Sand Castles

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Succinctly put, she thought. There was little more to say after that.

  They were making their way through the compact but historic waterfront district of Warren. Briefly a whaling town, then a mill town, now a commercial shipbuilding and—naturally—antiques center, there was still nothing cutesy about the nearly four-hundred-year-old town. It might be restored, it might be authentic, but it would never be either elegant or glamorous. Wendy had always had an affection for Warren; relatives from the Portuguese side of her family lived there.

  Not so in Bristol, the next town on their agonizingly slow run to Newport. A much more beautiful town with far grander homes, Bristol was equally historic, and darkly so. Active in the slave trade, bombarded by the British, later abandoned by Continental soldiers and then really sacked by the British, home to a den of privateers after that: Bristol had always impressed Wendy as a strikingly beautiful but somehow compromised town.

  They followed the shoreline through Bristol rather than traverse its inland road not because they were interested tourists, but because they were afraid of missing a yellow Civic that might be parked in front of some home by the water that was open to the public.

  On Hope Street they came upon Linden Place, built by an infamous man and restored by his philanthropist grandson, and Zack said, "That qualifies as a mansion to me."

  He sounded hopeful, but they found no yellow Civic parked among the out-of-state cars there.

  "She had to mean Newport," Wendy said doggedly. "They have mansions everywhere that dwarf this one."

  On they rode, over the quaint Mount Hope Bridge to Aquidneck Island, home to three historic small towns, the last and most easily famous of which was Newport.

  Zack said, "Any mansions in Portsmouth?"

  "No, but lots of beaches."

  "Beaches have cottages, some for sale."

  "But not castles, Zack. Zina wrote that they were off to see castles. No. I'm sure we're on the right track," Wendy insisted, but her fears were at war with her instincts.

  The cell phone rang again, this time, Wendy's. Odd, how the front seat of a pickup could so have the feel of a war room. She answered and was shocked to hear Jim's voice at the other end, and even more shocked that he was acting as if he really were on a business trip.

  "Everything okay back there?" he asked matter-of-factly.

  "Okay? Okay? No, Jim, everything's not okay. I've been assaulted, we can't find Tyler, and Zina is more or less—"

  She glanced at Zack, and out of concern for him, said "—in danger of losing her grip."

  "Whoa, whoa, back up," Jim said. "Start at the beginning, for God's sake."

  She brought him up to date on all of it and finished by saying, "I've answered your questions, now you answer mine: where the hell are you, you bastard?"

  There was a slight pause before he said, "Lincoln."

  "Lincoln? Nebraska? What are you doing there?"

  "Just tying up some loose ends," he said cryptically.

  "I don't believe you. You're lying. As usual, you're lying," she said, frustrated beyond measure. "Wherever you are, come back here and give yourself up."

  He laughed bitterly. "Oh, yeah, I'll do that. Why'd you have to go to the police, Wen? We could have worked this all out."

  She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. "I can't talk to you, Jim. I just can't stand it anymore."

  "What about Tyler?" he said, sounding panicky that she might hang up on him. "Tell me about Tyler."

  Wendy felt a tap on her arm. Zack was pointing to an events sign nailed to a utility pole along a tacky strip of beach-related shops just outside of Newport.

  It was electrifying: Sand Castle Competition, Easton's Beach, June 21. Sponsored by Row to Go Sea Kayaks.

  "Zack, that has to be it. She's taken him to see the sand castles, not the mansions! How could I not have thought of that? I saw an ad in the East Bay section yesterday! That's it!"

  "Wendy! Wendy, what're you talking about?" Jim was shouting.

  "Easton's Beach; they must be there," she said, hardly aware that he was still on the phone and that she was talking to him as much as to Zack. "They have to be!"

  "Number sixty-seven, fisherman's platter! Number sixty- seven, fisherman's platter!"

  The voice came over a loudspeaker in the background at Jim's end—if Jim was telling the truth—in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  "Yeah, right," she said contemptuously. She knew a Rhode Island accent when she heard one. She snapped the phone shut with one hand and tossed it back on the dashboard.

