Watching Eagles Soar

by Margaret Coel

  Captain Jelenik introduced us to Mr. and Mrs. Robertson, Mr. and Mrs. Shea, and, finally, to Peter Hainsworth from Philadelphia, who held Maddie’s hand between his own for a long moment, saying how the captain had told him many fine things about Mrs. Thad Norton and how sorry he was to hear of her husband’s death. At that, the double doors swept open and the other passengers plunged toward the tables, filling the dining hall with the buzz of voices and the scrape of footsteps on the carpet.

  Maddie was seated to the captain’s right, next to Peter Hainsworth, with both men vying for her attention through the hors d’oeuvres and salad, the filet mignon and pyramid of mashed potatoes, the crème brûlée and coffee that smelled as if the beans had been picked yesterday, and glass after glass of heavenly wine. I, on the other hand, was stuck between boring Mr. Robertson who went on and on about the flour mill he’d inherited from his grandfather and built into a multinational processed-food empire, while his wife nodded and grinned, and the even more boring Mr. Shea of the Shea Timber Company of northern Minnesota. Surely I had heard of the company. Who hasn’t? I asked, giving the fool and his equally foolish wife my best smile, and all the time, keeping one eye on Maddie. Oh, yes. Maddie had Peter Hainsworth in the palm of her dainty, manicured hand.

  * * *

  “I’ve met Mr. Perfect.” Maddie rushed past me and dropped onto the edge of the bed in my suite, crossed her shapely legs, and smoothed the front of the blue-green dress, which had most likely gotten mussed in saying her good-nights to Peter Hainsworth.

  I closed the door and settled back into the chair at the desk. After dinner had ended and Maddie and Peter had excused themselves—Peter saying that the ship’s orchestra was too good to miss on such a beautiful night—I managed to escape from the Robertsons and Sheas and even from Captain Jelenik, who’d obviously decided that he was striking out with Maddie and maybe her sister wasn’t so bad. I’d headed for my laptop.

  “Well, tell me all about him,” I said, hoping Maddie had learned more than I’d managed to pull up on the Internet. My search for Peter Hainsworth had produced fifteen links, which meant that the man could be any one of fifteen different people, including Realtor, guitar player, expert on eating disorders, or athlete.

  “He’s rich. What else do we need to know?”

  “How did he get his money?”

  “The old-fashioned way, Jules. He inherited it, and now all he has to do is manage it.” Maddie gave a little laugh and smoothed the blue-green silk over her lap. “Imagine having so much money that you have your own company to manage it.”

  “Company name?” I turned back to the laptop and curled my fingers over the keys.

  “Schiff Investments.”

  “Schiff,” I said, about to ask Maddie to spell it, then laughing at the idea of my sister spelling anything. I typed in what I thought might work. The laptop went through its gyrations, text appearing and disappearing, and finally the notice: no matches found. I tried another spelling. Still nothing, so I typed in, Private Investment Company. Now I had a screen full of names, but nothing that resembled Schiff.

  “So he manages his investments.” I turned to Maddie, who was leaning back on both elbows, swinging a silver high-heeled foot into the space between us. “That doesn’t prove he’s rich.”

  “Peter comes to the Greek Isles three or four times a year,” Maddie offered. “I’d say that takes money.”

  Okay, she had me there. It took money, but the question was still how much money? I could see by the stars dancing in my sister’s blue eyes that if Peter Hainsworth had a bank account big enough to pay the grocery bill, it would be enough for her.

  I jumped up and went to her. “Listen,” I said, slipping my arm around Maddie’s shoulder. “Don’t go falling for this bozo . . .”

  “Bozo!” Maddie shrugged away and glared at me. “Peter’s wonderful, Jules. He’s handsome and smart. If he says he’s rich, then he’s rich. He wouldn’t lie to me.”

  “You’ve known the man for like ten minutes.”

  “Long enough.” Maddie pushed herself to her feet. “Trust me, Jules. I know what I’m talking about. When we dock tomorrow morning at Mykonos, Peter insists we spend the day together.” Maddie pivoted around and started for the door.

