Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (31 page)

 
          
Gently,
Ferguson
explained, “Lady Beatrice’s home, Romney
Hall, is, uh, rather extensive.”

 
          
“I
guess it must be,” Mercer said, looking more carefully at this dotty old lady.

 
          
“We
shall maintain security,” the dotty old lady said, rubbing her shagreen hands
together in plotter’s satisfaction, “by not informing your guests of the change
in plans until the very last moment. Once they’ve arrived on the island, we’ll
redirect them to the site of the happy occasion.”

 
          
“Yeah,
but right there’s the snag,” Mercer said, grimacing and shaking his head and
automatically looking out at the damn yacht in the damn offing, even though
he’d
sworn
to himself he would never
look at that ship or acknowledge its presence ever again. “The press is all
over this island like maggots on a dead horse,” he said. “Any move I make,
they’ll know it in a second.”

 
          
“Ah,
but we are prepared for these maggots,” Lady Beatrice said, and smiled with
approval on Mercer, saying, “How my late husband would have enjoyed you. He too
had a colorful way with a phrase.”

 
          
Ferguson
said, “We have a van without side windows
that we use for picking up supplies at the airport. We can get you into that,
with your luggage, absolutely unseen. On your way toward the airport, the van
will turn off on
Pohoganut Road
as though the driver had to—excuse me, Lady
Beatrice—relieve himself. One of Lady Beatrice’s limousines will be there to
pick you up.”

 
          
“The
one with the side curtains and the little Venetian blinds in back,” Lady
Beatrice added.

 
          
“By
the time the press finds out where you are,”
Ferguson
assured them, “you will be man and wife.
And may you have long years of happiness, contentment and privacy.”

 
          
“Hear
hear,” Lady Beatrice said.

 
          
“Gone?”
Jack cried, like a mortally
wounded yak.
“Gone?
They can’t be
gone!”

 
          
It
had been Don Grove’s sad task to bring this unhappy news to command center late
that afternoon, a duty that did nothing to lift his normal cloud of pessimism.
“They’re gone,” he repeated. “Disappeared without a trace. The manager had a
lot of fun with it, let me know the

 
          
Galaxy
could rent that suite for as long
as we want. Eleven hundred dollars a day.”

 
          
“You
took it, of course,” Jack said.

 
          
“Sure
I took it,” Don agreed. “But they won’t let me in until the maid’s done. Really
done.
I don’t suppose she’ll leave
anything.”

 
          
Ida
and Sara, the latter still looking mostly like a trauma victim, came over to
the scene of the disturbance, Ida saying, “What’s up?”

 
          
“The
love birds have flown,” Jack explained, with bottomless bitterness.

 
          
“Impossible,”
Ida said. “We’re all over them like acne. We’ve got stringers hanging from
their ears.”

 
          
Sara’s
attention, too, had been fairly caught, for the first time today. “Gone?” she
echoed. “Gone where?”

 
          
“That
is the question, all right,” Jack agreed.

           
“Gosh,” Sara said. “They wouldn’t
try to leave the island, would they?”

           
“Leave?” Jack stared madly around
the command center. “Leave
Martha’s Vineyard
? You mean, when the love birds fly, they fly?”

 
          
“There’s
no more flights out today,” Ida said.

           
“There’s such a thing as charter,”
Jack answered, and pointed a trembling finger at Don. “Go you to the airport,”
he started.

           
Don frowned. “What about the suite?”

 
          
“Ida
can do that. She’s the best searcher in the business. You go to the airport,
you hire every charter pilot they got, you put everybody on standby. Nobody
flies tonight.”

 
          
Don
managed to nod and shake his head at the same time, as he said, “What am I
hiring them for?”

 
          
“Potential
emergency. We have this small sick child here.”

 
          
Sara,
coming fully back to life at last, said,
“All
the pilots?”

 
          
“A
class,” Jack decided. “The whole first grade has this mystery illness.”

 
          
“Doctors
are baffled,” Ida suggested.

 
          
“Aren’t
we all,” Jack agreed. “Go,” he told Don.

 
          
Don,
the true centurion’s underling, went. Jack turned to Sara and Ida, saying,
“Now, we have to find those two.”

