Safe Harbor

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Is that relevant?"

  "Do you?" Cottier persisted.

  "Yes."

  "And yet they didn't tell you about Miss—Mrs.—?"

  "She kept her maiden name."

  "—Ms. Walker borrowing money from them. Why is that?"

  "I don't know."

  "Could it be that they thought it would distress you? Anger you?"

  "Possibly."

  "Because it was adding insult to injury?"

  "I don't know what their reasoning might have been for thinking it would distress me."

  "Why did Ms. Walker take the engraving?"

  "She said, to have it appraised."

  "You don't think she had that intention?"

  "No."

  "You think she took it under false pretenses? You think she stole it?"

  "Yes."

  "Why do you think that?"

  "Because she had stolen from the elderly before. She was accused of taking some diamonds from an elderly shut-in once. The woman died five years ago."

  "Let's go back to your involvement with the law. When was the last time you were in court?"

  "I was seventeen."

  "And the occasion was?"

  "I was involved in a fight."

  "Was anyone seriously injured?"

  "Yes. An eighteen-year-old was killed."

  "And you were responsible?"

  "Indirectly, yes."

  "How do you mean, indirectly?"

  "He and two others were attacking a woman. I intervened. I hit him; apparently it caused him to hemorrhage. Before the police arrived, the other gang members carried him away. They didn't take him to a hospital, though, and he died."

  "Who was the woman who was being attacked? A girlfriend?"

  "No."

  "Did you want her to be?"

  "No."

  Cottier peered over his glasses at Sam. "You took on three gang members who were attacking a girl you didn't want for your own?"

  "Strange as it may seem," said Sam.

  "Have you done that since—spilled blood over a woman?"

  It was luridly put, an attempt to get a rise from Sam.

  "No."

  "Did you try to find Eden after she split?"

  "Yes."

  "What did you do?"

  "Made calls, the usual thing. I hired an investigator, but the bills ran on."

  "I'll need his name."

  "I'll have to look it up."

  "Have you remarried?"

  "No."

  "May I ask why?"

  "No."

  The chief sighed and went back to his keyboard. "Okay. This engraving. Have your parents reported the theft of it to the police?"

  "No."

  "Because?"

  "They're waiting to see what I find out."

  "What have you found out?"

  "That Eden sold the engraving to someone who wasn't especially interested in its provenance."

  "Who would that be?"

  "I don't know his name."

  "How do you know that it happened at all?"

  "I talked to the dealer that Eden cut out of the sale."

  "His name?"

  Crunch time. Sam didn't want to give his name. If the police followed up and questioned Stefan Koloman, it was Holly who'd bear the brunt of the dealer's rage. Sam could have, maybe should have, lied about what he had found out. But he'd promised Holly that he'd answer truthfully, and this is where it had landed him.

  "I can't remember his name." He was going to lie after all.

  "Really. Where is his place of business? Can you remember that?"

  "Nope."

  "If I gave you more time—would you remember it then?"

  Sam shrugged. "Probably not."

  Cottier leaned forward in his chair and beat a tatoo on each side of his laptop with the palms of his hands.

  Eyeing Sam shrewdly, he said, "Miss Anderson's irate visitor wouldn't be the disgruntled art dealer, by any chance?"

  "I can't say," Sam offered, which was true.

  Cottier scowled and said, "Look, Steadman, I don't have time for bullshit answers. Suppose I give you twenty-four hours to come up with the dealer's name and address. Sleep on it, try hypnosis, do whatever it takes," he said dryly. "If Eden Walker was hanging with some unsavory types, it would be extremely helpful to this investigation to know who they are. You understand that you're not doing Eric Anderson any favors by holding back this kind of information, don't you?"

  "Sure." But Sam understood even more clearly that he wouldn't be doing Holly any favors by coming forward with it. He wasn't about to put her in jeopardy just to save her father.

