Time After Time (12 page)

For a moment he looked
blank. Then his expression settled into an ironic smile. "I
remember now: chocolate cake or white. You're right. I'm a cad," he
said in a softly mocking, oddly seductive voice.

Just for that, Liz decided
to take all her peonies back. She wrapped her left arm around one
black vase, then marched across the room and wrapped her right arm
around another. "Where I come from," she said primly, "people only
apologize when they mean it."

"Elizabeth, I was only
teasing you," he said, amused by her reaction. "Hasn't Netta given
you her little speech yet about my bark being worse than my
bite?"

"I assumed she meant
Snowball," Liz said, sweeping past him with the vases in her
arms.

Where she was taking them,
she had no idea. She detoured into the kitchen, completely
flustered by his behavior. For a man in a hurry, his banter sure
did seem idle.

Liz yanked the flowers out
of each of the vases and tossed them onto the stainless-steel
counter of the sink, then began a pointless search through all the
marble-topped cabinets for something cheap and plastic to transport
them in. And meanwhile, Jack Eastman still seemed to have some time
on his hands before he had to punch back in.

"Maybe I can help you," he
said from way too close behind her. "What're you looking
for?"

"A plastic Kool-Aid
pitcher," she snapped without daring to turn around.

But he turned her around.
"What exactly is your problem, Mrs. Coppersmith?" he asked without
letting go of her shoulders.

Hot, hot, hot! Overwhelmed
by the sizzle in his touch, Liz said, "My problem is, you don't
drink Kool-Aid, and I'm afraid to borrow the crystal martini
pitcher."

He let out a short baffled
laugh, and then apparently it hit him: she resented his wealth.
"Did you know you have an attitude?" he asked, squinting amiably
into her brown eyes.

Oh, God, I do know it, and
f I don't get it under control, I will never, ever, be able to make
one red cent off these damned rich snobs.

"Do I?"

He grimaced. "I said I was
sorry, I said I would pay you, I said I was harmless," he repeated
in careful English, as if she'd just stepped off a boat from
Norway. "Don't you think it's time to stop beating me up over our
rocky start?"

"Our rocky start on the
road to where?" she blurted. Really, it seemed — obviously she must
be wrong, but it
seemed — as
if he was coming on to her.

Or not. He let go of her,
then walked over to the sink, picked up a deep red peony the size
of a cauliflower, and presented it to her. "I'd like you to do
another event for me," he said with a very level, very serious
look. "Would you be willing?"

"Is this a trick
question?" Liz asked, confused by the signals he seemed to be
sending.

He laughed. "You're not a
very trusting person, are you?" Liz remembered Keith, remembered
how she came home from a trip to her obstetrician a week after Susy
was born — and found a note from him on the kitchen table. A year
later, she was still so traumatized that she had to sell the
table.

"I've learned that the
only person I can really trust is myself," she said tersely. "What
event did you have in mind?"

"A company picnic for the
second Saturday in July. We used to have an annual cookout at the
shipyard, but then things got tight in the recession and we had to
drop it. Ironically, things are so much worse this year — morale is
so low — that I think we have to find the money for one," he said,
his brow furrowing. "We have to."

Hey, just hock the
clock,
thought Liz. Aloud she said, "I
couldn't possibly bid my time as cheaply as I did for the
birthday." She handed him back the peony.

She saw — she thought she
saw — a flicker of annoyance in his eyes as he took the
thick-stemmed flower and laid it gently on top of the others. "I
don't expect you to work for nothing," he said easily enough. "But
I
would
like you
to bring some magic to the event, the same as you did here. It'll
be an outdoor affair, but if it rains, we'll move it into one of
the boat-storage sheds."

He slipped his hands into
his back pockets and rocked slightly on the heels of his deck
shoes. "Well? How about it?"

If ever a job offer
sounded like a double-dare, this was it. Everything about the man
seemed to be taunting her, from the pose he struck to the words he
chose. Liz had worked with ornery clients before, but never with
one so rich, handsome, or unforgiving. If she blew this assignment,
it was good-bye to the Gold Coast.

"I have just two
questions," she said grimly. "Will there be dogs? Will there be
rugs?"

"Dogs, no rugs. And kids,
lots of them," he added with a dry little smile. "My secretary
Cynthia will tell you what you need to know. Just call her, or stop
by the yard."

Liz allowed herself a
small smile in return. "Okay. I'll work up an estimate. But I think
you should know: Magic doesn't come cheap."

He picked the peony back
up from the pile and slipped it through her fingers and then, with
no warning at all, began to lower his mouth to hers. Then he
stopped, pulled back, and smiled.

"We all need a little
magic in our lives," he whispered before he sailed out of the
kitchen.

Liz was left in a state of
shock. Her cheeks were burning and she forgot, quite literally, to
exhale. So she'd been right after all — he
had
been coming on to
her.

Sexual harassment,
she decided with a kind of cynical triumph.
Exactly what she'd have expected from a man like him. She touched
the big red peony to her lips.

The question was, how much
was sexual, and how much was harassment?

The reporter from the
Newport paper simply wanted Liz to confirm a few facts.

He was writing a feature
story on Jimmy Screener, a lifelong Newporter who ran a locksmith
shop on Thames Street. Jimmy was chock-a-bloc with interesting
anecdotes, the reporter explained, and one of the most recent ones
concerned Liz.

Was it true, he asked,
that in her attic she'd discovered a cache of old letters and an
antique box with a pin in it?

"Well, yes, it's true,"
Liz answered reluctantly.

And was it true that
they'd all been sealed away? Could Liz tell him a little more about
that?

