A Tangled Web (64 page)

“I remember that. He was taken aback when I said it. But . . .
Rory Carr?
You think he was working with Max?”

“He confessed to that. It was part of the whole Westbridge story. You said in your letter that he'd been fishing for information about Olivia Chasson's Meissen stork, the one that turned out to be a forgery.”

“The one I broke.”

“That was brilliant, Stephanie. I wouldn't have thought of it; I'd been going crazy trying to figure out how to tell Olivia I'd sold her a fake.”

“Oh, it was such fun. I made it look like an accident and I felt so good about doing it for you . . .”

“And Rory asked you about it.”

“Yes.”

“So he probably thought maybe it wasn't an accident, that you'd broken it deliberately, and then he would have panicked, thinking you knew all about Westbridge.”

“I didn't.”

“But you implied that you did when you said you knew everything there was to know. When I read your letter about that, I was sure that was why they blew up the yacht; they were after—”

“
Blew it up?
Max said it was the boiler.”

Sabrina put her hand on Stephanie's. “That's the one part I didn't tell you. It was a bomb. Under your stateroom.”

“A bomb . . . But all those other people . . .”

“Whoever did it wasn't concerned about other people.”

Instinctively Stephanie curled her shoulders against a world that had such people in it. After a moment she said, “But it couldn't have been Rory. If he worked with Max he wouldn't have killed him; he would have picked a time when I was alone.”

“Rory and Ivan Lazlo—”

“Ivan Lazlo?”

“Max's secretary, years and years ago; he was in with Rory in Westbridge. These people seem to hang around forever. They confessed that they'd planned to blow up the yacht and one or both of them set the bomb. And they were after both Max and Sabrina Longworth. They said they'd had some quarrel with Max, but I don't believe that anymore. I think they were working for someone.”

“Someone else was after us? Why?”

“I don't know. But Rory and Ivan are in jail, and someone found out that Max was alive and learned where he was living and sent someone to kill him, and I don't think Rory and Ivan are smart enough for that, or have the right connections. But someone did it, and we have to find out who it was. Because . . .”

Sabrina turned her hand and Stephanie clasped it, and suddenly they were girls again, with Sabrina explaining something and Stephanie putting her trust in her sister. Their handclasp tightened and Sabrina closed her eyes, treasuring the warmth that flowed between them.

She opened her eyes to the cloudless sky and the bright sun filtering through chestnut leaves and the song of the nuthatch descending in sweet trills. “Because now there are two of us. And you can't stay in hiding forever. And however all this works out between us, one of the first things that's going to happen is that the news will get back to London that Sabrina Longworth is alive. And Max could be, too, as far as that goes.”

“Max is dead!”

“Who knows that? You and I and Robert and Andrew Frick, who's disappeared. The murderer couldn't exactly report back: he's dead and buried. So whoever gave the order will be wondering about Max, and then he'll hear that Sabrina Longworth is alive. And he'll probably try again.”

Stephanie froze, her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. “But then, which one of us . . . ?”

“I suppose whichever one he sees first, you or me. So we have to find him and stop him before he hears that you're alive.”

“How?”

“I don't know. We'll have to figure that out. I think we'd better go to London, though; that's where it starts.”

Their eyes met.

“I'll call Garth. He wants to know where I'll be staying. He's leaving tomorrow for a conference in The Hague; we're meeting—we're supposed to meet—in Paris next week.”

“You won't tell him!” Stephanie exclaimed.

“I can't lie to him. I've already—”

“Sabrina, please! You don't have to lie; you just don't have to tell him! Please, please; you've got to give me some time. It's too soon; it's all happened so fast, I don't know what to . . . What am I going to tell Penny and Cliff? I've got to think about it; I've got to think about what I'm . . . what I can . . . I mean, I can't just walk in and pretend I've been there all this—” She stopped. That was what they could not talk about; not yet. That was what Sabrina had done: walked into a house that was not her own and built a life of love and cherishing . . . built a family.

He wants to know where I'll be staying.
Léon will want to know where I am, Stephanie thought. And I want to be with him. But my children are with Garth.

Sabrina had pulled back, her body shrinking away. Stephanie saw the bleak emptiness on her face and knew she was thinking of Stephanie Andersen reclaiming her life: slipping smoothly into the house in Evanston, into her family, leaving Sabrina to return to London. Alone. As if the past year had never been.

But I couldn't do that, Stephanie thought. Garth would know. I couldn't fool Garth.

She looked again at Sabrina's desolate face, and tears came to her eyes. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't know what to think or what to say . . .” She leaped up and
walked around the small courtyard, arms crossed, hugging herself as if to hold inside all the emotions that were clamoring for attention. She looked at Sabrina across the space between them. “Please don't tell him, Sabrina.
Please.
Not until I know what to do, what to say . . . how to talk to Penny and Cliff. Oh, God, it seemed so simple when we started . . . remember? But what do I tell them now? That I left them because I wanted a little adventure all to myself but now I'm back and ready to be their mother again? I can't say that; I have to think of something else, another way to . . . I can't do it! I can't face them! Please, Sabrina, please, I beg you, please give me some time!”

“All right.” Sabrina's voice was so low that Stephanie did not hear the despair in it. “But just for a week. Just until we meet in Paris.” Until who meets in Paris? an inner voice asked, but she pushed it away. She felt drained. She would keep the secret for Stephanie, but it could destroy everything she and Garth had built when he learned that she had kept it from him for a week that her sister was alive.

But isn't it destroyed anyway if Stephanie wants her family back?