  Sooner or later the cops were going to track down Koloman—sooner, if Holly obliged them with a physical description. Forget about names; how many art dealers sporting gold front teeth could there be in the area?

  And then Koloman would come after Holly. Which meant that Sam, who had put her in danger in the first place, was going to have to hang around to keep her out of danger. Which meant that finding the engraving—finding the money, finding Eden, finding anything—was going to be even trickier.

  After scrolling through his computer notes, the chief said, "I'll need the address where you were living with Eden Walker at the time she left."

  Sam gave it to him and said edgily, "Are we done here?"

  "Yeah, I think for the moment—wait. One more. When were you divorced?"

  Ah, hell. Damn. Shit.

  "We weren't."

  The chief pulled his glasses down to the end of his nose and left them there. "You're still married to Eden Walker?"

  "As far as I know. I was never served, and I never filed."

  "Why the hell didn't you say so in the first place?"

  Sam said cooly, "You didn't ask."

  And that was how the game was played. Cottier knew it, and now he knew that Sam knew it. In the course of the interview Sam had volunteered just enough information so that the chief would think he was a cooperative witness. That little delusion was now shot officially to hell.

  "Do you mind if I ask why you never divorced?"

  "I do."

  "For the record?"

  "For the record, I never got around to it."

  Cottier blew out a slow, angry exhale through his nostrils and said, "Wait here. I'll clean up what I've got so far and you can read it over."

  Sam nodded briefly and sat back in his chair. He was sorry the bookshelves were empty.

  Chapter 17

  After ransacking the drawers of her father's desk, Holly found what she was looking for: an old pair of geeky reading glasses that her mother never could stand to see him wear. Her father had refused to throw them out and had saved them for an emergency.

  Well, this was that emergency. Holly left the house and used her truck more or less as a battering ram to get herself through the afternoon traffic clogging the town's quaint streets. She thought of Sam and smiled: he'd be curled up in a fetal position under the dashboard right about now. Wasn't that odd, how someone so tough could be so afraid of a woman driver. She wondered whether he'd ever been in jail at all; maybe it was all an act.

  She drove to the Bouchards in a state neither of anger nor apprehension, but of relief. Finally she was doing something. Finally. When she saw the house coming up in the distance, she knew she'd made the right decision.

  The house was nothing more than a big box with a hipped roof, but it was spectacularly located just a few feet from the beach, facing southwest. Holly used to feel, and still did feel, that it had the best location on the Vineyard. She had spent many wonderful weeks there. The place was too big for the Bouchards, who had no children; but it was just perfect for guests and murder suspects.

  Holly could see Mrs. Bouchard in a rocking chair on the leeward side now, reading a book and keeping an eye on her husband who was nearby, working under a big straw hat on his beloved sweet millions.

  "Hello, stranger!" she called as Holly climbed down from her truck. "W
e haven't seen you all summer."

  "It's been that kind of year," Holly said, trying not to sound grim. She waved at Louis Bouchard, who held up a garden trug in greeting. Tomatoes, many pounds of them, were on the first leg of their journey cross-island.

  Mrs. Bouchard smiled and said, "Remember the last time I saw you in early spring? You were complaining that things were so quiet."

  "I know, I know," groaned Holly. "Be careful what you wish for." She lifted the cat that was curled up on the cushion, nuzzled his nose, and eased him on his way.

  She dropped tiredly into the chair; the tabby jumped on her lap. Idly stroking the animal's throat, Holly said in a strained, singsong voice, "So, how're you?"

  "Oh, I'm fine," said Mrs. Bouchard. "You know what they say—whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

  That's how Judy Bouchard dismissed life's little setbacks, including the heart attack she'd had over a year ago. Holly began to murmur something polite and agreeable, but the older woman interrupted her. Rocking back in her chair, she slanted her head sideways at Holly and said, "More to the point, how are you all doing?"

  "A bit off balance at the moment," Holly admitted in a deliberate understatement. She didn't dare start weeping and wailing; Mrs. Bouchard would never have stood for it.

