By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (6 page)

Tiptoeing down the hall in the opposite
direction of Alan's rooms, Cindy suddenly froze, gripped by the
first real moment of panic she had felt since she'd returned to the
house. The note! She'd forgotten the suicide note! She retraced her
steps to her room, sat down at the Queen Anne writing desk at which
she'd poured out so many passionate letters in the last two months,
and scribbled vindictively: "Alan, it was an accident, but what
difference does that make? You wouldn't care, either way. My life
is a mess. Cindy." She tucked the note into the leather edge of the
desk blotter, locked the door as she left, and in minutes was on
her way to a rendezvous with the Newport Bridge.

Now that she had made her escape from
Seacliff, and despite the first faint suggestion of a foggy, murky
sunrise, Cindy began to sink fast into an exhausting sense of
anticlimax. She rummaged in the handbag lying on the seat beside
her until she found a large gold pillbox—not without taking the
Mercedes nearly off the road. How ironic, she thought, popping two
diet pills into her mouth, if after all this she crashed head-on
into a telephone pole.

Like most resort towns, Newport tended to
party late and sleep in on the following morning. Ocean Avenue,
which meandered along the coast past dozens of huge estates placed
at ostentatiously discreet distances from one another, was deserted
at this early hour. Cindy was driving the long way around the
island because she wanted one last chance to take in the splendor
of Ocean Drive. She drove rather slowly past the forty-and
fifty-room summer "cottages" built on fortunes made from oil and
railroads, from copper mines and diamond mines—and from margarine,
paper clips, Worcestershire sauce, and liver pills. Not that she
cared a whit where money came from. As long as it was there. She
was so much more democratic about those things than her cousins;
but then, they hadn't been raised in deprivation in a French
convent the way she had.

She rolled past the historic Ida Lewis Yacht
Club, made the little jog up to Spring Street, with its colonial
houses tucked side by side, and dropped back down to the
waterfront. Even America's Cup Avenue was deserted. The bars and
restaurants were closed; boutiques and souvenir stores would not
open before ten. Between the shops and condominiums Cindy caught
glimpses of the historic harbor, crammed with moored, docked, and
anchored boats arranged as precisely as sardines in a can. She had
been to cocktails on two or three of the larger yachts and had
enjoyed herself. What a pity that Alan wasn't more of a yachtsman
and less of a madman; life aboard a hundred-foot pleasure boat
might have had its moments.

A bank of thick gray fog hung over the
graceful suspended expanse of the Newport Bridge. As she swung onto
the double lane going west, Cindy's heart began to pound. If he
wasn't there? For the first time the enormity of her situation hit
home. For the first time it occurred to her that, looked at one
way, her actions could be considered criminal. She herself hadn't
done anything wrong—not deliberately, anyway. She had been
careless, perhaps; remiss, yes; an accessory, she supposed. But she
was no criminal mastermind.

But her heart kept pounding—slamming,
really, up against her chest, ricocheting inside her head. Where
was
he, damn it,
where
? She was creeping as slowly as
possible toward the center span, expecting to see him parked
somewhere on the bridge, waiting for her. If he wasn't there—she
would jump, she really would. Cindy knew that the speed was kicking
in, making her psychotically impatient. She knew, but she was
helpless to fight it. She felt her blood thinning to the
consistency of water, rushing through her veins like a gurgling
brook.
Delly, Delly... don't do this to me,
she prayed. In
her panic she hadn't even noticed the car following close behind
her; it took a quick tapping of the horn to get Cindy to look in
her rear-view mirror and, at a hand signal from him, to pull her
Mercedes over to the right.

In one mad dash Cindy and her duffle bag
were in the front seat of Delgado's Chevy Suburban, although, like
Cinderella, she had in her hurry left behind a slipper—in this
case, a cobalt-blue pump, on the floor of her Mercedes.

"Delly! I thought you'd be parked and
waiting!" she said, breathless with rapture.

"Woman! That was the old plan. Quickly—over
the seat and on the floor. Under the blanket."

"Okay, sure. I'm sorry, Delly; I forgot
that," Cindy said, moving as fast as her skin-tight designer jeans
would allow. "I was just so nervous." She pulled a charcoal wool
blanket over her head. It made her feel suddenly ignominious and
ridiculously small.

