Safe Harbor (13 page)

"Thank you. I've been known to try."

"I didn't mean you didn't look nice before," he amended. "Just that you look—green must suit you." Suddenly he was feeling
truly
uncomfortable.

She laughed and said, "I know what you meant, Sam. Now sit down and we can enjoy a delicious lunch. The avocado's ripe, the wine's breathing, and the crab salad is perfection itself—as perfect as yesterday's crab salad can be, anyway. You really lucked out. There are days when I have turkey hot dogs for lunch."

He saw that she had se
t the table with care. Lattice-
patterned dishes shared space on a fancy white tablecloth with a vase of flowers, stemmed glasses, and a wicker basket filled with French bread. The salt and pepper shakers were silver. The atmosphere struck him as less struggling-folk-artist than lunch at the Ritz. Leisurely lunch at the Ritz.

"This is really very nice," he said as he took the chair he was bid. "You went to a lot of trouble, Holly. The only thing is
...
I
have to catch a ferry."

"A ferry! When?" she asked, setting a plate with a crab-stuffed avocado before him.

Right after I wolf this down
would have been the honest answer. He settled for saying, "I have a little while yet."

"I see." She brought the bottle of wine over and filled his glass. "It's just that you never mentioned it."

"True. I would have, if I'd known about it. Something just came up."

"What could come up?
Your cell phone's dead
."

"True." The girl was quick. "It's more something that I remembered." Lies, more lies, more lies. What
was
it about her that made him want to cover his tracks so completely?

"Well, it's a good thing you remembered," she said, stabbing the stuffed avocado hard with her fork. After a minute she looked up at him and said, "Remembered what, exactly?"

Even
he
knew that she was crossing the bounds of good manners. He twitched an eyebrow in the politest possible reprimand. It was enough to send
heat
flooding into her cheeks.

"Well, of course if you'd rather not say, I understand," she said as she concentrated on buttering a slice of bread. "That's absolutely your right." After a short, meditative chew, she lifted her chin. "Why would you rather not say?"

"I thought it was my right," he answered lightly.

She thought about it and apparently decided that it wasn't. Resting her fist ends on the table, she leaned forward and said, "Sam, can we stop playing games? This change of plans has something to do with
Eden
. If it has to do with
Eden
, then it has to do with me."

"I'm not sure I see a connection," he ventured.

"Then take
off your blindfold! I've told you everything I know about her—and a lot of stuff I shouldn't have said about my parents besides. Whereas you've told me virtually
nothing
," she said, her voice rising with emotion. "I don't even know who owns the damn engraving!"

She was impassioned, and she had a point. With a grudging frown he handed her a cookie of information. "The engraving belongs to my parents."

"Your parents! You said they were dead!"

"My birth mother is, they tell me. Since no one has a clue who my biological father is, I like to think of him that way as well. But my adoptive parents are alive. Alive and ailing and poor as church mice now."

Her full lips parted in an expression of unquestioning—and unwanted—sympathy. "Sam! Oh, that's awful! No
wonder
you're after
Eden
. Why didn't you tell me?"

So that I wouldn't have to deal with that look on your face, that's why.

All his life Sam had been an emotional loner. Millie and Jim Steadman had done
their best, but a loner he had
remained—until
Eden
. The one time he had fully trusted someone
... the one time he'd given in to what he now saw was a pathetic need to be wanted and needed by someone
...

"I didn't see the point of mentioning it," he said with a shrug.

Bad answer. Holly didn't like it at all. "Does everything have to have a point?" she said, sitting back in exasperation. "Can't you just confide in someone because it feels good?"

"You've read way too many books in that bookcase," he shot back. There was definitely an edge in his voice. He could feel it coming, that prickly, defensive reaction whenever someone talked psychobabble. He remembered a title on her bookshelf and said acidly, "Men are from Mars, remember?"

She scowled. "That's right. So tell me, why don't you all just go
home?"

Yep. It was getting down and dirty at the Ritz. Sam decided to back away smiling before the two of them ended up in a food fight. Abandoning his half-eaten crab salad, he glanced at his watch, feigned surprise, and stood up. "Time and tide wait for no man," he said lightly, "and neither does the Vineyard Express."

He laid his napkin neatly on her prettily arranged table. "Thanks for going to all the trouble. As it turns out, I won't be coming back to the apartment."

"You must be psychic," she said in a deadly tone.

He took the hit and turned to leave, then turned around again. She wasn't expecting it; he saw her unguarded look of baffled dismay and pretended not to notice. He was behaving like an ass, but he didn't see what he could do about it.

"Look
... Holly
... this has nothing to do with who you are or what I am. I have a lead, okay? A lead that might take me to
Eden
. That's why I came to the island, that's why I'm leaving it. To find
Eden
. It's as simple as that."

"You don't have to explain," she said, gathering her dignity around her like a mailed cloak. "You have a boat to catch. I hope you find her."

"If I don't, I may be back," he said with an apologetic smile.