  "That's Easton's Beach coming up, right after this light," she told Zack, pointing frantically. "See the changing houses and the pavilion? Turn in before it."

  The phone rang again; they ignored it.

  It was a fine beach day, but still early in the season and cool; the lot wasn't completely full. They cruised up and down it, looking for a yellow Civic. Wendy was crushed when they didn't find one.

  "Wait! I forgot; there's another lot, farther to the west," she said, taking heart again. "Let's try that one."

  They drove out and around the median and pulled into the second lot. Again they were disappointed.

  "I don't believe it," Wendy moaned. '"They're here, I know it!"

  Without a word, Zack climbed down from the truck, into the bed, and onto the roof of the cab. Wendy got out and stood on the ground, gazing in the same direction.

  "I see her car," he said after a moment, probably the happiest four words that Wendy had ever heard in her life. "She's parked on the road, pretty far up the hill."

  His laugh was filled with obvious relief as he said, "Leave it to my sister not to spend the big bucks to get into a lot when she can get by with a few coins in a meter."

  Somehow everything else—the assault, the bigamy, the ongoing threat—seemed absolutely trivial in the face of this one truth: Zina and Tyler were on the beach, looking at sand castles.

  Exploding, really, with relief, Wendy bolted across the lot and for the beach, never thinking that one of them should keep an eye on the Civic, until Zack caught up with her and said, "I'll run to the other end of the exhibit, the one closer to the car. You start at this end."

  "Right," she said, and off she went while Zack raced through the parking lot, headed for the other end.

  She expected to pick Tyler and Zina off easily—but nothing since the day they'd won the lottery had been easy. The crowds were large, and by no means all in bathing suits. Clusters of people stood around each of the incredible exhibits. Wendy had to go around and through them, trying to keep focused, trying not to look everywhere at once and end up seeing nothing.

  She was amazed at the number of sand castles, considering that this exhibit wasn't even the traditional end-of-summer one. It was as if they'd brought in professionals from all over the country to create them: big ones, little ones; vertical and horizontal ones; drippy ones, moated ones; and one incredible creation that looked to be an entire walled medieval town.

  But no Tyler, and no Zina. Devastated not to have found them, Wendy began looking around for Zack. He was a distance away: she shook her head in long, slow arcs, sending him a message of disappointment. He pointed up the hill: he was apparently going to check out the route to the car.

  Wendy dropped down to the water's edge to look up and down at the swimmers: the two could be wading, she supposed. Or wandering off toward the arc of houses that ran all the way out to Easton's Point. They could be at the opposite, western end, walking along Cliff Walk, the spectacular pathway that lined the Gilded Age mansions that their absurdly wealthy owners liked to call "cottages" and that ordinary folk like Wendy and Zina called "castles."

  They could be inside somewhere, visiting a mansion, a realty agency, a restaurant; they could be anywhere.

  "Wendy," came his breathless voice behind her. "Find them yet?"

  She whirled around.

  "Jim! Where did you come from?" she asked, and then she said, "Never mind," because she really didn't care.


  "I've been in Newport, lying low while I figured out what to do next," he confessed.

  Which made sense. Lots of crowds, lots of transients. He could stay somewhere different every night if he chose, without arousing notice. She hated him for figuring that out, for always working the angles.

  "I bought a Harley," he added, which truly amazed her. Could he possibly think it mattered?

  He fell in beside her. She had nothing further to say to him and continued on her way in tense silence, scanning for Zina and Ty. Jim was silent, too—until they drew abreast of the sand castles.

  "Wow. These things are unbelievable!" he said with awe, pointing to the medieval city. "Doesn't it make you just want to walk up to one and ... kick it?" He was giving her that half-cocked look with that impish grin that she knew so well.

  Wendy looked away. She utterly despised him.

  Seconds later, she stopped in her tracks, and so did her heart: ahead of her she saw Zina and Tyler, each of them clutching a Del's frozen lemonade, each of them walking with a stiff and zombielike gait. Between them walked a monster with hairy arms and a round face. She didn't need to have known that his hair was black or that his skin was blotchy, or that his neck was short and thick.

