Stowed Away

by Barbara Ross

  “Interesting.”

  Did she have attic dust in her eyes or was she batting her eyelashes at Chris? Did women really do that? Unlike Quentin, Chris had been all too susceptible to pretty women’s charms, as the string of ex-girlfriends I constantly ran into in the harbor reminded me. Or at least he had been, until me. His devotion made me feel warm and loved. The women who constantly approached me to send him their greetings made me uneasy.

  “This is it,” Quentin said. “If you want to see more of the upstairs, we have to get a ladder on the outside.”

  Wyatt wasn’t dressed for ladders. “I’ve got enough. Why don’t you two men take me on a tour of the basement?”

  “That puts us in our place,” I said a few minutes later as I sat on a porch step next to Mom. She hadn’t said a word during the tour.

  “Really, Julia, what great insights could you have offered about the cellar?”

  “None,” I admitted, but I didn’t like being excluded.

  “What is up with you and Wyatt? You act funny around her.”

  “Long story,” I answered.

  “Long ago story,” my mother said, “if you’re referring to something that happened at school. I hope it isn’t going to be a problem.”

  “Of course not. If she’s the right person for the job, she’s the right person.”

  “She is,” my mother said confidently. “I can feel it.”

  The merry band returned, appearing from around the corner of the stone foundation. Wyatt sat down on the porch step on the other side of my mother, smoothing the pastel shift.

  “What do you think?” Mom asked. The spot over her nose creased with anticipation. The stakes were high for her.

  Wyatt cleared her throat delicately and gave Mom a megawatt smile. “I think your project requires more research.” She spoke slowly, as if weighing her words. “I want to check some sources.”

  “Will that take long? I know you’re based in New York.”

  “I’m staying here in the harbor. My boyfriend is in town, waiting with his yacht for a refit at Herndon’s. Can we meet tomorrow?”

  Mom perked up. “My house in the harbor? Ten AM?”

  “Perfect. And you all should come for dinner aboard tonight.”

  “Where’s his boat?” Chris asked.

  “At Blount’s. It’s called the Garbo.”

  Chris’s eyebrows shot up. There’d been a mega-yacht anchored in the marina at Blount’s Hotel for days. Even though we were used to seeing yachts in Busman’s Harbor, its size had everyone in town talking about it.

  “We’d love to come,” Quentin said, apparently speaking for all of us.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t make it.” Mom sounded regretful. “I’m babysitting.” My sister Livvie and her husband had a four-month-old, and a ten-year-old who wasn’t quite up to caring for her brother.

  Wyatt must have been disappointed. My mom was the potential client, and therefore probably the person she most wanted to accept, but she didn’t show it. “The rest of you then?”

  “Sure, Julia and I would love to,” Chris answered, without so much as a glance at me.

  I smiled. Wyatt was attractive, but what Chris really wanted was to see that boat.

  “Great!” Wyatt said with more enthusiasm than I thought the occasion required. “I’ll send a text and let him know there’ll be three guests for dinner. I’m sure he’ll be interested to meet you, Julia. He’s never met any of my school friends.”

  He wasn’t going to tonight either.

  As she pulled out her phone, Chris said, “You won’t get service out here. You’ll have to wait until you’re closer to the harbor.”

  Her perfectly shaped eyebrows drew together over her pert little nose, but she put the phone away.

  “I’ve got to get back to my house to clean up,” Quentin said, though he looked as crisply turned-out as always, especially in comparison to Chris and me. I pictured his closet as yards-long racks of perfectly pressed blue, tailored shirts, rows of khaki-colored shorts and pants, and a hundred pairs of boat shoes. “Do you mind running Wyatt back to the harbor?” he asked us. “I’ll sail home, get changed, and meet you in town.”

  “Sure. You can park at our place,” Chris said, again without consulting with me. June days were long and normally we worked on the island until the sun went down, but today would be different. Even though I was annoyed, I couldn’t say I didn’t welcome the break.

