Safe Harbor

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "But not the Canal?"

  "Yeah, that, too. You're gonna have to backtrack, I guess. There's no point to following the outer Cape to Provincetown; no one sails that route."

  "What is this? What's going on?" said Holly, obviously catching on to the point of the plan.

  "Here we go," Billy said cheerfully.

  "Belt, will you?" Sam repeated. Over Holly's protests that she wasn't going anywhere, he reached over and did the job for her.

  The seaplane accelerated with an earsplitting but somehow jaunty din, and then with a mighty lift, the little craft became airborne. Up, up, and away they went, leaving the island curled below like a sun-drenched cat. Ahead and to port lay a bracelet of fuzzy green, sheep-grazing lumps: the unspoiled chain of Elizabeth Islands, nailed down at the western end by the quaint community of Cuttyhunk. To starboard lay the channel that led to Woods Hole and the mainland, plied just then by a ferry and a smattering of early sailors.

  "Now this is more like it," Sam said, happy despite his misgivings about Holly. He loved being away from it all. A sailboat knifing silently through the water was his first preference; but the seaplane, despite its noisy drone, wasn't a bad way to get around, either. "Nice, huh?" he offered hopefully.

  He saw high color in her cheeks; he chalked it off to excitement.

  Wrong.

  "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she said with not-so-repressed fury. "This is an abduction! And you!" she said, poking Billy in the back. "You're going to lose your license over this!"

  "Oh, hey, now, lady, I haven't abducted nobody. You climbed aboard of your own free will."

  "My father is an attorney, I hope you're aware of that!"

  "Probate, Billy; no big deal," Sam interjected.

  That made her, if possible, even more pissed. "This is all about finding my father, isn't it? You actually think I'm going to sit here and hunt him down with you two morons?"

  Sam shrugged and said, "Unless you're planning to jump out of the plane—yeah. I do."

  "You outrageous, godforsaken liar! I will have you arrested. The instant we touch down! This is a kidnapping, pure and simple!"

  Now that she put it that way, Sam could see how some law-minded person might jump to that conclusion. It didn't help his case that he had a history of kidnapping things that he wanted or needed: that go-fast boat; the red Corvette. Still, he knew that he'd left his life of crime behind him, so if the morning's otherwise perfectly normal situation had an awkward side to it, it wasn't because of him, but her.

  "What do we do, Sam?" asked Billy.

  "Keep going."

  "Turn aroundl"

  "You make things hard on a guy, you know that?" Sam said, getting a little testy himself. "I mean, here's Billy, taking time out of his charter business just to do us a favor—"

  "Us a favor? I don't care where Eden is!"

  "But you care where your father is. You have to care," he said simply. "He's your father."

  Sam, who didn't have a clue who or where his own biological father was, had cared about that for a long, long time.

  "You're wrong," Holly said with icy disdain. "I don't want to have anything to do with my father ever again."

  "You say that now. But eventually—in a month, a season, a year—you'll want to have something to do with him again. So the sooner you see him and confront him about this, the better off you'll be. You have issues to work through."

  "Issues!" She laughed scornfully at that one and said, "And how do you propose I deal with them? By swooping low over the Vixen and pelting it with propoganda leaflets?"

  God, no, Sam thought. The last thing he wanted was to tip Eden off. He said, "The way I look at it, if they're still around here it means that your father isn't as committed to this wild affair as you think. He's sticking close to home, at least subconsciously; you can assume that he'll come to his senses soon."

  "Why? Because he hasn't sailed off with Eden to Raratonga yet? He couldn't if he wanted to," Holly muttered as she stared out the window at the water below. "My mother burned all his charts."

  Whoa. All that stuff about a woman scorned was true, then.

  "Please, Holly," Sam murmured, sensing that she, at least, was softening. "I need your help. I know we got off on the wrong foot. I wish I had been more candid with you from the start. I ... I've never in my life had to ask a woman to help me out, but I'm doing it now. Please, Holly. I need to find Eden."

  Her expression was extraordinarily grave as she studied his face while she considered his plea. Sam had the uncanny sense that she was looking into his soul. While he felt confident that he had God on his side in this one, he wasn't nearly as sure that God approved of the way he was going about His business.

