By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (30 page)

Quinta was assuming that her father was
steering her away from Alan, away from possible complications down
the line.

How wrong she was. "What has your
grandmother's marriage got to do with Alan Seton?" Neil demanded.
"What the hell is going on between you and Alan Seton? Are you
telling me you're going to
marry
the man?"

"No.
Of course not," Quinta answered
quickly. "What a ridiculous idea! And why are you talking to me in
that tone? You make me feel like I'm thirteen years old again."

"You're right," he said, backing down.
"You're right. So," he said softly. "You did read the diary. What
did you think of it?"

"I think," Quinta answered, "that Laura
Powers would have loved Colin Durant if he were her age, or
younger, or older. Age had nothing to do with the way she felt.
That was the real thing. You could feel her heartache ... her
longing ... probably you don't want to hear this, do you. Because
you thought it was wrong."

Neil stared at his drink with a sad smile.
"At the time, anyway. It did mess me up for a while. I was a kid; I
didn't understand any of it. On the
Virginia
, they fell in
love so fast. And meanwhile, I was under Colin's spell myself. He
was dashing, handsome, cool—the complete opposite of my father.
Looking back, I can see that each man had his own strengths.
Colin's just happened to be what my mother was looking for."

"I guess! They've been married almost fifty
years."

"Hard to believe, looking at them; they just
refuse to slow down. Until this summer, anyway."

"I know; I miss their visit. But Grandmother
told me her doc said that her ankle should be mended well enough
for them to come up for Thanksgiving."

"We're going
out
for dinner," Neil
warned. Just so you know. Don't be getting any ideas about
preparing some grand feast here."

"We'll see," Quinta said. She favored her
father with an enigmatic smile, then said, "I do like grandfather.
I have a bit of a crush on him myself."

Her father laughed and said "He was a good
stepfather, conscientious, more of a big brother, really. But it
was my mother first, for him. Still is. Always will be."

They drank in silence after that, each of
them wondering about a world that was, a world that might have
been. When the phone rang, Quinta answered it, expecting the
detectives, or maybe Alan, whom she'd not yet seen since the fire.
Expecting any voice, in fact, but the one she heard: cheerful,
voluble, excited. On the edge.

"Thank
goodness
you're home. It's
been so
exciting
that I haven't had a chance to call. Wasn't
it a
fabulous
fire? I never imagined that aluminum could
melt. It didn't even occur to me. I mean, did you see Alan's
face
on the evening news? He looked so exhausted. No. Not
exhausted.
Drained.
He looks like that sometimes after he
makes love. But then—you know that already
,
don't you,
Quinta? I'll see you at the stone tower in ten minutes. You won't
be a tittle-tattle, will you?
Ciao."
She hung up.

Quinta was left with a pounding heart and a
dry mouth. Her father, looking oddly triumphant, said, "Cindy! I
knew it! What did she say?"

"She really is deranged," said Quinta. "She
wants to meet me at the stone tower in ten minutes. Obviously she
means the old stone mill."

Neil had his cordless out of its holster and
was punching in a telephone number. "Perfect. The police will have
her bound and trussed five minutes after that."

"No, dad, don't! She wants to talk to me
alone. I know, I know," she said in response to her father's look
of amazement. "But it's perfectly safe; the tower's in the middle
of a well-lit green. It's on Bellevue Avenue, for goodness' sake!
She can't have anything devious planned or she'd have picked
someplace more out of the way. Let's give her this one chance.
She's got some wrong ideas. I can straighten her out, I'm sure of
it. I can talk her down from her tree. She really seems to be
crying out for help."

"Since when are we running a hotline for
psychos?" Neil demanded.

"Just this once," Quinta said, grabbing a
jacket to ward off the damp and foggy evening. "Mr. Locklear's
upstairs; you're safe, and, really, so am I. Gotta go, she might
not wait!"

He nodded, reluctantly, and she waved on her
way out the door. He waited until he saw her running up the street
toward her car, and then he picked up the phone again. "Alan?" he
said when it got answered. "Cindy's just set up a meeting with
Quinta at the stone mill. Get over there, for God's sake.
Please!"

