Time After Time

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  Jack scowled and let go of her arm — as if a gold chain he'd picked up from the sidewalk had turned out to be only gold-plated — and said, "Sure he's having a good time. He reckons he'll never have to do this again."

  "I'm sorry?" she said, puzzled.

  "You must know that he'd like to sell the yard."

  "I heard something to that effect," she said cautiously, remembering the shouting match in the Great Room on the day she met Jack.

  "He's old, he's tired, he wants out."

  "Can he do that?" Liz asked naïvely. After all, Jack acted as if he pretty much owned the yard. "You don't have some say in that?"

  "I have a forty-nine percent say."

  "And he has fifty-one," she said, seeing at once what the problem was.

  "No; he also has a forty-nine percent say."

  "That leaves two percent—?"

  "To my mother," said Jack with a thin smile.

  "Ah."

  Since Liz didn't know Jack's mother, she had no idea how she'd vote. Would she want to thwart her husband? Go for the big bucks and bail out of the marriage? Jack wasn't saying. Maybe he didn't know. Maybe she didn't know.

  "I can see why things might be tense," Liz allowed.

  "Tense?" Jack said sardonically. "Tense is when you're caught in traffic on your way to the airport. This is life and death!"

  "Life and death seems strong," Liz said, put on the defensive by his vehemence. "People do sell businesses. People do sell properties." She got a little breezy. "What's the big deal?"

  Without dropping his gaze from his father, Jack said in a menacing voice, "The big deal is, he's willing to sell the yard to an unsavory group who want to tear it down and ultimately stick a casino in its place. That's the big deal. Goddammit. That's the big deal."

  "Oh." Not good. She'd managed to bring his temper up to flash point. Fearing an explosion, Liz went on to say the most conciliatory thing she could think of: "Lots of people are for casinos — not just the mob. If that's who you meant."

  Which, when she thought about it later, was a remarkably stupid thing to say. Jack didn't care who was for or who was against casinos. All he cared about was the shipyard and the employees who worked there. In an age of takeovers, mergers, and downsizing, Jack Eastman was one of a dying breed: a traditional, stubborn, utterly loyal business owner.

  Liz winced under his scathing look and said placatingly, "But I suppose it could be the mob."

  "Mob? What mob? What're you talking about?"

  She was saved by the arrival of Cornelius, who'd been making his way toward them with a relaxed and mellow smile on his face.

  "You did a damned good job here, Liz," he said for the third time, winning her over to his side in one sentence. "I hope we can count on you next year for the event."

  "Thank you, Mr. Eastman. I tried really hard—"

  "You hypocrite," said Jack in a voice of seething candor. "Who're you kidding? You just took a long call from them. Couldn't you put them off at least for the duration of the picnic?"

  "Business is business, Jack," said his father amiably.

  "This business stinks to high heaven!"

  "You're being emotional, son. I always said you got that from your mother."

  "I certainly didn't get it from you!" Jack said hotly. "This is the most cold-blooded sellout—"

  "Jack, Jack — things change; learn to roll with it."

  Liz should've been gone at the sound of the first shot Jack fired across his father's bow, but somehow she'd become trapped in the circle of their maneuvering. It was Cornelius's fault: he kept glancing at her with that half-smile of his, as if to say, "See the abuse I get?"

  Now he said to Jack, with a benign and sorrowful shake of his head, "My job ... is to look after my daughter's interests as well as your own."

  It was an outrageously bold remark, shocking to make at any time but particularly in front of her. Liz sucked in her breath, expecting fisticuffs at best, a duel at worst, while at the same time feeling ridiculously flattered that she should be allowed to hear their exchange of insults.

  She hardly dared look at Jack, who had as ugly, as combative an expression as she'd ever seen on a man. He seemed to be waiting for her to leave before he began swinging.

  Suddenly tired of their turf war, she decided to oblige him. "I think I'd better see how the other children here are doing. Please excuse me."

  "No, stay," Jack said with a sudden harsh laugh. "The two of you can chat about the bright future of the gaming industry in Rhode Island."

