“To see Georgia dance in the
Nutcracker
tomorrow night in Baltimore,” India told her grandly.
“Oh, oh,”—Corri jumped up, the left skate still tied on her foot—“can I go too, please, please? I heard the
Nut-cracker
music on television this morning. It’s so floaty!”
Corri twirled around.
“Well, we were considering that very possibility.” India tried to look pensive.
“Really? I really could? Is Zoey going too? And Nick?”
“I think all of the Enrights are going,” August told her, “but they could only get two extra seats.”
Corri visibly counted. “But there are three of us,” she pointed out.
“I can’t go, sweetie,” India told her. “Even if there were three tickets, I couldn’t go. I have tons of work to do between now and Monday morning.”
“Oh, but Indy—”
“Sorry, sweetie. Maybe another time. But if I want to take lots of time off, I have to put in lots of time now. Understand?”
The phone rang and August answered it.
“Why, we were just discussing that very thing, Nick.” August’s clever eyes did not miss the way India’s color deepened at the sound of his name, or the little smile that played across her lips and that her niece thought no one else could see.
Good.
Just as August had hoped.
Very good.
“She’s right here, Nick.” August tapped India on the shoulder and handed her the telephone.
“What’s this I hear about you passing on the ballet?” he asked.
“Aside from my normal work schedule, something has come up that I need to look into.”
“Now what could have come up so quickly?” She paused. Corri was in the room, working hard to get a knot out of her skates’ laces, well near enough to hear every word India said. India did not want to discuss the shady dealings of the mother with the child so close at hand.
“India?” Nick questioned the unexpected and overly long pause.
“Ah …” She sought the words.
“Why don’t you let me take you out to dinner tonight and you can tell me all about it.”
“Aren’t your mother and sister still there?”
“Yup. But they have their own plans for this evening. Some parlor concert at Captain Jon’s.”
“Oh, I passed by there today. I saw the activity but forgot about the concert.” India smiled at his use of the locals’ name for the Devlin mansion in town. “And now that you mention it, I believe Aunt August is going also.”
They agreed upon a time for dinner, and India fled to the shower, taking the steps her usual two at a time. August sighed with true satisfaction and hummed as she rinsed out the coffeepot in the kitchen sink. Things were moving along quite nicely. Quite nicely indeed.
Casual dress, Nick had told her, which was, India thought, fortunate, since casual was about all she had brought home, other than the dress she had worn on Thanksgiving Day. Shaking the extra water from her hair, India brushed it from underneath with one hand and blow-dried it with the other, hoping to give it volume. She pulled on a pair of khaki pants and a sweater the color of ripe plums, popped shiny silver shells on her ears and slid her grandmother’s large silver filigree ring set with amethysts onto her middle finger. She was ready long before Nick rang the doorbell.
“Hey.” He grinned and leaned down to brush his lips across hers when she opened the front door. “I’m happy to see you.”
“Hey, I’m happy to see you too.”
“And I’m happy to see my niece getting out for a change.” August came into the hallway from the back of the house. “Now, where are you going tonight?”
“I thought maybe we’d have dinner at Carol’s,” Nick said.
“Ummm, Carol’s crabcakes,” India’s eyes lit up at the thought of the plump little cushions of chunky white crabmeat, expertly seasoned and browned.
“Carol’s it is, then.”
“Will you be home late, dear?” August watched Nick help India into her suede jacket. Watched him straighten her collar. Watched India smile up into his face.
“I doubt it,” India called over her shoulder as Nick took her hand and led her through the front door.
“Where’s Corri tonight?” He took her hand and they strolled, unhurried, down the sidewalk. “Umm. You smell as good as you look. What is that scent?”
“Freesia,” she told him. “And Corri is at a birthday party at a friend’s house. Darla will bring her home.”
“Then we have, oh, a whole few hours to spend together.” He looked pleased at the prospect. “Walk or drive?”
“Walk. It’s only a few blocks. I could use the exercise.”
“According to my sister, you had plenty this afternoon.”
