by Ed McBain
Watching Ransome jump into the bow of the cruiser, Echo felt frustrated for his sake. Obviously he was not going to be painting anytime soon. She also felt a dim sense of betrayal that made no sense to her. Yet it lingered like the spectral imprint of a kiss that had made her restless during a night of confused, otherworldly dreams; dreams of Ransome, dreams of being as naked in his studio as a snail on a thorn.
Echo watched Taja back the cruiser from the dock and turn it toward the mainland, pour on the power. She decided to take a minute to go into the empty church. Was it time to ring the bell for a confession of her own? She couldn’t make up her mind about that, and her heart was no help either.
Cy Mellichamp was using a phone at a gallery associate’s desk in the second-floor office when Peter was brought in by a secretary. Mellichamp glanced at him with no hint of welcome. Two more associates, Mellichamp’s morale-boosting term for salespeople, were working the phones and computers. In another large room behind the office paintings were being uncrated.
Mellichamp smiled grievously at something he was hearing and fidgeted until he had a chance to break in.
“Really, Allen, I think your affections are misplaced. There is neither accomplishment nor cachet in the accident of Roukema’s success. And at six million—no, I don’t want to have this conversation. No. The man should be doing frescoes in tombs. You wanted my opinion, which I freely give to you. Okay, please think it over and come to your senses.”
Cy rang off and looked again at Peter, with the fixed smile of a man who wants you to understand he could be doing better things with his time.
“Why,” he asked Peter, “do otherwise bright young people treat inherited fortunes the way rednecks treat junk cars?” He shrugged. “Mr. O’Neill! Delighted to see you again. How can I help you?”
“Have you heard anything from Mr. Ransome lately?”
“We had dinner two nights ago at the Four Seasons.”
“Oh, he was in town?” Cy waited for a more sensible question. “His new paintings sell okay?”
“We did very, very well. And how is Echo?”
“I don’t know. I’m not allowed to see her, I might be a distraction. I thought Ransome was supposed to be slaving away at his art up there in Maine.”
Cy looked at his watch, looked at Peter again uncomprehendingly.
“I was hoping you could give me some information, Mr. Mellichamp.”
“In regard to?”
“The other women Ransome has painted. I know where one of them lives. Anne Van Lier.” The casual admission was calculated to provoke a reaction; Peter didn’t miss the slight tightening of Cy Mellichamp’s baby blue eyes. “Do you know how I can get in touch with the others?”
Cy said after a few moments, “Why should you want to?” with a muted suggestion in his gaze that Peter was up to no good.
“Do you know who and where those women are?”
An associate said to Cy, “Princess Steph on three.”
Distracted, Cy looked over his shoulder. “Find out if she’s on St. Barts. I’ll get right back to her.”
While Cy wasn’t watching him Peter glanced at a computer on a nearby desk where nobody was working. But the person whose desk it was had carelessly left his user ID on the screen.
Cy looked around at Peter again. “I could not help you if I did know,” he said curtly. “Their whereabouts are none of my business.”
“Why is Ransome so secretive about those women?”
“That, of course, is John’s prerogative. Now if you wouldn’t mind—it has been one of those days—” He summoned a moment of the old charm. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks for taking the time to see me, Mr. Mellichamp.”
“If there should be a next time, unless it happens to be official, you would do well to leave that gold shield in your pocket.”
EIGHT
Peter got home from his watch at twenty past midnight. He fixed himself a sardine sandwich on sourdough with a smelly slice of gouda and some salsa dip he found in the fridge. He carried the sandwich and a bottle of Sam Adams up the creaky back stairs to the third floor he shared with his brother Casey. The rest of the house was quiet except for his father’s distant whistling snore. But with no school for two days Case was still up with his iMac. Graphics were Casey’s passion: his ambition was to design the cars of the future.
Peter changed into sweats. The third floor was drafty; a wind laced with the first fitful snow of the season was belting them.
