Safe Harbor

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  She loved her sister too much to stay angry; that, she knew. But it was hard not to feel hurt. If something had happened between Ivy and Jack, then why hadn't Holly been told? She was going to have to get married and then pregnant simply to have adequate credentials!

  Her pride was smarting big time now, so she resisted the impulse to run back and make up and forced herself to plow ahead until she reached the turn onto the drive that led to the barn. To Sam. Out of all her relationships, hers with Sam was the only one that hadn't been tainted by Eden.

  Eden! Holly remembered now. Sam had wanted to tell her something about Eden, but between her mother interrupting them in bed, and the day's nonstop visit immediately after that, Holly had forgotten all about it. Instinctively, she began to drag her steps as she neared the barn. Whatever it was that Sam had to say about Eden, it was probably unpleasant. Holly wasn't in the mood for unpleasant. What she needed now was someone to tell her that she was right and everyone else was wrong.

  As it turned out, Sam wasn't home; his Corolla was gone. Holly actually felt relieved. She was feeling too tired and too wretched to exchange another sorry sentence about Eden.

  Maybe after a cup of tea.

  ****

  The water hadn't yet come to a boil when the phone rang.

  Holly ran and snatched it up. "Ivy?"

  "Who is this?" a man's voice asked quietly.

  "Who is this?" Holly challenged. Her heart began to pound like a piston.

  "Miss Walker, I want my money."

  "I'm not Eden. You have the wrong wom—"

  The click at the other end sounded, like the caller's voice, lethally calm.

  Again Eden! She was everywhere and nowhere, like an island fog. Stefan Koloman obviously didn't believe Holly's claim that Eden was missing and presumed drowned. Where was he, anyway? Watching the house? Watching her?

  Oh, God. She hung up and then called her mother, just to hear a friendly voice.

  "Ivy left in tears to look for you," Charlotte told her. "The children are still all weepy over no presents. I seem to be the only dry-eyed one around," she said wryly.

  Holly said nothing about the hang-up call, preferring not to rattle her mother. Better to wait and tell Sam.

  The knock came right after she hung up. Holly peeked through a sidelight before opening the door to her red-eyed sister, who threw her arms around her and said between wails of apology, "It's my fault, it's all my fault—"

  "My fault, too," said Holly, hugging her tight. "I was being defensive—"

  "No, no, it's all my fault; I'm taking Jack out on you—"

  "I overheard you in the kitchen. What happened with Jack?"

  "Mom didn't tell you?"

  "Not a word."

  "I thought for sure she would, even though I begged her not to. And when you never said a thing to me—"

  "I didn't know! Start from the beginning," Holly said, heading for the kitchen. "We'll have our tea on the swing."

  Ivy trailed after her, blowing her nose into a shredded tissue, then tearing off a square of paper towel to finish the job. "You know how Jack often has to fly to customer installations to upgrade their hardware," she said, after a big sigh to compose herself. "Well, sometimes he travels with others from his regional tech support team. One of them is a single woman."

  "Uh-oh."

  "Yeah. When they first started going off on assignments together, he talked about her a lot. She was good looking and she spoke computerese, a killer combination for someone like Jack. I asked him jokingly if I should be jealous, and he honestly laughed it off.

  "Anyway, after a while—even though I knew they were still being sent off together occasionally—Jack didn't bring her up at all. Everyone knows what that means."

  "How did you finally find out?"

  Holding the screen door open for her sister, Ivy smiled ruefully and said, "I asked him."

  "That's one way of doing it."

  In the dim halo of the backyard light, they picked their way over a newly mulched path and took seats opposite one another on a wooden swing that Holly had built herself, over the winter, from a pattern she'd sent away for. It was dark out now, and strangely eerie. The birds had packed in it for the night, leaving the sisters with no other company than an army of crickets.

  Holly peered in the direction of the barn, but a stand of scrub oaks and pines baffled sound and blocked all light from there. Was Sam back yet? She couldn't tell. In any case, right now her thoughts had to be for her sister.

