By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  "Yes, Quinta," he said, not unkindly. "Just think."

  "And I talked to the dockmaster at the marina. He thinks the docks are wide enough for a ramp to the boat, but we'll have to work out some way to rig—"

  "Are you kidding, girl? I can't go on the boat anymore." There was genuine wonder in his voice.

  "Sure you can, Dad. Look, I've been thinking about it. Why can't we put in some kind of, I don't know, a rod or like a roll bar or something to lash the wheelchair to?"

  Despair hovered around the edges of his amusement. "How the hell do I see forward to steer? Periscope?"

  "Oh, well, no. I could steer. I handle the boat pretty well." In an unsure voice, her confidence faltering, she added, "You always said I did."

  Alan half-turned on his heel; he had no right to be privy to this conversation. But there was something about the young woman's voice—her brave, single-handed effort to appease her father—that made Alan want, if nothing else, to divert the bitterness of the father to himself.

  He knocked lightly on the open door, cursing himself for having worn boat shoes and a polo shirt, for seeming to rub it in that he was an active sailor.

  "I'm Alan Seton," he said without preamble. "May I come in?"

  Neil Powers made a sound and looked out the window. Alan interpreted it to be a yes, entered the room, and stood at the foot of the bed. The second bed was unoccupied, he noticed, but flowers were on both bedstands. The girl, younger than she'd sounded, was watching her father anxiously. She was tall, with surprisingly strong-looking arms and shoulders set off by a yellow tank top. Alan wondered whether she was a swimmer. Like a lot of people in Newport, she was tanned, fit, healthy. Her hair, shoulder-length and straight, gleamed like polished brass plate. She did not look at Alan. She was neither shy nor intimidated, he decided; just intensely preoccupied.

  Still, when her father continued to act as if Alan weren't in the room, she turned to Alan with a silent plea for understanding. Her look was clear, hopeful, surprisingly bewildered by her father's despair.

  Alan broke the awkward silence. "The police have finished with me in their investigation. I'll be leaving Newport tomorrow, probably for good"—Why did he add that?—"but I wanted to tell you first how ... how extremely sorry I am. I still can't believe this has happened." His words sounded painfully clichéd to him.

  "Funny, it seems real enough to me." Powers spoke without taking his gaze from the view through the window, a sweep of Newport and the harbor beyond. Despite the comfortable temperature in the room, he seemed to huddle, as if he were waiting for a bus on a cold night.

  "Mr. Powers, I understand that Dr. Greene remains hopeful that your ... condition ... is temporary. In the meantime, is there anything—anything at all—that I can do?"

  Powers turned to Alan and looked him full in the face. His eyes were so different from his daughter's: his were sad, soulful, yearning eyes. They were the eyes of a romantic, Alan thought; of a man who can't help but dwell on the tragic possibilities of life. What could he offer as comfort to such eyes?

  "Anything you can do?" Powers said quietly. "Yes. You can get out of here." And Neil Powers, America's Cup fanatic, turned deliberately away from the first skipper since Harold Vanderbilt to speak to him directly, and resumed his mournful gaze out at the harbor.

  "What my father means is that he's not up to seeing anyone just now," the daughter said quickly.

  Alan gave her a quick, grateful smile. "Yeah—that part I got." To Neil Powers he said, "I understand completely. I am sorry." And he left.

  But before Alan reached the end of the corridor, the girl had caught up with him. "Mr. Seton," she said breathlessly, pulling up alongside him, "that wasn't right. My dad isn't mad at you personally, just ... the world," she said, trailing off.

  Alan stopped where he was and studied her. She suggested a maturity that she didn't perhaps have yet, but she carried herself well. Head high, shoulders back—she was ready and eager to take on the Forces of Evil, wherever they happened to be. Alan felt slavishly grateful to her, he didn't know why. "What's your name?" he asked.

  "Quinta," she answered with a sigh.

  Alan said softly, "Is that so bad?" Because it did seem as though she was embarrassed by the name.

  "Well, no. It's just that Quinta is a funny name and people always ask what it means," she said with another sigh. "It means 'fifth,' because I was my dad's fifth daughter with no sons," she explained. "As if that was my fault."

