Time After Time

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  "Thanks all the same," she said, rubbing her arms against the chill that had come out of nowhere, "but I don't particularly want to find him anymore."

  "You don't really mean that" came Jack's voice from behind her. He sat up, too, and swung his legs over the side of his chaise so that he could face her. "Look, this guy's got a responsibility here. He's Susy's father. He should be visiting; he should be writing; he should be paying for child support."

  She laughed softly. "You don't get it, do you? But then, why should you?" she said, implicitly throwing his bachelor status back in his face.

  "You're right," Jack said, coolly now. "I don't get it. Enlighten me. Tell me how a man can walk away from that kind of commitment."

  Liz jumped up and rounded on him. "Are you kidding? Because he thought Susy was a dirty trick I'd played on him! Because he never committed to having children! As far as he was concerned, I was the one who broke the commitment."

  "I guess I don't see it that way," Jack said, looking up at her. "I guess I see it as a case of your hurt pride getting in the way of your daughter's welfare."

  "That's — outrageous!" Liz said, stunned. She walked off to the far end of the yard, stifling the urge to scream and shout. Overhead, the branches of the huge copper beech on the other side of the fence began to sway in the steadily rising wind. Clouds were scuttling through, and the dark, starry night was turning into a seesaw affair between the threat of rain and the pledge of more fine weather.

  Fine for what? Liz wondered while she waited for Jack to leave. Not for romance, which ten short minutes ago had been uppermost in her mind. What a fool she'd been, to think she could depend on his sympathy. God! He didn't even admire her spunk! Everyone who knew her admired her spunk.

  "We can agree to disagree on this, you know," Jack said. His hand was on her shoulder. She tried, not very hard, to shrug it away, but he turned her around to face him. "You're right," he said with that improbable melancholy that she associated with him. "In matters of family, I don't have much to go on. I've never been married, and my own father is — as you now know — a master of irresponsibility."

  She felt like arguing, so she said, "Is he? After all, he's taken in Caroline — and even her brother — when they needed someone."

  "A noble gesture. My mother doesn't think so."

  "She knows about this?"

  "What do you think?" he snapped.

  Liz said defensively, "I'm not the psychic around here, remember? All I know is that Netta said Mrs. Eastman had extended her visit in Italy. That could mean anything."

  "Sorry; sorry. The situation's been going on for weeks, but it's still very ... raw." He sighed and said, "I don't know what the hell my father was thinking — that he'd get Stacey Stonebridge in and out of the clinic before my mother came back? That he'd just let the chips fall where they may? That we'd all live as one big happy family at East Gate? I have no idea how his mind works anymore.

  "Anyway, in answer to your question, my mother may well not come back. No one knows. My mother, probably least of all."

  Maybe it was the darkness; maybe it was the baffled, rueful tone of his voice. Whatever the reason, Liz felt like his equal for the first time. They were two lost souls, wandering through the swamp of human motivation together. It was reassuring that he was just as confused as she was.

  "Your father knew Caroline existed?" she asked.

  "Oh, yeah. There was a generous settlement, all very proper and legal, when she was born. If my mother was aware of it at the time, she never told me. I guess Stacey went through all the money and came back for more. I'm not exactly in the loop on this one."

  "I guess you can always give her the benefit of the doubt."

  "Right."

  Liz tried not to hear the irony in his voice, but it was hard to miss. It left her feeling dispirited; she didn't need any more evidence that he had a cynical view of women. "Stacey might really want to do right by Caroline," she ventured.

  "You haven't met Stacey" was all he said. "Jeez," he said, laughing softly, "will you listen to me? All I've done is carp about the way people try to cope: my father, Stacey, Keith — I don't even know the guy! — and worst of all, you."

  "Yes," she said lightly. "What a scoundrel you are."

  "Well, I'm sure as hell no expert on relationships. Forgive me?" he asked.

  "Forgive you for what? For being honest with me?" Liz shook her head, sad that he didn't find her spunky, glad that he was sorry about it. "In a weird way it's pretty flattering."