  Between sips of tea and bites of cookie, Ivy said, "There was no lipstick on Jack's collar to set me off, and he didn't suddenly start coming home late. No hangup calls, no attempts by him to lose weight—and you know what a pot Jack has. I don't know what made me eventually ask him. Just a routine check, I guess."

  "And he actually told you?"

  Ivy shook her head. "No—but he looked so guilty that I poked him in the middle of a sound sleep and asked him again. This time he snored out a yes."

  "Oh, wow. Really?"

  "Uh-huh," said Ivy, voice quivering. "It was a Saturday. I managed to hold myself together until I dropped the girls off at a birthday party, and then Jack and I had a knockdown, drag-out fight. He insisted it had been a one-time thing. I don't know why the hell she did it, but I know why Jack did: because she asked him to. I was stunned. You expect a fifteen-year-old boy to respond that way, not a man who's supposed to be happily married and has two kids.

  "Ivy—I don't know what to say."

  "Well, anyway," she said, sipping from the mug, "that's the whole story. He swears it was only the one time. We've been seeing a marriage counselor, but Jack keeps insisting that he has no complaints. He claims he loves me, adores the kids, likes his work ... But I resent him so much. He was so stupid. When I think about it, really think about it, I could kill him still. I don't think I'm making progress at all."

  "I can't blame you," said Holly. "But if it was just once ... if he's sorry ... if you love him and want to save the marriage ... won't you have to put it behind you?"

  "I don't see how. I really don't. Bastard."

  In thoughtful silence, in deepening night, they rocked idly back and forth, making the swing squeak in protest.

  "I should get some oil on that," Holly said absent-mindedly.

  But she was thinking, what the hell was wrong with the men in her family? Why were they so restless? What were they looking for? A supermom who earned super-money and gave them supersex? What, exactly, was their problem?

  Why, she wondered, couldn't they just be like Sam?

  ****

  The squeak of the swing drowned out the low murmurs of their conversation, but if they had said Eden's name, he would've damn well heard it.

  He stepped away from the shadows of the trees, straining to make out their conversation. The tall blond wasn't Eden, a disappointment. But the dark one—Holly Anderson. She was Eden's buddy, her landlord. How could she not know where Eden was, for chrissake? Waste of time, asking her nice. More than one way to skin a cat.

  He took another step nearer and snapped a twig.

  The creaking of the swing stopped.

  "What was that?" he heard the one say.

  "A deer, maybe?"

  "So close?"

  "There's a lot of development going on; they're losing habitat here, just as everywhere else."

  "I don't like it out here, Holly. I don't know how you can stand the isolation."

  "I'm an artist. It lets me think."

  "Let's go inside. I have to be getting back, anyway. I left Mom with the kids."

  "When did you turn into such a scaredy-cat, Ivy? This is the Vineyard, for goodness' sake."

  "Blame it on all the traumas. Nothing and no one seems safe anymore."

  "Boy. You would've loved my pal Stefan."

  Chapter 22

  Eric Anderson looked less old than Sam had imagined him to be, and less miserable than his daughter had described him to be.

  Sa
m found him waiting on the beach side of a wraparound porch on a house in Chilmark. Yes, it was dark, and yes, Sam had never seen the man before—but no way was this any grieving lover in a near-suicidal depression.

  Anderson's handshake was firm and his voice tight with repressed excitement as he said to Sam, "Let's walk along the beach. My hosts turn in early and I don't want to wreck their serenity any more than I have already."

  His considerateness annoyed Sam, who wanted intensely to hate the man. Still, Sam was fairly sure that he was going to have the last grim laugh of the evening, so he said, "Fine with me. Let's go."

  By the time they dropped down below the tide line where the wet, hard sand was easier to walk on, Sam's eyes had adjusted to the night. A dazzling canopy of stars overhead made him resent his mission all the more. He should be strolling on this beach with Holly, not her old man, and talking about their glorious future, not Sam's misbegotten past.

  The low hiss of the sea as it advanced and retreated at their feet seemed to set the stage for what was bound to be a venomous conversation—but Holly's father was blissfully unaware of that.

