Safe Harbor (7 page)

"
Eden
has something that
doesn't belong to her," Sam said at last.

"Yeah. My father."

"Something else. It has great value."

"Sentimental, or monetary?" Holly asked, sitting up with interest.

He shrugged. "Both
,
once, but monetary now."

It was a confusing answer, but at least the man was talking. She said, "Is this thing yours?"

He shook his head.

"But
Eden
did steal it?"

He shrugged. "
I'm
convinced."

"Are you going to tell me what it is?"

"Nope."

"Are you going to tell me who it belongs to?"

"Nope."

"Well, then I'm wasting my time here, aren't I?"

She stood up to leave, but he caught her wrist.

"Sit down, please. You promised to help."

It wasn't exactly a request. Holly found herself sliding back down onto her chair and wishing she had her Mace, "Fine," she said warily. "But that Jack Webb routine isn't going to get you very far in your inquiries."

"Let me worry about that. I need to know where your father would be likely to sail the
Vixen."

Holly tossed her hair back and said, "With Eden aboard? The
China Sea
, for all I know. Obviously he's going to want to cruise somewhere off the beaten path."

"And if he were staying
on
the beaten path?"

She let out a bored sigh—a teenager being grounded would let out just such a sigh—and said, "The Cape. The
Elizabeth
Islands
. He might go through the canal and Down East; he loves
Maine
, and it
is
August, after all."

"Does he have a favorite harbor?"

"The same as everyone else," Holly said, watching their food arrive. "Hadley."

"Which you can only get to by boat, if I'm not mistaken."

Holly pulled her hands back daintily to give the waitress room. "Isn't that usually the point? To get away from the madding crowd?"

She stared at her chicken salad with real confusion. It was eleven in the morning, for pity's sake. She'd just got up from breakfast. She gave Sam a look shot with frustration and renewed hostility, then said, "Are we done here?"

"Not quite," he said, returning the look exactly. "Tell me where I can charter a boat."

"Excuse me? You're going to pursue them by
boat?"
She laughed at the sheer absurdity of it.

Sam ignored her reaction and asked another question: "Did
Eden
clear out of the apartment completely?"

By now Holly more or less hated the man. "She cleared out, all right. Just as I'm about to do." She stood up and unhooked her bag from the back of the chair.

"Hey," he said, much more mildly this time. "Aren't you going to eat that?"

"I am
not
hungry," she said through gritted teeth.

"Well,
I
am," he answered, slicing through his turkey breast.

"Are you?" Holly picked up her knife and picked up her plate, then scraped the contents of hers onto his.
"Bon appétit
, in that case," she said, and she spun on her heel and walked out.

U
nder a moody gray
sky, Holly bicycled past blue-
petalled chickory and green blades of dune grass, searching for her mother's car.

She had headed out early for her parents' big, white house, intending to bring her mother up to date over breakfast about Sam Steadman and his mysterious mission. But she arrived to find the white picket gates flung open and her mother's Volvo gone.

It wasn't unusual. Charlotte Anderson was an early riser and walked all over the island for exercise. It wasn't unusual—but for days now, Holly had been watching with dread as her mother sank like a waterlogged hat into a sea of deepening despair. Instead of pedalling back to her barn, Holly decided on the spot to track down her missing mother.

Her search took her out of Vineyard Haven and onto
Beach Road
, which she followed at a fairly fast clip right through Oak Bluffs. She zipped past the town beach with hardly a glance: her mother preferred the more desolate stretches. Once outside of Oak Bluffs, Holly jogged onto the bicycle path that ran side by side with
Beach Road
down the eastern end of the island, scanning constantly for her mother's car.

She was halfway to Edgartown before she discovered the white Volvo that so clearly was her mother's. (It was the only car on the island with an angel whirligig suction-cupped to its roof, ready to spin its wings if the car ever got up to a speed of, say, a hundred miles an hour. The guardian angel—a disastrous design—had been a welcome-summer gift from Holly to her mother. The most successful thing about it was that in over two months it hadn't been pinched.)

Holly streaked across the road and dumped her bike alongside the car, then peered up and down the long, narrow expanse of white sand being wetted by a gray and sullen sea. The beach was still deserted. She saw a couple with two young children who, sun or no sun, had set up camp on a blanket, and another couple deep in conversation as they walked along the water's edge—but th
ere was no sign of a sixty-year-
old woman walking along with arms folded and head bowed, wondering
what had become of her world.

Holly's heart, which had slowed after the ride, began to pound all over again. How long had the Volvo been abandoned there? She stared left, stared right, strained to see
...

"Holly! Where did
you
come from?"

She whirled around to see her mother crossing the road from the bicycle path. She was dressed in khaki shorts and a pink cotton shirt and she didn't look desperate at all.

Relieved, Holly said, "I went to the house; you weren't there."

''So you tracked me all the way out here?"

"Well, what did you expect? I'm worried about you."

"You should be," her mother said bluntly. "I've had another premonition."

The admission sent a wave of cold across Holly's consciousness. She had learned, over the years, not to take her mother's premonitions lightly.

They fell in together and began walking along the beach. "What was this one?" Holly asked, but she knew the answer beforehand.