"That is perfectly natural, my love," he
said over his shoulder. "But you left the note?"

"Yes, just like you said to."

"And locked the door?"

"Yes."

"And left behind all your things? This bag
looks to me very, very full." There was suspicious reserve in his
voice.

"All the clothes are brand new, Delly. No
one knows I even bought them. What do you take me for?" she asked,
wounded. There was a pause. "Delly, there
is
one
thing..."

"What thing?" It wasn't alarm; it was
low-key menace.

"I ... ran someone down on the way home last
night. He was in the middle of the road, Delly, and it was dark,
rainy... oh, Delly. I killed him, and I didn't tell any one," she
confessed. Crouched on her knees like a penitent under the darkness
of the blanket, Cindy felt the rush of contrition at last. Up until
that moment her ability to ignore the thing had been absolute. Once
or twice when her mind had wandered back to the appalling accident,
it did so with complete detachment, as if it were envisioning a toy
Mercedes knocking over a little toy man with a little toy dog in
his arms. But now her defenses were collapsing. Suddenly terrified
of the dark, she threw off the blanket. "I can't breathe under
here, Delly!"

"Of course you can breathe! Stay there until
we're through the toll booth. Now listen to me. It was an accident,
and you killed a man. But there was nothing in the circumstances
that you could do. Reporting it would not bring the man back. You
must not blame yourself. What's done is done. You must understand
that. I cannot speak now. There are cars opposite."

She continued to crouch reluctantly until
she felt the car come to a stop and heard the window roll down and
the clunk of the token, after which she ventured, "Now?" in a meek
voice from under the blanket.

There was no response.

It threw her. Cindy loved Delgado's Old
World authoritarianism and believed absolutely in everything he
said and did. In the two months that she'd known him, he had
replaced virtually all the men in her life: the father she'd never
known; the husband she'd known so little; even the executor of her
parents' estate, old Mr. Hinsley, whom she feared and disliked.
None of them had so completely taken her over as Delgado had; she
basked in it, this total possession by another.

But she thought that Delgado was testing her
unnecessarily now. Hadn't she already proved she'd do anything for
him? "Damn it, Delly, let me sit up," she whispered. "No one knows
who I am."

No response. They drove another ten minutes,
and Cindy, nearly in tears, said, "Delly? Oh, please." They were
going over the Jamestown Bridge now. Cindy recognized the whirring,
rutted sound of the tires on the metal mesh of the center span.

Five minutes later Delgado spoke. "Come out
now, Cindy dear. And if you promise to be very good, you shall have
an ice cream with your lunch."

'"Very
funny." Nearly limp with
relief, Cindy scrambled awkwardly into the front seat. "Why are you
being so melodramatic about all this?" she asked, poking
ineffectually at her tumbled hair. She had to get her hands on a
blow-drier, and fast. "It's so unnecessary. I mean, what's the very
worst
case? That Alan or the police figure out I've faked my
suicide and run away? So what? Who would care?"

At that Delgado turned to her with raised,
finely shaped brows. "It was you, was it not, who wished to strike
back at the husband who abandoned you to pursue a mere trophy? I
understand such emotions. I understand the need for retribution. I
sympathize completely with you, Cindy. And yet you treat this as if
it were a child's game. It is not. Nor, I regret to say, is your
fleeing the scene of a fatal accident. And finally, of course,
there is the loss of some very valuable emeralds by your beautiful
friend."

"Oh, which reminds me. Can I have my watch
back now?"

Again he looked surprised. "My dear! Most
definitely not. We are trying to maintain a—how do you say it? A
low profile. I will dispose of the Bulgari, as well as the
emeralds, in Las Vegas. We do not wish to encourage scrutiny by
customs officials on
either
side of the Atlantic."

"I see," Cindy answered, although she did
not. With gentle naïveté she persisted. "Can I get another one once
we get to Lisbon, then?"

"Anything your heart desires, little
one."

Cindy lifted Delgados arm and snuggled
happily underneath it. "Oh, I am
so
happy to be getting away
from Newport, away from ... everything. If you only knew how I've
dreamed of your castle in Lisbon—"

"Not a castle," he interrupted. "A
villa."

"Don't be modest, darling," she argued
contentedly. "Anything with a moat around it is a castle."

