By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (4 page)

Cindy, breathless and speechless, followed
Mavis onto the footpath.

"Very good," Delgado said, as they
proceeded, single-file, down a generally smooth path through thick
high shrubs. "Now stop, please." They did. "To your left,
please."

They had reached a small clearing in which
another stone bench, long unused and partly overgrown, waited to
play its part in a lovers' tryst which would probably never happen.
A small garden lantern threw the clearing and its occupants into
dim relief. Delgado, as before, kept his back to the light.

"Please. Your rings and your watches," he
said, and held out his left hand. His gun was pointed between the
women but favored Mavis's side. Cindy sobbed once, prompting
Delgado to let out a warning noise that sounded to Cindy like the
swish of a snake through grass. With what was left of her strength
she unclasped her 18-karat Bulgari watch and dropped it on top of
Mavis's in Delgado's hand. Her ring, a four-carat yellow sapphire,
followed. She wore no other ornament.

Delgado pocketed the jewels and said to
Mavis, "And now the emeralds. Please." He was pointing his gun at
Mavis, ignoring Cindy altogether now.

Mavis unfastened her bracelet and with a
motion signifying fear of contamination she dropped it from several
inches above Delgado's outstretched hand. No word had escaped her
so far.

"Excellent. And now—the
pièce de
rèsistance,"
Delgado said, waving the gun toward Mavis's
throat.

"I can't," she answered evenly.

Cindy swung her look away from Delgado and
gazed wide-eyed and horrified at Mavis. She was going to resist.
Oh, no.

"Can you not? And why is that?" Delgado
murmured, clearly surprised.

"It's ... welded shut."

"Welded?" He hesitated a moment, as if to
review his English vocabulary. Then he chuckled in a soft, ominous
way. "How, then, would you be able to wash your very pretty neck?"
he asked as he slipped the watches and bracelet into the pocket of
his dinner jacket.

"Once a week I stroll through a car wash,"
Mavis snapped.

"Mavis!" Cindy choked, shocked at her
flippancy.

"Give it to me now," Delgado demanded,
dropping all pretense at urbanity.

Unaccountably, Mavis stepped back and looked
at Cindy. Cindy thought she might be planning to run, an absurd
idea. And then Delgado lashed out at Mavis with his left fist.
Cindy heard the sound of his knuckles against Mavis's jaw and
watched Mavis collapse. She stared helplessly as Delgado turned
Mavis on her side; fumbled with the clasp; said, "Hell! It
is
welded!"; fumbled some more; succeeded at last; and stood
up.

"All right!" he said hoarsely. He was
breathing heavily now. "Don't screw it up, lady." And he was
gone.

For the first time the sounds of the nearby
ocean slamming against the sea wall penetrated Cindy's state of
arrest. An irrational fear that if she moved she would stumble into
the ocean and drown seized her. She dropped to her knees, gripping
the thick grass with her hands as if she were a jostled baby
holding on to her mother's hair for support. A sense of nausea
swept over her and she thought she might throw up, but she didn't.
Mavis lay on the ground where she had fallen, and Cindy bent over
her.

When Mavis stirred, Cindy slipped her arm
behind her shoulders, cradling the injured woman.

Mavis's chin and neck were warm with blood;
Cindy drew her hand away instantly, fighting down another wave of
nausea.

"Mavis, can you sit up?" Cindy helped her
struggle partly to her feet and sit back on the stone bench. "Are
you okay?" she asked. She looked around wildly to see if anyone was
coming toward them.

"Been ... better," Mavis said thickly. "Jaw
... hurts." Her breath was coming in long, ragged strokes.

Cindy groped in her handbag and pulled out a
wonderfully useless lace-edged handkerchief. Her thought was
somehow to keep the blood from staining the white fabric of Mavis's
gown; she pressed the tiny remnant against Mavis's breastbone, the
way one tries in a panic to stop spilled coffee from running over
the edge of a kitchen counter. "Should I—what should I do?" Cindy
asked, numb with indecision. "Should I scream? What if he comes
back?"

"Just ... quiet," Mavis said.

The two sat without speaking—Mavis, trying
to bring her painful breathing under control; Cindy, holding her
useless little rag to Mavis's breast.