There was an e-mail on the screen of his laptop that said only missyoumissyoumissyou. He smiled bleakly, took a couple of twenties from his wallet and walked through the bathroom he shared with Casey, pausing to kick a wadded towel off the floor in the direction of the hamper.
“Hi, Case.”
Casey, mildly annoyed at the intrusion, didn’t look around.
“That looks like the Batmobile,” Peter said of the sleek racing machine Casey was refining with the help of some Mac software.
“It is the Batmobile.”
Peter laid a twenty on the desk where Casey would see it out of the corner of his eye.
“What’s that for?”
“For helping me out.”
“Doing what?”
“See, I’ve got this user ID, but there’s probably gonna be a log-on code too—”
“Hack a system?”
“I’m not stealing anything. Just want to look at some names, addresses.”
“It’s against the law.”
Peter laid the second twenty on top of the first.
“Way I see it, it’s kind of a gray area. There’s something going on, maybe involves Echo, I need to know about. Right away.”
Casey folded the twenties with his left hand and slid them under his mouse pad.
“If I get in any trouble,” he said, “I’m givin’ your ass up first.”
After nearly a week of Ransome’s absence, Echo was angry at him, fed up with being virtually alone on an island that every storm or squall in the Atlantic seemed to make a pass at almost on a daily basis, and once again dealing with acute bouts of homesickness. Never mind that her bank account was automatically fattening twice a month, it seemed to be payment for emotional servitude, not the pleasant collaboration she’d anticipated. Only chatty e-mails from girlfriends, from Rosemay and Stefan and even Kate O’Neill, plus Peter’s maddeningly noncommittal daily communications (he was hopeless at putting feelings into words), provided balance and escape from depression through the long nights. They reminded her that the center of her world was a long way from Kincairn Island.
She had almost no one to talk to other than the village priest, who seemed hard put to remember her name at each encounter, and Ransome’s housekeeper. But Ciera’s idea of a lively conversation was two sentences an hour. Much of the time, perhaps affected by the dismal weather that smote their rock or merely the oppression of passing time, Ciera’s face looked as if Death had scrawled an “overdue” notice on it.
Echo had books and her music and DVDs of recent movies arrived regularly. She had no difficulty in passing the time when she wasn’t working. But she hated the way she’d been painting lately, and missed the stealth insights from her employer and mentor. Day after day she labored at what she came to judge as stale, uninspired landscapes, taking a palette knife to them as soon as the light began to fade. She didn’t know if it was the creeping ennui or a faltering sense of confidence in her talent.
November brought fewer hours of the crystal lambency she’d discovered on her first day there. Ransome’s studio was equipped with full-spectrum artificial light, but she always preferred painting outdoors when it was calm enough, no tricky winds to snatch her easel and fling it out to sea.
The house of John Ransome, built to outlast centuries, was not a house in which she would ever feel at home, in spite of his library and collection of paintings that included some of his own youthful work that would never be shown anywhere. These she studied with the avid eye of an
archaeologist in a newly unearthed pyramid. The house was stone and stout enough but at night in a hard gale had its creepy, shadowy ways. Hurricane lamps had to be lit two or three times a week at about the same time her laptop lost satellite contact and the screen’s void reflected her dwindled good cheer. Reading by lamplight hurt her eyes. Even with earplugs she couldn’t fall asleep when the wind was keening a single drawn-out note or slapdash, grabbing at shutters, mewling under the eaves like a ghost in a well.
Nothing to do then but lie abed after her rosary and cry a little as her mood worsened. And hope John Ransome would return soon. His continuing absence a puzzle, an irritant; yet working sorcery on her heart. When she was able to fall asleep it was Ransome whom she dreamed about obsessively. While fitful and half awake she recalled every detail of a self portrait and the faces of his women. Had any of his subjects felt as she now did? Echo wondered about the depth of each relationship he’d had with his unknown beauties. One man, seven young women—had Ransome slept with any of them? Of course he had. But perhaps not every one.