  Chapter 2

  It took half an hour after Quentin left to finish our work and secure the island for the night. Since we’d begun prepping for the clambake season, I’d slept most nights in the little cottage by the dock where I’d spent my childhood summers. But tonight, because of the dinner, I’d stay in town at the studio apartment over Gus’s restaurant that Chris and I had shared all winter, the closest thing I had to a home.

  I undid the lines holding our Boston Whaler to the dock and jumped into the boat. Chris steered away, back along the shoreline of Westclaw Point toward the entrance to Busman’s Harbor. Wyatt and Mom sat in the back, talking energetically. I was sure their conversation was about Windsholme, and I was deeply curious, but I couldn’t hear them over the noise of the engine and the rush of the sea air.

  Several times, Wyatt pulled out her cell phone, tapped on the keys, and stared at the sky, as if a satellite for the signal to bounce off would suddenly appear. Chris brought us through the mouth of the outer harbor, which was just wide and deep enough for the fishing trawlers and small cruise ships that sailed through it. We passed Dinkum’s Light, a white lighthouse on a tiny island, where dozens of seals lay basking in the late afternoon sun. As the Victorian homes that lined Chipmunk Island came into view, I heard a distinctive ding that could only mean that Wyatt’s cell was back online. My own phone vibrated in my pocket, downloading dozens of e-mail messages, stacked up after three days on Morrow Island.

  Wyatt jumped from her seat in the stern, making her way to Chris and me. “Geoffrey says great for dinner. On his boat, the Garbo, at eight PM.” She took off the big sunglasses and shaded her eyes with her hand. “There she is now.”

  As we came around Chipmunk Island, Wyatt pointed toward Blount’s Hotel. Or at least toward the spot where it should have been. The old hotel was almost entirely obscured by the gigantic white boat. Yacht? It looked more like a battleship.

  “She’s a beauty,” Chris said.

  “Yup.” Wyatt shielded her eyes and squinted into the late afternoon sun. “She’s in town for a complete refit at Herndon Yachts, stern to stern. I designed the new interiors. I can’t wait for you to see her. If you see the ‘before,’ you’ll have a better appreciation for the ‘after.’”

  On the pier, we exchanged cell numbers—“just in case”—and went our separate ways.

  * * *

  At the apartment, Chris grabbed a shower first, his loud, off-tempo baritone echoing around the bathroom tiles. During the off-season, we’d run a dinner restaurant in Gus’s space downstairs, where he served the best breakfasts and lunches in the harbor. Chris and I had never said we were officially living together, but most nights after working in the restaurant, we’d fallen into my bed upstairs, exhausted. Lots of his stuff had slowly migrated from his cabin to the apartment.

  I’d never been in a serious relationship, and I’d expected working and living together to be claustrophobic, but it hadn’t been. With a few small hiccups, Chris and I had fitted together like a well-oiled machine. The long winter had carried us from our first, tentative movements toward romance to “I love you,” and then on to comfortable conversations that sailed seamlessly through talk about “next summer,” “next Christmas,” and “next year.”

  But when spring came, without really discussing it, we reverted to our old lives, almost as if the winter hadn’t happened. I often stayed out on Morrow Island, and Chris frequently slept on his wooden sailboat, the Dark Lady, as he always had during tourist seasons in the past. It made no sense for him to stay on the island
given how busy his spring was, as he rushed to open summer cottages, a service of his landscaping business. I’d been lucky to borrow him for a single day of work on the island, and I suspected it was only the lure of a conversation with an architect about restoring Windsholme that got him to give up the day’s much-needed income.

  Chris emerged from the bathroom and rooted in the closet that occupied one dormer of the studio apartment. “What do you wear to dinner on a yacht?” he called. His stuff was spread over three different locations, his cabin, his boat, and the studio, just as mine was spread out between my mom’s house, the island, and the apartment. I longed for a place for both of us that was truly home.

  “Clothes,” I said, unhelpfully.

  Chris ignored my sarcasm. “What’s with you and Wyatt?” he called as he toweled himself off.

  “Like I said, we went to boarding school together.”

  “Julia . . .” He let my name hang in the air. A warning.

  “She was my first roommate freshman year.”

  “And?”

