by Barbara Ross
“Well, I hope he’s alive,” Chris said. “’Cause I’m hungry.”
Chapter 3
A few minutes later, we arrived at Blount’s Hotel. For the most part, pleasure boating in Maine was like an informal party. Tying up next to new people and chatting about where they’d been and where they were headed was part of the fun. The marina at Blount’s was a different sort of place. For one thing, it had the only dockside moorings that could accommodate truly big yachts. And for another, you had to pass through the hotel and out its back door to access the boats. Blount’s was a place for yachters who wanted privacy—celebrities, CEOs, heirs, and other assorted billionaires.
As we crossed the lobby, I stood straight, kept my eyes forward, and tried to look like I belonged. Just here for a little dinner on one of the yachts. Nothing to see. I recognized the kid behind the reception desk. His parents were friends of my mom’s, and my sister had babysat for him when she was in high school. He waved and smiled as we walked by.
Exiting out the back door of Blount’s, we took the steep wooden steps down to the floating dock. The tide was low and the Garbo towered above us. Truth was, she would have done so at any tide. Up close, she looked even more like a warship, though the glimpses we had of the fittings spoke of luxury, not battle.
“Permission to come aboard!” Quentin shouted.
Wyatt’s head hung over the deck above us, her sleek brown hair falling around her face. “You’re here! Be right down.”
Before Wyatt could reach us, a tall, tanned young man with tousled blond hair arrived. “G’day!” He carefully lowered the gangway. “Welcome aboard.” When we reached the deck, Wyatt came up behind him, beaming.
We paused to put our shoes in the box provided, a yachting custom. No matter how formal the occasion, we would navigate it unshod. Even Chris and Quentin shed their boat shoes. Wyatt was barefoot too. Only the crew would wear footwear specifically approved for the ship’s decking. My worn flats looked sad in the basket. They must have been the cheapest, oldest shoes ever left there. The blond man wordlessly took the crumpled brown bag with the wine bottles and the flowers from Quentin and disappeared.
Wyatt stood in front of a gleaming white wall, with the ship’s logo, four slash marks of different sizes, and it’s name painted in aqua. “I’m so glad you’ve come. Geoffrey is finishing up some work. Let me give you a tour while he’s occupied.”
Quentin stared at the logo for a moment. “Clever.”
Wyatt smiled. “Thank you. I designed it. It was painted yesterday. A little experiment before the refit so we could see if it worked.”
The logo didn’t seem like anything to brag about until I took a second look. The slashes formed themselves into the cloche hat, eyebrow, nose, and mysterious smile of a glamorous woman. Greta Garbo, the ship’s namesake, I assumed. Okay, so maybe it was clever.
Another man appeared behind Wyatt. He wasn’t dressed in a uniform, but in dark slacks, a cream turtleneck, and a brown sports jacket that strained across his broad shoulders. For one confusing moment, I thought he might be Geoffrey, but then he grabbed a small basket off a side table, held it in front of him, and said, “Cell phones, please,” in an accent I couldn’t place.
I looked at Quentin, who shrugged and put his smartphone in the basket. Chris did the same. I hadn’t brought the Snowden Family Clambake tote bag that usually went everywhere with me, so I didn’t have a phone to contribute.
The man glanced in the basket. “These will be returned to you when you leave.”
“Thank you, Emil,” Wyatt said to his retreating back. “We’ll start our tour with the staterooms since they’re on this level. Remember, as I said, you’re seeing the ‘before.’ I’ve designed the new interiors, with help from the experts at Herndon’s. I’ve never done this sort of thing before. I’ll show you the drawings when we get to Geoffrey’s office. It’s one deck up.”
Herndon Yachts, with offices in Busman’s Harbor and Monaco, was famous the world over for building new yachts, both sailing and motor, and refitting old ones. The age of transportation by ship might seem long ago to most people, but in Maine shipbuilding remained an important source of work. Bath Iron Works, just down the coast, was one of the largest employers in the state, making huge warships for the US Navy. The most modern ones, designed to evade radar and satellite photographs, looked like someone had forgotten to take off their gray paper wrapping.
