One Way or Another: A Novel (7 page)

Zacharias rolled his eyes; he’d known she would be trouble. He surely was not letting this guy on board, spying around, asking questions. “What is she to you?” he demanded.

“I saw her. I saw someone strike her, hit her head so hard it sent her reeling, bleeding…”

“This was not on my boat,” Zacharias said. “No woman got killed on my boat.”

Marco eyed him from the foot of the gangplank. The captain stood at the top, barring the way.

“Then she
is
dead,” Marco said quietly.

Zacharias’s expression turned to shock. “She is
not
dead,” he said, deciding quickly he had better tell what happened. “Only
almost.
I think not much longer and she will be. She drowned,” he added, to further clarify the position. “My crew found her, got her out of the water. She must have fallen off some tourist boat, smashed her head open. It was not good,” he added with a deep sigh because he saw no way out of this with the authorities.

“Then if she’s not on your boat, where is she?”

“On another boat. Big. Expensive. They came to pick her up.”

“The name of the boat?” Marco demanded, impatiently.

Zacharias shrugged. He had not taken notice, in fact he did not remember even seeing a name, he’d been too involved with getting rid of the girl.

Marco knew he had to get to the girl first if there was any chance at all of her being able to speak. If she was even, please God, still alive. He was witness to what was probably going to turn into murder, not simply a violent attack. Somebody had to protect this young woman’s rights. Somebody had to help her and it looked like he was the only one who could do it. But first he had to find that boat.

12

In New York, Martha was lingering over her usual morning macchiato and sesame bagel in the deli near her apartment, prior to meeting a client to go over the revamped designs. This was the third set and Martha suspected the total might rise to four. Or even five. Some of these women were too rich even to
know
their own minds, let alone
make up
their minds. One day it was this, the next that; in fact the grass was always greener. It paid, in Martha’s opinion, to have less and enjoy what you had, but ever the diplomat, she was always concerned for her clients’ well-being, striving to make sure they were, in the end, happy. That was her job, and despite its frustrations she loved it and found it creative.

Anyhow, for once her mind was not on her job; it was back in Turkey with Marco.
Marco and Martha.
It sounded like a cartoon, an animated movie that would make people laugh. Marco had called her again about the girl he supposedly had seen fall off a boat and drown, and since then she’d been worried about him. This was a girl, Marco also said, who had been beaten around the head. She was bleeding as she fell; a girl he had searched the sea for—and not found.

Spooning up the froth on her macchiato Martha wondered if there had been such an incident. Since no missing person had been reported she had questioned Marco as to exactly what he thought he had seen.

“Not
thought,
” he’d said, sounding angry, something she had never heard in his voice before. “
I saw
a girl fall from a boat. A black yacht. Her head was bloody. She had red hair. I got in the dinghy and went to look for her.”

And never found her, Martha thought. And that was the problem. She sighed as she took a sip of the coffee. It was too hot and she burnt her lips. She slicked on her cherry Blistex to take the sting away, which of course made the coffee taste awful. She sighed again. She had never known Marco like this, so concerned, so adamant as to what had happened. About the large black boat from which the girl had fallen. About her red hair floating in the sea. And the extent of his despair when he was unable to find her. It was as though Marco felt guilty, that somehow it was his fault that an unknown woman had “disappeared.” Yet no one had been reported as “disappeared.” No one was lost. No one found. No one drowned.

Martha’s phone rang. She checked it quickly. It was her youngest sister, Lucy. “Hi,” she said, answering. “What’s up?”

“I met a guy.” Lucy’s voice was high-pitched with excitement.

There was a lull while Martha took in this news. Then, “Who, exactly?” she asked, wearily, because this was not Lucy’s first foray into love, and when Martha had seen her a few weeks ago she was not even attached. Nor, as far as she had known, was she seeing anyone in particular.

“His name is Ahmet.” Lucy told her quickly all about him. He was not an Englishman, he was “foreign.” When Martha asked exactly what kind of “foreign,” Lucy told her he was probably Croatian, and a millionaire. “And good-looking,” she added, sounding more thoughtful. “And sexy.”

