By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  She trailed off, feeling disloyal, and took a sip of coffee. "Clearly you and I both want Franklin Delano Roosevelt," she said with a crooked smile. "Boy. I sure know how to conduct an incisive interview."

  Without a word Alan took out the small recorder from her bag, plugged it in, and pressed the start button. "Shoot."

  With a fear that everything that followed their conversation so far would be anticlimax, Quinta began the on-the-record interview. "Why do you think you are going to stand out from the pack?"

  "I suppose it's because we have the fastest, best-designed boat. But others will tell you that, because others also believe it. What they can't in all conscience tell you is that they have the best-managed syndicate. We can. We're not too big, not too small. We're not top-heavy with managers and committees, but neither do we run around hysterically trying to be all things to all people. We have a simple flow of command. In a Cup campaign the left hand has got to know what the right hand is doing. A small mistake gets magnified many times when you're out on the ocean."

  "So who's at the top?"

  "I am, on the technical side. Mavis Moran, our chief fund-raiser, has a lot to say on the administrative side."

  "Do you ever clash?"

  '"Does a dragon fly? That's off the record," he added. "For the record: almost never."

  "I see." Quinta was disappointed. They seemed to be retreating from the middle ground of friendship, each to his own corner. "Would the outcome in 1983 have been different if you'd been able to stay in the race?"

  "I'd like to think so, but I'm damned if I can see how. Australia came through with a breakthrough boat. Nothing could have touched it. It was brilliant engineering."

  "Speaking of which, do you think the Aussies played fair?"

  Alan took a slug of coffee while Quinta listened to the falling rain. At last he said, "Designers change citizenship at the drop of a hat. What difference does it make?"

  "Off the record?" she pleaded.

  "Off or on: we'll never know. But I will say this: the designers are the new warriors. All we skippers do is steer the boats around a triangle."

  "You're being too modest," Quinta said, sighing. She tried another tack. "As you know, Wall Street and corporate sponsors have long been a target of protestors who consider the Cup races elitist, the sport of millionaires."

  "Someday, billionaires," he amended. "I have no doubt."

  "Whatever. The point is, the band of college students who picket the Pegasus dock gets bigger every day."

  "They're kids," he said, shrugging. "Out of school and with nothing better to do until their evening shifts at the bars and restaurants. What I don't understand is why they're not picketing the other syndicates' docks; we all have corporate sponsors."

  "Your docks are more accessible and visible; and you have lighter security."

  "You sound remarkably well informed," he said, suddenly wary.

  "As it happens, I am." She dropped what she knew was exclusive information: "Yesterday I learned that the protestors plan to have small boats out on the bay, interfering with your practice sessions. What's your response to that?"

  "This is the first I've heard of it," he said, genuinely surprised. "Obviously it's a serious escalation, one we have to consider carefully."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I'd rather not comment until I've had a chance to meet with the other syndicate members," he answered, looking suddenly preoccupied.

  At least she had him a little off balance. "Your syndicate is being very coy about where the next races would be held if you won and had your say. Why not Newport?"

  "Are you asking as a property owner or as a traditionalist?" he said almost absently.

  "As a journalist," she said, offended, and regretted it. Would Barbara Walters allow herself to get huffy?

  "That's not a technical decision. You'll have to ask the Namisquot Yacht Club," he said.

  "Why did you decide to challenge through that particular yacht club?"

  "Every other one was taken," he answered, still a million miles away. Clearly he was back in charge and tired of the interview. He definitely wanted to be doing something else.

  They worked their way through the usual questions: Did he think Dennis Conner was too old for this stuff (no); would the Pegasus syndicate consider throwing their lot in with some of the other Americans if the money got tight (it wouldn't get tight); did he like western Australia (the people are great, the flies a challenge); why had almost his entire 1983 crew returned to him (not for the money, that was for sure).

  It was all very adequate. Quinta was getting average, decent copy. Running out of time, she tried her best to adopt the sympathetic, confidential tone of her hero, Barbara Walters: "You know, of course, that I have to ask you this," she began. "There were rumors for months after your wife's suicide that you refused to accept the fact of her death. Do you feel you've put the past behind you sufficiently to focus on the upcoming trials?"

