The Perfect Summer (Hubbard's Point)

by Rice, Luanne

  She headed for New London. Driving down to the waterfront, she pulled into the parking lot of Eliza Day Boat Builders, parked beside Dan's truck, and walked inside.

  She stood inside the vast shed, looking at the various boats under construction. Two were old, in the midst of restoration. A new sailboat appeared ready to be painted. And a new dinghy was being built. A radio was playing, the music echoing through the space. Following the sound, she found Dan standing on a ladder on the far side of a beautiful old boat. Her heart caught as she saw him: his wide shoulders and strong arms, his blue eyes, the lips that had kissed hers.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Bay,” he said, eyes registering joy. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt, both smeared with varnish, and he climbed down the ladder two rungs at a time. Their gazes locked as he stood before her, but he picked up on her tension and didn't come any further.

  “She's pretty,” Bay said, pointing at the boat, to put an end to the awkwardness of not hugging.

  “She's a six-meter,” he said. “Beautiful, graceful boat. She's an old plank-on-frame, filled with dry rot.”

  “What's this wood?” Bay asked, running her hand over the rich, fine-grained timber.

  “Honduran mahogany,” Dan said, breaking into a big smile. “You've still got a good eye.”

  “Thanks,” she said, but she found she couldn't smile back. Her skin hurt, and her heart was solid, heavy in her chest. Even her breath made her ribs ache. Everything had taken such a toll lately. “Can we talk, Danny?”

  He nodded, leading her into his office. Again, she admired the magnificent carved desk—it seemed to tell a story, with all of its sea creatures of legend. Taking a chair opposite the desk from Dan, she drew in a deep breath.

  “I'm glad you came,” he said.

  “Me, too . . .”

  “If you hadn't come, I'd have gone to find you.”

  She nodded. They stared at each other, unspoken words hanging between them. She wondered whether he felt the same conflicts she did. She had steeled herself for this moment, and she knew she couldn't go forward with Danny until she knew everything.

  “Tell me the rest of what you wanted to say. What did Sean want?” she asked quietly. “I'm confused about all of it.”

  “I know.” He picked up a brass tool from his desktop, frowned at it, put it back. “It's been driving me crazy. Trying to figure out what he had in mind, and why he came to me. I haven't said anything about it—wanting it to go away, I guess.”

  “I want to understand what happened,” Bay said, staring directly into his eyes. “I—there's been so little to trust lately, Danny. I always thought you were the one person who, unconditionally—” she stammered. “It's probably not fair, the way I idolized you. No one could have lived up to that. But I have to ask you this: Did you help Sean?”

  “Help him?”

  “Are you . . . is the investigation focusing on you?”

  “No, Bay. Not that I know of,” Danny said.

  Bay let her head drop in relief. “When the police first told me, at the beginning of the summer, that Sean stole from his bank clients, I thought the world had ended,” Bay said, remembering the cold shock of those days. “I really did. And then you were there, and I thought it was such a gift, to have you back in my life, as a friend . . .”

  “I'm still your friend, but I'm human,” he said quietly. His forehead was lined, worried. He gazed at her, his blue eyes dark with exhaustion and upset. “Will you let me tell you what happened?”

  She nodded, pulling her jacket tighter, wrapping her arms around herself.

  “I'd like you to start by telling me why you lied to me, about not having seen Sean until recently. When I first came to you, you said you hadn't seen him before he came here wanting you to build a boat for Annie.”

  “That was true, Bay.”

  “But if he was trustee for your daughter's trust—”

  “Charlie handled that,” Dan said. “The money came from her family, and there was a lot of it. I never cared about that. I know that sounds disingenuous—and maybe, in a way, it is. I mean, I liked not having to worry about the mortgage, the way other people do. But I have pretty simple tastes—I wasn't into flying off to the Bahamas, or buying BMWs and Rolexes.”

  Bay nodded. The Dan Connolly she had known had cared about the wind, the stars, the sea, fine wood, good tools, friendship. In that way, he had been so different from Sean, to whom material things meant success, prestige—things that had gained dramatically in importance every year they were married.

