Tides of the Heart

by Jean Stone

  He wiped the sweat from his brow and smiled. “Criminal” was another intimidation-inducing word.

  While Bradley was squirming, Phillip would pounce. “My client has knowledge of a certain sum of two hundred thousand dollars paid to you by her father in 1968,” he would say, careful not to mention the note for the fifty thousand in Miss Taylor’s things or the menacing letter and call Jess had received. Those, after all, could be tied to the Bradleys only through mere speculation, and it was too early for Phillip to reveal all the cards in his very screwed-up deck. “We believe there is a connection with Dr. Larribee’s misconduct,” he would continue, “and we believe you were involved.”

  Brilliant, he thought, as he kept running. Worthy of a standing ovation at the Brief Room, the beer-scented pub where he’d spent too many hours as an eager law student.

  He rehearsed his lines, deciding which gestures to use, how he could come across firm and believable, authoritative and … well, yes, intimidating. His brother would be better at this, but Joseph wasn’t here. Thank God, Joseph wasn’t here to see what he was doing away from the firm.

  He wondered if he would ever tell his mother about meeting the woman who had given birth to him. He envied Lisa her relationship with Ginny. She still had both her mothers, and they even conversed from opposite coasts. Maybe if P.J. had lived, he would have told Jeanine about her and they might have met. But P.J. had died, and there hadn’t been any reason to tell Jeanine.

  A few moments later, Phillip passed a small cemetery with centuries-old markers bearing names that were faded and worn. He felt a brief tug at his now-empty heart, a tug for P.J., the woman who had given him life.

  Sweat trickled down his face—or was it tears? Phillip shook his head and again stepped up his pace.

  The houses were getting bigger now. Off to the left was a thickly wooded area, with a crudely made sign reading, West Chop Woods. It looked like a fun place to explore, a place he might have brought Nicole if only she had come. He wondered if they would have made love in the woods, or if she would have preferred the dunes or the beach … then he wondered why he was thinking of her. She was out of his life. “They come, they go,” he had said to Jess, though he’d hated it that it was so true.

  He straightened his back and kept running, trying to force his thoughts back to Mr. Bradley, to the Perry Mason moment Phillip was going to orchestrate as soon as Jess gave him the go-ahead, as soon as Jess was ready to find out the truth, no matter what the cost.

  He was heading into an area dense with tall pines, where huge homes stood off to the right—houses with magnificent vantage points overlooking the water, picture-postcard scenes to send to loved ones back home, if the loved ones knew you were there and you had nothing to hide. As he rounded the bend, Phillip spotted a tall flagpole and two park benches. Just as he was about to run by, he looked down onto the beach and saw a woman, the woman from last night. This time she padded along the sand in bare feet, a lonely-looking woman draped in a long skirt. Richard’s sister. Karin.

  I think she knows why we’re here, Jess had said. I think she’s the one who summoned me.

  Phillip hesitated a moment, then thought, What the hell. It was a free country and it was a free beach.

  He saw an opening in the dunes and jogged down a path toward the water.

  “Good morning,” he called out to the woman named Karin. “Beautiful morning.”

  She dropped something she had held in her hand. She looked up at him quickly and shielded her face against the sun.

  “Brit?” she asked.

  “No,” Phillip replied, walking now, approaching her. “I’m Phillip.”

  He reached her and she stared at him. A veil of distance crossed over her eyes. “You’re not Brit.”

  “No. My name is Phillip.”

  She turned her back and sifted sand through her toes. “Go away.”

  “Hey,” he said, trying to sound gentle, “I’m sorry I’m not Brit. But it’s still a beautiful morning, isn’t it?”

  Her back went rigid. Suddenly she snapped around. “Why don’t you just do it and get it over with?” she hissed.

  The venom in her eyes made him back off. He turned and walked away. So much for the brilliant, intimidating attorney and his standing ovation.

  “I know who you are,” she shouted after him.

  Phillip stopped in the sand. He did not turn around.

  “I know who you all are. But what’s taking so long? There’s no one left to protect, you know. No one at all.”

