"Then she isn't watching the sky," Sam said. Clearly he was.
Holly couldn't get over Eden's fierce determination to come out of this with cash. "What a risk she took, fiberglassing the money to the hull," she said. "What if she hadn't been able to talk my father into taking her back after the mess she got him into with the state police?"
Sam said wryly, "As you can see, Eden always has a Plan B. Okay, no more talking. Voices carry."
Their approach was slow and wary and, it seemed to Holly, ear-splittingly obvious. (She was convinced that Horatio Hornblower would have swum out from the nearest point of land, breathing through a bamboo reed.)
Still, what could Eden do, once they descended upon her? Holly's greatest fear, her only fear, was that she would hurl the money into the ocean from spite.
They could see the Vixen clearly now, even without binoculars. Small bars of light shone through the cabin portholes where the curtains were poorly drawn. Sam cut the engines still more, but there was a look of concern on his face. Holly interpreted it to mean that he was worried that Eden would hear the Robalo pulsing through the water; she was in the bilge, after all.
But that wasn't it. He pointed to the western sky, and it looked, even in the current murky visibility, positively evil. Another squall loomed, and this one had their name on it.
The flashes of light and rumbles of thunder quickly became bolts of lightning and cracks of gunfire, and a gust of wind unlike any other so far rolled over them like a bowling ball, sending their small runabout reeling to starboard. Holly clung to a grab rail while Sam goosed the engine and headed up into the wind, presenting the smallest possible target to the brutalizing force of the squall.
Rain pelted them at a horizontal angle, making hearing and speaking impossible. The horizon, the sky, the sea, the Vixen—all gone, lost in the fury of nature at her bitchiest. Holly hung on with wordless trepidation, barely able to open her eyes. There was nothing they could do now but try to ride it out. They had power enough, if Sam had skill enough; and he seemed to know instinctively what to do. They bowed their heads, as much in humble submission to the awesome power of the screaming banshee who ruled over them as to the pounding, biting, savage rain that did her bidding.
The Vixen, too, was taking it on the chin. Through the pummeling rain, Holly could see a big bright square of light in the hull, issuing from the cabin below. The boat was lying beam to the wind, being pushed eastward and sliding on its ear in helpless response to the ruthless beating it was enduring. No one was climbing on deck, rushing to the boat's defense; the boat was on its own. Holly waited and wondered how Eden could bear to be below with all hell breaking loose outside.
They were within a hundred yards of the Vixen when a figure clad in a white foul-weather jacket popped up in the companionway of the boat, holding the hood from blowing back off her head. As if on cue, the rain began to abate and the wind dropped, if only slightly. The squall was running its course.
"Sam!" said Holly in an urgent undertone. "What should we do? If we let her get in the dinghy and have to follow her, we'll lose the Vixen."
Save the money or save the Vixen?
It never became a full-blown dilemma.
Oblivious to their presence in the darkness nearby, and clutching something silvery to her breast, Eden was making her way forward to the gate in the lifelines, where the dinghy lay tied to the low side of the drifting boat. Light and inflatable, the dinghy was streaming downwind, ahead of the Vixen itself. They watched as Eden sat down on the starboard deck with her legs dangling overboard, then tried to haul the dinghy in closer before jumping into it.
By now Holly, who had been taught to sail by a once cautious man, had a sick and sinking feeling in her stomach: it was insane to take the kind of risk that Eden was taking, all for a suitcase of cash. She wanted to shake Eden, wanted to scream in her face, "It's not worth it! Don't you get it? It's not worth it!"
Eden still did not see the Robalo as it closed on the Vixen. That was the wonder of it. She stayed focussed on her foolish, dangerous task.
Unwilling to drop the valise into the dinghy, she attempted the awkward maneuver of dropping down into it while still clutching her cargo. She landed on both feet, all right, but lost her balance and the valise flew out of her hands and into the sea. They heard her cry out in dismay and saw her reach for the money with both arms extended, upsetting her balance even more. She tumbled out of the dinghy just as a sea lifted the Vixen and sent the boat rolling to starboard over her before resuming its angled slide downwind.
