“That’s an interesting story, Zephyr. What does it have to do with me?”
Zephyr regarded her with a challenging grin. “Who says it has anything to do with you?”
“I thought—”
“I was merely indulging in a bit of reminiscing. And now that it’s getting dark, how about if I fry up some pork chops and redeye gravy.”
Since Tara and Jill were going to dinner and a movie at the mall in Melbourne, Chloe was free for dinner. Staying would mean that she wouldn’t be subjected to halfhearted invitations from Ben and Emily, and that was good, too.
“Thanks, Zephyr,” she said. “I’d love to.”
“Good. Can’t have you mooning over Ben. Emily will be gone before long, and then you and Ben can thrash things out. Just be glad Emily doesn’t weight two hundred and fifty pounds and want money.”
“I guess that is something,” Chloe said, unable to keep from laughing.
Zephyr’s excellent pork chops and gravy served up with rice and fresh peas was the first decent meal Chloe had eaten in two days, and when she went back to her room at the inn, she could hear Emily humming across the hall as she moved around Driftwood. As for Ben, his Jeep wasn’t parked outside.
After Tara came home and went to bed, Chloe stayed awake listening for the crunch of the Jeep’s tires on the driveway. Ben showed up around midnight, and she heard the sliding glass door open and close beneath her window. The creak of the floorboards across the hall told her that Emily was still in Driftwood.
Chloe didn’t fall asleep right away, so she sat up in bed and reached for the old diary.
Dear Trees, I want to die. Gold hasn’t spoken to me in three whole days! In fact, I don’t know where he’s been. Maybe on the dive boat or someplace. Mrs. Mixon, a lady who lives at the inn all year round, says Gold is gone for good. I don’t know how she knows this. He still has things in his room, I sneaked in one day and looked around. His room still smells like him. He left his old plaid shirt on the chair. His clothes are in the closet.
Wind says his rent is paid up to the end of the month, and that’s when I’m going back to Farish. I want to see him so badly you can’t imagine. And I can’t tell Ocean or Wind—they’d think it’s ridiculous. Ocean keeps trying to get me to meet this friend of hers, Hank Something Or Other. I am not interested. I’m in love with Gold.
But where is he?????
Worried and wondering,
Fire (Chloe D. Timberlake)
She’d drawn a remarkably good likeness of Ben as he’d been in those days, capturing the warm light in his eyes and the boyish charm that had made him a favorite with the other residents at the Frangipani Inn.
Now, unlike then, at least Chloe knew where Ben was. But since it wasn’t with her, the knowledge gave her no comfort at all.
ON THE DAY EMILY LEFT, Ben was glad to see her go. It meant he could patch things up with Chloe.
Chloe prepared a breakfast of eggs, bacon and English muffins, and while Emily ate alone in the dining room, he went upstairs to get her suitcase. On his way outside with it, he heard Chloe refuse payment. Afterward, his ex came out of the inn alone.
“That’s it, then,” Emily said, lingering where he stood to put the suitcase in her car. “I hope everything goes well for you from now on.”
“Thanks, Em.”
After a moment of awkwardness, she kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Be happy, Ben.” He may have detected the sheen of tears in her eyes, but she climbed in the car too quickly to be sure.
As he slammed the trunk lid, Chloe barged out of the house. She immediately noticed that the garbage can had been overturned again, probably by the hungry possum that kept mounting night raids, and she went to pick it up and stuff the bags of garbage back in. He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she weighed the lid of the can down with a chunk of coquina rock and tested it to see if it would hold.
“Goodbye,” Emily called out the car window. She waved at Chloe, who returned the wave in an unenthusiastic fashion. Ben stood, hands on hips, feeling relieved as he watched Emily back out of the parking space.