  He stood numb for a moment, then slowly he turned. But her figure was disappearing down the beach, her loose skirt flowing after her from the breeze that wafted off the water.

  • • •

  By the time he got back to Vineyard Haven, Phillip was tired and his brain was worn out. All the way back he had tried to sort Karin’s words in his mind, tried to make sense of them, and tried to decide whether or not he should tell Jess. He also tried to figure out who the hell Brit was, but he had no idea.

  Obviously, Jess had been right, and he had been wrong. Karin was the one who had sent the letter postmarked Vineyard Haven; the one who had made the call. That part was clear now. But he had no idea why. Other than she seemed a little bit crazy.

  As he trotted down Main Street, he spotted Jess sitting on a bench on a grassy slope that rolled from the sidewalk down to the water. She was staring out at the boats that stood in the harbor.

  “Jess,” he called, slowing his pace until he reached her.

  She had a smile for him, but it looked disconnected. “I tried your hotel,” she said. “The man at the desk said you’d gone running.”

  “Yeah,” Phillip replied, swiping his brow, “it’s my addiction. Not much time for it in Manhattan.”

  “Or places to do it, I’d expect.”

  He started to sit next to her, but he was so sweaty, he decided against it. “If you want to wait here, I’ll go grab a shower and we can get some lunch.”

  “Maybe,” Jess said, “but I’m not terribly hungry.”

  He leaned against the bench. “You weren’t hungry last night, either.”

  She smiled. “I know.” That’s when he noticed the red lines in her eyes and the fact that her eyelids were pink and swollen, as if she’d been crying a very long time. She turned her face back to the water. “I saw her,” she said.

  “Saw who?”

  “Melanie. My daughter.”

  He pulled up one knee and rested his foot on the bench. “Jess, we still aren’t sure …”

  “She’s my daughter, all right. And I saw my granddaughter, too. Sarah.” Her words sounded like whispers as they floated in the air.

  “Oh, God,” Phillip said and sat down. “What happened?”

  She told him. Between brave tears, she told him of the school. Of Melanie. Of the little girl with her leg in a cast. Phillip wanted to put his arm around her, to comfort her. But he was so sweaty it didn’t seem right.

  “I want to go home,” Jess said suddenly. “I know what I needed to know. And now I want to go home.”

  “But we don’t know for sure …”

  “I know. In my heart, I know. That’s all that matters. I’ve been sitting here thinking for over an hour. And that’s what I’ve decided. I want to go home.”

  He looked into her eyes, pale and tired. She looked like she must have looked when she was a child, a little girl herself, tiny and in need. “Jess, what about Melanie? What about her right to know the truth?”

  Jess swung her feet under the bench. “She’s with her family,” Jess said. “That should be enough.”

  “It wasn’t enough for me,” Phillip said. “I always wanted to know my real mother.” Then he stood up. “I’m going to go take my shower.”

  Jess nodded. “And if you don’t mind, I’m going to pass on lunch. I want to go back to Mayfield House and check on the ferry availabilities. Thank you for all you’ve done for me, Phillip. But the sooner I get off this island, the bet
ter.”

  “I’ll come up there when I’m done,” he said. “Promise you won’t go anywhere until then?”

  She smiled again. “I promise.”

  He couldn’t believe Jess wanted to leave. After thirty years of wondering, she had at last found her daughter. He couldn’t believe she didn’t want to meet her, talk to her, find out if she was happy, and learn what had happened.

  Not that they needed Sherlock Holmes to solve the island mystery.

  He changed into a pair of jeans he had bought first thing this morning and a green Black Dog T-shirt. If he ran into Ginny, she could not make any more comments about his looking like a “suit.”

  He stood before the mirror, combing his hair, taming his cowlick, just as the telephone rang. Jess, he thought and moved between the twin beds to answer it.

  “Phillip?” the voice asked, a voice deeper that Jess’s, yet very much female.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Lisa, Phillip.”

  Lisa? He ran his hand through his freshly combed hair. “Hi,” he said, stupidly.

