Time After Time (38 page)

Ignoring her sarcasm, he
stayed focused on the story. "Where does Victoria St. Onge fit
in?"

Liz shrugged and took a
swallow of her tea. "She felt that by interfering in Christopher's
party plans, she'd manipulated his destiny. She was a spiritualist,
don't forget. She dabbled."

"Okay, fair enough," he
allowed "But where do
you
fit in? Why is Christopher Eastman appearing to
you and not, say, to me?"

Was he being sarcastic?
This time she couldn't tell.

Liz wasn't ready to
confess that she was Ophelia's great-great-granddaughter, and so
she simply said, "I'm the one who found the letters."

"Yes, you did find them,
didn't you?" said Jack, obviously seizing on a new line of
reasoning. "And they sound like damned lively reading."

"Some of it."

"With lots of detail.
Sure. It makes sense. You're a creative, imaginative woman, Liz.
How hard could it be for you to conjure up the ghost of Christopher
Eastman on the basis of those letters?"

She let out a caustic
laugh.
"There's
a
left-handed compliment if I ever heard one. Anyway, don't you think
I've thought of that possibility? But I saw Christopher Eastman by
your grandfather clock before I read a single letter. It's true
that Tori had discovered them and was reading through them at the
very moment I saw him — but unless she and I shared the information
telepathically, I don't see how I could have conjured up an
artist—"

"How could you tell he was
an artist, anyway?"

Liz described the stained,
loose-fitting shirt he wore: how at first she thought the stains
were blood but later realized that the shirt was a smock and the
smears were paint.

Jack wasn't convinced. He
went up to the windows, threw open the painted shutters, and stared
out at the distant harbor, working through the problem. "You were
in the grand entry hall of an old dark house with a Gothic
interior," he mused, thinking aloud. "You were
ready
to see a ghost. The ghost of
choice is of a murderer; everyone knows that. So you saw blood; you
inferred evil."

He turned around to Liz
with a look of obvious relief on his face. "Later, when you found
out about Christopher Eastman and that he was an artist, you
tweaked your vision to fit the new information. Your so-called
ghost wasn't a murderer at all; he was an artist.
Simple!"

"Simple!
You're
the one who's
simple!" she said, exploding. "Do you think I
like
believing what I'm seeing,
Jack? I'm telling you: Christopher Eastman
exists!
In some way, in some form,
for some reason! There are two many facts, too many coincidences —
dammit!"

She slammed her teacup on
the nightstand, spilling tea on the appliquéd linen, then stood up
and stepped into her skirt, still lying like a nest on the rag rug.
As far as she was concerned, this party was
over.

Jack let out an
exasperated curse and said, "Don't you get it? Don't you see that
I'm trying to come up with a plausible theory to prove
that—"

"I'm not crazy? Forget it,
Jack," she said, her cheeks hot with anger. "That ship has
sailed."

She began to dress,
fumbling with the hooks and eyes on the skirt with no success
whatever, then was forced to go through the minor humiliation of
stepping back out of the skirt, walking over to the bureau, opening
a drawer, taking out a pair of shorts, and slipping into them
instead. All of this was done in stony silence in a room too small
to contain two people in love, much less two people at
war.

When she was finished, she
picked up Jack's discarded clothes and handed them to
him.

"What're these?" he said,
snorting. "My marching orders?"

She didn't know. She
honestly didn't know. All she knew was that Susy was in Disney
World and that they were blowing the best damned opportunity she'd
had in five years.

"Is the fund-raiser still
on?" she asked, ignoring his question for one of her
own.

He looked bewildered by
her detour. "Of course it's on," he said, pulling the T-shirt over
his head. "The fund-raiser is
business.
This is—"

"Pleasure?" she said
sorrowfully. "I don't think so."

Something in her tone of
voice made his anger melt visibly. "Okay, what we're doing
now
isn't much fun," he
said, taking her in his arms. "But we can deal with this,
Elizabeth. Truly. You're not the first impressionable person who's
seen something she can't explain," he said softly into her ear.
"The good news is, there's no logical reason for Christopher
Eastman to be appearing to you."

He pulled his head back
and looked down at her, anticipating her next crack. "Or is that
the bad news?"

Liz sighed and said,
"Neither. It's just not true. There
is
a logical reason for him to be
appearing to me."

She hadn't wanted to tell
him about Ophelia, but now she saw she had no choice. Her
credibility — such as it was — was on the line. She led him
silently downstairs where the oil portrait of Ophelia Ryan Pinhel
stood leaning against the side of the sofa.

"I haven't figured out
where to hang it yet," Liz said, handing him the ornately framed
painting.

Jack accepted it with a
puzzled look that disappeared at once when he saw the portrait.
"This was painted by Christopher Eastman," he said quietly.
"Ophelia?"

"Yes. She was my
great-great-grandmother."

"My God."

Obviously stunned, he
seemed to take refuge in the portrait, studying it closely as he
gathered his thoughts. "You're nothing alike," he said at
last.

He was the expert, she
thought, blushing at the memory of their lovemaking; he ought to
know. "Ophelia was pure Irish. I have more Portuguese blood than I
do Irish."

"Where did you get the
painting?"

"It came down through my
family and ended up in my parents' attic. I remember it from when I
was a child. It was the first racy picture I'd ever
seen."

Jack smiled at that, then
returned to an examination of the reclining nude swathed in a
paisley shawl. Liz could see that he was practically willing it to
speak to him. He seemed to be racking his memory for mentions of
Ophelia in the family history, but it was clear that he was coming
up dry.

"So tell me about this
Ophelia."

