She was going too fast. She understood that, too, but there was something exhilarating about flight and escape. It was just like before, when she left her car on the Newport bridge. Delly was dead, but she was perfectly capable of escaping on her own. The bow of the inflatable lifted up, obscuring her view. She moved her weight forward in the dinghy to bring the bow back down so that she could see. It worked, but now she could not reach the throttle. And meanwhile, she was skimming over the flat-calm channel, going fast, much too fast. She tried to move back in the inflatable so that she could slow down before she got in among the moored boats. Behind her the sky pulsed in dull, fog-shrouded light: gold and green and red. Her last conscious thought was that the evening hadn't turned out at all; it was supposed to have been so much better.
She was still probing for the throttle when the inflatable slammed full speed into the steel channel buoy, throwing her into it with such force that she was dead even before her body slipped into the deep, cold water of Newport Harbor.
****
On a Saturday night in summer the staff of Newport Hospital are not surprised to see a victim of drunk driving, or of a stabbing, or of domestic violence. It's rare that they treat a victim of a shooting. When Alan Seton brought Quinta to the emergency room, it sent a scandalized buzz through the night shift; Newport was not yet that kind of town. By the time the surgeons finished operating on Quinta, the police, working from Alan's statement, had put two and two together about the drowning victim.
"Actually, she didn't drown, Mr. Seton," said the young lieutenant who tracked him down to the second-floor waiting room. "Death appears to be a result of massive injuries sustained when the victim was thrown into a harbor buoy. We're getting the statements of the witnesses right now, but we need—I hate to ask you for this, sir—we need an identification, if possible." The lieutenant, a boating man himself, looked intensely sympathetic.
"All right," Alan said quietly.
They went downstairs and for the first time in three years Alan saw the woman who was once his wife. He was shocked by her dyed brown hair and by the ravages of three years of dissolution. He wasn't sure he'd have recognized her on the street; he wondered how Neil had managed it. Cindy was as much a mystery to him in death as she had been in life, and he could not help wondering how much of that was his fault. She had needed the kind of obsessive attention that he could not give, and she had reacted violently to the discovery.
Was the line between tantrum and insanity so thin?
He sighed heavily and nodded to the intern, who drew the sheet back over her. Cindy had written the script three years ago, but the dress rehearsal, the opening, and the closing were not fated to be held until tonight. As he ascended in the elevator to the second-floor waiting room, Alan felt as if he were climbing out of hell; he felt his spirit struggle to shake off the three-year-old oppression.
When he got to the waiting room he found Neil Powers, alone and in his wheelchair. Alan took Neil's hand in both of his, dismayed to see that the older man was trembling. "I'm sorry I couldn't come for you, Neil," Alan said quickly. "The police—"
"I have a neighbor who helps me out. He knows how to use the van," Neil mumbled. His eyes were wide, pleading for the truth. "They tell me she's all right," he said. "She's all right?" His lip trembled. He clamped down hard on it and looked away.
"She's lost some blood, but the surgeon tells me she's as strong as a horse," Alan said to reassure him.
Neil nodded, not trusting himself to speak. After a moment he said in a shaky voice, "Thank God you got to her in time—"
Alan said, not without bitterness, "It wasn't one of your more heroic rescues; in retrospect I should've taken my chances at commandeering something in the harbor. If I'd been two minutes earlier—"
"If you'd been two mintues later!"
Alan laid his hand on Neil's shoulder. "All right, Neil. You win. When will they let you see her?" he asked gently.
"You don't want to see her?"
"Can you possibly think that?" Alan said, smiling wearily. He added, "She'll want to see you first. I'll just sit here, quietly gnawing on this chair, and wait my turn."
Neil said nothing. Then he made a physical effort to gather himself together. He wiped his eyes, sat up straighter in his chair, even smoothed his hair with one hand. He cleared his throat. "You seem to care for my daughter," he announced.
