By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  "Straight out, then. I don't have time for games."

  Neil took a deep breath and plunged. "Mother says there's a job for the Virginia. A load of cargo from Connecticut to the Bahamas. And she says she's going to take it." He exhaled. Actually, Mother had also said she was going to have to use extreme diplomacy in telling Dad, and so not a word.

  Well, he had to say something to his dad, hadn't he?

  "Your mother told you to bring me this news?" Obviously Sam gave his wife Laura more credit than that.

  "Not exactly. She isn't sure. I don't know. I might've got it wrong. Can I go now, Dad?" he pleaded.

  "You tell your mother to keep dinner warm tonight," Sam Powers said grimly, and he turned back to the Rainbow.

  Normally the expression on his father's face would have made the row back to the Virginia a long and cheerless one. But the thought of being the cause of an argument between his parents paled before the astounding five minutes Neil had spent aboard the Rainbow. So he relived instead his awesome moments on the great J-boat, taking out all the unpleasant parts (like his bare feet) and leaving in all the good parts: how kind Mr. Vanderbilt was, and how perfect the yacht was, and how he'd love to be a crew member dressed in white ducks aboard the Rainbow. Or, no: what he'd really like is to be Mr. Vanderbilt, and then he could have it all, the boat, the crew; and he would steer. And win the America's Cup for America. When he grew up.

  After Neil had rowed back to the Virginia and scrambled aboard for lunch, he only said, "Mother, why was the Rainbow named the Rainbow? It isn't painted like one."

  His mother had broken away from her work to serve him lunch: baked beans thick with molasses, and corn bread. He watched her climb back into the pilot berth and bend herself into a shape suitable for painting the underside of the decks. Her thick brown hair was hidden under a large workman's kerchief, and she was wearing a pair of his dad's worn-out flannel pants with the cuffs rolled twice and a length of manila rope belting the thirty-six waist down to a twenty-three.

  "I think," his mother answered thoughtfully as she laid on a stroke of pale gray above her, "that the Rainbow is meant as a symbol of hope after the terrible Depression we've been through."

  "Hope for who, Mother?"

  "Whom. Now that, Mr. Vanderbilt doesn't say," she answered quietly.

  Neil bit into a corn muffin, his favorite, all hot and buttery, and asked, "Why don't we polish our brass cleats and chocks and things?"

  She paused mid-stroke and looked at him. "Because polished brass on deck is a hopeless waste of time; it would be green again the next day. And besides," she reminded him, "you haven't polished the brass below decks this week, young man. No more dory until you do."

  Fifty years later, Neil still had the photograph of him at the helm of the Rainbow. Not the framed one—that had been lost in the wreck along with everything else—but a small wallet-sized version that had belonged to his father. Creased and frail, it rode with him always in his hip pocket, a kind of temporary boarding pass to a world not available to him by birth. In it, mercifully, his bare feet didn't show, but his ears, next to the elegant Commodore Vanderbilt's, looked awfully large, which had caused him intense pain, especially in his teens, until his grandmother in Bangor pointed out that Clark Gable had jug ears also.

  Neil smiled bleakly at the memory and shifted his weight in the wheelchair; jug ears were the least of his problems now.

  Laughter and applause brought him back to the present. The long bolt that had held down the Cup in its display case at the New York Yacht Club was being presented to Alan Bond, the owner of Australia II, who had spent eight million dollars for the privilege of having it. Neil was still disoriented, somewhat confused. He had no idea why the New York Yacht Club was now presenting a flattened hubcap to the Australians, or why anyone would possibly find it funny. Nor did he notice his daughter gingerly lay her hand on the arm of one of the onlookers who was making his viewing of the ceremony so difficult. All he knew was that some of the men in front of him melted away and before him stood the Cup, sending off laser beams of sunlight in every direction.

  If it had been a cloudy day, maybe, or an indoor ceremony, or if the Cup hadn't been buffed to blinding perfection, it might not have had such seductive, spell-binding power. But the power was there; Neil could feel it humming through his body, skimming along his nerve endings, making his breath come short, his eyes sting. He clenched his teeth, pressing the palms of his hands to the arms of his wheelchair. So great, so deep was the spell that he was actually on the verge of trying to stand up.

