Padraig had wanted to motor over to the island, but Jennifer had used every excuse. She had been slow clearing up their simple lunch. Then she had pleaded weariness from her trip and gone to her cabin for a nap. This time she had used the lock, and had settled into the bed with two pillows so that her head was up and her eyes fixed on the door. There was no chance of her sleeping, but she needed to get away from his continuous chatter so she could think. Padraig had maneuvered her to a place where no one could save her. If she was going to make it through the next two days, she would have to do it on her own.
When she came back up to the saloon, Padraig was on deck, looking patiently across at Pennobquit Island. Instead of joining him, Jennifer made a point of busying herself in the galley, pretending to be enthusiastic over the evening meal. He came in, hoping to hurry her along so they could still get over to the island before dark. The pots and dishes were chattering in her hands, and nothing she said sounded natural.
“Jennifer, darlin’, you seem distraught. Dinner is no problem. I don’t give a damn what we eat.”
“I want things nice,” she lied, and then she dropped a plate of vegetables on the deck. The plate bounced and rolled, leaving a trail of zucchini slices. She bent to pick them up, then jumped when his hand came down on top of hers.
“What is it?” he asked. She thought he seemed suspicious rather than concerned.
“We came out here to see if we had a future, not to explore an island,” she snapped at him.
He stayed on his knees, helping her clean up the mess. “Whatever you want,” he assured her. “We can take a glass of wine up to the flybridge. And we can talk until the sun comes up. The island will still be there tomorrow.”
But his expression had changed. His eyes were narrower, and the signature smile had disappeared from his lips. The nervous chatter was gone. He was talking softly and trying to sound reassuring.
He knows, Jennifer thought. He knows that I’ve found out why he brought me here. At that moment it seemed that her best chance to make it through the night was to convince him that she had no suspicions whatsoever.
They climbed up to the flybridge with a bottle of wine and glasses and watched the sky redden to the west. Jennifer used the moment to press her first question: Had he ever really loved her?
He swore that he had. “Not at first, of course. No, at first it was strictly a matter of money. You had it and I needed it.”
“Just money?” she asked as though it were a dirty word.
“Oh, it’s never just money. Not for me, anyway. With me it was my life. Things were falling apart on me, darlin’, and I was frightened out of my wits.”
He explained the miserable ending of his career that was staring him in the face. He was middle-aged, playing the role of a youthful hero, and there were these young Turks snapping at his ass. “Kids just out of film school and illiterate punks who had decided that they were actors. There wasn’t one of them who could play the butler in a high school play. And they were all sitting around in their black shirts, smoking their dope, and talking about bringing in one of their studs to replace me. So, the future looked bleak, Jennie, darlin’. There was nothing left for me. Maybe doing a few walk-ons or playing some pathetic fool in a television series. No, it wasn’t just money that I needed. I needed to save my life.”
He admitted that their first meeting hadn’t been as romantic as he had often painted it. It had been no accident when he walked in on her at the trade show. Letting her drive through the mountains had been the most frightening experience of his life. The car he had given her had been no money down. “All I made was the first payment. We were two months behind when the damn thing went over the cliff.” And his exit from the hotel in Cannes had been carefully staged. He had lurked behind a pillar while the desk clerk explained his departure, and then he
had paraded his entourage across the lobby, knowing she would see him.
“What a fool,” Jennifer derided herself. “I should have known.”
“Now, don’t be thinking that way,” he consoled her. “Theater is about making people see what isn’t there and believe what isn’t true. And I’m damn good at my craft.”
She asked him about her auto accident, and he took on a brooding expression while he weighed his answer. “Hardest thing I ever did,” he finally admitted. “You see, by then I was truly taken by you. I had already called the whole thing off once, and I damn near called it off again.”
