To the Ends of the Earth

by Elizabeth Lowell

  And with each dawn came the worst question of all. Did he leave because I didn’t please him as much as he pleased me?

  The one bright spot in Cat’s life was that Blake Ashcroft had stopped trying to crowd her into his bed. She still shot sunsets for him, but she shot them alone. Tonight he was coming over to sort through the slides she had taken for his book.

  Cat wasn’t looking forward to having Ashcroft in her house, though she doubted that he would revert to caveman tactics. The poet was also a pragmatist, and the pragmatist had a healthy fear of a certain hull designer.

  If that wasn’t enough, Cat wouldn’t be taken by surprise again. It wouldn’t have happened the first time if she hadn’t been focused on her photography instead of on the spoiled poet who couldn’t believe that she didn’t want him.

  Lacing her fingers together, Cat wished heartily that Ashcroft hadn’t insisted on having her around while he reviewed the slides. Not that he didn’t have every right to expect her presence. It was his book, after all, his poetry, and his choice of images. He could hardly be expected to explain what he liked and disliked over the phone.

  But it would have been very nice just the same.

  “Cathy?” Dr. Stone said.

  Cat glanced up from her interlaced fingers. “What?”

  “I asked if you were taking the new vitamins.”

  “Yes.”

  “They aren’t meant as a food substitute,” the doctor said dryly, looking at Cat’s drawn face.

  “I know.”

  “How many meals a day are you eating?”

  Cat tried to focus her thoughts on something besides Travis or photography or the growing mountain of bills waiting to be paid. The Big Check from Energistics hadn’t come.

  “I don’t really have time to cook,” she said.

  “There are many good restaurants in Laguna.”

  “Too expensive.”

  “No time to cook and no money to eat out. What does that translate to in actual meals for you?”

  “When Jason comes over at dawn, he makes breakfast.”

  Dr. Stone waited expectantly, but her patient wasn’t feeling chatty. “What does Jason make for you?”

  “Cocoa and peanut butter toast.”

  The doctor laughed and shook her head. “Well, at least your body can put the carbohydrates and fat to good use. But you might teach your Jason how to make scrambled eggs.”

  “I tried. Took me two days to get rid of the smell.” Cat smiled slightly. “Besides, I’ve acquired a taste for peanut butter.”

  “What about lunch and dinner?”

  “Soup. Eggs. Cheese and crackers. Whatever.”

  “Fruits? Vegetables?”

  “They’re the whatever,” Cat said. “Whatever looks good when I get to the store.”

  “I want you to keep track of what you eat between now and next week’s appointment.”

  Cat sighed and kept quiet. She knew she should eat better meals, but had neither the time nor the desire to cook real meals for herself. As a result, the more tired she became, the less she ate. And the less she ate, the more tired she became.

  Dr. Stone called the nurse in and left instructions for B complex and iron shots. A few minutes later Cat left the office rubbing her hip. The doctor had been right—iron shots were a literal pain in the rear.

  On the way home Cat stopped at the camera store and picked up her latest batch of processed film. The majority of the slides were duplicates of slides in her files, duplicates she hadn’t had time to make herself because she was too busy with the Swift and Sons show.

  Cat had long since given up mailing her original slides across country to various photo agents. They didn’t like getting duplicates, but the quality of the slides was such that they put up with it, knowing that the alternative was no slides at all from the photographer known only to them as Cochran.

  She was careful not to send identical slides to different agents. Each agent had slides no one else had. It was more expensive that way, but it paid off in the long run because agents could assure clients that the precise slide or slides they were buying weren’t available anywhere else, at any price.

  Even so, Cat flinched at the cost of duplicating so many slides, especially when she didn’t do it herself. Including her professional discount but not including the cost of the film itself, the bill came to just under one thousand dollars.

  And this was only the first of several batches of slides she had sent off to be processed.

  Even though the long nights of work were bearing fruit in terms of more images indexed and sent to her agents, she would rather have caught up on her backlog of slide editing in some other way than driven by loneliness and anger.

  Cat carried the cardboard carton full of slide boxes to her car and thought gloomily of all the sorting, indexing, filing, and mailing to various agents that lay ahead of her. It was a part of the business of photography that least appealed to her. It also was vital at this point in her career.

  As Cat pulled into the garage, she heard the phone ringing. Simultaneously she remembered that she hadn’t turned on the answering machine when she left. She ran down the stairs to her tiny front yard, vaulted the little white gate, and unlocked the front door.

  Then she remembered that she had left the portable phone on the lowest floor of her three-level house. She raced down the stairs connecting the levels and snatched the receiver out of its cradle, promising herself that as soon as the Big Check came, she would buy a phone for every level of the house.

  “Hello,” she said breathlessly.

  “Forgot your machine again, Cochran.”

  Disappointment went over Cat like winter surf, cold and powerful, numbing. It wasn’t until that instant that she admitted to herself how much she had wanted the voice on the other end to belong to Travis.

  She swallowed, took a steadying breath, and hoped she responded in her normal teasing tones.

  “Hi, Harrington. Going to be my green angel again?” she asked, referring to his gift for getting highly paid assignments for her.

