Sand Castles

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Zina might be deluded. She might be living in a fantasy world. There was that possibility. But it was so remote that Wendy brushed it aside, and that brought her to Zack. Obviously he had to be telling the truth, as well—either that, or he was equally deluded. And what were the odds of that?

  The fact remained that Zack was at best a blackmailer with a loyal heart and a horrific childhood. But he was still someone who had sauntered up to the bubble of Wendy's existence and had rammed a spear through it, and it was hard—impossible—for her to get past that. She was bitterly dismayed by him, and for a multitude of reasons, some of which bewildered her.

  She turned onto Route 195, where traffic was heavy—headed for the Cape and points beyond; headed, perhaps, for Plimouth Plantation. The thought of the tourist attraction particularly bothered her, she wasn't sure why. It was like a hangnail. She wanted to tear it away, never mind the pain.

  By the time she pulled up to the beach house in Barrington, Walter had relaxed enough to curl up into a light and wary doze.

  Catnap, she thought with a smile. She could use one herself; any brief respite from the relentless pounding of emotions would do.

  It wasn't yet three and Jim's car was gone. He had warned her, but where was Ty? Obviously with him, but where? She carried her new and nervous pet, the first she'd ever had of her own, inside and set him down, then retrieved his belongings and arranged them in the sunniest room of the house, a wide, heated breezeway between the garage and the family room. Near the French doors, a couple of painted wicker chairs with fat cushions flanked a small table; Walter went up to one of the chairs and blithely began sharpening his claws on it, tearing through the paint.

  Oh, shit, she thought, remembering too late the no-pets clause in her lease. She would have to straighten that out with the agent. And get a few scratching posts.

  "Hey, you," she said softly to her new charge. "This is not the way to make a good impression." She dropped down into a crouch and rubbed her fingers together, and fat, lonely Walter came over and butted her hand. She smiled again, reveling in the simple bond between them, and vowed to send another check to the shelter, and tried not to think of the agonizing confrontations that lay ahead of her.

  The cat's purr resonated in the empty house but then became drowned out by a drone on the bay that increased to the roar of a tornado before abruptly dying to an irritating and still earsplitting glug: another hot-rod boat was tearing up the waters of Narragansett Bay. Wendy hated the things. Muscle boats, Ty had said they were called—noisy, gas-guzzling pleasure boats that, as far as Wendy could tell, brought pleasure to absolutely no one within hearing distance of them.

  Annoyed, she glanced out the bay window above the kitchen sink where she was filling a water bowl for Walter. The purple and banana-yellow boat was tied to a mooring directly off their beach. At the helm was her husband ... the man who might be her husband ... the man who used to be her husband. He was bare-chested, sickly white and with a spread of pink, as was Ty, who was in the boat with him. They were laughing, they were loud. Wendy could feel the blast of their adrenaline from where she stood.

  She squinted hard and stared unbelieving at Jim, seeing him for the first time and stunned to realize that she didn't have a clue who on earth he was. It had nothing to do with the boat—God knew, she was used to his insane impulse buys—and everything to do with the fact that he was apparently a bigamist.

  Still, the contrast between the loud, garishly painted boat and the image of Zina in the quiet of the shelter was great enough that it kicked Wendy out of her confusion and into a state of mounting fury. Everything seemed to be pointing to his guilt. Everything.

  And yet.

  She looked at Ty, looked at Jim, and couldn't believe that a man who loved his son could have so much contempt for women. It was impossible—still—for her to believe. She needed absolute proof.

  She walked outside, determined to keep her fury under control, and waited with fists planted firmly on her hips as her son scrambled over the side of the boat and waded ashore.

  The boy was in a state of rapture. "Mom, Mom!" he yelled happily as he forced his spindly legs through the resisting water. "It's ours, look! It's way past cool! And it's ours! Dad just bought it in Newport. It's ours! He let me drive it," the boy fairly screeched. "It'll do eighty, ninety miles an hour. Oh, man, you should feel it! And it's ours! I can't believe it!"