  "I would," he snapped, "if people like you didn't keep bringing it up."

  No one, from the Shah of Iran to Nancy and Ronald Reagan, would have answered Barbara that way. Alan was dismissing Quinta as he would an impertinent child, and it smarted. "Well, naturally people are going to bring up the past," she retorted. "Do you think they don't ask Dennis Conner how it felt to break the world's oldest winning streak? If you're so thin-skinned, why are you out here in the limelight in the first place? I mean, really! You've said absolutely nothing at all about yourself. What do you want me to ask you? Who chose the designer color scheme of the crew's uniforms?"

  She slammed a finger down on the stop button. "Thank you very much, Mr. Seton. I can hardly wait to go back and feed all this pap into my computer. I see a Pulitzer Prize for sure." She yanked the cord out of the outlet and began wrapping it around the recorder.

  He was genuinely angry now. "Hold it right there! Before you go banging your fists on the floor and kicking your heels in the air, maybe you should stop and consider: is my marriage really part of the public's right to know? Am I the first to throw up a tall fence around things that are none of your—or anyone else's—business?"

  "Then why did you agree to this damn interview?" she said hotly. "I could have got all this by reading your press release!"

  "Ah. And you wanted a scoop. God. I remember you as such an innocent, sweet ..." He ran his hand hallway through his black hair and left it there. Something—the banjo on the wall—held his attention. He stared at it as if it were a sign written in fine print.

  "Okay, Quinta," he said at last, giving her a level look. "A story. I owe you—and your father—that. Here it is: I did think Cindy was alive. I spent a minor fortune having private investigators track someone who may or may not have been Cindy to Madrid, and there the trail went cold. Dead and cold. Did I do it out of love? Not in the damned least. I wanted the satisfaction of divorcing Cindy fair and square. I wanted her technically and legally out of my life. I got that, but by default. It stinks."

  He held up his arm horizontally under Quinta's face. "See the hairs of my arm? They stand, when I think of her. There's not a day goes by that I don't twist inside with revulsion, thinking of her and her demon-lover. She left behind a journal, full of very sick, very perverted musings. You're too young, too naive, to know about deliberate, degrading cruelty. About the infliction and enjoyment of all kinds of pain," he said. "Do you really want to know this, Quinta? The devices they used? Is this the story you came for?"

  Wide-eyed with shock, she shook her head almost imperceptibly and formed the word "no" with her lips.

  "It's too late now, though, isn't it?" he murmured. "Now you know that the one who broke your father in two was one of life's throwaways."

  "I don't want—"

  "But if you print one word of it," he continued, his voice fierce with emotion, "I'll run you and Cup Quotes into the Bay on a rail."

  He saw her to the door after that. It was pouring out. He offered her a spare umbrella. She d
eclined.

  "I'm sorry it turned out this way," he said stiffly.

  "It couldn't have turned out any other," Quinta replied in sorrow. "I see that now." Then she dashed through the pounding rain, to the shelter of her little Honda Civic.

  Chapter 10

  During the long drive back to Newport, Quinta had plenty of time to review. She did not believe in rehashing mistakes; she'd seen enough of that in her father to last a lifetime. Still, dumb was dumb, and she was smart enough to know it. It was dumb to have taken advantage of Alan Seton's guilty feelings toward them by requesting the interview; dumber still to have pouted when he didn't obligingly spill his soul; and dumbest of all to have let him say all that about his dead wife. There was no way Quinta would compound her stupidity by repeating any of it to her father.

  On the other hand, it was fair to say that Alan Seton had overreacted. Why he had was an interesting question. World-class competitors were all a little high-strung, she knew. Celebrities had been known to spit at the media, or beat them up. At least Alan had made coffee. She stole a look at herself in the rear-view mirror: a straight-haired blonde with what she hoped was an honest face. But dumb, dumb, dumb.