  “And stuff. High school stuff. Not worth revisiting.”

  He pulled on a pair of khakis. “Honey, it’s obvious there’s something more between you two than a high school rivalry over the debate team. It’s almost like you don’t trust her.”

  I waited until he stood up straight so I could look him in the eye. “It didn’t work out. It often doesn’t with roommates. That’s all.”

  “Didn’t work out how?”

  “Didn’t work out the way those things don’t work.” I tried to keep the defensiveness out of my voice, but didn’t succeed. I let out a long breath. “It’s embarrassing.”

  “You can tell me. I was a teenager once too, you know.”

  “Yeah. Captain of the football team. Hell-raiser. You were a god.” Our lockers had been next to each other when he was a senior and I was in eighth grade. Whenever he’d casually asked how I was doing, my knees had turned to jelly. I was always afraid I’d end up falling to the floor.

  “You only think that because you were younger than me. I had my own stuff.” He sounded a little hurt.

  “She had some friends. They were kind of the Mean Girls.” I looked around the tiny apartment, desperate not to go on. “I need to get in the shower.” I hurried into the bathroom and closed the door.

  As I stepped under the spray, I tried to focus on the cascading warm water and push Wyatt Jayne from my mind, but I didn’t succeed.

  I’d met Wyatt, then called Susan, the day I moved into my dorm at prep school in New Hampshire. Right after Mom and Dad said their good-byes, three girls arrived in the room. Wyatt introduced us. “This is my friend Amber from day school in Rye. And this is Melissa and Lainey. They went to a school just like ours only on the North Shore outside Chicago. They’re the Amber and me of Winnetka! Julia lives on an island,” she told them.

  “Shouldn’t you be at the foreign students’ orientation?” Lainey asked. “It’s going on right now in the chapel.” Later, I would figure out that despite her polish and confidence, Lainey wasn’t very bright.

  “An island in the United States, off the coast of Maine,” I clarified. “I only live there in the summer. Off-season we live in town.”

  “What town is that?” Amber asked, picking a lipstick off the bureau and whisking it across her lips with a practiced movement of the wrist I instantly envied.

  “Wait till you hear this,” Wyatt responded.

  “Busman’s Harbor,” I answered.

  “Her father’s a lobsterman,” Wyatt informed them.

  “Grandfather,” I corrected unnecessarily. It’s not like my dad never worked his father’s traps.

  Melissa brightened. “My friend Cokie Henderson’s family has a place there. Do you know her?’

  Cokie. With a name like that, definitely a summer person. “No,” I said.

  “Oh.” They quickly lost interest in me and engaged in a long conversation full of gossip about people I didn’t know, discovering more and more connections between them, and leaving me more and more on the outside. I was used to not fitting in. In Busman’s Harbor it had been because my mother was a former summer person, descendent of a once-wealthy family that owned a private island. In prep school it would be because my father’s father was a lobsterman. Great.

  “You keeping track of the time?” Chris called from outside the bathroom door.

  “Coming!” I wrapped myself in a towel and rummaged through my clothes rack. “This had better be an informal evening,” I said. “Or else we’re screwed.”

  Chris had added a white cotton dress shirt over the khakis. I went with a T-shirt dress that evoked an extra, extra long T-shirt more than a dress, but at least I’d made an effort. I slipped into my familiar black flats, my go-to whenever boots or sneakers wouldn’t do.

  “Should we take wine?” Chris asked.

  I didn’t want to show up empty-handed, but I couldn’t imagine what wine we could bring to someone who owned a yacht that size. We went with two bottles, one red and one white, left over from our days of running our winter restaurant. I imagined the yacht’s chef, or its sommelier—yacht sommelier, was that a thing?—quietly dumping the contents over the side.

  We were headed toward the door when there was a sharp knock. Chris opened it and Quentin stood there. “You ready?”

