The Black Sheep

by Patricia Ryan

  “Just choose someone else.”

  Phil was contemplative for a minute. Then he said, “Remember back when we were kids and we used to argue about competition? You used to say there was nothing wrong with a little healthy competition, and I said you were just an unrepentant jock, and competition led to wars and other sundry miseries?” Tucker answered him with a grim stare. “Well, you’ll be happy to know I’ve come around to your way of thinking. And to prove that I’m willing to compete, I’m going after Harley. May the best man win.”

  “How come, all of the sudden, after six months, you want her?”

  “How come, all of the sudden, you want her?” Phil countered. “Yesterday she was ‘just the house sitter.’ Now you’ve suddenly staked a claim.”

  “You hardly even know her.”

  “And you do? When did you meet her? Two, three days ago? And what makes you think she’d want anything to do with you, anyway? You know, I hate to point this out, but on the one hand here’s this nice, sweet girl, an M.B.A. candidate and all, and on the other hand...” He gave Tucker the once-over and shrugged.

  “I’m not a serial killer.” Tucker pointed out.

  “You’re not a doctor or lawyer, either, which is probably what she’s in the market for.” He grinned cockily. “Doctor is my guess.” Tucker snorted. “Seriously, does she know anything about you? Does she know your history? Does she know about... Well, does she know about Miami?”

  Tucker sighed with irritation. Phil was bringing out the heavy ammo now. “What, are you threatening to tell her?”

  “All’s fair in love and war. It would tip the scales in my favor, that’s for sure. She seems like a pretty straight arrow. A criminal record is a real turnoff to a girl like that.”

  Tucker gripped the cane with a white-knuckled fist. “I can’t believe you’d actually—”

  “Hey, relax.” Phil stood and gave Tucker a friendly whack on the arm. “I wouldn’t. Which is not to say I won’t play dirty. I just won’t play that dirty.”

  A woman’s voice from the beach called, “Phil?” and the two men turned to look. Marie, in a white beach cover-up now, walked toward the boulder stairway. “Phil Zelin?”

  “Oh, that’s Marie Tilton,” Phil said, and waved.

  “You know each other?” Tucker asked as she climbed up to them.

  Phil smiled at her. “She’s a friend of Kat’s. Nice girl. Awfully young for widowhood, but it seems to suit her. While her husband was alive, she always looked kind of tired, but in the past year she’s really bloomed.”

  Marie joined them. When Phil introduced her to Tucker, she extended her hand and said, “So you’re the black sheep I’ve been hearing so much about. You’ll have to tell me which version of your death comes closest to the truth.”

  Tucker laughed, appreciating her candor and wit. She reminded him of Liz; not in appearance—she was a slender brunette no more than twenty-five—but she had the self-possession of an older woman.

  “Here you are,” said Marie, and Tucker turned to see Harley approaching. “I was worried about you. Jamie said you didn’t run yesterday, and it’s the first day you’ve missed.”

  Explanations were made, and Marie cluck-clucked and promised to bring over her “world famous, better-than-sex lasagna” later. “So, Tucker,” she said, “it’s a shame R.H. turned out to be gone when you got here. What are your plans now? Will you stay the summer anyway, or do you have obligations elsewhere?”

  Phil answered for him. “He’s got a business to look after, Marie. He couldn’t afford to take the whole summer off.”

  “Actually,” Tucker corrected, “my top pilot’s been running the business for a year now, and doing a damn good job of it. She wants me to sell it to her, and I’m thinking about it.”

  “She?” Phil said.

  “Molly Little. Best pilot I’ve ever worked with.”

  “So, stay,” Marie said. “I’m sure Harley wouldn’t mind.”

  Harley glanced from Marie to the ground, and then looked up and met Tucker’s eyes. He thought she would look away again, but she held his gaze.

  Phil said, “Business or no business, that’s just not Tucker’s style, Marie. A rolling stone like him? My guess is he’ll be gone by sunrise tomorrow.”

