By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (25 page)

When the dance was over he gave her a light
and courtly bow, a replica of the one he'd bestowed on her three
years earlier. Was he making fun of the article she'd written about
him? She muttered, in some confusion, "What's new with you, Alan?
Has the pizza man struck again?"

He looked surprised. "Yesterday, as a matter
of fact. If you don't mind my saying so, you sound like an obvious
suspect." He was smiling as he said it, but his blue eyes looked
puzzled.

Just as she feared: she'd tripped over her
own tongue and gone sprawling. "I'm innocent, honest," she said
quickly. "I must have practical jokers on the brain; we've had one
hard on our trail lately. I really didn't mean to pry."

The orchestra struck up another dance, a
tango this time. Immediately the ballroom floor began to empty.
Alan said, "This isn't my cup of tea. Do you mind if we sit this
one out?"

She wanted to ask,
Together?
but
stopped herself in time.

He led her through French doors which opened
out onto a modest terrace, not so small that it would be considered
intimate, not so large that it invited eavesdroppers. The night was
deeply starry; a breeze lifted the folds of her long skirt and
ruffled the jeweled sleeves of her top, sending pinpoints of
starlight shimmering from her neckline. The setting was impossibly
romantic. Quinta took it all in, the mathematician in her
calculating the odds of something like this ever happening to her
again.

Alan Seton, like the rest of the
Pegasus
crew, wore cream-colored flannels and a blue blazer,
the more easily to stand out from the black-tie assembly. He took
off his jacket and threw it on the balustrade; the night was warm,
and he loosened his tie. I suppose I should be grateful that I
don't have to wear a monkey suit," he said with a sigh. "You look
extremely fetching, by the way. I found myself staring at you
before I knew who you were."

"And after you found out?" she asked, not at
all coyly.

"I did a double-take."

"Because?"

"Because you're a kid, or supposed to be,
and you're not anymore, that's all." He laughed softly. "I don't
think you understand how deeply ingrained a certain picture of you
is in my mind. In my mind you'll always be wearing ratty jeans and
have your hair in ... kind of loose, I think," he said, struggling
to translate his vision of her into words. "You symbolized
something to me then, something very special, a kind of
life-must-go-on-attitude that carried me through some hard
decisions. I think you still have whatever it was I saw in you,
except that the wrapping is fancier now."

He reached up and with the lightest possible
touch lifted a strand of her hair and let it fall over her
forehead, the way she let it do years ago. "There. You wore it
something like that, he said softly. "Not so pulled back."

"I was a kid," she whispered, faint with
pleasure. "As you said."

"And now you're not. I know." He swept her
face with a searching look, as if he were making sure of it; and
then he lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her on her lips, in a
gentle, almost melancholy acknowledgment of her womanhood.

To be kissed on a starry balcony at a ball
is not the same as being kissed on the steps of your front porch.
She held her breath, afraid to move, afraid to think.

He drew his lips away from hers and said
softly, "Why did I do that?" He was as much amazed as she was.
"What a dumb thing to do."

"It wasn't
that
bad," she said,
suddenly crestfallen.

"Ah, Quinta ... this isn't the time;
certainly not the place." He looked around quickly. "I have no
right to take your life out of your hands and hand it over to the
media. Forgive me."

"I handed a piece of
your
life over
to the media," she reminded him promptly. "And I'm not sorry."

"My life's fair game," he said with a
crooked smile. "But yours—yours is precious to me."

"If it's so precious, why didn't you ever
call or write?" she blurted.

"I did write."

"
To my father. Not to me."

He laughed a short, bemused, frustrated
laugh. "What was my relationship to
you?
Friendly Dutch
uncle?"

"
Friend, period," she said
gravely.

He murmured the word after her: "'Friend.' I
don't think I have any of those."

"You mean you don't have
time
for any
of those."

He grinned. "What a little scold you
are."

She colored, then replied, "It comes from
living with my father."

"I think you're the best thing that could
happen to your father. He won't ever want to give you up," Alan
added, lifting his hand and tracing her lips with a feather-light
touch of his forefinger.

