Off Season

by Jean Stone

  She looked down at the cover and saw the picture of the house. She felt that awful tremble in her belly. Then she sucked in her lower lip so she wouldn’t start to cry.

  Rita smiled. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked. “Can I tell you something you promise you won’t tell your mother?”

  Mindy shrugged.

  Rita smiled some more. “I think I have a buyer for your house.”

  Hauling a tarp up from the ground, Mindy smoothed it across the top of the boat. “Oh,” she said.

  “We’ll keep our fingers crossed, but the buyer knows the property. He’s coming by tomorrow to check it out. That will be good, won’t it? To sell your house?”

  Mindy shrugged. “I’ve got to go inside now.”

  “Mindy?” Rita had called after her. “I know Ben Niles.”

  She stopped dead in the tracks she made with her light-up sneakers, which her mother hadn’t yet replaced. “I know you do,” she said, staring straight ahead. “You brought fudge to the museum.”

  She felt Rita move up close behind her. “That’s right, I did. Ben’s wife is a friend of mine. And I don’t think he’s a bad person, do you?”

  Mindy looked away. “I’m not going to talk to you about any of this stuff,” she said. “I’m not allowed to. It’s the law.”

  Rita nodded. “Sure. That’s okay. But just remember, if you ever want to talk, I’m Ben’s friend, too. And he’s very worried about you.” The woman turned and started walking toward the Toyota.

  Then, not knowing why, Mindy heard herself call out, “Ritablair?” The name came out as one word, letters strung together.

  Rita turned around.

  “Is he okay?” she asked. “Is Ben okay?”

  “Sure,” Rita replied with a shrug that matched her own.

  Mindy watched the woman leave, then went inside the house and up into her room where she sat and wondered if sometime between now and April she could be dead like Grandpa, or at least if she could run away.

  This time they did not make up by making love.

  Instead, they walked on the beach, said little but touched often, hand in hand, arm in arm, fingers touching lips and eyes and cheeks.

  There was little to be said except I’m sorry, which she said to him and he to her.

  Then they held hands again and walked along the water, past the pilings and the pier, past the lighthouse and around the harbor, escorted only by the gulls and a forgiving winter sky.

  Charlie flew up to Logan from Florida, so Rita wouldn’t have to drive back to the ferry alone, in case there was a snowstorm, in case she didn’t feel well. So after Jill had set off in her car, Rita climbed in next to Charlie. The expectant father then carefully headed south toward Woods Hole. He never, not once, went over the speed limit, as if two yellow baby-on-board signs were already flopping in the back window of her car.

  Along the way, he convinced Rita that she should let him stay with Hazel and her (in the downstairs den, of course), in case Rita needed him in the middle of the night.

  All of which helped prove to her (not that she really needed proof) that she could count on Charlie, that he’d be there no matter what.

  She therefore did not hesitate to lure him into her scheme, and loyal Charlie, the father of her children, did not question why she wanted him to pretend to be interested in the Ashenbach property. And he did not say it was odd that Rita was trying to befriend a little girl, or suggest that Rita was using him as a ruse to get to spend more time with the girl.

  “Do you like babies?” she asked Mindy now, while Charlie talked with Fern about the septic system, about which Fern probably knew squat. “I’m going to have twins.”

  “My friend Suzanne has a twin brother,” Mindy said to Rita, who stood inside her bedroom, pretending to examine the ceiling for any parts that might indicate a leaky roof. “Well, she’s not a friend, really. Just a kid in school.”

  Rita walked over to a group of stuffed animals lined up on Mindy’s shelf. “I like your stuffed animals. I never had stuffed animals. I had a doll, though. Peggy, I called her. She had dark hair, and her eyes opened and closed, her knees and elbows bent.” Rita laughed. “When I was a kid, that was the best you could expect. Today dolls talk to you.”

  “I don’t like dolls,” Mindy replied.

  Rita turned and looked back at Mindy. “No? Wow. I don’t know what I would’ve have done without Peggy. She was my best friend. I told her everything.”

