Kiss River (34 page)

C
lay was glad Gina was not yet home from the store. He sat in the living room after his father left, Sasha’s head on his knee, staring into space. He needed some time to think, to absorb all his father had told him, and to come to grips with the anger that now tarnished the feelings of love and loss he had for his mother. He wished Lacey would kick her damn boyfriend out so that he could talk to her about what they had learned. She was the only person who could share his sense of horror and betrayal. He had a feeling, though, that she felt it even more deeply than he did.

The phone rang, jarring him out of his lethargy, and he went into the kitchen to answer it.

“Miss Gina Higgins, please.” The caller was a woman with a vague, possibly British accent, and he realized that this was the first call Gina had received since living in the keeper’s house.

“She’s not here right now,” he said. “Can I give her a message?”

The woman hesitated a moment. “Yes. This is Mrs. King. Tell her that, given how complicated matters have become over here
now, the price has risen to two hundred thousand dollars. Tell her I’m sorry, but everything’s become much more difficult.”

What was she talking about?

“Where is ‘over here’?” he asked. He was afraid he knew, and afraid, as well, that he knew what the money was for.

“I’m calling from Hyderabad,” the woman said. “Be sure to give her the message.” She hung up the phone abruptly, and Clay was left with the sound of the dial tone in his ear.

When Gina arrived home with her load of groceries, he was waiting for her in the kitchen.

“Did things go all right with your father?” She set the three overstuffed bags down on the counter and bent over to nuzzle Sasha.

“You had a call,” he said from his seat at the table. He’d been sitting there as numbly as he’d been sitting in the living room, and he didn’t make a move to help her with the groceries.

Gina’s hands froze on Sasha’s neck. “A call?”

“From a Mrs. King.”

She stood up, reaching into one of the grocery bags to extract a box of cereal. “What did she say?” she asked.

“That the price has gone up to two hundred thousand dollars because it’s more complicated ‘over there’ now.”

Gina set the box of cereal down and leaned stiffly against the counter, her back to him. She pressed her fist against her mouth.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked. “Who is Mrs. King? Are you paying some sort of bribe? And with what money?” The questions poured out of him quickly. His temper felt very short. On this day of revelations, he was sick of being lied to.

Gina turned and walked toward him, lowering herself into one of the chairs at the table. She covered her eyes with her hand and cried silently, her shoulders shaking, and he had to fight the urge to comfort her.

“I want the truth, Gina,” he said.

She nodded, dropping her hand from her face. “Yes,” she said. “I know. And I’m sorry, Clay. I’m so sorry. But I just couldn’t tell you this.”

“I thought I was supposed to be the one with the communication problems,” he said.

She ignored the comment; he wasn’t sure she had even heard
it. “Mrs. King has gotten other children out of the orphanages in Hyderabad,” she said. “She gets paid a lot of money for doing it, but she succeeds. How she avoids getting arrested, I don’t know. And I don’t know what she does with the money. She pays bribes, I’m sure. She probably buys off judges and attorneys and orphanage staff and who knows who else. I don’t care.” Her hand trembled as she pressed her fingers against her temple. “I just want my baby,” she said. “She’s dying. One of these days, it’s going to be too late to save her.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“If you were going to pay someone an illegal fee for saving your child’s life, would you tell anyone?” she asked.

I would tell you,
he thought, but he wasn’t sure that was the truth.

“I’m not a bad person, Clay,” she said. “I’m not a criminal. I don’t even jaywalk. But I can’t see any other way to get Rani out of there.”

“Where do you intend to get two hundred thousand dollars?” he asked.

“I…” She sighed, then looked at him with those dark eyes he had come to love. “I’d like to read you some of Elizabeth Poor’s diary, all right?”

He was perplexed. “That’s going to tell me where you’re getting the money?” he asked.

She nodded.

“How? Did she bury diamonds in the sand behind the privy or something?”