"I seem to love her," answered Alan in a quiet voice. "I seem to want to marry her." With a quirky smile he added, "Is that unseemly?"
"That depends on who you're asking. Why don't you try it out on her and see what she says?" Neil suggested soberly.
Alan grinned. At least Neil hadn't laughed in his face.
"You don't think I'm rushing it? You don't think I should wait till she's fully conscious?"
Flustered, Neil muttered, "You two have the same damned sense of humor, anyway."
Not long after that they were told that Quinta's anesthetic had worn off. Alan pushed the wheelchair; the two men went in together. But Quinta was a little too groggy to propose to, although her sweet, rather unfocused smile made Alan want to do just that. He stood near the bed, doting on her, while her father held her hand. A few minutes later the nurse came in and threw them out, which was not unreasonable. They were told to go home, get some sleep, and come back tomorrow.
Alan took Neil home in his van, the van paid for by Alan's anonymous contribution to the settlement three years earlier.
After Neil was settled back inside his house, Alan said, "Quinta's going to be fine. I hope you can rest tonight, maybe for the first time in a long time."
Neil was clearly relieved, though exhausted. "Listen, Alan—despite everything, I'm sorry about ... about Cindy. I'm sorry she died."
"Cindy died long ago," Alan said quietly, shaking his head. "Good night, Neil."
Chapter 19
After reclaiming his car, Alan found himself on Howard Street in the middle of the night with his choice of destinations: he could go back to the crew house; or to his own rented condo in Brenton Cove; or to Mavis Kendall's place.
Mavis was easily his first choice.
He drove down an empty Thames Street, cleared both of cars and people now, and in a very few minutes was buzzing the intercom of Beau Rêve, the extraordinary mansion bought and paid for by an ex-lady's maid who happened to be Mavis Moran's grandmother.
At last Mavis's sleepy voice came over the intercom. She sounded annoyed but not surprised when Alan identified himself. "I'll come down. No ladder over the balcony, please."
He waited at her threshold, wondering how he was going to handle this. Not until she opened the door to let him in did he stop wondering: he saw in her eyes that she knew he knew, and that made it easier.
But not much easier. Mavis seemed to him movie-star beautiful in her satin nightgown. She was a classic beauty, with her tumbling auburn hair and long-lashed jade eyes: untouched by time. She had so much going for her, so much more than any mere mortal could hope to have ....
"They were right," he said to her. "It was Cindy all along who's been behind the nasty things that have been going on. She's dead. It's over." He took a seat in a deep, wool-covered side chair and related briefly and without emotion the events of the night, until he got to the shooting, when he suddenly stopped and said, "Do you have any cigarettes?" He hadn't smoked in half a year, but recalling Quinta's near-miss made him want to light up.
"Obviously it was Cindy who broke into Mergate," he continued, taking a cigarette from a small gold box that Mavis handed him. "All those stupid things she took, the photos she smashed, the goofy damage she did—I should have figured it out." He lit the cigarette, drew deep, exhaled, felt no comfort, and put it out. "But Cindy didn't go in for high tech. She did not take the Pegasus plans."
"Really," said Mavis, crossing one leg over the other. "And how do you know that?"
"Quinta let me know that Cindy told her she hadn't taken them. Which is reasonable. Cindy might have sh
redded the Pegasus plans, but she'd never have bothered to steal them."
"But we know they were missing."
"True." In a soft voice he added, "You've known that longer than I have, haven't you, Mavis?"
"I'm afraid I don't catch your drift."
"Let me spell it out for you, then. You took the plans on the night before the burglary, when we were working late together. We'd finished for the day. I came down to pour us each a drink. While I was gone you slipped the plans into your attaché. After I came back we made fairly compelling love. You seemed so into it. Fool that I am, I thought you needed—well, someone. You were simply trying to keep me distracted, I suppose. Then the next day you copied the plans, with every intention of slipping them back into their files after dinner when we came back here to work. How did you feel when you learned that the place had been tossed in the meantime? Terrified, or gratified?"