  “I thought Ben’s wife was your best friend.”

  Well, Rita hadn’t expected that. She smiled, watching the little girl who was a step ahead of her. “I mean Peggy was bester than my best friend. She never thought anything I said or did was dumb. It was like having a big sister.”

  “Oh,” Mindy said. She walked to the window away from Rita’s line of sight. “I had a doll. Raggedy Ann. I threw her out.”

  “How come?”

  Mindy laughed and turned back around. “Because I’m ten!”

  “Well, I’m older than that, and I still have Peggy. She sits on my dresser now, and she still helps me with my problems.” It was true, her doll did sit on the dresser, but she’d become a dust collector, hardly a confessor. But Mindy wouldn’t know that. “It helps to have someone to talk to sometimes. Not a friend and not your mother.” Rita shrugged. “Well, I gotta go see if Charlie’s going to buy this place.”

  “What are you doing, Rita?” Charlie asked after they’d left the Ashenbach place and he was driving back toward Edgartown.

  “Why, Charlie Rollins, whatever are you asking?”

  He shook his head. “You’re up to something. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care—I’d do anything you asked, you know that. I have. I helped you get the passport so you could go rescue Jill. I never asked for an explanation, not once. But this woman started grilling me about Ben. I didn’t like the things she asked. Like how much I think he’s worth.”

  Rita shifted on the seat. The baby, one or both, whacked her in the side. “I can only say that while you were in Florida, a lot happened.” She thought for a moment. “Actually, it started before you left, but I didn’t know it.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as I’m not the one who should be telling you.”

  “Jesus, Rita, I’m the father of your unborn children.”

  She turned her head toward him. “That has nothing to do with this.”

  He smiled. “Tell me, Rita. I want to know.”

  She sighed and looked back toward the sea that hugged the narrow strip of road. “At the beginning of October, Mindy Ashenbach told her grandfather that Ben had touched her. Dave Ashenbach had Ben arrested. The trial is in April, and in the meantime, I’m trying to make friends with Mindy so she’ll recant her story and tell the truth. And before you ask how I’m qualified to do that, I’ll tell you that when I was a kid, a man molested me. Several times. He never raped me, but he might as well have. It was old Blanchette at the corner store, remember him? Anyway, I figure if I can win Mindy’s trust, she’ll ‘fess up before it’s too late. Oh, and in the meantime, another wrinkle popped up. Apparently Ben and Fern Ashenbach had a thing a few years back. She’s trying to blackmail him out of half a million dollars. She says if Ben antes up, she’ll have Mindy say she lied.” She moved her hip the other way, to ward off another kick. “For obvious reasons, few people know. We’re trying to keep it that way.”

  The ocean looked calm for January, and the sun sparkled off the water almost as if it were spring. Thankfully, it was not, for the progress Rita was making with Mindy was definitely slow going. And on top of that, there was the babies’ room to do.

  “I’d say you were joking,” Charlie finally said, “but I’ve known you long enough to know when you are and when you’re not.”

  Rita nodded.

  “I can’t believe this, though. It all sounds preposterous.”

  “It is,” she said. “It’s also very real.”

  Ben and Jill did not hear from Herb Bartlett
until the end of January, the week before Jill left for New York for her February coming-out party. They had telephoned the attorney five times in between—Jill three times, Ben twice. She wanted to ask Addie what the hell was going on, but Addie would tell her to hold her horses, that men like Herb Bartlett worked on their own time, in their own way. Besides, Addie did not know the real reason they needed Bartlett: she still thought they needed him for the island boy accused of molesting the island girl.

  So it came as a surprise on a Tuesday evening when someone knocked at the front door and it turned out to be the fringed-leather-jacketed attorney, a briefcase in his hand, a young female assistant at his side.

  “There wasn’t time to phone,” Bartlett said, making his way into the living room before he’d been invited. He sat down in the wing chair, and his straight dark-haired assistant, in a gray pin-striped suit, made herself at home across from him.

  Jill glanced down at the heavy cowboy boots on her great-grandmother’s braided rug. “May I take your coats?” she asked.