  He said genially, "Sorry I couldn't meet with you earlier; I've had a million things to do. So what's on your mind? You said on the phone that you have important information about Eden."

  "That I do," Sam said wryly. A wave rolled up a little higher than the rest, washing over one of his deck shoes. He hardly noticed. "It seemed best to handle it face-to—"

  "Y'know, I could have saved you the trouble of coming here," Anderson cut in, sounding laughably cocky. "I already know what you have to say. I know pretty much everything there is to know about Eden—now."

  "Really. I'm probably wasting your valuable time, in that case," Sam said in a dry voice.

  It was obvious that Eden had made contact with Anderson. But even if she had told him about Sam and her—which Sam did not believe—it wouldn't have made any difference. Sam was there to make it official before he returned to tell Holly. In his mind there was a definite protocol to a full confession: first you prevented the bigamy; then you went back and dealt a full body blow to your own chances for happiness.

  "So Eden got in touch with you," he said.

  "Indeed she did," Anderson crowed. "She did not drown. I did not kill her. She did not run off with a Durer engraving."

  "That's not what my folks tell me," said Sam, seizing on the one inaccuracy.

  "That was all a misunderstanding," Holly's father assured him. He was so clearly eager to explain. "Eden took the engraving to have it appraised, just as she had promised your parents she'd do. She knows how naive they are, and she didn't want them getting fleeced by some unscrupulous dealer."

  "Uh-huh," said Sam, studying a brightly lit house down the beach with more interest than he could muster for Eden's excuses. "Unfortunately, I know at least one dealer who's offering a different version of events."

  "Stefan Koloman, you mean. Yes, she told me about him, too. A shady, unscrupulous character. He claims that she cut him out of his commission," Anderson acknowledged. "Not so. Technically, Eden found the buyer on her own: she deduced the name of the party from something that Koloman said."

  "She stole the name of the party from Koloman's Rolodex."

  "Is that what he claims? Why would you believe a man like that instead of Eden?"

  "Doesn't it tell you something that I believe a man like that instead of Eden?" Sam asked wearily.

  "She was trying to get the most money she could for your parents, Steadman. Can't you understand that?"

  "Where's the money, in that case?"

  "I didn't ask. It was enough for me to know that she's anxious to give it all to your parents. You ought to feel the same."

  There was a shame-on-you quality to his scolding that Sam found infuriating. He said, "Are we to assume that Eden was traveling by windsurfer to the nearest safe-deposit box?"

  Anderson's laugh sounded genuinely bemused. "Crazy kid—you wouldn't believe what she was trying to pull off."

  "Sure I would," Sam said. "Try me."

  "We were in Portsmouth. She took a call on her cell phone that upset her very much. I know—now—that it was from Koloman; he was threatening to kill her for going around him. She didn't know what to do—she didn't want to involve me and put me in harm's way—so she decided to fake her own death. It seemed like the only way to throw Koloman off her trail. That's why she staged the windsurfer accident. Poor thing ... she had no idea that the police would misinterpret the scene and term it suspicious. She was devastated when she read about that in the papers—devastated."

  "I can imagine," said Sam, but the irony eluded Anderson.

  Sam knew that Eden wouldn't give a damn if the scene were misinterpreted; she might even prefer it to look like a homicide—although he couldn't imagine why.

  No, there were only two possibilities to explain Eden's return. Either the money or the engraving was still on the boat, in which case Holly was right and they should have searched the Vixen harder.

  Or (and in the circumstances, the second possibility was distinctly relevant):

  "Have you offered to marry her yet?"

  Anderson's head jerked up—the question was bluntly put—but he declined to answer.

  They were abreast of the brightly lit house that had caught Sam's eye. A party of beautiful-people types were enjoying drinks and muted patter on one of its decks, high above the beach. Holly's father maintained a steadfast silence as they passed, and Sam listened instead to the waves rolling in and then out, flat and hissing, dragging shells and stones behind in their wake.

  The next few houses were dark—a better backdrop, apparently, for what Anderson had to say.