"I didn't feel anything," Mavis answered, coloring. "Except a profound sense of frustration at your carelessness."
"Oh, but I did lock the doors. Obviously Cindy still had a key. It isn't considered careless not to change the locks when a spouse dies."
Mavis got up from her chair and went over to a sideboard, where she poured two Scotches into heavy crystal tumblers. "That's the difference between you and me," she said as she handed him one of the drinks. "I take nothing for granted."
"No. I'll give you that. But in this case you also had an incredible stroke of luck. Despite our unexpected taking of inventory, you were completely off the hook. We couldn't very well report the theft—that would alarm our contributors—so you were safe for the foreseeable future as well."
She had walked up to a window overlooking the ocean, listening rather than seeing. Her back was to him. "Safe to do what?" she asked in a languid voice.
"To sell the plans to another syndicate, of course. How much did you get? More than the usual thirty pieces of silver, I hope."
"You're nuts."
"Ah, no. That was Cindy. But I am a little slow: it never occurred to me that a woman who has as much money as you have could still want more."
She turned around, walked up to him, and threw the remains of her drink in his face. "Until you prove that," she said calmly, "I'm going to have to hate you."
"Is that a trick promise?" he asked with a mournful smile. He stood up and, taking a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the drink from his face. "Did you feel any twinge at all when they had the boat torched?" he murmured. "Or do you have an artificial heart as well?"
Her hand came up automatically for the slap, but he intercepted it. "You've already made your point," he said.
"I know nothing about the arson," she said angrily. "Nothing!"
"Well, of course not," he answered. "Your business with them was done. The rest of it they could handle themselves."
"The protestors burned that boat!"
"Don't be naive, Mavis. Or rather: don't pretend to be naive. That stretches even your acting ability. Those kids have moved on to other amusements; they were nowhere in sight."
"This is all wild speculation on your part, completely without proof."
"In your defense, though," he continued, as if she hadn't spoken, "I will say this: it must have been temptingly easy. You were right behind us on the water with your camera; you had access to our data; you knew where the money was flowing. The network for spying was in place. All that was missing was the payoff. How much, Mavis?" he repeated. "And what can you possibly need to spend it on?"
She stared at him with impenetrable coolness for a long, long time, and then she shrugged and said, "I plan to follow the sun for a while. New England winters bore me."
"What?" he said with mock surprise. "You're bypassing the Cup races in Perth?" He let go of her wrist, resisting the nearness of her as he would a dangerous drug.
"I think so," she said with a carefully elaborate sigh. "Now that Pegasus is out of the picture, the syndicate looks suddenly so much less interesting."
"Ah, but a near-clone of Pegasus will be popping up in someone else's camp in the next few months. I don't suppose you'd like to predict whose?"
"I guess we'll find out," she said, getting the door for him, "when they win the Cup."
"Not when, Mavis. If. Whoever they are, they won't have our sails, our crew, our spar-maker, our clean conscience," he said, aware that he was not going to extract an admission from her. She began to close the door on him, but he threw his arm out to hold it open. He stared at those bottle-green eyes as he said quietly, "I wouldn't have taken a million dollars for what you did."
Her smile was as brittle as the look in her eyes: "Even if it were tax-free?"
"God almighty," he said in a low breath. "Who bought the plans? Some oligarch?"
She lowered her lashes, then opened her eyes wide. "I don't know what you're talking about."
But he wasn't done with her yet. "Can you live with it, Mavis? I truly don't think you can. "
"Again: I guess we'll find out. Good-bye, Alan."
****
She closed the door on him, then turned and leaned into it, closing her eyes, listening to the pumping of her heart. Her artificial heart. The phrase would haunt her, like the thought of her prosthesis, for the rest of her life. She had crossed a moral divide, and he had made certain that she would remember it.