“Not nearly enough to make up for all I ate yesterday,” she said, laughing.
“I’m glad you had a little time to spend with Zoey. Besides being my sister, she’s one of my all-time favorite people.”
“I enjoyed her company. But you know, I never did get around to asking her what she’s doing these days,” India noted.
“I believe she may be gainfully unemployed once again,” Nick mused. “Though I think she is considering several options. I told you, I believe, that Zoey has had many jobs over the past few years. She just hasn’t found her calling yet.”
“Would you call Zoey a bit of a rolling stone?” India asked.
“Not really. Mother says it’s not that Zoey’s
flighty
so much as she just hasn’t
landed
yet. But we all know that when she does, it will be with both feet. She’ll make an enormous splash and she’ll live happily ever after.”
“Does believing in fairy tales run in your family?” India looked up at him as they passed under a streetlight. The halo of pale yellow obscured his features for a brief instant, rendering him faceless in the foggy night.
“Maybe.” He laughed and passed out of the light, his eyes and nose and mouth returning to their appointed places. “Must have something to do with having a mother who writes fiction, who always makes certain there’s a happy ending. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, just something Zoey said today.” India and Nick stepped sideways to permit a group of noisy teenagers to
pass by. “She was talking about an old friend of yours that she had a crush on.”
“Ben Pierce.”
“That’s it.”
“Why was she talking about him?”
“She said he had been your friend, like Ry had been. And that she was sorry that you had lost both of them.”
They had reached Carol’s, the small restaurant that occupied the first floor of a rambling Queen Anne-style house on Bond Street in the “newer” section of town. “New,” in Devlin’s Light, referred to houses built after the Civil War, as so many of the structures had been built before 1800. There would be a fifteen -minute wait for their table, they were told, so they opted to wait at the bar, which occupied what had once been the music room in the century-old house.
“India Devlin, I haven’t seen your face in here in, well, I can’t remember how long.” Jake the bartender dried his hands on a towel and reached them across the mahogany plank that served as the bar top. “Hey, and Nick too. How’s it going?”
“Going well,” Nick told him.
“Hello, Jake.” India smiled.
“Let’s see, a glass of zinfandel for India and a beer for Nick, right?”
“You’ve got a great memory, Jake.” India nodded.
“How’s your aunt doing, Indy?” Jake set the wineglass on the bar in front of her.
“She’s doing just fine.”
“Gotta be tough on you guys this year with Ry gone.” Jake shook his head sadly. “Hell of a guy, Ry Devlin was.
Hell of a
guy.”
“Thank you, Jake. I appreciate your remembering him,” India said softly.
“Aw, how could you forget a guy like that?” Jake shook his head again and took a few steps to the left to fill another order.
India sipped at her wine and Nick stared into his beer, his fingers slowly turning the glass around in his hand.
India broke the silence. “It’s hard to lose a friend. It’s
good when people remember him, when they talk about him.”
She thought back to Lucien Byer’s visit that morning.
“Someone stopped by the house this morning,” she told him. “A real-estate developer named Lucien Byers. He said he is the president of Byers World. He was looking for Maris.”
“Maris?” Nick’s eyes widened. “Did you tell him he was about two years too late?”
She nodded. “It seems that not long before her accident, Maris had ‘sold’ Byers some of the Devlin land—about seventeen acres or so down along the river. He had the agreement of sale with him, with Maris’s signature and a very poor forgery of Ry’s on the bottom.”
“What?”
“Of course, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, but Mr. Byers wasn’t happy to learn he’d been tricked out of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
Nick slammed his glass on the bar. “Start from the beginning, and tell me everything.”
She did.
“Wait a minute,” he said when she had concluded. “You think there may be some connection between Maris’s death and Ry’s?”
“It’s beginning to look that way. Suppose for a minute that Maris did take this cashier’s check and cash it—”
“She’d have been walking around with a quarter of a million dollars. Where would she have stashed that?”
“I think that’s exactly what this Shuman wanted to know. So maybe she didn’t tell him.”
