Maria Flook

Excerpt from Chapter One

IT WAS THE END OF HER SHIFT and the rain was falling. In the half dark, Alden switched on her desk lamp. A silhouette from its finial loop cast a noose across the ceiling. She unscrewed the dreary ornament and got rid of it. She enjoyed hearing it clang in the metal wastebasket at her feet.

Her moods often pounced on her at quitting time, and she hurried to finish last minute items. She had been having some trouble with a married man she had met in her office at the National Seashore Visitor Center on Cape Cod. He was scouting locations for an Internet travel agency that booked "wilderness tours" and "nature vacations" and had come to collect information about the outer peninsula. He showed up when Alden was surrounded by schoolchildren as she monitored a stranded sea turtle, a creature about the size and shape of a pressure-cooker lid. The turtle had been found on First Encounter Beach, stunned by a sudden drop in the water temperature. During their autumn migration, these stragglers sometimes washed ashore, numbed by the cold. The New England Aquarium retrieved the endangered turtles for observation and eventual release into warmer Florida waters, but the research truck had been late to collect this one.

He had tried to make small talk about the turtle and other wildlife attractions within the National Seashore, but Alden said that she was just the "bookstore manager" and he should try to find the director at the other end of the corridor. The man went away but soon returned to her bookstall. He wasn't fazed by her initial brush-off and he asked her about her perfume, seeming quite pleased by it. He was surprised, he told her, that "a book clerk" would bother wearing scent, but he was handing it right back to her.

"This perfume?" she said, tugging her cuff to extend her wrist. But she withdrew her arm before he could have a closer inspection. The French scent was a subversive incorporation of musks and spicy florals, bergamot spitballs and gingers. "Like a hothouse on fire," her husband had once told her in his typical ridicule. But her husband was out of the picture.

The travel agent told her his name was Mr. Ison. She thought "Ison" had a clear, ringing note, like the name of a steep mountain or a famous skyscraper building. The Prudential, the Chrysler, the Hancock, the Ison. She kept busy, charting the sea turtle's progress. It had not yet reached room temperature. Ison lingered with the children, pretending to be interested in the stranded animal. He had recognized something about Alden, a willingness or desperation that made her seem receptive.

Alden sometimes looked unraveled, a little akimbo, like a sticky door that needs planing, or a window propped open by a book when its sash weights are broken. She was still trying to regain her footing after her husband had disappeared two years ago. Alden thought she saw her husband everywhere.

She sometimes saw Monty coming out of the automatic doors at the supermarket just as she entered with an opposite river of shoppers. She turned around in an instant and tried to follow him back outside, but the electronic sensors were slow to signal the mechanism, and the door didn't sweep open until after he was gone. Once, she drove past an alley and saw Monty standing beside some garbage cans. She turned the car into the private lane to confront him, but it was just an apparition-- a bicycle had been left standing vertical on its handlebars.

Or it was a rake propped in a barrel with a blue jean jacket draped on its tines. Another time, it was a pair of bibbed overalls luffing on a clothesline. Never Monty.

After Monty disappeared, she visited a therapist a few times. The MSW had told Alden that there is the "imagination of hope" and the "imagination of fear." Imagined fears accelerate to a finite disaster scenario. The building burns. The bridge collapses. The 737 nose-dives. The lover cheats on his beloved. Fear eventually climaxes, thank goodness, but hope just escalates. Hope is an ascending fever; hope is the one-and-the-same unfounded expectation that spikes hotter and hotter.

The therapist slapped Alden's hand to get her to stop twisting a loop of hair around her index finger. The woman told her, "Uncontrolled anxiety can eat you up."

He'd been less than a perfect husband, but Alden still hoped Monty would turn up. When she filed a missing-persons report, the police officers looked at her as if she was crazy. They were certain that the schoolteacher had jilted her. If only her husband had remained in town with his new conquest, Alden might have got over him. When she pestered the officers too often, they nicknamed her "Miss Bride Interrupted."

Left on her own, Alden had opened her door to suitors, but they were just "filler" until Monty returned. She sometimes believed that she brought out the predatory and, even worse, the scavenging instinct in these men. Men would gladly pick over her bones, feeling no responsibility for what had befallen her. That was her husband's fault.

Continues...