 
          
“That
son of a bitch,” Ida said, low and angry. “Running out on us. Who is he without
us, anyway?”

 
          
“That’s
right,” Sara said, as fierce in her own way as Ida. Jack stared at her in
ambivalent surprise—did he want Sara to
become
Ida? What a thought!—as the girl shook her fist and declared, “What do people
like John Michael Mercer have, except their celebrity?”

 
          
“That’s
right,” Ida said, glaring at Sara in aggressive solidarity.

 
          
“And
where do they
get
their celebrity?”
Sara demanded.

 
          
“From
us!”
Ida snapped.

 
          
“That’s
right!” Sara cried, in full voice. “When they want publicity, we give it to
them. And when
we
want,
they've
got to give!”

 
          
Finding
this new fierceness—not that new, actually—of Sara’s both encouraging and
disturbing, Jack said, “Sara, my darling, I can hardly wait for you to get the
opportunity to make that point to John Michael Mercer face-to-face. But before
that happy event can occur—”

 
          
He
broke off to glance at the door, and in came Boy Cartwright, pasty and
unhealthy and diseased and smiling. Gazing around command center, “Charming
little hovel,” he said.

 
          
I’ll
have to get along with this toad, Jack reminded himself. “Hello, Boy,” he said.
“Welcome to
Martha’s
Vineyard
.”

 
          
“Ah,
Jack,” Boy said, with his puffy squidlike smile. “How’s the old interview
coming along?” I’ll have to tell him we’ve lost Mercer, Jack thought, and
listened to hear how he’d phrase it, but all he heard from himself was silence.

           
Ida, who would not stay in the same
room with Boy Cartwright if she could avoid it, turned away, saying to Jack,
“I’ll go check the suite.”

 
          
“Good.”

 
          
“No
more long faces,” Boy announced. From the laziness of his eyes, he must be
taking Valium by the bottle these days. “We’ll all have to be much jollier, now
that I’m aboard.”

 
          
“And
where’s Paul Revere,” Ida was heard to mutter, on her way out, “now that we
need him?”

 
          
A
fierceness held Sara like a sheathing of blue flame, warming and protecting
her, as she made phone call after phone call. “This is Henrietta Nelson,” she
would say, a quaver in her voice. “Is my niece Felicia there? Her mother has
been taken suddenly ill. No? Oh, dear. If we don’t find poor Felicia in time”—a
little break in the voice at that point—“I’ll never forgive myself.”

 
          
The
calls ranged far and wide across the island, from
East
Beach
to Lobsterville, from Scrubby Neck to West
Chop. Mercer and his bride were in no hotel on the island, but they were
definitely still
somewhere
on the
island—the wedding guests were still scheduled to be here for tomorrow’s
ceremony—so that meant they had to have gone to ground in someone’s private
residence. Home owners and home renters and house sitters, beginning with
showbiz people Mercer knew or had worked with, spreading to showbiz people
Mercer
might
know, spreading to
anyone with any sort of celebrity at all or any sort of potential connection
with Mercer at all, every one of them was being approached by Sara on the
phone. And at the same time, the same list was also being investigated by
various of the New England stringers by foot and in cars—selling magazine
subscriptions, reading meters,
anything
—and
by a couple of photographers by air, via charter pilots already on the
Galaxy
payroll.

 
          
Sara’s
fear, following last night’s attack, had paralyzed her ah day long, but had
disappeared like smoke with the news of Mercer’s disappearance. Rage can be
stronger than fear, and Sara’s rage at John Michael Mercer was now both wide
ranging and intense. She was furious at him for complicating the already
complicated life of Jack Ingersoll. She was indignant with him for causing the
descent into their midst of Boy Cartwright. And she was wrathful at the son of
a bitch for
not playing the game.
Just who did he think he was?

 
          
We’re
quicker than you are, John Michael Mercer, Sara thought, as she dialed her
numbers and told and told her story. We’re tougher than you are, we’re meaner
than you are, we’re more determined than you are, and we
do not give up.

 
          
“This
is Henrietta Nelson ...”

