By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (19 page)

Without a word Alan took out the small
recorder from her bag, plugged it in, and pressed the start button.
"Shoot."

With a fear that everything that followed
their conversation so far would be anticlimax, Quinta began the
on-the-record interview. "Why do you think you are going to stand
out from the pack?"

"I suppose it's because we have the fastest,
best-designed boat. But others will tell you that, because others
also believe it. What they can't in all conscience tell you is that
they have the best-managed syndicate. We can. We're not too big,
not too small. We're not top-heavy with managers and committees,
but neither do we run around hysterically trying to be all things
to all people. We have a simple flow of command. In a Cup campaign
the left hand has got to know what the right hand is doing. A small
mistake gets magnified many times when you're out on the
ocean."

"So who's at the top?"

"I am, on the technical side. Mavis Moran,
our chief fund-raiser, has a lot to say on the administrative
side."

"Do you ever clash?"

'"Does a dragon fly? That's off the record,"
he added. "For the record: almost never."

"I see." Quinta was disappointed. They
seemed to be retreating from the middle ground of friendship, each
to his own corner. "Would the outcome in 1983 have been different
if you'd been able to stay in the race?"

"I'd like to think so, but I'm damned if I
can see how. Australia came through with a breakthrough boat.
Nothing could have touched it. It was brilliant engineering."

"Speaking of which, do you think the Aussies
played fair?"

Alan took a slug of coffee while Quinta
listened to the falling rain. At last he said, "Designers change
citizenship at the drop of a hat. What difference does it
make?"

"Off the record?" she pleaded.

"Off or on: we'll never know. But I will say
this: the designers are the new warriors. All we skippers do is
steer the boats around a triangle."

"You're being too modest," Quinta said,
sighing. She tried another tack. "As you know, Wall Street and
corporate sponsors have long been a target of protestors who
consider the Cup races elitist, the sport of millionaires."

"Someday, billionaires," he amended. "I have
no doubt."

"Whatever. The point is, the band of college
students who picket the
Pegasus
dock gets bigger every
day."

"They're kids," he said, shrugging. "Out of
school and with nothing better to do until their evening shifts at
the bars and restaurants. What I don't understand is why they're
not picketing the other syndicates' docks; we all have corporate
sponsors."

"Your docks are more accessible and visible;
and you have lighter security."

"You sound remarkably well informed," he
said, suddenly wary.

"As it happens, I am." She dropped what she
knew was exclusive information: "Yesterday I learned that the
protestors plan to have small boats out on the bay, interfering
with your practice sessions. What's your response to that?"

"This is the first I've heard of it," he
said, genuinely surprised. "Obviously it's a serious escalation,
one we have to consider carefully."

"What does that mean?"

"I'd rather not comment until I've had a
chance to meet with the other syndicate members," he answered,
looking suddenly preoccupied.

At least she had him a little off balance.
"Your syndicate is being very coy about where the next races would
be held if you won and had your say. Why not Newport?"

"Are you asking as a property owner or as a
traditionalist?" he said almost absently.

"As
a journalist,"
she said,
offended, and regretted it. Would Barbara Walters allow herself to
get huffy?

"That's not a technical decision. You'll
have to ask the Namisquot Yacht Club," he said.

"Why did you decide to challenge through
that particular yacht club?"

"Every other one was taken," he answered,
still a million miles away. Clearly he was back in charge and tired
of the interview. He definitely wanted to be doing something
else.

They worked their way through the usual
questions: Did he think Dennis Conner was too old for this stuff
(no); would the
Pegasus
syndicate consider throwing their
lot in with some of the other Americans if the money got tight (it
wouldn't get tight); did he like western Australia (the people are
great, the flies a challenge); why had almost his entire 1983 crew
returned to him (not for the money, that was for sure).

It was all very adequate. Quinta was getting
average, decent copy. Running out of time, she tried her best to
adopt the sympathetic, confidential tone of her hero, Barbara
Walters: "You know, of course, that I have to ask you this," she
began. "There were rumors for months after your wife's suicide that
you refused to accept the fact of her death. Do you feel you've put
the past behind you sufficiently to focus on the upcoming
trials?"

