The other detail she needed to decipher from Madeline’s letter was when precisely she was expected. A quick internet search revealed that high tea, unlike afternoon tea, did not involve cucumber sandwiches or scones. High tea was in fact a larger meal, consumed after the workday was over. While various etiquette websites said it started anywhere from five to seven, Madeline’s letter had condemned tardiness. This was another clue, meant to indicate that Alice was expected promptly at five.
Alice had a time. She had a vague location. That left one mystery Alice could not solve from the comfort of her studio apartment.I find myself in dire need of your assistance.The line would have sounded melodramatic if the rest of the letter had not been so spare.Direwas the only adjective in the entire note. If someone who wrote in directives, in plain, unadorned language, chose to indulge in an adjective, it was important. It meant that Madeline truly regarded her need as urgent.
Need was a common emotion in Alice’s line of work. All her potential clients declared a need for love, as though it was as essential as food or water, something they could not subsist without. Everyone deserved love if they wanted it. Alice wasn’t quite sure that was the same thing as needing it, though.
Only Madeline hadn’t said she was indire needof love but of assistance. That meant she did not think she could find love on her own, that she believed Alice could help her access whatever she lacked. It meant that Madeline possessed an essential weakness, and essential weaknesses were quickly becoming Alice’s specialty. She could sniff them out the way her cat, Agatha, could track a dog a block away. And once Alice located the blockage that stood in the way of her clients finding love, she could write them a story that would clear their arteries to let the love course through them. All she had to do was meet Madeline and she would know what ailed her—assuming she could locate her home somewhere along Stagecoach Road.
7
High Tea
The sky glowed as Alice’s car lurched up the steep incline to Stagecoach Road. By a little after four, the sun had already fallen behind the mountains, its rays fractured by the lush green hills. She had forgotten the rise of that first turn into the forest, the way the brush obscured the road and everything that lay beyond it. While she was nervous about finding Madeline Alger’s house, the real feat for her was facing the road itself, each curve tightening with the memory of her father.
When Alice’s mother, Bobby, started medical school, her father, Paul, had decided to embark on a lifelong dream of his own to ride a Harley. “You’re really going to pursue something life threatening when I’m off at school, learning to save lives?”Bobby protested. Paul reasoned that it was only dangerous if you weren’t careful. Although Bobby disagreed, she could hardly refuse him, not after he had all but filled out the paperwork for her to follow her passion. They were not equivalent desires, being a doctor and riding a motorcycle, yet they stemmed from the same need not to let life pass by.
At first Bobby forbade Alice from riding on that death trap. Once Alice’s legs were long enough to reach the footrests, the legal requirement for riding passenger on a motorcycle, her mother could not stop her. Every Sunday while Bobby was studying, Alice donned the brown leather jacket and glittery helmet her father had bought her, clutched his thick, warm body as he took the curves on 154 toward Cold Spring Tavern. The wind assaulted her knuckles and knees as she hid the rest of her body behind her father’s. Each Sunday, when they returned home bloated on barbecue, ears ringing from bluegrass, but otherwise unharmed, Bobby grew a little less anxious, until the motorcycle trips to the mountains became as routine as Alice and Paul’s beach adventures, their minigolf expeditions. Who knew the tri-tip sandwiches they’d eaten at the tavern would be more dangerous for Paul than the bike on the windy road?
Alice pulled her beastly car around another hairpin turn, her chest spasming as the tavern came into sight. Several bikes were parked out front. Men in leather pants leaned against a wooden fence as they blew cigarette smoke into the otherwise pristine mountain air. Light spilled from the tavern’s open door where a couple was standing in the alcove waiting to be shown to their table. Alice pulled to the side of the bend and watched the happy hour crowd that spilled to the tables outside the bar, a wooden structure a short walk from the tavern. Her eyes stung. It was all exactly as she remembered. It hadn’t grown grander or shabbier in her mind than it was in life.
Alice had been back to Stagecoach Road once since her father died, when Skylar, a musician with a lisp that came out when he sang, had wanted to impress her with an unsung piece of California history. When they began the drive toward the mountains, Alice assumed he was taking her to wine country until he hit his left blinker and his car took the sharp incline onto Stagecoach Road. At first her heart was beating too fast for her to tell him to pull over. When the car finally careened to a stop, they were parked across the road from the tavern. He smiled eagerly at Alice until he noticed the stricken look on her face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. It was their third date. He didn’t even know that she’d grown up in Carpinteria, let alone that her father had died unexpectedly when she was fourteen. As she looked at his imploring face, she had no interest in explaining it to him. Instead she said, “Please take me home.” They drove back to Santa Barbara in silence, and once he was stopped outside her apartment, she whispered, “I’m sorry,” before sprinting out of the car. After that, they never spoke or saw each other again. In Santa Barbara you always ran into people sooner or later, but miraculously she’d successfully avoided bumping into him.
A car door slammed, jolting Alice out of her memories. She watched as two women walked arm in arm toward the restaurant. One of them laughed as the other held the door open for her. They disappeared inside, and Alice wondered what would have happened if she’d followed Skylar into the tavern, if she’d allowed this place to have new memories, ones that could never replace those afternoons with her father but might make their legacy a little less painful.
She put her car into Drive and watched the tavern retreat in the rearview mirror as she continued on Stagecoach Road toward the stretch where Madeline’s house was supposedly located. Sometimes, when Alice and her father left the tavern, they would take the long way home, not wanting the afternoon to end. Paul would follow the windy road north, as Alice did now, under the highway bridge, until it eventually met up with the 154 again, farther from Santa Barbara. Like the rest of Stagecoach Road, the miles beyond the tavern abutted sandy bluffs on one side, the other a sheer drop to the forest below. There were no houses, no streets, no driveways carved into that part of the national forest, nothing except trees and rock.
