When we emerged from the stairwell, we found ourselves to be anchored offshore about half a mile. The remaining overnight lights of a sprawling beach resort seemed to hop up and down with the rolling of the yacht, while the surrounding ocean churned like a Maytag washing ink out of a giant load of jeans. A briny breeze coming in from the sea dampened our clothes and chilled our skin.
The amazing, anything-you-want Anna stood by the bar minding a plastic pitcher of Bloody Marys, which both Mike and I declined. I assumed he wanted to stay sober in Toby’s honor. I wanted my hands free in case I needed to grab something stationary.
The Roitmans obviously possessed better sea-legs than us outsiders. They each held a tumbler of spicy red hair-of-the-dog except for Chantal, who hugged a dark rectangular box to her chest.
“Well, shall we?” Frank prompted, as if our arrival was a signal. One by one the three drinkers relinquished their plastic cups, although Gavin chugged his dry first.
With the yacht floating perpendicular to the beach, we lined up on the northernmost side with an indirect view of the slash of yellow slicing through the clouds to the east. I felt the first cold plop of rain on my arm when I stepped out from under and reached for the rail. The rain gathered momentum as the others took their places, but no one dared acknowledge the downpour or attempt to avoid it.
Our position was perhaps ten feet above the water with the staterooms just below our feet and the deck for fishing—or whatever—and the captain’s equipment and canopied seat above. Chantal stood at the notch in the hull used for climbing on and off when the boat was docked. Presently, it was closed off by a removable rail. Frank and Gavin stood to the widow’s left. Her mother clung to her right side. Then came me and Mike.
“Say something, darling,” Marsha shouted at her daughter due to the splashing waves and the chilly breeze hissing in our ears.
Already tears cut a path down Chantal’s cheeks, which may be why she extended the box out over the water instead. Unfortunately, a wind gust flipped up the loose lid and sent it twirling into the Caribbean. A seagull gliding by in the hope of scoring something edible complained with a squawk and angled sharply toward shore.
Evidently no one had thought to check inside the crematorium’s container, because it seemed to come as a surprise that Toby’s ashes were secured inside a thick plastic bag. Chantal was forced to remove it, turn it over, and dislodge a strip of tape before she could begin to scatter anything. Considering the trouble, not to mention expense, her parents had gone to, dumping the contents all at once would have been unseemly and anticlimactic, so she closed off perhaps a third with her hands and tilted it down slowly.
“Good-bye, Toby,” she said with a sob. “I miss you.”
Some of the particles dropped soundlessly into the sea, but some ashes got taken up by the breeze and got swept back toward Chantal’s father and brother.
Frank managed to tuck his face beneath his arm, but Gavin didn’t have his father’s foresight or good luck. He uttered a disgusted “yuk” and ran for the stairs. Frozen in place, nobody dared breathe, let alone look around, until the footsteps ended and a door slammed.
By now Chantal’s sobbing was painful to hear, so painful that her mother drew her to her breast and murmured into her hair. The box quickly became an awkward problem, though, so the moment didn’t last.
Free again, Marsha wiped the mascara running down her face with the napkin she’d kept in her hand. “Just do it,” she advised her daughter, and the shivering widow complied.
While the rest of us wondered what to do next, Chantal grasped the railing with both hands and stared ahead like a pioneer woman trying to imagine the west.
So there we also stood thinking our respectful thoughts until a large rolling swell doused us all with cold, salty water.
“That’s it,” Frank announced, retrieving the bottom of the box from the deck and flinging it into the next oncoming wave. Turning, he lifted his head and shouted up to our waiting captain, “George! Get us out of here.”
The anchor chain squealed its mechanical ascent even as we filed off toward the stairs. Frank chose to climb upward, presumably to speak with George, while his wife and daughter headed to their respective staterooms for warm showers and dry clothes.
Mike and I lagged behind, but Accommodating Anna and the pitcher of Bloody Marys were nowhere to be found.
Chapter 13
Somehow the morning slipped by. Chantal hid in her stateroom, perhaps with her mother. Gavin probably finished sleeping off his night out.