  Harley still had not looked away from him. To Phil and Marie, her expression probably appeared completely neutral, but Tucker saw something in it that surprised and pleased him. That distance, that safe remoteness that had always been there when she looked at him, had vanished. He realized that he had not been consciously aware of it up till now. Its presence had been subtle, like a haze in the sky that doesn’t really register until it clears and the sun shines, bright and powerful.

  Phil said, “Isn’t that right, Tucker? Tucker?”

  Tucker looked from Phil’s irritated sneer to Marie’s knowing smile. “Actually, I, uh, I was thinking of staying on. Till R.H. comes back at the end of the summer, anyway. That is, of course, if Harley wouldn’t—”

  “Of course, I wouldn’t mind.” Harley’s smile transformed her into a creature of extraordinary beauty. “Please stay.”

  Tucker took a deep breath. “All right. That would be great. Thanks. I’ll try not to get in your way. I’ll pay for half the groceries and I’ll split the housework with you fifty-fifty.”

  Phil guffawed. “You’re going to do half the housework? I’m sorry, but I have a hard time picturing Mr. Bush Pilot Tough Guy in a frilly apron, pushing a broom across the floor.”

  “I’ve lived on my own for twenty years,” Tucker said. “Trust me, I can push a broom with the best of them. Only the apron’s leather, and there are pockets for my power tools.”

  “Do you cook, too?” Marie asked.

  “Just bear meat.”

  Harley said, “I don’t mind doing the cooking.”

  “No, I’ll do the cooking,” Tucker said, thinking about that oatmeal from hell. “That’s really not a problem.”

  “I don’t mind. Really,” she insisted.

  “Neither do I. In fact, I’d prefer if you’d let me.”

  The exchange was interrupted by excited voices from the beach. They all looked down to see Hazel squatting at the edge of the water, dipping Marie’s book purposefully in and out of the waves. Jamie and Brenna hovered over her, he laughing, she wringing her hands.

  “I’m sorry, Mimi,” Brenna called up.

  Marie groaned, but managed a smile. “I’d better go down and supervise. Ever since I got an au pair to help out, I haven’t had a second’s peace.” She waved goodbye and descended the boulder stairway.

  Phil said, “I’d like to go down there, too. I’ve been wanting to take a walk on the beach, but I want company. Harley—would you join me?”

  She said, “Do you think I should? After the heatstroke?”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Phil said, “if you feel up to it, you should do it. You’ll know if it’s too much. Besides, I’ll be there if you start to feel sick.”

  She shrugged. “All right.”

  Phil shot a triumphant look in Tucker’s direction, then added, “Too bad Tucker can’t join us, but given his disability, any kind of strenuous activity’s pretty much out of the question.”

  Tucker rolled his eyes. “You don’t play fair,” he growled as Harley turned away and headed for the drop-off to the beach.

  Phil grinned puckishly. “I warned you.” He followed Harley to the beach.

  Tucker lit another cigarette and watched them pick their way down to the shore. Phil assisted Harley with a hand on her arm, which probably served no purpose other than to slow her down, but annoyed the hell out of Tucker—no doubt Phil’s sole intent.

  Tucker reflected on that surprising openness in Harley’s expression, which had turned out to be temporary. As quickly as it had come, it was gone, replaced by the old familiar distance.

  He expelled a stream of smoke in a long sigh. It had been like a brief, unexpected thaw in the middle of January. It tantaliz
ed you with its warmth and then the cold set in again. The only thing that kept you going through the rest of the winter was the eventual promise of spring.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TUCKER HALE HAS MARCHED to a different drummer from a very young age,” Liz said.

  Harley shifted the phone to the other ear and turned her head to listen for sounds in the hallway outside the closed door to the study, but all she could hear was the light rain that had just begun pattering against the windows. Tucker was presumably in the kitchen, making a salad to go with the lasagna Marie had brought over, but he might start wondering where she was and come looking for her. It would not be good for him to overhear her talking on the phone about him.

