Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  Echo had sensed his vulnerability—all artists had it. But she wasn’t quite sure how to deal with his confession.

  “You’re a great painter.”

  Ransome shook his head, shying from the burden of her suggestion.

  “If I ever believe that, then I will be finished.” Echo got up, pinched some salt from a silver bowl and spread it over the wine stain on the fine linen tablecloth. She looked hesitantly at him.

  “How can I help?”

  He was looking at the salted stain. “Does that work?”

  “Usually, if you do it right away.”

  “If human stains were so easy to remove,” he said with sudden vehemence.

  “God’s always listening,” she said, then thought it was probably too glib, patronizing and unsatisfactory. She felt God, but she also felt there was little point in trying to explain Him to someone else.

  After a silence the unexpected flood of his passion ebbed.

  “I don’t believe as easily as you, Mary Catherine,” he said with a tired smile that became tense. “But if we do have your God watching us, then I think it likely that his revenge is to do nothing.”

  Ransome pushed his chair back and stood, looked at Echo, put out a hand and lifted her head slightly with thumb and forefinger on her chin. He said, studying her as if for the first time, “The light in your eyes is the light from your heart.”

  “That’s sweet,” Echo said demurely, knowing what was coming next. She’d been thinking about it, and how to handle it, for weeks.

  He kissed her on the forehead, not the lips. As if bestowing a blessing. That was sweet too. But the erotic content, enough to cause her lips to part and put a charge in her heartbeat, took her by surprise.

  “I have to leave the island for a few days,” he said then.

  Ransome’s studio had replaced the closetlike space that once had held the Kincairn Light and reflecting mirror. It sat upon the spindle of the lighthouse shaft like a flying saucer made mostly of glass that was thirty feet in diameter. There was an elevator inside, another addition, but Echo always used the circular stairs coming and going. Ciera was a very good cook and the daily climb helped Echo shed the pounds that had a tendency to creep aboard like hitchhikers on her hips.

  She had decided, because the day was neither blustery enough to blow her off her Vespa nor bitterly cold, to pack up her paints and easel and go cross-island for an exercise in plein air painting on the cove and dock.

  Approaching Kincairn village, Echo saw John Ransome at the end of the town dock unmooring a cabin cruiser that had been tied up alongside Wilkins’ Marine and the mail/ferry boat slip. She stopped her puttering scooter in front of the cottage where a lone priest, elderly and in virtual exile in this most humble of parishes, lived with an equally old housekeeper. Echo had no reason for automatically keeping her distance from Ransome until she also saw Taja at the helm of the cruiser. Which wasn’t much of a reason either. She hadn’t seen the Woman in Black nor given her much thought since the night of the artist’s show at Cy Mellichamp’s. Ransome never mentioned her. Apparently she seldom visited the island.

  Friend, business associate, confidante? Mistress, of course. But if she kept some distance between them now, perhaps that was in the past. Even if they were no longer lovers Echo assumed she might still be emotionally supportive, a rare welcome visitor to his isolato existence; his stiller doom, Echo thought with a certain poignancy, remembering a phrase of Charlotte Bronte’s from Echo’s favorite novel, Jane Eyre.

  Watching Ransome jump into the bow of the cruiser, Echo felt frustrated for his sake. Obviously he was not going to be painting anytime soon. She also felt a dim sense of betrayal that made no sense to her. Yet it lingered like the spectral imprint of a kiss that had made her restless during a night of confused, otherworldly dreams; dreams of Ransome, dreams of being as naked in his studio as a snail on a thorn.

  Echo watched Taja back the cruiser from the dock and turn it toward the mainland. Pour on the power. She decided to take a minute to go into the empty church. Was it time to ring the bell for a confession of her own? She couldn’t make up her mind about that, and her heart was no help either.