  He turned around on the beach and waved at his father, who was still on the boat, shutting it down. The sudden silence was a mercy, but it made Ty's declaration all the more audible.

  "Woo-woo!" Ty shrieked, pumping his arms in the air. "Dad, you're the best. You're the best!"

  Chapter 22

  On Monday morning, Zack showed up with the rest of the crew, drank coffee with the rest of the crew, and strapped on his tool belt with the rest of the crew. It was a risk, going back to work after Wendy had dismissed him, but only to his ego. He knew her well enough by now to feel fairly sure that she wouldn't give him the boot in front of the others. His hope was that she wanted to be done with the house more than she wanted to be done with him.

  Nonetheless, he was so unnerved by the sight of her car pulling up that he tripped on the staging plank on which he was poised outside the second floor, a first in his career as a housebuilder.

  Christ almighty, I'm going to get myself killed.

  It would solve one problem, anyway: the growing and entirely mystifying feelings he had for her. It had been forty-eight hours now since she'd sent him away, and he'd thought of almost nothing and no one but her. Granted, part of that was because Zina had mournfully forgiven his deception (although she'd begged him not to call her for a little while to give her time to get over it). For better or worse, ending the charade with his sister had left his emotions free to roam—and they hadn't had far to go.

  It was all so new. Him! Zacharias Stanford Tompkins, dedicated to the proposition that all women are created equal and, give or take their talent in bed, should be treated that way. He did not—he did not—want one of them stepping forward and compelling a closer inspection. He did not, especially, want this woman stepping forward. The chances were so good that it would be with a bat in her hand.

  From outside the second-floor window he noticed that Tyler was sitting in the front seat of the Taurus. He saw the boy wince when Wendy slammed the door with extra ferocity as she emerged from the car. Zack was convinced that he'd been spotted, but, no; she was apparently just mad on her own.

  When Scottie yelled up from ground level, "Hey! Zack!" that's when she saw him. She looked in the direction that Scott was looking; her eyebrows first went up and then went down.

  "Zack?"

  "Yessum," he called down with ironic sheepishness.

  Her jaw dropped enough for him to notice it from up there. She recovered and said tightly, "Can I see you a moment? Down here?"

  "Yessum," he drawled.

  She went inside, slamming the screen door probably off its hinges.

  From inside, Pete stuck his head out the window. "What the hell was that all about? Why does she want to see you?”

  Climbing back inside the house, Zack said blandly, "Darned if I know."

  She hadn't ordered Pete to send him packing. She had expected that Zack would just drift away like the con artist she believed him to be. Interesting, how she was assuming that he'd do the right thing for the wrong reason. And way off base, of course: he was still determined to do the wrong thing for the right reason.

  He found her in the kitchen. She was wearing slacks and a tailored white blouse, so she wasn't there to work. In a frigid undertone she said, "I did not expect to see you back here."

  "And yet here I be."

  He wasn't really worried that she'd make good on her threat to call in the cops; she hadn't looked confident enough for that. Sooner or later she was going to put all the pieces together and figure it out. He wanted to be there in case she was missing some elements of the puzzle. In a way
, he was on a death watch of a marriage. It didn't particularly fill him with joy.

  Her color was high with emotion as she said, "Have you spoken to your—Zina?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  She looked confused by that. "Well, I'm sorry it had to happen, and I'm still not ... I need to ... why are you here?" she asked in obvious distress. "If it's for money—"

  "I'd be sitting on Jim. You know why I'm here." A rush of exasperation whisked away caution and he said, "Because of you. Haven't you figured that out yet?"

  He saw the look he was giving her singe her consciousness, and then he saw her blink and look away. "I have to go," she said, almost in a plea. "You have to go. I'll figure out what I figure out," she added incomprehensibly.

  "For God's sake, Wendy, if you need proof, if you refuse to believe me, then hire yourself an investigator. I'll pay for the guy!"

  She hushed him and looked around, askance. "What, and have some sleazy PI sell the story to a tabloid? Are you insane?"