 
          
The
Mercer suite was clean. Just to make absolutely certain that no clues had been
inadvertently left behind, the maid had gone so far as to remove notepads,
matchbooks, room service menu, magazines, TV listing sheet and all other such
materials from the suite and replace them with brand-new. The medicine chests
in both bathrooms smelled of Lysol. When Ida lifted the carpet in the living room,
she saw that the maid had already done so. When she lifted the mattresses on
the beds, the maid had been there first as well. When she took the drawers out
of the dressers, to see if perhaps something had fallen down inside, she
smelled Pledge; the maid had done this, too.

 
          
There
was nothing here, that’s all, nothing to be seen but the empty gesture of the
Princess Pat
, the yacht still poindessly
floating offshore, centered in the picture window. Giving that useless tub a
cold look, Ida left the suite, wandered the curving brick paths in the late
afternoon air, and finally saw ahead of her a wheeled maid’s cart, piled high
with tissue boxes and soap. It stood in front of another small shingled
separate structure, another cabana suite like Mercer’s.

 
          
The
maid, busily at work in the sitting room, was short, skinny, bony-faced,
pale-skinned, grayhaired and fiftyish; no doubt the wife or widow of a
fisherman, daughter of fishermen, member of a longtime family along these
waters, proud and poor and dismissive of the rich summer people who had taken
over their world. Ida, who quite naturally looked more like this maid than like
the rich summer people, entered this suite and said, “Hi.”

 
          
The
maid looked at her, a flat and waiting look, not yet suspicious. “Yes, ma’am?”

 
          
“Did
you clean the Mercer suite?”

 
          
Now
the expression
was
suspicious. “Yes,
ma’am.”

 
          
Ida
extended toward her a folded green bill, saying, “You dropped this.”

           
“Oh, no, ma’am,” the maid said, calm
and positive in her competence. “I couldn’t have.”

           
“Well, it was there,” Ida said,
brisk and impatient. “Do
I
look as
though I need a dollar? I work for the
Weekly
Galaxy
, they pay me plenty. A lot more than my sister, she’s a waitress.
Here, make sure.”

 
          
The
maid doubtfully took the bill, which Ida had folded so that all the numbers
were inside, and so that the bill was already in the maid’s hands when she
opened it and saw those repeated digits: 100. “Oh,
no,
ma’am,” she said, almost in a panic, trying to push the bill
back into Ida’s hands. “This isn’t mine!”

 
          
Ida
backed away, lifting her hands as though the bill scared her, too. “That’s a
hundred!” she cried. “It isn’t
mine!
We’re in enough trouble with the management here, I don’t want anybody saying I
took money.”

 
          
“But—”
The maid looked at the hundred-dollar bill in her hand, looked hopelessly
around the room as though for a place where she could safely put it down, then
looked back at Ida. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed.

 
          
“I
tell you what,” Ida said. “Maybe it was dropped by whoever was here with the
Mercers just before they left. If I leave it with you, you could pass it on to—
Who would that be?”

 
          
The
maid looked keenly at Ida. The bill crackled in her fingers.

 
          
“Lady
Beatrice Romneysholme,” Ida announced, her mouth curling around the syllables
of the name. “Widow of an army general known as the Dunce of Dunkirk.”

 
          
Jack
frowned. “I thought
Dunkirk
was a success.”

 
          
“A
successful retreat,” Ida pointed out. “He made it necessary. The British press
gave him the horse laugh the rest of his life, so naturally the widow hates
reporters.”

 
          
Jack
nodded, sad but noble. “They always blame the messenger,” he said.

 
          
“Sure,”
Ida agreed. “Lady Bee has kind of a castle over on the west side of the island.
Up on a bluff over the water. Very tough to get into.”

 
          
“Servants?”

 
          
“Old
retainers,” Ida said. “Been with her since Magna Carta.”

 
          
“I
look ahead of me,” Jack said, “and I see oblivion.”

 
          
Boy,
with his dreamy infected smile, floated over to say, “I understand the happy
couple have been rediscovered.”

 
          
“You’re
quick, Boy,” Jack told him. “You’ve got what I call a nose for news.”

 
          
Ida
studied her nails. They were long and sharp.

 
          
“They’re
with a compatriot of mine, I understand,” Boy went on.

 
          
“In
a manner of speaking,” Jack agreed.