  ______

  Cy Mellichamp was using a phone at a gallery associate’s desk in the second-floor office when Peter was brought in by a secretary. Mellichamp glanced at him with no hint of welcome. Two more associates, Mellichamp’s morale-boosting term for salespeople, were working the phones and computers. In another large room behind the office paintings were being uncrated.

  Mellichamp smiled grievously at something he was hearing and fidgeted until he had a chance to break in.

  “Really, Allen, I think your affections are misplaced. There is neither accomplishment nor cachet in the accident of Roukema’s success. And at six million—no, I don’t want to have this conversation. No. The man should be doing frescoes in tombs. You wanted my opinion, which I freely give to you. Okay, please think it over and come to your senses.”

  Cy rang off and looked again at Peter, with the fixed smile of a man who wants you to understand he could be doing better things with his time.

  “Why,” he asked Peter, “do otherwise bright young people treat inherited fortunes the way rednecks treat junk cars?” He shrugged. “Mr. O’Neill! Delighted to see you again. How can I help you?”

  “Have you heard anything from Mr. Ransome lately?”

  “We had dinner two nights ago at the Four Seasons.”

  “Oh, he was in town?” Cy waited for a more sensible question. “His new paintings sell okay?”

  “We did very, very well. And how is Echo?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not allowed to see her, I might be a distraction. I thought Ransome was supposed to be slaving away at his art up there in Maine.”

  Cy looked at his watch, looked at Peter again uncomprehendingly.

  “I was hoping you could give me some information, Mr. Mellichamp.”

  “In regard to?”

  “The other women Ransome has painted. I know where one of them lives. Anne Van Lier.” The casual admission was calculated to provoke a reaction; Peter didn’t miss the slight tightening of Cy Mellichamp’s baby blue eyes. “Do you know how I can get in touch with the others?”

  Cy said after a few moments, “Why should you want to?” with a muted suggestion in his gaze that Peter was up to no good.

  “Do you know who and where those women are?”

  An associate said to Cy, “Princess Steph on three.”

  Distracted, Cy looked over his shoulder. “Find out if she’s on St. Barts. I’ll get right back to her.”

  While Cy wasn’t watching him Peter glanced at a computer on a nearby desk where nobody was working. But the person whose desk it was had carelessly left his user ID on the screen.

  Cy looked around at Peter again. “I could not help you if I did know,” he said curtly. “Their whereabouts are none of my business.”

  “Why is Ransome so secretive about those women?”

  “That, of course, is John’s prerogative. Now if you wouldn’t mind—it has been one of those days—” He summoned a moment of the old charm. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks for taking the time to see me, Mr. Mellichamp.”

  “If there should be a next time, unless it happens to be official, you would do well to leave that gold shield in your pocket.”

  EIGHT

  Peter got home from his watch at twenty past midnight. He fixed himself a sardine sandwich on sourdough with a smelly slice of gouda and some salsa dip he found in the fridge. He carried the sandwich and a bottle of Sam Adams up the creaky back stairs to the third floor he shared with his brother Casey. The rest of the house was quiet except for his father’s distant whistling snore. But with no school for two days Case was still up with his iMac. Graphics were Casey’s passion: his ambition was to design the cars of the future.

  Peter changed into sweats. The third floor was drafty; a wind laced with the first fitful snow
of the season was belting them.

  There was an e-mail on the screen of his laptop that said only missyoumissyoumissyou. He smiled bleakly, took a couple of twenties from his wallet and walked through the bathroom he shared with Casey, pausing to kick a wadded towel off the floor in the direction of the hamper.

  “Hi, Case.”

  Casey, mildly annoyed at the intrusion, didn’t look around.

  “That looks like the Batmobile,” Peter said of the sleek racing machine Casey was refining with the help of some Mac software.

  “It is the Batmobile.”

  Peter laid a twenty on the desk where Casey would see it out of the corner of his eye.

  “What’s that for?”

  “For helping me out.”

  “Doing what?”

  “See, I’ve got this user ID, but there’s probably gonna be a logon code too—”

  “Hack a system?”

