A fierceness held Sara like a sheathing of blue flame, warming and protecting her, as she made phone call after phone call. “This is Henrietta Nelson,” she would say, a quaver in her voice. “Is my niece Felicia there? Her mother has been taken suddenly ill. No? Oh, dear. If we don’t find poor Felicia in time”—a little break in the voice at that point—“I’ll never forgive myself.”
The calls ranged far and wide across the island, from East Beach to Lobsterville, from Scrubby Neck to West Chop. Mercer and his bride were in no hotel on the island, but they were definitely still somewhere on the island—the wedding guests were still scheduled to be here for tomorrow’s ceremony—so that meant they had to have gone to ground in someone’s private residence. Home owners and home renters and house sitters, beginning with showbiz people Mercer knew or had worked with, spreading to showbiz people Mercer might know, spreading to anyone with any sort of celebrity at all or any sort of potential connection with Mercer at all, every one of them was being approached by Sara on the phone. And at the same time, the same list was also being investigated by various of the New England stringers by foot and in cars—selling magazine subscriptions, reading meters, anything—and by a couple of photographers by air, via charter pilots already on the Galaxy payroll.
Sara’s fear, following last night’s attack, had paralyzed her ah day long, but had disappeared like smoke with the news of Mercer’s disappearance. Rage can be stronger than fear, and Sara’s rage at John Michael Mercer was now both wide ranging and intense. She was furious at him for complicating the already complicated life of Jack Ingersoll. She was indignant with him for causing the descent into their midst of Boy Cartwright. And she was wrathful at the son of a bitch for not playing the game. Just who did he think he was?
We’re quicker than you are, John Michael Mercer, Sara thought, as she dialed her numbers and told and told her story. We’re tougher than you are, we’re meaner than you are, we’re more determined than you are, and we do not give up.
“This is Henrietta Nelson ...”
The Mercer suite was clean. Just to make absolutely certain that no clues had been inadvertently left behind, the maid had gone so far as to remove notepads, matchbooks, room service menu, magazines, TV listing sheet and all other such materials from the suite and replace them with brand-new. The medicine chests in both bathrooms smelled of Lysol. When Ida lifted the carpet in the living room, she saw that the maid had already done so. When she lifted the mattresses on the beds, the maid had been there first as well. When she took the drawers out of the dressers, to see if perhaps something had fallen down inside, she smelled Pledge; the maid had done this, too.
There was nothing here, that’s all, nothing to be seen but the empty gesture of the Princess Pat, the yacht still poindessly floating offshore, centered in the picture window. Giving that useless tub a cold look, Ida left the suite, wandered the curving brick paths in the late afternoon air, and finally saw ahead of her a wheeled maid’s cart, piled high with tissue boxes and soap. It stood in front of another small shingled separate structure, another cabana suite like Mercer’s.
The maid, busily at work in the sitting room, was short, skinny, bony-faced, pale-skinned, grayhaired and fiftyish; no doubt the wife or widow of a fisherman, daughter of fishermen, member of a longtime family along these waters, proud and poor and dismissive of the rich summer people who had taken over their world. Ida, who quite naturally looked more like this maid than like the rich summer people, entered this suite and said, “Hi.”
The maid looked at her, a flat and waiting look, not yet suspicious. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Did you clean the Mercer suite?”
Now the expression was suspicious. “Yes, ma’am.”
Ida extended toward her a folded green bill, saying, “You dropped this.”
“Oh, no, ma’am,” the maid said, calm and positive in her competence. “I couldn’t have.”
“Well, it was there,” Ida said, brisk and impatient. “Do I look as though I need a dollar? I work for the Weekly Galaxy, they pay me plenty. A lot more than my sister, she’s a waitress. Here, make sure.”
The maid doubtfully took the bill, which Ida had folded so that all the numbers were inside, and so that the bill was already in the maid’s hands when she opened it and saw those repeated digits: 100. “Oh, no, ma’am,” she said, almost in a panic, trying to push the bill back into Ida’s hands. “This isn’t mine!”
