Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (149 page)

“There is no guilt on you,” I insisted passionately. “You were faced with life or death and you dealt with it the only way possible. It was he or I. Then you or Tony. You had no option.”

“Like a piece of driftwood,” he murmured. “Just bobbing off in that dark water — the sea claiming him.”

“Eric,
please
… you couldn’t then have saved us both.”

Tom wouldn’t be the same. That boy had witnessed a scene that would be indelibly imprinted on his memory for a long time to come, perhaps forever. A struggle for life … and then a life lost. Three people had been in the water: only two came back to the beach. It would be a shadow across his mind, a blight on him.

Guilt? I was the one to feel it, and I did. Whether it was merited or not, the culpability was mine, and mine alone.
I
was the
deus ex machina
, the chief link in the chain of evil. I had unwittingly wrought a kind of chaos by the mere fact of my presence on the Lestrange grounds. My being there had made me a kind of chemical catalyst … what had happened, little by litttle, had been somehow awesomely inevitable.

As for Tom, my staying in the cottage had coincided with the onset of the boy’s emergence into young manhood. With his family he was a kid, low man on the totem pole, the least of them all. Then I had come into his life, befriended him, and given him a first push out of boyhood.

Tom had found a summer hobby after all … me.

He had followed almost my every movement; I had become a love object. How many sleepless nights had he spent, perhaps creeping out of bed and hanging around my cottage. The night my car had almost been burned, Tom had been aware of someone lurking about outside the house.

And when I screamed, he was first on the scene.

He told me, when we were sorting out the events which took place before that last, terrible night, that he couldn’t make out who it was in the darkness. At first he thought it was pure imagination. Tony must have hugged the shrubbery on his long journey down the flagstoned path. And there were, of course, trees around my cottage, and two tall bushes girdling the entrance.

But when I screamed, and Tom sprang from his room and sprinted across the lawn, he had seen the intruder making his way to Caroline’s house.

It could have been Toussaint, he knew. But he opted for Tony because the figure seemed to be less gigantic than Toussaint’s.

After that, he had kept a kind of methodical surveillance. He knew, for example, about that next to last night on the beach. He saw Tony come to the cottage, left his house, and came over to mine. When we left, and climbed down the hill, he kept a vigil from above, a lone sentinel watching and waiting.

I
had
heard a sound. It had been Tom, keeping an eye on my safety. It might even have been a deliberate sound … designed to send me scurrying.

And if there had been no sound? I had some very sober thoughts about
that
.

Thank God there had been no such act. Yet he had seen our embraces, seen them with mixed feelings, obviously. With anxiety on my behalf … and who knew what sensations of envy and covetousness … or sick repulsion … shock.

Then he did an incredible thing.

He knew Eric’s telephone numbers, knew them both, home and office. After that screaming night at my cottage, he had calmly looked in my address book when he was in the cottage with me next day, copied out both numbers and pocketed them. And on the morning after my flight from the beach, had called Eric at six in the morning saying it seemed wrong to him for Eric to have left me a prey to “unknown dangers.”

Imagine Tom doing a thing like that! For me.

But I still wonder if it was entirely for me. I wonder if it wasn’t for Eric too. Some kind of
esprit de corps
. Because Eric is the kind of man Tom would want to be while Tony Cavendish seemed an outlander perhaps, a threat to something in Tom.

Tom seemed older now, more sure of himself. He had saved my life and he knew it. When Eric reached the cottage and found me gone, he hadn’t been alone for long. Tom heard the car because he was listening for it, and he went over on the double. Tom knew where I probably was … on the beach, in the moonlight, with Tony Cavendish.

That was the hardest part, Eric told me. That even then, after our talk on the telephone, I would be down there once again, with Tony.

“I thought about not going,” he admitted.

But he went.

“It was either that or a total loss of sanity,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it, not after our talk. I couldn’t accept it If it were true, then there was no meaning to
anything
.”

I had many somber thoughts, some of them rather bitter. I had been made much of this summer. By Caroline, who had cossetted me and doted on me. By Peter, who had considered marriage with me. And by Tom, who had given me something very much like love.

And by a man who was now dead.

But you have something special when you’re young. Resiliency. And the ability to store away bitter thoughts for a long, long while.

• • •

It was a little more difficult to bury Anthony Cavendish. My mind was filled with his death, and with his live presence, which seemed impossible to ignore. I kept fancying I would run into him, see him from a distance, waving, catch a glimpse of his bright blond hair. His voice rang in my ears at odd times: “I say, love, what shall we do this afternoon?”

“Don’t do this to me, love! Love … love …”

I wished he could know that I was thinking about him, and that I wasn’t at all sure I could ever forget him.

I never took him for a profound personality. He was charming, a pleasure simply to look at, but I had guessed that he was shallow, and lazy, Mammon-loving. I had surmised all that, but I hadn’t had an inkling that he was mindlessly unscrupulous.