B
oston
in August was definitely not the Vineyard in August. Brutally hot pavement sent spirals of heat around Sam as he walked the length of fashionable
Newbury Street
, dotted with upscale galleries tucked discreetly between high-end salons and clothing shops. Almost at once he
was able to eliminate
the two galleries whose ads he had hunted down in the Sunday
Boston
Globe.
No one claimed to have heard from
Eden
, and Sam believed them.

Undaunted, he continued to canvas the street of shops, until he stumbled into The Hungary I, a small gallery below street level that specialized in East European art.

At the end of a long wall hung with dozens of obviously mass-produced religious icons, he discovered a wild-haired man in an ill-fitting suit and with a desperately eager smile on his face. The gallery would be closing in a week, the obese shopkeeper told Sam in fractured English, so this was, absolutely, last chance. Half price! For two, take off extra twenty percent!

Sam had to decline a series of increasingly final offers before he got the chance to put forward his own agenda: Had anyone in the last several weeks offered to sell an engraving by Durer?

The dealer thrust out a huge lower lip and pondered. "Durer? You want Durer?"

Sam nodded, unsure whether the guy was getting his implication.

"Tell you where you go: Ironic Curtain, on
Huntington Avenue
. You know where is
Huntington
? Other way from
Copley Square
. My cousin—Stefan Ko
loman—he will help you." He winked and added, "Say Lajos sent you, okay?"

****

The Ironic Curtain sat squeezed between a plumber's supply house and a mechanic's garage in a marginal stretch of
Huntington Avenue
. The cousins were as different as their galleries. Stefan Koloman was thin and dour and eyed Sam suspiciously as he approached in the dark, dingy shop, stacked three and four deep with framed and unframed paintings.

The first words out of his mouth after Sam introduced himself were, "Yeah? What
about
the Durer?"

Sam said, "I'm trying to locate the engraving, and I understand that a woman
n
amed Eden Walker was trying to shop it to you."

Then he waited.

The dealer eased onto a high wood stool. "You lookin' for her?"

"Right now I'm more interested in the engraving," Sam said, which was true enough.

"What's your connection to her?"

"None worth mentioning." True as well.

Stefan took a pack of smokes from the pocket of his polo shirt and shook a cigarette free. He tapped it against the box, stuck it in his mouth, lit it, inhaled deeply.

He said through a stream of smoke, "Tell you what; I'm looking for her, too."

"Why is that?"

"She screwed me," he said, flicking an ash into a cheap glass tray. "I got real scrod."

He
allowed himself an ironic
grin, and Sam saw that he had a gold tooth. "You wouldn't be the first," he said.

Stefan grunted and took another drag. He studied the shine on his loafers. After another long pause he looked up. "I found her a buyer for the Durer. A collector of German art. A rich fanatic, the kind who have to have it, no questions asked. But the bitch cut me out of the sale."

"She went around you?"

"Yeah. She took the name off my Rolodex, maybe, when I went out to the front of the shop."

Sam grimaced sympathetically. "Would you be willing to tell me the buyer's name?"

Stefan's laugh was low and sneering. "You joking? It'd be the last thing I ever did. No one messes with this guy. What about her?" he added. "She's not still on that island?"

"The V—?" Sam thought better of naming the island in question and settled for saying, "Long gone."

"Bitch. I could kill her. I
will
kill her," he said calmly, as if he expected Sam to relay the message.

Sam said, just as calmly, "I wouldn't go off the deep end just yet." He propped one of his cards against the stub-filled tray. "If you change your mind about naming the buyer, I'll make sure you recover a fee. Think about it."

Stefan snorted and flicked an ash into the tray; some of it settled on Sam's card. "Find her for me, I'll pay
you."

He took a deep, deep drag and was still
grinning
malevolently when Sam walked out.

****

So where the hell do I go from here?

Sam slugged beer to wash down a heart-killer Reuben as he sat alone in a dark
Boston
pub and considered his options. He was vain enough to feel pleased that he'd tracked down
Eden
and the engraving as far as he had. But it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that
Eden
had won not only the round, but clearly the match.

She had stolen the engraving from an elderly, naive couple who had dutifully kept possession of it a secret for decades. She had sold the painting to some rich maniac who was never going to admit to having bought it. She had swindled a dealer out of his commission in the bargain, and since the dealer was a crook, it was safe to assume that he wouldn't be suing her anytime soon. The original owner, good old Uncle Henry, was dead and buried, and so was the attorney who had handled his will.

It was a situation tailor-made for Eden, who would've considered it just slightly more challenging than taking candy from a baby and then pushing the buggy off a cliff.

Eden
,
Eden
... where have you gone?

Why, off on a
yacht, to play with a rich man.

And the loot? That could be anywhere, from a bank in the Cayma
ns to a pocket in her shorts, h
aving been bartered for the moment into uncut diamonds. She'd done it all before.

Maybe it was the sauerkraut in his Reuben sandwich that was to blame: out of nowhere, Sam experienced a vivid flashback to an afternoon seven years earlier, an afternoon that had knocked his heart into a black, sticky bog where it remained still.