  Smiling, Alan said, "Are all your sisters listed numerically, too?"

  "No, they're named after boys: Eddie, Georgie, Bobbie, and Jackie."

  "You must be special, then, since you were named on a different system."

  "You think so?" She turned her pretty hazel eyes on him, cutting through his patronizing remark. "Actually, I've always thought it was because Dad got bored with waiting for a son and just lost interest." Her shrug was the gesture of an older, more world-weary woman.

  "Anyway," she said, reverting to her real age, "I'm sorry Dad ... you know ... spoke to you like that. It wasn't your fault, and"—here she blushed scarlet—"I guess you do have problems of your own." She stuck out her hand in apology.

  He took it and said fervently, "Quinta, look, I've spoken to Dr. Greene and—well, obviously the insurance companies will take care of everything, but if there's anything you see that your dad might want, anything, really, at all—" He was thinking of dock ramps and roll bars, and he didn't know what he was thinking of—"just call me, or write." He let go of her hand to take a business card from his wallet. "And don't apologize for your father. If it had been me—" I'd have blown my brains out, he thought, but he left the sentence unfinished. He wondered again about the dock ramp. "Now think," he urged her. "Is there anything—anything—I can do or get?"

  Just as earnestly, she stood and stared at a spot in mid-air, considering. "No, except—"

  "What is it?" He'd put a down payment on the Brooklyn Bridge if she asked him to.

  "This is maybe a little silly," she said reluctantly, "but the dog that dad was holding? He said it was a female who looked like she was still nursing. He still feels bad about her. I was wondering about her litter ... but I don't know who the owners are ... although I suppose I could find out from the police?"

  Of course she could; perhaps she knew it; but he understood her hesitance in pursuing it. "I'll have the information for you in five minutes. Can you meet me in the lobby then? I need to make a phone call or two." He was elated at the chance to be useful.

  She gave him a tight, self-conscious smile. "Thanks. I will."

  In five minutes he was pacing the lobby impatiently; he'd had an idea. Ready or not, Quinta Powers was destined to be mistress of a very expensive purebred black Labrador puppy. It was something he wanted to do, a symbol of his fierce desire to make amends. In another minute he saw her, walking quickly, a canvas backpack slung over one shoulder. In her faded jeans and flip-flops, she looked like every other young woman on campus, except that she wasn't on her way from class but leaving her broken father for a little while. She would be right back the first chance she got, Alan had no doubt.

  "Hi," she said, suddenly shy. He supposed it was because of the more everyday atmosphere in the lobby. People were coming and going, speaking normally, laughing.

  Suddenly he felt a little awkward himself. Really, how would it look if he hauled her off without her father's knowledge? The puppy plan was dumb. He decided to give her the information she'd asked for and leave it at that. "Okay, here's the scoop," he began. There are six in the litter, which was born of a very high-class liaison. Three have been sent off to other breeders and surrogate mothers. The owners are keeping one, a female. The last two are up for adoption: one is a very frisky, friendly male; the other is a female, but she's been spoken for. Apparently they weren't quite weaned, but they're adapting nicely. So the situation seems to be under control."

  Like all young women when the words "puppy" and "adoption" are
mentioned, Quinta went misty-eyed. Her eyebrows tilted up toward one another, and she shaped, but did not say, the word, 'ohh' on a sigh.

  "I was thinking of going out to see them," he said, suddenly yielding to his original impulse after all. "If you want, I could take you along and drop you off at your house afterward. Or back here, if that's where you left your car."

  "Oh, would you?" It was said without coyness. Puppy puppy puppy was written all over her lit-up face. He hadn't noticed before how high and fine her cheekbones were when she smiled. But then, she hadn't smiled before.

  "Do you want to run back up and tell your father where you're off to?" he said conscientiously.

  Quinta didn't answer right away; she just gave him a look. He had no idea what it meant. Annoyance? Contempt? Wonder? Pity?

  Very quietly she said, "I don't think that's necessary." Mrs. Astor couldn't have done it better.