Alice followed one curve and the next until she reached the highway bridge. Its arches cut diagonal lines across the darkening sky. She’d forgotten to look for a perpendicular road on the stretch between the tavern and the bridge, but she was certain she hadn’t passed any turnoffs. The cliffs were too steep. As she wound deeper into the woods, the panic of her father’s memory was replaced with a more visceral, immediate concern: What if she couldn’t find Madeline’s home? Her phone battery was dangerously low, not that she had a number for Madeline.
She kept her eyes peeled for a place to make a U-turn so she could revisit the stretch of road where the house must have been. This felt like a test, one Alice was already failing.
To her left, a flash of muted red appeared amidst the green foliage. Was that a chimney? A mirage? Alice craned her neck to see what it was, only to drive past an unmarked dirt road that might be a driveway. A mile later, she finally found a turnoff and swung her car around to inch toward the unmarked road, careful not to drive past it again.
The sky continued to darken as Alice followed the bumpy dirt road through the red oak and sycamore trees, only her dim headlights to guide the way. Her old sedan was not made for off-roading. It thudded in protest over every divot and root. The road seemed to go on forever with no sign of the brick chimney or the house Alice now despaired of finding. The farther she drove, the more the road narrowed, so much so that Alice would not be able to turn her car around if she decided to abandon this fruitless endeavor. She kept driving, fearful that if she gave up, she’d find herself stuck in the woods. She checked her phone, dismayed to discover that the battery had died. Why hadn’t she left a note for Gabby or Bobby, alerting them to where she was going?
Moisture stung her eyes as it became clear how reckless this journey was. Alice wasn’t scheduled to work again until a wedding that weekend. Although she’d never missed an event before, no-shows were common in the catering business. The manager would make note of it in her file and would not schedule her for another event until he got the go-ahead from Caroline, Alice’s boss. While Alice and her mother often met for dinner, it wasn’t regularly scheduled. And Bobby was back with Mark. A week might pass without her even realizing. These days it took several texts back and forth to nail down any engagement with Gabby. Alice’s clients would assume she’d run away with their deposits, that she was a swindler when really she was a corpse behind the wheel of a beat-up car stuck along a forgotten strip of dirt road in the woods. Alice kept driving, tears welling, threatening to spill over. She was completely alone. Not just in this moment but in life. She had no one who would notice that she was missing, no one who prioritized her above anyone else in their life.
After a large divot sent her car thudding, Alice slammed on the brakes, causing the poor old car to screech in protest. If she made it out of these woods, she was going to have to give it a good wash or tune-up, something to show it the love it deserved. The tears began to fall. It was ridiculous, crying over her car and her own foolishness. Eventually, the absurdity of her situation caused her to laugh. It was not funny, but laughing comforted her more than crying. She concentrated on her breath, trying to decide what to do. In her rearview mirror, the road behind her car disappeared into blackness. There was no light pollution up in the woods, nothing other than the bright stars to punctuate the night.
She looked into the darkness ahead, and that was when she saw it, a light bleeding through the trees. It wasn’t natural light but an honest-to-God manmade glow emanating from something in the distance. That must be the house. It must be the house!
It took Alice another ten minutes before the road ended at a clearing where an A-frame house sat perched between the trees, a single light illuminating the porch.
The mountain air pricked like needles against her cheeks and smelled sharply of soil. She breathed in deeply, the sting of the evening burning in her lungs. It was fully nighttime. She was late.
Alice clutched Madeline’s letter and followed the stone walkway to the front door. The porch light offered hope that someone might be inside, even though the house behind it was dark. There was no bell, just a brass knocker shaped like a lion. The woods swallowed the dull sound of the knocker as Alice banged it against the door. She hadn’t realized just how silent the forest was, how rarely she was engulfed in absolute quiet. She shut her eyes to absorb it, trying to hear noise in the void.
The only sound she heard was that of the door creaking open.
Alice met Madeline’s voice first.
“You’re late,” she said as a rush of warm air from the house kissed Alice’s face. Madeline’s voice was deep and gravelly. When Alice opened her eyes, the house behind Madeline was so dark she could only discern the outline of the woman’s small frame and mass of short white around her head.
Before Alice could protest that she’d gotten lost, Madeline added, “Come. Tea’s ready.” She started down the hall.
As Alice stepped into the foyer, the lights came on and she found herself standing in a cavernous hallway paneled in redwood, an antler chandelier dangling twelve feet above her. The floor was fashioned from the same redwood as the walls, making the hall appear boundless, except for Madeline’s childlike figure disrupting the space. The halo of corkscrew curls around her head was starkly white as though it had never had any pigmentation to it. She was dressed in tapered black tuxedo pants, a silk blouse tucked in at the waist. Her feet were bare and alabaster, her exposed ankles covered in varicose veins.
“Are you Madeline, Madeline Alger?” Alice asked just to be sure.
She turned to face her guest, and Alice was struck by how beautiful the woman was. Alice had never before seen someone so old who was so beautiful. She scolded herself for this ageist thought. Society had preconditioned her to treat youth as beauty. Madeline did not try to look younger than she was. Her skin was creased along her forehead and cheeks, so much so that Alice didn’t immediately spot the scar carved into her right cheek, echoing the curve of her oval face. It was as deep as the smile lines on both sides of her mouth, its plump lips lavished in crimson. The lipstick was the only makeup she wore, other than equally bright red nail polish. Her cheeks were bare, with sunspots and hints of rosacea. Chunky gold and turquoise rings adorned every finger, even her thumbs, her knuckles so swollen that Alice doubted Madeline could remove the rings if she’d tried.
