Time After Time (43 page)

"God," she said to Jack,
"you must've really clobbered him."

"You're the one who got
clobbered," said Jack in a shaky voice. He helped her to her feet.
"How do you feel?"

She rubbed the back of her
head. "Ow-ow," she said, wincing. "Okay, I guess." She was alive.
That was all she cared about. But why did her jaw hurt?

The paramedics were there
now, too, although she hadn't seen them come in. They looked Liz
over and asked her questions. Liz knew her name, the day of the
week, and how to count backward from ten, but they wanted to take
her to the emergency room anyway.

"No!" she said
impatiently. "Absolutely not. I'm fine. I'm just
— pissed,
that's
all."

She watched with loathing
as the police cuffed the derelict — whom they obviously knew — and
read him his rights before they took him and the recovered knife
away. The detective from the Grant Dade case arrived before they
left and talked in the street with the arresting officers, then
came and asked Liz if she felt in shape to come to the station and
make a statement.

"Whatever it takes to keep
him behind bars," she said grimly.

Detective Gilbert nodded
in agreement, then hesitated and said, "Here's something you might
find interesting, Mrs. Coppersmith. The perpetrator has scars on
his hands and forearms that appear to be recent."

"Does
he?" said Liz. She looked at Jack and sighed. "Okay, so it
wasn't Grant Dade the other time. So sue me."

Jack gave her a complex
look that made her heart, tired as it was, beat a little bit
faster.

Eventually the
professionals left, the neighbors retreated, and Liz, who'd been
doing her best to look spunky for everyone, collapsed on the sofa
before her legs gave out altogether. She closed her eyes, then
opened them again instantly. There was no peace in darkness.
Perhaps there never would be again.

Jack came in from outside
and sat down next to her. "How did I not see this coming?" he said
in a voice of bitter self-reproach. "Obviously — once the grad
student was cleared — I should have figured out that someone was
still running around with an uncompleted agenda."

Liz said tiredly, "What
does he want with the letters? That's what I want to know." But she
didn't want to know, not really. She never wanted to think about
him or his motives again. She shuddered at the recollection of him
on top of her. "I have to take a shower first," she said in numb
tones. "Then we can go."

"Oh, sweetheart, oh, Liz,"
said Jack, embracing her.

She pulled violently away.
"No! He made me so—filthy. I don't want him to be passed on to
you."

"But I don't
care—"

"Jack!" she said, nearing
hysteria. "Just let me do this! Let me get him
off
me!"

"Okay, I'm sorry ...
darling, I'm so, so sorry."

"I know, I know; I'll be
fine. It's going to take a little while, that's all," she said
stoically. She stood up and began heading for the bathroom, then
turned and said to Jack, "Who is he? Obviously they know
him."

"Eddy Wragg? Yeah. He's a
vagrant. He's been in and out of Newport over the last few years.
They had a warrant out for him for breaking and entering. There's
more. I'll tell you later, if you want."

"I'm not sure I will," she
confessed. "Will you stay tonight after we get back?" she added.
"I'd rather not be alone."

"Do you think wild horses
could tear me away?"

It occurred to her that if
he had gotten there on time, none of this would've happened. It
wasn't a kind thought, but life was looking a little unkind to Liz
just then. She said with pointed politeness, "How did things work
out with your investors?"

"Oh, them," he said. "They
ended up lost in the shuffle. We had a fire."

"What?"

"A small one. It looks
like arson.
That
sent chills up their spines, I can tell you. Everything's on
hold for the moment. Anyway, go shower. We'll talk
afterward."

She threw her arms out,
palms up, in a gesture of bewilderment. "Are the planets out of
kilter or something?" she asked plaintively.

Then she mounted the
stairs to the bathroom, reliving every single step of her trauma as
she did it.

****

After a shower and two
shampoos, Liz felt decent enough to get on with the process of
putting away Eddy Wragg. She dressed in jeans and a shirt, then
went downstairs where Jack was waiting for her.

"All set?" he asked,
watching her with a certain wariness.

"Almost." She dropped to
her knees, flattened her cheek to the floor, and began looking
under all the furniture. "Ah. There it is," she said, reaching
under the skirted slipper-chair for her canister of
Mace.

She tucked it into her
purse. "Until I get a burglar alarm installed," she said in a
steely voice, "and a gun, and Mace for every room,
this
stays by my
side."

Jack had a simple
four-word response to all that: "You have a child."

It pricked her resolve
like a pin in a balloon. "Oh, God, that's right. I can't surround
my daughter with weapons."

"You don't have to
surround your daughter with weapons, Liz. Wragg's in jail," Jack
reminded her. He watched her lock the front door, then check it
twice. "You're safe now."

"But for how long?" she
said as they walked to his car. "He knows I have the letters. He
wants the letters." She could feel her voice rising, her throat
constricting. "Sooner or later, he will be back
,"
she said shrilly.

She heard an upstairs
window slam in a neighbor's house. It was pretty obvious that she
was wearing out her welcome on the quiet, tucked-away
street.

"He
won't
be back," Jack said firmly.
"He's going to do time. And we'll make sure he knows that you've
donated the letters, or given them to me for safekeeping, or any of
a dozen scenarios. He will not be back, Elizabeth."

They were in his car now.
Jack turned the key; the Mercedes sprang discreetly to life.
Reassured by Jack's tone, Liz leaned back on the leather headrest,
grateful to be in his care. She hadn't done that for a long time —
given herself up for safekeeping to someone else. It felt
good.

"What did you learn about
Wragg?" she asked reluctantly.

"You remember that
research you did on the guy who murdered Victoria St. Onge? The
young gigolo who lived with her, then killed her and got sent up
for manslaughter?"