"I would," he snapped, "if people like you
didn't keep bringing it up."

No one, from the Shah of Iran to Nancy and
Ronald Reagan, would have answered Barbara that way. Alan was
dismissing Quinta as he would an impertinent child, and it smarted.
"Well, naturally people are going to bring up the past," she
retorted. "Do you think they don't ask Dennis Conner how it felt to
break the world's oldest winning streak? If you're so thin-skinned,
why are you out here in the limelight in the first place? I mean,
really! You've said absolutely nothing at all about yourself. What
do you want me to ask you? Who chose the designer color scheme of
the crew's uniforms?"

She slammed a finger down on the stop
button. "Thank you very much, Mr. Seton. I can hardly wait to go
back and feed all this pap into my computer. I see a Pulitzer Prize
for sure." She yanked the cord out of the outlet and began wrapping
it around the recorder.

He was genuinely angry now. "Hold it right
there! Before you go banging your fists on the floor and kicking
your heels in the air, maybe you should stop and consider: is my
marriage really part of the public's right to know? Am I the first
to throw up a tall fence around things that are none of your—or
anyone else's—business?"

"Then why did you agree to this damn
interview?" she said hotly. "I could have got all this by reading
your press release!"

"Ah. And you wanted a scoop. God. I remember
you as such an innocent, sweet ..." He ran his hand hallway through
his black hair and left it there. Something—the banjo on the
wall—held his attention. He stared at it as if it were a sign
written in fine print.

"Okay, Quinta," he said at last, giving her
a level look. "A story. I owe you—and your father—that. Here it is:
I did think Cindy was alive. I spent a minor fortune having private
investigators track someone who may or may not have been Cindy to
Madrid, and there the trail went cold. Dead and cold. Did I do it
out of love? Not in the damned least. I wanted the satisfaction of
divorcing Cindy fair and square. I wanted her technically and
legally out of my life. I got that, but by default. It stinks."

He held up his arm horizontally under
Quinta's face. "See the hairs of my arm? They stand, when I think
of her. There's not a day goes by that I don't twist inside with
revulsion, thinking of her and her demon-lover. She left behind a
journal, full of very sick, very perverted musings. You're too
young, too naive, to know about deliberate, degrading cruelty.
About the infliction and enjoyment of all kinds of pain," he said.
"Do you really want to know this, Quinta? The devices they used? Is
this the story you came for?"

Wide-eyed with shock, she shook her head
almost imperceptibly and formed the word "no" with her lips.

"It's too late now, though, isn't it?" he
murmured. "Now you know that the one who broke your father in two
was one of life's throwaways."

"I don't want—"

"But if you print one word of it," he
continued, his voice fierce with emotion, "I'll run you and
Cup
Quotes
into the Bay on a rail."

He saw her to the door after that. It was
pouring out. He offered her a spare umbrella. She declined.

"I'm sorry it turned out this way," he said
stiffly.

"It couldn't have turned out any other,"
Quinta replied in sorrow. "I see that now." Then she dashed through
the pounding rain, to the shelter of her little Honda Civic.

During the long drive back to Newport,
Quinta had plenty of time to review. She did not believe in
rehashing mistakes; she'd seen enough of that in her father to last
a lifetime. Still, dumb was dumb, and she was smart enough to know
it. It was dumb to have taken advantage of Alan Seton's guilty
feelings toward them by requesting the interview; dumber still to
have pouted when he didn't obligingly spill his soul; and dumbest
of all to have let him say all that about his dead wife. There was
no way Quinta would compound her stupidity by repeating any of it
to her father.

On the other hand, it was fair to say that
Alan Seton had overreacted. Why he had was an interesting question.
World-class competitors were all a little high-strung, she knew.
Celebrities had been known to spit at the media, or beat them up.
At least Alan had made coffee. She stole a look at herself in the
rear-view mirror: a straight-haired blonde with what she hoped was
an honest face. But dumb, dumb, dumb.