  The hell with it, he thought. His first instinct had been the right one. "Well, then," he answered with more cheerfulness than he felt, "off we go to Ocean Avenue. I don't suppose you know where an estate called 'The Gray Tower' is." She shook her head and he went on, trying to cover his earlier faux pas. "Why they can't use plain old number addresses is beyond me. So big deal; so the house has a tower. That doesn't tell us much about east or west, does it? Oh, Almy Pond. They're across from it. And they're near the ocean. Some clue. Everyone on the island is near the bloody ocean."

  They were in the parking lot and face to face with faux pas number two: the infamous silver Mercedes that had run down the mother of the litter in question and the kind-hearted man who was holding her at the time. Alan swore a silent, intense string of especially violent oaths and, desperately hoping that Quinta would not make the connection, opened her door for her and went around to the driver's seat.

  He talked on, asking her where she was planning to go to college, and what sports were her favorites, and math or English? And all the while he was glancing at her through the side of his aviator sunglasses, seeing her look around and then run her hand over the tufted seat, no doubt saying to herself, "This is where the mysterious high-heeled shoe was lying. This is where the little box of pills and drugs rolled out." And he was telling himself, Oh shit, oh shit, what a dumb idea this was.

  But she merely commented, "I've never been in a Mercedes before."

  Which surprised him. Was she so oblivious? Is that what her generation amounted to? He launched on another irrelevant ramble, this time about every car he'd ever owned, including his first, a 1965 red Volvo, as they negotiated the one-way morass that is downtown Newport.

  They passed the southern end of the harbor, and Quinta said, "My dad lived for a while in a little house off that street, but it's been torn down. He was eight when he moved there—off a boat, no less. An old coastal schooner. That must have been so cool, but he doesn't ever talk about it. I suppose because it was wrecked on a reef in the Bahamas."

  "Whoa. Was he aboard the schooner at the time?"

  "Yeah. With my grandmother. They had a mate and crew, but my grandfather wasn't aboard because he was crewing on Vanderbilt's Rainbow."

  Worse and worse. A man steeped in Cup history and a survivor of a tragedy at sea, crippled probably for life because of Cindy. No more boat for him; no ocean, no joy … because of Cindy. He remembered vividly her words: Blood? Oh, that. I hit a dog.

  God help him, but he hoped fervently just then that Cindy truly was at the bottom of the bay. There would be divine justice in that, at least.

  He did not know what to say to Quinta's simple account of what was obviously another traumatic event for Neil Powers. To pursue it struck him as ghoulish, so he settled for saying, "Your father has not lived an ordinary life so far." And even that sounded lame to him.

  "No," Quinta agreed. "That's my grandmother's doing. She was very adventurous. Even now. She and my step-grandfather are nearly eighty and on a round-the-world cruise. Who does that? But anyway, my dad won't let us try to get in touch with them; he doesn't want us to ruin their trip of a lifetime, he says."

  They were on Coggeshall Avenue now, abreast of Almy Pond. Not until they made the turn onto Ocean Avenue, each of them looking for a gray ivy-covered tower, did faux pas number three occur to him: that he was, in the best tradition of Agatha Christie, reenacting the crime for the sweet young woman next to him who had merely wanted to be sure that the puppies were doing all right.

  He pulled the car over onto the shoulder, stopped it, and looked at Quinta. She was staring straight ahead. When she blinked, the first tear fell. He wanted to brush it away, but another came rolling down directly behind it. He let them be.

  "I'm a complete ass, Quinta. I wasn't thinking," he said softly.

  "No, it's okay, really," she insisted, but the words caught in her throat. "I wasn't ..." She stopped, swallowed, wiped both eyes with the palms of her hands and said, "... thinking either. But I'll have to go down this road sometime—get used to it sometime. Dad too, even. It's a small island. So … please."

  He eased back on the road, and it was she who spied The Gray Tower—an ungainly, square-turreted Victorian set back behind enormous hedges a little away from the road. You had to look for the mailbox and the small bronze signboard hanging beneath it that said "The Tower" in tiny inch-high letters, which annoyed him, so he said, "There must be easier ways to maintain privacy. Why don't they just live in a cave, for God's sake?"

