Safe Harbor (22 page)

"How is your mother?" he asked her mournfully.

"Oh! You remember I have one."

"Don't, Holly."

"Why not? Surely I have your gene for cruelty."

"Is she all right?"

"What do
you
think?"

He wasn't thinking at all; that was obvious in the way he turned away from her and began staring at the sea again. Wasn't thinking, wasn't feeling, wasn't—certainly was not—aware of Holly anymore. She was the favorite of his three children, but she might as well have been one of the potted geraniums on the porch. For the first time, she understood on a brutally visceral level what her mother had been going through. It wasn't easy to cease to exist before your very own eyes.

Her gaze sli
d past the back of her father's
silvered head and out to the whitecapped sea, glorious and fresh and alive and everything that Holly and her father, just then, were not. The wind, boisterous in its joy, whipped her hair across her cheeks and pinned her clothes against her body as she stood unheeding and unresponsive while she waited for her father to explain his mad deed.

Out on the beach she saw a man walking below the high-water mark alongside a small child, who clutched a bucket with both hands as she stumped across the sand, searching for shells. To say that Holly felt more kinship with the stranger and the little girl than she did with her own father would not have been an exaggeration. Immobile as the potted geraniums, she waited a long, long moment for Eric Anderson to break the agonizing silence.

When he didn't, when she decided that he never would, she asked him outright: "Why, Dad? What were you thinking?"

His head turned slightly in her direction: he had heard her, at least. They were not the father and daughter she saw at the water's edge; they never would be again, she supposed. But he had heard her.

"I wanted
... more," he said at last, and then he let out a shuddering sigh and wrapped his Scandinavian reserve around him as if it were a thick terrycloth robe.

His answer, his demeanor, infuriated her. "More? More what? More than a woman who loves you, a family who cares? More than the freedom to walk among your friends and enjoy the respect of your peers? More than your house, your boat, your place by the sea? What
more
can you
want
? You have health, wealth, people who love you. To want
more
than that strikes me as—obscene!"

He nodded slowly, apparently agreeing.

"That's it? That's your reaction? Can't you at least say you're
sorry
?
"
she cried, rushing around to face him. She stood with feet apart, her hands thrown up in frustration. "You at least owe us
that
!
"

"But
.
.. I'm not," he said, almost confused about it. "Why do you think I'm here and not home?"

Instinctively, she balled her hands into fists; her mouth fell open but no words came out.

Her father seemed to hear the response that she wasn't able to scream. He propped his elbows on his knees and folded his hands in contemplation, just as he had when she was five and he was trying not to beat her at checkers.

"I'm sixty-two years old, Holly," he said, looking up at her across the bridge of his knuckles. "I've gone into the same suite of offices in the same historic brick building for over thirty years. The work I do there is mind- numbing—drawing up deeds, setting up escrows, sitting at closings. Maybe a title search, if there's a fight and the stakes are high enough. The fact is, the paralegals can do most of what I do, and for a fifth of my earnings."

"So you're bored by your job," Holly said scathingly. "So
what.
Lots of people are bored."

"You're not," he said with a sad smile.

"Of course I'm not. I'm going after my dream. Why shouldn't I? I don't have mouths to feed, tuition to—"

She stopped herself, aware that she was describing a typical parent. That she might well be describing her father.

He thought so, anyway. "I got married when I was still in law school. I'm not blaming anyone, Holly, please understand me—but very quickly there were mouths to feed."

Holly knew that. Her brother was born six months after her parents eloped. Her sister was born a year after that. Holly herself was the
coup de grace
: born less than a year after her sister.

She shrugged and sa
id, "Sorry. I didn't ask to be
born."

"I told you, I'm not blaming anyone. But I purposely took the least stressful route there was. I wanted no long hours as a criminal lawyer; no iffy income from contingency work. My entering into probate law has worked out well for our family. Real estate has been good to us."

He rubbed his tanned, smooth hands across his jawbone and sighed, apparently struggling in his search for words.

"You know the clock on the bank across the street from my office?" he asked in a wistful tone. "The one with the big gold hands? That's the clock I watch ticking my life away, minute by gold-leafed minute. Almost every day when that clock tolls noon, I'm at my desk, eating a salad. At the stroke of four I'm packing my briefcase. Day in, day out, there we are: me, and the clock with the gold-leafed hands.
"

"Oh, please. You could have retired by now. Why are you even there?" she said, pitiless for her mother's sake.

"I could have quit," he agreed. "I
should
have quit. It's the damndest thing: it was such a painless life, such an easy one, that I didn't even know I hated it until—"

Eden
. If he said the word, she'd slap his face.

But he
d
idn't. "It's only now, in retrospect, that I see how unsatisfied I was," he said. "How unhappy."

She laughed contemptuously at that. "Oh, and now you're satisfied? Now you're happy? What an odd sense of bliss you have."

He bowed his head over his clasped hands, just the way he had at Sunday services when they all went to church together. "I'm dying, Holly," he whispered. "I'm in hell."