Meanwhile, Frank settled in at the end of the dining table and took turns tapping his laptop and speaking on his phone. He seemed to be acquiring a company that imported coffee. I knew this because I’d curled up in the adjacent lounge with a wrinkled paperback of Lee Child’s first thriller that I’d found on a bookshelf.
When the rain blew away around a quarter to eleven, a brilliant sun cut sharp edges on the elegant buildings alongside our mooring. Since our yacht was so big, it was the only one stretching along the reinforced water’s edge next to a macadam walkway. Just beyond lay a strip of flowered lawn adorning a widely windowed restaurant attached to a resort.
As I wandered down to check on Mike, Chantal and I nearly collided as she emerged into the small hallway we shared.
“Oops, sorry.” “Excuse me,” we said in unison, then Chantal predictably burst into tears.
I waited to hear what she would say and wasn’t surprised when she blurted, “It was a disaster, wasn’t it?”
I folded my arms as if to think.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I waffled. “You said Toby had a good sense of humor. Maybe it was his way of getting everybody to lighten up.”
Something bubbled up from Chantal’s throat, a snort that may have been a chuckle that took her by surprise. Her hand covered the O of her mouth, and she blinked so hard the waiting tears ran down her face in a rush.
“You think?” she said, and this time she really laughed. “Oh my lord. You really are something. What’s your name again?”
“Lori.” For now, anyway.
“Lori. You really are something.” She proceeded up the stairs as she’d originally intended, but her shoulders had lost some of their slump and her steps rang on the wood like little hammers.
When I entered our stateroom, Mike finished a text message before looking up.
“The sun is out,” I said. “You ever going to leave this foxhole?”
“Yeah, sure.” He stood arms down, almost at attention.
“You promised to act more like a couple, remember? Got a bathing suit?”
“This is it.” He pinched the leg of a baggy blue and white garment that looked like ordinary shorts to me.
“Fine. Let’s go to the beach. Give me five minutes, okay?”
“Sure. I’ll be up on the deck.” The phone went into his pocket, a towel over his shoulder. Pulling the cabin door shut behind him, he left me alone.
To make sure Mike didn’t renege, I hurried into my pink bikini with the yellow polka dots. Karen had thoughtfully provided an opaque white cover-up that closed in the front and nearly reached the middle of my thighs.
To my shock and delight, in the few minutes it took me to change, Mike had buddied up with Gavin for a windsurfing date.
“Darling, do you mind?” His brow wrinkled, and he actually wrung his hands.
“Sure, honey,” I said. “I forgot what a windsurfing fiend you are.”
“Since college,” he supplied. Maybe he was finally playing his part. Or maybe he really was a windsurfing fiend.
Gavin spied Anna eavesdropping from the galley. “We’ll pick something up for lunch,” he told her, and, simultaneously, me.
The body language at the airport, the club outing last night, and now the windsurfing escape with Mike began to build a profile of Gavin Roitman hint by hint. Perhaps he wasn’t completely anti-social, just adverse to his family.
Which made me wonder. Were he and Chantal li
ke Ron and me or just ordinary siblings? Were he and Frank two lions vying for the same pride, or were their differences merely a generational gap? Had Marsha been too controlling, too motherly, or maybe too self-involved for Gavin The Youth to tolerate? So many reasons why a family member might disconnect, most of them sad.
And some of them toxic.
I decided the beach could wait. To kill the hour until lunch, I took the Lee Child novel and some coconut-scented suntan lotion topside. With the only shadows hidden under the furniture, I had to tiptoe over to one of the cushioned lounge chairs facing the cove. From inside the adjacent resort came the slow, pock…pock music of a tennis game and the rattle of an awning flapping in the breeze. Across the marina an engine roared to life and grumbled its way out to sea.
My skin began to glow with tiny dots of sweat, and soon my whole body felt limp. I exhaled a deep, luxurious sigh.
“Nice up here, isn’t it?”
Marsha’s stage voice sat me upright, and Lee Child dropped to the deck with a slap.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” She had a tilted smile when she said that. “Do you mind?” She gestured toward the lounge chair to my left.
“Of course not. Please.” I waved her into the seat that was rightfully hers to begin with.
