Time After Time (21 page)

There was no easy way to
tell. With only him, her, and the antique yacht in her field of
vision, Liz was unable to say which of their time zones was being
breached. She tore her gaze away from him: the first thing she saw
was a silver Lexus parked nearby. Liz was never so glad to see a
status symbol in her life. It meant she might be hallucinatory, but
at least she wasn't leaping freely through time and
space.

She turned back to the
vision, but it was gone.

She stood there, fierce
and attentive, listening for the chime-sound. But it was over.
Feeling oddly desolate and more rubbery-legged than ever, Liz
turned and retraced her footsteps to the office. Jack was gone, and
so was Cornelius. Only Susy remained, backpack at her feet, under
the watchful eye of the shipyard secretary.

****

"It's the sex. The sex is
just ... so ...
good,"
Victoria told Liz after she got back from Block Island. Dr.
Ben had been there, just as Liz suspected, and a truce between
Victoria and him had been declared.

"Of course, we declared it
in bed, so who knows how long it'll last? But he promised not to
keep looking for the me behind the me," Victoria said. "He promised
to accept me at face value."

Liz whacked off a stray
sprig of privet with her hedge clippers and said, "If your Dr. Ben
really does that, he's a better man than most."

"Tsk, tsk," said Victoria,
bending over for a handful of cut branches to stuff in the recycle
bag. "We're sounding bitter today."

"Yeah, well, blame it on
the fact that you're getting some and I'm not," Liz said. Really,
it was ridiculous, the hunger she was feeling. Where had it come
from? She was as restless and irritable as a caged cat.

"Anyway, I meant what I
said," Liz continued. "Men go at this mating thing differently from
women. Women — most of us — have only the vaguest idea of what we
want. We say, 'Okay, this guy's not perfect, but he's not a bad
compromise, either. He'll do.'

"But a
man —
a
man
draws up a precise list: big boobs, blond hair, good dancer, flashy
dresser, whatever. The sensitive ones maybe would like her to have
an intellectual side — in other words, know a little about sports.
So that they can share the Super Bowl together," Liz added with a
dry smile. "Then, if the man doesn't find an exact match, he has an
excuse for not making a commitment."

Victoria blinked and said,
"Is that how you picked Keith? You said, 'He'll do'?"

"You bet," Liz said with
brutal candor. "And he would've done, too, if he hadn't run away.
But then, 'baby' wasn't on his list."

"You never loved
him?"

"I guess not," Liz said
grimly, moving her ladder to the next section of untrimmed privet.
"Or I would've been able to keep him, baby and all."

"But you said yourself
that 'baby' wasn't on his list. I mean, family just wasn't his
thing. He was more selfish than that. He's probably standing guard
over some marijuana patch in northern California, even as we
speak!"

Liz laughed and said, "You
think maybe that's why I couldn't trace him for child support?
Because he's not paying tax on his income?"

"You
never
loved him?" Victoria
repeated.

"I thought I did," Liz
confessed in a whisper. "But I was so young."

"They're not all like
him," Victoria said, hauling the brown bag out to the curb. "Jack
Eastman isn't."

"Jack!"
cried Liz after her. "He has the longest, most
specific list of all! You're the one who told me he's already
sampled everyone on Bellevue Avenue."

Victoria cringed and made
a shushing sound. She came back and in a lowered voice said, "I
think in his case it's a good thing, not a bad, that he hasn't
married yet. Obviously he could find himself a gorgeous socialite
who'd jump at the chance to be his wife. So he must be looking for
love as well."

"Well, bless his heart. I
hope he finds his perfect package."

"I've seen the way he
looks at you," Victoria said evenly. Liz blushed and said, "Yes.
The same way I look at a hot fudge sundae." She whacked silently at
the straggly privet for a minute or two, then climbed back down the
ladder and folded it shut.

"There's definitely
something there when we're alone," she admitted as she laid the
ladder against the mud shed. "The trouble is, it's the wrong
something."