  And then the Cup was handed over by the Americans to Alan Bond, who held it with both hands high above his head in a gesture of shocking triumph. A roar went up, wild, elemental, the victory cry of one brash continent over another.

  The sound rang in Neil's ears, and he bowed his head. It was the end of a dream. When he lifted his head again he saw his daughter, tears streaming down her face, watching him.

  "Oh Dad, I'm so sorry," she sobbed. "It isn't fair, none of this is fair." Wretched, she covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed. Quinta, who never cried. Nothing he said could soothe her, and the dispersing crowd was beginning to stare in wonder and disapproval at this golden-haired creature who had so little control over herself.

  In desperation Neil said, "Quinta, for God's sake, stop crying. You're embarrassing me."

  Immediately her chin came up. With her lips set, she took one last, long sniffle. Breath suspended, mouth quivering, Quinta stared blankly for a moment, looking at nothing, at life's unfairness perhaps. And then she let out the breath and was quiet.

  Relieved, her father said, "That's better. Now. Do you think you can get me home all in one piece? Or do I have to wheel myself down Bellevue Avenue?" He had not meant to be scathing, but weeping invariably frightened and angered him. Nancy, too, had hardly ever cried.

  And Quinta knew that, had known it since she was a little girl. How she had let herself collapse this way .... "Of course I can drive," she answered with something like bravado. "What do you take me for? A girl?" And she took hold of his wheelchair, to help guide it over the rough spots.

  Chapter 8

  Summer 1986

  Technically, she was a burglar: Cindy Seton, pencil-thin and chic as ever, stuck a key in the door of Mergate, the Georgian manor in Westport, Connecticut that had been in her husband's family for four generations, and pushed it open. Nothing had changed. The strange bronze sculpture that her husband called The Thing was still in the hall, and so was the threadbare Persian runner that he'd dragged down from a family lodge in the Adirondack Mountains. She thought she even smelled lingering, three-year-old traces of her perfume, A Jamais. Nothing had changed, not even the breaker for the alarm system. Cindy might have been out shopping for the afternoon, instead of having been living with her lover in a rundown villa near Lisbon for three years.

  And yet everything had changed. After her arrival from Portugal, Cindy had driven straight from Logan Airport to the Newport Library. At the end of an afternoon of poring over three years of newspapers, she'd been forced to accept the unthinkable: she was legally dead; the man she thought she'd killed was still alive; and her widower-husband was involved—still or again—in an America's Cup campaign.

  Cindy wandered randomly through the house, renewing old hostilities. There had been a time, when she was newly wed, that she'd wanted to do Mergate over. But no. Alan wouldn't hear of it. He preferred to keep it a shrine to his dearly beloved ancestors. She fingered a little silver-framed photograph of his grandmother, Amanda Seton, that stood on the mantel of the drawing room fireplace. On an impulse she lifted it up and dropped it to the floor. To hell with him, she thought. Where were any pictures of her?

  She drifted from room to room after that, taking whatever little bibelots caught her eye, tossing them into her bag like canned vegetables into a shopping cart: a scrimshaw letter opener, a brass rope-twist candlestick, a crystal bird by Lalique. When she finished with the gr
ound floor she moved up to the second, to the bedrooms and study. They were the reason she had come.

  It was obvious that Alan had slept in his room last night, which surprised her. She assumed he was in Newport, putting the finishing touches on his latest 12-meter yacht before shipping it off to Australia for the latest races. But his bed was unmade—and there was a scent of something other than A Jamais in the air. The thought that some other woman had been there with Alan electrified Cindy, reminded her of the times she had caught other scents on her own pillow in Delgado's Lisbon villa.

  So. A woman. Permanent? She peeked into her husband's closet but found only men's clothes; disappointed, she lifted his America's Cup tie from its rack and added it to her booty. Then she noticed that Alan's pajama tops were heaped on one side of the bed, his bottoms on the other. To Cindy that meant Alan's lady friend had not brought her own nightwear; it had been a spur-of-the-moment lay. Cindy took the pajama tops from the bed and dropped them into the toilet of the master bath.