With Emily here, he hadn’t felt free to be himself. To be truthful, he’d been eager to reconnect with his ex-wife, but only because she was the mother of his child and he would forever feel guilty that Ashley had died. His guilt had thrown up a wall between them where none had been before; when he and Emily should have been able to support each other, he’d had nothing to give. Now that she was on the threshold of a new beginning, he’d been able accept her forgiveness. During the past few days, she had convinced him that this was key to their moving on with their lives.
How was he going to explain all this to Chloe, who was presently stalking back to the porch, her eyes boring holes through him? He was going to give it his best try.
“You could have charged Emily for the room,” he said conversationally as he approached.
Chloe pivoted on her heel, regarded him for a long moment and shrugged—a careless movement that didn’t fool him. She was perturbed, and rightly so. “Emily is family,” Chloe said abruptly before turning toward the kitchen door.
He was right behind her when they reached the kitchen. “Was family,” he said, touching Chloe’s shoulder in a gesture of supplication.
Eyes flashing, hands clenched at her sides, she said, “You told me you’d been married before, Ben, but you never mentioned a daughter.”
“She died,” he replied helplessly. “It was painful to discuss it.”
“You could have told me.”
“I didn’t talk about Ashley to anyone. When she died, it was—it was—” He didn’t know how to describe the utter hopelessness, the futility of his life. The anguish, the heartbreak, the guilt. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and saw Chloe. The anger had gone out of her expression, leaving only disappointment. In a moment of empathy, he knew how she must feel.
“It was horrible. I felt empty. I couldn’t function. I couldn’t manage even the most simple aspects of my life,” he finished.
Chloe’s expression softened, and then, after a wavering moment, her face crumpled. She buried it in her hands. “Oh, Ben. I’m sorry,” she said, her voice muffled.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We should talk about it.”
“You and Emily,” she said, dropping her hands and staring at him with a bleakness he’d never seen in her before. “What is that all about?”
The words poured out, and he said things about grief and guilt and ultimate forgiveness. He was repeating what Emily had so earnestly told him, but because it was what he had come to believe, too, there was no falseness. Chloe stood staring at him, and she must have been somewhat surprised because she didn’t interrupt, she didn’t speak.
“It’s about moving on,” he said. “Emily and I were never really in love.”
“You married her, Ben. That summer I was crazy in love with you, and you went and married Emily. I was devastated.”
He stared at her, shocked. “You were just a kid,” he said finally. “I was much older, twenty-one to your sixteen. We hardly knew each other.”
“What I felt was a teenage crush, but to me it was the real thing. You broke my heart, Ben.”
“Are you going to blame me for that? When it would have been wrong for me to show any interest in you, considering the age difference?” He spoke heatedly, but he didn’t derive pleasure from the way she deflated in the face of his logic.
“No,” she said. “No. I never thought of it that way.”
He forced himself to remain calm, to ignore his urge to take Chloe in his arms and comfort her.
“Emily and I married very young when she discovered she was pregnant that summer. I was her child’s father. I respected Em, I liked her, and I didn’t want her to be alone even though a pregnancy was the last thing I’d expected to happen. We used precautions, and they didn’t work, and—she got pregnant. Anyway, from the beginning, it was a disastrous marriage, because even though we were friends, we w
ere unable to live together. When Ashley was six months old, we divorced. I’m happy that Em’s found someone who really cares about her. She’s not too old to have more kids of her own.”
Chloe sank onto a chair. “So while she was here, you weren’t falling in love with each other all over again?”
He stared incredulously. “Is that what you thought?”
“I’ve even considered that you might be seeing someone else besides me.”
“Absolutely not.” His denial was vehement. “Whatever gave you that impression?”
“You go out at night and stay out late.”
“I go to AA meetings, Chloe. It helps me stay sober. I thought you knew that.”
“You never said,” she pointed out.
“I hang at the Sand Bar sometimes. It’s a good place to pick up information about treasure hunting, which I find necessary in order to keep up now that I’m not working in the field. There’s no one but you, Chloe. Why didn’t you ask me about it if you were concerned?”
“I didn’t want to pry.”