"Sam, Eden's overboard!" cried Holly, aghast. "We have to save her!"
Sam was ahead of Holly, moving the Robalo almost alongside the Vixen and its still-tethered dinghy. "I see her—that patch of white! Take the helm," he shouted, kicking off his deck shoes. "Keep it in neutral as much as you can."
Shaking in fear for Eden's life now, Holly nodded and got behind the wheel of the Robalo just as Sam dove over the side and plunged into the still-churning seas.
He was in dark clothes and harder to see, and Holly stopped breathing for the entire time it took her to spot his face, bobbing up from below.
But he was alone. Where was Eden? Again Holly lost sight of Sam as he dove below the surface in search of her, with the Vixen drifting steadily to the east, and the valise of money who knew where.
Call in a Mayday, a voice told Holly, but another voice said, Don't take your eyes off him, not for a second. She listened to the louder instinct—and listened to Sam, putting the Robalo in gear only enough to keep from drifting too far downwind from them. Even so, her stomach tightened at the thought of what a spinning propeller could do to someone in the water.
She heard Sam finally shout in a watered-down cry, "I've got her!"
Thank you, oh, thank you.
Holly's concentration was ferocious as she maneuvered the Robalo into a position downwind of Sam and Eden and then put the boat into neutral. "Hold on, hold on," she cried, dumping a float cushion and an inflatable fender into the water next to Sam for extra insurance.
She grabbed the hood of the unconscious Eden and held her heavy, waterlogged weight, freeing Sam for his hand-over-hand struggle up the dock line she'd thrown over the side. He managed to get aboard without her help, then immediately relieved Holly of the weight of her burden. Between them, and with the help of the sturdily-made, zipped-up jacket that Eden was wearing, they were able to pull her lifeless form aboard.
"CPR," was all Sam said after a quick examination of her on the cockpit sole. "You breathe."
He assumed that Holly would know what to do, and she did, because her father had insisted she learn. Tilting Eden's head back, she began mouth-to-mouth breathing without waiting for Sam. Sam positioned Eden's body for external cardiac massage, counting aloud, cuing Holly to her part in their CPR effort. Holly's mind was absolutely blank as she focused on one wish only: Let her live. If there was a single reason why Eden didn't deserve to be revived, Holly couldn't think of it. Let her live. Just, please, let her live.
Sam pumped Eden's heart and Holly supplied Eden's breath until finally Holly felt a breath coming from Eden on her own. "Sam... you feel it?"
"There's a beat!" he said, breathing heavily from his efforts so far. "Call the Coast Guard."
Holly radioed for help while Sam kept up CPR on his own. After being grilled by the Coast Guard about their knowledge of the treacherous passage through Woods Hole, and after being informed that the squall line had now passed completely through, Holly and Sam agreed that they should begin ferrying Eden to a dock there.
A Coast Guard cutter came out to intercept them, but they were close enough to their destination that the cutter, lights flashing and sirens wailing, simply blazed a trail in front of them to the dock and waiting ambulance.
Eden was rushed, semi-conscious, to nearby Falmouth Hospital, and Holly found the time at last to contact her father. She had to raise him on the marine radio because, almost inconceivably, she did not kn
ow the number of his cell phone. The only person who had that number was now in no position to use it.
Sam returned to the Robalo just as Holly signed off. "How did he react?" he asked as he gave her a hand out of the boat.
"He was devastated for Eden, of course," said Holly, sinking onto the dock's edge in bone-weary exhaustion. "But I think the enormity of the mess he's made has begun to sink in. He sounded scared and alone and more at sea than the Vixen right now."
"Speaking of which, how did he take the news that his boat is wandering the Sound without a care in the world?"
"More shock; he's calling a salvage outfit to rescue it. What did the hospital say?"
"They'll keep her under observation awhile, watching for delayed reactions."
"Fluid in the lungs, that kind of thing?" asked Holly, skirting around the big question.