 
          
“I
suppose, really,” Boy said, “one ought to drop in on dear old Lady Beatrice.”

 
          
“That’s
a great idea, Boy,” Jack said.

 
          
“I’m
sure we’ll get along famously,” Boy said, drifting toward the door. “Ta.”

 
          
Jack
watched him leave. Slowly, a smile overlaid the lineaments of despair on his
features. “Now, why,” he asked, “do I find myself feeling this unreasonable
sense of happiness?”

 
          
Amid
that mix of New England fishing village, undeveloped sand dune and elegandy
rustic architected homes of the rich and famous which combine to give Martha’s
Vineyard its aura and ambiance, a kind of Frankenstein castle rose on a bluff
overlooking the western shoreline, a tall building of stone and stucco and
shingle, surrounded by well-tended and well-watered greensward, neatly placed
ornamental trees, smooth stone patios and a croquet field, all enclosed by a
thick stone wall, with a grand stone gatehouse at the only entrance, and a
gravel drive curving in and up to the fieldstone portico at the broad front
door.

 
          
Inside,
Romney Hall was furnished in great part from the original Romney Hall, a
similarly sprawling stone structure beside the
Thames
near
Wallingford
. When, after the war, Romney Hall was given
to the National Trust as part of some sort of complex tax deal, and when for a
variety of reasons it had seemed best for the Romneysholmes to remove
themselves from England, this furniture, these carpets, these paintings and
sconces and tea sets, all made the move as well, first for a brief, mistaken,
unfortunate stay in Bermuda—Little England, indeed!—and then on here to
Martha’s Vineyard
, where people’s memories were blessedly
shorter and the weather wasn’t so boringly perfect all the time. “Hate to be in
a place where only man is vile,” the General used to say, on the cold bleak
days of winter, standing on his bluff overlooking the sea, with the sharp icy
wind and the stinging salt spray in his face.

 
          
Since
the General’s demise—Lady Beatrice found herself at times saying he’d “been put
down,” as though he were one of his own dogs, or a case of his favorite vintage
port—Lady Beatrice had sometimes considered a return to the old country, but
when she read the news in her airmail edition of the
Times
and saw what her countrymen looked upon as a “conservative”
these days, the decision to go back just kept being postponed. And so she
stayed, and the old family retainers stayed with her, and generally speaking
she was content. And from time to time there were little events—like this
hounded young couple and their upcoming nuptials—which enlivened her landscape
and put the roses back in her cheeks.

 
          
How
sweet they were, as from her upstairs window she watched them stroll hand in
hand across the lawns, he with his rugged good looks, she clearly a practical
girl of the sort Lady Beatrice had always approved. Apparendy Mr. Mercer was
something in show business, but so many people on the Vineyard were, and in
fact, at a certain level, there were any number of acceptable people in that
area of endeavor. Sir Larry back home, for instance, and the Rossellini girl,
and perhaps Mr. Reagan (though Lady Beatrice harbored the suspicion that Mr.
Reagan was a climber). In any event, they had been so harried and unhappy and
tense when she’d met them, and now look how relaxed and joyous they were,
laughing together, strolling without a care in the world.

 
          
The
phone near Lady Beatrice’s elbow tinkled, the sound of an in-house call. Still
gazing out at the lovebirds, she picked up the receiver and spoke: “Lady
Beatrice here.”

 
          
“It’s
Jakes, Mum.”

 
          
Jakes
was the man on duty at the gatehouse, the one whom traders and visitors and
other callers had to get through, and whom no one got through if Jakes did not
approve. “Yes, Jakes?”

 
          
“There’s
a
chap
here, Mum,” Jakes said, with a
faint but unmistakable edge of disapproval. “He’d like a word with you.”

 
          
“What
about?”

 
          
“Well,
he says he’s from a newspaper, Mum.” Faint murmurings off: “He says he’s from
the
Weekly Galaxy
, Mum, it’s a sort
of servant-girl paper, all in color.”

 
          
Lady
Beatrice’s eyes glinted. So the villainous press had traced the fair couple,
had it? Well, it would not be permitted to destroy their happiness. “And the
scamp,” she said, “has the effrontery to come to my front
door?”