  It was very sad. In the baggage from her youth she'd been carrying a special feeling for Alan Seton. He'd been so kind, so easy to talk to on that day they'd gone to pick up a puppy for her dad. But today he hadn't even asked about Leggy, who was just fine, thank you very much.

  When she got back to her father's house she found him in a humor that was, even by his standards, unusually black. She'd learned over the years to tiptoe fearfully around such moods as if they were so many mousetraps, ready to snap her serenity in two and ruin her day. But the day was already shot, and Quinta was feeling neither serene nor, after what she'd been through, particularly afraid.

  "What's bugging you, Dad?" she asked after a couple of hours of watching him wheel his chair with particular ferocity through the downstairs apartment he had fashioned for himself. He seemed to want to be everywhere at once: at his computer station, the microwave, the file cabinets, the waist-high bookshelf that ran the length of one entire wall. But he was doing it all at fever pitch, and that made him clumsy. He ran over his favorite CD, of Beethoven sonatas, and then he nearly ran over Leggy's tail. When he went to put back an ungainly reference book, it slipped from his hands and fell to the floor. Each time he swore, and each time he meant it.

  "Dad. For goodness' sake, what's wrong?"

  "The same thing that's always wrong!" he shouted at her. "I can't walk!"

  "You couldn't walk yesterday; you couldn't walk last year!" she said recklessly. "What's so different about today?"

  Obviously Neil had been waiting for her to ask. "Today I got this in the mail." He reached into a side pocket of his wheelchair, pulled out a large brown envelope, and sent it sliding across the floor to her.

  Quinta picked it up. Her father's name and his Howard Street address were printed in penciled letters; there was no return address. Inside was a single sheet, torn from a magazine: a full-page color ad for Reebok running shoes. Across the top of the page, which featured a silver-haired executive-type jogging, someone had scrawled: "Don't you wish!" And that was all. It was a mean and very personal kind of attack, and it took Quinta's breath away. She looked at the envelope again, to check the postmark: Newport.

  Newport was not that kind of town.

  "This is obscene," she whispered, shaking with anger.

  "Just what I need, don't you think?" said her father, mollified by her reaction. "A neighborhood crank."

  "There's no one in the neighborhood so cruel," said Quinta.

  "Kids," Neil argued. "Kids are vengeful. You remember last week I told you I gave hell to those little snots from Spring Street, the ones that were using my ramp with their skateboards? They did this."

  "Dad. Those boys were ten, twelve years old. Their minds wouldn't be capable of something this cruel."

  "The hell they wouldn't. They listen to groups with names like Twisted Sister. What do you expect?"

  "I like Twisted Sister," said Quinta with a wry look.

  "Yeah, well, who's to say you won't show up for breakfast tomorrow with a safety pin through your nose?" He was backing down. It wasn't the work of neighborhood brats, and he knew it. "Any ideas?"

  She thought about it a minute. "I'm no handwriting expert, but I'd say the sender is decently educated. He knows his capitals from his lowercase—unlike most of my classmates. There's an old-fashionedness about the printing, as if it were, you know, a work of art or something. Maybe an architect?"

  "Come now, Quinta. Besides, they'd use all capitals."

  "All right then, someone between an architect and an eighth-grader. That ought to narrow it down a bit. I'll get right on the case." She ventured a small, affectionate smile.

  To her immense relief, it was returned. Her father's smiles were usually of the melancholy sort, but this one was flinty, as if someone had pushed him too far. All in all, she liked it.

  "You think you're joking," he said, as he gestured for her to return the Reebok material. "But you just may end up moonlighting for me the rest of this summer."

  "That's fine with me," she said, pleased that he needed her in any capacity at all, even a theoretical one. "My standard fee is two hundred a day and all expenses."

  "Ingrate! I'll bill you for your room and then credit you."

  She laughed and flipped her hair over her shoulder. "Careful, Dad. You're beginning to sound like a Newporter."

  It was a nice moment, one of the few they'd shared in a very trying summer. Quinta understood why the last few months had been so hard—Cup fever was in the air for the first time since her father's accident, bringing it all back home to him—but this closeness was welcome just the same.