  “Even Charlie wasn't that impressed with money, or what it could do. I think that's how it is for people who've had it their whole lives: they just take it for granted, and there's no reason to flaunt it. I've had that old truck out there forever; Charlie drove a ten-year-old Ford.”

  Bay nodded, listening.

  “She . . . Eliza . . . the money was all theirs. I never wanted anything to do with it, and I was proud about not needing it. I come from a working-class Irish family, always pulled our own way. My grandfather was a builder, and he carved this desk . . .”

  “For her grandfather . . .” Bay had been struck by the bond.

  “We were two kids from opposite sides of town. Her family owned the mansion, my family worked in it. They were landowners, we were tradesfolk.”

  “Then why—”

  “Why did we get married?” Danny asked. His gaze shot sideways, taking in the pictures on his bookshelf. Charlie looked out from one, blond and confident, elegant but now—to Bay—cold; a woman who walked away, instead of dealing with her daughter's emotions. “Opposites attract, right?”

  “That's for sure,” Bay said, thinking of herself and Sean; night and day.

  Danny nodded. “I was this big, gawky working-class hero with a tool belt, and Charlie was a finishing-school debutante who always knew which fork to use.”

  “You were more than that,” Bay said, in spite of herself.

  Dan shrugged. “There were always obstacles. I'm Irish Catholic, she's a WASP. Caused a few problems, on religious holidays, and when Eliza was born. But mainly, we got through them. We learned how to fight: Never do it. Charlie could never stand anyone raising their voices. So the easiest way to be, for me, was to let Charlie win.”

  “You gave in?”

  “Pretty much,” Dan said. “‘When she's right, she's right; and when she's wrong, she's right,' as the song goes. Maybe I was just afraid that we were too different, didn't really belong together—so I didn't want to make waves.”

  Bay caught a glimpse of herself, reflected in the glass of a picture. Her wild red hair and freckles left no mystery about her origins; she was from Irish working-class stock, like Dan, and like Sean. But while she had felt proud of her roots, Sean had spent his adulthood trying to scour his life of any history of toil, any reminders of the fact that the McCabes hadn't always belonged to the yacht club, hadn't always had a membership at Hawthorne Links.

  “I thought you were very happy,” Bay said. “The way you said her name that first day.”

  Dan nodded. “I know. I do that. Trying to convince myself, maybe. Because I loved her so much . . . we were happy at first, and for a long time. But about a year before she died, something shifted. I don't know what it was, but I know the day it happened. I came home from work one day, and she wasn't there. Eliza was home alone, upset because her mother was gone.”

  “I know how that feels,” Bay said, hugging herself tighter, thinking of her children's faces on nights when Sean didn't come home.

  “Charlie came home about an hour later, and she was happy and excited, talking on and on about a movie she'd seen. I forget which one—but she'd gone with a friend. She said . . .”

  “Did you think—?”

  Dan shook his head. “I thought she'd gone with a friend. Period. To this day, I still do.”

  But he didn't really—Bay could tell. He was lying to himself as hard as he could.

  “After that,
her eyes were different. Before, they'd always light up when I came home. But that year, I began to wonder whether she was thinking of leaving. I'd ask her—I'd even beg her to tell me. Charlie didn't like begging, didn't like strong emotions . . . I guess it's the way she grew up. Keep your feelings totally inside, don't let anyone see you hurt.”

  “Eliza seems able to express them,” Bay said.

  “I want her to,” Dan said. “It's harder for her than it sometimes seems. She strikes out, then shuts down totally. Nothing gets in or out. But anyway—going back to that last year with Charlie, my work really slipped.”

  Again, Bay knew what he was talking about. She thought of her own intense level of distraction, trying to help the kids with their homework, keeping things normal, inwardly frantic with anxiety . . .

  “I worried I was losing her, and I stopped caring as much about work. I mean, wooden boats are beautiful, and for me they've been a labor of love, but they're nothing compared to my family.”