  He turned on his heel and walked away, leaving Liz feeling like a co-conspirator at a racketeering trial. Dismayed that Jack seemed to think she wanted to see a casino replace his shipyard, she said to his father, "He counts me among the enemy."

  "Anyone who disagrees with Jack is the enemy," Cornelius said. "He won't read the writing on the wall: the shipyard's doomed. The land it's on is too valuable. We could sell the damned thing and make more in interest in a year doing nothing than we make in profit running the shipyard. Far more."

  He turned a cool, unruffled look on Liz. "The sooner my son accepts the idea that we're sitting on a gold mine," he added dryly, "the better."

  "It seems to be going down like cod-liver oil," Liz said uneasily.

  She excused herself. With a reassuring wave at Susy, she went straight to the long buffet tables that were set up on the north side of the house, under a tent and out of the sun, to tell the caterer to fire up the propane. To the satisfying sound of steaks being slapped on the grills, Liz made a last-minute circuit of the heavily laden tables, festive with centerpieces of summer-fresh fruit and big glass vases of daisies.

  Immediately, her spirits improved. Jack and his father could agree to disagree all they wanted; it wouldn't change the fact that the company picnic — her first bona-fide Bellevue Avenue event — was a smashing success. Even Snowball was cooperating, romping with the kids in a far corner, away from the food.

  Was there enough food? Liz suffered the standard bout of last-minute panic, then reassured herself that they could probably feed most of Newport if they chose. Bread piled high ... twenty pounds of melted butter ... bowl after bowl of salads.

  She lifted lid after lid, reassuring herself with mounds of colorful rotini and artfully assembled pastas. But when she came to the Meissen bowl with its matching lid, she did a double-take. The serving bowl was part of East Gate's exquisite formal service and certainly didn't belong out here. Annoyed that someone would jeopardize her success — even a tiny chip to the bowl would be a disaster — Liz lifted the lid of the china bowl and found: ants.

  Millions and millions of ants.

  Chapter 13

  Beating back an instant wave of nausea, Liz slammed the lid hard enough to break it in two. Some of the ants had already gotten out; she brushed them violently from the tablecloth, then set about tracking down the dozen fastest ones, crushing them mercilessly with her thumb.

  Ants! God in heaven, whose idea of a sick joke was this? Liz picked up the serving bowl, nailing the lid to it with the palms of her hands, and marched it over to a remote corner of the grounds. To the three people who were bold enough to ask her what she was doing, her answers were brief: nothing, never mind, and what's it to you?

  Behind the carriage house she dumped out the ants — swarming over a few wet pieces of half-melted hard candy that had been placed in the bowl as bait — at the base of a birch tree. Then she went back to the tool shed for a sprinkling can, rinsed out the bowl, and examined it for the dreaded crack she was sure would be there. But the precious Meissen was intact, even if Liz's nerves were not. Still shaky from the disgusting shock of her discovery, she found a small, tucked-away bench and sat down on it, trying to make sense of the wretched deed.

  Why the ants, besides the obvious reason that no picnic was complete without them? It was such a simple question, and yet — because Liz had no answer to it — a profoundly unsettling one. Who was the butt of this prank, and who w
as behind it?

  Since it was Jack's affair, the short answer seemed to be that someone wanted to spoil the picnic to get at him. Was it an isolated act, a nasty little statement by an employee who would've rather had a raise?

  A less satisfying answer was that it was related, somehow, to the other, seemingly unconnected events that had been plaguing the shipyard recently — the toxic spill; the vandalized boat.

  But the picnic was her affair, too. Was it possible that someone was trying to make her look bad? After the birthday party fiasco, it wouldn't take much. A few thousand ants drowning in vats of melted butter, and her name would end up a laughingstock on Bellevue Avenue. She'd be grist for the anecdote mill whenever the subject of events-planners came up — and in Newport society, that was sure to be often.

  But who around here could possibly care whether she succeeded in the carriage trade or not? It wasn't as though she was even a remote threat to the competition. And in any case, the thought of party-planning saboteurs sneaking around with bowls of ants was ludicrous.