  "You're the second person to ask me that," he said at last. "It doesn't concern you, but—maybe because you're not family—I think I'll tell you, anyway. The answer is, no, I hadn't spoken of marriage with Eden before she disappeared. But earlier today when she called me—yes. I did."

  Sam felt no jealousy, only sadness for Holly and her family as he said dryly, "Presumably Eden is willing."

  "She is!" Holly's father blurted, sounding amazed and grateful.

  He recovered and said in a more dignified way, "I'm only telling you this because I want everyone to understand that Eden took a huge risk when she re-established contact with me. She had no idea that I'd be willing to forgive her for the embarrassment—the humiliation—I'd endured. You have to realize also that she's opening herself up to the possibility of prosecution by the Coast Guard. At a minimum, they'll likely present a hefty bill for their search effort. The State Police aren't too happy, either."

  He made a dismissive gesture with his hand and said, "But that's all behind us now. I told her we'd pay Koloman his outrageous commission, we'd give your parents the full amount of the transaction, we'd make everyone happy."

  "Everyone?"

  It was a jab to the throat; Anderson's voice became taut. "You know what I mean."

  Another wave oozed around their feet as they marched doggedly on in their walk to nowhere. Behind them Sam heard the cocktail chatter become suddenly animated, and then several guests breaking away from it in a shouting, laughing run through the dark for the beach.

  Sam wanted out of there. It was time to tell the besotted fool that there was one little detail that Eden, for all her candor, apparently had forgot to mention. Before that, though, Sam had one last question. "Did Eden ever explain the blood on the deck of your boat?"

  "Holly told you about that?"

  Sam said bluntly, "Your daughter thinks you're making up that story about Eden hurting herself cutting an orange. Although she didn't say so, I assume she believes as I do: that Eden did indeed try to frame you for her murder, and that you're lying to cover for her."

  "Well, that's where you're wrong, Steadman!" he said in triumph. "I admit, I didn't know how the blood had got there, and I accounted for it in the most logical way I could envision. But this morning I asked Eden if she had cut hers
elf without my knowing it, and she said yes, absolutely yes. So much for your frame-up theory."

  Sam snorted. Eden could have seen this guy coming with her eyes closed and a lead box over her head.

  Anderson sounded almost plaintive as he said, "No, I'm telling you: she was staging an accident, not a murder."

  Out of patience, Sam stopped where he was, pulling the other man up short. "And I'm telling you," he said, "Eden is a liar, a con—and somebody's wife."

  "Wife? What are you talking about?" Anderson said angrily. "Whose wife?"

  "Mine, Mr. Anderson."

  He staggered as if Sam had kicked him in the balls. "You're full of shit," he said. "Eden's never been married."

  "Oh, yes, sir. At least once. We never divorced. I thought for a while there that she might be legally dead, but what do you know? She lives to wreak her havoc."

  "You son of a bitch liar—my family put you up to this!" he cried, taking an awkward swing at Sam.

  It was such a contemptible accusation that Sam lashed out with a fist without thinking, landing it, despite the darkness, squarely on Anderson's jaw.

  Anderson staggered with a shocked uh—no doubt he'd never been decked before—and then something seemed to snap in him as well. He came lunging back at Sam with surprising ferocity, catching Sam completely off guard. Down they went, rolling and flailing in the wake of retreating shells and stones, getting soaked, tasting salt, cursing like a couple of kids in a schoolyard brawl.

  He thinks we're fighting over Eden, Sam realized as he tried not to hurt him. For all I know, he's right. He held Anderson immobile, but he wriggled free of Sam's grip. Maybe I'm taking her out on him.

  He tried to contain the man, but Anderson continued swinging wildly, a clueless knight on an ignoble mission. And then Sam caught a punch to the ear, ridiculously painful for a creampuff swing, and it infuriated him. The New Bedford street fighter took over and he landed a succession of punches, left, right, left, to Anderson's nose and chin. He wanted to pull back, but there was something about the man—something so stupid and irrational and mirror-image of Sam—that he wanted to destroy it completely.