By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (31 page)

"I can't answer all that," said Cindy
petulantly. Her voice had a whining, fretful quality that seemed to
fit the way she held her head, the way she lifted her shoulders and
let them fall. "I don't have time. I thought the paint was a really
beautiful color. I spent a lot of time with a paint chart on that
one. It had to be just right, kind of like congealed blood, not
fresh. And I didn't take hardly anything from Alan's house that
wasn't mine. Except his tie."

"The
Pegasus
plans weren't yours,"
Quinta argued gently.

"What plans? I didn't take any plans. I took
my little box and some other things, and I had some jewelry hidden
in the basement. And I sent the pizzas because—you won't believe
this—Alan once told
me
to bring pizzas to the dock for him
and the crew. I didn't do it that time, so this time I made amends.
Twice."

Her voice became even more petulant. "He
always ignored me, you know. It was always boat, boat, boat. Cup,
Cup, Cup. He was obsessed; he never had time for me. He isn't like
most other men. I hope you don't think he's like other men. Other
men buy their wives pretty things, or take them shopping. Not Alan.
He wants ... I don't know, Wonder Woman. Oh, but he was so
good-looking, so wonderful in bed. He knew what he was doing there.
But you know that, don't you? You're with him there all the time,
aren't you?"

She laughed, a merry schoolgirl's laugh, a
playground laugh. It was a mindless sound, a terrifying sound. "I
didn't like the dog," Cindy added in a lower, tenser tone. "The dog
scared me. It was like the other dog. It took a lot of courage for
me to go up to it that night with the food."

"You were very clever," said Quinta softly.
"There were no fingerprints on the food bowl."

"Gloves. Did you figure out what the poison
was?"

"We haven't heard yet," answered Quinta,
watching feverishly for someone, anyone to come.

"It's colchicine. Delly's grandfather had it
for his gout. He took too much of it once and nearly died. I saved
it, because you never know." She sounded pleased that she had
stumped the experts.

"It's too bad about your father," Cindy went
on. "That he actually lived, I mean, and I didn't know it. Maybe my
life would've been different. I might have come back sooner. Or not
at all. I really don't know. But if I hadn't come back I might have
missed the fire. I'm glad I saw the fire .... I saw it all—"

"You didn't start that fire, did you,
Cindy?" Quinta said, resolved to drop to the ground when the
fireworks began. She had nothing to lose ....

"How I wish I had," Cindy moaned. "It was so
beautiful, so right—"

Suddenly the first fireworks were launched,
perhaps two dozen of them almost simultaneously. It was so abrupt;
despite all her intentions, Quinta was taken completely by
surprise. Cindy, also startled, let out a little frightened cry and
Quinta's split-second thought was,
she's not a killer;
I
was right.

But she was wrong: in the next millisecond,
before Quinta could drop out of the way, came a bright white light
from the barrel of Cindy's gun. White light—that's all Quinta saw,
but at the same time, she heard thunderous cannon sounds and
machine-gun fire, and in the middle of it all, the little pop. And
then she dropped to the ground, but not by choice.

She lay in the dark on the cool, damp grass,
aware that her chin was resting in an ooze of blood on her
shoulder, aware—crazily—that Cindy had ruined yet another outfit of
hers, feeling dreamily outraged, unable to express her anger. She
wanted to demand a new dress. It seemed only fair that she should
have a new dress. She must stop wearing white ... white was
apparently not for her ....

"Well?" Cindy had come nearer and was
standing over her. She nudged one foot in Quinta's side, causing
her exquisite pain. "Are
you
dead?"

****

Quinta wasn't the only one able to pick out
the hollow little pop of Cindy's pistol. Alan, breathless and with
a burning pain in his side, arrived at the fort in time to hear the
shot just inside and see Cindy moving cautiously toward Quinta. The
stab of despair he felt was searing, but he kept himself from
screaming out in rage and crept up behind Cindy as she padded
toward the fallen figure in the grass. The words "Are you dead?"
had no sooner been uttered than he tackled his wife with a
viciousness he did not know he possessed. They fell to the ground
together and he wrenched the gun away from her, prepared to break
her arm in the process; and yet in the act of disarming her, his
fury dissolved. Cindy was nothing, a blind instrument of mindless
Fate.