  Bartlett shook his head. “We’ll just be a minute.”

  Ben had moved into the room and was standing next to Jill.

  She sat down and introduced herself and Ben to the assistant.

  “Are there any new developments?” the attorney asked.

  “No,” Ben said. “Except I went to the co-op the other day and Bill Harrington looked at me oddly, and I think that he might know. Then again, I think pretty much everyone knows, not that they’d say it to my face, not on this blessed island.”

  Bartlett clicked open his briefcase and withdrew some papers. “You’d better get used to that,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice, “because the girl’s mother has been in touch with my office.”

  Jill looked from Bartlett to Ben, who was motionless by the fireplace.

  “What?” he asked.

  The attorney perched half-glasses on his nose and peered at the papers. The assistant sat mute. “Fern Alice Ashenbach,” he said, and Jill tried to quell the chill that crawled through her veins at the mention of the name. “Attorney Fitzpatrick notified the court that I had joined your defense team. The court, in turn, notified Ms. Ashenbach.” He sifted through the papers.

  Ben leaned against the fireplace.

  “Why did he do that?” Jill asked, because Ben was saying nothing.

  “Courtesy,” Bartlett said, “and the law.” The attorney cleared his throat. “Ms. Ashenbach called to say that if you were trying to intimidate her by bringing in a ‘high-priced lawyer,’ then you’d better think twice. She said she knows Ms. McPhearson is going to be back on TV soon, and how would everyone like it if the news about what Ben did was on the front page of the National Exposé. She said she’d even send them pictures of her daughter, that she really didn’t mind, because someone was going to pay for her story. If not Ben, then someone else.”

  His soft, easy Atlanta-speak helped mask the threat in those words and the horror of it all.

  “That’s blackmail,” Jill said, the cords in her neck tightening. “She can’t blackmail us. She’ll go to jail.”

  The attorney shook his head. “She can’t go to the tabloids, either. I reminded her of the gag order. I told her she’d be the one in jail.”

  Ben let out a breath as if he’d been holding it.

  “So she asked for a ‘settlement.’ In other words, if we pay her, she’ll have her daughter change her story.”

  Closing his eyes, Ben said, “She already tried. I already said no.”

  Jill looked at her husband. “She asked you for money?”

  “Half a million dollars,” he replied. “Even if we had that kind of money, the price of freedom is too high.”

  Jill was too stunned to know how to reply.

  Bartlett retrieved another paper from his pin-striped assistant. “There’s more,” he said.

  Jill held her breath, braced for the other proverbial shoe to thud to the floor.

  “Even though right now she can’t sell her story or get you to ‘settle,’ the woman apparently is determined to make a big score. She said she knows her ‘rights.’ And that after the criminal trial, she’ll file a civil suit. She thinks she’ll get her money that way, because of all the attention it will draw because of Jill’s celebrity.”

  “A civil suit?” Ben asked, and Jill was glad, because she could only hear the words “Jill’s celebrity” echo like a death sentence somewhere in her mind.

  “Yes. At which time, I have to caution you, there will most likely be no gag order, because she, Fern Ashenbach, will sue you, Ben Niles, for pain and suffering brought on by what she claims you did to her daughter and by the humiliation of the trial.” He laced his words with sarcasm and mockery toward the woman who claimed she had rights.

  “And no matter what happens at the trial, the whole world will know,” Jill stated.

  Bartlett nodded, and in Ben’s face, Jill saw that pale anguish return. She closed her eyes a moment, then stood up and left the room.

  Chapter 29

  There was no sense calling Addie, who would probably lash out with hot-headed anger. Not that telling Christopher would be any easier, but Jill thought he might handle it better, with fewer threats and less intimidation.

  She went upstairs and called him and left a message on his voice mail. Twenty minutes later, just as she heard Herb Bartlett and his assistant downstairs saying good-bye, Christopher called.

  “I’m en route to New York,” he said. “Good-bye, L.A.”

  Jill drew in a shallow breath. “You’re en route, as in for good?”