“Then we can go to London right away.” Stephanie's voice was calm now; she had averted a crisis and put off a decision. “That's the most important thing right now, isn't it? If you're right, if someone really will come after me . . . or you . . . or us . . .”

Her voice took on another kind of anxiety, the kind Sabrina recognized from when they were young: fearful, edgy, but also oddly confident, because Sabrina was there and Sabrina had always been the one to lead the way into adventures and find the way out of them. “We'll find them, won't we? We've got to! You're right, I can't stay in hiding forever, but I can't go through anything like that again . . . If you knew what it was like on that mountain, watching that man and Max and feeling so helpless . . . It comes back at night, you know; I wake up and I'm up
there again and that man is so close to me, and then Max is telling me I'm in danger . . . Oh, you're right, you're right, we have to find out who it is and . . . stop it. Somehow. What shall we do in London? Talk to Rory Carr? We could make a list of people Max knew—”

Sabrina stood up. “I'm going to call home. They'll just be getting up.”

“Home,” Stephanie murmured. Her rush of words stopped; she stood, drooping, beside the wooden gate, holding a trailing vine of bougainvillaea. My home is with Léon, she thought.

And Sabrina paused at the door to the house and looked back at her sister, gazing intently at the tangled vines of pale purple flowers, fragile-looking but tough. My enemy, my love, Sabrina thought. We've spun a web that has no way out.

L
eon drove them to the airport and Sabrina went alone onto the plane, leaving them to say goodbye.

They stood in a corner, away from the crowds. The sun streamed through the glass wall, and Stephanie closed her eyes against it. Léon held her to him with a kind of fatalism. “Through this whole mad story, this remains: I love you. And I'll be here. I'll wait as long as you need.”

“But not forever,” she murmured.

He smiled faintly. “Forever has a great deal of flexibility. I don't know how long mine would be. But you're right: I won't wait if you show no sign of being able to make up your mind to come to me.”

She opened her eyes. “I love you, Léon. I want to marry you. I can't imagine living with Garth ever again. But . . .”

“But Penny and Cliff. I understand that. They're wonderful in those pictures; she showed us so many I felt I almost knew them.”

“So many,” Stephanie echoed, remembering the shock of seeing the small leather-bound album that Sabrina carried
in her purse. Twenty photographs of Penny and Cliff playing, studying, reading, digging in the garden, grinning into the camera or making gargoyle faces and striking poses, Cliff in a muddy soccer uniform, Penny painting at an easel on the screened-in back porch, the two of them on bicycles with Garth. Stephanie barely looked at Garth, but she could not take her eyes off her children. How could they have grown so much in only a year? They had a poise, a confident stance, a lift to the head that she did not remember. She had not even recognized their clothes. She had ached to hold them and she had studied each picture for some sign of unhappiness or insecurity. But she had found none. They were all prospering, she had thought: secure, comfortable, loved. And the house had looked neater than she remembered it: newly painted, the warped boards on the front porch replaced and stained, the bushes trimmed. So many pictures, she had mused, leafing through them again and again. Most parents are satisfied with one or two. And then she remembered that Sabrina was not even a parent. Or maybe . . .

She shook off the memory and kissed Léon, clinging to him, afraid to let him go. “I'll call you. I can't decide anything until we know what we can do in London, but I'll call you, I promise, every day.”

“I can still come with you; there are seats on this plane. It might be better—”

Stephanie was shaking her head. “I told you before, Léon, we have to be together and figure out who we are and what we're going to do, and no one can help us with that. We got ourselves into this and somehow we'll get ourselves out.”

“You may. You may find it impossible. And meanwhile you could be in danger. If you would go to the police—”

“We can't. I told you: if we went to them the whole story would come out and Penny and Cliff would . . . oh, God, read about me in the newspapers, hear about me on
television, that I left them . . . You said you understood that, Léon; I have to tell them myself.”

“And when will you do that?”

“When I know what to say. And how to say it.”

“But first you'll go off on this crazy adventure in London, the two of you, after you told me you'd had enough of crazy adventures.”

“But we're in danger. You just said that. We have to do this.”

“Yes, all right, I understand that. But at least let me come with you. I don't know how much good I'd be at protecting you, but you might need help; how do you know what you're getting into?”

They heard the final boarding call for the plane. “We'll be careful; we'll be all right.” She kissed him. “I'll call you, I love you, please don't forget. I love you.”

He held her for one last moment. “I want to do so much for you. But you'll have to let me.”

“I know.” She tried to promise him that she would, that they would do so much for each other, but she could not promise. “Thank you for saying that; thank you for wanting it for me. Please trust me; I'll try . . . I love you.”

In the plane, Sabrina was sitting in the aisle seat, her hands folded loosely in her lap. She looked up. “I thought you might want the window.” A glass of orange juice was on the small tray between the wide leather seats, and she held it while Stephanie slid past.

“Thank you. I would like to see Paris again, even if only from above; it's been so long. Do I look all right?”

Sabrina smiled. “Like a woman in disguise.”

“But it's all right?”

“Yes, of course; you look wonderful.” They had chosen their clothes the night before, dressing for London in October: Stephanie in a gray wool pants suit Max had bought for her, perfectly tailored, with a high-necked sweater and a wide-brimmed felt hat pulled low over her forehead, almost touching her dark glasses. Her hair was
in a braid tucked beneath the hat. She wore no makeup. Sabrina wore a wine-red wool dress with a long triple strand of pearls and carried a matching cape; her hair fell in long waves below her shoulders, her makeup was distinctive. “We look perfect,” she said and looked up as the steward came with his tray of drinks.