Alan could have turned her in; she knew that. She also knew that nothing could be proved. Bringing empty charges against her would create scandal and speculation, and there was too much at stake for that: hundreds of millions in the contest, billions in Cup-related investments. And what would be the point? Alan was right: for all the technology, for all the scheming and the secrecy, the contest was still a match between men. And even she believed that the best man with the best crew would win. That was the magical allure of the Cup: that it could be won and held only by the best.
Why had she done it? It was one thing to be asked to steal the plans, another altogether to agree to the offer. It had been a huge risk. She might have been discovered and humiliated, or worse. Was it the thrill of easy money? She was a businesswoman, after all, and business people like to make money. Or was it something in her genes? The America's Cup race was a tycoon's game, the most elitist sport of all. Had Mavis, like her lady's-maid grandmother before her, simply wanted to give someone a good poke in the eye?
Probably. Too bad it had to be Alan. He wasn't poor, but he was certainly no Vanderbilt. Well, you worked with what you had, and what Mavis had was Alan. But really, it was too bad.
****
Twelve hours later Alan was standing outside Quinta's room in the Newport Hospital, heart pounding like a schoolboy's, far, far more self-conscious and awkward than on the day three years earlier when he'd stood outside a similar room listening to a young woman giving comfort to her paralyzed father. Neil had stayed home purposely this afternoon, to give Alan his chance. This was it.
Alan knocked on the door and heard Quinta say, "Come in." He pulled a rose from the bouquet of yellow flowers in his hand, then stepped inside. Quinta was lying on the partially raised bed, her shoulder wrapped tightly, her arm strapped to her body. Her hair fanned out on the pillow behind her, shining and straight. Her face, he saw, was still a little pale, but her smile was and always would be the most welcoming he'd ever seen.
"For you," he said, handing her the rose. "And if you like that, there's more where it came from." He placed the bouquet across her lap.
With a bemused expression Quinta accepted the rose and the back-up bouquet. "Thank you," she said, holding the flowers to her face. "They're beautiful."
"Not as," he said, and when she looked puzzled, he changed the subject. "I didn't get the chance to tell you how wildly irresponsible you were last night," he said, trying to look severe. "That was pretty stupid."
She grinned. "Dad says you came after me on a moped," she answered, laughing. "Not even a white horse."
He sat on the bed beside her. "That's the problem with you: you
tend to see me as a knight in shining armor."
"That's because you are. So is everyone else who rides after the Cup, from Dennis Conner on down."
"Ah. Well. In that case." He tried not to look crestfallen, but in fact, he was stung. He was one of a pack, that was all. She didn't distinguish between them. "Actually, I've come to you in a far more ... ordinary capacity," he began, hardly knowing where to begin.
"Really? How ordinary?" she asked, her hazel eyes looking straight into his.
"Well, ordinarily, I guess, I'd want to know, I suppose, how you are? Are you ... in pain?" he asked softly.
She made a dismissive face. "No. Just a little. I wanted to go home today, only they said I'd lost a lot of blood. If you can believe them. They're so conservative." She smelled the flowers again and beamed at him. "These are so beautiful, really, Alan."
"And, ordinarily," he said, forging ahead, "given the circumstances of the last time we saw one another—I don't mean on the way to the hospital last night; I mean the time before that—I guess I'd be curious to know whether you've thought about, ah, that other time. On the porch."
A slow, infinitely attractive color crept into Quinta's cheeks. She became attentive to the flowers again, making a business of inhaling their scent. Then: "Yes."
"You have thought about it?"
"Yes."
"What have you thought about it?" He was feeling very warm himself and wanted desperately to throw the bed stand through the window, to let in some air.
"That I liked it very much," she said softly, not looking at him. Then she lifted her eyes to his, and he saw neither shyness nor seductiveness, but only clear, honest longing. "That I'd like to do it again," she added.
By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs Page 23