His secret. Theirs. And what might other women to come, lying awake in this same room on a night as fierce as this one, adrift in loneliness and sensation of their own, imagine about Echo’s involvement with John Leland Ransome?
Echo threw aside her down comforter and sat on the edge of the bed, nervous, heart-heavy. Except for hiking shoes she slept fully dressed, with a small flame in one of the tarnished lamp chimneys for company and a hammer on the floor for security, not knowing who in that island community might take a notion, no matter what the penalty. Ciera went home at night to be with her severely arthritic husband, and Echo was alone.
She rubbed down the lurid gooseflesh on her arms, feeling guilty in the sight of God for what raged in her mind, for sexual cravings like nettles in the blood. She put her hand on the Bible beside her bed but didn’t open it. Dear Lord, I’m only human. She felt, honestly, that it was neither the lure of his flesh nor the power of his talent but the mystery of his torment that ineluctably drew her to Ransome.
A shutter she had tried to secure earlier was loose again to the incessant prying of the wind, admitting an almost continual flare of lightning centered in this storm. She picked up the hammer and a small eyebolt she’d found in a tool chest along with a coil of picture wire.
It was necessary to crank open one of the narrow lights of the mullioned window, getting a faceful of wind and spume in the process. As she reached for the shutter that had been flung open she saw by a run of lightning beneath boiling clouds a figure standing a little apart from the house on the boulders that formed a sea wall. A drenched white shirt ballooned in the wind around his torso. He faced the sea and the brawling waves that rose ponderously to foaming heights only a few feet below where he precariously stood, waves that crashed down with what seemed enough force to swamp islands larger than Kincairn.
John Ransome had returned. Echo’s lips parted to call to him, small-voiced in the tumult. Her skin crawled coldly from fear, but the shutter slammed shut on her momentary view of the artist.
When she pushed it open again and leaned out slightly to see him, her eyelashes matting with salt spray, hair whipping around her face, Ransome had vanished.
Echo cranked the window shut and backed away, tingling in her hands, at the back of her neck. She took a few deep breaths, wiping at her eyes, then turned, grabbed a flashlight and went to the head of the stairs down the hall from her room, calling his name in the darkness, shining the beam of the light down the stairs, across the foyer to the front door, which was closed. There was no trace of water on the floor, as she would have expected if he’d come in out of the storm.
“ANSWER ME, JOHN! ARE YOU HERE?”
Silence, except for the wind.
She bolted down the stairs, grabbed a hooded slicker off the wall-mounted coat tree in the foyer and let herself out.
The three-cell flashlight could throw a brilliant beam for well over a hundred yards. She looked around with the light, shuddering in the cold, lashed in a gale that had to be more than fifty knots. She heard thunder rolling above the shriek of the wind. She was scared to the marrow. Because she knew she had to leave the relative shelter afforded by the house at her back and face the sea where she’d last seen him.
With her head low and an arm protecting her face, she made her way to the seawall, the dash of waves terrifying in the beam of the flashlight. Her teeth were clenched so tight she was afraid of chipping them. Remembering the shock of being engulfed on what had been a calm day at the Jersey shore, pulled tumbling backwards and almost drowning in the sandy undertow.
But she kept going, mounted the seawall and crouched there, looking down at the monster waves. It was near to freezing. In spite of the hood and slicker she was already soaked and trembling so badly she was afraid of losing her grip on the flashlight as she crawled over boulders. Looking down into crevices where he might have fallen, to slowly drown at each long roll of a massive wave.
Thought she saw something—something alive like an animal caught in discarded plastic wrap. Then she realized it was a face she was looking at in the down-slant of the flashlight, and it wasn’t plastic, it was Ransome’s white shirt. He lay sprawled on his back a few feet below her, dazed but not unconscious. His eyelids squinched in the light cast on his face.
Echo got down from the boulder she was on, found some footing, got her hands under his arms and tugged.