  “Wait a minute.” I went after her. “Let’s say you’re right and Peter Hainsworth has money to burn. If you fall for him, all our plans go out the window. Even if you get him to marry you, he’ll be the one in control of his fortune.”

  “Jules. Jules.” Maddie was shaking her head. “All that worrying’s gonna give you a lot of wrinkles. So what if I fall for him?” Maddie flung open the door. “I figure I’ll have about three great months as Mrs. Peter Hainsworth . . .” She headed into the corridor and tossed the rest of it over one shoulder: “Before I’m a widow again.”

  * * *

  Maddie and Peter spent all of their time together, strolling the narrow, steep alleyways of Mykonos, past the whitewashed houses gleaming in the sun, with the Aegean lapping at the beaches far below. I followed at a discreet distance, trying to fend off the Robertsons and Sheas and two or three men traveling alone, who, I suspect, had decided that the sister of Thad Norton’s wealthy widow might also be floating on a sea of gold.

  The next day we put in at Patmos, and the day after that, we were in Rhodes. It was always the same, following Maddie and Peter up and down the narrow streets that wound past arcades and courtyards to ancient churches and temples. Peter, handsome even in his walking shorts and open-neck shirts, and Maddie, turning everybody’s head with her blond hair trailing down her back, the short shorts that showed off her long legs and slim hips, and the tight, sleeveless tee shirts. They would hold hands, then slip their arms around each other as they paused on the top of a steep hill to gaze across the sea at the dark smudge of another island rising between the water and the sky. Before returning to the ship, they would duck into a taverna where I would join them for a plate of meze and a glass of Greek wine. We’d sit on a balcony and watch the sun light up the sea like fire as it dropped below the horizon. Oh, Greece. What happy memories for a while.

  In the evenings, while Maddie and Peter danced or walked along the decks, I hit the laptop and tried to confirm whatever new information Maddie had gathered. At one point, Peter let slip that he’d graduated from Princeton, the definitive proof to Maddie that he was rich. “They don’t let poor people into fancy colleges,” she said, giving me one of her looks that meant, I told you so!

  I searched for Peter Hainsworth and Princeton. Bingo! Class of 1990, president of half a dozen clubs as well as the drama society. The senior photograph showed a younger version of the man, smiling good looks and laughing eyes, the kind of guy everybody loved. What was not to love? I shut down the computer with the sense that maybe Maddie had hit the jackpot.

  * * *

  It was over wine one late afternoon, above the bay on Crete, that Peter turned to Maddie and said, “Tell me about your husband, sweetheart.”

  I don’t know who was more startled, Maddie or me. I figured she’d already told him how Norton had made a gazillion dollars in his dot-com business, leaving out the part about how he’d lost it, but obviously that wasn’t what they’d been discussing when I heard them in the corridor at night. Always the swish of Maddie’s door opening and closing, followed by the kind of absorbed stillness that meant she wasn’t alone.

  “Oh, Norton was quite successful,” Maddie said, using her best adoring wife tone.

  “Did he hang on to his money?”

  Something in Peter’s voice made me wonder if he hadn’t also been searching the Internet, and I jumped in. “A lot of dot-com guys lost money,” I said. “But not Norton. He was fortunate enough to sell out before the company crashed.” Also fortunate, I was thinking, that Norton never took the company public, so chances were good that Peter Hainsworth hadn’t found any more about the company than I’d been
able to find on Schiff Investments.

  Peter laid a tan hand over Maddie’s. “How did Norton die?”

  Maddie blinked a couple of times, then took her eyes away and stared out at the Aegean. Very effective, I thought, but then I’d seen her play the part dozens of times in the months since Norton’s accident. She had it down pat, even to the slight moisture pooling at the corners of her eyes. “Norton loved to sail,” she said finally. “He always wanted to take me sailing.”

