Tides of the Heart (24 page)

“Don’t look now,” Ginny whispered beside her, “but we’re being followed.”

Jess fixed her gaze on the glass. “Followed?”

“Morticia’s right behind us.”

Jess looked up. “Karin?” There, two doors down, stood Richard’s sister, her orange sarong bright against the new white paint of the Tisbury Inn. Their eyes met briefly, then Karin averted hers before Jess could wave.

“Don’t be so melodramatic, Ginny. I’m sure she wasn’t following us.” Jess watched as the woman walked through a line of sidewalk café tables and ducked inside the inn.

“I’m not,” Ginny replied. “Let’s go down the hill. Old Man Bradley said the Black Dog has good burgers.”

“Old Man Bradley?”

“Richard’s father. Before you arrived, he and I had a nice little chat.”

“You didn’t …”

“Don’t worry, kid. I didn’t blow our cover.”

But as they headed down the hill, Jess quickly looked back in time to see Karin emerge from the inn and watch their progress. It left her with an unsettled, upset feeling that things might not be as easy as she’d hoped.

There was nothing to do on the island in the evening—an evening that preceded Memorial Day weekend, when apparently the whole place would come to life.

Until then, there was nothing for Jess and Ginny to do but sit and watch the ferry glide back and forth across Vineyard Sound and plot their best approach to uncovering what had happened.

By the time the sun had set they had a plan: Ginny would be the one to ask the questions, and they would start at breakfast the next morning.

The dining room of Mayfield House was eerily like the one at Larchwood Hall had been: a long cherry table and matching sideboard, silver candlesticks and tea sets, gilt-framed
oil paintings of stern-looking New England ancestors of someone, but no one knew who.

Jess and Ginny were alone at the big table: Jess had not slept well, but had lain awake most of the night, listening to the many clocks downstairs chime two, then three, then four. Now, they chimed nine times, and through the door, as if on a rigid schedule, came Karin with a coffeepot. Today she wore a sarong of blue. Again, she wore no shoes.

Right behind her was Richard’s father, smiling and bearing a basket of what smelled like warm muffins. Tucked under his arm was a newspaper. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” Jess replied. Ginny did not speak, but sized up Morticia/Karin instead.

“Tide’s up, the sun’s shining, and it’s going to be a perfect island day,” he said.

“Tell that to my sinuses,” Ginny commented, watching Karin pour coffee into her cup.

“So what brings you ladies to our fair island?” he asked.

The silence that fell between Jess and Ginny dropped with all the ease of a guillotine.

“Well …” Jess began, hoping that their plan would work, that they could pull this off.

“Vacation,” Ginny blurted out. “It’s the only reason why anyone comes here, isn’t it?”

Mr. Bradley smiled. Jess noticed that when he smiled he looked much younger than what his years must be. Richard would be forty-seven now; she wondered if he was aging as well as his father. She also wondered why Ginny had said they were on vacation when that was not what they’d decided.

“If it weren’t for folks taking vacations,” he answered Ginny, “we’d be a deserted island.”

Karin padded across the floor toward Jess and tipped the coffeepot above her cup. Jess noticed the woman wore a large silver pendant with a flat, smooth, deep blue stone. “What a lovely necklace,” she commented.

Karin’s gaze dropped to her chest as if she’d never seen it; then she stared back at Jess without uttering a word.

“Sea glass,” Mr. Bradley said. “Karin collects it on the beach in West Chop. I keep telling her she should make it into jewelry like that and sell it in the shops.”

“Oh, you should,” Jess said. “It’s really quite extraordinary.”

Karin left the room.

“Have you lived on the Vineyard long?” Ginny asked.

Jess sipped from her cup, then averted her eyes to the newspaper Richard’s father had set down.

“Almost thirty years.”

We know that
, she wanted to say.
Now where’s my daughter?
Instead, she picked up the
Vineyard Gazette
and scanned the front page news.
Let me do the talking
, Ginny had said, and so Jess tried now to comply.