  The graduate student. Grant Dade. The image of his angry, bitter face when Liz denied him access to the letters hovered in front of her, sending chills through her. Dade was a maniac, and whether or not he had scratched his hands hiking in the White Mountains was irrelevant: no one would ever convince her that he wasn't the one who'd stolen the packet of letters from her cottage and then escaped over the barbed-wire fence. He hated her, and he was certainly capable of a stunt like this. But could he have done it unnoticed?

  And was he capable of worse?

  A sharp crack behind Liz sent her bolting up from the little wooden bench. She spied a mop of blond curls behind an enormous, rotting tree trunk: Caroline Stonebridge was hiding there, and Liz wanted to know why.

  "Are you looking for me, Caroline?" she asked in a sharp voice. "Or are you just playing hide-and-seek with yourself?"

  The sarcasm was unkind; but Liz was jumpy and angry and suddenly suspicious of this selfish, manipulative child. She wouldn't have realized how valuable Meissen was; she'd see it as just another serving bowl in a cupboard filled with them.

  Caroline stood up slowly, clutching a dandelion in her hand. She held it out silently to Liz — not as an offering, apparently, but as evidence of her purpose in crouching behind an old tree trunk on a remote, overgrown corner of a property that at that very moment was brimming with bright amusements and enchanting games.

  I'm supposed to think she'd rather be picking weeds. Right.

  "Come over here."

  Caroline considered whether she should obey or not; then, with an indifferent shrug, she approached Liz.

  "Don't you have an ant farm in your room?" Liz asked her.

  The child let out a bored sigh and said, "I don't anymore."

  "I'll bet," Liz said dryly. "Where is it?"

  "I suppose, under your feet — and under Susy's feet — and under everyone's feet. I got tired of it."

  Unsatisfied with her answer, Liz asked her directly, "What are you doing here?"

  Caroline glanced at the Meissen bowl on the bench and said to Liz, "What are you doing here? Aren't you supposed to be getting things ready for people to eat?"

  Very true. Liz didn't have time to be investigating snotty five-year-olds. She made an impatient sound, picked up the covered bowl, and began walking away.

  She heard the child's voice, high and brittle, ring out behind her: "Is my mother coming back or not?"

  Liz stopped and turned and said, more softly now, "Of course she is, Caroline. I'm sure you know that."

  "Because sometimes she doesn't, you know," the child said with a tremulous sneer in her voice. "She stays away. And when she comes back, my father yells, and she yells, too. And then Bradley always cries. But I never do."

  "Your father—?"

  "Not Dada," Caroline said dismissively with a flip of her little wrist. "The man who lives with her."

  She sounded so world-weary. It was impossible for Liz to believe that the child was Susy's age. The sad irony was that neither girl seemed to have a clue what a real father was — and in that, they were more alike than not.

  Liz said with gentle caution, "When your mother comes back from the clinic, it will all be fine, Caroline. Really."

  But the child seemed to have jumped onto another track altogether. She folded her arms across her floral sundress; the dandelion, its stem bent in two, hung from her hand like a broken promise. "You want to live in East Gate, don't you," she said, clamping her lips in a tight grim line. "You and Susy."

  Liz hesitated before she acted puzzled. "Why would I want to live at East Gate, Caroline? I have a pretty little house of my own."

  Caroline gave her a shrewd look. "I knew you wouldn't tell me.''

  Flushing, Liz said, "I'm sorry, young lady; I'm very busy right now," and left her.

  She had absolutely no idea what Caroline's game was. Was the child afraid that Liz was going to displace her mother — who was threatening to displace Jack's mother? What an unholy mess! Didn't anyone believe in the nuclear family anymore?

  It occurred to Liz, as she slipped the Meissen bowl back to its rightful place, that Caroline's cross-examination might have an element of wishful thinking in it. The girl seemed so jealous of Susy; was it possible that Caroline was simply fishing? That she was willing to take any mother she could get? Liz fervently hoped not — it was too distressing to imagine such open, aching need.