  * * *

  I was relieved to see Quentin was in his usual blue shirt, khakis, and boat shoes and was holding a bouquet of peonies from his garden. That meant we weren’t seriously underdressed. Or at least, if we were, we wouldn’t be the only ones. I looked past Quentin at his gleaming, wood-sided estate wagon sitting in Gus’s parking lot. That Quentin lived way out at the end of Westclaw Point, yet relied entirely on an antique car to get around, was one of his charming and mostly harmless eccentricities.

  We walked over the harbor hill, past my mom’s house, and crossed the footbridge that bisected the inner harbor. Quentin and Chris lingered on the bridge, staring at the gigantic yacht in front of Blount’s.

  “You guys can’t fool me. You couldn’t care less about this dinner party. You want to get on board that boat,” I teased.

  Chris smiled. “You got me.”

  Quentin was more circumspect. “I admit I’ve been staring at the Garbo for days, hoping for an invitation. But I’m also dying to meet Wyatt’s mysterious boyfriend.”

  I realized I hadn’t asked a thing about him. Not even our host’s name. “Who is he?”

  “Geoffrey Bower,” Quentin answered with a breeziness I suspected was feigned. “You’ve heard of him, surely.”

  “I haven’t,” I said. “And don’t call me Shirley.”

  “Bower was one of a handful of people who made a killing when the U.S. housing market collapsed,” Quentin informed us.

  “You mean like those guys in that book?” I asked.

  “And that movie?”

  “Exactly. But he wasn’t in either one. He never allowed it.” Quentin paused for a minute to let a family of tourists pass. “Bower was reclusive even before he made his real fortune. He had a hedge fund and a hundred or so people whose money he invested. He never interacted with them except via e-mail. His lawyer and business partner, a man by the name of Seebold Frederickson, handled all the investor relations, did all the client schmoozing. They’ve been friends since boyhood. From what little I’ve gotten from people who knew them, Frederickson always ran interference between Geoffrey and the rest of the humans.”

  “And by ‘made a killing’ you mean . . . ?” Chris asked.

  Quentin pointed to the mega-yacht tied up at Blount’s. “Billions.”

  We were two weeks away from the longest day of the year, and even at that hour, the lines of the Garbo were clear from the footbridge. Chris leaned his arms on the railing. “How big do you think she is?”

  Quentin stopped to admire her too. “Three hundred feet or so.”

  Chris whistled. “As long as a football field. That’s insane.” The Garbo w
as obviously old. An untraditional yacht, she looked almost military, like Geoffrey Bower was a small country.

  “She’s beautiful,” Quentin said.

  “Jealous?” I asked.

  He grinned. “A little.”

  “So even the one percent has their one percent,” Chris said.

  Quentin laughed. “Yup. Whatever you have, someone else has a bigger one.”

  “C’mon, you guys,” I urged. “We’re going to be late. When we get there, you can see her up close.” They fell into step on either side of me as we climbed the hill on the other side of the footbridge. “You said Bower was reclusive even before he made his fortune. What happened afterward?”

  Quentin squinted in the gathering dusk. “After the housing market collapsed, the stock market collapsed—”

  “You don’t have to remind me.” We’d almost lost our business because of a terrible loan my brother-in-law had persuaded my mother to take out during the go-go days before the crash.

  “After the dust settled, Bower disappeared,” Quentin finished.

  “You mean like, disappeared disappeared. Like poof?” Chris used his hands to mime a small explosion.

  “No. It was more orderly than that. He still invests money for a handful of his original clients.”

  “And nobody’s seen him since the crash?” Chris asked. We were almost in front of Blount’s Hotel and Marina.

  “Wyatt has, obviously. And the staff on the yacht. But he hasn’t appeared in public since.” Quentin paused. “There’s a Web site that tracks the movement of every registered yacht around the world. Spotters report when they see a boat in a port. Following Bower’s movements has become a bit of a game for some people. There have been some fuzzy photos taken with long lenses, but he never leaves the Garbo. Ever. Periodically rumors run through the investment community that he’s a drug addict, or has a beard down to his knees, or even is dead.”

  “And he’s Wyatt’s boyfriend? How does that work?” I wondered.

  Quentin kept walking. “I can’t wait to find out.” “No wonder you wanted to come so badly.” My curiosity was piqued as well.