Time After Time (15 page)

She began walking to the
door, assuming that he'd take the hint. When he stood there,
apparently in disbelief, she repeated, "I'm
sorry."

Something in her tone got
through to him. He flushed deeply — whether in anger or
embarrassment, she couldn't say — and muttered, "I hope you
reconsider."

He got up and walked past
her, but when he reached the door, he suddenly turned to her with a
chilling look and whispered, "I really do."

She took a step back, then
watched through the front screen door as he climbed into a beat-up
red Volvo and made a four-point U-turn on the narrow, lane-size
street and tore out of there.

"He's pissed," said
Victoria evenly. "Did you get his license?"

"I never thought of it,"
Liz said with a sinking sensation. "All I know about him are two
syllables: Grant and Dade."

"He goes to Brown,"
Victoria added. "He must be all right."

Liz gave her friend a
sideways look. She hated it whenever money talked instead of common
sense. But there was no point in getting into
that
discussion again. For one
thing, Liz was well aware that she had a blue-collar chip on her
shoulder the size of Rhode Island. For another, she just didn't
have the time.

****

By eleven o'clock that
night, Liz felt reasonably confident that Jack Eastman wouldn't
kick her out of his boatyard office the following morning. The
proposal wasn't to die for; but at least the food would be good,
thanks to a last-minute cancelation that had freed up a favorite
caterer of hers. If only she knew what to do with the kids! Boat
rides were the obvious choice; but even she, a landlubber,
understood the liability complications that boat rides would create
for the shipyard.

She stretched at the
little Shaker desk that she'd set up for temporary office duty in
the kitchen, and yawned, tired beyond measure after the last few
nights. There would be no letter-reading tonight. She was sick of
Victoria St. Onge's outrageous handwriting, sick of the hassle that
the letters had brought into her life. In any case, she hadn't
found a single new allusion to the rakish younger-brother artist.
If he was so dashing, where the hell had he dashed off to? Liz
slumped in the near-dark of her desk-lit kitchen, too tired to
move, too weary to care.

Normally she loved a night
like this: thick, thick fog, with only the shrill, distant wail of
the warning siren on the Newport Bridge and the low, flat moan of
the foghorns in the harbor drifting through the window screens. But
tonight she wasn't altogether comfortable with the soupy silence;
it was more eerie-scary than eerie-neat. She wished she had Susy
with her, or Victoria staying over.

Dammit,
she thought.
I've let
that graduate twerp
get
to me.
She resented it
thoroughly. What right had he to force himself into her life? And
for what? So that he could add a few more footnotes to a piece of
writing that no one would ever read? She had a good mind to call
Brown the next day and complain to his department head.

She stood up, yawned
again, and surveyed the rubble from a day of last-ditch planning:
papers on the desk and floor, dirty dishes on the desk and floor,
and cookbooks and brochures everywhere. Liz was a tidy person by
nature (she had to be, to live in a house that small), but tidy was
the last thing on her mind right now.

Sleep, blessed
sleep
was her only thought as she turned
her back on the mess and dragged herself up the stairs. She brushed
her teeth, changed into a man's extra-large T-shirt, and went to
bed. In less than two minutes, with visions of picnic tables
dancing through her head, Liz fell fast asleep.

****

The sharp crack of one
dish against another was like the crack of lightning before a
squall. Liz jerked up on one elbow, eyes wide open, mind still off
in dreamland. Her first, irrational thought was that her mother was
fixing a snack for Susy. Her second, less irrational thought was
that it was awfully late for snacks.

Someone is in the
house.
It didn't seem possible. Intruders
were things that happened to other houses in other towns. Not
here!
Please,
she
prayed,
not here.

Then a second, sickening
sound, of someone bumping into furniture. And her without an
upstairs phone. A business phone in the basement, a home phone in
the kitchen, and zip-nada upstairs.
How
dumb, dumb, dumb can you get?

She had no Mace. Mace was
for those other houses in other towns. And she certainly had no
gun, not with a child in the house. If she were a witch, she could
maybe cast a spell, but her psychic skills seemed to have come and
gone.

The fakeout. It was all
she had. If you could repel an attacker with screams and shouts,
you ought to be able to do the same with a burglar on another
floor. Without taking the time to second-guess herself, Liz bolted
from the bed with a loud commotion, deliberately knocking things
over and screaming,
"Jim, Jim — call the
police! Get the gun! Do something!"
and
then began stomping down the stairs the way she imagined a
two-hundred-pound Jim would do.

It worked. Halfway down
the stairs, she heard the back door slam.

She paused, her heart
knocking wildly in her chest. Then, still working on instinct, she
ran to the back-door yard switch and threw it on, infusing the
thick wet fog outside with bleary white light. She was in time to
see a man — he certainly was no ghost — drop down on the other side
of the barbed-wire fence and flee, stumbling, into the murky
shadows on the grounds of East Gate.

She ran to the phone and
punched in the number of East Gate to rouse the house there. Jack
Eastman picked up on the first ring. His voice sounded annoyed,
which was understandable; it was one in the morning.

"Jack! Quick!" she said
without introducing herself. "Look out your windows for a burglar.
I just chased one out of my house!"

"Jesus! Call the police.
I'll be right over."

He slammed the receiver
down before Liz could argue with him. She was baffled by his
response; why rush to the barn after the horse had escaped? He
should be guarding his own homestead. She ran to the front windows
to wait for his car, and then, like a fool, ran barefoot out into
the street to look for red Volvos. The street was quiet, the houses
were dark; she lived on the kind of block where people had to get
up early and go to work, party town or no party town.

