By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (20 page)

"Ingrate! I'll bill you for your room and
then credit you."

She laughed and flipped her hair over her
shoulder. "Careful, Dad. You're beginning to sound like a
Newporter."

It was a nice moment, one of the few they'd
shared in a very trying summer. Quinta understood why the last few
months had been so hard—Cup fever was in the air for the first time
since her father's accident, bringing it all back home to him—but
this closeness was welcome just the same.

"So!" said Neil at last, smacking his palms
on the arms of his wheelchair. "Who cooks tonight, you or me?"

"Oh Dad—
would
you?" she asked,
resisting the urge to jump up and "do" for him and put him off his
mood. "I've had one hell of a day." Was selfish the right way to
play this? She watched her father carefully as he rolled his chair
to the door of the upright freezer and peered inside. "Glazed
Chicken or Oriental Beef?" he asked.

He didn't mind, then; she'd second-guessed
right. "Whatever you don't want. No, wait. I'll take the chicken,"
she corrected herself. Keep it selfish.

"Oh. I had a taste for chicken."

Oh damn.
"Well, Oriental Beef is
fine, really—"

"No, no. You want the chicken. As it
happens, I did have an Oriental Beef for lunch, but—hold it. Here's
another Glazed Chicken in the back."

Thank you, Lord
.

"So we'll both have chicken. Now: did you
want a salad?"

They'd been playing this game for three
years, and Quinta had not begun to learn the rules. Chess, at which
she excelled, was child's play in comparison. While she was
agonizing over her next move, her father said, "I guess I will make
a salad. I've got to use up these tomatoes that Mackenzie dumped on
me. By rights I should charge him for taking them off his hands.
Damned victory gardeners."

She was on a roll, no doubt about it.

Her father made tea for them both—no guilt
attached, he was in the kitchen anyhow—and Quinta sipped from her
cup gratefully and played with Leggy while the frozen dinners
bumped molecules in the microwave. Life was a string of such
pleasures—not deepwater pearls, necessarily; more like small wooden
beads. To Quinta there was very little difference.

She set the table while her father tossed
the salad. The rain outside had stopped at last. Quinta ducked out
onto the porch, stood at the top of the wheelchair ramp, and looked
west: thick fog had swallowed the yachts at anchor a block
away.

"Harbor's socked in good," she said as she
sat down to a salad heavy on overripe tomatoes. "
Pegasus
wouldn't be sailing tomorrow, even if it were ready."

"And it's not?"

"Eh ... not exactly. It's having some
modifications done."

"Says who?"

Wrong topic, wrong time. "Says Alan Seton,"
Quinta answered helplessly.

"In other words you went and did the
interview anyway," her father said at last. "Well? How did it
go?"

The question was wrapped in a cool, damp fog
of its own. Quinta, thoroughly tired of trying to fathom the human
mind, said tiredly, "It went pretty lousy. I never should have
gone. He didn't really want to see me. He obliged me but ...." She
shrugged and shook her head. "There was no story there."
Not one
that's fit to print, anyway.

"Did you ask him why he's gone back to Mavis
Moran?"

Quinta became still, then bounced up from
the table, carefully perky. "Do you want dessert? The
strawberry-rhubarb pie at Crest Farm looked so good, I couldn't
resist." She stood up and said over her shoulder as she walked back
into the kitchen, "Why would I ask him that?"

"Why not? It's in the gossip columns. If you
weren't such a snob about reading them, you'd have been better
prepared. The other night Seton and the 'vibrant Miss Moran' were
seen having drinks together, just the two of them, for the first
time in a long time."

"So what? They're in the same syndicate. Why
should that interest my readers? I'm not writing a society column."
She sliced into her pie viciously.

"You're writing a
people
column;
Society are people, too." He swung his chair away from the table
and wheeled over to his favorite reading lamp. "Don't be so naive,
girl," he continued. "Alan Seton's love life is very important to
how he handles his run for the Cup. Witness 1983."

"Well, sure—if his love life jumps off a
bridge!"