At the other end of the spectrum was my friend Bud Barbour’s boatyard, where he did minor repairs on local lobster boats. Maine offered those businesses and everything in between, including a place in Brooklin, where people From Away could pay to learn to build wooden boats in the manner of their ancestors. Or at least, in the manner of my ancestors.
Herndon’s was an important source of local pride and well-paying jobs for people using new skills, like fabricating carbon-fiber hulls, and old skills, like cabinet and sail making. A complete refit at Herndon’s meant that Wyatt would be visiting Busman’s Harbor for many months, giving her plenty of time to persuade my mother to rebuild Windsholme. Still, I was happy the Garbo was in town. Keeping Herndon’s pipeline full of new yacht orders and refits benefited all of us.
“This deck is the first living floor on the Garbo,” Wyatt said. “So we’ll start here. Below is the engine, mechanicals, galley, crew quarters, a complete fitness center. That sort of thing.”
Quentin and Chris exchanged glances. I was sure they’d have loved to see the engine room and other inner workings, but they followed Wyatt as directed. We passed through a set of double doors and she led the way down a broad hallway carpeted at intervals with oriental rugs that felt heavenly on my bare feet. Quentin stooped to examine one, fingering its fibers and smiling with admiration. The wood-paneled walls and ceilings, teak floors, and elaborate moldings made it hard to reconcile the inside of the Garbo with its formidable outside. The hallway was like one in a sumptuous country house. Slightly old and slightly shabby, but still the ultimate in luxury.
Wyatt opened the door to the farthest stateroom and we stepped inside.
Chris let out a low whistle. The room was enormous, dominated by a king-sized bed. Over its headboard was a dazzling piece of art, a painting with bold shapes that reminded me of pieces from the 1930s I’d seen in museums. The rest of the cabin included a desk under the big windows that framed views of Busman’s Harbor, and a sitting area with a flat screen TV that stuck out in the room like a sore thumb.
“Let’s see the head.” Wyatt led us forward into the bathroom. Hardly the usual cramped and basic ship’s facility, it was bigger than my room at Mom’s house and dripping with luxurious fixtures, an enormous tub, two pedestal sinks with round mirrors above them.
“Holy moly.” The words flew out of me before I could stop them.
“You see my challenge,” Wyatt said.
“Updating the 1940s decor without losing its essence,” Quentin supplied.
“Exactly.”
When Quentin and Wyatt left the room, I reached for Chris’s hand and held him back. “What was the deal with the guy who took the cell phones?” I whispered.
“Bodyguard,” he whispered back. “He didn’t want us to be able to take photos. Did you notice the bulge in his jacket?”
“Wow.”
“Wow for sure. This is not your father’s lobster boat.”
We hurried to catch up to the others. Wyatt led us down the hall, opening one door after another to staterooms of equal size, each decorated like the others, with a hotel-like sameness. A five-star hotel to be sure, but a hotel nonetheless.
“The Garbo sleeps twenty guests,” Wyatt said.
“Or five hundred refugees,” Chris muttered.
“What? I didn’t catch that.” She most certainly had.
“Nothing,” Chris answered. But I could tell it wasn’t nothing to him.
We climbed a broad staircase, not at all shiplike, to the next deck. “The Garbo was originally built by the Canadian Navy,”
Wyatt said, in a tour-group-leader singsong. That explained the battleship lines. “When she was retired after World War Two, she was bought by a Greek billionaire. He spent millions transforming her into a luxury yacht, all in the hopes of seducing the film star Greta Garbo.”
“Did it work?” Quentin asked.
Wyatt laughed. “Tragically, no. She spent a few nights aboard and never returned. But we use her name to this day.”
I noticed the proprietary “we.” I had assumed Garbo was a reference to Geoffrey Bower’s reclusiveness, but the name predated his ownership.
On the next deck, Wyatt knocked on a set of doors with matching windows of Art Deco glass. It was the only entrance on that level. “Geoffrey?” There was no answer. “Oh, good, he’s not here. Let’s go in.” We entered a stateroom that took up the entire level. “Geoffrey’s cabin,” she said.
An enormous bed stood in the center, something bigger than a California king. An Alaska king, perhaps? Off one side of the room was a bathroom twice the size of the one we’d already seen, a huge walk-in closet, and a small area with exercise equipment.