"Johnny Ripen? Sure I
remember. After he got out of ACI, he came back to Newport. He died
about ten years ago; I think he was seventy-something at the time.
The police found him, bled to death, under a cherry tree in the
Burying Ground."

"Right. You told me his
wrist was cut open on a broken vodka bottle and that the cops never
made a case for it being a murder."

"I can see why," she said,
reflecting on the scene. "The obvious clue —fingerprints on the
bottle — would be no clue at all if the victim happened to be a
derelict sitting in a graveyard and passing around a bottle to
other—"

The little light bulb went
on at last. "Eddy Wragg? Eddy Wragg knew Johnny Ripen?"

"Bingo," said Jack.
"Detective Gilbert told me that for a while the two were as thick
as thieves get. The cops knew both men well. Johnny Ripen used to
be arrested routinely for petty stuff — drunk and disorderly,
urinating in public, that kind of thing. But Wragg was a younger,
more ambitious bum. He got caught at bigger crimes: breaking and
entering, assault, and a mugging."

"And yet here he is, right
back out on the street. Oh, boy. I'd better donate those letters to
someone real quick," Liz said nervously.

Jack reached over and took
her hand in his. "We'll work this through. I promise. Anyway," he
said, "until tonight Detective Gilbert never was able to figure out
why someone like Wragg would have bothered with an old geezer like
Johnny Ripen."

"Victoria St. Onge?" Liz
ventured.

"Exactly. Gilbert
remembered her name from when he investigated Johnny Ripen's
death."

"It does seem more than
coincidental."

"When you were showering,
I got to thinking: By the time Johnny Ripen — still a good-looking
gigolo, presumably — latched on to Victoria St. Onge, she would've
been pretty old, probably senile if she let him under her roof. She
would've had money, jewelry, securities. Maybe it was all buried in
her backyard somewhere. She had a big place by then on Kay Street.
Maybe Johnny Ripen got sent away before he could dig any of it
up."

"Maybe pigs can fly," Liz
said dolefully. "Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say Johnny
Ripen reminisced in his old age to Eddy Wragg about Victoria St.
Onge. Ripen tells Wragg how he was
this
close
to getting his hands on Victoria's
money," she said, pressing her forefinger to her thumb. "And then,
one dark night in the graveyard, they argue about something stupid,
and Wragg kills the old man."

"And then suppose, ten
years later, Wragg sees the article in the paper about the trunk of
St. Onge's letters that you found in your attic."

"So? What does Wragg think
is in her letters? A treasure map?"

Liz could see, by the dim
lights of the dashboard, that Jack was smiling. "Damned straight.
Why not?"

"I've read all of the
letters, except for some of the ones Wragg stole. There is no
treasure map."

"Maybe it's in
code."

"Oh, come on." She closed
her eyes — saw her attacker — and opened them again. "I don't get
it. I do not get it."

Her thoughts ebbed and
flowed around the night's events. Suddenly she felt a surge of
adrenaline.

What if Susy had been home
tonight? My God. What if she'd been home?

She wanted desperately to
think about something else.

"The fire! Good lord,
Jack, you haven't said anything about it!"

"Lady, lady," he said,
laughing softly. "One crisis at a time. Anyway, we're here," he
said, turning left off Broadway and parking in front of the
red-brick station.

"Should I tell Detective
Gilbert about our theory? Or will he think it's too
goofy?"

"Yes, and yes," said Jack.
"If he doesn't want to take notes, he doesn't have to."

****

By the time they got back
from the station, there wasn't a whole lot left to their third and
last night together. Not that it mattered. The last thing in the
world Liz wanted was to have someone on top of her.

"I guess your disasters
and my disasters aren't related," she said in a dull, used-up
voice.

"Not unless Wragg is evil
incarnate."

That's just what she
thought he was. "Jack ... oh, Jack," she murmured into his shoulder
as they sat in the dark in the engulfing softness of her prized
down-cushioned sofa. "I was terrified. If I weren't so exhausted, I
still would be terrified."

"I know," he said
soothingly as he smoothed her hair away from her face. "I
know."

"What will I do? How will
I get over this?" she asked in a voice that was bleak with
despair.

"Time ... give it time,"
he murmured, holding her close.

"But Susy comes home
tomorrow," she protested in a tired, aching voice.

"Exactly. Susy comes home
tomorrow."

****

The next morning, Liz
learned from Detective Gilbert that the police were getting a
warrant to search the room Wragg was staying in at the local
shelter. They expected to find the stolen letters and hopefully
some clue to Eddy Wragg's deadly interest in the ones that Liz
possessed.

"Can I have the stolen
letters back after you look at them?" she asked the detective,
knowing full well what the answer would be.

He apologized and said
they'd be kept for evidence.

"Can I at least read
through them myself'? I never got the chance, before they were
stolen. I'd be willing to stay under someone's watchful
eye."

"I'll see what I can do,
Mrs. Coppersmith," the detective said. "But don't worry. You'll get
them back safe and sound."

So that was that. In the
meantime, Liz had a fund-raiser to launch. She had taken advantage
of a completely unexpected lull (back-to-back broken-off weddings)
to draft the working committees to handle decorations, publicity,
and tickets.

Victoria had, with her
usual enthusiasm, volunteered to be on all three committees, but
Liz managed to confine her to what she did best —decorations, which
included helping design the invitations. Dr. Ben, who'd been
shanghaied for various charity events from time to time, was
willing to write and distribute the press releases. (Liz agreed to
sign him up on condition that he absolutely, positively avoided the
subject of psychotherapy until after the event was
over.)