"Same thing:
Eden
, dying. The terrible thing is that this time she was dying in my arms. I was holding her; we were near water, just as you and I are now. I could have saved her—the feeling was very strong that I could have saved her—but I was choosing not to. And then I woke up. I don't know whether I woke myself up to stop myself from letting her die, or to stop myself from saving her life."

"Mom, it was just a dream," Holly said. She tried to laugh off her fears. "Don't be so Freudian. How are you feeling, by the way?" she asked, concerned at the furrows in her mother's brow. "Is your migraine gone?"

"It lurks at the edges," her mother said grimly.

"I'm amazed you're out, then. Shouldn't you be lying down?"

"Come home with me. There's something I want you to see."

Charlotte
refused to say more than that, so Holly loaded her bike into the back of the car and they drove home with Holly doing
the talking. She related word-
for-word and look-for-look all that had happened between her and Sam Steadman on the preceding day, but all she got from her mother was the occasional nod.

The sun had begun to burn away the night's rain and the morning's gray haze; by the time they pulled into the grassy drive, the flattened daisies that lined the walk were starting to lift their heads again. Holly fell in behind her mother on the curving brick path and followed
her through the side French doors into the kitchen.

Dumping her straw carryall on the marble countertop,
Charlotte
marched down the hall over an Oriental hall runner worn thin from generations of sandy shoes.

She stopped at the white-panelled door that led to her husband's study. "Look what I've done," she said simply.

Holly stepped inside and stared in shock at the panelled and shuttered room.

Chaos. Her father's "nautical" shelves had been cleared of all of their books, whose ripped-out pages lay strewn about like torn-away leaves from a hurricane. His beloved, antique sextant had been used as a blunt weapon to smash everything of his that was breakable, including the crystal golfing trophy that lay in pieces under its twisted arc. The wedding photo of a smiling Eric and a radiant Charlotte had been smashed in—not a disaster, because everyone had copies—but the World's Greatest Father mug, that was gone forever, and so was the collection of children's mementos that Holly, her brother, and her sister had presented to their father over the years.

Holly stepped over the wreckage with far more apprehension than when, at the innocent age of seven, she had stepped over the mess in her parents' ransacked, burglarized house in
Providence
. Her fear this time was not of evil forces without, but of terrible forces within.

"Mom," she whispered, stunned into speechlessness.

Her mother was standing stiff as a flagpole. Her arms were folded across her chest and a look of burning defiance glittered in her green eyes: there were no tears there, none that Holly could see.

"I burned all of his Admiralty charts, too," said
Charlotte
. "He had charts for the entire
Bahamas
chain, and the
Caribbean
, and God knows what else. Look over there. In the fireplace. I burned them all. They cost him forty to sixty dollars apiece. I remember how he muttered about the cost every time he invested in one. Now they're ashes. What do you think about
that
?
she asked Holly in a brittle, high-pitched voice.

She went on. "He told me he'd be back for all of this stuff, you know. I can hardly wait. He said he didn't want anything out of this marriage except his boat things." She looked around her and let out a short shrill laugh. "Really: I can hardly
wait."

Holly picked up a recent photograph, also smashed in, of her brother and sister and her sitting on the bow of the
Vixen.
It occurred to her for the first time that the three of them—but especially her blond, blue-eyed brother and sister—were walking, breathing reminders of Eric Anderson.

She laid the frame gently down on the desk, hoping that it was the boat and not the children that had been the butt of her mother's fury.

"When did you do this?" she murmured.

"Late last night, after you phoned. It's Ma
rjory Bet
son's fault," her mother explained with a lift of her chin. "She called about an hour before you did to tell me—she was
so
concerned; she would be, the bitch—she called to tell me that when she and Mark sailed into Onset, they saw the
Vixen,
all snugged down at anchor. Eric and Eden were in the cockpit, carrying on. Naturally, Marjory had pretended not to see the boat.

"I lay in bed, thinking about that—it was so easy for me to picture them, you know?—and then sometime after midnight, I came in here and started
...
just started
... smashing things. It felt, I don't know—good. I was sure it would get rid of the migraine," she added with a sudden, pitiable smile. She took the lone book that remained on the built-in shelves that flanked the fireplace and stood it carefully on end again, as if to prove how reasonable she really had been.

"And did it get rid of the migraine?" Holly asked.

"I told you," her mother said, turning to face her. "It lurks at the edges."

"So then
... how do you feel about—" Holly lifted her arms, palms up, and gestured around her.

This time her mother's smile was no more than a small, pained twitch at the corners of her mouth. "You want me to admit how sorry I feel; how I came to my senses and was horrified when I walked in here this morning," she said.

Holly sighed and nodded hopefully.

Charlotte
turned back to the bookshelves and took down the book she had just propped up, a paperback cruising guide that looked brand-new. She opened it wide over her knee and bent its halves over her thighs until the spine let out a fatal, cracking sound. Without a glance at Holly, she walked over to the fireplace and tossed the fractured book on the grate.

"I feel no more regret than
he
does," she muttered, and she walked out of the room.

In the hallway she stopped and turned back to her daughter. "You're a naive little fool, Holly," she said bitterly. "Grow up."