"Mmm. Lung infections, inflammation, cardiac problems..." His voice trailed off.
"Sam?" she said timidly. "Did they say anything about ... about the possibility of brain damage? She was under for what seemed like an eternity."
He shook his head. "They wouldn't; how could they know yet?"
It was a somber moment, the realization that someone so smart, so daring, could end up incapacitated—and possibly die from complications.
Holly was having trouble dealing with it. "It's so overwhelming," she said softly. "I thought I hated her. I was sure of it. And yet when I saw her go overboard ... well, I don't, that's all. I just don't."
"I know," said Sam. "I know."
They sat side by side in silence, with their legs dangling over the dock, like two kids playing hooky to go fishing.
Only there were no poles. There was no joy. And unlike two kids, they knew that life was finite.
"Sam?"
"Mmm."
"The money's gone. We'll never find it now. If this were a movie, we'd discover the valise—I think it was the kind that floats—tangled in a line hanging overboard on the Robalo."
"Yeah, but you're too good a sailor to leave a line dangling overboard," he teased.
"You know what I mean. No one is going to turn the money in, and even if they did, how could we claim it? Legally, I mean."
"See? This is where thinking like an outlaw got you. Bitter disappointment when your hopes went amuck."
"Because it's not fair."
"Life isn't fair. If you hang up on that, you die miserable and unhappy. The money's gone. Assume it's at the bottom of the sea; for all practical purposes, it is. We move on. My ma and pa will be fine. I'll see to that." He added a little wistfully, "It's just that I know how proud they are. They wanted that independence."
"At least now you can tell them the engraving's a fake," Holly realized. "They'll feel better about that after this."
He smiled and put his arm around her and pulled her close. "Now yer talkin'. Come on," he said, standing up. "It's going to feel like a long way back to the Vineyard."
"Oh, Sam, I can't," Holly protested, refusing to be dragged to her feet. "I'm so tired. I'm sick of the ocean, sick of the salt. Let's stay at an inn in Falmouth. We'll have a nice shower, clean sheets. We'll want to go to the hospital first thing in the morning, anyway."
Sam thought about it and suddenly snapped his fingers and dazzled her with a eureka-smile. "Or how about this? We go to my place. I wouldn't mind waking up in my bed with a dish like you. I don't suppose," he added with a boyishly hopeful look, "that you brought your diaphragm along?"
Tired as she was, Holly laughed out loud at the notion. "My thoughts haven't exactly been running that way," she admitted.
But now, suddenly, they were.
"Of course, since you bring it up," she said, "I don't really see why we should need a diaphragm at all," she said softly. "Don't you agree? Sam?"
Will we be married and have babies and barbecues and go on vacations mostly on land and prune our forsythia and take your dad on walks in the park and fill stockings at Christmas and teach Sally it's okay to get her hands dirty and have more barbecues and try to get my parents together and tell Jack he can't do that ever again and take ballroom dancing and have more barbecues and teach our kids not to lie and take turns cooking and will you do all the cooking and will we love each other no matter what?
"Sam?"
He tipped her chin up and, still smiling, kissed her lightly, lovingly, on her lips. "Yes, Holly. Yes."
Epilogue
June on the Vineyard is a hit-or-miss thing. Sam and Holly's wedding day missed a stretch of perfect weather and hit a cold front going through.
They were married under a tent pitched right on the beach not far from the house because the events planner "just had the most fabulous feeling about it" and knew that the day would be perfect. So the ceremony was marked by—what else?—thunder and lightning and drumming rain, and no one except Sam heard the lovely vow that Holly had written, promising till death did them part. (As for Sam, no one would have heard him rain or shine, because he barely whispered the vow that he'd written. What did he think, that it was only for her?)
As the ceremony proceeded and the tent sprang leaks, the planner, the photographer, the caterer, and the bride's mother all put their heads together and decided to move the whole shebang to the big house on Main, where, if you asked just about anyone, it should have been held in the first place.
So much for the charm of the beach.