Wyatt noticed me looking at it. “There’s a full gym belowdecks. Geoffrey lets the crew use it. He likes his privacy.”
An office took up the entire other side of the space. It had built-in desks, with a half-dozen monitors on top of them, displaying talking heads with brightly colored bands of numbers running underneath them. Between the desks was a rectangular safe as tall as a man. It looked heavy and as old as the ship itself, except for the gleaming keypad that at some point must have replaced its original combination lock.
“Here are the drawings for the refit.” Wyatt led us to the other end of the office where posterboard-backed, computer-generated color images sat on an easel. She flipped through them, showing us the cabins, Geoffrey’s stateroom, the public rooms. I could see why Quentin had recommended her for Windsholme. Each of the designs felt fresh, yet still honored the Garbo’s heritage in the glamour of the 1940s. Despite my misgivings about Wyatt as a person, I was impressed.
“They’re beautiful,” I said.
“Yes,” Chris agreed. “Perfect.”
Quentin held out a hand and Wyatt passed him a drawing of the redone dining room. “Gorgeous.”
“Thank you. That means so much.” A blush spread from Wyatt’s chest, up her delicate throat, and overtook her cheeks. Why did she care so much what Quentin thought?
Chapter 4
We finished the tour on the top deck by the swimming pool, its bottom lined with mosaic tiles that formed a portrait of Greta Garbo, a tribute to another man’s obsession. I could see that the likeness, illuminated by the pool lights, had inspired Wyatt’s logo. A yacht employee we’d not yet met stood behind the teak bar. “We’ll take our cocktails here,” Wyatt told him. She turned to us. “This is Rick, our head steward. He’ll fix you whatever you’d like.”
Quentin and Chris both seemed to take that as a challenge, asking for obscure top shelf whiskeys that Rick produced without so much as a search through the bottles displayed on the back bar, all the while bantering with them about quality of the liquor. He appeared to be in his forties, as deeply tanned as the other deckhand had been. He had dark hair on his head, worn short, and facial hair that might have been described as a small beard or a large goatee. He wore white pants and an aqua V-neck sweater, cashmere unless I was mistaken, with the ship’s name over his right breast. His flawless English was delivered with a charming French accent that made me doubt his name was actually Rick. An Anglicism to help out the muddled Americans?
When the moment came, I asked for champagne. Wyatt said, “I’ll join you.” Rick opened a bottle and poured. We took our glasses to the heavily cushioned chairs on the deck, which were perfectly arranged for conversation. The sun had set and the sky behind the harbor hill still glowed a rich purple. The lights came on in the houses. I found the windows of my mother’s yellow mansard Victorian, all lit up, always my beacon home.
I shivered in the fading light. June in Maine is not so warm. Wyatt noticed and asked Rick to bring me a sweater. An aqua cashmere cardigan appeared, also sporting the ship’s name. I shrugged into it.
The glass door from the salon opened and a man walked onto the deck. “Ah, good evening,” he said. “Wyatt’s friends.”
I didn’t know what I had expected. I’d had so many contradictory impressions of Geoffrey before I met him. When Wyatt called him her boyfriend, I’d expected someone as turned-out, type A, and sophisticated as she was. When Quentin had described a reclusive financial genius, I thought of someone with a long beard and no social skills. Then, as Wyatt had walked us through the sleek yacht, I’d grown even more confused. What kind of a recluse needs a ship that sleeps twenty?
Where my imagination had ended up was nowhere close to the man who stood on the Garbo’s pool deck. He was also older than I’d expected, midfifties, I guessed, two and a half decades older than Wyatt. He was short, pudgy, and pale, and wore white slacks, a blazer with gold buttons in it, and a jaunty yachtsman’s cap. He was a caricature of a yacht owner, a Thurston Howell III. And, unless I was very much mistaken, he was wearing a brown wig under the cap.
He strode over to where we stood, grabbed Quentin’s hand, and pumped enthusiastically. “You must be Tupper. Wyatt has told me so much about you.” Quentin opened his mouth to return the greeting, but Geoffrey had already turned to me. “And you’re Julia, the old school friend.”