"Love has to start
somewhere," Victoria said, impatient now. "Give him a chance.
You're letting one bad experience define your whole
life!"

Liz turned to her friend
with a sad, surprised look and said, "You aren't?"

The arrow hit its mark.
Victor a colored a vivid pink. Liz had never done that before,
thrown Victoria's amnesia in her face.

"Let's talk about
something else," Victoria said, obviously hurt. "Any word about our
graduate student?"

"Ah — I haven't told you!"
said Liz, glad for the diversion. "Grant Dade came into the
station, and yes, he
did
have scratches on his hands. But he claimed he
got them hiking, which was plausible enough."

"Did he go hiking with
anyone who could corroborate that?"

"Nope," said Liz. "I
gather he was amazed and angered by the questioning. Apparently he
charged a gas fill-up in New Hampshire, but he can't produce the
Visa slip. They're looking into that now."

"So no lineup or
anything?"

"Nobody mentioned that.
It'll be just my luck that he's really innocent but pissed off
enough to come back and make trouble for me."

"If he's innocent, then
who stole the letters? And why?" Victoria mulled it over for a
moment, then said, "For someone with no men in your life, you sure
have a lot of men in your life."

Liz flashed to the
afterdeck of the
Déjà Vu.
"Tori," she said, "you don't know the half of
it."

"R-i-p-e-n? I'll look it
up," said the official who answered Liz's call to the Adult
Correctional Institute. He didn't even have to put her on hold; the
computer was too fast to bother.

"Nope," he said, "he
doesn't show up. He's either dead or discharged. I can find out for
you, but the request will have to go through the archives in
Providence. It'll be a couple of weeks."

It was a disappointment.
Liz wanted to find out what happened to Victoria St. Onge's
murderer, and she wanted to find out
now.
She wasn't sure why it
mattered; maybe she wanted to know for poor Tori's sake. She
declined the official's offer and decided, instead, to play a
hunch.

It paid off. In the
Newport City Clerk's office she learned that — however long he'd
been at the state penitentiary — Johnny Ripen had ended up coming
back to Newport. He died nine years ago, when he was seventy-one
years old.

So the murdering gigolo
had passed on. If Liz had had any wild ideas of finding out what he
knew about the woman he'd conned and then killed over half a
century ago, those hopes were dashed forever. Morbidly curious now,
Liz drove the few short blocks back to the library and looked up
the date of Johnny Ripen's death in the
Daily News
obituaries, half
expecting to find out that he died in royal splendor in some big
estate on Bellevue Avenue.

Wrong again. Johnny Ripen
was found dead under a cherry tree in the Common Burying Ground,
which was a favorite gathering place for drunks and disreputables.
It was as good a choice as any: None of the colonists, Indians, and
slaves who were buried there were likely to complain about
rowdiness.

****

When she got home, Liz
telephoned Victoria to tell her what she'd found.

"The police speculated
that Johnny Ripen either cut his own wrist or got into a fight over
the broken bottle of vodka they found lying in his lap."

"How horrible," Victoria
said, truly shocked. "If he was drunk, and he probably was, he
wouldn't even have known he was bleeding to death."

"I checked with Detective
Gilbert. The police never did make a case for murder. I'm surprised
I don't remember the episode. But I was living in Middletown then;
I suppose it just got past me."

There was a thoughtful
silence at the other end of the line. Then Victoria asked in a low
and apprehensive voice, "Do we have any idea where Victoria St.
Onge is buried?"

"Don't be theatrical," Liz
said all too quickly. "There was nothing supernatural about Johnny
Ripen's death. It was a predictable end to a wasted
life."

"If so, it's the only
predictable thing that's happened so far. I'm frightened, Liz. It
was exciting at first, the letters and all — but now I'm
scared."

"Well, don't be," Liz said
with a reassurance she did not feel. "Come over tonight. We'll have
a cookout. Bring along your Dr. Ben. It's high time I met the
man."

