Patricia Potter (30 page)

But now he grew warm with need. With the kind of longing she’d created in him so long ago and which had haunted him for years.

His hand tightened around the glass, and he allowed himself a large desperate gulp.

The hovering attendant approached him again. “We’ll be in Atlanta in one hour. Is there anything I can get you?”

There was an invitation in her eyes, one he’d seen many times before. He shook his head and leaned back in the seat, letting her take the now empty glass.

Hours now. Only hours.

The single-engine plane his secretary had ordered was waiting for him. Chris arranged for payment, presented his license, and filed a flight plan, carefully going over the route. He’d always been a cautious pilot, ever since he won his license five years earlier. He liked the freedom of flying, just as he had once enjoyed the sea. But now it held little joy.

He landed at the Brunswick airport near dusk and rented a car. He’d spend tonight in Brunswick and find a realty company tomorrow.

The window of his hotel room looked out over the marshes to St. Simons Island. He couldn’t see Jekyll Island, or the new causeway that led to it. The smell of the marshes and the sea was just as he remembered, and he felt eager anticipation even though he knew he was a fool to do so. Meara’s husband was recently dead. Even if Sanders was still alive, Chris knew he could expect little but scorn and possible exposure from her. Yet he couldn’t rid himself of the anticipation that ran through his mind and body.

Chris called a real estate firm and made an appointment for the morning. He told the agent he understood homes were available for rental on Jekyll Island, and he was interested in a furnished cottage.

For how long?

Chris hesitated.

“Most owners require at least a two-week minimum,” the agent added helpfully.

Chris agreed and asked that a list be ready when he arrived. He sat down and studied the telephone book. He found a Sanders Evans on Beachview.

He knew something about Jekyll Island through the detective agency he had hired to track Meara. The club had closed after that Easter of 1942 and never reopened, the clubhouse and cottages abandoned. The island had been sold to the State of Georgia in 1947 and it had been transformed into a state park with motels, camping grounds, public beaches, and some private residences that were often rented. Meara had owned one in her own name for the last five years.

Chris wondered if the island had been ruined, or if it still retained the almost mystical beauty of years ago. Or had it been mystical only because of Meara?

As dusk developed into evening and evening into night, Chris remembered every moment of those two weeks. Every glorious, painful moment.

He wondered whether Kurt Weimer had arrived yet on Sea Island. And what the man was after.

Meara wandered restlessly through the house. Sanders had been buried more than a month now, but she still missed him. Dear Mother, but she missed him.

They had often spent time apart. After being transferred from one city to another, he had returned to Washington, and they’d bought a small house in Virginia. He was still often away on assignment, gone for months at a time. But she’d always known he would be back, that his warm brown eyes would see her with affection and understanding. She would miss that most of all. She wondered what she should do about the house in Virginia. Lisa would be going to law school in Washington, so perhaps she should keep the house for Lisa’s use. They had enough money with Sanders’s insurance and her own income from freelance writing to support both residences. At least for a while.

The cottage, one of the first built after the state bought the island, was hers, free and clear, except for the taxes. It had been a surprise bequest from Cal Connor when he’d died six years ago. She’d almost refused it, but Elizabeth Connor had convinced her to keep it, that it was something Cal had very much wanted. Meara had always refused any payment or reward for protecting the Connors’ children, and Cal had known how much she’d loved Jekyll. It was his way of finally paying what he considered a debt.

Meara had felt, then and now, like a fraud. She had felt that way twenty-one years ago when she unwillingly became a heroine. No one on the island, other than Sanders and her, knew exactly what had happened that night. After the explosion, when people came running out of the clubhouse, Sanders had taken complete charge. He had calmed everyone down, saying only that there apparently had been a kidnapping which had been foiled by Meara. The explosion? He didn’t know yet.

He and Meara, who had been silent with shock, had taken Cal and Elizabeth Connor to the power plant where Tara and Peter were unconscious and bound…but alive. The Connors were embarrassingly grateful to Meara, who felt everything was her fault. When she tried to tell them, Sanders steered her away and said she needed rest. She was sedated, and the next day, between bouts of tears and self-accusation and grief, she was made to understand national security concerns. The island had been vacated immediately, and Meara, accompanied by Sanders, was taken to Washington, presumably for medical care but in reality for endless questioning.

It was Sanders who stayed with her, who probed gently, who made her understand that no outsider must know what happened that night. Not the American public. Not the Germans who had so easily breached American defenses.

When Meara had finally repeated everything to him, every word that was said that night, a strange expression passed over Sanders’s face as he’d asked, over and over again, every movement Michael Fielding had made.

“He was trying to call the submarine?”

Meara nodded, her eyes blind with tears.

“And he accused the other man, the gardener, of losing a battery?”

“Yes, and he…they were going to take the children.”

“Did Fielding say so?”

“He didn’t disagree.”

“But why the fight?”

Meara looked at him with a lost expression on her face. “I don’t know. Everything happened so fast.”

“I wonder…,” Sanders said after they had gone over it several more times, but he never finished his sentence as another agent entered the room.

He never did say what he wondered, but she had asked him what had happened to him that evening, how he knew to come after them with the gun.

“Fielding tried to drug me,” he said.

“Tried…?”

“The dosage was light, which was…odd,” Sanders said. “He could easily have killed me. That would have been the smart thing.”

Meara looked up, wanting to believe, wanting so desperately to believe that there had been more to Michael Fielding, or von Steimen or whoever he was, than a deadly spy.