  Well, that was a lie. The man couldn’t swim, hated the water, and had never been in a sailboat. Maddie and I, on the other hand, had become pretty good at sailing, after she hooked up with the guy that rented out boats near the bar. For a while he took us out sailing every week and taught us how to crew, and in return Maddie spent the night with him, which she didn’t mind since he wasn’t half-bad looking and we were both under the impression that he was Mr. Rich. The arrangement ended, along with our sailing lessons, when my laptop coughed up the fact that Mr. Rich didn’t own the boat rental business. He was paid by the hour, same as Maddie and me. But by then, Thad Norton had wandered into the bar.

  “One day, Norton begged me and Jules to go sailing.”

  We were the ones begging Norton. “It’ll be such fun,” Maddie had said, leaning over his chair so that he got a good look down her shirt and planting a kiss on the freckled bald spot on his head.

  “It was such a pretty day that we agreed to go. Isn’t that right, Jules?” Maddie glanced at me.

  “I wish we’d talked him out of it,” I said, playing my part pretty well, too.

  Maddie was going on: How we were a good three or four miles out and running full with the wind and what fun it turned out to be after all, Norton looking like a real sailor, except that he was standing up straight, which he shouldn’t have been doing, when the jibing boom bonked him in the head and pitched him into the water.

  Bonked him in the head, all right, after I yelled, “Jibe ho,” and pulled the tiller windward, which brought the boom swinging hard across the cockpit straight at Norton. Of course Maddie had neglected to center the boom.

  “God, we tried to circle into the wind and luff up alongside him to pull him out,” Maddie said, her voice quivering. “But he’d already disappeared beneath the waves.”

  Disappeared, all right, as Maddie and I were racing away. And who could prove that it wasn’t an accident?

  “What a dreadful experience,” Peter said, lacing his fingers into Maddie’s. “Poor man.”

  Yes, Maddie and I both agreed. Poor Norton.

  Maddie turned her still-moist eyes back to the man beside her. “How did your wife die, Peter?”

  This was the first I’d heard of a wife, but it made sense that a man like Peter Hainsworth had a few women in his past. Why not a wife?

  “Also terrible,” Peter said. “Annette was out shopping one day. A little boutique she liked to frequent a few miles from home. She was walking back to her car when she was struck by a hit-and-run driver. She never regained consciousness.”

  Now Maddie’s tears actually seemed real. “Oh, Peter,” she said. “We’re both wounded spirits.”

  From the distance came the bleat of the ship’s horn. We finished our wine and started for the dock.

  Later that evening, while Maddie and Peter were dancing on the upper deck, I checked the Internet for Annette Hainsworth and drew about ten links, none of which seemed likely. Annette Hainsworth, veterinary assistant? I didn’t think so. Then I found the website of the Philadelphia Inquirer and hit pay dirt. The front-page headline screamed in black type, Socialite Victim of Hit and Run. The socialite part was good. It was looking more and more like Peter Hainsworth really was rich.

  I read through the two-column article, which confirmed what Peter had said, and added some details he’d left out. His wife, who went by the name of Annette Schiffler, had been run down by a rental car, later found abandoned two miles from the accident. Witnesses said that the driver was a woman with long black hair, the same woman, a police spokesman said, who had rented the car that morning using a stolen credit card and driver’s license. The victim was the daughter of the late Owen Schiffler, who built Schiff Telecommunications Company, which he sold for thirty million dollars. Annette Schiffler was survived by her husband, Peter Hainsworth.

  I shut down my laptop. Well, well. We’d found the perfect husband for Maddie. Only one thing kept me from going to bed smiling: Maddie had fallen for the guy.

  * * *

  Three hours later, a loud pounding interrupted my dreams. I managed to swim up into consciousness, stumble through the bedroom and sitting area to the door, while, at the same time, trying to clear my throat and mumble, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me, Jules.” My sister’s voice, as cheery as the sunshine that wouldn’t appear for another two hours.

  The me turned out to be Maddie with Peter hovering at her shoulder, a wide grin plastered across his handsome, half-drunken face.

  “You have any idea what time it is?” I asked as they loped inside.