  “I’m trying,” he said with a sigh. “It’d be a hell of a lot easier if I could talk to you from time to time. Swear to God, I’m getting you a pager for Christmas. Maybe I won’t wait that long. Hold it for a minute.”

  There was a pause while Harrington turned away from the phone. Cat heard one of his six assistants speak hurriedly to him. His answer was muffled and abrupt.

  “Swear to God,” he sighed into the phone, “the bigger the boobs, the dumber the booby.”

  The assistant’s response was muffled, creative, and explicit. So was Harrington’s.

  “They’re going to get you for sexual harassment,” Cat said, amusement curling in her voice.

  “Jim? Nah. He’s been lifting weights. I get out of line, he’ll just hammer me into a thin paste, right, Jim?”

  “The ‘booby’ with the boobs is a man?” she asked, startled.

  “On a man, they’re called pecs. Besides, there isn’t a woman here who could give a C cup a run for its money.”

  There was a chorus of outraged and outrageous responses questioning Harrington’s eyesight and more personal functions. Unruffled, he continued speaking loudly into the phone, drowning out the comments.

  “They’ve got no sense of humor,” he complained. “I hope you do.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Good. You’re gonna need it. Energistics has stopped returning my calls. Word is they’re in a cash-flow crunch.”

  Cat closed her eyes and swallowed hard against the turmoil in her stomach. She had been counting on that check to survive.

  “They can’t do that,” she managed.

  “I said about the same thing to them in a registered letter,” Harrington said. “I mentioned accountants, contracts, lawyers, courts, and other obscenities.”

  Cat swallowed again, harder. She couldn’t afford the time or expense that a lawsuit would involve.

  “That bad?” she asked final
ly.

  “Let me put it this way, Cochran. I’m tired of being jerked around by Energistics. I’m so tired of it I’m going to sue their tight asses off unless they pay.”

  Cat let out a long breath. She trusted Rodney Harrington too much to start questioning his business judgment now. If he said a suit was necessary, then somehow she would find money to pay the lawyers.

  “How much do you need and when?” she asked, her voice only slightly hoarse.

  “How much what?”

  “Money, what else?” she asked wearily. “All those obscenities you mentioned cost a lot.”

  “Nothing right now. If it gets serious, three to five grand should take care of it.”

  “Three to five.” Cat hoped the dismay she felt didn’t show in her voice.

  “Think of it as an investment, because sure as God made little green apples, we’ll get every cent of it back out of their corporate hide and more for the insult. But it probably won’t come to that. Usually these business types come across when you wave a lawyer at them, especially when you have them by the balls. And that’s where we have Energistics.”

  “Then squeeze,” Cat said bluntly. “I need that money. The twins’ next-to-last school payments aren’t very far away. And my mother . . .”

  She hesitated, not wanting to criticize the very dear, very helpless woman who was her mother. Mrs. Cochran still believed that checks were a magic form of money unrelated to dollars and common sense.

  “Well, you know my mother,” Cat said finally.

  “Lovely lady,” murmured Harrington. “A real old-fashioned woman. Wouldn’t know a balance sheet if it walked up and introduced itself.”

  “January,” Cat said, code word for freedom.

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  Cat almost smiled. Of all the people in the world, it was Harrington who best understood the pressures she was under. He had been the one who introduced Cat’s mother to her future husband. Privately Harrington had been heard to say that it was the best piece of work he’d ever done for Cochran.

  “I have some good news, too,” Harrington said. “Well, it could be good, anyway.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Remember that new account of mine, the guy who started a face-goo company?”

  “Er, no. Does it matter?”

  “He’ll pay fifteen thousand dollars per shot for every shot he uses in an ad campaign. He’s looking for five good ones.”

  “What does he want—beach, flowers, hills, skin?”

  “Just pretty, Cochran. Whatever you have that would go well on a slushy greeting card or a postcard. You know, the kind of shot that makes people say, ‘Ohhh, isn’t that pretty,’ and then they walk away and never think of the image again. Not your usual style, but you must have some little cuties hiding away in that wall of filing drawers.”

  “Boxes and boxes,” agreed Cat. “There’s a lot of demand for pretties. Photo banks love them. Most common denominator and all that. Like Ashcroft’s poetry.”

  Harrington laughed. “How has the octopus been behaving? Did the herpes gambit work?”

  “No. He tried to get physical.” Cat flinched and held the phone away from her ear for a moment. “It’s okay, Rodney. Travis happened to be nearby. He cut off most of Ashcroft’s arms and tied the rest in knots.”

  “Travis? As in T. H. Danvers?”

  “The same. He has chivalrous instincts and the strength to enforce them. Ashcroft has been very well behaved since he met Travis.”

  “Chivalrous?” Harrington said in a rising tone. “Cochran, are we talking about T. H. Danvers, the ship designer? About six foot two, odd-colored eyes, hard-faced, and meaner than a junkyard dog?”

  “Hard-faced?” Cat asked, unaware that her voice had softened as she remembered Travis’s face close to hers, Travis smiling with pleasure as he lifted her into a kiss. “Mean?” Memories of laughter and gentleness, his sensitive fingertips bringing warmth to her, his body sharing with her the gift of passion and shimmering release. She laughed softly. “Must be talking about two different men.”