  “He thinks, and will tell you, that his rebellion began at sixteen.” Liz spoke the way erudite people write, in complete and well-thought-out sentences, with no awkward pauses, not even the occasional “uh” or “um.” She spoke slowly, and with a pronounced Hale’s Point drawl that made her sound almost British.

  “In fact,” Liz continued, “he’s been something of a wild card since much earlier—since the age of eleven, to be precise.”

  Liz loved to be precise—it was in the nature of statisticians, Harley acknowledged—but still... “Since the age of eleven?” Harley asked. “How did you pick that age?”

  “I didn’t just pick it,” Liz snapped, and Harley realized belatedly what an insult that would be to a woman who had spent her career quantifying facts in order to prove how factual they were.

  “I know, Liz,” Harley began. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Tucker was eleven years old when he found out that his mother committed suicide,” Liz said. “He hasn’t been the same since.”

  It took several seconds for the older woman’s words to sink in. Harley sat perfectly still with the phone to her ear, mentally replaying the words over and over to make sure she had heard them right: His mother committed suicide... His mother committed suicide.... She was still a little dazed from the heatstroke, but she didn’t think she had heard wrong.

  Liz’s voice snapped her out of it. “Harley? Dear?”

  She said the words out loud. “His mother committed suicide?”

  “Yes, of course. I assumed you knew.”

  “No. I knew she had died. When he was five, he said.”

  “It was suicide,” Liz stated with finality. “Of course, he wasn’t told the truth. He was deemed too young. R.H. told him her appendix had burst. Still, it affected him profoundly. He was despondent for quite some time. As he got older, I begged R.H. to tell him what really happened before he found out on his own, but unfortunately he didn’t take my advice.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “When he was eleven, he stumbled across her death certificate. The cause of death was asphyxiation by hanging.”

  Harley felt as if she had been kicked softly in the stomach. All the air went out of her lungs. “My God.” she whispered.

  There was a pause at the other end. Harley could sense Liz’s puzzlement. “It does happen, my dear. People do kill themselves. It’s a sad fact of life.”

  “I know,” Harley said quickly. “I know. I just...” She closed her eyes and saw the darkly beautiful Anjelica as she appeared in the photograph on Tucker’s desk, and the baby in her arms, the baby with her eyes. “Why? Why did she... Why would she—”

  Liz’s words were measured. “My understanding is that she was unhappy in her marriage.”

  Another face materialized over Anjelica’s, also young, also sad-eyed, but fair and pale—Jennifer Sayers, Harley’s mother. She rubbed her eyes to dispel the image.

  “When Tucker found out,” Liz continued, “he took complete leave of his senses. Children that age are notoriously irrational, especially the male of the species. He came to the conclusion that R.H. was responsible for her suicide, that he somehow drove her to it. He was also furious at having been misled for so many years about the cause of her death.” She sighed. “He never did regain his trust in his father, and from then on, he pretty much went his own way.”

  “Which brings us around to his leaving home twenty years ago—”

  “Twenty-one,” Liz corrected.

  “Twenty-one, and suddenly showing up now. He told me he’s here for R and R, but he could have chosen anywhere to recuperate. Do you think it’s possible he wants to... I don’t know...”

  “Mend fences with his father? After all these years?”

  “Would Mr. Hale be open to that, do you think?”

  Liz responded to that with a lingering sigh. “Raleigh Hale is a very proud man, and stubborn. I really couldn’t say.” Several muted electronic beeps came from her end of the line. “And now, if you will excuse me, it appears that my microwave has finished wreaking havoc with the molecules in my frozen veal marsala. Goodbye.”

  Harley slipped the phone back in her pocket, slumped down in R.H.’s leather swivel chair, and rubbed her hands over her face.

  His mother had committed suicide. She supposed she could have told Liz why that information had stunned her so, but although she liked Liz very much, their friendship had never been on that personal a level.