That he was capable of murder.

I’m just as sure he didn’t realize it either, that he didn’t know the scope of his infamy. He
was
cruel, though … cruel and vicious. He had tried very hard to do away with me.

I had very nearly died on that hideous August night.

His body was never recovered.

Eric and I decided on a Christmas wedding. Caroline pleaded urgently for us to have the ceremony at her house in East Hampton. “Your guests can stay here and in the other houses,” she coaxed. “The overflow can be put up in the village … and I’ll stand the expense. My pet, it won’t cost anyone a penny! And it would give me such delight.”

She shamelessly used her years. “How much longer have I got?” she asked piteously. “It might be the last small pleasure life has to offer.”

But I had to turn a deaf ear to her
cri de coeur
. She was a valued friend, but not family. The wedding would be in Riverdale, at my parents’. It would cost a very pretty penny, but I had my allegiances.

So she was an honored guest, and she had a wonderful time with all the young men, who, I think, had as wonderful a time with her.

Now I’m working on her life story. Sometimes into the wee hours, and driving myself on week-ends. But it is a lovely challenge, and I have more than Caroline’s eighty-odd years with which to work. You don’t find a source like that every day in the week. And I’m determined to meet that challenge in the finest prose I can muster, to celebrate Caroline Lestrange, who has lived the better part of a century, seen the decades come and go.

I’d been trying to think of a title. When you can see, in your mind’s eye, those words, in caps, that decorate the book jacket, the whole job seems easier, more possible. I finally settled, tentatively, for “Memoirs of a Rebel.”

Eric said, yes, it would do for a “working title.” The kiss of death for a title, if you’re in the book trade.

“What does it matter about the title?” I asked angrily, as Eric kept fishing in his brain for a glorious trimming for my book. “The content is the thing!”

I was only whistling in the dark. He was right, of course. As always.

So Eric went right on picking his own brain, and furnishing me with titles, sometimes idiotic ones, meant to cheer me up in the pangs of creation.

“She had lots of lovers, right?” he said one day.

“So she claims, and yes, I’m sure she did.”

“How about ‘My Bare Lady?’ ”

Things like that which, when I’m tired and cross and bleary-eyed with exhaustion, make me want to sock him. But I laughed.

I never can stay annoyed with Eric for very long. I love him far too much for that, and I have — thank God — made progress with his children. Not just Kenny, but Brenda too. I gave Brenda an Elsa Peretti gold heart for Christmas, on a slender gold chain, and she wears it.

She wears it!

Not only that, but I see her fingering it when we dine together, once a week. Her hands stray to the chain, and then the heart, and linger there. She said, when we saw each other after Eric delivered my presents to the kids, “This is beautiful, Jan.”

It was the first time she had ever called me by my name. That was one of
my
best Christmas gifts.

She has a mother, and I never aspired to be a second one. It’s just that, after all, Eric fathered those kids, and they are part of his life and world. So it’s meant everything to me to be accepted, to be received into their lives.

At times I think of that recent summer; in my imagination I walk through the rooms of that little cottage, see the soft white sand of the beach, and the gray-green water that almost took me away from life but which, instead, took Anthony Cavendish.

Perseus is gone, with his golden hair. Perseus is dead. I know this in dreams.

Then I wake up, muttering, but Eric is here. He turns on the light and says, “What is it, Jan?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

We smoke a cigarette and talk for a bit. After a while the horror goes away, and I think of whether or not I will be pregnant this month, and we finally yawn and lie back.

“I didn’t want to interrupt your sleep, darling.”

“Always glad to be of service,” he replies, and just before he turns out the light again he kisses me gently, smooths back my hair, and then gives me that slow, patient, kind, gentle, sexy and irresistible smile.

This edition published by

Crimson Romance

an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

Blue Ash, Ohio 45242

www.crimsonromance.com

Copyright © 1976 by Dorothy Fletcher

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 10: 1-4405-7208-9

ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7208-1

eISBN 10: 1-4405-7207-0

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7207-4

Cover art © istock.com/Xsandra

Avon, Massachusetts

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Copyright

THE SMALL PARK was at the edge of the East River where Sutton Place south met Sutton Place north: where these streets ended abruptly, high above the water, a ramp sloped gently down to a lower level which was a resting place for the tired pedestrian, for those with time on their hands, or for the curious New Yorker who made it a point to discover, one after the other, the out-of-the-way nooks and crannies of the city.

Dinah Mason was one of the latter. She had just come off a nursing case, had called the Registry to say that she would be ready to take on a new assignment by the following Monday, and was now looking forward to a few days’ rest. Such an interval, she had found, was desirable. There was something draining about the end of a long-term case, as if she were giving up something of herself … or perhaps leaving something behind. Bits and pieces of herself, she often thought, were here, there and everywhere … wherever she had spent any appreciable time.