  “Cathy.”

  Harrington’s quiet use of her first name shocked Cat. He had called her Cathy only once before, when she had comforted him after his brother died in a yachting accident.

  “Are you listening?” he asked gently.

  “Yes,” she whispered, wishing she wasn’t, knowing she wasn’t going to like what she heard.

  “I’d give my life for Travis and consider it well spent,” Harrington said, his voice calm and absolutely sure. “He would do the same for me. He’s unique, brilliant. A man couldn’t ask for a better friend to share a bottle or a fight or a dark night of the soul.” He paused. “But, Cathy . . .”

  “I’m listening.”

  “That man is hell on women.”

  “What do you mean?” Cat asked, her voice flat, afraid that she knew the answer before she heard it.

  “Nothing physical. He would never hurt a woman in that way. It’s just that they fall for him and he gets in the wind. Something to do with his ex-wife, I think.”

  “Yes. He told me.”

  “He did?” Harrington asked, startled. “Then you’re the only person other than the two of them who knows what burned him. He never told me a damn thing except that he was divorced.”

  Cat didn’t know what to say.

  There was a long, not entirely comfortable silence.

  “Oh, hell,” Harrington said. “You’re a woman grown and all that. But be careful. For women, Danvers is like one of the big storm waves at Oahu—glorious and fascinating as hell until you get caught in it. Then it’s out of control and damned terrifying. I care about you too much to want to pick up the pieces after the wave goes out again.”

  “I know,” Cat said softly. “I’m a good swimmer, angel,” she added, keeping her voice light. “Remember? But thanks. I care a lot about you, too.”

  “Send the pretties,” he said gruffly. “Turn on your machine. And, Cochran . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  Harrington hung up before Cat could answer. She stood and stared at the phone for a long time.

  They fall for him and then he gets in the wind.

  Maybe that was the answer to the worst of her dawn questions. It certainly fit. There was no doubt that she had fallen for Travis like a breaking wave, curling over and tumbling until she was little more than spindrift glittering on a sandy shore.

  But she thought Travis had been with her, riding the crest of the wave.

  Cat closed her eyes, angry that she missed Travis the way she had never expected to miss anything. It was futile to care about him. Rich men didn’t know how to care about anyone but themselves. Surely she should have learned that by now.

  Yet Travis’s great black ship flew across her mind, as unforgettable and compelling as the memory of his touch. She couldn’t believe that a man who created such wild, fierce beauty was as shallow as her ex-husband.

  With a dispirited curse, Cat went to her cluttered desk, drew out boxes labeled “To be paid,” “Overdue,” “Owed to me,” and began adding columns with the aid of a small calculator. She worked for several hours, writing checks, delaying some bills and paying part of others, trying to make the outgo balance with the income. She worked until her jaw ached from the tension of her clenched teeth.

  No matter how many times Cat juggled the figures, they came up dripping red.

  She rubbed her eyes and the back of her neck and thought about deadly serious corporate portraits, handshakes between smiling politicians, advertising brochures, and all the other small jobs that might add up to enough money to survive.

  It took several minutes before Cat geared herself up to sound cheerful and energetic. She hated what she was about to do, but there was no choice. She had to keep going until the Energistics check or the Danvers assignment came through.

  At the moment, neither seemed a good bet.

  Grimly Cat
reached for the telephone and punched in a number she hated to call. “Hi, Dave. It’s Catherine Cochran. You still buried in weddings, gala openings, corporate portraits, and the like?”

  THIRTEEN

  PUSHING AWAY from the desk, Cat stood, stretched, and kneaded the small of her back. The bills were in different pigeonholes now. That, some small jobs from Dave’s Lifetime Memories, and a hip that ached from iron shots were all she had to show for the morning.

  She was tired, bone-tired, but she ignored exhaustion without even realizing what she was doing. She had learned that hard work was the price of freedom.

  Besides, the checks always came. Eventually.

  With a sigh Cat sat down at the typewriter, pulled over the box marked “Owed to Me,” and began writing the biweekly round of dunning letters. As soon as she finished with them, she should call the custom color printers and find out if the first batch of prints for the L.A. show was ready.

  If the prints were in, she would have to pick them up, assuming they passed her inspection. If they didn’t pass, she would spend time arguing about cropping and color register. If the prints were good, she would pay for them with her credit card, if it wasn’t maxed out.

  Then she should take the prints immediately to the framers and spend more time—and credit—trying out various combinations of mats and frames.

  Part of Cat hoped that the prints weren’t ready. Part of her knew they had better be. She simply must get everything in shape for the Swift and Sons gallery showing.

  But even if the prints weren’t ready, it didn’t let her off the hook in terms of office work. There were all those slides to sort, query letters to write, slides to index and file, slides to duplicate. Slides, slides, and more slides.

  Cat muffled a yawn and thought longingly of a nap. It would take only a moment to shift the boxes of slides off the low couch and make room for herself. She could lie beneath the open windows and listen to the surf thunder and dissolve on the beach.