He hung up and waited five breathless
minutes, then he picked up the phone again and began punching in
the number he'd been given earlier by the sergeant-detective. But
no: he was going to trust Quinta, trust in her judgment and in
Alan's. For the first time in a long time, he was going to trust
someone. He turned off the talk button.

And then he turned it on again and called
the police.

****

It took Quinta a little longer than five
minutes to reach the park. It was a Saturday night, and Newport was
suffering its usual weekend gridlock. She found a place just shy of
tiny Touro Park, left her car there, and ran the last block.
Breathless, she arrived alone at the tower, an odd stone structure
built by either Vikings or Benedict Arnold (no one was really sure)
for religious or more practical reasons (no one really knew). In
Newport it was officially called the Stone Mill, but everyone knew
it as the mystery tower. The cylindrical tower was two stories
high, supported by eight stone pillars and surrounded by a
five-foot iron fence to keep tourists from taking home chunks of
souvenirs.

It was quieter in the park than Quinta had
expected, and eerier. The air was heavy and muggy, with lowering
clouds. She could taste the salt: fog would be closing in soon. The
benches in the park were empty, and surprisingly few people
strolled on Bellevue Avenue.

The only sign of Saturday was the endless
line of traffic a couple hundred feet away exiting Newport. Quinta
waited by the iron fence, feeling observed, oddly grateful for the
nearby traffic. It was nearly dark. She circled the mystery tower,
feeling the hair on the back of her neck stand, wondering when
Cindy, wherever she was, would be convinced that she had come
alone.

It was only on her second pass around the
tower that she noticed, through an archway framed by the pillars,
the sheet of paper that was jammed between two of the flat stones
inside. The paper had not been there long, of that she was certain.
Quinta looked around, then vaulted the fence. She stepped inside
the cylindrical tower, convinced that she had called down a curse
on herself, and took the paper from its nook. Roosting pigeons,
disturbed from their evening roost, fluttered over her, adding to
her sense that she was violating a natural order.

By the light from one of the ground fixtures
fixed on the tower, Quinta was able to make out the writing on the
sheet of paper: "I'm glad you came," it read. "I hardly know anyone
in town. Would you consider viewing the fireworks show at Fort
Adams tonight with me? We could chat. It would mean a lot. I could
meet you just outside the fort, nearest the point, on the side next
to the Bay. I hope you can come. The Japanese Black Ships fireworks
are the best. Just you, though. I need to talk to you. Please don't
tell."

It was like being invited to a child's
birthday party. If Cindy was crazy, she was also strangely
innocent. Quinta looked around, saw no one. She folded the paper,
then tucked it absently back into its nook. Should she go? The
fireworks were scheduled to be set off just south of Cindy's
proposed rendezvous point, a safe enough place in the
circumstances. Thousands of Newporters would be in the area. In a
way, it was a fitting occasion: a celebration of the friendship
between Japan and America that was established when Commodore
Matthew Perry opened up diplomatic relations with Japan in the
eighteen-fifties. Yes. She'd go.

****

Ten minutes later, Alan arrived. He'd been
trapped in the worst of the Thames Street traffic, all of it headed
out to Fort Adams for the fireworks display. Furious with himself
for not having put the fear of God in Quinta about Cindy; furious
for having given her his reassuring opinion that he did not think
Cindy was behind the arson; furious with the way Fate doled out its
disasters in twos and threes—Alan scoured the pocket-sized park and
nearby cars, looking for some sign of either woman. If
anything—anything—happened to Quinta, if a hair of her head were
touched ....

Alan grabbed hold of two of the spear
pickets of the iron fence and swore a short, fierce oath that was
half plea. When he looked up, a piece of paper caught in a gust of
wind was fluttering to the ground in the center of the tower, in
token acknowledgment from the gods. A second gust pushed it out
from the tower and up against the fence.

Alan snatched the paper before it took off
again. He knew the handwriting before he saw it, understood the
message before he read it.
Oh God, Quinta. No. Don't.

