass, Maisie answered, “Not that I could see. He warned me that if I knew what was good for me, I’d get it to you safely.”
“That was all he said?”
“He was kind of in a hurry to get away.”
I noticed the Saint-Saëns concerto had ended and a string quartet had taken its place, probably by Haydn, though many of that era’s string quartets sounded much the same to me. It had the disconcerting effect of briefly becoming a kind of soundtrack, one that made everything in our otherwise very real, very lived-in kitchen, with my collection of copper pans, vintage Amish baskets, and homegrown dried herbs hanging from the rafters, seem like a scene from a movie, a scene I didn’t want us to be actors in.
Will, clearly stricken by Maisie’s description of the man’s threat, reached behind him to remove the package from his apron pocket and place it on the table. “Can’t you tell us more what he looked like? I mean, beyond any resemblance to your uncle Adam?”
“It was too dark, happened too fast,” she explained, brushing tears from her eyes and glancing from the glass of water over at the parcel. For a moment we all studied it in silence. A thin dun mailer, the kind you would send a sheaf of photographs in, or perhaps a children’s book, with a cream-colored envelope secured beneath the knot. Will’s name was written on it with a calligraphic flourish. On either side of his name were skilled pen-and-ink drawings of what appeared to be black flowers. Black tulips. I saw a fleeting look of curiosity pass across Maisie’s face as she regarded the decorations on the envelope, rendered in an elegant art nouveau manner that belied, it seemed to me, the meanness of this act of terrifying a young girl.
Maisie reached over to touch the tulips on the mailer, then snatched her hand back as if to avoid being bitten. Glancing at Will, she continued, “He came at me from behind a tree, or bushes along the road, I’m not sure.”
“How old do you think he was?”
“I don’t know. My headlamp wasn’t working.”
“That we’ll fix in the morning, but about this man. Was he thin? Short-cropped hair, maybe bald?” he pressed. I shot him a glance meant to suggest he needed to ease up, but, intent on Maisie, he appeared not to notice. “Could you see what he was wearing?”
She shrugged her shoulders, jutted her delicately cleft chin. “He came out so fast, and then I was on the ground and he was standing over me with his smile. Then he just shoved that package at me, told me to give it to Will—”
“Wait, so he specifically said your father?”
Maisie nodded; I felt awful for the poor girl. Her cheeks were blushing crimson with confusion and guilt at not being able to answer Will’s salvo of questions.
My husband, who was seated on her left with his arm on the back of her chair, stood up as if to go somewhere, breathed in and out, then sat down again. I waited for him to speak, but he had fallen mute, agitated, preoccupied. For a moment it seemed he wasn’t fully with us in the room, while the wall clock continued indifferently to tick, the refrigerator hummed away, and the faucet softly went on dripping into the sink, as in my haste I hadn’t completely closed the spigot.
“Do we call the police?” I asked him, gently squeezing Maisie’s slender forearm.
Abruptly alert again, he said, “And tell them what? That a man, possibly a ghost, who didn’t at any rate identify himself, gave our daughter—who has no idea what he looks like other than your dead brother—a package on her way home from her friends’ house?”
“Will,” I warned.
Hearing me, and all of a sudden self-aware, he turned to Maisie with a concerned frown, and quietly asked, “Look, I know he frightened you. But did he touch you in any way?” He leaned forward and clasped his hands tightly, prayerlike, on the table.
In that moment, I was forced to admit to myself that my husband, three years shy of sixty, seemed even more unnerved by the incident than eleven-year-old Maisie. This was not a criticism but a fathomable truth.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “At least, I don’t think so.”
“Would it make you feel better if we reported this to the police?” briefly overcoming his stubborn reluctance—the result of a serious encounter years ago—to have anything to do with the authorities.
“No,” she repeated, surely to Will’s relief, and took another swallow of water. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist and forced a smile meant to let us know that she’d answered every question as best she could. “I’ll be fine. Can I go upstairs now?”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Meg, honestly. I’m all right.”