Sanders took one of her hands in hers. “We’ll never know a lot of things,” he said.

“There’s no chance—?”

“That he survived the explosion? No,” Sanders said. “I saw him pull away in the boat, and the explosion was just seconds later.” He hesitated a moment, then added. “For what it’s worth, I think he really cared about you. I saw the way he looked at you.”

Meara shook her head. “He merely used me. How can you use someone you care about?”

And how can you love someone who betrayed you so completely?

She’d never been able to answer that question. She’d thought the love would die, quick and violently, as he had died, but it hadn’t. She never had an opportunity to forget, to try to forget; six weeks later, two weeks after she went to work at
Life,
she discovered she was pregnant.

Sanders had kept an eye on her, calling her frequently. He had called the day she had discovered she was pregnant, and he heard the raw, painful desperation in her voice.

“What’s happened?” he asked with concern, his voice soft with sympathy.

She couldn’t tell him. She stuttered a denial that anything was wrong. The next day, he was at the door of her apartment and he wouldn’t leave until she blurted out the news.

He took her in his arms, holding her as one would hold a child. “Will you marry me?” he said unexpectedly.

She stilled, her eyes meeting his in disbelief. She hadn’t known what to do. She was Catholic and wouldn’t even consider an abortion. Yet what would she do with a baby? How would she support it? How could she taint a child with the label of bastard? The bastard of an enemy. A spy.

Sanders’s offer was an answer, yet she couldn’t do that to him. She didn’t love him. It wouldn’t be fair. She told him so in a shaking voice.

“I know you don’t love me,” he said. “But I think you like me, and that’s a good beginning. Meara, I’m lonely. I have been since my wife and baby died. I’ll love the child. I’ll take care of you. And I’ll be getting the best of the bargain.”

Lost and miserable and lonely, she’d finally agreed. But she’d always known he didn’t get the best of the bargain. She’d given him a home and child, but she’d never been able to give him her whole heart, and she’d realized very quickly that that was what he wanted.

She stopped her pacing to glance at her typewriter. She had been in the middle of an article about Georgia’s barrier islands for a travel magazine when she’d been notified of Sanders’s death. It was due next week, but she had no heart for it now. Not now. She wondered if she ever would.

“Mother.”

She started as Lisa came in. Her daughter’s eyes were sad, solemn, as they had been for the past month. Meara wanted to take her in her arms, to comfort her, but she was afraid she might be rebuffed, and she didn’t think she could bear that now.

“Darling?” she said, looking at her golden-haired daughter with eyes the color of the deepest ocean. Her coloring was so much like Michael’s. A familiar lump clogged her throat.

“Why…don’t we go back to Washington for the summer.”

“But I thought you were going to stay here this summer, work for Kellen’s firm.”

“I’m not sure I…want to stay here.”

Meara reached out a hand and was grateful that Lisa didn’t move away.

“Why, honey?”

Lisa looked at her stubbornly. “I don’t think Daddy ever liked it here.”

Since she’d been left the house, Meara and Lisa had come here each summer when Lisa wasn’t in school. Sanders would usually make it for the weekends, but Meara had never noticed Sanders’s reluctance. He had been proud that Meara had defeated her demons, had even urged her to come back in the beginning. “You can’t hide,” he had said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, he never said anything, but sometimes he got such a sad look on his face when he didn’t think you were noticing.”

Meara felt broken inside. “What?” she said in a ragged whisper.

“It doesn’t matter,” Lisa said in a flat voice.

“But it does,” Meara said. “It does to you.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel any more. I just miss him so much.”

“I thought you liked it here.”

Lisa’s eyes clouded. “Maybe I did, once.”

“I’ll go back with you.”

“No,” Lisa said. “I’m almost twenty-one. I’ll be in law school next year. I’m old enough to be on my own.”

Meara didn’t know she could hurt this much, not any more. Lisa had never said before that she hadn’t wanted to stay at home while she finished school. Because of Sanders. She knew that now.

“Lisa…don’t go. Not now.”

Lisa hesitated at the raw pain in her mother’s voice, then her face stiffened. “I’m going to the cemetery.”

Meara nodded. “I’ll go with you.”

“No,” Lisa said. “I want to go alone.”

Meara surrendered. “All right. Will you be home for dinner?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s wrong, Lisa?”

Lisa wanted to tell her. She wanted to tell her mother she wished she could be as strong as she. She had always wanted to be that strong, that perfect, that…controlled. But she couldn’t. Her own tears came so easily. She couldn’t understand why her mother’s didn’t. Even when her mother touched her, there was a kind of remoteness about it, a remoteness that protected but didn’t always comfort. “Why don’t you ever cry?” Lisa said finally, almost hopelessly.

Meara closed her eyes. How could she explain that she used up her tears long ago. Tears didn’t help. Tears didn’t bring people back, or recall events.

“I loved him,” she whispered.

“I know,” Lisa said, ashamed of what was almost an accusation. Her mother had always been there for her, for her father. Strong and sure. But right now Lisa needed something more than that. She swung around, almost running out the door, slamming it behind her.

Meara heard the noise, and opened her eyes.

Once more, she thought bitterly, she had failed as she looked around the spotless, empty, lonely room. For the second time her life seemed to lie in tattered threads. And there was no Sanders to pull them together again.

Chapter Sixteen

T
HE MORNING DAWNED
bright and sunny.

Chris was used to little sleep. He had not slept well in years, and three or four hours was sufficient.