Ignoring Cindy, he turned immediately to the
woman who lay wounded in the grass, the woman who meant more to him
than life itself. He lifted her gently in his arms, aware that
there must be a proper medical procedure to follow, aware that he
was not following it, aware that the stain in her dress was
flashing now red, now green, now blue, now gold, in the eerily lit
sky. But hearing nothing: it was as if they were in a vacuum, and
the explosive celebration around them was a silent light show,
nothing more. He didn't even hear the sound of his own voice
murmuring, "Quinta ... love ... can you hear me? Darling ... can
you?"

All the wit, energy, and love that he
possessed were focused on her answer. When her "yes" dissolved into
a low moan, it was enough for him. He carried her out of the fort,
feeling his way over the uneven, tufted grass, his soul rejoicing
that she heard.

He never saw Cindy flee, never thought about
her after she stopped being a threat to Quinta.

****

Cindy, outraged and determined to avenge
this final, insulting cut, ran down to the waterfront. She would
get away again, and then later she would come back. A cluster of
dinghies lay tied to one of the east-facing docks. She jumped into
a small boat, an inflatable with an outboard engine, and untied the
painter. She had been in inflatables before, and although she knew
nothing about oars, she did understand how to start an outboard.
Pushing herself away from the dock, she used her hands to paddle
the boat around to face the bright lights of Newport, then yanked
the starter cord. The engine caught at once, and she threw the
throttle into forward.

She was going too fast. She understood that,
too, but there was something exhilarating about flight and escape.
It was just like before, when she left her car on the Newport
bridge. Delly was dead, but she was perfectly capable of escaping
on her own. The bow of the inflatable lifted up, obscuring her
view. She moved her weight forward in the dinghy to bring the bow
back down so that she could see. It worked, but now she could not
reach the throttle. And meanwhile, she was skimming over the
flat-calm channel, going fast, much too fast. She tried to move
back in the inflatable so that she could slow down before she got
in among the moored boats. Behind her the sky pulsed in dull,
fog-shrouded light: gold and green and red. Her last conscious
thought was that the evening hadn't turned out at all; it was
supposed to have been so much better.

She was still probing for the throttle when
the inflatable slammed full speed into the steel channel buoy,
throwing her into it with such force that she was dead even before
her body slipped into the deep, cold water of Newport Harbor.

****

On a Saturday night in summer the staff of
Newport Hospital are not surprised to see a victim of drunk
driving, or of a stabbing, or of domestic violence. It's rare that
they treat a victim of a shooting. When Alan Seton brought Quinta
to the emergency room, it sent a scandalized buzz through the night
shift; Newport was not yet that kind of town. By the time the
surgeons finished operating on Quinta, the police, working from
Alan's statement, had put two and two together about the drowning
victim.

"Actually, she didn't drown, Mr. Seton,"
said the young lieutenant who tracked him down to the second-floor
waiting room. "Death appears to be a result of massive injuries
sustained when the victim was thrown into a harbor buoy. We're
getting the statements of the witnesses right now, but we need—I
hate to ask you for this, sir—we need an identification, if
possible." The lieutenant, a boating man himself, looked intensely
sympathetic.

"All right," Alan said quietly.

They went downstairs and for the first time
in three years Alan saw the woman who was once his wife. He was
shocked by her dyed brown hair and by the ravages of three years of
dissolution. He wasn't sure he'd have recognized her on the street;
he wondered how Neil had managed it. Cindy was as much a mystery to
him in death as she had been in life, and he could not help
wondering how much of that was his fault. She had needed the kind
of obsessive attention that he could not give, and she had reacted
violently to the discovery.

Was the line between tantrum and insanity so
thin?

He sighed heavily and nodded to the intern,
who drew the sheet back over her. Cindy had written the script
three years ago, but the dress rehearsal, the opening, and the
closing were not fated to be held until tonight. As he ascended in
the elevator to the second-floor waiting room, Alan felt as if he
were climbing out of hell; he felt his spirit struggle to shake off
the three-year-old oppression.