Victoria agreed, and Liz
hung up, more uneasy now than ever.
Were
these bizarre events connected?
Was someone, somewhere administering a kind of rough justice every
once in a while as the world went spinning around? Or was
everything — the deaths, the visions, the box, the letters, the
pin— simply the clutter and mess of life itself, with Liz
desperately looking for a pattern, trying to impose some kind of
order and meaning on it all.

It would be so nice if she
knew.

In any case, that world
was spinning plenty fast at the moment; Liz had no idea when she'd
find the time to squeeze in a cookout. It wasn't as if Jack
Eastman's company picnic were all arranged, or the back-to-back
weddings over and done with. Tomorrow alone she had three meetings
with potential clients. Not to mention, her new landlord had moved
hell and high water to make her office ready for occupancy; the
least she could do was to occupy it.

Liz spent the rest of the
day on the phone with florists, bands, jugglers, mimes, and
minstrels, then dashed out at five to pick up steaks and hot dogs
and some ready-made salads. By the time Victoria arrived with her
beloved internist, Liz was in a darn good mood: she'd mixed up a
pitcher of rum punch and had helped herself to an icy tall glass of
it. Suddenly her life was seeming a lot more manageable. After all,
it was a beautiful summer night in Newport. Thousands of people
were in town expressly to have fun. Why shouldn't she be one of
them?

Dr. Ben turned out to be a
charmer. Shorter than Victoria, with dark, quizzical eyes and a
self-deprecating wit, he had Liz in his corner in no time at
all.

"So you're the lady with
the letters," he said with a nudge at Victoria. "The letters that
hold the key to my lady's heart. And soul. So to speak."

"Ben!" cried Victoria.
"You promised!"

"Yeah, I know," he said,
pulling up a chaise longue close to the barbecue. "But this way we
don't spend the evening waiting for that particular shoe to drop.
Madame?" he said to his belle with a flourish. "Will you
sit?"

"I never should have told
you," said Victoria, pouting prettily. She arranged herself in the
chaise, a picture of otherworldly elegance in a longish white
sundress trimmed in crochet. She wore a hat, of course: a
small-brimmed affair of crushed linen with big silk cabbage roses
sewn to the band. Liz, wearing dress jeans and a V-necked T-shirt
of bright coral, felt positively frumpy.

And very much like a third
wheel. Ben pulled a resin chair up close to Victoria and — when he
wasn't making pleasant, amusing conversation about the trials and
tribulations of his practice — was dropping light kisses on
Victoria's shoulder or idly rubbing the back of her
neck.

Now
he
has
the
hands of an artist,
Liz thought ruefully.
She thought of Jack Eastman's hands, callused from his work at the
shipyard. But then, remembering his touch, she had to admit: Jack
had the hands of an artist, too.

Suddenly she decided to
wallow in her rum punch. Victoria had someone, a very nice someone
indeed, while Liz had ... no one. Where was the justice in it?
Rich, pretty, tall Victoria had a whole new life ahead of her—but
Liz? What did Liz have to look forward to? Making sure that other
rich, pretty, tall people enjoyed happy birthdays, wonderful
weddings, joyful holidays, and — if she ever got that far —
successful fund-raisers.

Some entrepreneur. She was
in
service,
plain
and simple. Just like her laundress grandmother and her gardener
father. Maybe it ran in the genes. There had to be
some
reason that she'd
never gone into, say, banking. She stole another peek at Ben and
Victoria. Yes. She could see them married, with children, shopping
for a summer place on the Vineyard.

Oh, who cares?
she thought, pouring herself another rum punch.
She had a delightful house with a year-round view, enough money for
the mortgage, and a daughter who made every minute of life worth
living. She gazed through a fond, rum-soaked haze at Susy, sitting
at her minitable with her waterpaints and her artist's pad, humming
a happy, inane little tune.