  They turned into the circular Belgian-block drive—the wrought iron gates that split the hedges were open—and pulled up in front of a wide, wraparound porch painted all white, with great copper washtubs bursting with red geraniums squatting on either side of the top step. Before they had a chance to cross the porch, the screen door was thrown open by an attractive middle-aged woman and they were mauled by three tumbling, leaping, licking, barking puppies. Quinta immediately fell down on all fours, offering herself to them as playmate. Alan was hard-pressed not to fall down beside her, so contagious was her happy abandon. But he remained upright, and despite interruptions (one puppy was chewing his shoe) managed to introduce himself and Quinta.

  "Mr. Seton, I'm so very pleased to meet you," the woman said, although Alan wondered why she should be, since his wife had killed her prize Labrador bitch. To Quinta the woman said softly, "I'm sorry about your father." Then, in an interesting stab at diplomacy she added, "Still, these terrible things do happen: we just have to make the best of them," as though her loss and Quinta's were roughly equal.

  She was typically Newport, from her pink and apple green floral wraparound skirt to her matching green espadrilles; from her carefully highlighted, perfectly cut blond hair to the broad "a's" which peppered her speech. Her name was Meredith Lacey Birman, and although she was not old, old Newport, she had lived there long enough to feel comfortable about it.

  "Oh, most of my life," she said in answer to Alan's chitchat inquiry about her residence in the house. "My father, who had a legal practice in Boston, bought the Tower as a vacation residence. We spent our summers here, with him commuting to Boston, until he retired, and then we moved in permanently. My father loved the ocean, the solitude—and his garden. He died six months before I married; my husband and I decided to stay on with my mother, who now has chosen to live in the guest cottage on the grounds. It works out well for everyone." She settled gracefully into an antique wicker chair. "Can I get something refreshing for either of you?"

  Alan declined and Quinta hardly heard the question. She was captivated by the animals. It was obvious that she was capable of shutting out everything around her in a celebration of puppy love. Alan sat on the top step with his head leaning against the corner post, only half listening to the woman's quiet enthusiasm about the Labrador breed, drinking in the delightful scene before him.

  Quinta was sitting cross-legged on the porch floor with one of the puppies on its back inside her legs, his little black paws wrapped around the shoulder strap of her bag, growling and gnawing. A jealous sibling was trying to
climb up the side of Quinta's leg to join the fun, and the third was doing his or her best to keep him or her from getting there. From somewhere Alan smelled roses. The busy, enchanted garden that surrounded them was in full summer bloom. When had he last smelled roses? High up in a majestic oak tree crows cawed and blue jays queedled. Smaller birds, finches, fluttered around a tube feeder hanging at the far end of the porch, oblivious to the half-dozen non-birds at the other end. It was a moment of delicious peace, a lazy daydream after the week gone by. Out of chaos he had stumbled into an orderly universe.

  Quinta's hair, spun gold in the afternoon sun, fell forward while she played, covering her face as she murmured silly endearments: "Ooh, you vicious thing! You're so darling, ohh, look at you!" Suddenly she looked up, her face flushed and transformed with inspiration. "Dad would love a puppy, don't you think, Alan?"

  In a mock European accent he said, "Ach, who could hate such a creature?" She'd called him Alan, and he felt pleased at being accepted.

  "Which one do you still want to give away for adoption, Mrs. Birman?" Quinta asked.

  Mrs. Birman did not want to give away anything, and her quick look to Alan said so. Of course, it was Alan who'd used the word "adoption" with Quinta. He held Mrs. Birman's look just long enough to pass on wordless assurances that the bill would be paid, and Mrs. Birman smiled and said, "The chewy one in your lap, dear. He's the male. Absolutely adorable for a pet, but he has some white hairs on his little belly. It's so cruel to pluck them if you plan to show the dog," she added kindly. "A few, yes—but he really has too many of them."

  Quinta looked blank for a moment. It was obvious that the idea of plucking hairs from the soft belly of a puppy was new to her. "Yowch! Your teeth are sharp!" She shook her hand back and forth in mid-air. "I'd definitely like to have him," she said simply.

  "Then you shall have him!" Alan said, banging his hands together regally. "That is," he added politely, "if Mrs. Birman doesn't object." Turning to her he said, "I can vouch for the girl, ma'am. She seems very kind and will make a caring mistress."