  Oddly satisfied, she turned her attention to the study, converted from a dressing room which once connected Alan's room to her old one. The study was no tidy gentleman's retreat but a real workroom, littered with correspondence, file folders, half-models of the hated Shadow from Alan's 1983 Cup campaign, plans, sketches—all the paraphernalia of an America's Cup defense. This was where Alan used to squander his time and his money; this was where he squandered them still. Only now he was throwing away her money, she supposed; he was her heir, after all.

  The thought infuriated her. She swept one arm across the top of his cherrywood desk, sending everything tumbling to the floor. She hated Alan Seton and his quixotic pursuit of the America's Cup. She hated this room and everything in it. How could she hurt him? She stabbed the heel of her shoe through half a dozen papers, crumpled others, wreaked havoc. When she was finished, she passed on to her old room.

  It looked the same, from the four-poster bed to the pastel drawings by Amanda Seton that adorned the walls. One of the pastels was of Alan's mother, Amanda's daughter-in-law. Alan had once offered to move it if Cindy preferred. As if she cared.

  She roamed the room, checking drawers, closets, the antique rosewood jewelry chest—but there was nothing of her own anywhere, no evidence that she had lived and breathed and bought clothes. Her other pearls, the sapphire pendant, the diamond choker—all gone. Gone to Alan's new lover, or to pay for a gadget on his latest 12-meter. Cindy stood in the middle of her bedroom, turning slowly around. So this was what it meant not to exist. People erased all traces of you and went on with their lives without you.

  Cindy was now a brunette, but the angry flush in her cheeks belonged to a natural blonde. Cindy Seton did exist, and she damn well meant to let them know it. One thing she'd learned from Delly before he was murdered: you could do anything you wanted to, and most times no one could stop you.

  ****

  "How the hell could you have forgotten to lock your door?"

  Mavis Moran didn't mince words, with Alan Seton or anyone else. The expression on her face, sharp and angry, was at odds with the soft, utterly feminine silk dress that she had worn to dinner with him.

  Seton hardly heard her. He was staring out the window of his study, seeing neither the sea nor the crescent of sun that was still visible behind it. His mind was recreating the morning's routine. "I took out the garbage," he said at last.

  "And you threw out your key with it?"

  He ignored her scathing tone. "I left through the back door. I could have sworn the front door was locked. I guess it wasn't."

  "You didn't set the alarm?"

  "It's a pain in the ass."

  "Of course," she agreed with crushing irony. "I'm sure our contributors will sympathize. They've pledged ten million dollars so far to develop the ultimate 12-meter, and now the lines and construction plans for that boat have been stolen. We've budgeted half a million dollars to keep the Pegasus design a secret from all the other—ah, well," she said, interrupting herself with a deadly smile. "It could happen to anyone."

  "The cantaloupe rind was getting smelly," Seton said absently. "I had to toss it." He seemed not to hear her, not to care. "I don't get it. It doesn't make sense." He was staring at a checklist he'd scrawled of the stolen or damaged items he'd noted so far. "This list is goofy. A photo of my grandmother ... pajamas in the toilet bowl ... the Pegasus plans ... a partial list of contributions-in-kind ... a jewelry box .... It's goofy."

  "On the contrary," Mavis said suddenly. "It may be brilliant." She tore the list from his hand and studied it in the light of a small green-shaded lamp on Alan's desk. "They didn't vandalize the place, so we know they're not just thrill-seekers. They took enough of value to justify a theft; enough of the plans to make a good case for sabotage. We have to decide which it was."

  "Except for the Fabergé box, nothing had much value."

  "Except! You said the Fabergé piece alone is worth eighty thousand dollars!"

  "More or less." He was shuffling through a stack of papers on his desk. "Shit. They took the keel alteration plan. I left it here after we looked at it the other night. So they have the latest version of Pegasus as well."

  Alan looked up at Mavis distractedly, his blue eyes focused on some midpoint between himself and her red-haired beauty. "I'm sorry, Mavis. You were saying? You think it's a case of simple theft?"