“I could never go back to the mainland,” Mr. Bradley continued, as he took a seat at the table and watched Ginny dive into a large muffin. “My kids grew up here, my wife died here. Nope,” he said, scratching a weathered, cleanshaven chin, “I could never go back.”

“How many kids do you have?” Ginny asked.

Jess almost choked. She feigned interest in the newspaper, but she could not focus on the words.

“Well,” he replied. “Karin, you’ve met. Then there’s my son, Richard, who works there.” He pointed at Jess, at the paper in her hands.

She blinked and looked at the inky headlines. The main article was about the renovated fishing docks in a village called Menemsha. “Your son works in Menemsha?” Jess asked.

Mr. Bradley laughed. “No. At the
Gazette.
He’s a reporter. Best one they’ve got, if you ask me.”

They hadn’t asked, although they’d planned to. But the open flow of information hardly seemed as if it would be coming from a man who had sneaked his family out of town and changed their name. Jess gripped the paper, suddenly
realizing he had just said that Richard worked there. Richard was a newspaper reporter. Richard really was alive and well and living on the island. Now it was official.

“Does he live here?” Ginny asked. “In this house?”

Jess could not unglue her gaze from the newspaper. Every muscle in her body tensed, became immobile.

“No. He has a place over in Edgartown. That’s where the paper is.”

Edgartown. Yes. Phillip had learned that Richard lived in Edgartown.

“Is he married?” Ginny fired the questions without hesitation, without the slightest hint of guilt that she was prying into his life.

“Divorced,” Mr. Bradley said with a slight frown. “Has two kids who live with their mother on the mainland. Boston. She was a tourist. She liked coming here, but not living here. Damn shame, too.”

Jess glanced up at Ginny and saw her reach for another muffin. “Any other kids?” she asked nonchalantly.

Jess set the paper down and took a gulp of coffee. She did not know how much longer she could sit there, acting as if she didn’t care.

“Oh, yes,” Richard’s father answered, his frown turning to a beaming smile. “My daughter Melanie. Mellie, we call her. She’s an elementary school teacher.”

Melanie
, Jess thought.
Mellie, Could it be
 … Nervously, she sat up, broke off a small piece of muffin, and popped it into her mouth. It was warm and crumbly, and made her mouth go dry.

“How old is she?” Ginny blurted out.

Richard’s father laughed and stood up. “Most guests ask twenty questions about the island. They couldn’t care less about us.”

The piece of muffin lodged itself inside her throat.
We’re not most guests
, Jess wanted to respond. She took another drink of coffee and washed the muffin down.

“Sorry,” Ginny said. “Just curious. I’m a sociologist at
Southern Cal, and I’m doing a study on people who live on islands. You know. Why they like it. Why they stay.”

Jess turned back to the newspaper, afraid that if she caught Ginny’s eye, she would laugh.

“So you’re not exactly here on vacation, then?” Mr. Bradley leaned back in his chair.

Not exactly
, Jess wanted to say.

“Well … call it a working vacation,” Ginny replied.

“Don’t know that we’ve had a sociologist ever stay here.”

Ginny smiled. “Good. I enjoy being first at what I do.”

“Well,” Mr. Bradley said, “I’ll leave you two to your breakfast. You’re the only ones here today. That’ll change this weekend, though. Memorial Day. The end of our sanity before the tourists come.” He started to turn away, then looked back with a chuckle. “You might want to do your research on that. How the people change once tourist season starts.” He nodded as if he liked that idea, than added, “Enjoy your breakfast,” and disappeared from the room.

Jess looked at Ginny. “Finish your muffin,” she said quietly. “We have somewhere to go.”

Ginny’s eyebrows raised. “And where might that be?”

“Edgartown,” Jess said, pointing to the newspaper. “We’re going to start at the
Gazette.”

“It’s her,” Ginny said moments later as they walked down the stairs and headed for the car. “Melanie. She’s yours.”