Friend? Not exactly. But I admitted I was Julia and allowed my arm to be moved up and down.
Geoffrey kept going. “And you are?” He was clearly puzzled by Chris.
“Chris Durand, Julia’s boyfriend.” Chris took Geoffrey’s proffered hand.
“Welcome aboard.” Geoffrey looked around our little group and clapped his hands together. “I apologize for the delay. Some urgent business I had to take care of. Let’s eat, shall we?”
* * *
The dining room table could have easily sat thirty, but just one end of it had been set. Rick, the goateed steward, held out the chair to the right of the head and gestured for me to take a seat. He did the same for Wyatt on the left. The men took their seats, Geoffrey at the head and Quentin and Chris on the outside.
The chairs were heavy, the table fixed to the deck. The room had the feel of an elegant, and very expensive, restaurant. The china was restaurant grade, heavier than what you’d have in a home, better for a yacht that would be moving. The silver was also heavy, probably sterling, with a wave pattern on the handles; the water goblets were lead crystal.
Rick glided up to the table with a bottle of wine wrapped in a cloth napkin. Geoffrey gestured for Wyatt to taste it. She nodded her approval and the glasses were filled with the pale liquid. We chatted about the things strangers chat about. Weather, sports, places to explore along the Maine coast. Geoffrey nixed some of the obvious ports, Bar Harbor and Camden. “Too many people.” He talked excitedly of the refit at Herndon’s.
“Where will you stay while the work is done?” I asked.
Wyatt cut in. “Geoffrey has chartered another yacht. Something a little smaller.”
Rick returned through the dining room’s service entrance with the first course. Raw oysters served on beautiful china oyster plates decorated in the Garbo’s colors, along with personal-sized servings of Tabasco, horseradish, and cocktail sauce. I reached for the small oyster fork to the right of my spoons. The only fork ever placed to the right, my mother had taught Livvie and me. Quentin’s mother had evidently done the same, or maybe he’d hired a fork tutor when he made his first million. Chris, however, grabbed the most prominent fork on the left, his dinner fork, and dug in. The delicious shellfish were undoubtedly from the Damariscotta River, just one peninsula up and famous for its oyster farms.
As we ate, Geoffrey turned to me. “Tell me about my dear Wyatt when you girls were at school.” His blue-gray eyes opened wide in anticipation.
I stared back. I had no warm and fuzzy an
ecdotes about the teenaged Wyatt to offer. “She was the captain of the debate team,” I stammered.
“I don’t doubt it. She and I had many a debate when we were choosing the appointments for the refit.” He’d removed the silly yachtsman’s cap and I had trouble not staring at the wig. Why would a man who could buy anything wear something that was so fake looking? But then, getting hair plugs or having a quality toupee made would require going ashore. Or allowing other humans on board. Or maybe he saw so few people, his looks didn’t matter. Which brought me back to my original thought about the wig: Why wear it?
But, confusingly, I saw no sign of antisocial behavior from Geoffrey. Quite the opposite. He chatted easily with everyone as Wyatt hovered near him proprietarily, touching his arm and fidgeting whenever he engaged with someone else too long. She used the same tired, flirty behaviors she’d tried on Quentin and Chris—the batting eyelashes, the whisper in the ear. It seemed almost like she was trying to win Geoffrey over, not like there was an established relationship.
Rick cleared the oyster plates and served the salads American-style, before the main course. Without drawing attention, he replaced Chris’s fork. Flawless service. If the oysters had been in the riverbed that morning, the greens and the raw, fresh peas in the simple salad had been picked at the same time. There was something familiar about the flavor of the dressing. It dredged up a memory, but the more I chased it, the fuzzier it got.
Quentin put down his salad fork (Chris had persisted with his dinner fork strategy) and looked at Geoffrey, finally asking what I knew he’d been dying to all along. “I’m not going to ask how you knew the housing market would collapse. I want to know how you had the certainty to place such a huge bet. It was your entire fortune, wasn’t it? And money you invested for your clients. That took guts. I’m not sure, even if I’d seen the crash coming, I would have had the nerve.”
“Ah,” Geoffrey answered. “Without risk, life isn’t interesting, is it?”