That had been his plan right from the beginning. Marry her, then arrange for her to have an accident. He had made the arrangements in his best French, paying half the cost in cash up front and promising the rest after the accident. It had been all set up for Ireland. But when the time came, he couldn’t go through with it. For the first time since his adolescence, he had truly fallen in love. “There were mornings, darlin’, when I’d just lie in bed and watch you sleep, hoping you’d wake up so I’d be there when you first opened your eyes.”
But then the real cost of launching Leprechaun had become apparent. Her checking account wouldn’t even come close. He needed total access to limitless funding. “That was the moment of truth. Was I going to remain an important man in the movie business? Or was I going to settle down with a lovely young girl and enjoy my newfound bliss? It wasn’t an easy choice. But I just couldn’t stop being Padraig O’Connell the famous actor.” He shook his head slowly. “It was the wrong choice, of course. But I’d probably make the same decision over again. Fame is an opiate. Not many of us can kick the habit.”
“So then it was you.”
He nodded slowly. “My needing the car was just an alibi. I called the garage and told them I’d be using it so it would look like I was the one who was supposed to go over the cliff. But I
want you to know that when you walked out of that room, I was on my feet and after you. I got downstairs just in time to see you spin out onto the street. Another few seconds and I would have stopped you. And then, when I saw you in that hospital, pale, dead, with those hoses keeping you breathing, I was horrified. I knew I had destroyed the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.”
Jennifer had heard enough truth for one night. Peter had been right when he blamed Padraig for cutting the brakes. And she had been right in thinking of herself as the ugly duckling. The only thing that Padraig had seen in her was money. They watched the sun set, and then each of them found a private place, Jennifer on the sofa in the saloon and Padraig outside, pacing the deck in the darkness.
She tried to look at ease, sitting with her legs drawn up and turning through the pages of a magazine. But her thoughts were racing. He had confessed that he was after her money and had talked freely about attempted murder. Unburdening himself of his guilt, perhaps, but in the process sticking his neck in a noose. She realized that the only reason he had spoken so candidly was that he knew it would never matter. She was the only one he was telling, and she would never tell anyone else: more proof that she wasn’t going to make it back.
She had to get away. But how? She couldn’t coax him ashore and then escape in the trawler. Padraig had the ignition key in his pocket. She could swim to Pennobquit. But it would be only a matter of time before he found her. You could stand on one end of the island and see the other. So it had to be the inflatable dinghy.
It wasn’t a certain escape. She wasn’t sure she knew how to operate the boat, although an outboard couldn’t be too complicated. She had no idea how much fuel it carried or how far it would take her. But she could head back up the bay as far as the boat would go and swim to whatever land was nearest to her. Without the dinghy, Padraig wouldn’t be able to get ashore and would have no way to find her.
When? It had to be right now. Tonight. She had no idea of Padraig’s plans, but she guessed she was supposed to die in an accident on the island. Probably a fall from the cliff. She had succeeded in stalling for the entire afternoon, but if she refused to go ashore with him in the morning, he would know for certain that she was on to his murderous intent. And then what? A blow to the head and her body tossed into the dinghy so she could be carried to the island and dropped from the cliff. No matter how she looked at it, time was against her. It had to be tonight.
She made a mental list of the things she would need. Some matches in a plastic bag so she could light a signal fire wherever she landed. A knife to cut twigs, or maybe even use in self-defense. A bottle of water and a few of the frozen breakfast bars. A length of twine to tie her supplies to her leg if she had to swim ashore. That was all she could carry.
Jennifer watched Padraig walking the deck down the port side that faced the island. She went to the galley and put on a pot of tea as her excuse for being there. Then she assembled what she needed and sealed her things in a kitchen bag. She had just slipped the bag under her belt when he came inside.
“I put a kettle on,” she said innocently. “You make some tea while I go below for a minute.” She walked past him and down the steps to her stateroom. He seemed more interested in the kettle than in her. Jennifer hid her supplies under the pillows, flushed the toilet, and went back up to the saloon.