“We don’t know that, Ginny. We don’t even know how old she is.”

Ginny took another bite from the last muffin she’d taken from the basket. “It has to be.”

“We’ll start with Richard,” Jess replied. “And then we’ll see.” Her words sounded much more patient, much more calm than she felt inside her heart.

•  •  •

From the window of the upstairs landing, Karin watched Jess and Ginny cross the driveway and climb into the shiny Jaguar. From beyond the door into the dining room, she’d listened to the bullshit questions the dark-haired one had asked. She’d listened, and she’d smiled, for she’d known that they must be tormented wondering what they should do next.

As she watched the Jaguar leave the driveway and turn right, Karin would have bet the ladies were headed to Edgartown in search of Richard.

God, she thought with a seed of envy, how she’d love to be a witness to that unexpected meeting.

Ginny scanned the onslaught of road-rage traffic and wondered if they’d get there in one piece. She juggled the island map she’d lifted off the marble table in the hall at Mayfield House and determined that they’d reached the spiderweb, five-cornered intersection in the center of Vineyard Haven: Cars and trucks converged from all directions, paused, then moved, in some secret bumper-car performance known only to the islanders. “Take a right,” Ginny said.

“Easy for you to say,” Jess replied.

“Well, you’re the one who wanted this freaking adventure.”

Jess stepped on the gas. The car lurched forward, then Jess braked again, stalled behind a string of vehicles that were going nowhere fast.

“We’d get there faster if we walked.”

“I’m in no hurry,” Jess said. “I’ve waited thirty years to see him. A few more minutes probably won’t kill me.”

Ginny looked at Jess and wondered if she could possibly be as calm as she pretended. If she once had truly loved this guy named Richard, wouldn’t she be jumping out of her pampered skin?

Until Jake, Ginny couldn’t have understood what love was all about. She had never understood why tiny, quiet Jess had pined away at Larchwood Hall for some dumb boy she’d let sleep with her, wondering why he didn’t come and rescue her. She’d never understood why Jess had written letter after letter on scented sheets of paper, only to have them go unanswered, then, the last ones, returned. She’d never understood the power love could have. Now she did. But she also knew that if she were Jess, she’d be having a major panic attack right now, right here, stuck in traffic on the beach road to Edgartown.

Shit
, she thought, hating herself for these damn … 
feelings
that always seemed to surface whenever she was with Jess. An unexpected thought of Lisa drifted into her mind. She wondered if, unlike Jake, Lisa would ever come around again, would ever come back to her, or if Ginny would remain alone forever until, like Jake, she dropped dead.

“Would you like to sleep with him again?” she suddenly asked Jess.

Jess flinched. “What?”

“Richard. Would you like to sleep with him again? Was he good in bed?”

“Good grief, Ginny, what a question. I haven’t seen the man since we were … children.”

“Yeah, so? Was he good?”

“I had nothing to compare him with.”

“You do now.”

Jess pulled down her visor and squinted in the sun that glared off the water on the left. “I honestly don’t remember. I thought I loved him, I remember that. He made me feel … safe.”

Ginny nodded and turned her head out the window. Feeling safe was something she could now relate to. She had felt so safe with Jake. Now, she felt so lost. “Richard is divorced,” she said, “which means he is available.”

“My God, Ginny, I haven’t come here to find a man to sleep with. There are other things in life, you know.”

Yeah
, Ginny thought,
I know.
And it was a good thing that she did, because chances were she’d never sleep with any man again, because she didn’t have the need. She shifted uncomfortably on the seat and realized what an unfamiliar feeling that was and how much it basically sucked.

They did not speak again until they pulled into the small, quaint place named Edgartown—with an O, which meant they could have a drink if they wanted. But Ginny didn’t need a drink: she was simply grateful to be there.

According to the map, the
Vineyard Gazette
was located on a side street, around the corner from a bookstore Ginny recognized from that Bob Newhart sitcom,
George and Leo
, that she had watched so many times, remote and Tostitos close at hand.