  "You think the world would care? If Jim were Elvis or you were Madonna—maybe. Believe me, nobody cares. Nobody but you, me, and my sister. Even Jim doesn't care! If he did, he'd be punching my lights out, he'd be—"

  "Stop! Shh, stop, oh, please," she said, surprising him by clamping her hand over his mouth. "Ty's in the car. I don't want this to come out until I know—"

  If it were anyone else, Zack would have slapped away the hand—but it was Wendy, and, God help him, he fell under the spell of her scent. He decided to wait for her to calm down mostly so that he could relish the nearness of her, the contact of her flesh and his.

  The pleading look she gave him tumbled into confusion as she removed her hand and suspended it, tentative and shaking, inches away from his lips.

  "You have to go," she urged in a whisper. "I'm begging you, Zack. Just ... don't be here when I get back. Please. I'm begging you."

  In his entire life, no woman had ever begged him for anything that didn't involve sex. He was stunned and chastened and profoundly sorry that the first woman who'd been forced to do it was Wendy.

  "I'll go," he said softly. "And I'll wait. But you're on a fool's errand, Wendy. The truth is staring you in the face."

  She closed her eyes at that, and he took it as a sign.

  Wendy ended up leaving the house first. Depressed, Zack stood in the shadow of a first-floor window and watched as she paused at her car door and allowed herself a sweeping look at her modest dream. Once again he was struck by her ability to remain unfazed by wealth. He was impressed and, he now realized, hopeful somehow because of it. It was the first time he'd admitted it to himself.

  She drove off and Zack went back to work. The phone rang, as it did less often now that she'd moved out, and the machine kicked in. He paused on his way out to look at the caller ID screen: the caller's number was blocked. Instinctively on the alert, Zack waited to see if the caller was going to hang up or not.

  The caller chose not.

  "Jimmy—you there? Yo! Bro! You there? C'mon, I'm getting impatient ..."

  Taking a shot, Zack picked up the phone and said briefly, "Yeh?"

  No dice. His voice, he knew, was deeper than Jim's. The caller realized it, too, and hung up.

  Zack played back the message. The background was free of moaning and groaning this time, but it was obvious that the caller was the same one who was tearing at Wendy's nerves. No longer did he sound like a dufus to Zack. Wendy was right: the guy was a first-class creep.

  ****

  Wendy returned to her rented house without her son. She had dropped Tyler off for a sleepover with his grandparents, who as usual were happy to have the chance to ply him with Ovaltine and video rentals. Grace Ferro, still smarting from the aftermath of her failed birthday party, had admittedly been a little subdued; but Wendy's father had seemed his usual gentle and courteous self. No one alluded to Friday's fiasco.

  With Tyler safely out of the way, Wendy felt ready for battle. She had warned Jim to stick around without telling him why, and he had instantly responded with a baffled and weary, "What, this again?"

  But he was as good as his word and had, in fact, stuck around. She found him puttering on his go-fast boat and had to wave him ashore, which had the effect of annoying them both. It hardly mattered; she no longer felt the need to tread diplomatically through the morass of his secrecy and double-talk.

  Jim suggested that they sit at the glass-topped table on the patio. Wendy suggested that they go inside. Jim didn't like her suggestion. Wendy didn't care.

  In the kitchen, she opened by saying, "Yesterday you asked where I got the cat, and I said, from a shelter. Didn't you think it was odd that I went out for faucets and came back with a cat?"

  "Nope. You've been talking about getting a pet forever." He added, "I would have picked a better-looking cat than that one, though. There must be a million of them out there to choose from."

  Hoisting himself by the palms of his hands, he plunked his butt on a kitchen counter—presumably because Wendy had asked him not to, since it offended her mother.

  She refused to let him get a rise out of her. "The shelter I went to was in Hopeville," she said, and when he looked blank, she added, "Near Worcester."

  His look changed to mild surprise. "Way up there?"

  "Way up there. I went to see Zina, Jim. She volunteers at a shelter."

  He laughed. "Who Zina? Crazy Zina? You're kidding. How did you find her?"