  Apparently Holly didn't, either. She whacked Billy on the shoulder again. "Take me back to the dock."

  "Hey! Geez! With pleasure," the pilot said, annoyed, and he began banking the seaplane to starboard.

  "Hold a turn, Billy," Sam ordered. He took hold of Holly's arm—why, he had no idea; it wasn't as if she was going anywhere—and said, "Would you recognize your father's boat from up here? Yes or no."

  She glanced scathingly at their point of contact and said, "Probably. My father has had the boat customized. And he flies an owner's ensign from the port spreader. It's an unusual color—magenta; I think it would show from up here."

  "Help me find them," Sam said bluntly, "and I'll have Eden behind bars in no time."

  "Oh, good; you can share a cell together," said Holly, yanking her arm free of his grip.

  Ignoring the snotty response, he spun a scenario that would help them both. "Eden has stolen an extremely valuable engraving," he admitted for the first time. "It belongs to people I care about deeply. Once I get it back, once Eden is out of the picture, your father will see her for what she is. It's happened before."

  "How would you know?" Holly said, surprised.

  "No—you misunderstand," Sam said quickly. No way was he going to admit that he was the one who'd had a rude awakening after Eden took off. "I meant, Eden has taken things before that she shouldn't have." His heart being one of them.

  "Really, Sam? She's a proven thief? And you think my father will reject her once he becomes aware of that?"

  Her eyes were wide and green and hopeful and Sam felt like a lying shit. Well, it had to be done. God worked in mysterious ways. "Let's take it one step at a time," he suggested. "First we have to find them."

  She nodded. Whatever Sam had said, however he had said it, it seemed to have worked. Holly did a complete one-eighty.

  "We can find them," she said, pressing her nose to the window in her sudden determination to locate the boat. "I know all my father's favorite harbors. Billy, don't bother with Quisset; he doesn't go there. But, yes, check out Hadley ... and Quick's Hole... definitely Cuttyhunk. That's one place where he'd actually pay for a mooring if there weren't any room to anchor."

  Billy said, "Now yer talkin'," and began a sharp bank to port. Holly didn't think much of the sudden maneuver. She tensed and grabbed Sam's arm reflexively, which he had to admit, he liked: it gave him the feeling that he was back in control of a hideously slippery mission. Smiling, he said, "Billy's just showing off, that's all."

  "Billy's just in a hurry," the pilot shot back. "Billy has to be in Marblehead for a two-thirty wedding in the air."

  Sam rolled his eyes at Holly. "Good grief. How corny can you get?"

  "Really? I think it sounds kind of romantic," Holly ventured.

  Ah, shit. "Oh, the general idea—definitely," Sam agreed, tap-dancing through his faux pas. "I meant, it's doing it over Marblehead that's corny. I would get married over Martha's Vineyard. Because the Vineyard—now that's romantic."

  Holly broke into one of her sunshine grins and he thought, here's a girl who should smile more often. Too bad Eden had tossed that grenade in her lap. Their laps, in fact—her mother sounded like a basket case as well. He had to wonder about the father. How the hell did a probate
lawyer ever find the nerve or, depending how you looked at it, become so witless that he was willing to drop a family on its collective head in a willy-nilly chase after a hot piece of ass?

  Eden. That's how. Eden. Sam remembered well how she would bat those long-lashed blue eyes at him and then walk away, implying that maybe he'd get some and maybe he wouldn't. She'd driven him crazy, driven every man she'd ever wanted to, completely crazy. Eden. He could almost taste the sweet honey of her kiss. He definitely could see the soft sway of her hips. Seven years, and he could still see those hips.

  Nosirree. Eric Anderson wouldn't have stood a snowball's chance in hell.

  "Oh, my God, I think that's—! No," Holly decided, disappointed. She shaded her eyes with her hands against the window. "It's a Roamer 44, but it's not my dad's. Here, Sam, look. Down there. See the boat with the teak decks? The Vixen looks like that, except that all her wood trim is varnished to a perfect gloss. The varnish would be glinting in the sun on a day like this."