"It is a dried-up stream, Cindy."

"I'm sure it's a moat."

"Your fascination is misplaced, my dear. The
villa is very old, it's true, but much of it has lain in ruins
since the middle of the eighteenth century. An earthquake and then
the fire ... No, it was too much. Few buildings in Lisbon survived
the devastation."

"Oh. You never told me that."

"I did not want to disappoint you. And you
see—I have done so just now."

"Can't we restore it? They're doing that a
lot of that in the British Isles, you know."

"I do not think so."

"Oh." Cindy looked blank for a moment, then
she rallied. "I'm sure parts of it will be very nice. And anyway,"
she said with a serene smile, "your villa has something that all
the beautifully kept mansions in Newport do not: proximity to
Paris."

"You are so very fond of Paris?"

"Yes! Yes, yes, yes!
Couture,
Delly.
Paris is couture! Once when Alan was tracking down a naval
architect in Paris, I went to a spring showing for Dior. It was
breathtaking, fabulous. There was a beaded gown ... I've never
wanted anything so much in my life. Alan was aghast when he found
out the price. And yet, you can't imagine some of the stories that
circulate over there—a sultan buying a dozen versions of the same
dress for each of his wives, when anyone knows the wives can't all
have been built to carry it off equally well. Private planes being
sent to pick up finished garments.... Did you know, on the flight
back to New York, Alan and I sat across from a fitter from
Givenchy; she was taking a dress to a New York customer for a final
fitting! Really, it just ...
boggles.

"That's what so infuriated me about Alan,"
she went on. "Granted, there's no reason why he should jump up and
down over an exquisite bit of embroidered fabric, or the perfect
line and detail of a
tailleur
by St. Laurent. Fine. But then
why expect
me
to go all misty over the shape of a
Mylar-Kevlar mainsail that costs so many thousands and can be
counted on to fall apart if it blows more than ten knots? Is that
fair? Why are you laughing at me, Delly?" she demanded, taking his
hand and nipping his forefinger. "I suppose you don't have ...
weaknesses?"

"Unlike the admittedly exotic needs of you
and your husband, my requirements are mundane: a line of nose candy
now and then; a roulette table; a friendly game of handball;
women—"

"Women! You mean
woman,
Delgado,"
Cindy said in a remarkably sultry voice. Close to him, she studied
his dark-skinned, dark-eyed face, the clean straight lines of his
profile, and she felt again the tingling rush down to her stomach
which had convinced her that she loved Delgado as no other. "You
make everything inside me go tumbling," she murmured, rubbing her
nose in the linen of his shirt, breathing in the scent of him. "I
love you so much," she said, almost in pain. She hesitated, and
then shyly asked, "Did I ... you know, do all right last
night?"

Delgado began to say something, then checked
himself and said carefully, "You did surprise me, rather. I thought
we had agreed you would isolate a frail, elderly type—the lady with
the tiara, for example."

"Oh, but I never got the chance. Mavis chose
me;
she took
me
away from the party. She wanted to be
alone with me."

"Is she a lover of women?" Delgado
asked.

"
Mavis
? Oh, I don't think so," Cindy
said with a shocked laugh.

"She is an extremely beautiful woman."

"If you like the type. She's so tall. And
that hair! And, anyway, Delly, don't make me jealous. What can I do
to make you not think about her?"

Delgado smiled an easy, comfortable smile.
"I think you know."

"
Now
?" She looked out the window.
Delgado was following the scenic by-roads to Interstate 95. The
foggy morning had not quite stretched and awakened yet, but judging
from his response to her touch, Delgado certainly had. "Delly,
you're outrageous," she said, grinning. "Should you pull over
first?"

"I prefer to drive," Delgado answered in a
low, rumbling voice. "It is more ... challenging."

She loved that in him, that willingness to
teeter on the razor's edge. To Cindy, a narrow escape was
infinitely more exciting than a dogged pursuit. Life with Delgado
was bound to be one long adventure. She wanted desperately for him
to make love to her, but this was good, too: it showed that she
also had some power, while at the same time it proved how much she
trusted in Delgado's almost incredible calm in any given situation.
If Cindy had done to Alan what she was doing just then to
Delgado—well, Alan would certainly have run them right off the road
and into the nearest ditch.