It was coming down hard by the time the wedding party (maid of honor, two flower girls, and one best man who owned a seaplane decked out with a Just-Married sign) piled into the two rented minivans pressed into limo service. Sam drove the women (Cissy sat on Holly's lap and Sally sat on Ivy's, to make room for the flowers), and Billy—still red-eyed from sobbing uncontrollably through the entire ceremony—drove behind them with the cake, the planner, and Charlotte Anderson.
Jim and Millie drove with Eric Anderson. They were too thoroughly intimidated by their first journey offshore and society wedding to go in Charlotte's van, despite her entreaties. It was only after the Steadmans saw the bride and her sister in bedraggled hair and soggy hemlines, laughing and sprinting barefoot behind the flower girls from the van to the house, that they looked at one another and whispered, "Well, maybe this won't be too bad."
They were surprised, in fact, at how many guests were just folks. Ivy's husband Jack from California—he was just folks. And Holly's artist friends from the Island, they were all a bit strange but still very friendly. The elderly couple with the French last name were not just folks, but still so easy to talk to.
It was too bad that their son Sam had so few friends of his own, but that was the kind of man he was. Anyway, he had Billy from way back by his side as best man, and the Steadmans were very fond of Billy.
They were supposed to have been in a receiving line or some such; but the rain and the unscheduled move, praise the Lord, had taken care of all that. Holly, sweet thing, made sure that they met each and every guest, introducing them with a new hug each time as her mother-in-law and father-in-law. It was so different from when Sam had brought Eden home from City Hall and then when Eden went to the bathroom, said, "Well? What do you think?" as if she were a brand-new car.
No, this was a different woman, and this was a different Sam.
Of course, sometimes you couldn't turn them around no matter how hard you tried. They'd had a foster son like that once. He lied, he stole, he drank, he fought with everyone and anyone. Eventually he was killed in a fight when he was only fourteen, and Millie had been devastated and had decided that she was unfit for foster parenting, but then the Good Lord had sent her Sam.
"Look at him, Jim," Millie whispered to her husband as she moved his walker out of the way of traffic. "Don't he look handsome? And don't he just look so in love with her? I can't remember him doting on Eden that way."
And Sam's father, never a man of words, nodded wisely and said, "Boy's older now. He's found what to look for." After a moment, he added, "That's something about Eden, no?"
"Yes ... that Marjory woman does seem to know everything about everyone, don't she? To think that Eden would have ended up married to an oilman! It's just so hard to believe. Where do all those rich Texans come from, anyway?"
"Texas, I expect," said Jim with a wry smile.
"At least he found out her true colors. I wonder how the court fight went."
"One thing's for sure: she'll find somebody else."
"Until she loses that bloom."
"Or runs out of states."
"Oh! Here's Charlotte!"
The mother of the bride arrived with plates of fancy food that she had made up personally for each of the Steadmans, and sat down with them a while.
"We haven't had any time to talk," she complained with a really gentle smile. "Please consider staying the night here; I can easily send someone to the inn for your things. I'm upset with your son, you know, for booking that room instead of bringing you here."
"Oh, don't be, please!" Millie begged, afraid that she'd wrecked things for Sam. "We're the ones made him do it."
Charlotte kept asking and Millie came around, by degrees, into agreeing to stay for just the one night. "After that, it's home to the bungalow, right Jim?"
"It's where we feel best," her husband explained.
"It's settled, then," said Charlotte, and she went off to make the arrangements.
They watched her leave the room. "She seems happy," Jim volunteered.
"And why wouldn't she be? She's the mother of the bride," said Millie, as if that explained everything.
"Well ... you know ..." murmured her husband as Eric Anderson caught their eye.
He came over and sat on a folding chair next to the more comfortable armchair that Holly had found for her new father-in-law.
He looked tired. Tired and a bit down in the dumps. But that was natural, thought Millie, him losing his daughter to another man and all. All fathers went through it. He hadn't been with Charlotte for almost a year, so that couldn't be it.
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