He was racing back to his car, aware that it
would take just as long to get to Fort Adams by boat, thinking that
the only way to get there in time would be on the real Pegasus,
when he came across a kid on a moped, weaving slowly but steadily
in and out of the stalled traffic on Bellevue. The boy's T-shirt
read, "I'm Not a Tourist; I Live Here." Perfect. Alan flagged him
down.

"I'm Alan Seton. I need your bike. It's life
and death, so help me God." He threw a fifty-dollar bill in the
astonished kid's hand and gave him his Visa card. "I'll get this
back to you tonight," he promised, and he was off before the boy
could scream grand theft.

Somewhere on Harrison Avenue Alan ran out of
gas. He couldn't believe it; the damn kid had been running on his
reserve supply. It was all one long nightmare, and no matter what
Alan did, he could not wake up from it. The lane of traffic to the
fort wasn't moving at all. Hitching would be pointless. He dumped
the moped near the Ida Lewis Yacht Club and began to run. His only
hope was that Quinta and Cindy had got caught up in the same
traffic jam.

But they hadn't; neither one of them. Quinta
found room in the Fort Adams parking lot for her Honda, and Cindy,
not far behind her, managed to tuck her rental car close by.
Clusters of Newporters with blankets and coolers were making their
way in the dark toward the fireworks launching area, clucking about
the wisdom of someone's decision to go ahead with the show on such
a foggy night.

Quinta split off from the crowds almost at
once and made her way to the fort that had never fired a shot
except in salute. It occurred to her that no one would be
interested in hanging out in an unlit stone fort at this hour,
especially when a spectacular fireworks display was about to take
place nearby; she would be quite alone. She didn't feel as
confident as she had twenty minutes earlier.

Holding her shoulder bag close to her side,
she tiptoed inside the low stone structure, worried more about
muggers than maniacs. "Cindy?" she whispered. The word hung in the
air, muffled in fog. The sound of Quinta's footsteps was cushioned
by the grass floor; the inside of the fort was as quiet as a tomb.
Quinta waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark; when they did
not, she suddenly lost heart, panicked, and turned to go.

But someone was at the entrance in front of
her, silhouetted in the lights of the harbor. Even in the dark,
Quinta could see that the woman was holding a gun. Both her hands
were gripping the pistol, police-style. Quinta did not know whether
to pray that Cindy didn't know what she was doing or that she
did.

"Hi-hi," said Cindy in the same bright,
feverish voice that she'd used on the phone. "You were able to make
it, after all."

"Y-yes," answered Quinta, more faintly than
she would like. "I wanted to meet you—to explain a few things that
I think you should know."

"Marvelous! That's why I wanted to meet with
you! There's so much to tell. I hope we have the time."

"I have lots of time," said Quinta
reassuringly. "I'm in no hurry."

"I'm not either, when you come right down to
it. But the fireworks will be starting any minute. I've got to be
done by then. Oh dear. Why didn't I set this up earlier? Then we
would have had plenty of time to chat."

She seemed quite bothered by her sense of
timing; Quinta could only speculate why. "I've seen the Black Ship
displays," said Quinta. "They're not all
that
great ...
especially in the fog ... we won't be missing much—"

"Oh,
I'll
be seeing them, as soon as
I'm through here. I'm looking forward to it."

The blood iced up in Quinta's veins, but she
pressed on. "Cindy, you haven't done anything seriously wrong yet.
Not ... not as wrong as you could do. There are things you can't
undo once you've done them—"

"What gibberish! Are you so afraid? Of
dying, I mean?"

"Well, I'm not looking
forward
to
it," Quinta said in a fading voice.

"But you should be. Oh, don't ever be afraid
to die. It's like an orgasm. That's what Delly always said. Of
course, it's hard to prove."

"Tell me why you did those things, Cindy,"
said Quinta, stalling for time. It was a transparent ploy; Quinta
understood perfectly well that Cindy meant to shoot her once the
fireworks began. "Why did you send the note?" she asked softly.
"And spill the paint, and send the pizzas, and burglarize Alan's
house? I have so many questions, Cindy. Why did you poison the dog?
And burn the boat?"