  His chuckle, soft and low and sexy, lingered in the air around them like the scent of roses. "Forget your career in party planning," he said, tilting her chin up to him. "You should go into public relations."

  The kiss, when it finally came, was as inevitable as a high tide. His mouth, warm and soft and interested, closed on hers. She was surprised at how familiar it seemed, as if it weren't their first kiss at all, but the kiss that came after they'd already made love. It's supposed to be electric, she thought, disappointed. We've danced around this kiss for so long.

  And then he probed her mouth further, and the touch of his tongue sliding over hers simply blew her away. She made a yielding sound low in her throat, and Jack Eastman, who probably knew that sound the way Toby knew knives, had to know that Liz was his for the taking.

  Come and get me was what the sound said. Oh, lord, here I am. I have waited so long for you; for this. And I am ready.

  All that, in one wordless sound.

  He slid his hands down her back and, still kissing her, began inching her shirt out of the waistband of her jeans. In a flash she understood that the restlessness she'd been feeling for the past year had had nothing whatever to do with forging ahead with her career.

  "Liz ... Liz," he murmured, breaking off the kiss to nuzzle the curve of her neck, "if you don't want me to keep going ..."

  She made another sound, a moan, which obviously translated as "Are you crazy?"

  He laughed then, a low, rich, utterly devilish chuckle that maybe should have frightened Liz but absolutely did not. Instead, she found her hand on the zipper of his khakis, because she had an urgent, demonic need for him of her own.

  Later, she thought she must have been possessed.

  The cry that ripped through the night from the upstairs window sent shivers of terror hard on the heels of the pleasure she'd been feeling.

  "Susy!" she cried in anguish.

  She broke away from Jack and made a blind dash for the back steps. The candle had flickered out sometime during the kiss; in her haste Liz stumbled over the first step and sprawled forward, scraping her arm on the concrete risers. She rose and yanked the back door open, then raced like a madwoman up the varnished stairs to Susy's bedroom.

  She found her daughter standing on the bed, her arms in front of her, warding off — Liz didn't know what.

  Chapter 11

  "Susy, honey, what's wrong, what's wrong?" Liz said, holding her daughter in her arms. The child was shivering violently and sobbing with fear; Liz lifted her up and then sat down on the side of the bed, cradling her.

  "I s-saw something," Susy stammered between sobs. "Over there." She pointed to the closed louvred doors of the closet, averting her head from the sight, burrowing into her mother's breast. "Is it gone?" she asked in a muffled voice.

  Liz turned on the lamp. "I don't see anything," she said, listening automatically for the chime-sound. She made reassuring murmurs while she rocked her daughter and stroked her hair reassuringly. This has to end, she thought. I'll tear up the letters, burn the box, bury the pin — this has to end.

  "It was kind of pink," Susy finally managed to say. "And I could see right through it. It didn't look like anything," she admitted, "but it was as big as you." She began to sob again, then checked herself with a brave little effort. "It was — it was like the wrapping on my Easter basket."

  Despite herself, Liz smiled. Cellophane? The image was so innocuous, so unlike what she feared Susy might have se
en. "That's not a ghost," she said soothingly. "That's just color that was left over from your dreams. When you opened your eyes, it was still there. Probably you were dreaming of a big fuzzy toy rabbit, that's all."

  Susy seemed persuaded by that, and let herself relax in her mother's arms, and finally lay back down to sleep.

  Liz said softly, "Would you like the door open or closed?"

  "Closed," Susy said, surprising her. "Because if the ghost comes in our house through the chimney," she explained in sleepy confusion, "then after it got up the stairs ... I can keep it out."

  Liz kissed her and said, "I'll be right in the kitchen."

  Which was where she found Jack with his sleeves rolled up, washing dishes. He looked so impossibly domestic, so unlike the imperious businessman-bachelor with little time or patience for life's more mundane chores, that, again, she had to smile.

  He glanced at her over his shoulder and caught her appraising look, then eyed her with a sudden burning one of his own. For one spark of an instant, some of the backyard electricity crackled again between them. But he knew, and she knew, that the moment had passed, at least for tonight.