“Actually, it
is
something like that.” She stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

She went upstairs, and he put away the groceries, trying to muster up a good self-righteous anger at her for keeping this from him, but he found he couldn’t. They were not married, not committed to a future with each other. She didn’t owe him anything.

She reappeared in the kitchen, a small, pink diary in her hand. “Could we sit on the lighthouse stairs?” she asked, glancing toward the hallway. “In case Lacey comes down?”

They were quiet as they walked out to the lighthouse and climbed the tall spiral staircase. The top step was still wet from that afternoon’s rain, and they had nothing to dry it with before
sitting down. They brushed the water off with their hands as best they could, and Clay felt the dampness seep through his shorts as he sat down.

Gina began to read to him from the diary. It was strange to listen to the tale, to hear about a world that had existed so long ago, right here on the land and in the house where he was living. He was shocked when Gina read about Bess’s discovery that the Coast Guard boy, Sandy, was the spy. But when she read the part about Bess carving his real name into the prism of the lens, he felt his anger rise.

“
That’s
why you want the lens?” he asked. “All this crap about…Gina!
Damn it.
Why didn’t you tell me any of this? Why didn’t you tell me your grandfather’s name will be on the lens?”

“I’m sorry.” She was crying, wiping tears from her cheeks with her fingers. “I’m so sorry, Clay. But I just couldn’t tell you.”

“I don’t get it,” Clay said. “What does a name on the lens have to do with getting the money?”

“He was being paid for spying, remember?” She held up the open diary. “My grandfather has money. He was probably wealthy, while my mother—his daughter—had absolutely nothing.”

He heard a rare sort of anger in her voice. She was making so little sense that it frightened him. “But he was probably arrested,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Bess still loved him, so she made a very weak attempt to turn him in when she carved his name into the lens. She knew it was unlikely Bud Hewitt would even notice the name. And she read the newspapers all the time, and never saw a word about him being captured.”

“It could have been kept very quiet,” Clay said. “And in any case, he sounds like a cruel, traitorous psychopath, not the sort who’s going to just hand two hundred thousand dollars over to you.”

“Then I’ll…” There was desperation in her eyes. “Then I’ll blackmail him with the diary.”

“This is ludicrous, Gina, don’t you see that?” he said. “Even if he wasn’t caught, he’s probably dead.”

“I know.” She brushed a tear from her cheek. “But the diary should give me proof that I have a right to some of his estate.”

Suddenly, he felt very sorry for her. Her love for a child had
turned her into a desperate and thoroughly irrational woman. He doubted, though, that she was the first woman to suffer that fate. He pulled her to him, and she seemed surprised.

“You’re not mad at me?” she asked.

“I am royally pissed off at you,” he said. “But it’s obvious to me that you’re not thinking clearly. Your love for Rani has made you a little crazy. You’ve lost sight of what’s right and wrong, and pinned all your hopes on a pipe dream.”

“Don’t say that, Clay, please.” Her voice broke. “There’s nowhere else for me to turn. I couldn’t get the money anywhere else. I tried to borrow it, but my credit is terrible because of my ex-husband’s debt.” She leaned back to look at him, her features contorted by her tears. “
This
is why I didn’t want to tell you,” she said. “I didn’t want to hear you say that I’m crazy or that this plan can’t possibly work.”

“It’s not just that you’ve picked a hopeless way to get the money,” he said, “but that you’re paying off a…baby broker, or whatever she is, to begin with.”

“I don’t know what else to do,” she repeated.

He pulled her close again, thoughtful for a moment. “You know,” he said, “it’s possible that Henry or Brian or Walter might know who Sandy was.”

“Why would they know that?” She sniffled against his shoulder.

“They were all in the Coast Guard here,” he said.

“They were?”

“That’s how they became buddies,” he said. “I’m not sure if it was during World War II, though, but we can ask them. Of course, they won’t know the name Sandy, but maybe they would remember who patrolled that beach.”