When he got to the waiting room he found
Neil Powers, alone and in his wheelchair. Alan took Neil's hand in
both of his, dismayed to see that the older man was trembling. "I'm
sorry I couldn't come for you, Neil," Alan said quickly. "The
police—"

"I have a neighbor who helps me out. He
knows how to use the van," Neil mumbled. His eyes were wide,
pleading for the truth. "They tell me she's all right," he said.
"She's all right?" His lip trembled. He clamped down hard on it and
looked away.

"She's lost some blood, but the surgeon
tells me she's as strong as a horse," Alan said to reassure
him.

Neil nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
After a moment he said in a shaky voice, "Thank God you got to her
in time—"

Alan said, not without bitterness, "It
wasn't one of your more heroic rescues; in retrospect I should've
taken my chances at commandeering something in the harbor. If I'd
been two minutes earlier—"

"If you'd been two mintues later!"

Alan laid his hand on Neil's shoulder. "All
right, Neil. You win. When will they let you see her?" he asked
gently.

"
You
don't want to see her?"

"Can you possibly think that?" Alan said,
smiling wearily. He added, "She'll want to see you first. I'll just
sit here, quietly gnawing on this chair, and wait my turn."

Neil said nothing. Then he made a physical
effort to gather himself together. He wiped his eyes, sat up
straighter in his chair, even smoothed his hair with one hand. He
cleared his throat. "You seem to care for my daughter," he
announced.

"I seem to love her," answered Alan in a
quiet voice. "I seem to want to marry her." With a quirky smile he
added, "Is that unseemly?"

"That depends on who you're asking. Why
don't you try it out on her and see what she says?" Neil suggested
soberly.

Alan grinned. At least Neil hadn't laughed
in his face.

"You don't think I'm rushing it? You don't
think I should wait till she's fully conscious?"

Flustered, Neil muttered, "You two have the
same damned sense of humor, anyway."

Not long after that they were told that
Quinta's anesthetic had worn off. Alan pushed the wheelchair; the
two men went in together. But Quinta was a little too groggy to
propose to, although her sweet, rather unfocused smile made Alan
want to do just that. He stood near the bed, doting on her, while
her father held her hand. A few minutes later the nurse came in and
threw them out, which was not unreasonable. They were told to go
home, get some sleep, and come back tomorrow.

Alan took Neil home in his van, the van paid
for by Alan's anonymous contribution to the settlement three years
earlier.

After Neil was settled back inside his
house, Alan said, "Quinta's going to be fine. I hope you can rest
tonight, maybe for the first time in a long time."

Neil was clearly relieved, though exhausted.
"Listen, Alan—despite everything, I'm sorry about ... about Cindy.
I'm sorry she died."

"Cindy died long ago," Alan said quietly,
shaking his head. "Good night, Neil."

After reclaiming his car, Alan found himself
on Howard Street in the middle of the night with his choice of
destinations: he could go back to the crew house; or to his own
rented condo in Brenton Cove; or to Mavis Kendall's place.

Mavis was easily his first choice.

He drove down an empty Thames Street,
cleared both of cars and people now, and in a very few minutes was
buzzing the intercom of Beau Rêve, the extraordinary mansion bought
and paid for by an ex-lady's maid who happened to be Mavis Moran's
grandmother.

At last Mavis's sleepy voice came over the
intercom. She sounded annoyed but not surprised when Alan
identified himself. "I'll come down. No ladder over the balcony,
please."

He waited at her threshold, wondering how he
was going to handle this. Not until she opened the door to let him
in did he stop wondering: he saw in her eyes that she knew he knew,
and that made it easier.

But not much easier. Mavis seemed to him
movie-star beautiful in her satin nightgown. She was a classic
beauty, with her tumbling auburn hair and long-lashed jade eyes:
untouched by time. She had so much going for her, so much more than
any mere mortal could hope to have ....

"They were right," he said to her. "It was
Cindy all along who's been behind the nasty things that have been
going on. She's dead. It's over." He took a seat in a deep,
wool-covered side chair and related briefly and without emotion the
events of the night, until he got to the shooting, when he suddenly
stopped and said, "Do you have any cigarettes?" He hadn't smoked in
half a year, but recalling Quinta's near-miss made him want to
light up.