“Chilly outside,” Padraig said, explaining why he was setting the teacups on the saloon table. He sat in one of the chairs. Jennifer went back to her place on the sofa. “But the sky is clear,” he went on. “Tomorrow will be a great day for exploring the island. We can look around in the morning, then maybe take a swim in the pond.”
She nodded. “Sounds great!” And then, to cover the panic that she was sure was giving her away, she continued the conversation from earlier. “You found you had feelings for me, and you came into New York every weekend to help me recover. So we had a second chance to make it together. But then you took up
with Catherine …” She left the statement hanging so that it begged for an explanation.
“Your sister is quite a woman,” he began. “Drawn to the limelight like a moth to a flame. She knows it will burn her into ashes, but still she can’t resist.”
“That’s what you said about yourself,” Jennifer reminded him.
He nodded. “Sad but true. Catherine and I were made for each other by the devil. It’s a marriage made in hell. But still a marriage. She had all the money I would ever need, and I had the movie industry, the world’s biggest and brightest stage. She had to be a player, and she was willing to spend everything to have the world as her audience.”
Jennifer was puzzled. “She was already a celebrity.”
“Ahh,” he said. “But she has this magic mirror that she looks in every day. She asks, ‘Am I the fairest of them all?’ But there was always a movie star to edge her out. She couldn’t stand it! She had to hear the mirror say that she was certainly the fairest.
“Then one day she asked her question, and the mirror said, ‘No, Catherine. Your sister, Jennifer, is the fairest of them all. Look how Padraig O’Connell worships her.’ And at that point, darlin’, you and I were dead. Catherine came to Hollywood with an armful of poison apples.”
“But if you knew all this—”
“Don’t try to understand,” he said, answering the question he knew she was asking. “Only a moth understands the allure of the flame. To sane people, like yourself, risking everything for vanity makes no sense at all.
“But your sister was willing to put it all on the line. And I have to tell you, she was dazzling. More glamorous than the stars. Smarter than the producers. With more money than the studios. She came in like a vision, and people simply sighed and fell down. It was like Marilyn in the old days, making kings and presidents tremble. Or like the Japanese when they arrived with more money than the Hollywood tycoons had ever imagined. Within a week, she was a force to be dealt with. And there was
I, a fading actor suddenly reborn in her aura, with people who wouldn’t buy me lunch suddenly wanting to invest millions. I may have been falling in love with you, Jennifer, but the fact is that you never had a chance.”
Jennifer went to the galley and returned with more tea.
“I knew Catherine hated me,” she said as she poured. “But I didn’t try to kill her. I swear I wasn’t the one who hired that actor.”
“Of course you weren’t.” He laughed as she sat back down. “How could it have been you? The truth is that it was me.”
“You? It can’t be. You just told me that Catherine was your rebirth. You were living in her aura—”
“True. But I was paying a terrible price. My God, but she can be an awful bitch. She was grinding my face in the mud. Humiliating me in front of my friends. She had used me just long enough to get into Hollywood and to make sure that your face would never pop up again in her magic mirror. The thing about Catherine is that she suffers no rivals. She destroys them lest they distract from her magnificence.”
“But how? You were out in Hollywood. And he was struggling in New York.”
“Now, try to be kind, Jennifer. I may be past my prime, but people still recognize me. Particularly aspiring young actors. It was Will Ferris who spotted me at that health club. And he made two passes at me. First just to introduce himself and to wonder if there was anything I could do to help his career. I gave him the standard answer: Send a picture to my agent. Then, a couple days later, he sprang at me in your doorway. Just wanted to let me know that if there were anything he could do to work with me—absolutely anything. When actresses say that, it’s an invitation to take them to bed. With actors, they’re covering their bases on the chance you might be gay. He was a pathetic little twit, but I did ask for his card and promise that I’d look for something. As I was leaving him, he called after me: ‘Remember, Mr. O’Connell … anything.’”