  “But your business kept running—”

  “Yes,” he said. “My heart wasn't in it, though. This is all sounding like a big excuse, I know—and it isn't. I don't mean it to be. I just want to tell you the whole story. See, Charlie invested in my company.”

  “This one?”

  “Yes. It's not a huge moneymaker, to put it mildly. In fact, people say boating is so expensive and basically uncomfortable, it's cheaper to just stand in a cold shower ripping up hundred-dollar bills. Well, building wooden boats is a lot like that. Hanging out in this basically unheated shed all winter is pretty crazy. Some years I'll clear a small profit, but usually if I break even on the boats I build, I'm lucky.”

  “So, Charlie helped you out.”

  “Yes. She bankrolled me. I never thought it bothered her—in fact, I thought she liked it. She'd say it was romantic. Knowing my grandfather built this desk, and that I had basically followed in his footsteps, working with wood . . . making classic boats from scratch with my hands. She has mariners in her ancestry. But that's looking into the past; maybe we forgot to look forward.”

  “Or be in the present.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, she began making comments. Who needed another classic gem of a ketch, anyway? She got really into the finances of Eliza's trust, wanting to understand the mechanics of it—talked about getting an MBA. Suddenly I think it seemed to her that I was just another laborer with a hammer.”

  Bay thought of Sean, of his superior attitude regarding workmen. He really looked down on them, thought they were a lower class of people. Even though his own father had been a railroad worker.

  “So, that year I really screwed up. Took too many commissions, and did a lousy job on some of them. Then I went the other way—stopped taking orders at all. The money I did make went away fast. So I had to ask Charlie for more from the trust, just to cover my overhead, the bills I had outstanding. It all snowballed.”

  “Was she upset?”

  Dan stared at his desk, as if straight into the eyes of Poseidon. “That's almost the worst part,” he said. “She didn't seem upset at all. She seemed amused.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “As if it wasn't to be taken seriously; that my work had always been just a hobby, and now I needed more money to keep it going. She seemed to be getting so much more from the people she was meeting at the bank, the lawyers' office—in ‘getting up to speed,' as she called it, regarding Eliza's trust.”

  “Sean?” Bay asked. “Was he one of the people?”

  Dan nodded. “Yeah. I remembered him from the beach. I hadn't liked him then. I never knew you two had married. I hadn't seen him in all those years, but she talked about him a lot. How helpful he was, how sharp with money, how much he encouraged her to educate herself about the trust, how willing he was to help her.”

  Bay had seen Sean in action; it had, at one time, seemed attractive. He had the gift of gab, and he was great at convincing people they were so smart, that he could learn from them, that if they joined forces with him they would form a formidable team. The quality had made him a superb businessman. But with Charlie . . . she was so pretty, and so upper-class, and so everything-Sean-wanted-to-be . . . perhaps with her he had actually meant the words he said.

  “I think your husband wanted to sleep with my wife,” Dan said.

  “Do you think he actually did?”

  Dan shook his head. “No. I swear, I'd have known that. I knew Charlie so well. I could read her like a book. I knew she was turned on by everything he knew, how smart he was in the financial world—all that stuff was diverting her. And I think he flattered her, and I think she liked that.”

  Bay cringed at the image, but she believed it totally.

  “Long before I met the guy again,” Dan said, “I wanted to kill him. I thought he was after Charlie, and even though I didn't really expect her to fall for it, I didn't like what it was doing to our family.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “Not your fault, Bay. Okay—that's all the background. Now here's the rest.”

  Bay steeled herself, watching Dan's face. He was grave, holding her eyes with his.

  “Charlie died. I won't even go into what that was like—for me and for Eliza. My business had been on the brink for about a year, but after that, it was heading straight to hell. I took over as trustee from Charlie—the potential was there for me to use Eliza's money. One day, I called Sean, to see about borrowing a few thousand from the trust—above what they paid me—to cover a check. He showed up here the next morning.”

  “Oh,” Bay said. Sean had seen an opportunity.

  “He was all sympathetic and kind of easygoing friendly . . . looked around, admired the boats.”