  “I left Ginny with Jess,” she said. “But I hate eating alone. Have you had lunch?”

  Lunch? With Lisa Andrews? “No. Not yet.”

  “I’m downstairs. I can get us a table at the sidewalk café.”

  “Sounds great,” he said. “I’ll be right down.” He hung up the phone and felt himself begin to sweat all over again. He walked back to the mirror and stared at his cowlick. “You are such a geek,” he said. “All she wants is someone to have lunch with. Nothing more.” But as he tucked his wallet in his jeans, he left the room smiling, happy that at least Lisa Andrews had remembered his name.

  “She couldn’t get ferry reservations until tomorrow night,” Lisa explained once Phillip had settled on the white metal folding chair out on the sidewalk.

  He toyed with the straw in his glass of iced tea. “I’m glad,” he said. “I’d like to see Jess give this a little more thought.”

  The waiter arrived with a salad for Lisa, a roast beef sandwich for Phillip. After he had gone, Phillip looked at her, trying to discreetly study her creamy complexion, wishing that she would look at him with those gorgeous topaz eyes. “Before you met Ginny,” he asked, “did you ever wonder about her? Who she was? What she looked like?”

  “Sure,” Lisa said, and her eyes met his.

  He took a huge bite of his sandwich and forced himself not to blush.

  “My parents are nice people,” Lisa continued. “Good people. But I always wondered where I came from, you know? I used to pretend I was a princess and that someday the queen would return for me and wisk me off to the castle where it was surrounded by green fields and big trees and horses and knights and didn’t look a thing like New Jersey.”

  Phillip laughed so hard he nearly choked. “No wonder you’re an actress,” he said, regaining his composure.

  Lisa smiled. “Yeah, well, I get that from Ginny. What about you? Did you always wonder?”

  “Sometimes. I remember watching my brother, and I knew he and I were so different. He was so … straight-laced. I liked to be around people. I liked to paint. My birth mother was an artist, did you know that?”

  Lisa shook her head. “I know that she died. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too. At least I got to know her, though.”

  They ate in silence for a few moments.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it? We probably were in bassinets next to one another,” Phillip said.

  “I thought you looked familiar,” Lisa said with a smile.

  Phillip returned the smile and took another bite. This time he did not look away.

  “You have incredible green eyes,” Lisa said.

  “From my mother,” he answered.

  “I feel bad for Melanie,” Lisa went on. “I mean, if she really is Jess’s daughter, I bet she’d want to know.”

  “I wanted to confront Mr. Bradley. But Jess doesn’t want me to.”

  “What about Melanie?”

  “What about her?”

  “Maybe we should confront her. Maybe if the two of us went, she’d be more responsive.”

  “What if she doesn’t know she was adopted?”

  “Maybe it’s time she was told.”

  Phillip chewed slowly and considered Lisa’s idea. Jess would probably be appalled. And he couldn’t be certain, but such action seemed a lot like a breach of attorney-client privilege. But Lisa seemed determined. And he had to admit it would be nice to spend more time with her. Maybe there was a way he could come up with the right words to talk to Melanie—words that would not breach Jess’s confidence. Maybe he could do it without being direct, and at least learn if she knew that the man who posed as her brother was really her father, and the man she called “Dad” was really her grandfather. If any of it were true. Maybe he could do it. If he were half the lawyer he pretended to be to himself.

  “We could go to the school,” he said to Lisa now. “Jess saw her there.”

  “Oh, yes!” Lisa exclaimed. “Let’s go tomorrow, before Jess can leave.”

  She returned to her salad, and he to his sandwich, his thoughts spinning with what the right words to say to Melanie would be, and how he could prove to Lisa Andrews that he was a brilliant attorney, after all. He wondered if she would give him a standing ovation.

  Ginny sat on the wide veranda at Mayfield House next to Dick Bradley, and tried to ignore Morticia, who kept swishing past them, cruising the front lawn as if she were the grass inspector checking for slugs. Jess had said she wanted to lie down; Lisa had gone into town, and there was nothing better to do. She decided she might as well spend a few minutes with the old man. Maybe she could dig up some more of her old man-enticing wiles and pry some information out of him about this kid called Melanie. Maybe Jess no longer cared, but she did. She’d always hated a script where the plot had no real ending.