  “I’m not stealing anything. Just want to look at some names, addresses.”

  “It’s against the law.”

  Peter laid the second twenty on top of the first.

  “Way I see it, it’s kind of a gray area. There’s something going on, maybe involves Echo, I need to know about. Right away.”

  Casey folded the twenties with his left hand and slid them under his mouse pad.

  “If I get in any trouble,” he said, “I’m givin’ your ass up first.”

  After nearly a week of Ransome’s absence, Echo was angry at him, fed up with being virtually alone on an island that every storm or squawl in the Atlantic seemed to make a pass at almost on a daily basis, and once again dealing with acute bouts of homesickness. Never mind that her bank account was automatically fattening twice a month, it seemed to be payment for emotional servitude, not the pleasant collaboration she’d anticipated. Only chatty e-mails from girl friends, from Rosemay and Stefan and even Kate O’Neill, plus Peter’s maddeningly noncommittal daily communications (he was hopeless at putting feelings into words), provided balance and escape from depression through the long nights. They reminded her that the center of her world was a long way from Kincairn Island.

  She had almost no one to talk to other than the village priest, who seemed hard-put to remember her name at each encounter, and Ransome’s housekeeper. But Ciera’s idea of a lively conversation was two sentences an hour. Much of the time, perhaps affected by the dismal weather that smote their rock or merely the oppression of passing time, Ciera’s face looked as if Death had scrawled an “overdue” notice on it.

  Echo had books and her music and DVDs of recent movies arrived regularly. She had no difficulty in passing the time when she wasn’t working. But she hated the way she’d been painting lately, and missed the stealth insights from her employer and mentor. Day after day she labored at what she came to judge as stale, uninspired landscapes, taking a palette knife to them as soon as the light began to fade. She didn’t know if it was the creeping ennui or a faltering sense of confidence in her talent.

  November brought fewer hours of the crystal lambency she’d discovered on her first day there. Ransome’s studio was equipped with full-spectrum artificial light, but she always preferred painting outdoors when it was calm enough, no tricky winds to snatch her easel and fling it out to sea.

  The house of John Ransome, built to outlast centuries, was not a house in which she would ever feel at home, in spite of his library and collection of paintings that included some of his own, youthful work that would never be shown anywhere. These she studied with the avid eye of an archaeologist in a newly unearthed pyramid. The house was stone and stout enough but at night in a hard gale had its creepy, shadowy ways. Hurricane lamps had to be lit two or three times a week at about the same time her laptop lost satellite contact and the screen’s void reflected her dwindled good cheer. Reading by lamplight hurt her eyes. Even with earplugs she couldn’t fall asleep when the wind was keening a single drawn-out note or slapdash, grabbing at shutters, mewling under the eaves like a ghost in a well.

  Nothing to do then but lie abed after her rosary and cry a little as her mood worsened. And hope John Ransome would return soon. His continuing absence a puzzle, an irritant; yet working sorcery on her heart. When she was able to fall asleep it was Ransome whom she dreamed about obsessively. While fitful and half awake she recalled every detail of a self portrait and the faces of his women. Had any of his subjects felt as she now did? Echo wondered about the depth of each relationship he’d had with his unknown beauties. One man, seven young women—had Ransome slept with any of them? Of course he had. But perhaps not every one.

  His secret. Theirs. And what might other women to come, lying awake in this same room on a night as fierce as this one, adrift in loneliness and sensation of their own, imagine about Echo’s involvement with John Leland Ransome?

  Echo threw aside her down comforter and sat on the edge of the bed, nervous, heart-heavy. Except for hiking shoes she slept fully dressed, with a small flame in one of the tarnished lamp chimneys for company and a hammer on the floor for security, not knowing who in that island community might take a notion, no matter what the penalty. Ciera went home at night to be with her severely arthritic husband, and Echo was alone.