One of his legs was awkwardly wedged between boulders. She couldn’t tell if it was broken as she turned her efforts to pulling his foot free. Hurrying. Her strength ebbing fast. Battling him and the storm and sensing something behind her, still out to sea but coming her way with such size, unequaled in its dark momentum, that it would drown them both in one enormous downfall like a building toppling.
“MOVE!”
Echo had him free at last and pushed him frantically toward the top of the seawall. She’d managed to lose her grip on the flashlight but it didn’t matter, there was lightning around their heads and all of the deep weight of the sea coming straight at them. She couldn’t make herself look back.
Whatever the condition of his leg, Ransome was able to hobble with her help. They staggered toward the house, whipsawed by the wind, until the rogue wave she’d anticipated burst over the seawall and sent them rolling helplessly a good fifty feet before its force was spent.
When she saw Ransome’s face again beneath the flaring sky he was blue around the mouth but his eyes had opened. He tried to speak but his chattering teeth chopped off the words.
“WHAT?”
He managed to say what was on his mind between shudders and gasps.
“I’m n-n-not w-worth it, y-you know.”
Hot showers, dry clothing. Soup and coffee when they met again in the kitchen. When she had Ransome seated on a stool she looked into his eyes for sign of a concussion, then examined the cut on his forehead, which was two inches long and deep enough so that it would probably scar. She pulled the edges of the cut together with butterfly bandages. He sipped his coffee with steady hands on the mug and regarded her with enough alertness so that she wasn’t worried about that possible concussion.
“How did you learn to do this?” he asked, touching one of the bandages.
“I was a rough-and-tumble kid. My parents weren’t always around, so I had to patch myself up.”
He put an inquisitive fingertip on a small scar under her chin.
“Street hockey,” she said. “And this one—”
Echo pulled her bulky fisherman’s sweater high enough to reveal a larger scar on her lower rib cage.
“Stickball. I fell over a fire hydrant.”
“Fortunately … nothing happened to your marvelous face.”
“Thanks be to God.” Echo repacked the first aid kit and ladled clam chowder into large bowls, straddled a stool next to him. “Ought to see my knees,” she said, as an afterthought. She was ravenous, but before dipping the spoon into her chowder she sa
id, “You need to eat.”
“Maybe in a little while.” He uncorked a bottle of brandy and poured an ounce into his coffee.
Echo bowed her head and prayed silently, crossed herself. She dug in. “And thanks be to God for saving our lives out there.”
“I didn’t see anyone else on those rocks. Only you.”
Echo reached for a box of oyster crackers. “Do I make you uncomfortable?”
“How do you mean, Mary Catherine?”
“When I talk about God.”
“I find that … endearing.”
“But you don’t believe in Him. Or do you?”
Ransome massaged a sore shoulder.
“I believe in two gods. The god who creates and the god who destroys.”
He leaned forward on the stool, folded his arms on the island counter, which was topped with butcher block, rested his head on his arms. Eyes still open, looking at her as he smiled faintly.
“The last few days I’ve been keeping company with the god who destroys. You have a good appetite, Mary Catherine.”
“Haven’t been eating much. I don’t like eating alone at night.”
“I apologize for—being away for so long.”
Echo glanced thoughtfully at him.
“Will you be all right now?”
He sat up, slipped off his stool, stood behind her and put a hand lightly on the back of her neck.
“I think the question is—after your experience tonight, will you be all right—with me?”
“John, were you trying to kill yourself?”
“I don’t think so. But I don’t remember what I was thinking out there. I’m also not sure how I happened to find myself sitting naked on the floor of the shower in my bathroom, scrubbed pink as a boiled lobster.”
Echo put her spoon down. “Look, I cut off your clothes with scissors and sort of bullied you into the shower and loofah’d you to get your blood going. Nothing personal. Something I thought I’d better do, or else. I left clothes out for you then went upstairs and took a shower myself.”