Oh God, Martha thought, she’s done it again. Lucy fell in love at the drop of a hat. And besides, no Croatians were called “Ahmet.”

“Maybe I’ll bring him over to New York to meet you,” Lucy told her in that rapid-fire way of speaking she had. “And I want to meet your Marco.”

“He’s not exactly
my
Marco.” Martha wished he was though.

“Anyhow, this guy owns a yacht. He asked me out on it.”

“
What?
You didn’t go, did you?”

“Of course I didn’t, I’m not that daft.” Lucy was laughing. “Not yet, anyhow. But you’ll get to meet him. We’ll have dinner or something. Talk to you later.” And Lucy rang off.

Just what I need, Martha thought, switching off her cell phone. Lucy was the youngest, just seventeen, and most irresponsible of the three sisters. The eldest, Sarah, was a pediatrician in England. Lucy was supposed to be at drama school, auditioning for acting jobs, but was perpetually out of work “seeing how the real world lives.” A typical Lucy remark if there ever was one.

In Martha’s opinion their parents had indulged Lucy shamefully. The family lived at Patrons Hall, “the Ancestral Home,” as Marco had called it, amused, when Martha had taken him for a quick visit. They’d been en route to Paris with a stopover in London, when she’d rented a small car and driven them there, whizzing fast down the motorway with Marco flinching next to her while she laughed at his fears and told him she had been doing this route for years, knew it like the back of her hand. She did, but he’d still heaved a sigh of relief when they arrived without incident.

Martha remembered turning to look at Marco sitting silently in the seat next to her. He was staring intently at the rambling, creamy-stone house with what she recognized as his “painter’s eyes,” a special look where he seemed to absorb a place, or a person, somewhere deep within his brain, in his soul perhaps. That was one of the reasons he was such a good artist. A great artist, it had often been said, though Marco would only describe himself, simply, as “a painter.”

“I’m looking at history,” he’d said quietly. “I’m looking at masons and woodworkers, at slate that must have been mined locally, for nothing came from far away, not when this place was first built. Elizabethan chimneys, Queen Anne tiles, Victorian gothic architraves…”

“And antique boilers that barely keep the place warm,” Martha said, laughing because it had always been that way. She remembered men standing by the fire after a dinner, lifting their coat tails to warm their backsides while the women, gorgeous in their sleeveless silk and jewels, fanned themselves as if too hot because to admit they were not would have been rude to their hostess, who was, in this memory of Martha’s, her grandmother.

Still, whatever its defects, Patrons Hall was home and always would be, and nothing, not the small flat in London’s Chelsea, nor her charming, cozy-in-winter-cooled-by-air-conditioning-in-summer Manhattan apartment would ever replace it in Martha’s heart.

Now she sighed: there was a new man on the scene who Martha would have to deal with. She’d probably have to extricate her sister from his clutches, at a time when she had so much personal stuff on her mind. Lucy was small, she was blond, she had Martha’s clear blue eyes inherited from their mother, and as far as men were concerned, absolutely no bloody sense. “Love” was what ruled Lucy, and she was about to become Martha’s responsibility. She guessed she had better call Marco and warn him.

First, though, she would get onto her friend at the jewelers about the chain with the initials, see if they might find to whom it had belonged. Like Marco, she had the feeling it might actually have belonged to the girl he claimed to have seen fall off the boat, never to be found. A shiver ran through her.
She might be searching for someone dead.

13

Sometimes, Martha felt a long way from home, which, of course, she was. Even though she now officially called New York “home,” nothing could replace Patrons Hall, where she and her two sisters had been raised, like wild kids, she remembered with a reminiscent smile, allowed to roam on their ponies through fields and woods, jumping fences and falling off; somebody always seemed to have a broken limb with a grubby white plaster cast scrawled with silly messages written by friends.

Patrons Hall was built four hundred years ago. Though Marco referred to it laughingly as her “ancestral home,” it was the truth. The ancestor in question, one Horatio Patron, had started out as a stonecutter working the local quarry, graduating to building small cottages, eventually helping restore larger houses, learning his trade until finally he’d built his own home to his own design, which if truth were told, was decidedly eccentric.