Finally Mavis said, through a wince that
could be heard rather than seen, "I bit my tongue. I think my jaw
is ... all right." She touched her hand to it gingerly, felt blood,
and made a sound of disgust. "I must be a mess. Bring me my wrap—a
white silk cape. Here's the check. And a damp tow—ow!—el."

Cindy stood above her uncertainly.
"Shouldn't I —you know—tell someone?"

"And ruin the Ball? No. I'll report it when
I get home. I'm insured, and I trust you are. Go."

Cindy turned and carefully retraced her
steps on the footpath. Cape. Towel. The important thing was not to
panic; that would ruin everything. She stayed on the edge of the
lawn, outside the tents, her black gown the perfect camouflage in
the pitch-dark night. A sudden fear seized her that she would be
grabbed from the bushes and held hostage until every last guest was
denuded of jewelry, but she knew that was crazy.
Just let me get
through this night,
she prayed. The heavy-metal pulsations from
the dance tent on the lawn graduated into the sweet flowing strains
of the string orchestra in the mansion's Great Hall. The Strauss
waltz reinforced the sense that she had arrived at Finnesterre a
hundred years ago instead of—how long?—half an hour? She glanced at
her wrist; no watch, of course.
Was
it insured? Who knew? It
didn't matter in the least; she hoped viciously that it was
not.

She was on the veranda with Mavis's cape,
two steps from a plunge back into the blackness of the night, when
she felt herself pinned by the strong, encircling arm of Mrs. Cyril
Hutley who had, as promised, a crushingly handsome male in tow.

"There
you are. I've told Jean-Louis
all about you. He loves ballroom dancing and doesn't know a word of
English. Perfect for you; no bothersome small talk. Now you just
turn right around and march back into that house with him," Mrs.
Hutley commanded, beaming with good will.

Cindy, unnerved by the new and opposing set
of commands, twisted away from the older woman's embrace. "No! It's
impossible!" she cried.

To the self-assured Frenchman, the words
sounded an awful lot like
"Non! C'est impossible!"
His
eyebrows shot up in true Gallic astonishment.

Mrs. Hutley, too, looked abashed as Cindy
mumbled, "You have to excuse me," and escaped by the veranda
steps.

Oh, God,
she thought,
I'll never
be invited to another ball in Newport.
But then, it didn't
matter
.
Newport would never matter to her again.

When she returned to the clearing, she
wasn't surprised to see Mavis standing and looking self-possessed
once more. They moved closer to the light of the lantern and Cindy
tried to wipe away the mess. It struck her that even though Mavis
was battered, bloody, and robbed of a fortune in emeralds, she was
behaving beautifully. There was intelligence and self-confidence in
every word that Mavis spoke, every line of her tall, fluid body, as
she stood in the dim light, bravely—almost majestically—enduring
Cindy's clumsy assault on the drying blood. Mavis looked born to
lead a rebellion against invading Scots and/or Englishmen; born to
carve up and defend her share of the Irish provinces.

And yet a hundred years ago her grandmother
had been in service in one of the huge Newport estates. Beau Rêve,
that was it. The grandmother had been a laundress, Cindy had heard,
or an upstairs maid. It seemed perfectly ironic that Cindy herself,
a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution Society,
should be attending to the granddaughter of an upstairs maid. She
had to giggle; it was all so funny.

Mavis clearly did not see it that way. She
turned on Cindy, emerald eyes blazing; the robbery had caught up
with her at last. "What the
hell
is so funny?"

Cindy didn't actually cringe, but she did
look less imperial than when she stepped out of the silver Mercedes
earlier in the evening. The details of the story of Mavis Moran's
grandmother were coming back to her now. She remembered that the
laundress or maid or whatever she had been had either shot or been
shot by her lover, one of the wealthiest of Newport's gilded
society. It wouldn't have surprised Cindy if Mavis's ancestor had
been the one wielding the gun.

"We're running the risk of being found
here," Mavis said, tossing the soiled towel into the bushes. "Leave
as unobtrusively as possible—don't even think of telling anyone.
Tomorrow morning I'm sure the police will be in touch with you. If
you're up to it, write down what you remember when you get home. My
insurance company isn't going to like this. But calling the police
now would throw the entire event into chaos."

"Won't he be on the prowl still?"