Ida backed away, lifting her hands as though the bill scared her, too. “That’s a hundred!” she cried. “It isn’t mine! We’re in enough trouble with the management here, I don’t want anybody saying I took money.”
“But—” The maid looked at the hundred-dollar bill in her hand, looked hopelessly around the room as though for a place where she could safely put it down, then looked back at Ida. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed.
“I tell you what,” Ida said. “Maybe it was dropped by whoever was here with the Mercers just before they left. If I leave it with you, you could pass it on to— Who would that be?”
The maid looked keenly at Ida. The bill crackled in her fingers.
“Lady Beatrice Romneysholme,” Ida announced, her mouth curling around the syllables of the name. “Widow of an army general known as the Dunce of Dunkirk.”
Jack frowned. “I thought Dunkirk was a success.”
“A successful retreat,” Ida pointed out. “He made it necessary. The British press gave him the horse laugh the rest of his life, so naturally the widow hates reporters.”
Jack nodded, sad but noble. “They always blame the messenger,” he said.
“Sure,” Ida agreed. “Lady Bee has kind of a castle over on the west side of the island. Up on a bluff over the water. Very tough to get into.”
“Servants?”
“Old retainers,” Ida said. “Been with her since Magna Carta.”
“I look ahead of me,” Jack said, “and I see oblivion.”
Boy, with his dreamy infected smile, floated over to say, “I understand the happy couple have been rediscovered.”
“You’re quick, Boy,” Jack told him. “You’ve got what I call a nose for news.”
Ida studied her nails. They were long and sharp.
“They’re with a compatriot of mine, I understand,” Boy went on.
“In a manner of speaking,” Jack agreed.
“I suppose, really,” Boy said, “one ought to drop in on dear old Lady Beatrice.”
“That’s a great idea, Boy,” Jack said.
“I’m sure we’ll get along famously,” Boy said, drifting toward the door. “Ta.”
Jack watched him leave. Slowly, a smile overlaid the lineaments of despair on his features. “Now, why,” he asked, “do I find myself feeling this unreasonable sense of happiness?”
Amid that mix of New England fishing village, undeveloped sand dune and elegandy rustic architected homes of the rich and famous which combine to give Martha’s Vineyard its aura and ambiance, a kind of Frankenstein castle rose on a bluff overlooking the western shoreline, a tall building of stone and stucco and shingle, surrounded by well-tended and well-watered greensward, neatly placed ornamental trees, smooth stone patios and a croquet field, all enclosed by a thick stone wall, with a grand stone gatehouse at the only entrance, and a gravel drive curving in and up to the fieldstone portico at the broad front door.
Inside, Romney Hall was furnished in great part from the original Romney Hall, a similarly sprawling stone structure beside the Thames near Wallingford. When, after the war, Romney Hall was given to the National Trust as part of some sort of complex tax deal, and when for a variety of reasons it had seemed best for the Romneysholmes to remove themselves from England, this furniture, these carpets, these paintings and sconces and tea sets, all made the move as well, first for a brief, mistaken, unfortunate stay in Bermuda—Little England, indeed!—and then on here to Martha’s Vineyard, where people’s memories were blessedly shorter and the weather wasn’t so
boringly perfect all the time. “Hate to be in a place where only man is vile,” the General used to say, on the cold bleak days of winter, standing on his bluff overlooking the sea, with the sharp icy wind and the stinging salt spray in his face.
Since the General’s demise—Lady Beatrice found herself at times saying he’d “been put down,” as though he were one of his own dogs, or a case of his favorite vintage port—Lady Beatrice had sometimes considered a return to the old country, but when she read the news in her airmail edition of the Times and saw what her countrymen looked upon as a “conservative” these days, the decision to go back just kept being postponed. And so she stayed, and the old family retainers stayed with her, and generally speaking she was content. And from time to time there were little events—like this hounded young couple and their upcoming nuptials—which enlivened her landscape and put the roses back in her cheeks.