  Sam craned to look over her shoulder. Caught off guard, Holly pulled away from him the few short inches she could. She seemed uncomfortably aware of him, which wasn't surprising: he was still very near indeed, near enough to see the fine gold fuzz on her cheeks. He smiled sheepishly and said softly, "You smell good," and then he sat up straight in his seat again.

  He, of course, smelled like Mennen, laid on thick. But that aura of hygiene could easily dissipate, and he was pretty sure that the sweet young thing beside him wouldn't survive long with a very raw male. Best to leave her some space, physically and psychologically.

  She sighed—with relief, pretty obviously—and went back to searching the waters below them. Up and down the little plane flew, winging over some of the most charming anchorages in New England, dipping low for better views, circling back for second looks, and always, to Sam's bitter disappointment, coming up empty.

  The sun rose higher, the water got bluer. Still no boat. It wasn't like looking for a needle in the haystack at all, Sam muttered to the others. It was like looking for a long blond hair in a haystack.

  "Correction," said Billy, who clearly was watching the clock. "Make that a long, blond, moving hair in a haystack."

  "Boy, when the boats are sailing to windward and are on their ears, you really can't identify them at all from up here," Holly confessed. She sounded apologetic, as if it were her fault.

  Someone's stomach growled loud enough to be heard over the engine. No one acknowledged it. Foodwise, it was true, they were in bad shape. The Black Dog doughnuts were long gone, and Billy's giant coffee thermos had been drained of its last drop. After a night spent as a vagrant, Sam longed for a steak sandwich, a hot shower, and clean sheets, in that order. It didn't help his mood that he was going to have to throw himself at the mercy of the Chamber of Commerce yet again that night. He settled into a sullen, dogged scan of the water below until Billy eventually broke the weariness of the spell that had them in its grip.

  "Okay, folks, that's gonna have to do it for today. I'm low on gas and I got a wedding to get to. Brides get nervous when the chapel doesn't show up on time."

  "Are you married, Billy?" Holly asked.

  "Nah. Who's got time for that shit, huh, Sam?"

  Sam had warned Billy about mentioning his marriage to Eden—but then, he'd warned Billy about lots of things over the years. It hadn't made Billy a lick more discreet.

  Sam had to settle for smacking his old friend on the back of his balding head. "Watch how you talk," he said cryptically.

  "Ow! Geez, you two are lethal. Next time we go up, I lash you to the wings."

  They were circling Point Judith in Rhode Island, but all they saw were three yachts anchored behind the stone breakwater, and a handful of boats from the fishing fleet tied up to the docks inside the main harbor. Holly was right: the weather was too fine not to be out and about.

  The seaplane banked gracefully and turned away from the sun and back toward the Vineyard. If the Vixen was still out there in plain sight, no one seemed to want to know about it: Billy speeded up the plane and Holly sat back in her seat with her eyes shut. Even Sam sat back for a breather; his neck was killing him.

  "They could be in Maine," Holly murmured without opening her eyes. "My dad likes Maine."

  "Mmm."

  "We shouldn't have wasted time searching the Cape. The water there is really too shoal for the Vixen."

  "Oh, well. We were in the area."

  "What will you do now, Sam?" she asked, rolling her head tiredly in his direction.

  "Keep lookin', I guess. She's got to be out there somewhere."

  After a time of quiet, Holly sighed and said, "She's kind of a Siren in reverse, isn't she? She leads men away from the island and out to sea, instead of the other way around."

  If only you knew.

  Sam smiled wearily and said, "One of these days you'll turn her into a whirligig."

  "Never. Please don't joke about that, Sam," she said almost wistfully. "My art is supposed to bring joy."

  "Joy?" Sam locked his hands and stretched his arms through the gap between his knees. "Joy would be a two-pound steak and a baked potato. Ecstasy would be a topping of sour cream."

  "Make that two," Billy chimed in over his shoulder.

  "Come back to the island tonight, then, bro. My treat."

  "Not a chance. Tonight is all Shirley, all night."

  "Ah. Thank you for sharing that with us," said Sam with a glance of apology at Holly—who so clearly was not an all-night woman.