  She knew without those details that he was the one. She'd know him anywhere.

  Zina and Tyler were frozen with fear, and only in a second wave of comprehension did Wendy know why: the thug had a weapon inside the fist that was jammed in his pocket. A gun, without a doubt.

  Jim turned around to see why she'd stopped. It must have shown in her face, because he swung his head back to confirm what she was looking at. "Ah, shit ," he said, and then, like a horse out of the gate, he took off and ran in the opposite direction, leaving Wendy to face the three others alone.

  Did the brute recognize her? It didn't matter, because her son did. His face broke out in a rash of different emotions, chief among them, relief. Wendy couldn't bear it. Without thought, she broke into a run at him, her shoes sliding in the loose sand and making her progress unbearably slow. He was so close; he was so far.

  Before she could reach him, her son was knocked down, fallout from the force that hit the monster from behind: Zack had hurled himself like a cannonball at the man, knocking him sideways into Ty. While Wendy gathered up her son and while Zina screamed uncontrollably, Zack and the monster locked forces, rolling around in the sand, swinging and punching, eventually fighting their way to the nearest castle and knocking down one tower after another, flattening walls and filling in moats, drawing real blood on a make-believe battlefield.

  All around them, children screamed and parents ran with them for cover. A lifeguard with a zinc-covered nose was first to try breaking up the melee; his white nose got instantly bloodied. The monster landed a huge blow to Zack's chin, flattening him before taking off. Horrified, Wendy fell to her knees at Zack's side, but he staggered to his feet after the man, who was well down the beach, incredibly fast for someone his size. Wendy watched him scramble over the rocks and then over the beach wall and run up the hill, with Zack behind.

  In anguish, Wendy clutched her son and tried to comfort Zina as the figures on the walkway got smaller and disappeared. Sounds replaced sights: Zina's cries and children's screams; a plane overhead, a boom box nearby. And on the boulevard feeding the beach, a pack of motorcycles leaving town. Among all of it, Wendy was able to pick out the sound of one motorcycle revving up and taking off, one motorcycle roaring out of the parking lot, one motorcycle crashing into something bigger than it was.

  Soon there were more sirens, many sirens, of ambulances and fire trucks and rescue vehicles, the paraphernalia of a city used to crazy behavior and reckless bravado, even on an early summer afternoon. Some of them stopped at the entrance of Cliff Walk, and some of them kept on until they reached the pavilion. All of them had lives to try saving.

  ****

  Wendy sat in the soaring, skylit Courtyard in the east wing of Newport Hospital and thought, How in keeping with a city of mansions.

  She was still shell-shocked, and Tyler, too; but they had been left standing. They were the only ones. Zina had been admitted for observation. Zack was being stitched up and his kidney was about to be scrutinized in an MRI. The thug—a just-released con whose name was, improbably, Hallowell Hix—was in surgery having multiple bones put right after being peeled off the rocks at the bottom of Cliff Walk.

  And Jim, whose name was not Hodene or even Hayward, but Hix—Jim would never walk or talk or even think again.

  "I don't know who will make the decision to remove him from the respirator," Wendy told Dave in an undertone. She was a little ways away from her son, keeping her gaze locked on him as he nestled in his grandmother's arm on one of the benches nearby. "I'm not his wife. Zina's in no condition, even if she were his wife: there may be someone else out there between Hix and Hayward. I really don't ... know who will do it," she said, still coming to terms with it all.

  "That's an issue for the medical staff," her brother said, wrapping his arm around her and pulling her close for comfort. "Don't worry about it, Wen. It's not today's problem."

  Wearily, she said, "They've stopped the bleeding in Zack."

  Dave smiled and said, "I know. You've told me. Twice."

  "It wasn't as bad as they'd feared. Did I tell you?"

  "Yes," he said, putting his other arm around her. "Twice."

  "Thank God," she murmured into her brother's shirt. She began to shake again. "Thank God."

  "That Mizzner seems like a good guy," Dave said, undoubtedly to reroute her thoughts.