No Volvos. By now, Liz was
shivering violently, and not just because the fog was cold and
clammy: it was her first-ever bout with crime, except for the time
her watch got stolen from under her beach blanket. The charmed life
she'd been leading was officially over. She scurried back into her
still-dark house, another disillusioned, frightened
statistic.

When she saw the shadowy
figure looming in her kitchen again, she let out a scream that
could be heard all the way to her parents' house.

"Elizabeth, for God's sake
— it's me!" cried Jack, fumbling in the dark. "Where the hell is a
light switch around here?"

"
Oh —
Jack,"
she said, dizzy with relief. She pulled the chain of an old
glazed lamp that stood on the foyer table.

Apparently he'd just got
home; he was still dressed in gray trousers and a long-sleeved
white shirt. The shirt was spattered with blood.

She threw up her hands
involuntarily. "Oh my god, you've killed him!" she cried, by now
beyond the reach of simple logic.

"Are you all right?" he
said, reaching her in three long strides. He grabbed hold of her
arms with his bloody hands. "Did he hurt you?"

He was wearing a tie,
even. She'd never been rescued by a knight in shining business
clothes.

"No ... I was upstairs ...
he was an oaf ... he tripped ...." Her voice trailed off in
confusion as she stared at the dark stains on his crisp white
shirt.

She took hold of one of
his hands and turned it palm up. "Is this paint?" she asked in a
daze. She drew her fingers across the red sheen that covered the
palm. "Is this some kind of joke?" It
was
blood, of course; but she
thought she smelled turpentine, which confused her still more.
Nothing made sense. How had he gotten into the kitchen?

"I scratched myself
climbing over the barbed wire," he explained tersely. "C'mon. Sit
down. You're shaking like a paint mixer yourself." He wrapped one
arm around her and walked her to the wing chair, then sat her
gently down in it. "Don't lean back until I wipe that blood off
your arm," he said.

"Oh, thank you," she
answered with bizarre politeness, impressed by his
thoughtfulness.

He was on his way into the
kitchen, but he turned and gave her an appraising look. "I guess
the scare is sinking in. You look pretty pale for a dark-eyed
girl."

"No, no," she said.
"You're
the one who
scared me. When I saw you standing by the clock."

The clock, the paint, the
blood ...
wait—he's the wrong
one.

"Sorry about that," he
answered from the kitchen. "I banged on the back door, but no one
answered. I didn't know what ... anything could've happened to
you."

"I thought you were coming
by car," she called back over the running water. "I went out to
wait for you."

He came back into the
living room with a wet dish towel in his hands. "Dressed like
that?" he asked with a bland half-smile.

Liz looked down at the
extra-large T-shirt she was wearing — that was
all
she was wearing — and felt her
own blood do a U-turn from her feet back up to her face. She
slammed both hands down between her thighs, pinning the T-shirt to
the cushion, and slapped both thighs together in a gesture that was
more pointless than prim. "I forgot," she explained numbly. "I was
excited."

Again the half-smile.
"Aren't we both," he agreed, extricating one of her hands from the
viselike grip of her thighs. He sat down on the chair's tufted
hassock, rolled the sleeve of Liz's T-shirt back, and began wiping
her upper arm clean of blood drops.

Liz stared, fascinated, at
his ringless hand. It was callused and deeply tanned, in vivid
contrast to the starched whiteness of the French cuff of his shirt.
His nails were blunt and clean but were neither manicured nor
buffed; obviously he did honest-to-god labor when he wasn't wearing
pinstripes. He may have been rich, but he sure wasn't idle. It was
all very confusing.

"Other arm," he said, the
way a father might to his child. Liz held out her left arm
dutifully. Her heartbeat, which had finally slowed back to normal,
began to pick up the pace. He was so near. His hair, thick and dark
and with a few odd strands of gray, had that rumpled look she
associated with him.
Probably from trying
to pull it out with worry over the shipyard,
she decided.

He was shockingly
handsome. Liz wondered how he'd managed to stay unattached all
these years. He had to be really selfish or really picky, she
decided; there were no other possibilities. She stared intently at
his profile, with its shadow of a beard so vaguely familiar to her,
and wondered what he'd look like, say, wearing a ball
mask.

Jack glanced up and caught
her gaping at him. She said awkwardly, "You really are scratched
up. Aren't you worried about tetanus?"

He shrugged and held his
hands palms-up her for inspection: there were several scratches and
punctures, but the bleeding had stopped. "You own a boatyard, you
get regular booster shots," he said. "Puncture wounds and boatyards
go hand in hand."

She shuddered again, upset
by the thought of him gripping the barbed wire. He said, "You'll
want to put something on; the police should be here any
second."

"The police? I didn't call
the police," she said blankly.

"What?"

"1 saw the guy running; he
wasn't carrying anything. And you were on your way; it never
occurred to me."

"Oh, for God's sake," he
said in disgust. "Where's the phone?"

Chastened, she pointed to
her little Shaker desk and waited while he made the very brief
call. After that he made a second call.

"Dad?" she heard him say.
"Anything?" He listened and then said, "All right. Put the alarm
on. I'll be back in a while .... No, we haven't spoken to them yet;
she didn't call them .... How do
I
know why not? Maybe she believes in guardian
angels .... Yeah. Bye."

He hung up and surveyed
the mess around the desk. His cheeks were flushed; obviously he'd
had time to work himself into a snit.

"Look at this place," Jack
said angrily. "The guy tossed it. How the hell are you so sure
nothing's missing?"

"He
didn't toss it," said Liz, embarrassed.
"I
did. That's how I work. And it's
a good thing, too. If he hadn't stepped into my dishes, who knows
how far he'd have gotten?"