  Billy's raunchy explanation brought predictable color to her cheeks. She studied a rip in the liner of the overhead for a moment and then turned to Sam and said, "Tell me about the stolen engraving."

  Sam smiled. All in all, she was being a pretty good sport about having been kidnapped by two guys in a seaplane.

  "The engraving was done by Albrecht Durer and is known sometimes as the 'Fall of Man,' more often as 'Adam and Eve.' It was made in 1504, and if you're really curious to see what it looks like, you can find another print in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts."

  "Another one!" Billy took offense at that. "How the hell can it be worth anything if there's more than one of it? It's like he was forging his own stuff."

  "Believe it or not, you've got a point there, good buddy. Durer, no snob, had a tendency to make a lot of prints available to the hoi polloi. He made a lot of money that way."

  "Tell us about the engraving, Sam," said Holly, deeply interested in what he had to say. It made Sam feel good, the way she was hanging on his every word. He was mildly surprised at how good.

  Puffed up with recent knowledge, he said, "Durer was fast, good, and cosmopolitan; he went to Italy, soaked up their ideas about Renaissance art, and after a few tries, came up with Adam and Eve, a trailblazing effort in Germany at the time. His Adam is muscular and idealized, but his Eve is a little on the fleshy side, more matron than maiden."

  He shrugged and added, "Whether the stylistic treatments complement or conflict with one another is up to the critics to decide. Me, I just want to know where the hell the stolen copy is."

  "Sam? How much do you think the engraving is worth?" Holly blurted.

  She looked embarrassed about posing the question; but then, her kind never talked about either money or sex, Sam figured. He tried to sound matter-of-fact about the value, but it was a staggering sum to him.

  "I'd say, considering the importance of the piece, somewhere in the mid-six figures. It depends how crazy the market is."

  Even Holly gasped. "If Eden stole it, wouldn't she run right out and sell it?"

  "It's my great fear," Sam admitted.

  "But then why stay with my dad and run the risk of being caught? What can she want with him? Is it possible that she really loves him?"

  "I dunno," said Sam, slumping tiredly in his seat. "What's your father like? What would a woman see in him?"

  "He—well, that's not an easy question. I mean, he's my father." She scrunched her face into a thought
ful and slightly freckled frown. "He's ... well, he's really loyal. Usually. You can always count on him. Usually." After a moment she gave up trying to come up with a decent answer and simply sighed. "My mother still loves him, I think."

  "Your dad must be some hot ticket," Sam muttered. It surprised him, how much he personally hated the guy. Sixty-two! A man that age was supposed to be hauling his grandkids off to a water park, not waltzing around the Cape and islands on a yacht with a babe. No wonder bitter women formed first-wives' clubs. Hell, Sam felt like starting one up for first husbands.

  Holly had an inspiration. "You know what? We don't actually know if Eden is with him. Maybe she's run off to fence the engraving and she's left him behind. Maybe my dad is alone on the Vixen right now, licking his wounds. He'd be too humiliated to come home, at least not any time soon."

  She didn't—quite—look gleeful, but she didn't look broken up over the possibility, either. Sam, on the other hand, felt screwed either way. If Eden was staying with Eric Anderson for love, that would hurt; but if she'd already dumped him and had sold the engraving, that would be worse.

  Damn you, Eden. I'll find you if I have to track you down to the ends of the earth.

  Of course, that determination, and a couple of bucks, would get him a cup of coffee on the Vineyard. He ran his hands through his unwashed hair and winced. Too bad it wouldn't get him a room.

  "Hey—a Coast Guard chopper," Billy announced. He dipped his wings in salute, and the seaplane banked and began its descent toward the Vineyard.

  Chapter 9

  The afternoon sea breeze had kicked in right on time, cooling Holly and Sam as they trekked under a bright sun from the seaplane to Sam's Corolla, parked on a side street well away from the docks.

  Sam seemed subdued, which wasn't surprising. But he turned down Holly's suggestion that they grab some lunch, and that did surprise her. The two of them had spent the morning in a small plane searching for a fugitive on a boat. Shouldn't that be a little like sharing a foxhole or something?