Holly wanted to believe her own definition of his hell: that he missed his family, that he was afraid of jail. But she knew from looking at him that hell for him was a life without
Eden
. Truly, there was no fool like an old fool, she thought. His refusal to repent was making her hard.

"And if you're cleared but
Eden
is
dead?" she said. "Will you still be in hell?"

"More than ever."

She sucked in her breath.
That's it! I don't have to listen to this.

She turned to leave, then spun back around for one last shot. "You understand, don't you, that she's trying to frame you for her death? That she's willing to have people think you're a homicidal maniac?"

He heard the words; he didn't understand them.

She waited for a light bulb, any wattage, to go on in the murky, besotted chambers of his brain. Nothing. He remained in the dark. Finally she threw up her hands and said, "Don't you get it? She's
framing
you! You didn't kill her, did you?"

A spark at last: "Of course not!" he said angrily. "What do you take me for?"

"Oh, Dad," she said wearily, "don't ask." She looked away.

She heard his voice slip back into broken musing as he said, "I should've gone looking for her sooner when she didn't come back on the windsurfer
... but she was so competent
... an expert
... it's my fault
... I shouldn't have waited so long
... my fault
.
..."

In the distance Holly saw the little girl with her bucket of shells fading from view.

She turned back to her father with white-hot resentment.

"Listen to me.
Listen.
I met someone who knows
Eden
; he came to the island looking for her.
Eden
is a thief and a con, Dad. She stole a valuable engraving from an elderly couple who were counting on the proceeds to get them through their old age. That's your
Eden
."

Now she saw real anger.

"That's
outrageous
!
Eden
would never do something like that!"

He jumped up and Holly actually believed he might knock her down for the blasphemy, but he turned away from her instead. She saw him clutch his thinning hair with both hands, a shockingly melodramatic gesture for him
.  He muttered something under his breath, then
planted his splayed hands on his hips and, bowing his head, stared at the gray-painted planks of the porch. Another pause, and then he looked sideways at Holly. She was the enemy now.

"You met someone who's on a vendetta," he said flatly, "that's all. And you're angry enough to believe him."

"Oh, I'm pissed enough, I agree, but—"

"How do you know this man isn't making it all up? How do you know he's not out to punish
Eden
in some way?"

It was an entirely new thought. "Because I trust him," Holly said at last. And she did.

"
Eden
is—was—is—a stunningly desirable woman.
 
Don't you think she's left a trail of broken hearts behind her?"

Holly looked at her father and said evenly, "It keeps getting longer all the time."

"Oh, fu—" He stopped himself mid-sneer and wheeled back around to the sea.

There he stood, apparently calm—but she could see the infinitesimal pumping of his shoulders. Her father was in a state of rage, and the worst of it was, it was holy rage. He honestly thought that
Eden
was suffering from a bum rap.

Infuriating, exasperating, self-deluded man! Where did you take people like him? To a detox clinic?

"Why would she bother staying with me," he said through gritted teeth, "if she had stolen a prized engraving."

Softly, so that she wouldn't alienate him from further dialogue, Holly said, "Your boat was a good place to hide, I imagine."

He shook his head. "She could have walked off the
Vixen
anywhere along the coast; we sailed nearly to
Nova Scotia
. Why go to the trouble of sailing all the way back with me?"

"I don't know," Holly had to confess. "I don't know why she wanted the police to think you killed her. She must have assumed that sooner or later, Sam would find out about the engraving and come running."

"Sam is the guy you say is after her?"

"Yes, but
not
because she broke his heart. The engraving belonged to his parents. They're not well-off; they have medical bills."

Her father gave Sam the benefit of a grunt.

"Dad—how did blood get all over the boat?" Holly asked bluntly.

He looked both annoyed and embarrassed. "Simple. Eden
... she hurt herself cutting an orange for breakfast—you know how sharp I keep my knives—and she bled on the butcher block in the galley, and then on the teak sole in the head when we took off the paper towel and were bandaging her finger. It took a couple of tries."

Holly was watching her father carefully. He was nervous, but surely that was a reflex. He'd already given the story to the police; if they treated him as if they thought he was lying, then naturally he was going to worry about how he sounded every time he told his story later. That's how innocent men flunked polygraphs.

"It wasn't anything that needed stitches," he continued, still averting Holly's gaze, "but
... but it did bleed for a while. And the police, well, they found blood on the port deck, too," he admitted. He cleared his throat and added, "But the bandage probably started leaking again when
Eden
was rigging the sail on the windsurfer. It definitely must have done that."

Holly listened to her father with growing dismay. He was lying through his teeth.

"It sounds as if it was a bad cut," she said, trying to draw him out. "Why would
Eden
go windsurfing with an injury like that?"

Her father shot her an angry look: clearly he did not expect skepticism from his own flesh and blood.

"She's
spunky
," he said. "It's part of her appeal."

There was a lull. Her father turned back to the sea.

"I would have made good on the engraving," he said after a moment. "Even if she
had
stolen it. She would have had a reason."

Besotted! "Did you give
Eden
any reason to believe that you would be capable of something like that? Dad—did you talk of marriage?"

"That's none of your business," said her father without turning around.