"Who says he's—?"

"Darling,"
came a voice behind
Quinta. "People are beginning to grumble. I hate to tear you away,
but the dog-and-pony show really must go on."

Quinta jumped guiltily away from Alan and
turned to see Mavis Moran, an iceberg on fire, smiling at them.
There was no question in Quinta's mind that her father's lurid
speculations about the two were right on the money. So: she
was
in the wrong place at the wrong time. Feeling very much
like Cinderella at 11:59 P.M., she mumbled a flustered good night
and left them on the terrace.

How
did Cinderella get home after
her coach pumpkined out?

That was the question on Quinta's mind as
she hurried to one of the cabs standing in the Ocean Court parking
area. Did she flag down a hackney? Walk the rest of the way? With
only one shoe? Would she have dared to hitch? These became burning
questions to Quinta. She racked her memory of the Disney movie and
the Golden Book for an answer. She could not remember, but the
effort distracted her from recalling the kiss, at least for a
little while.

A kiss was nothing.
People kissed all
the time, especially in Newport, for no apparent reason. Besides,
she understood perfectly well what Alan meant by it: he was
acknowledging that she'd grown up. No problem. She twisted the
little string handle of her Taiwanese pearl bag absently round and
round, and soon it came off in her hand.
It's not as if it was a
sexy kiss.
It wasn't even open mouth. On the other hand, it
wasn't a pass at the air beside her cheek, either. Whatever it was,
it left her weak-kneed. It left her wanting more.

She bowed her head and shut her eyes tight.
There he was, in full color: Alan Seton, black-haired, blue-eyed,
his face coming nearer, nearer to hers.

"Oh God," she whispered.
Don't let me be
in love.

"This it, lady? The house with the peeling
paint?"

Tense and angry with herself for possibly
being in love, Quinta took it out on the tactless cab driver.
"What're you—a moonlighter from the Preservation Society?" she
snapped. "It'll get painted, if someone ever agrees to do it. Do
you have any idea what kind of boom this town is enjoying? Just try
getting a painter before December; every damn one of them is
booked. This is a big house. I can't do it. My father can't do it.
Do you want to do it? Give us an estimate."

Quinta threw a twenty at the stunned driver
and for the first time in her life did not wait for change. She got
out, leaving the door open, and stalked away disgusted. But
something was wrong at home: every light in the house was on,
upstairs and down, including the porch light and the floodlight
over the stamp-sized back yard. She ran up the wheelchair ramp,
threw her key in the door, shoved it open: there, at the other end
of the hall, she saw her father, and his beloved black Lab Leggy,
and she fought back a surge of panic and nausea.

Turning back to the cab driver she screamed
"Wait!
Come back!" in a high shrill voice that stopped him
in his tracks.

She ran back to the doorway of the living
room, where her father lay on the floor, several feet away from his
wheelchair, half hovering over his companion, his friend, his
confidant. The dog was covered in vomit and was clearly in hideous
pain, convulsed and panting. His eyes were dilated; his coat was
wet and slick. His limbs twitched violently; his claws made
scratching sounds on the parquet floor, as if he were running from
a tiger in his sleep.

Neil Powers was numb with horror. "Again ...
she did it again ... all over again ...."

"What
happened
, Dad? Did what?"

"Poisoned ... I saw her do it ... in a bowl
of dog food .... I yelled ...."

"Hey lady—geez, my God, what happened here?"
interrupted the cab driver, who'd come up behind Quinta.

She moved the dog from her father's lap and
said, "Help me get my father in his chair ... then take the dog—Can
you carry him?—into the cab. I'll call the vet—"

"Yeah, oh, geez, he's in a bad way ...."

He tried to help Quinta lift her father, who
easily shook them both off. She had no idea how strong her father
was; it shocked her. "Dad,
please ...
you're slowing me down
.... I have to get him to the vet .... Do you want Leggy to
die?"

"No, no," he mumbled, incoherent with grief.
"Help him ... this time let it be all right ...."