  She rubbed down the lurid gooseflesh on her arms, feeling guilty in the sight of God for what raged in her mind. For sexual cravings like nettles in the blood. She put her hand on the Bible beside her bed but didn’t open it. Dear Lord, I’m only human. She felt, honestly, that it was neither the lure of his flesh nor the power of his talent but the mystery of his torment that ineluctably drew her to Ransome.

  A shutter she had tried to secure earlier was loose again to the incessant prying of the wind, admitting an almost continual flare of lightning centered in this storm. She picked up the hammer and a small eyebolt she’d found in a tool chest along with a coil of picture wire.

  It was necessary to crank open one of the narrow lights of the mullioned window, getting a faceful of wind and spume in the process. As she reached for the shutter that had been flung open she saw by a run of lightning beneath boiling clouds a figure standing a little apart from the house on the boulders that formed a sea wall. A drenched white shirt ballooned in the wind around his torso. He faced the sea and the brawling waves that rose ponderously to foaming heights only a few feet below where he precariously stood. Waves that crashed down with what seemed enough force to swamp islands larger than Kincairn.

  John Ransome had returned. Echo’s lips parted to call to him, small-voiced in the tumult, her skin crawling coldly from fear, but the shutter slammed shut on her momentary view of the artist.

  When she pushed it open again and leaned out slightly to see him, her eyelashes matting with salt spray, hair whipping around her face, Ransome had vanished.

  Echo cranked the window shut and backed away, tingling in her hands, at the back of her neck. She took a few deep breaths, wiping at her eyes, then turned, grabbed a flashlight and went to the head of the stairs down the hall from her room, calling his name in the darkness, shining the beam of the light down the stairs, across the foyer to the front door, which was closed. There was no trace of water on the floor, as she would have expected if he’d come in out of the storm.

  “ANSWER ME, JOHN! ARE YOU HERE?”

  Silence, except for the wind.

  She bolted down the stairs, grabbed a hooded slicker off the wall-mounted coat tree in the foyer and let herself out.

  The three-cell flashlight could throw a brilliant beam for well over a hundred yards. She looked around with the light, shuddering in the cold, lashed in a gale that had to be more than fifty knots. She heard thunder rolling above the shriek of the wind. She was scared to the marrow. Because she knew she had to leave the relative shelter afforded by the house at her back and face the sea where she’d last seen him.

  With her head low and an arm protecting her face, she made her way to the sea wall, the dash of waves terrifying in the beam of the flashlight. Her teeth were clenched so tight she was
afraid of chipping them. Remembering the shock of being engulfed on what had been a calm day at the Jersey shore, pulled tumbling backwards and almost drowning in the sandy undertow.

  But she kept going, mounted the seawall and crouched there, looking down at the monster waves. It was near to freezing. In spite of the hood and slicker she was already soaked and trembling so badly she was afraid of losing her grip on the flashlight as she crawled over boulders. Looking down into crevices where he might have fallen, to slowly drown at each long roll of a massive wave.

  Thought she saw something—something alive like an animal caught in discarded plastic wrap. Then she realized it was a face she was looking at in the down-slant of the flashlight, and it wasn’t plastic, it was Ransome’s white shirt. He lay sprawled on his back a few feet below her, dazed but not unconscious. His eyelids squinched in the light cast on his face.

  Echo got down from the boulder she was on, found some footing, got her hands under his arms and tugged.

  One of his legs was awkwardly wedged between boulders. She couldn’t tell if it was broken as she turned her efforts to pulling his foot free. Hurrying. Her strength ebbing fast. Battling him and the storm and sensing something behind her, still out to sea but coming her way with such size, unequaled in its dark momentum, that it would drown them both in one enormous downfall like a building toppling.

  “MOVE!”

  Echo had him free at last and pushed him frantically toward the top of the sea wall. She’d managed to lose her grip on the flashlight but it didn’t matter, there was lightning around their heads and all of the deep weight of the sea coming straight at them. She couldn’t make herself look back.