“And he killed her? Or maybe she did tell him and he killed her anyway, then hid the money and disappeared before Byers could figure out the fraud.”
“Then he came back looking for the money in Devlin’s Light.”
“Where else could she have hidden it? The house, the Light, or someplace in between?” India rationalized. “Maybe Ry caught him, and he killed Ry.”
“Hmmmm.” Nick pondered this. “I guess it makes as much sense as anything else. Ry really didn’t seem to have any enemies. I spent several days out at Bayview last week. I
couldn’t find one person who said one thing against him, India. From the faculty to the administrators, he was well liked, highly respected. Even the students I spoke with had nothing but good things to say about him. But didn’t you say that you thought there might have been two people involved in his death?”
“That’s a possibility. Someone to get his attention, to draw him out to the lighthouse. Someone waiting there to kill him.”
“Then there was someone else working with Shuman.”
“There were several names on the settlement papers. A lawyer, a settlement clerk, someone from the title company. At the very least, one of those persons would have had to be involved in order to have lent a sense of authenticity to the sale. Byers promised to fax me copies of all the documents first thing on Monday morning. Once I have the names of the players we can start to track them down.”
“That’s why you need to be back in Paloma early on Sunday?”
India nodded. “That’s part of it. I need to get my ducks in a row if I’m going to ask for a leave. The Man won’t be happy.”
“‘The Man?’”
“The D.A. My boss.”
“You’re really going to do it, then? Take time off?” His eyes watched her face.
“I am. I owe it to Corri to be here. I owe it to Aunt August to be here.”
“I think the person you most owe it to is India,” he said as the waitress tapped his arm to let him know their table was ready.
They were seated at a small round table in the dining room next to a window overlooking the side yard.
“There used to be a goldfish pond out there.” India pointed toward the darkness outside. “Ry and I used to bring bread crumbs and feed the koi. Some of them were as big as catfish. That was before this was a restaurant.”
“What did it used to be?” he asked, knowing that her face would light with the telling of it and loving the look on her face as she drew up a memory to share with him.
“It used to be Mrs. Mason’s place. Her husband was a
pharmacist. He died in the sixties, but she stayed on here until she died, maybe ten years or so after he did. Carol is their granddaughter.” India laughed then as she told him, “Now, understand that
Mr.
Mason’s family was
new
to Devlin’s Light. His family built this house in ‘87; that’s
1887.
Mrs. Mason, however, was from an old Devlin’s Light family. She was a Whitlock, one of the yeoman whaler families that settled here in the late 1600s.”
“‘Yeoman whalers?’” Nick looked amused. “There’s a new term.”
“There were thirty-five families—whalers—that came to the Cape May peninsula from New England and Long Island in the late 1600s. By purchasing large parcels of land—several hundred acres or so each—they were able to build modest plantations. They had come to hunt whales but stayed to work the land and become respected members of the community. In those days a yeoman occupied the rank just below that of gentleman. So ‘yeoman whaler’ refers to not only their occupation but their social standing in the community as well. Descendants of some members of those families ended up over time in Devlin’s Light. The Whitlocks were one of the families that sailed with the Devlins.”
“So Mrs. Mason outranked the old man, eh?”
“By several centuries.” She grinned.
The young waitress stopped by their table to recite the dinner specials, prompted by a card she had tucked into the palm of her hand. Nick stopped her midway through to order crabcakes for both of them, thus sparing the young girl from peeking at her cheat sheet.
“I’ve had dreams about these things,” India told Nick when the golden brown bundles of crabmeat were placed before them.
“Well, since my goal in this life is to make your dreams come true, I guess it’s a good start.” India blushed and smiled that half smile he was beginning to know well, and he grinned. “This is, after all, only our first real date.”
“What about that weekend in Paloma? We went to the museum, to the ballet …” she reminded him.
“That was a play date for Corri. This is a play date for you.” He smiled into her eyes and her heart flipped over in
her chest. “Now, tell me, what would you like to do after dinner?”
She looked across the table at his face, handsome as an autumn sky, his eyes warm and lush as honey, his dark hair a tumble across his forehead.