  He said amiably, "Nothing serious, I take it?"

  "Depends who you ask. Susy thinks so," Liz said with a tired sigh. She felt like a racquetball after a hard game between two lawyers. Emotionally, she'd been batted all around the court tonight. And she still wasn't sure if the game was over.

  "I used to have a recurring nightmare when I was a boy," Jack recollected as he rinsed the last of the cups. "There'd be some kind of emergency — usually medical — and I'd have to drive someone to the hospital, only I didn't have a license. Sometimes I tried driving without one, sometimes I couldn't find the car or the keys — but I always woke up in a cold sweat, feeling as if I'd desperately failed somebody. Oddly enough, the dreams stopped when I turned sixteen and got my license," he said, flashing her an all-male, all-modern grin.

  When Liz didn't respond, he said, not without sympathy, "So she's in one of those monster-in-the-closet phases?"

  Liz laughed bleakly and said, "You might say that — only the monster's a ghost."

  "Ah." He wiped his hands on the dish towel and hung it back on the hook. "Well, lots of different things go bump in the night."

  Instantly Liz pictured herself with him in bed, which she knew was not what he'd meant at all. "Speaking of ghosts," she said, recovering with an awkward laugh, "don't you think it's funny how only the mansions get haunted, never the three-bedroom ranches?"

  "You've deduced this scientifically?" he asked with a wry smile.

  "I've read stories," she said, riding roughshod over his irony. "Let's take East Gate. Just ... for example. I'll bet that over the years there've been all manner of sightings and unexplained goings-on there."

  "Nope," he said, leaning back on the counter and watching her with a sideways look. "Can't say as there have."

  "Nothing at all? You never had a crazy aunt who saw, well, something going up or down the staircase or ... maybe by the clock?" she finished in a tiny, failing voice.

  "Nope."

  "You never took a photograph and ended up with strange vapory columns in it that you couldn't explain?"

  "Nope." The smile on his face was gradually settling into a straight line that ran parallel to the square set of his clefted jaw. Liz found herself getting distracted again, thinking how impossibly like an old-fashioned screen star he looked, when he said seriously, "What exactly have you been seeing, on and around the Eastman property?"

  Liz couldn't quite face him for the answer. She turned and made a business of cleaning off the kitchen table, picking up a bottle of A1 steak sauce with one hand, the pepper grinder in the other. Suddenly, arbitrarily, she remembered that her T-shirt was still half in, half out of the waistband of her jeans. Very carefully, blushing furiously, she put the bottle of steak sauce and the pepper grinder back on the table, then casually began tucking her shirt back into her jeans. If she'd been a cat, she could have hidden her embarrassment in a fit of grooming.

  But alas, she wasn't a cat. "I've been seeing an Eastman, I think," she murmured, more embarrassed now than ever. And yet, what else could she say? It was the truth, whether or not it was stranger than fiction.

  Jack made a wry, almost comical grimace and rubbed his chin with his thumb and forefinger as he considered his response. "Which Eastman?" he merely asked.

  "It's the artist who painted in the studio that used to be on this property during the 1890s. I don't know his first name. He was a younger brother, dashing, impulsive, somewhat scandalous in his behavior. But not for an artist," she quickly added, amazing herself by defending her ghost. "For a while he was in love with one of the servants at East Gate," she said to explain her last remark.

  The half-amused expression on Jack's face disappeared. In its place a puzzled look took over; then that, too, got lost behind a curtain of scarcely veiled suspicion. "How do you know all this?" he asked evenly, folding his arms across his chest.

  Liz didn't need a clinical psychologist to translate his body language: he had assumed the role of defender of All That Was Eastman. "It's in the letters I found," she said haplessly. She felt like a teenager caught smoking in the girls' bathroom. But she wasn't guilty of anything.

  Except, apparently, of having an overactive imagination. She could see it in Jack's eyes: he thought she was impressionable at best, hysterical at worst. "The only one who even remotely fits your description is Christopher Eastman," he said at last.

  "Who is—?"