  “So you won’t be leaving today after all,” Dick said, tapping a copy of the Vineyard Gazette on his knee.

  “There was room on the ferry for people, but no cars,” she replied.

  “Hmph. Damn ferry. They changed their reservation system last year and have the tourists all in an uproar.”

  “I don’t care about the ferry. I’m flying.”

  “Do you have a flight yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well, don’t think that’s going to be any easier.”

  “Christ, can’t they decide if they want tourists here or not?”

  Dick laughed and picked up a plate that sat beside him on the floor. It was layered with cookies—big, round, gooey-looking cookies. “Have one,” he said. “Millie Johnson made them this morning.”

  “Millie Johnson? Isn’t she the one who made the clam chowder at the picnic?”

  “The very same.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Ginny said. “She’s a widow lady with designs on you.”

  Dick laughed. “Hardly! She’s a married woman whose husband got laid off and she cooks homemade soup for a couple of restaurants and sells her cookies all over town.”

  Ginny laughed in return.

  “Besides,” he said, “who’d want an old man like me?”

  “You’re not so old.”

  “I’m a grandfather! And I’ll be seventy next year.”

  “So you’re sixty-nine. My last husband wasn’t much younger than that.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Ginny picked up a cookie and tried not to smile. “He dropped dead,” she said. There was silence for a moment, then both of them laughed.

  “See?” Dick said. “Who’d want an old man like me?”

  Ginny decided not to tell him that Jake, the old man, had been the best thing in her life, that he had plenty of life left in him himself and would still have if he hadn’t dropped dead. She decided not to tell him because she decided he wouldn’t understand. Instead, she thought about her mission. She tucked her swollen feet under her on the newly painted Adirondack chair and tried t
o look fascinated by his every move. Flirting, she thought, is so much easier when you’re young. And thin. “You’re not so old,” she said. “Besides, didn’t you say you have a daughter who’s only twenty-nine?”

  Out on the lawn, Morticia stopped strutting. She moved to the stairs and came up on the veranda.

  Dick nodded. “Late-in-life baby for my wife, God rest her soul.”

  “Not so late today,” Ginny said, ignoring Morticia. “Lots of women are having babies in their forties.”

  Dick shifted on his chair, obviously uncomfortable with the conversation. His eyes darted to his daughter, then back to Ginny. “My wife was dead by the time she was forty-five,” he said.

  So, Ginny thought. His kids had been young. She cast a quick glance at the woman who had probably raised Jess’s baby … maybe as if she were her own. Was this the motivation behind it all? Was she pissed because she’d had to raise a kid she’d somehow just learned was really Jess and Richard’s?

  “Thank God for my kids,” Dick continued. “After my wife died, they kept me going.”

  “And this inn,” Ginny said. “I’m sure this was quite a burden.”

  “Oh, we didn’t own it then. I just worked for old Mrs. Adams. She left it to me when she died.”

  So it was true. The two hundred thousand had not bought Mayfield House. But it had helped pay to get Melanie from greedy Miss Taylor. With a little help from Dr. Larribee. And probably that sleazeball Bud Wilson.

  “We all worked for the old biddy,” Morticia spoke up. “She left it to all of us.”

  “Right,” Dick added. “Well, Karin here is the only one who still cares about it. Melanie and Richard both have their careers.…” His eyes drifted from the porch onto the lawn. He tapped the paper again. “He comes back tomorrow,” he suddenly said. “I need to remember to have him help me with the gutters.”

  “What did you say?” Ginny asked.

  “I said my son Richard is coming back tomorrow. He’s been up in Boston.…”

  “Oh, shit,” Ginny said, standing up quickly. “That reminds me, I’d better check with the airlines about a flight back to L.A.” There would be plenty of time to flirt with the old guy later, if it wound up to be necessary at all.