She tipped her head back to look at the sky, and he smoothed his hand across her wet cheek. “Only if we can’t find out from the lens,” she said. “With any luck, we’ll be able to see it tomorrow. I don’t want to involve any more people than I have to in this.”

“All right,” he said.

She leaned her head against his shoulder again. “I know you’re mad at me, Clay,” she said, “but I just want to thank you for not being madder. I wouldn’t blame you.”

“I think your plan is nuts,” he said, “but I also know how crazy a person can get when they feel like they’re losing someone they love.”

“Thank you,” she said. Then she raised her head to look at him. “Is your father okay?”

It was Clay’s turn to sigh. “He told us some things that were a bit hard to hear,” he said.

“Can you tell me?” she asked.

He felt torn, hesitant to speak the words out loud, but he wanted her to know. “He told us that Lacey is apparently taking after our mother, who was…well, I guess she cheated on him throughout their marriage.”

“Oh, no,” Gina said.

“Not that Lacey’s cheating on anyone,” Clay continued. “But my mother apparently had a series of lovers, my father being just one of them. And she would bring them here, to the keeper’s house. Mary Poor, your great-grandmother, knew all about it, I guess.”

“She did? She was so strict with her own daughter.”

“Well, not with my mother, apparently.”

“I’m sorry, Clay. That must have been so terrible for you to hear.”

He shook his head, still incredulous. “It’s like I have to adjust to a whole new world,” he said. “It’s as though I just found out that I’d been lied to all my life about the stars being three-dimensional objects in the sky, when they’re really just dots painted on a dome.”

“Did your father have a clue that was going on?” Gina asked.

“He didn’t find out until after she died. He thought she was a saint, just like everyone else did. Can you imagine how he felt?” He ached for his father. “Why do people have to betray each other?”

“They don’t,” she said. She turned to him, taking his hands. “Clay, I have no idea what will happen between you and me. Whether we have a future or not. I don’t know and you don’t know.” Her voice was strong now, the tears gone. “But I am through with lying and with keeping things from you, I promise you that.”

He squeezed her hands, and asked her the question that had
been on his mind since she’d first told him how desperate she was to get Rani. “How would you feel if someone else was able to adopt Rani?” he asked. “Maybe an Indian couple, so they wouldn’t be subject to the problems you’re dealing with.”

She stiffened in his arms, and it was a moment before she answered. “If they would get her the surgery she needs right away…” She spoke slowly. “And if they were the sort of people who would…” She started to cry again, shaking her head. “But she’s my
baby,
Clay,” she said. “She’s my
daughter.
”

“A
h, this twinkie’s gonna be nothin’ to lift.”

Gina sat on the edge of the barge, listening to the barge captain, or operator, or whatever he was called, talking to Kenny about raising the lens. It was the third time she’d heard him call the lens a “twinkie,” and she assumed he was referring to the fact that, compared to the sort of things he usually had to retrieve from the ocean bottom, the lens was relatively light.

She’d awakened that morning to the sound of voices slipping through the window of Clay’s bedroom. Peering outside, she saw Kenny standing in the knee-high water east of the lighthouse. He was wearing a short-sleeved wet suit and shouting something to a man who stood on a small, yellow-rimmed barge floating near the buoy. The early-morning sun tinted the entire scene with gold, and the sea was like glass. The crane rising from the middle of the barge looked like a giant, amber-colored insect standing upright on its hind legs.

Gina awakened Clay, then dressed quickly in Lacey’s red bathing suit and rushed out to the beach.

She and Clay had to swim out to the barge, climbing up the ladder attached to the rear of the floating deck. The barge was much larger than it had looked from the window of Clay’s room, and Gina felt dwarfed by the crane. On the deck, a short distance away from the crane, sat a square framework of wood timbers, perhaps a foot high.

“The crane will put the lens down on top of that set of timbers there,” Kenny explained, pointing to the box. He was on the barge now as well, perspiring in his wet suit; the morning was very warm. “Then we’ll transport it to Hatteras to get it cleaned up.”