  That’s when Maddie, posing next to the sofa like a model on a runway with adoring fans at her side, announced that she and Peter were getting married. Then she shoved out her left hand, flashing a diamond ring that shone like a headlight and, unlike the diamond on her other hand, was most assuredly real. For once, I didn’t know what to say, which is what I said.

  “How about, you’re happy for us,” Peter suggested.

  “Yes, of course.” The announcement had come sooner than I’d expected. “When’s the big day?”

  “Day after tomorrow.” Peter again.

  “Wow. That soon?”

  “We’ll be docked at Santorini for two days,” Maddie said. “Captain Jelenik will marry us in the morning. Peter insists that we spend the first night of our honeymoon”—she paused and gave her future husband a look promising especially great sex—“on Santorini. Peter loves Santorini,” she hurried on. “It’s so romantic. He always spends time there when he’s in the Greek Isles.”

  Well, what could I do but order champagne, and join in the small talk about the upcoming nuptials and the dress that Maddie would wear—the pink chiffon that looked great with her blue eyes, and the pink high heels. We chatted about the other arrangements. How, after the ship docked at Piraeus in Athens, Maddie and Peter would fly to Philadelphia to begin their life together in a house that Peter called “the estate,” which I took to mean the kind of mansion Maddie and I had dreamed about. I assured her that I would pack her things and have them shipped to Philadelphia, thinking that should take about five minutes, with what the creditors had left her.

  Finally, a sleep-addled steward delivered a bottle of chilled Dom Perignon on a tray with three crystal glasses, and I toasted the happy couple.

  * * *

  The wedding went off as planned, with Maddie and Peter pledging their vows on the upper deck, the turquoise Aegean swelling and murmuring around us, and the little houses like white cubes piled on the cliffs of Santorini coming closer and closer. Maddie looked gorgeous, as usual, holding a bouquet of white and pink flowers, and Peter—well, Peter was a knockout in his white morning coat. Captain Jelenik looked both pained and proud, and the Robertsons and Sheas and other passengers stood around with looks of rapture on their sunburned faces, witnessing the true love of the most beautiful woman and the most handsome man on the cruise. I had to blink back the tears. We were so close to our goal, Maddie and me. She’d be Mrs. Peter Hainsworth of “the estate,” and I’d be lucky if she remembered her older sister with a check now and then.

  Afterward, the little wedding party adjourned to the dining room for brunch, courtesy of Captain Jelenik. I plied myself with five or six glasses of champagne, picked at the omelet and croissants, and listened to the inane toasts. Finally, Maddie and Peter began to make their getaway. Santorini was waiting. But as my sister moved around the b
ack of my chair, she leaned down.

  “Trust me,” she whispered in my ear.

  The next day, while I was walking up the narrow, winding path to the town of Fira, I understood. Above me, on a lookout that dropped a thousand feet into the sea, were Maddie and Peter. Maddie stood back, her head bent into a camera. Peter was at the lip of the edge, so that behind him was nothing but the endless blue sky dropping into the sea, and below, the black, jagged rocks. One slip—a sudden push—and Peter Hainsworth would disappear into the abyss.

  But not yet. Peter Hainsworth visited Santorini two or three times a year. “Three months as Mrs. Peter Hainsworth,” Maddie had said. “Then we’ll all go to Santorini, and I’ll become a wealthy widow.”

  * * *

  It was two and a half months later when Maddie called. She caught up with me after my shift at the restaurant on Wilshire, which had patrons several notches in class above the bar in Redondo.

  “We’re in Santorini,” Maddie said, her voice faint against the bleat of music in the background, as if a band were marching down one of the narrow streets. “Peter’s waiting for me in the lobby. We’re going to hike around the caldera. Can you come over afterward?”

  “Afterward?”

  “When it’s over, Jules.”

  “I was supposed to meet you there, Maddie. You can’t do it alone.”

  “I can handle it,” she said. I could barely hear her. It was hard to make out the rest of it—something about an overlook that makes the perfect photo opportunity.