Neil made a dismissive gesture. "I don't
mean Cindy Seton. I mean Mavis Moran.
She
was his love life
then. Hell, I saw them in a downtown parking lot once. They were
arguing: intense, involved. You can bet they were sleeping together
even then. You can always tell," he added in a thoughtful, faraway
voice. "You can tell by their eyes, by the way they look at one
another ...."

"Who do you know who does that?" she asked,
surprised.

"Not nowadays. Obviously. But when I was a
kid, I—well, never mind. How the hell did we get on this subject,
anyway?"

"Interview. Alan Seton. Disaster. You were
right, and I was wrong. Happy now? Here's dessert."

Quinta placed his dish of pie on a small
mahogany reading table, and put down another cup of tea. It
distressed her, this almost voyeuristic interest her father had in
celebrities' lives. It had to be her mother's fault, for dragging
him off to gawk at all those balls.

She put her own dessert on a small stand
next to the loveseat, then circled the living area, turning on
lamps to ward off the penetrating fog. It was the kind of night
that made less committed New Englanders think about San Diego. But
Quinta loved the fog, loved its salty taste and the way it waved
her hair; she felt softer and less stressed, in the fog. On the
other hand, her father complained that it was like living aboard a
boat again and that it made his legs ache. "What's the point of
being paralyzed if my bones can still hurt?" he liked to ask. So on
foggy evenings they turned on all the lights, to dry things
out.

Quinta was standing at the front windows,
drawing the heavy burgundy drapes (almost the only thing left from
when her mother was alive), when the window to her left burst
violently inward, shattering on the hardwood floor and sending her
jumping back in shock. The offending missile, a fist-sized rock,
carried away the gauzy curtain as if it were a cobweb and slid
across the varnished floor, fetching up against one of the wheels
of her father's chair.

Quinta yanked the drapes violently shut and
stepped back. "What happened?" she said, refusing to believe her
eyes.

Her father reached down and picked up the
smooth, round rock and stared at it as if it were moon material.
Then he muttered, "The Reebok Man."

Fear set upon Quinta like a clinging bat,
but she beat it off.
This is Newport. This is Newport,
she
told herself. The incantation worked. "Don't be silly, dad!" she
said sharply. "This time it
is
kids. This time I'll find
them for you." She grabbed a dark-blue windbreaker from a peg in
the hall and opened the door. "No, Leggy, you stay here. Stay," she
commanded the big black retriever, who sensed a chase was on.

"Quinta,
come back here!"
It was a
tone she hadn't heard from her father in a dozen years.

"In a minute." She was already outside,
wondering too late whether her father was afraid to be alone.

This is Newport, this is Newport,
she
repeated over and over to herself. Newport, where she'd been born
and raised. Newport, where the Fire and Police column featured
crimes like library books stolen from the front seats of open cars.
Newport, where, despite all the hundreds of thousands of tourists
who roamed up and down Thames Street in the course of a summer
season, folks half a block up the hill knew one another, and cared
about one another. Newport, where it was still possible to feel
safe at night. Surely someone had seen the stone-throwers. Someone
cared, and someone would tell.

But the night, conspiring with the fog, had
driven the real people away, giving phantoms free reign. No one was
playing in the street or on the sidewalks. No one sat on her porch,
chatting with her neighbors. No one anywhere, up or down the
street. Quinta could see, in the yellow cobra-lights on Thames
Street, the night shift of tourists strolling past the still-open
shops, a decent throng for a foggy night. A rock-thrower could hide
there easily. But she instinctively believed that the kids had fled
up the hill, not down, because that's what locals would do—escape
to their own territory, not the neutral ground of the tourist
traps.

But on narrow Spring Street the lights from
a steady stream of one-way traffic blinded her. She thought she saw
someone running to the south. Jogger? Teenager? Hard to say. She
retraced her steps to her father's house, no longer sure of
herself. Kids broke windows, in Newport and in every other city of
the world. But what if her father was right, if the hate mail and
the rock-throwing were related?