  "You're here for the tomatoes?" she asked with an innocent look.

  Holly smiled grimly. "Not exactly."

  "I didn't think so. He's on the beach side of the porch," she said with a nod in that direction.

  "Thanks, Mrs. B."

  Holly had come specifically to tell her father what an unfeeling monster he was, so she straightened her spine and patted the eyeglasses in the pocket of her shorts, and, thus armed, marched off to do battle.

  Her father was sitting in a painted Adirondack chair, facing the sea. If he was aware that his hosts had a guest, he didn't show it. If he was aware that the guest was his daughter, he certainly didn't show it. Holly came up to him from behind and on the right and caught the once-sharp edges of his profile, blurred now by time, as he stared serenely at the sea.

  He turned when she approached and looked her full in the face—and Holly became instantly, profoundly aware that she had confused the stillness of serenity with the paralysis of agony. The change in him was shocking; he looked as if he'd been thrown into the lowest pit of hell, bounced around for a while, and hauled back up to die.

  Her father had always looked strikingly fit and much younger than his years. This was not that man. His face was gaunt and deeply lined, his shoulders stooped; his mouth hung slightly open, as if it was too much effort to close it anymore. His eyebrows were no longer light brown and streaked with gray, but gray, shot through with white.

  Holly's instinct was—anyone's instinct would be—to say, "What happened?" But she knew too well what had happened. Her father had gone off on a lark with the devil, and the devil had made him play by her rules.

  That, at least, is what Holly wanted to believe. And yet she knew full well that older men fell in love with younger women all the time, and that the younger women weren't devils, and that the older men weren't monsters and didn't come out of the affair looking like—well, like the faded wreck who had a hard time rising to his feet before her.

  "Hello," she said with neither pity nor censure. Her heart was far too constricted to feel either.

  "Holly ..."

  "They didn't let Mr. Bouchard aboard the boat, did they?"

  "Holly, I—no. They did not."

  "I didn't think they would. Here," she said, fumbling to get the glasses case out of her pocket. She had wanted to be so cool about it! "You left them at home when you ... left."

  He looked baffled, as if she were offering him Styrofoam when he was expecting water. "Those are mine?"

  "You kept them in your desk for emergencies—remember?" Here, too, he was failing her. He couldn't even remember that he looked like a geek in them. That his wife was convinced that he looked like a geek. He couldn't even remember his wife.

  "Yes... all right," he said, accepting them and then absently dropping them on a little wooden table next to the Adirondack chair.

  The offhand gesture seemed to diminish her offering, her sacrifice of going there, still more. After she had swallowed her pride and come to see him, he didn't even thank her. He was a monster.

  "How is your mother?" he asked her mournfully.

  "Oh! You remember I have one."

  "Don't, Holly."

  "Why not? Surely I have your gene for cruelty."

  "Is she all right?"

  "What do you think?"

  He wasn't thinking at all; that was obvious in the way he turned away from her and began staring at the sea again. Wasn't thinking, wasn't feeling, wasn't—certainly was not—aware of Holly anymore. She was the favorite of his three children, but she might as well have been one of the potted geraniums on the porch. For the first time, she understood on a brutally visceral level what her mother had been going through. It wasn't easy to cease to exist before your very own eyes.

  Her gaze slid past the back of her father's silvered head and out to the whitecapped sea, glorious and fresh and alive and everything that Holly and her father, just then, were not. The wind, boisterous in its joy, whipped her hair across her cheeks and pinned her clothes against her body as she stood unheeding and unresponsive while she waited for her father to explain his mad deed.

  Out on the beach she saw a man walking below the high-water mark alongside a small child, who clutched a bucket with both hands as she stumped across the sand, searching for shells. To say that Holly felt more kinship with the stranger and the little girl than she did with her own father would not have been an exaggeration. Immobile as the potted geraniums, she waited a long, long moment for Eric Anderson to break the agonizing silence.