Liz had no desire to tell
him anything at all, but she didn't want to seem as if she were
hiding something, so she said, "The entrance to the attic had been
plastered over to blend in with the rest of the ceiling. It was
done, I would guess, over half a century ago."

"Was the pin very
valuable?" asked the reporter.

"No, it's just a garnet
pin."

"And the letters? What
were they all about?"

"I've hardly had a chance
to look at them," Liz said, which wasn't true. She was bleary-eyed
from having read through the night. "Most of them were written by a
woman named Victoria to her sister Mercy around the turn of the
century."

For some stupid reason Liz
added, "Victoria was a kind of spiritualist."

"Hey, there might be a
story there," said the reporter, eager about the possibilities.
"Would you mind if I looked them over?"

Nuts!
"Well, maybe eventually," Liz said vaguely. "I'd like to go
through them myself before I decide. But I have your name; I'll be
in touch," she said, easing out of the reporter's grip.

She hung up, not without
promising that she'd give his paper first crack. For the first
time, it occurred to Liz that she might not even be the lawful
owner of the stuff from the attic. What if someone from Victoria
St. Onge's estate came to claim them? The thought was profoundly
unsettling. For whatever reason, Liz felt deeply connected to the
material she'd found.

Overnight Liz had learned
enough about Victoria St. Onge to convince herself that the lady
was a genuinely gifted con-woman. She was the kind of person to
whom people were forever saying, "Why, you've read my thoughts
exactly!" But she was also as cynical as they came. Her remark to
Mercy that the summer colonists in Newport were like sheep in a pen
— "easily spooked, and easily fleeced"— was fairly typical.
Presumably Victoria always kept her shears sharpened and
handy.

She was also either a
thief or a kleptomaniac: "I took the scarf" she wrote in one
letter, "because it was rather pretty, and because Lucy was
altogether too vain in it."

Worse, she was not above a
bit of prostitution. How else to explain the extravagant diamond
brooch presented to her by a lovesick suitor? "George told me,"
Victoria had written gleefully to her sister, "that in the privacy
of my sitting room I am less a
St.
Onge
than I am an
El Diablo."

All in all, a picture of
Victoria St. Onge was emerging that wasn't very pretty. It was
impossible for Liz not to think about her own Victoria, tucked
cozily away on Martha's Vineyard with the first two shoeboxes. Was
she, too, becoming disillusioned? And if so, would this be the end
of the reincarnation nonsense?

Liz drifted into the
kitchen, with its irresistible view of the East Gate estate, and
let herself get lost in the peaceful majesty of the scene before
her. After two weeks in her new house, she could safely say she'd
never seen the same view twice. Every day it grew richer, fuller,
greener; every day the light was new and different. Liz understood,
at last, why some artists paint the same scene dozens of times,
trying to get at its essence.

She herself couldn't
decide whether she preferred morning light to afternoon, bright
days to foggy ones. She liked the garishness of the noonday sun,
but she loved the subtleties of a rainy day. Dawn always seemed
more wonderful than sunset — until the sun went down. Liz was
overwhelmed by the beauty of the summer season, aware that she had
the rich red blaze of fall, the pristine snows of winter, the
sleepy greening of spring still to look forward to.

And — unlike Jack Eastman
— she wouldn't have to pay property taxes on any of it.

Liz thought of Jack,
thought of the near kiss. To call it a kiss would be a bit of a
stretch. She closed her eyes and relived it — again — and chewed
her lip over it — again — and thought, again, that he meant it as a
handshake, nothing more. Dammit.

"Anyway, who cares?" she
murmured to herself. Did men like Jack Eastman ever really ask
women like Elizabeth Coppersmith on dates?

She let herself drop back
into the fantasy. Assuming he weren't her client, would she say
yes? Jack was good-looking, powerful, rich. He could, when he
wanted to, be charming. He had a seductive laugh. He knew all the
right people. He was a very eligible bachelor.

Or — would she say no?
Jack was vain; bossy; ungenerous. It took a major effort for him to
be charming. His laugh was arrogant. He knew all the wrong people.
He was eligible, all right, but he was a
bachelor — the
most selfish kind of
male.

Interesting. Liz couldn't
imagine
what
she'd say — if he ever asked her.

****

After picking up Susy from
school, Liz fed her some lunch and dragged her off to the Newport
Library. Liz wanted to find out when Victoria St. Onge died. For
that matter, she wanted to know
if
she died.

The last letter Liz had of
Victoria St. Onge was written in early
1935
,
a
rambling note done in a shaky hand. The woman would've been about
eighty-five years old by then and was obviously failing, both
physically and mentally.

Nonetheless, Victoria St.
Onge came across in the letters as someone so intense and
manipulative that Liz was ready to believe — well, just about
anything. Finding a date of death would be oddly reassuring to Liz
in the mood she was in right now.

The mood was:
jumpy.
Liz's
breakthrough to the attic had cost her a lot in peace of mind and
hours of sleep. Chimes ... ghosts ... claims of reincarnation. Liz
was convinced that the only way to get her life back to normal was
to read through the letters, get to know Victoria St. Onge as an
ordinary — if cunning — human being, and dismiss her from her
thoughts forever.

She was far less confident
about what to do with her amnesiac friend on the
Vineyard.

After plopping Susy down
under the watchful eye of the children's librarian, Liz squirreled
herself a few feet away in the Newport Room and began leafing
carefully through bound and yellowed copies of the
Newport Daily News,
beginning with the ones from early 1936. The crumbling
newspapers, with their simpler, gentler themes, were naturally
fascinating to Liz, a Newport native, but she made herself focus on
her mission: to find out when Victoria St. Onge died.