This Ophelia.
Again!

"Her affair with
Christopher Eastman caused a great scandal in my family. After he
abandoned her," Liz said, choosing the brutal verb deliberately, "a
Portuguese shoemaker named Pinhel took pity on her and made an
honest woman of her. We think."

"God in heaven," Jack
muttered. He let out a short, bleak laugh of disgust. "History
repeats itself."

Liz was thinking of her
ex-husband: of the note he left on the kitchen table; of his flight
from commitment. "I'm perfectly aware that history repeats itself,"
she said coldly. "You don't have to remind me of it."

Jack looked up, puzzled.
Then it dawned on him that they were on different wavelengths.
Coloring, he said, "I was talking about myself, Liz. And my father.
And his father. And now Christopher Eastman. About our amazing
inability to stick with one woman. The Eastman curse," he said,
more to himself than to her.

"Curse? What curse? You
sound like a vampire," Liz said impatiently as she took the
painting back. "I've got news for you, Jack: That particular men's
club has a very large membership."

She laid the painting up
against the side of the sofa, sorry that she'd let her bitterness
show. He was who he was. They all were.

When she turned around,
more composed now, Jack said gently, "This is a painful subject —
for each of us. Why don't we put it aside for now?"

"True," she said, her
voice catching in her throat. "We have so many other painful things
we can talk about."

"Stop, Liz. Painful or
not, they need to be talked about. What we need now is—"

"Some space. Please, Jack.
I need to be by myself. For now, anyway." She looked at him with
tense, pleading eyes.

"I understand."

Liz wondered if he was
thinking,
Hell, I don't
have a condom anyway.
She was appalled by her own cynicism; it was getting worse,
not better.

Jack touched his
fingertips to her lips, still puffy from their lovemaking, and
smiled an almost unbearably kind smile. "You'll be all right here
alone?"

"For sure," she said in a
carefree lie. It was an impossible situation: She couldn't sleep
with him, she wouldn't sleep without him. But she looked at the
clock and feigned a yawn, trying to make it easy for him to leave.
"Ten-thirty. Where does the time go?"

They walked to the door
together, carefully avoiding the subject of his people and hers,
and discussed the fund-raiser instead. They decided that it would
be Liz who would approach the executive director of Anne's Place;
Jack would be available by phone if needed. It was all very
businesslike, all very free of emotion. It set the tone for his
farewell at the threshold.

"Good night, Elizabeth,"
he said as she stood inside with her hand on the doorknob. He
turned to go, then suddenly turned back and gave her a fleeting,
almost furtive kiss. "Good night."

After that, Liz showered,
then went to bed, utterly exhausted and unable to think, unable,
almost, to feel. She was dropping off to sleep when a forgotten
sensation slid like a snake through the clutter of her thoughts:
she remembered that when she and Jack were saying good night, she'd
had the distinct and entirely creepy sense that there was someone
in the shadows, watching them.

Liz rose at dawn. She was
restless, almost punchy, from the events of the day before. There
was much to plan, much to think about. And she wanted to do it on
Cliff Walk, with the sound of the ocean in her ears and the taste
of salt on her lips.

Cliff Walk — a thin
asphalt path between the mansions and the ocean, scarred and
battered by countless storms and hurricanes — was so much a part of
her life that Liz scarcely thought about it, any more than she
thought about the air in her lungs or the blood in her
veins.

Liz was a Newporter, and
Cliff Walk belonged to Newporters — all Newporters. Centuries of
trekking along the rocky cliffs had made the path theirs, never
mind what the deeds to the mansions said. (Every once in a while
over the last century or so, some mansion owner would try a little
funny business by extending his fence across the path, sparking a
hue and cry second only to the Boston Tea Party. The rich got away
with a lot in Newport, but not with highway robbery.)

Liz walked along the path
almost alone, every one of her senses alive to the profound beauty
of the place. A robin pierced the air with its absurdly upbeat call
of
cheer-up-cheerily,
while the sea — older, wiser, sadder — answered with a slow,
mournful sigh as it ebbed and flowed over the rocky shore below. To
the north of her, half a dozen sea gulls wheeled and darted in a
midair brawl over a half-eaten fish.

Through a break in the
brush growing along a stretch of chain-link fence, Liz was startled
to see a fox standing bold and alert in the middle of a mansion's
lawn.

Lucky you,
she thought.
A hundred
years ago they would've hunted you down here for fun.

The fox became aware of
her. With a flick of his red bushy tail, he trotted off.

How did he pick up my
scent over the rugosa?
she wondered. The
smell of the bright pink blossoms was intense, driving out even the
briny tang of the sea.

She walked on, leaving the
fox, the roses, the sea gulls behind, wishing she wasn't walking
alone.

Did Jack ever stroll on
Cliff Walk?
Probably not. Why would he,
when he could be invited to any one of the estates and gaze at the
sea from a higher vantage? No, Cliff Walk was strictly for the hoi
polloi like her.

She came to the legendary
Forty Steps, restored after a generation of neglect, and stopped to
peer over the low stone wall at the forty granite slabs that led to
the rocky shore below. In the old days, she knew, the spot was a
popular rendezvous for the lower-tier servants of the nearby
mansions. Vanderbilt maids and Astor footmen once dallied and
danced to concertinas here in their rare free time.

Ophelia Ryan had no doubt
dallied and danced here, too. Why hadn't she married some nice
young footman, or maybe a valet? What was the point of setting her
sights on Christopher Eastman? Liz thought about her own kindred
stupidity and smiled wryly.
History
repeats itself
Jack had said. And by golly
if he wasn't right.