  “Even though wooden boats weren't his thing,” Bay said.

  “You'd never have known it,” Dan said. “I started to think maybe I'd been wrong about him. Suddenly I had a new best friend.”

  “You really felt that way?” Bay asked skeptically. Yet she wanted to believe it: that someone had seen something good and true in Sean.

  He shook his head almost sadly, not wanting to let her down. “No. I knew he was after something. I was being played—I could feel it. But I was pretty desperate myself—Eliza was having such a hard time. I felt that I was on the verge of going down the drain, losing everything, if I didn't figure something out.”

  “The trust . . .”

  Dan nodded. “‘There's all that money just sitting in the bank,' Sean said.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I thought about it overnight,” Dan said. “Because he really didn't suggest anything, or make it sound illegal, I thought he meant there was a way to juggle things, so that I could use the money—borrow it from the trust—and pay it back. But the next day, I called him.”

  “Sean?”

  “Yes. And I told him to forget the loan. I didn't want the money—even a few thousand. Next day, he showed up again.”

  “Here?”

  Dan nodded.

  “He said he wanted to hire me to build a boat for his daughter . . .”

  “At least he did that,” Bay said.

  But Dan shook his head. “No, Bay. I think it was a front—a reason for him to come here. He said Annie liked boats, but that she wasn't very active—that she probably wouldn't put the boat to much use.”

  “That bastard!” Bay cried.

  “I know. Both of us,” Dan said. “Hearing him say that, I really knew that he wanted something wrong. He was trying to feel me out—see how much money I needed, how far I'd be willing to go. He was using his daughter, and I'd be using mine.”

  “But you didn't—”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I shouldn't have even considered it in the first place. But I was going through rocky times, and I was so afraid of losing this place, losing my livelihood. My daughter has all the money she'll ever need, but I think of myself as providing for her. I want her to be proud of me, of what I do.”

  “What did Sean want you to do?”

/>   “He said that as trustees, we could arrange for the business to use cash from Eliza's trust. I started thinking: Maybe I could do it one time, essentially taking a loan against the principal. He was throwing around numbers—fifty, a hundred thousand.”

  Bay folded her arms, hating Sean for trying to get Dan to take money from his own daughter.

  “I thought, what if I did it for a year? Maybe six months. I'd get aggressive and start selling boats. I'd cut back on my materials, maybe use cheaper wood. My customers tend to be wealthy yachting types, and they don't blink at big bills. I'd get better at accounting, collect some back debts—I'd gotten sloppy in all that.”

  Bay just listened, wishing Dan had never even thought about it.

  “Sean said that, compared to what was in the body of the trust, it was nothing.”

  “What did he want in return?”

  “Looking back, I think he wanted to use the trust as a holding company. He asked how I would feel if there were some unfamiliar deposits and withdrawals, as long as they didn't affect the long-term value of the trust. I said I wasn't interested.”

  “Just like that?”

  Dan nodded. “As soon as he asked the question, I knew he was after something wrong. I don't know banking, but I knew the look in his eyes. He covered it right away—talking to me about building that boat.”

  “That creep,” Bay said. “She made that boat.”

  “I know,” Dan said. “I told him I didn't need to keep it—that if he just showed me, I could calculate the dimensions on a larger scale, build Annie something really pretty.”

  “And you think the whole thing was a front for him to—what? Launder money?” Bay asked, the strange, law-breaking expression sounding bizarre even as she said it.

  “I don't have any proof,” Dan said. “That's just how it seems to me now, as I try to piece it all together.”

  “Why didn't you tell the police?”

  “Because I'm Eliza's trustee. And I felt bad for even entertaining it with him, even briefly. I just wanted the whole thing to disappear.”

  Bay was shaking inside. Her husband had been busy plotting all this, working it, all the time, and she hadn't even seen it? She stared at Dan, thinking of how in love with him she had been as a young woman, and how right she had felt in his arms the other day. She had wanted to see him as her hero . . . the incorruptible man . . . Standing up, she began to pace.