“You puzzle me,” she said as she smoothed the pink terrycloth robe beneath her legs.
Suddenly worried, I replied, “Oh?”
She looked me in the eye. “You can eat twice as much as me, and look at you.”
My body unclenched by a very small increment.
“How do you do it?”
“Five miles every other day.” Weight lifting, target practice, jumping rope, farm chores for Ron, house chores for Karen, standing on my feet bartending for several hours whenever I got a shift.
“You run?” She seemed to equate that with eating grasshoppers.
I shrugged and said I liked food.
Then I mentioned that I’d never met Toby. “What was he like?”
Marsha’s face hardened as if the subject was distasteful.
“For the most part a pleasant man,” she allowed. “Very good with money. Lucky, because he certainly liked having it.” She tilted her head briefly in thought. “A good husband, I guess. At least Chantal seemed to think so.”
We sat there metaphorically chewing our cud for a moment or two. Marsha relieved her neck by facing forward. She crossed her ankles comfortably and grasped the armrests like a sphinx.
Then she asked, “Why are you really here?”
Yikes! Guts and pitch-perfect instincts. She hadn’t bought my minding-Mike’s-mental-health story, and now she was calling me out on it. I would have to watch myself around this one.
“Time together,” I answered simply.
“Yes. Any chance you can get, I’ll bet. It won’t work out, you know. You do know that, don’t you?”
I gave her a tiny nod of acknowledgement.
“Yes. Of course you do. I should ship you back home in a cardboard box, but…”
The silence that fell required me to say something. “But you won’t. Why?”
Marsha huffed irritably. “Because Chantal could use a friend right now, and for some reason, she likes you.”
I treated myself to a nice, normal breath.
“Chantal is not a strong person,” her mother remarked. “Sometimes I wonder how that happened with parents like Frank and me, but she simply is not and never will be. Toby. It’s too bad…Toby seemed to appreciate her.” Marsha tidied the pink terrycloth covering her knees. “Now he’s gone, and she must learn to adjust.”
Love, horror, and disappointment briefly comingled on the former actress’s face. Then just as quickly her inner thoughts passed. When she faced me once again, I swear I felt a chill.
“Help distract my daughter, Ms. Lori Whatever-your-name-is, and I will tolerate your presence among us. Otherwise, it’s the cardboard box. Do I make myself clear?”
“Crystal.”
With that, Marsha Roitman swung her slippered feet onto the deck and stood. Her parting words were spoken into the stairwell.
“I’m going to help Anna. Tell Frank lunch will be ready in ten minutes, will you?”
Chapter 14
So much for sunbathing about as far away from care as a person can get. How had I ever convinced myself that pretending to love a guy I just met and getting inside the heads of our four hosts would be easy? It was a dangerous delusion, and the fact that I’d sold it to myself bruised my very recently mended confidence. I truly felt lucky not to be flying home in a cardboard box.
Most of the criminals I encountered as a small city cop were not brainiacs. They drank too much and hit their wives, or killed a rival drug dealer. Some let their parking meters expire or jaywalked. Others tried to hire prostitutes who looked like me or hid “free” groceries under their jackets. Rarely were they CEOs of billion dollar enterprises or their deceivingly perceptive wives.
In high school I once dated a guy who attended a famous Philadelphia prep school. It took me longer than it should have to pinpoint what was different about him and his friends. And no, it wasn’t money. My boyfriend was a scholarship student, and so were some of his friends. Their common denominator turned out to be the entrance exam. They had all passed.
CEOs of billion-dollar enterprises get to be CEOs because they have brains. It follows that to be interesting to a smart man, a woman probably should be intelligent, too. Their children? Genetically, the odds favored better than average IQs. Maybe the exposure to luxury was giving me a sugar high, or maybe Mike’s conviction that the Roitmans’ were innocent had eroded my common sense, but whatever it was, I needed to snap out of it or it was entirely possible that I might not be up to this challenge.
The ribbon along the bottom of the flatscreen in the lounge read, “Breaking News.”