  “Yep. I’m in an airplane as we speak. Thirty-some-odd thousand feet over somewhere. The Rockies, maybe. I don’t know. It’s dark.”

  “It’s dark here, too.”

  He laughed. “Did you call to tell me that?”

  She twirled the cord around her finger. “No. I called to say I’m backing out of the contract. I won’t be doing Good Night, USA.”

  He paused a second, then laughed again. “Have you been drinking?”

  “This is serious, Christopher. You know about the situation with Ben. Well, now the girl’s mother has said she will file a civil suit. There will be no gag order against it, so chances are she’ll also sell her story to the tabloids. She thinks she can get away with it, because it will cause a huge scandal because”—she choked on her next words—“because of who I am. If I—we—are just getting back into the spotlight together, the world will jump on it. It will kill the show, and you’ll go down as well.”

  “How much does she want? Whatever it is, I’m sure Addie will pay.”

  “No, I don’t want Addie involved.”

  “Then I’ll pay her, goddammit. This affects my future, too.”

  She wanted to say it was his own fault. She wanted to remind him that he was the one who’d stayed in touch with Hugh, as if he had possessed her even when she’d married someone else. She wanted to say it was his own fault because she needed so badly to blame someone else.

  She stared down at the deacon’s bench and remembered the day Ben sat there, the day he told her the news. “I’m out, Christopher. It means Ben and I will no longer be able to afford Herb Bartlett, but we’ll work something out. As for the show, I should have known better. I should have left well enough alone.”

  “Addie will sue you.”

  “I’m sure she will. But let her know that my house is in my kids’ names and Ben’s is in his daughter’s. There’s nothing else she can touch. She’s already taken it all.”

  In the silence, she could hear the gentle hum of the jet engines.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “I cannot do this to my family,” she said. “And I will not do this to my husband. If I weren’t who I am, no one would care. By being in the public eye—by returning to the public eye—I can’t have a real life, with its flaws and its hurdles. I’ve forgotten what a miserable place fame creates.”

  He did not say anything for a minute. “Why d
o you still want to be with me, Christopher? Can’t you see I belong where I am?”

  “You belong with me, Jill.” He laughed. “You’re the first woman who ever walked out on me, did you know that?”

  She did not. “But why did you help us get Bartlett? I thought you wanted Ben to be found innocent. You said you wanted me to be happy.”

  He laughed again. Oh God, he laughed.

  “I thought you’d need to know you had the best man on your side. But even Bartlett can’t help your husband. He’s not innocent, Jill. Wake up and accept that Ben is as guilty as sin. He’s a child molester, for chrissake. Get your head out of the clouds.”

  He clicked off without saying good-bye. Jill held the receiver, the dial tone droning in her ear. Then she looked up to see Ben standing in the door.

  “Bartlett’s gone,” he said.

  Jill nodded.

  “We don’t need him,” Ben added.

  She nodded again.

  “I told him to take the next ferry back to Atlanta.”

  She broke into a smile. “What the hell are we going to do?”

  He approached the bed and flopped down on it. “We’re going to be glad that we agree on something. It’s time to end the bullshit, honey. Tomorrow I’m going to find Mindy. And I’m going to talk to her.”

  In the morning, Ben drove out to Menemsha with determination firing his gut. He had no intention of turning this into a confrontation; he only wanted to talk to her. He only wanted to let her know that this had gotten out of hand. It was Sunday morning, so hopefully Mindy would be home. Unless, of course, Fern had taken up church-going.

  He spotted the sign for the turnoff to the cliffs of Gay Head. Noepe would approve of what he was doing: taking charge, taking the risk to be right.

  On the way, he’d stopped at Dippin’ Donuts for a coffee and a honey-dipped cruller. He’d also bought a dozen doughnut holes to take to Carol Ann’s—he might as well stop by there later and give them the resounding news that all hell was going to break loose, or was not. Either way, Ben thought as he drove along State Road, chewing on his cruller and realizing it had been months since food tasted so good, it didn’t matter anymore. He and Jill were on the same team now, and they’d get through this on their own.