  "My great-great-grandfather. As for his scandalous behavior, I know nothing of it," Jack added grimly. "He married a woman whose portrait hangs in the entry hall. As a matter of fact, he painted the portrait."

  Liz went blank for a moment, calling up in her memory the various paintings that hung in strategic locations above the paneled wainscoting of East Gate's grand hall. Then it came to her. She knew exactly which one he meant. It wasn't the subject so much as the style of the artist that she remembered: it was different from all the rest, and yet — now that she thought about it — disturbingly familiar.

  "The blond woman in the blue gown?" she asked.

  "That's the one."

  "Hmm. And his death wasn't ... untimely?" she asked, grasping by now at straws.

  "He lived a long and healthy life."

  "As an artist?"

  "No, he gave all that up to run the shipyard and to manage other scattered real estate the family owned at the time. A hundred years ago," Jack explained with a dark flush, "the Eastman empire was farther away from bankruptcy than it is now."

  "Oh. I'm sorry," Liz said, fixating on the bankruptcy part. "These are such hard times."

  He was just as glad to change the subject. "Our customers have been hit hard. Commercial fishermen are running out of fish, and mom-and-pop boaters are running out of leisure. The recession didn't help, and neither did the luxury tax, despite its repeal. Few have the money to keep boats for business or pleasure.

  "The only real scandal in our family nowadays," he added ironically, "is the amount of the shipyard's receivables."

  Liz remembered seeing some very fine yachts when she visited the yard. "But surely," she argued, despite her reluctance to provoke him on such a sensitive matter, "the rich are still getting richer."

  He arched one brow at the hostility in her manner, so predictable whenever she spoke of the wealthy. "Yeah, but they can cut better deals at other yards in less prime locations than ours, and they are. Look, it's getting late; I really ought to be going." He looked around the homey kitchen as if he were doing one last sweep of a hotel room before checking out. "Thanks for supper. I hope your cat's none the worse for wear."

  "Not a snowball's chance in hell," she said with a wan smile. Leaving? Just like that?

  He ignored the pun, passed on a kiss, and got out of there as fast as he could, leaving a hurt and puzzled Liz to wipe the dishes by herself.

  One thing she knew: Ja
ck had a wide choice of reasons to run from her. Tonight he'd got a close-up look of a woman who abandoned sex at the drop of a hat; who hallucinated regularly; and who didn't seem to care very much for people who had either servants or boats. Which of these sterling character traits had scared him the most?

  All of the above, Liz decided glumly. She was a pretty frightening package.

  ****

  Several days later Liz was glued to her television, watching the weather, when the doorbell rang.

  "Who is it?" she yelled, unable to move away from the weather map that had her transfixed. A hurricane. A frigging hurricane!

  It was Victoria, demanding to be let in. "In a minute!" said Liz, ignoring the summons and turning up the volume.

  Wildly impatient by now, Victoria began alternately pounding on the door and cranking on the ear-splitting doorbell. "Dammit, Liz! Let me in! I know who he is!"

  The hurricane had formed overnight west of Hatteras and was projected to follow a northerly path. "Too soon to call," Liz heard the weatherman say over her shoulder as she went at last to get the door. "We'll be watching this one closely."

  Victoria was standing on the stoop, waving one of Victoria St. Onge's letters in Liz's face like an American flag at the summer Olympics. "I got it, I got it!" she cried, brushing past Liz into the living room.

  "I promised Jack no rain for his picnic," Liz moaned — unnecessarily, since Victoria wasn't listening. "Wait'll he hears about this. A stupid hurricane. Of all the rotten, miserable breaks—"

  Victoria was scanning her letter, searching for what was obviously the good part, oblivious to Liz's latest problem. "Ah! Here it is. Listen!"

  "'Last week I attended an amusing affair—'"

  "Oh, please," Liz said, interrupting her at once. "Not another amusing affair! I can't take any more. I've read through endless years of endless accounts of endless balls, fêtes, tennis matches, fox hunts, yachting parties, and soirees. God! How could they stand such nonstop idleness?"