  "So!" said Neil at last, smacking his palms on the arms of his wheelchair. "Who cooks tonight, you or me?"

  "Oh Dad—would you?" she asked, resisting the urge to jump up and "do" for him and put him off his mood. "I've had one hell of a day." Was selfish the right way to play this? She watched her father carefully as he rolled his chair to the door of the upright freezer and peered inside. "Glazed Chicken or Oriental Beef?" he asked.

  He didn't mind, then; she'd second-guessed right. "Whatever you don't want. No, wait. I'll take the chicken," she corrected herself. Keep it selfish.

  "Oh. I had a taste for chicken."

  Oh damn. "Well, Oriental Beef is fine, really—"

  "No, no. You want the chicken. As it happens, I did have an Oriental Beef for lunch, but—hold it. Here's another Glazed Chicken in the back."

  Thank you, Lord.

  "So we'll both have chicken. Now: did you want a salad?"

  They'd been playing this game for three years, and Quinta had not begun to learn the rules. Chess, at which she excelled, was child's play in comparison. While she was agonizing over her next move, her father said, "I guess I will make a salad. I've got to use up these tomatoes that Mackenzie dumped on me. By rights I should charge him for taking them off his hands. Damned victory gardeners."

  She was on a roll, no doubt about it.

  Her father made tea for them both—no guilt attached, he was in the kitchen anyhow—and Quinta sipped from her cup gratefully and played with Leggy while the frozen dinners bumped molecules in the microwave. Life was a string of such pleasures—not deepwater pearls, necessarily; more like small wooden beads. To Quinta there was very little difference.

  She set the table while her father tossed the salad. The rain outside had stopped at last. Quinta ducked out onto the porch, stood at the top of the wheelchair ramp, and looked west: thick fog had swallowed the yachts at anchor a block away.

  "Harbor's socked in good," she said as she sat down to a salad heavy on overripe tomatoes. "Pegasus wouldn't be sailing tomorrow, even if it were ready."

  "And it's not?"

  "Eh ... not exactly. It's having some modifications done."

  "Says who?"

>   Wrong topic, wrong time. "Says Alan Seton," Quinta answered helplessly.

  "In other words you went and did the interview anyway," her father said at last. "Well? How did it go?"

  The question was wrapped in a cool, damp fog of its own. Quinta, thoroughly tired of trying to fathom the human mind, said tiredly, "It went pretty lousy. I never should have gone. He didn't really want to see me. He obliged me but ...." She shrugged and shook her head. "There was no story there." Not one that's fit to print, anyway.

  "Did you ask him why he's gone back to Mavis Moran?"

  Quinta became still, then bounced up from the table, carefully perky. "Do you want dessert? The strawberry-rhubarb pie at Crest Farm looked so good, I couldn't resist." She stood up and said over her shoulder as she walked back into the kitchen, "Why would I ask him that?"

  "Why not? It's in the gossip columns. If you weren't such a snob about reading them, you'd have been better prepared. The other night Seton and the 'vibrant Miss Moran' were seen having drinks together, just the two of them, for the first time in a long time."

  "So what? They're in the same syndicate. Why should that interest my readers? I'm not writing a society column." She sliced into her pie viciously.

  "You're writing a people column; Society are people, too." He swung his chair away from the table and wheeled over to his favorite reading lamp. "Don't be so naive, girl," he continued. "Alan Seton's love life is very important to how he handles his run for the Cup. Witness 1983."

  "Well, sure—if his love life jumps off a bridge!"

  Neil made a dismissive gesture. "I don't mean Cindy Seton. I mean Mavis Moran. She was his love life then. Hell, I saw them in a downtown parking lot once. They were arguing: intense, involved. You can bet they were sleeping together even then. You can always tell," he added in a thoughtful, faraway voice. "You can tell by their eyes, by the way they look at one another ...."

  "Who do you know who does that?" she asked, surprised.

  "Not nowadays. Obviously. But when I was a kid, I—well, never mind. How the hell did we get on this subject, anyway?"