  When he didn't, when she decided that he never would, she asked him outright: "Why, Dad? What were you thinking?"

  His head turned slightly in her direction: he had heard her, at least. They were not the father and daughter she saw at the water's edge; they never would be again, she supposed. But he had heard her.

  "I wanted ... more," he said at last, and then he let out a shuddering sigh and wrapped his Scandinavian reserve around him as if it were a thick terrycloth robe.

  His answer, his demeanor, infuriated her. "More? More what? More than a woman who loves you, a family who cares? More than the freedom to walk among your friends and enjoy the respect of your peers? More than your house, your boat, your place by the sea? What more can you want? You have health, wealth, people who love you. To want more than that strikes me as—obscene!"

  He nodded slowly, apparently agreeing.

  "That's it? That's your reaction? Can't you at least say you're sorry?" she cried, rushing around to face him. She stood with feet apart, her hands thrown up in frustration. "You at least owe us that!"

  "But ... I'm not," he said, almost confused about it. "Why do you think I'm here and not home?"

  Instinctively, she balled her hands into fists; her mouth fell open but no words came out.

  Her father seemed to hear the response that she wasn't able to scream. He propped his elbows on his knees and folded his hands in contemplation, just as he had when she was five and he was trying not to beat her at checkers.

  "I'm sixty-two years old, Holly," he said, looking up at her across the bridge of his knuckles. "I've gone into the same suite of offices in the same historic brick building for over thirty years. The work I do there is mind- numbing—drawing up deeds, setting up escrows, sitting at closings. Maybe a title search, if there's a fight and the stakes are high enough. The fact is, the paralegals can do most of what I do, and for a fifth of my earnings."

  "So you're bored by your job," Holly said scathingly. "So what. Lots of people are bored."

  "You're not," he said with a sad smile.

  "Of course I'm not. I'm going after my dream. Why shouldn't I? I don't have mouths to feed, tuition to—"


  She stopped herself, aware that she was describing a typical parent. That she might well be describing her father.

  He thought so, anyway. "I got married when I was still in law school. I'm not blaming anyone, Holly, please understand me—but very quickly there were mouths to feed."

  Holly knew that. Her brother was born six months after her parents eloped. Her sister was born a year after that. Holly herself was the coup de grace: born less than a year after her sister.

  She shrugged and said, "Sorry. I didn't ask to be born."

  "I told you, I'm not blaming anyone. But I purposely took the least stressful route there was. I wanted no long hours as a criminal lawyer; no iffy income from contingency work. My entering into probate law has worked out well for our family. Real estate has been good to us."

  He rubbed his tanned, smooth hands across his jawbone and sighed, apparently struggling in his search for words.

  "You know the clock on the bank across the street from my office?" he asked in a wistful tone. "The one with the big gold hands? That's the clock I watch ticking my life away, minute by gold-leafed minute. Almost every day when that clock tolls noon, I'm at my desk, eating a salad. At the stroke of four I'm packing my briefcase. Day in, day out, there we are: me, and the clock with the gold-leafed hands."

  "Oh, please. You could have retired by now. Why are you even there?" she said, pitiless for her mother's sake.

  "I could have quit," he agreed. "I should have quit. It's the damndest thing: it was such a painless life, such an easy one, that I didn't even know I hated it until—"

  Eden. If he said the word, she'd slap his face.

  But he didn't. "It's only now, in retrospect, that I see how unsatisfied I was," he said. "How unhappy."

  She laughed contemptuously at that. "Oh, and now you're satisfied? Now you're happy? What an odd sense of bliss you have."

  He bowed his head over his clasped hands, just the way he had at Sunday services when they all went to church together. "I'm dying, Holly," he whispered. "I'm in hell."

  Holly wanted to believe her own definition of his hell: that he missed his family, that he was afraid of jail. But she knew from looking at him that hell for him was a life without Eden. Truly, there was no fool like an old fool, she thought. His refusal to repent was making her hard.