By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (7 page)

Fog consumes Newport from two directions.
Sometimes it begins by nibbling at the southern shore of Aquidneck
Island, munching its way northward at a leisurely pace until the
pretty little City by the Sea disappears lock, stock, and harbor.
And sometimes the fog hovers over the city itself, sampling the
taller parts: the towers of the Newport Bridge; an occasional
smokestack here and there; the signal tower on the Navy Base; and
of course the Newport Hospital, built on Newport's most prominent
hill. The fog which soon gobbled up Cindy's silver Mercedes was of
the top-to-bottom variety; it had swallowed the red brick hospital
first thing, making it appear even more ominous to those who had
business there.

One of these was a thoroughly frightened
seventeen-year old whose life, after the four-thirty a.m. phone
call, would surely never be the same. At an hour when girls her age
were deep into dreams about boys her age, Quinta Powers was pulling
on a pair of battered jeans with shaking hands in the predawn quiet
before the police arrived to take her to the hospital. At an hour
when most girls her age were just becoming sleepily aware that
today was Sunday, no school today, Quinta Powers was rocking back
and forth in anguished suspense in the lounge chair outside the
Intensive Care Unit, waiting for her father to be wheeled out of
the operating room.

"She's alone? No one else?"

The nurse on duty nodded grimly.

"How did she get here? Surely she didn't
have to drive."

"Lieutenant Halran and another cop went out
to her house to pick her up. Apparently the patient's a widower
with five daughters. This one's the youngest. Only one other still
lives in Newport, and
she's
pregnant and due any minute.
Take your choice," the nurse said wryly, aware that the orthopedic
surgeon would rather be anywhere on the planet than where he was
right now.

"Well, hell. No grandparents?
Neighbors?"

"Uh-uh. It was the patient's decision.
Apparently he's worried about the pregnant daughter; there's a
history of miscarriages in the family. Though how he had the energy
to worry …. Anyway, the girl's been doing pretty well. It's only
since she knows the operation's over that she's started to
crumble."

Fred Greene was a case-hardened veteran of
many hundreds of operations, most of them successful. He had given
his prognoses—good, bad, and uncertain—to thousands of relatives
and survivors of his patients. But never, to his recollection, had
he had to face a pretty teenager wide-eyed with fear and all, all
alone. There was far too much of Charles Dickens in it, and it
filled him with loathing for the task before him. Hastily he
checked his scrub suit for tell-tale traces of blood—if he'd left
his surgical gown on, the girl might have passed out in horror—and
approached her.

"Miss Powers? Er—Quinta?" A peculiar name,
he thought; he couldn't have got it right.

"Yessir." She jumped up, an athletic,
tallish girl about to explode with tension. Her hazel eyes were
fastened on his face with an intensity that wilted his resolve to
look upbeat.

"I'm Dr. Greene. Quinta, I'm sure you
realize that your father has been very seriously injured." He
hastened on with the good news part: "If it weren't for the dog he
was holding, he might easily have been killed; the poor dog, well,
absorbed the blow somewhat."

"Yes?"

It was a signal, he thought, to continue at
his own peril. Her eyes never left him, and he felt, more than ever
before, like a demi-god who'd screwed up. There was nothing further
anyone could do—he knew that. But how in the name of Hippocrates
could he convince
her
of that? He plowed stoically ahead
through the bad news. "When your father was brought in, he had a
fracture dislocation of the spine," he said carefully. "The exact
location was D-12 on L-1, but you don't care about that."

"But I do care, I care about every last bit.
'Fracture dislocation... D-12 on L-1,'" she repeated fiercely,
memorizing the meaningless labels.

Oh Christ, she's going to want to be
adult about it.
"We had to operate immediately to reduce the
pressure of the piece of bone pressing on the nerves," he continued
slowly. "We hope that by reducing the pressure, your father will
recover completely."

"From the fracture dislocation?" she said
with touching naïveté.

"Well, yes. From the paralysis," he
explained, unsure suddenly whether she understood what the danger
even was.

"What ... paralysis?"

"From the dislocation, Quinta. Your father
has no movement from his waist down."

She sucked in her breath slowly, quietly.
Her large hazel eyes glazed over with tears; they welled behind the
thick lower lashes with no more hope of staying back than
overflowing reservoirs out west in spring. "My father can't
walk?"

"Not when he was admitted; but we're hoping
for the best, Quinta."

"But he
has
to walk; he has a
boat,"
she argued, as if that would tip the balance of
justice in her father's favor. "He has to get on the dock ... off
the dock ... up to the boat's flying bridge .... You
have
to
walk if you have a boat, one with a bridge especially," she
repeated, still in shock.

"Quinta, you have to hope for the best. And
you have to help your dad hope for the best. He's going to need you
very much in the next few weeks. He'll be counting on you."

"I've failed him completely," she whispered
in agony.

Puzzled, he said, "Nonsense! You seem to me
very levelheaded, very intelligent. This is what you have to do:
you have to stay calm and be optimistic. Can you do that,
especially in front of your dad?"

She nodded. "If you could tell me," she
said, taking a deep breath, "the worst case."