Who? Why? Neil Powers was a software
engineer, a successful author of an ongoing series of technical
books. He wasn't controversial; he was hardly even visible. Yelling
at some kids for commandeering his wheelchair ramp for their
skateboards was a perfectly normal thing to do. It could not
possibly have warranted a campaign of terror.

Unless the campaign were aimed at her.
Quinta had her own phone, and her listed address was on Howard
Street. If she did have enemies—and she, at least, was out there
mingling with the possibilities—then Howard Street was the place to
throw rocks. Ah, but what about the Reebok ad? Maybe the incidents
were unrelated and aimed at each of them. She sighed, discouraged,
as she came back up the ramp. There would have to be a third
incident for a pattern to emerge, and she did not want a third.

Her father was waiting for her. "Well?
Grown-up, or kids?"

"I saw ... some kids, running down Spring
Street," she lied. "I'll clean this up. Do you want to call the
police or anything?"

"I already have. Maybe if they read about it
in the paper tomorrow, it'll put the fear of God in 'em. Damn
punks. If I ever get my hands on them ...."

But he knew he wouldn't.

The small band of protestors who had latched
onto the
Pegasus
syndicate like barnacles finally managed to
attract a feature reporter from a local television station. That
was all it took. The day after the group was given air time, their
numbers increased fivefold. They clogged the entrance to the
shipyard where the
Pegasus
lay berthed, waving placards and
giving the security guard at the gate a hard time of it. They were
all well-dressed and freshly scrubbed, completely camera ready.

"They seem determined," Alan Seton muttered
to the others of his syndicate who elbowed their way with him
through the crowd.

Mavis was following in the path he cleared
for her. "Everyone wants to be a star," she said.

"What
do
they want?"

"Who the hell knows?"

"Well, we're going to have to deal with
those protesters directly sooner or later," Alan said. "I don't
want any more of them out on the water bothering me. Yesterday I
damn near took the rig out of one of their little daysailers. I
doubt that the Coast Guard will feel like riding shotgun on our
practice sessions from now until we leave for Australia."

"If that's what it takes," said Mavis.
"We're not going to dump a single one of our corporate sponsors
just to satisfy a bunch of well-heeled brats." They walked briskly
down the dock toward the sleek blue hull that carried all their
hopes for success. "I wonder how they'd feel if their cries for
boycotts actually took hold, Daddy's stock portfolio took a dive,
and they couldn't get that Porsche for graduation after all."

"That's between them and their daddies,"
answered Alan. "But I don't want anyone knocked overboard or hurt
while you battle a matter of principle with them. In any case, it's
lousy press," he said as he acknowledged some well-wishers with a
wave. "It's your job to keep everyone happy, and that includes
protestors, Mavis. Do something. Meet with them. I've got my hands
full making the boat go."

"And you only have to do that for two more
weeks," she said impatiently. "Then the
Pegasus
will be
packed up and shipped to Perth. That bunch will not follow their
convictions hallway around the world."

"Don't be too sure. They're smart, rich, and
savvy. They like to travel. Don't make them mad; someone could get
hurt. I'm counting on you."

Mavis Moran had the kind of green eyes that
could narrow menacingly. She pulled her white
Pegasus
visor
down over her auburn hair and said softly, "Seton, sometimes you
piss me off. Sometimes I wonder just whose side you're on." She
turned on her heel and walked away from him toward the fifty-foot
sport-fisherman that acted as tender and supply boat to the
Pegasus
while it was out practicing.

She would not set foot on the dock again
until the day's sailing was over and the sport-fisherman, having
guided the
Pegasus
back safely to its berth, was tied up
beside it for the night. Mavis Moran had more stamina than some of
Alan's crew; she never skipped going out to observe the
Pegasus
with the excuse that the day was cloudy, or the
water was bumpy, or the Jumping Derby was competing in nearby
Portsmouth. No. She took her seat high atop the flying bridge, with
her binoculars and camera beside her, and—observed. She was
fascinated by the
Pegasus,
obsessed with it. Alan would look
behind him from the cockpit of the 12-meter and there she was,
right behind him. It got to the point where he felt pursued by her,
spurred to do his job by her.