  As for Caroline's suspicion that Liz had designs on East Gate: it was simply unfair. Certainly, Liz would like to live at East Gate. Who wouldn't want to live in a fairy-tale palace? It was a perfectly normal desire.

  The question was, would she like to live there with the fairy-tale prince as well?

  ****

  The lump of fear that had lodged in Liz's throat began to ease when no one actually dropped dead of food poisoning. She had worried, not unreasonably, that the ants might merely have been the warm-up act to the main event: salmonella or arsenic or worse. But the guests ate, and the guests survived, at least for today.

  And at least for today, Victoria gave up on sneaking the heart-shaped pin into Jack's room. None of the keys on the first key ring had fit the lock, and when she'd approached his door the second time with the second ring of keys, she'd been intercepted by Cornelius Eastman himself.

  "Y'know — I think he was coming on to me?" Victoria said to Liz in a bemused voice. "We stood in the hallway for a long time, and he said something about what an intense 'presence' I had. And he asked me if I'd ever — honest to God — been on the stage."

  Liz rolled her eyes and said, "I suppose it's better than 'What's your sign?'

  "I thought it was cute. It was such an old-fashioned thing to say; he probably learned to hit on women before movies were even invented. He's charming, actually."

  "He's married, actually."

  "Liz! I wasn't taking Old Corny seriously. I think the guy was just on automatic, anyway. I mean, look at him now — flitting from pretty woman to pretty woman. He's like a bee in a flower bed."

  The picnic was clearly winding down; guests were departing. From where they stood in the shadows of dusk, Liz and Victoria had a good view of Cornelius Eastman extracting a little bit of nectar from every female he chose to alight on.

  "He's a man who loves women, no doubt about that," murmured Victoria, half in admiration.

  "From what I've seen," Liz said, sighing, "it's a family curse."

  Victoria laughed and said, "If you mean Jack, I'm not so sure anymore. Word on the street is, suddenly he's taken himself out of the action. He hasn't been seen holding up anyone's arm in a couple of weeks."

  "Because he's preoccupied with the shipyard, I imagine," said Liz at once. But in fact she was imagining something else entirely, and it frightened her.

  Don 't start fantasizing, she warned herself. Don't. Where can it lead? Nowhere.

  Victoria was smiling her knowing smile. "Do you really think a man like Jack Eastman would
give up women just to put in a few extra hours at the shop?"

  "Why not? It's been done before."

  "Get real, Liz. I mean, look at the guy."

  Victoria took her by the shoulders and turned her ninety degrees. There was Jack, standing alongside a tall bamboo torchère, his hair glinting black in the amber glow of the citronella lamp that burned brightly in its hobnailed bowl. He was laughing and saying good-bye to little Amy, whose father, a welder at the shipyard, lived on Liz's parents' street. Even from that distance, Liz could feel her body begin to hum in response to his sheer physical presence.

  All day it had been this way, even though they'd scarcely had time to speak since the casino conversation. Liz would be doing her job, minding her own business, and suddenly her radar would lock onto him. She'd look up, and there he'd be, sometimes staring at her, sometimes not. But every time, it was a jolt to her system, a shock to her heart. And every time, she felt a little more consumed, a little more lost.

  This couldn't go on. Either he'd have to sell his house, or she'd have to sell hers. Because it couldn't go on. She was falling in love with him, and it was the most pointless, time-consuming, heart-wrenching waste of time she'd ever spent.

  "Yes," she said calmly. "I see him. So what?"

  "So what? So buttons! He's rich—"

  "He's not rich; it just looks that way. His money's tied up."

  "He's handsome—"

  "Not so handsome. I think his nose was broken once; it's a tiny bit off to the left."

  "—and he's looking your way. Oh, Gawd." Victoria burst into nervous giggles and turned aside. "How can you resist him?"

  Liz felt hot tears rush up and then recede. "I don't know," she admitted. It came out in a moan, not in a boast.

  Victoria swung slowly around. Her head was cocked curiously to one side, like a cardinal checking out a new feeder. "Is something going on? Have you been — Liz, you haven't gone to bed with him! Not without telling me!"