The cabbie and Quinta hoisted him back into
his wheelchair. The cabbie said, "Lady, I'm gonna need a blanket
.... He'll ruin my seats .... I got fares to think about ...."

Quinta jumped up, catching her gown under
her high heel and tearing it. She ran to her father's bed, grabbed
a blanket, hurled it at the taxi driver.
"Go!"
she
commanded. Then she ran to the phone, spun the Rolodex, punched the
number with a shaking hand. "Hello? This is an emergency. Our dog's
been poisoned. He's gone into convulsions. We're bringing him in
... I don't know; I don't know what kind of poison. No.
Deliberately. Should we do anything before we get there?"

As she spoke she was yanking off one high
heel, then the other. Slamming the phone back into its cradle, she
ran to help the cab driver carry Leggy onto the blanket. The
quivering dog weighed eighty pounds; it took both of them to get
him up into the driver's arms. Waste and vomit smeared across her
dress, and even blood. Her heart grew faint; it was too late. The
driver staggered through the doorway toward his cab; Quinta was
grateful for the wheelchair ramp to ease his way.

She turned back to her father. "I'm going
with him, Dad. We'll do our best. I hate to leave you ... you're
not hurt?"

He shook his head, only mumbling, "Again ...
I can't believe it ...."

It was an agonizing time for Quinta: too
many decisions, too fast. She had to go. "Don't let anyone in,
Dad," she pleaded. "No one."

Outside, the driver had struggled with his
door and managed to lay the stricken animal on the back seat of his
cab. Quinta got in beside Leggy as the driver, muttering about a
hernia, went roaring the wrong way up the hill toward Spring
Street.

"Can you call the police from your cab and
have someone sent to watch my father's house? He said the dog was
poisoned deliberately by someone. I'd feel better—"

"Yeah, we can do that." He called in the
situation and Quinta thought with gratitude of the dozens of
scanners that must be tuned, even at this late hour, to the
conversation.

Let the whole city know there's a nut on
the loose,
she thought fervently.
The more the merrier.
She stroked the dog's heaving ribcage, utterly useless in her
ministrations, hoping only to pass on her love for the animal. It
was all she could do.

There was no sound in the cab except for the
anguished breathing of the dog, punctuated by cryptic crackling
sounds on the driver's radio. After a while the driver said, "How's
he doin'?"

Quinta replied, "The same."

A little later the driver asked again, and
though she answered, "The same," it seemed to her that the pain
must be worse; or maybe it was her own heart breaking for the dog
and for its master.

The vet was waiting for them at the
hospital. She repeated the little she knew, and then the dog was
taken away. Quinta thanked the driver, and apologized to him, and
gave him all the money she had left.

"That's all right," he said gruffly,
returning it. "You'll need it for your fare home. I'll drive past
your place and make sure everything's okay."

She rallied a limp smile for him.

After that, Quinta telephoned her father.
There was nothing to report, much to learn. Neil was exhausted but
lucid. He told his daughter that after he'd flipped on the porch
light, he'd had a clear look at the woman who was feeding Leggy in
the side yard. She was wearing a black and crimson ball gown. She
had dark hair. He yelled at her through a screened window to get
away from his dog. She looked up at him with a face twisted by
hatred, but there weren't enough twisted expressions in the world
to throw him off a face. He knew that face. It was Cindy Seton's
face. Meanwhile Leggy, stupid, trusting Leggy, kept on wolfing the
food.

"
She's
the Reebok Man," he finished
up tiredly.

For a long moment Quinta said nothing. Her
father had given her the access code to a secret file in the
computer of her mind: Cindy Seton. Suddenly it all came printing
out, the crime sheet of a psychopath. The poison pen note; the rock
through the window; the blood-red paint; and now Leggy. Escalating
violence, and tonight a line had been crossed. What next? The
possibilities made Quinta's blood run cold.

"Have the police shown up yet?" she asked,
trying to keep panic from creeping into her voice.

"Yeah. There's a cop here now, taking a
statement."

"Ask him to stay. I'm coming right
home."