Children gunned down at school? A government building bombed? An assassination attempt? Whatever it was, Frank Roitman appeared ready to tackle it personally. His feet met the floor like a sprinter’s braced against the starting block. The fists at his sides pressed into the sofa cushions as if they were crushing rocks. Had I smashed a lightbulb on the coffee table in front of him, I doubt that he’d have flinched.
I eased onto the arm of a chair facing the television.
“So far six confirmed dead and forty-two injured in the derailment of a Washington, DC, Metro train,” the CNN reporter announced. “Emergency crews quickly responded, but access was made difficult due to a damaged stairway…”
The devastation resembled a war scene. Four long train cars lying in a twisted pile. Clouds of smoke and dust hanging in the underground air. Uniformed rescuers carrying heavy stretchers across the screen. Other medics crouched alongside passengers whose hold on life remained unclear.
“No word regarding what caused the crash, but because the accident occurred so close to government offices, terrorism has not been ruled out. As yet, no one has come forward to claim credit…”
The announcer was a news veteran. I’m not good with names, but everything about him conveyed professionalism—his suit, his calming voice, the honesty that easily closed the distance between us. I appreciated the stability he managed to convey, but Frank required something more. Bourbon on the rocks, perhaps. His thick hands now shielded his entire face. He released a heavy sigh then rubbed this temples with stiffened fingers.
Mentioning lunch would have been an obscenity. When his wounded eyes returned to the video coverage, I slipped behind him and into the galley.
Anna was balancing an enormous shrimp on the edge of a dish lined with lettuce, her lips pressed together so tightly that I thought she might have seen the news.
“This way, dear,” Marsha physically corrected her placement. Then she raised her eyes and asked, “Did you tell Frank?”
“Uh, no,” I admitted. “He was watching CNN, and I…”
“Not again.” She slapped a dishtowel onto the counter and huffed off
around the corner.
I had just caught on that Anna’s personal bad news was Marsha when the “anything” woman shot me a look that dared me to take over where her meddling guest had left off.
“I’ll just be…” I pointed my thumb toward the rear deck, and Anna mouthed what appeared to be a heartfelt, “Thank you.”
Chantal and I ate at the shady table that doubled as a bar.
We talked about nail polish.
Chapter 15
Frank Roitman shut off the satellite TV and reached for his drink. The air-conditioning in the yacht’s lounge area cooled his knees below the madras-plaid walking shorts Marsha had purchased for him in goddamn Bermuda, for chrissake, years before, and the ice from his bourbon on the rocks chilled his thick fingertips. His eyes felt dry and gritty from staring at images of mangled metal, the same damn images he’d already seen who knows how many times before.
It seemed to him that the Metro accident was taking the course of no course at all. Compelled to speak, reporters repeated the obvious facts, dressing up their accounts with speculation that ranged from likely to very unlikely, from responsible to extremely irresponsible, all safely phrased as questions. Could this tragedy have been caused by human error? Or was it the work of a terrorist organization? Will we know in a few hours, a few months, or never?
Tired of the repetition, Frank’s mind chose to dredge up another, more familiar, disaster life had provided to make him miserable at a moment’s notice.
Darryl Sykes, father of twenty-two-year-old Luanne Sykes. Darryl had lost the civil lawsuit he brought against Roitman Industries for selling a very small part of an anti-lock brake system to the domestic automobile manufacturer that produced the first car Luanne ever purchased. After failing to secure a job in a law office doing anything, she’d become an x-ray technician in a Chicago hospital—Frank forgot which one. Happy and eager to show off her new engagement ring—her fiancé was an intern, Frank remembered that because of the cliché—Luanne had skipped dinner to make the two-hour trip to her parents’ house somewhere in rural Illinois. The weather was vile—driving rain and gusting wind—but Darryl’s attorney claimed the flashing lights of the broken-down truck that blocked the right-hand lane had offered plenty of warning time for Luanne to apply her brakes. Yes he argued, it was likely, just as the truck driver claimed, that cars going the same direction in the adjacent lane prevented her from going around the truck. However, the real blame for the fatality belonged to the manufacturer of the anti-lock brake system that failed, not to Luanne herself, or God, as some might suggest, for making it rain.
Guilt Trip Page 6