  She uncovered her eyes. The study was a masculine enclave of leather, wood, and books, dappled with rain-silvered light from a big, mullioned window with dozens of little panes. Directly across from her, on a table all its own behind a tufted green leather couch, sat a large, exquisitely detailed model of a sailboat. Harley recognized it as an oversize twin of the one Tucker had been handling the other day in his room upstairs. It had been crafted of varnished wood with canvas sails, and she could tell from the scale that the boat it represented was a large one. It had two masts and four sails, and the word Anjelica was painted across the stern in neat maroon letters.

  She looked at the two photographs on the desk, the photographs of Tucker, wondering why R.H. had kept them there, given their estrangement: the happy, clean-cut young boy at the wheel of the Anjelica and the worldly, disenfranchised teenager with the sailplane. Before and after.

  She rose and walked around the room. The walls were covered in mustard-colored silk and crowded with framed pictures, a good half of them drawings or photographs of the Anjelica. She knelt backward on the couch in order to face the model, and ran a finger along the hull. It was a beautiful piece of work.

  The door opened and she jumped.

  “Did I startle you?” Tucker said. “Sorry. The lasagna comes out in twenty minutes.” He sat on the arm of the couch and nodded toward the model. “My father and I made that. I was seven or eight, I guess. It took months.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “So’s the original. The real Anjelica. She’s an incredible boat. A forty-foot schooner, custom-made. The most perfect boat I’ve ever seen.”

  “Your father told me it was the Anjelica he’d be sailing in the Caribbean this summer, he and a friend of his, one of his retired law partners.”

  “She’s a lot of boat for two men that age to handle alone. I’m glad to hear he’s still sailing her, though. I’d wondered if she was still around—she’s about thirty years old. But he always did take real good care of her.” He reached over to touch one of the sails.

  “I don’t know much about these things, but are they going to actually live on it?”

  “On her. Of course.”

  “And they’ll be comfortable?”

  He chuckled. “When he had her built, he was extremely particular about the living quarters. They’re better-appointed than most people’s homes.”

  “Did he have it—her—built for your mother? I mean, he did name her the Anjelica.”

  His eyes grew opaque. “He built her after she—after she died.”

  “After?”

  He was staring at the model. “He became obsessed with her after she was gone—when it was too late. If he’d paid that much attention to her while she was alive, she probably never would have...” His jaw clenched. “But that’s in the nature of marriage,
isn’t it?”

  She turned around, tossed her sandals off, and sat with her back against the other arm of the couch, legs stretched out and crossed. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “I mean, it’s kind of a perverse institution, isn’t it? You take two people who are madly in love, then they get married, and nine times out of ten, it goes sour. My parents were typical. The things he loved about her, that made her so different, suddenly looked like flaws that needed fixing. He took a quirky, artistic, impulsive Greek girl and tried to turn her into an uptight Hale’s Point matron.”

  “Marie’s not uptight.”

  “She’s the exception,” he said.

  “Do you really believe nine out of ten marriages are like that?”

  Tucker kicked off his moccasins and slid down so that he was sitting against the opposite arm from Harley. He stretched his good leg out adjacent to hers, then lifted his bad leg next to it. The hair on his right leg softly tickled her left leg from thigh to ankle. “Enough of them are so you have to wonder why any sensible person would ever want to do it. The facts argue loud and clear against it. Marriage is for people who can’t think straight.”

  “And you, of course, are a straight-thinking, sensible person.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Much too sensible to be influenced by one bad marriage—your parents’—into condemning marriage as a whole.”

  Again he shrugged. “We are the sum total of our experiences. Our characters are forged in fires we didn’t build, and there’s little we can do to change them. Or, as Popeye so succinctly put it, ‘I yam what I yam and that’s what I yam.’”

  She stared at him. “Popeye.”

  He grinned. “I don’t just quote Thoreau, you know. I’m a well-rounded guy.”

  “You are well-rounded. Ridiculously well-rounded. That’s a wonderful thing, and it’s thanks to your father that you turned out that way. It was all his doing, you know. He wasn’t all bad.”

  “He was just trying to make me like him. It backfired on him, though. We couldn’t be more different.”

  “Except for this thing about boats, planes, and cars. You’ve both kind of got a fetish about machines that take you places.”