How sweet they were, as from her upstairs window she watched them stroll hand in hand across the lawns, he with his rugged good looks, she clearly a practical girl of the sort Lady Beatrice had always approved. Apparendy Mr. Mercer was something in show business, but so many people on the Vineyard were, and in fact, at a certain level, there were any number of acceptable people in that area of endeavor. Sir Larry back home, for instance, and the Rossellini girl, and perhaps Mr. Reagan (though Lady Beatrice harbored the suspicion that Mr. Reagan was a climber). In any event, they had been so harried and unhappy and tense when she’d met them, and now look how relaxed and joyous they were, laughing together, strolling without a care in the world.
The phone near Lady Beatrice’s elbow tinkled, the sound of an in-house call. Still gazing out at the lovebirds, she picked up the receiver and spoke: “Lady Beatrice here.”
“It’s Jakes, Mum.”
Jakes was the man on duty at the gatehouse, the one whom traders and visitors and other callers had to get through, and whom no one got through if Jakes did not approve. “Yes, Jakes?”
“There’s a chap here, Mum,” Jakes said, with a faint but unmistakable edge of disapproval. “He’d like a word with you.”
“What about?”
“Well, he says he’s from a newspaper, Mum.” Faint murmurings off: “He says he’s from the Weekly Galaxy, Mum, it’s a sort of servant-girl paper, all in color.”
Lady Beatrice’s eyes glinted. So the villainous press had traced the fair couple, had it? Well, it would not be permitted to destroy their happiness. “And the scamp,” she said, “has the effrontery to come to my front door?”
“He asks if he can have a word with you, Mum.”
“Put the villain on.”
“Boy Cartwright here, Lady Beatrice,” said the villain, and the instant she heard that glutinous voice, that style of Uriah Heep after assertiveness training, Lady Beatrice placed the fellow precisely and unerringly in his proper pew in the great English pecking order. A tradesman’s son from somewhere like Bradford, a redbrick university dropout, the sort of fellow who in Manchester or Liverpool sells used cars to Pakis. “If I could have a bit of a chat, Lady B,” this mongrel said, “I’d be most appreciative.”
You’ve had your bit of a chat, my lad, Lady Beatrice thought, and said, “Put Jakes on.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That large strapping fellow there with you. Jakes. Put him on.”
“Oh, of course, of course. See you in half a tick, then,” the creature said, and Lady Beatrice heard him, away from the phone, say snottily to Jakes, “Your mistress has instructions for you.”
“Mum?”
“That wide leather belt you usually wear, Jakes,” Lady Beatrice said. “Are you wearing it today?”
“Yes, Mum.”
“Then use it, man!”
Lady Beatrice hung up, and smiled out at the happy couple still strolling around the lawn, saying little private things to one another. To the right, the gravel road curved down and away. Almost out of sight through the ornamental trees was the gatehouse. All at once, from down there, came the sound as of someone crying out, “Woop!” And then again: “Woop! Woop! Woop!” The couple down below seemed not to hear it, and rapidly the woops receded into silence, and all was well.
Seven
Jack couldn’t sleep. Usually, no matter what happened in the course of a day, no matter how much warthog dung was dumped on his head, it all sloughed away by beddy-byes, and he slept like an innocent babe; which just goes to show. But tonight, in the dark, with Sara’s dear head on his breast and the sound of her slow respiration soothing to his ears, tonight for some reason he just couldn’t seem to lose consciousness.
When in doubt, make a list. What’s bugging the old brain, then, that it won’t let go of Saturday?
Well, let’s see. Outside this room, out there beyond the repaired glass doors and new curtains, a Massachusetts state trooper patrolled, or was alleged to patrol; with a second wandering the halls of the inn. No one could figure out why those shots had been fired into this room last night, so there was a general effort to keep more shots from being fired tonight. Had someone been trying to kill Sara, and if so, why? Had they been trying to kill someone else, and got their targets mixed? Had it just been a random shooting, without sense or meaning?
Hmm. Whatever the cause of the shooting, the fact of the shooting was item number one on Jack’s list, and he studied it, turned it over and over, poked at it with his brain as his tongue might poke at an aching tooth. Is that why I can’t sleep? Because somebody emptied a gun through that window into this bed last night?