“I haven’t been interested in any other woman since I moved into the inn, and that’s the truth.”
“What about Emily?”
“Chloe, Em and I are like oil and water. We’ll never mix. This may have been the last time I’ll ever see Emily. She says it’s too painful to come back to Sanluca. We parted friends—again. That’s what we both wanted.”
“I liked her,” Chloe said. “It surprised me that she was so nice.”
Ben rubbed the back of his neck. “I wouldn’t have married her in the first place if she hadn’t been, as you say, nice. It was a mistake, but one I made in good faith and for a good reason. I wanted Ashley to have my name and I wanted to contribute to her support. I was a presence in my daughter’s short life. That’s important to me.”
Chloe nodded, then looked away. “When did Ashley die, Ben?”
“A little over two years ago.”
Chloe swiveled abruptly and went to the sideboard in the dining room, where Emily had eaten a solitary breakfast that morning. “Emily left these,” she said, thrusting a sheaf of yellowing newspaper clippings in front of Ben’s nose.
For a moment, he didn’t comprehend. Then he understood.
“That’s Em’s way of putting the past behind her,” he said heavily. “She said she was going to get rid of them.”
“Well, her way of doing that was to dump them here at the inn.”
“She probably thinks it will bring closure to me if I’m the one to destroy them. She mentioned that.” He shook his head at Emily’s tactic. She’d always been one to insist on other people doing things her way. “I’ll take care of it,” he told Chloe. “Then we can talk.”
“Why don’t you let me read these,” she said quietly. “Wouldn’t that make it easier on you?”
“Nothing makes it easier, but go ahead, if you like,” he said, keeping his voice low.
“If it upsets you…”
“No,” he said. He reached out to touch her cheek, wanting things to be right between them again.
“I’ve got things to do in the annex,” he said. “I’ll be back later and we can have lunch.”
She smiled, but it was a pained smile.
Not knowing what else he might say to make things better, he left her, going to his apartment to sit for a long time in the armchair facing the patio. He, like Emily, needed to put the bad time to rest. Say goodbye to it and move on.
With a sigh, he got up and cleared a stack of old magazines off the kitchen counter. Several were women’s magazines that Emily had brought, and he set them aside in case Chloe and Tara might like to read them. Emily had also left a bottle of excellent Scotch, which she liked to drink on occasion. She’d probably forgotten it, so he stashed it away in a cabinet where he wouldn’t see it every time he came into the kitchen. Joe, the bartender at the Sand Bar, had proved a loyal friend. Ben would give the bottle to Joe next time he saw him.
He could ask Chloe if she’d drink it, but she didn’t care for anything more potent than beer or wine. Of course, he and Chloe would have other things to talk about when he next saw her. And it was time, definitely time, to discuss them.
CHLOE DIDN’T READ the clippings as soon as Ben left her. She was already operating on emotional overload and reluctant to take on any more. After she cleaned the sink and swept the kitchen floor, taking her time about both, she sat down at the table and steeled herself to read about his daughter’s death.
The fire had been big news when it happened, and all the major newspapers in the country had covered it.
THE MIAMI POST-EXPRESS TAMPA—Terrified fans leaped from windows and trampled fellow concertgoers as a fire at a rock concert Friday night gutted a theater in the town’s historic Ybor City district.
The blaze killed at least ten people, most of them teenagers, and injured dozens more.
The concert, featuring the Latino band, Chico Chico, was a performance to benefit music programs in the public schools. No band members were injured.
“I smelled smoke, and someone yelled ‘Fire.’ Flames shot off the stage and went everywhere,” said Maria Torres-Ola, 25, who attended the concert with her boyfriend.
“The girl in front of me started screaming for her father,” said Brant Senecal, 17. “Her long blue dress was on fire. I ran up the aisle, choking in the smoke.”
“I saw people scrambling up the walls, trying to get out the windows,” said a shaken parent, John Schultz, 48. “I was lucky. My kids and me crawled on our hands and knees toward an exit door.”