"With $100,000 worth of emeralds in his
pocket? I doubt he'll feel the need. Besides, I just followed his
path a little way. It leads right into Cliff Walk. By now he's
disappeared into the darkness and is heading for his car."

"He would be noticed; he's dressed in black
tie!"

"Who isn't, during a Cup summer? At worst
he'll be taken for just another bored guest from one of the
mansions. Go home, Cindy," Mavis implored wearily. "It's over."

The first big pellets of rain splashed the
back of his neck; Neil Powers picked up the pace. He'd be drenched
by the time he reached home. Hell. This was all Nancy's fault. If
she were alive she'd never have let him out the door without an
umbrella, or a foldable raincoat. Or something. She always knew
when it was going to rain, just like she always knew which events
were worth rubbernecking. He had missed her fiercely tonight. Why
hadn't she been standing by his side, giving him the
real
lowdown, the stuff that never made it into the
Newport Daily
News
but got passed around at her hairdresser's on Bellevue, or
the produce mart on Memorial Drive?

He had never much cared who Yves St. Laurent
was, or why it was important for women to be seen wearing one of
his gowns; but he'd had to confess to real interest the night, back
in 1977, when Nancy had pointed out a backless and almost frontless
debutante who'd been found a week earlier clinging naked and drunk
to the stern of a yacht in Newport Harbor and hollering for all she
was worth. The ensign whose Coast Guard cutter aided in the rescue
was pals with the mechanic who had tuned the station wagon of
Nancy's neighbor's cousin (Nancy was scrupulous about her sources).
Nancy.
Nancy! You knew everything except how to beat a
two-pack-a-day habit.

He'd loved her in a way that only the quiet
ones could. Sometimes, during their first year of marriage, he'd be
sitting at his desk hunting down a programming bug and his mind
would simply shut down, and then he'd call her. Edwina, their
colicky one, would be bawling in the background and Neil would
tease, "Whaddya say, Nance? Should I come home and we'll make more
Edwinas?" And she'd laugh her exasperated laugh and say, "Bring me
a cupcake and we'll see."

Off he'd go to her favorite bakery on
Broadway, and then home, and by golly if they didn't just succeed
in making another baby. Five births, four miscarriages. Nancy
Powers was always pregnant, always happy about it.

But always, always smoking. Was that what
had caused the miscarriages? Maybe affected the health of the girls
even? He dismissed the thought. All the girls were healthy,
rosy-cheeked, pretty. The married ones had healthy babies of their
own, and his latest grandchild was due any hour now. Maybe nicotine
only hurt boy babies. Two of the miscarried babies had been boys.
Both times Neil had planned to name them Sam, after his father. He
had cried bitterly after the second time, and they never had
another boy.

His rambling, melancholy thoughts seemed to
blur and diffuse in the steadily increasing rain. A thin, cool
trickle of wet had settled in a trail down his spine. He was about
to break into a run for it when a high, shrill bark of distress
stopped him in his tracks. It trailed off into a whimper, and Neil
knew immediately that an injured animal lay nearby. In his pocket
he carried a small disposable flashlight—something Nancy had
succeeded in training him to take on his night strolls. But finding
the dog wasn't hard.

It was lying on its side almost in the
center of the narrow asphalt road, panting the way it might if it
were a sunny and hot July afternoon instead of a dark and wet July
night. It was a black Labrador, impossible to see from a car on a
night—on a road—like this. Neil shone the light over the animal.
Brown eyes stared up in fearful wariness. The Lab's leg was broken,
at the least; fresh blood covered one haunch. Maybe there were
internal injuries, too, but the dog couldn't be left lying in the
middle of the road. Neil swore violently at the bastard who'd left
her for dead; at the owners who let a black Lab run leash-less and
unreflected in this dark neighborhood. A golden retriever might
have had a chance. Not so a black Lab.

As gently and carefully as he could, Neil
slipped his arms under the dog's back, not without a fear that the
dog might lunge for him. But the animal's pain was too great, or
perhaps she understood, because she lay limply as Neil adjusted his
own weight to lift the load.

That was when the sound of a car registered
somewhere deep, deep inside his brain. It was too fast, it was too
late, for him to form any other thought than, "This dog is having
the rottenest luck." Too late, even, to look up and see a silver
Mercedes bearing down on them both.