  "It wasn't hard. She's convinced that she's your wife."

  "I think we've already established that," he said with a lingering smile. In no hurry, he waited to see what else she had to say.

  "She told me about her childhood. And Zack's. About their parents. About the murder-suicide."

  "Murder, geez. Sounds like you had a real friendly chat," he said. He rested the heel of his docksider idly on a drawer handle and began sliding the drawer open with it.

  Wendy tried not to get distracted by his little maneuver. She had to watch him closely—watch for some sign, some twitch, some rise and fall of his Adam's apple that would tell her what she was trying to learn without her going to the ignominy of hiring a private investigator.

  "In fact, Zina said that you were married not once but twice."

  "Because ...? They mispelled Hodene? Not enough witnesses?"

  "Her name is Hayward," Wendy said. He was being deliberately obtuse, more infuriating to her just then than being a liar. "And you know it."

  "All I know is what you tell me," he said, with the first hint of resentment that she'd seen so far.

  She wasn't sure if that meant she was winning or losing. "Where did you get the name Hodene?" she asked bluntly. "Zack told me you probably stole someone's identity."

  "Oh—Zack told you. What can I say?" he said with a shrug. "Consider the source." He slammed the drawer shut with his heel, then opened it again.

  "I went through our files last night—"

  "What? No eBay?" he said, smirking.

  "—and I dragged out your birth certificate," she announced calmly. She opened the cookie sheet drawer, removed a piece of paper, and handed it to him. "This is all I could find. It's not an original; it's nothing but a copy."

  "Well, duh. People lose their originals, you know. For lots of reasons. Fire, flood, theft. Shuffling between foster homes." He began folding the birth certificate into a paper plane on the counter's surface.

  She thought, He won't look me in the eye anymore. Either he's wearing down, or he just doesn't care. The realization sent her adrenaline surging. She circled him and began to move in.

  "It can't be that hard to get hold of a fake certificate with an embossed seal, can it?" she said. "Or wasn't it worth going through the trouble? Oh, wait—you didn't have a pot to pee in back then, did you? Was that the hitch? Lack of funds to do the job right?"

  "Jeezuz, woman, what's your problem?" he asked lightly, and he sent the little paper plane soaring off.

  It made a perfect loop and came down low,
jabbing into poor Walter, who'd wandered into the kitchen looking for more treats. Startled, the cat jumped sideways and skulked back out.

  That too bothered Wendy. Everything about Jim was suddenly an irritant. What he said, how he looked, every single thing he did—irritants. At best.

  "My problem is you, you total jerk," she said, not bothering to hide the bitterness she was feeling toward him. "I know you're lying. I just don't know why you're lying. Why bother? You're rich. You can afford an even newer wife. Or whatever the hell she'd be. Why bother trying to hang on here?"

  "If you don't know," he muttered, dropping down from the counter, "then I'm not going to tell you."

  There it was: that wounded sincerity that always ended up blindsiding her, time after time after time. This time, it was different. She stepped in front of him to prevent him from walking away.

  "Tell me," she commanded, sticking out her hand at him like a crossing guard. "Tell me why you're still hanging around here. Because I really don't have a clue."

  "You know what?" he said angrily. "Neither do I. Up until that woman showed up, I would've told you it was because I loved you, loved Ty, loved our life together. Not anymore."

  His fair skin flushed dark and he ran his hand through his hair, classic signs of his frustration.

  "You've always been suspicious of me," he said hotly, "but this takes the cake. I feel like a prime frigging suspect in a murder trial! A total stranger walks across the lawn and claims to be my wife, and you buy into it hook, line, and sinker. You hunt her down and wring your hands because you think her daddy shot her mommy," he said, sneering. "I mean, come on; who do we know with a history like that? I think you want to believe I'm a bigamist, God only knows why. If you're tired of the marriage, then say so, damn it. Have the guts and the decency to just ... say so!"

  Her head was bursting, but her voice was deadly calm as she said, "I never told you that Zina's father shot her mother. I only mentioned a murder-suicide."