Attendees at the concert numbered around 600. Many parents were in the audience, since Chico Chico tends to appeal to young teenagers.
Francis O’Rourke, head of security for Flo-Star Productions, the sponsor of the event, said that the hall was filled to capacity. “It’s an old theater, but we thought we had adequate fire alarms and escape routes. The flames spread fast, and people didn’t have time to reach the exits. I can’t tell you how shocked and sad I am.”
The fire apparently started around 9:00 p.m. in pyrotechnic equipment used onstage.
A fire department official told reporters that when rescue workers reached the scene, they found ten people dead and many wounded. About twenty survivors were brought down extension ladders that reached the higher windows.
Bringing the fire under control took an hour, according to O’Rourke, but eight hours after the blaze began, the building was still smoldering and the street was cordoned off. About a hundred firefighters battled the blaze.
“We will be looking into any safety violations. You can be sure of that,” said the fire department official, who declined to be named.
“This is one of the worst fires in our city,” said Mayor Beaujames Chadwick. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Police said they will begin an investigation into possible involuntary manslaughter.
The picture accompanying the article showed the ruins of a building. Smoke still rose from the charred rubble. Chloe shivered with terror for the poor souls who had been caught in that all-consuming conflagration.
She folded the bit of newsprint and set it aside. She was too horrified to read any of the others until a small one caught her eye. It was a scrap clipped from the local weekly, the Sanluca Courier:
OBITUARIES
Ashley Martyne Derrick
Ashley Martyne Derrick, thirteen-year-old daughter of Emily Martyne Derrick and Benjamin J. Derrick, both of Sanluca, died Saturday in Tampa as the result of a fire.
Ashley was born on December 10, 1990, in Vero Beach. She was an honor student at Jerome Ruby Middle School and a champion speller who represented Indian River County at the state spelling bee in Orlando last year.
A clarinetist in the school band, Ashley also sang soprano in the Trinity Community Church choir. She played the lead in the seventh-grade play Princess P. Green and the Dragon.
She is survived by her parents, and her maternal grandfather, L
eonard D. Martyn, of Palm Beach Gardens, as well as her maternal great-aunt Talitha M. Surrency (Samuel) of Denver. Other survivors are uncles William Derrick (Judy), serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq; Jane D. Zillessen (Joseph) of Merced, California, and Mindy Carman (Michael) of Atascadero, California; as well as several cousins.
The obituary, though it gave many details, seemed so cold and unfeeling. It didn’t attempt to express or record the wrenching emotions that the death of such a promising young girl must have brought to the lives of her loved ones. Chloe’s heart ached for them, and for Ben especially. She couldn’t begin to imagine the agony of losing a child.
Chloe blinked her eyes to clear the tears away. As she did so, a shadow fell across the table. She lifted her head. “Ben, I’m so sorry.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I don’t talk about it. Up until now, I mean.”
“Until Emily came to see you?”
He shook his head. “No. Until I cared about you. The full story isn’t in the newspaper articles. Those are cut-and-dried factual accounts. They say nothing about Ashley, who she was. That she loved animals, that she cared about kids with disabilities, that she wanted to be a doctor so she could help people. They don’t say what really happened that night.”
Chloe stood up and reached out to him. Her hand found his.
“Tell me, Ben.”
Wordlessly, he led her to his apartment, where he lay down on the bed and she settled beside him with her head on his shoulder. Outside, over the sound of the waves, they heard children shouting. A car door slammed. Someone on the boardwalk laughed.
Those were the outside noises. Inside, it was quiet. Not even the sound of a dripping faucet marred the silence.
“It was Ashley’s birthday,” Ben began after a long time. “Chico Chico, Ashley’s favorite band, was giving a concert in Tampa, and I was going there to see a man about selling some boat equipment to Andy. Ashley was spending the week with me because Emily was away taking care of her mother, who was in the hospital.
The Treasure Man Page 18