Martha remembered winters there, the roaring fire in the nursery grate and old-fashioned Nanny, who, though she had a proper electric dryer in the laundry room, still liked to dry their clothes on the brass fender in front of the fire, causing it to smoke, as a result of which the children always smelled of applewood.

In fact, now, as she thought about the past, sitting in busy, bustling, towering Manhattan, its bumpy, cracked streets teeming with people intent on their lives, oblivious to those around them, Martha remembered her childhood home as full of friends, her parents’ friends and their own. She remembered the butler, who nowadays would have been called “the houseman.” Then, though, “butler” was a prestigious job to which a man might aspire. Besides, he had been with the family for forty years and was so much a part of it, they could never have done without him. His wife, known only as “the Mrs.,” was shorter than her husband, who was a very tall, very thin man with silver hair and a beak of a nose, and who Martha remembered as never smiling, though he was kind enough to the children, when he acknowledged their presence in “his” house, that is. The Mrs. barely made the five-foot-tall mark on the kitchen wall where the three children were measured annually, their height marked with a Biro. Of course, the butler himself was never measured, he kept his dignity at all times. They were an odd-looking couple, she in charge of housekeeping, overseeing the cook and the maids, always in her dark blue daytime dress, which was changed to black at five
P.M.
and never with an apron. The Mrs. was above all that. The fact was they were “family.”

They lived in a cottage near the gates, down a mile-long avenue bordered once upon a time with magnificent elms, later decimated by disease and felled to make way for hardier chestnuts, which now cast shade where needed and protected the old house from wind and storms. Martha loved the trees best when their branches were limned with the first winter snow, an event that often coincided with her and her sisters’ return from boarding school for the Christmas holiday. She remembered those trees at another time too, at a party, hung with scarlet Chinese lanterns for their parents’ wedding anniversary, throwing their glow across white linen cloths on the two dozen tables, when miracle of miracles and with what some called Patron luck, the English night was balmy, no rain fell, and all was calm and full of happiness.

How, Martha wondered now, sitting alone sipping her macchiato on a New York morning, could she ever find that again. It was part of her life, her background, her family. But times had changed; her parents were long gone, hopefully to what was called “a better place.” And with them went that way of life. Patrons Hall was still there, but there was no butler to ensure its upkeep, its “soul” as Martha liked to think of it.

The sisters often returned to their old home but there were no more times like the wedding anniversary dinner, at which the girls had been allowed to mingle with the grown-ups, and to choose what to wear, which resulted in the eldest sister in jeans and a Rolling Stones tongue T-shirt; the youngest in her mother’s strapless long red silk dress, hitched up with safety pins, and Martha in a short black velvet dress with a puffy skirt. Nobody warned her that a puffy skirt flipped up when you sat down and she still recalled the hot embarrassment of dropping onto a chair only to reveal her girly white cotton knickers to the entire room. She blushed even now, at the memory. She’d kept that dress, her first grown-up party dress; still had it sheathed in a plastic cover, though when she looked at its tiny waistline she marveled at how she ever fit into it.

That night had been the most magical of her childhood, both parents so good-looking; James Edward Patron, tall, dark, and handsome in the classic style, elegant in a dark blue dinner jacket, with tiny sapphire studs, a gift from his wife, in his shirtfront. The shirt, though, was not buttoned to the neck and bow-tied in the conventional way, because he was not “conventional.” He wore it open at the neck and removed his jacket halfway through dinner, with apologies to the ladies, getting up to prowl the tables, pour more wine, stopping everywhere to chat, making everyone feel welcome. Her mother was the best at that, though. Mary Jane Patron had the happy knack of making each person feel they were the most important guest, the most vital to the spirit of the party, the most interesting of all. Her wide pale blue eyes, which Martha inherited, sparkled with amusement, her laughter rang out across the dark night from where they sat beneath those red Chinese lanterns. It was, in Martha’s memory, as though they were touched by magic. And she was sure, even now, that they were.