  "I was saying it's possible. It's diabolically possible that the thieves know about you and the Pegasus campaign to win back the America's Cup. They may have stolen the plans along with the Fabergé because they know we won't dare go to the police and blurt out that the construction plans are also missing. Maybe they're hoping by that to keep the theft of the Fabergé out of the papers."

  "Come on, Mavis," he said, suddenly irritated. "No one is that ingenious. Besides, I could always report the theft of everything except the design plans."

  "That would still set off alarm bells with our contributors. If the thieves know it, then they know we know it. They're aware that fundraising is an absolute, urgent priority." She laughed softly to herself. "Ask the America II syndicate if they could afford to scare off Newsweek or Cadillac."

  Pacing the room, Alan rubbed his eyes with the fingertips of one hand. "What a fricking mess," he said with disgust.

  Mavis stopped toying with the emerald bangle that she wore around her wrist and looked up at the man with whom she'd thrown in her lot for a run at the Cup. "What made you keep something so valuable as a Fabergé box in your living room, anyway?"

  Alan shrugged. "It belonged to Cindy. She got it when she was still a child, from her grandfather after he toured the Continent one summer. I had her jewelry auctioned off—I had no use for it—but somehow the box ... I guess I expected some long-lost relative to show up and claim it. It's hard to believe there was absolutely no one to contest the will ... that she was such a waif ...."

  Mavis stood up abruptly and said, "If you're going to take a trip down memory lane, I think I'll go. There must be something better I can do with my time."

  "Sorry. I didn't mean to go into it again. It's just that I never understood her. Whether it was the drugs or her screwed-up childhood—I was never able to reach her."

  Mavis turned on him impatiently. "Admit it, Alan. Your vanity suffered when she killed herself. She ended her marriage to you, after all, in a fairly spectacular way."

  "We were talking about the theft," he said coldly. "We seem to have strayed afield."

  "But that's just it; it's all connected. Vanity: that's why you're still smarting over her suicide. That's why you're still chasing the Cup. But vanity isn't a pure enough motive. It lets you be careless about alarms."

  For a moment he said nothing, only stared, as he had a way of doing, at a point in the air between them. Then he looked at her and grinned and said, "Vanity, hey? I wish you'd call it hubris. It sounds more noble."

  Slowly she shook her head and said, "That's what I hate most about you: your sense of humor. It's the
kiss of death to ambition. Can't you see that?"

  "I wouldn't worry about it, Mavis," he said, pulling off his tie and heading for his bedroom. "You lack enough sense of humor for both of us."

  "Don't push me too far, Alan," she said, following him but pausing in his doorway. "You are expendable."

  "I have a contract," he reminded her.

  "It can be snapped like kindling."

  "But it won't, because I'm the best, and you want the best."

  "Tell that to Dennis Conner," Mavis replied.

  "He's not bad either, but at the moment he's hell-bent on avenging a personal score with Australia. I doubt that he'd be available to pinch-hit for you and the syndicate."

  Mavis leaned against the doorway and folded her arms.

  She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes as she said, "Conner has it, you know. Ambition. Fire in the belly."

  "Good for him." Alan reached in his closet to hang his tie on its rack, then paused. "What the—? They took my Pegasus tie. For Pete's sake, all they had to do to get one was give a few bucks to the campaign. It's tax-deductible. My tie! Nothing's sacred anymore. These are probably the same creeps who pulled hairs from the mane of Caroline Kennedy's pony Macaroni, the same nuts who yank blades of grass from James Joyce's grave. Gee, I wonder if I can claim a tax loss? I'd better add the tie to my list of—"

  "Stop it!" Mavis shouted. "Be serious for once, would you?" Just as suddenly she stopped, pulled herself up, took a deep breath. "Oh, no. I will not let you banter your way out of this, Alan. You screwed up, and royally. I want to know what you plan to do about it."

  "Wait and see," he said quietly.

  "I want to know now, Alan."

  "That is the plan: to wait and see which turns up first, the Fabergé box or the construction plan. Maybe neither one will. Maybe the loot will end up in someone's rumpus room in Queens. There's not a hell of a lot we can do right now. But you knew that. You just wanted me to confirm your worst fears."