It was very sad. In the baggage from her
youth she'd been carrying a special feeling for Alan Seton. He'd
been so kind, so easy to talk to on that day they'd gone to pick up
a puppy for her dad. But today he hadn't even asked about Leggy,
who was just fine, thank you very much.

When she got back to her father's house she
found him in a humor that was, even by his standards, unusually
black. She'd learned over the years to tiptoe fearfully around such
moods as if they were so many mousetraps, ready to snap her
serenity in two and ruin her day. But the day was already shot, and
Quinta was feeling neither serene nor, after what she'd been
through, particularly afraid.

"What's
bugging
you, Dad?" she asked
after a couple of hours of watching him wheel his chair with
particular ferocity through the downstairs apartment he had
fashioned for himself. He seemed to want to be everywhere at once:
at his computer station, the microwave, the file cabinets, the
waist-high bookshelf that ran the length of one entire wall. But he
was doing it all at fever pitch, and that made him clumsy. He ran
over his favorite CD, of Beethoven sonatas, and then he nearly ran
over Leggy's tail. When he went to put back an ungainly reference
book, it slipped from his hands and fell to the floor. Each time he
swore, and each time he meant it.

"Dad. For goodness' sake, what's wrong?"

"The same thing that's always wrong!" he
shouted at her. "I can't walk!"

"You couldn't walk yesterday; you couldn't
walk last year!" she said recklessly. "What's so different about
today?"

Obviously Neil had been waiting for her to
ask. "Today I got
this
in the mail." He reached into a side
pocket of his wheelchair, pulled out a large brown envelope, and
sent it sliding across the floor to her.

Quinta picked it up. Her father's name and
his Howard Street address were printed in penciled letters; there
was no return address. Inside was a single sheet, torn from a
magazine: a full-page color ad for Reebok running shoes. Across the
top of the page, which featured a silver-haired executive-type
jogging, someone had scrawled: "Don't you wish!" And that was all.
It was a mean and very personal kind of attack, and it took
Quinta's breath away. She looked at the envelope again, to check
the postmark: Newport.

Newport was not that kind of town.

"This is obscene," she whispered, shaking
with anger.

"Just what I need, don't you think?" said
her father, mollified by her reaction. "A neighborhood crank."

"There's no one in the neighborhood so
cruel," said Quinta.

"Kids," Neil argued. "Kids are vengeful. You
remember last week I told you I gave hell to those little snots
from Spring Street, the ones that were using my ramp with their
skateboards?
They
did this."

"Dad. Those boys were ten, twelve years old.
Their minds wouldn't be capable of something this cruel."

"The hell they wouldn't. They listen to
groups with names like Twisted Sister. What do you expect?"

"I like Twisted Sister," said Quinta with a
wry look.

"Yeah, well, who's to say you won't show up
for breakfast tomorrow with a safety pin through your nose?" He was
backing down. It wasn't the work of neighborhood brats, and he knew
it. "Any ideas?"

She thought about it a minute. "I'm no
handwriting expert, but I'd say the sender is decently educated. He
knows his capitals from his lowercase—unlike most of my classmates.
There's an old-fashionedness about the printing, as if it were, you
know, a work of art or something. Maybe an architect?"

"Come now, Quinta. Besides, they'd use all
capitals."

"All right then, someone between an
architect and an eighth-grader. That ought to narrow it down a bit.
I'll get right on the case." She ventured a small, affectionate
smile.

To her immense relief, it was returned. Her
father's smiles were usually of the melancholy sort, but this one
was flinty, as if someone had pushed him too far. All in all, she
liked it.

"You think you're joking," he said, as he
gestured for her to return the Reebok material. "But you just may
end up moonlighting for me the rest of this summer."

"That's fine with me," she said, pleased
that he needed her in any capacity at all, even a theoretical one.
"My standard fee is two hundred a day and all expenses."