  Wendy straightened, nodding emphatically. "He is. He is." She smiled and said, "Why am I repeating everything I say?"

  "Because you know I'm thickheaded," quipped Dave.

  "You aren't; I am. To have lived with Jim so long ...."

  "Hey, we all were taken in. He was good at living lies. He'd had plenty of practice, even before he met you."

  "I'm glad you were there when Detective Mizzner explained it all. I'm hazy about parts of it. Why didn't Hix come after Jim right after we won the money?"

  "He was still in jail in Massachusetts. Wasn't much he could do. It had to make his blood boil, doing time while his brother—the one who'd actually pulled the trigger and wounded the store clerk—had not only got away but was enjoying such dumb blind luck. We're lucky Hix rented a car instead of stealing one; it made Mizzner's job easier. Hallowell Hix: what an ijit," Dave said, shaking his head in wonder.

  "I still can't believe that Jim would let himself be pushed into doing all those robberies by a brother. A brother, Dave."

  "Half brother, I expect; their mother was a hooker, don't forget. Anyway, you've seen Hix up close and personal; he's the proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla."

  Bitter now, she said, "Baloney. Frank doesn't make you go around robbing and shooting people."

  "Frank's a teddy bear, not a gorilla."

  It was true. She reflected a moment and then said with a wince, "Do you think Jim did anything like ... that ... while he was living with me?"

  Dave shook his head. "By then he'd ditched his brother. The crime spree, that was before Zina and of course during Zina. Even Zack wasn't on to Jim's double life. The guy really was good; look how we all bought into that childhood history of his. In Jim's own pathetic way, he was trying to clean up his act once he met you. He just didn't know how. He was pretty much a lost cause by then."

  Shuddering, she said, "We talk about him as if he's gone."

  "He is, Wendy. He is. And you have your whole life ahead of you now."

  ****

  She touched her fingertips tenderly to the sling that held his bandaged arm, unwilling, still, to think of him lying at the edge of Cliff Walk and bleeding profusely, both inside and out.

  "How many stitches?"

  "Ah, in the forties, give or take," said Zack, brushing off the idea.

  "You'll have a scar," she said, distressed.

  He gave her
a crooked smile. "Will you mind?"

  "Oh, Zack."

  She slipped her hand under his good one; he held it tight, reassuring her with his strength.

  "I was sure he had a gun," she said. "I never imagined a knife."

  "I think that in his twisted way, Hix was trying to stay out of reach of the law," Zack said. "I'll bet he would have been perfectly happy to take Jim's money and retire to Boca Raton."

  There it was again: the money. Wendy pulled her chair closer to Zack's bed and said in a low whisper, "That money is cursed. Look at the pain it's caused. Zack, I'm afraid of it."

  His smile faded. Alarmed, she shut up—she just wanted, really, to hold his hand and look at him for the few minutes that she had left with him—but he had something he wanted to say.

  "I don't think there will be any money," he said, "not after all the lawsuits are resolved. From what I hear, a couple of those teens that got mowed down by Jim's skidding bike were badly hurt. Then there's the woman in the car he hit. I'm sorry, Wendy."

  "Why?" she asked, genuinely bothered by his sympathy. "I told you that I was afraid of the money. I've always been afraid of it."

  "I was part of your pain," he said, dropping his head back on the pillow. He closed his eyes. "I'm sorry for that."

  She studied his face, this strong, silent, completely loyal man who had taken her off-kilter life and righted it for her.

  "You might have been part of my pain," she acknowledged. "But now you're my cure, and my only hope. I love you, Zack," she said softly. "I love you."

  He was drifting off, but with a smile. She sat there, her hand in his, until the nurse came and removed her gently but firmly from the room.

  Epilogue

  Dave Ferro pulled up the hood of his jacket against the driving snow and waited on the darkened porch of the duplex, wondering whether Zina had got his message. She wasn't answering the door, though her little yellow Civic was parked in the drive, covered in snow. He rang the bell again.

  Nothing.

  Great. And his cell phone was in the car, parked at the bottom of the drive because he was afraid that he wouldn't be able to squeeze past the Civic in the drifting snow.