No. Doesn’t feel right. Not my problem, to begin with, plus we have police protection, plus the shooting didn’t accomplish anything. So, no.
Boy Cartwright, then; item number two on the list. I am now in a subservient position to Boy Cartwright, my assignment to get an interview with John Michael Mercer having been superseded by Boy’s assignment to get the wedding pictures. Is that why I can’t sleep?
Certainly not. The worst day of his life, Boy Cartwright couldn’t keep me awake for a second if I wanted to sleep. So, no.
The wedding itself, then, the whole problem of John Michael Mercer and his marriage and Martha’s Vineyard and the very wild card of Lady Beatrice Romneysholme. Yes?
No. The job does not keep us awake. No.
In her sleep, Sara murmured slightly, sighed, shifted position, her palm warm on Jack’s chest, her hair pleasantly tickling his chin.
Sara.
Yes.
Jack pondered that idea, found it surprising, found it discouraging, but reluctantly admitted he also found it plausible. The reason he couldn’t sleep was because he was worried about Sara.
Not Sara being shot at. His worry was much sillier than that, much more ridiculous, too absurd even to look at straight ahead; which is why he’d been unable to think about it and deal with it and ignore it and go to sleep.
He was afraid Sara was getting too good at her job.
It had probably been happening from the very beginning, or at least from the time of the hundred- year-old twins, but it hadn’t been out front and obvious until here in Martha’s Vineyard, until Sara’s reaction to frustration had been to get steadily tougher and tougher, stronger and stronger, more and more ruthless and determined. When Jack had seen her with Ida today, had seen how well the two women meshed, had seen how Sara was becoming Ida, something terrible had happened inside his brain, something awful, something he had thought himself safe from, something he had believed could never again get its clutches into him:
Ambiguity.
If Sara’s getting better at her job, if she’s becoming ever more useful, there’s only the one reaction possible, isn’t there? Pleasure. Satisfaction at the development of another powerful member of the team. So whence, damnit, this ambiguity, these doubts, this brooding inability to sleep?
With what trouble and difficulty Jack had rid himself of extraneous emotion several years ago he could barely stand to remember. A thoroughgoing romantic in college and beyond, sl
opping over with empathy and fellow-feeling, as naive as a CIA man at a rug sale, he had been hardened, annealed, by circumstances too harrowing to store in the memory banks, and since that time he had been safe.
It had been a conscious decision he had made, four years ago, to retire from the human race, to care about nothing, to become as self-sufficient as Uncas. He had chosen deliberately an environment where emotional attachments of every kind, from the greatest to the smallest, were literally impossible. It was not conceivable to care for one’s fellow workers at the Galaxy, for instance. One amusedly pitied a Binx Radwell about as meaningfully as if he were a puppy with a thorn in its paw; one used an Ida Gavin and then washed one’s hands; one rather relished a Boy Cartwright as so thoroughly representing the environment.
Equally, one could not become emotionally involved with the job. Not this job. Nor could one care about the pip-squeak transitory celebrities on whom they all lived their parasitic existence. Even the state of Florida helped; anyone who managed to sing the glorious rocks and rills of that sunny buttcan needed psychiatric care.
Too thoroughly a bumt-out case even to relish the romantic self-image of being a bumt-out case, Jack Ingersoll had retired to Florida and the Weekly Galaxy and the likes of Ida Gavin and Boy Cartwright to lick his wounds and care never again about anything at all. Not even possessions; his
Spartan life not only gave him more money to put into blue-ribbon investments, the better to prepare for that inevitable day of involuntary retirement, it also kept him from falling—like puppy Binx— in love with things. He who has nothing has nothing to lose. And he who has nothing to lose has already won.
Unlike Sara. I don’t want to care about her, he thought. I want to be pleased that she’s getting better and better at the job. I want to be happy that I have a second mad dog on my team, nearly as good as Ida, and potentially even better. I want to be amused by the knowledge that she lied to me in bed about the hundred-year-old twins, and that I’ll never be able to prove it. I cannot save myself because I do not want to save myself, and therefore I cannot save Sara, so I should merely find contentment in her transformation.
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