Kenny explained the entire process to them in great detail. They would use a water jet to blow the sand away from the bottom of the lens, he said. Then they’d put lifting straps beneath it, attach the straps to the cable coming from the crane, and that would be it. “A snap,” Kenny said.

She and Clay watched as Kenny and the other diver climbed down the ladder and into the water, carrying hoses and other paraphernalia needed to prepare the lens to be raised. Although the water was fairly clear today, she would not be able to see what was going on beneath the surface, since the barge was anchored a distance from the lens to prevent the crane from swinging the lens onto its side as it raised it into the air. Gina kept glancing at the framework of timbers where the lens would be brought to rest. If the bottom of the lens was too deep inside that network of timbers, she would not be able to see what she needed to see.

“You excited?” Clay asked her.

She was chewing on her lower lip. “What do you think?” she asked. “I can’t wait to get a look at that twinkie.”

She knew that Clay was curious to see what, if anything, they would find, regardless of how harebrained her scheme seemed to him. He’d talked about searching the Internet once they had the name of the spy. Maybe they would be able to find out if he had been caught. Or if he was still alive, maybe they could find an address for him.

She’d been feeling embarrassed for the past two days, ever since telling Clay her plan. She could see why he thought the
scheme seemed crazy. It
was
crazy. But it was the only course of action that she had been able to see. It was the only course of action she could see even now.

She’d had no word from Denise in three days, and that raised her anxiety level even higher. Denise used the computer in her hotel for her e-mail, and sometimes those computers were down. Gina hoped that was the reason for Denise’s silence, and that it was not an indication of something more ominous.

Lacey had wanted to join them on the barge, but one of the other vet techs was out sick, and she’d had no choice but to go in to work. Gina was glad. It was going to be hard enough for her and Clay to examine the lens without arousing suspicion from the diver and barge operator and Kenny. It would have been just about impossible with Lacey there.

Lacey had been very quiet since Alec told her the truth about her mother on Tuesday. She was nearly impossible to engage in conversation. Gina and Clay decided the best approach was to leave her alone rather than press her to talk. “She’ll talk when she’s ready,” Clay had said. But it was hard to watch Lacey’s sparkling personality slip into something dark and brooding.

A half hour passed. Gina knew her skin was starting to sunburn. She hadn’t given a thought to sunscreen. She didn’t care, though. Clay rubbed her back as she closed her eyes, trying to breathe evenly, patiently, in an attempt to still her nerves.

Finally, Kenny reappeared on the surface of the water and gave the guy operating the crane the thumbs-up sign. Slowly, with a grinding, whirring sound, the cable attached to the arm of the crane began to rise, dragging seaweed with it. In less than a minute, the giant, algae-covered beehive broke the surface of the water. It rose into the air, a series of waterfalls pouring from the tiers of glass.

Gina and Clay stood well out of the way as the crane lifted the lens high into the air, then turned and began lowering it into the timber frame.

“It’s on an angle,” Clay said to her.

She had already noticed that fact, and it was good news. The lens was not upright, but rather lying nearly on its side in the cradle of straps. If it was still on its side when the crane let it down
on the frame of timbers, she and Clay would be able to see the prisms at the bottom of the lens with relative ease.

A couple of workers from the barge guided the lens into the frame, laying it almost on its side, in the same position it had been in in the cradle.

Gina and Clay walked toward the lens, ignoring the crane operator’s pleas to keep their distance.

“This is the bottom,” Gina said, her hands already feeling the prisms beneath her palms.
Don’t let the name have been on the missing panel,
she thought. She scraped at the algae-covered prisms with her fingernails, while Clay used a rag he found on the deck of the barge.

“Gina!” Clay suddenly called from the other side of the lens. “I’ve got it! I can see a couple of letters.”

Quickly, she circled the lens to see him holding the grubby rag in his hand, a look of shocked disbelief on his face.

She followed his gaze to the prism. The glass was nearly clean, and the etched name was more vivid for the green algae held deep in its crevices: Walter Liscott.