"The paralysis would be permanent, Quinta.
But even then, if your father were very determined he could move
around with leg braces and crutches." Very, very few were that
determined, he might easily have added, but not to her.

Instead he said, "But let's take things one
at a time. Right now I want you to go up to the coffee shop and get
something to eat. Do you know where it is?"

"Yes. I was here before," she murmured, for
the first time averting her eyes from his. "When my mother was ...
ill ."

Best stay away from that,
he thought.
"All right then," he said briskly. "Do you have any money with
you?"

Again she nodded. "But I'm not really
hungry."

"Hunger has nothing to do with it. You have
to be strong—for your father—and that's where food comes in, you
know that. So get off to the snack shop and strengthen up." He
tried a lame smile. "I'm going to call your brother-in-law."
Whether the patient likes it or not,
he added to
himself.

"When can I see my dad?"

"Soon. But I gotta tell ya," he said
lightly, "he isn't going to be much for small talk. Don't plan on
discussing the theory of relativity or anything like that."

Quinta let him have a pale ghost of a smile,
which nonetheless had a feisty sweetness in it. She picked up her
canvas purse, slung it over her shoulder, and started out for the
visitors' lounge. Then she stopped and turned around. "Thank you,
Dr. Greene. I'm sorry I was such a baby."

"Oh, but you
weren't,"
he said
sincerely, shaking her hand.

"Yes, I was. But I'll get better. I just
wasn't, you know, expecting ... this." Her voice broke and she
turned and hurried toward the elevator.

****

Four days later, Alan Seton called a press
conference. Dr. Frederick Greene couldn't come; he was busy
operating on the fractured tibia that would pay the July mortgage
on his overly large Victorian house. Quinta Powers couldn't come;
she was dividing her time between her sister's house, where Jackie
was overdue and in a perilous state, and Intensive Care, where her
father lay broken and grieving. Cindy Seton couldn't come. She was
dead, and besides, she was in Nevada, taking in the shows at the
casinos while her lover fenced a few emeralds. Mrs. Cyril Hutley,
shocked beyond expression by her protégé's suicide, certainly
wouldn't come. She would have nothing further to do with the
Setons. And she couldn't bear Alan Seton anyway; he was so
hopelessly single-minded. Of all the principals in the Saturday
night drama, in fact, only Mavis Moran had the leisure and the
inclination to go and see what Alan Seton had to say for
himself.

Not that the Newport National Guard Armory
was empty. The historic granite building, which by tradition was
converted to press headquarters for the duration of the America's
Cup trials as well as the final races, was filled to overflowing.
The media were there, naturally, and so was anyone else lucky
enough to have wrangled a guest pass for the summer—crews and
members of the four U.S. and seven foreign syndicates; local
officials responsible for avoiding chaos whenever possible; and the
usual smattering of politicians, crashers, and hangers-on.

This wasn't very fair to the residents of
Newport—it was more or less their Armory, after all—but those who
really cared could always tune in to the local radio station for a
fairly complete broadcast. And since this press conference was
not
about the Aussies' secret winged keel; since it was
not
about which yacht club advised which measurer on what
date; since it
was
about a juicy, scandalous piece of news
that everyone could understand—most Newporters, and quite a few
non-Newporters, did tune in to listen. There was no doubt about it:
the combined events of the last few days had had everyone in
Newport reeling.

The average townie shook his head and said,
"It isn't right. Neil Powers is a good man who puts in long hours
on the Christmas toy drive. For him to be run down by some damn
socialite high on drugs just isn't right."

Society shook her head and said, "What a
tragic pity. Cindy was pretty, charming, bright. If her parents had
lived, who knows how high she might have flown? She might have
bowed at the Palais Schwarzenberg. Fate was too cruel to her. First
her parents' car crash, then this fellow wearing dark clothing on a
dark road on a dark night. Too cruel."

The butler murmured to the housekeeper,
"There'll be trouble if he's not reinstated. Never heard of such a
thing, dismissing a man like Bob—never sick hardly in twelve years,
steady as the day is long—and why? Because that security outfit
fell flat on their faces and Mrs. Cyril Hutley was looking for a
scapegoat, that's why."

The press, ecstatic over the bumper crop of
stories, packed away hearty, cheap breakfasts at Handy Lunch and
told one another gleefully, "Best Cup summer in a hundred and
thirty-two years. A Cup assignment used to be about as exciting as
watching paint dry, but damn if
this
isn't fun. This'll be
the death blow to Alan Seton's campaign. Guaranteed. "

So far Mavis Moran had successfully avoided
the media men who flocked to the waterfront like seagulls to
dumpsters. She had given a report of the theft to the police, and
then, after the silver Mercedes was discovered on Newport Bridge,
she had given it again. She had been interviewed by the insurance
company more than once, but to the media she had said not a
word.

Now she stood quietly in the back of the
crowd, dressed in flat sandals, nondescript khakis, and a cheap
navy polo shirt. Her thick auburn hair was hidden under a
visor-bandanna combination, and a pair of enormous light-adjusting
glasses broke up the Celtic curves of her face. She had taken
extreme care to hide the fading bruise on her chin under makeup,
not so much out of vanity as from a sense of embarrassment that
Delgado had landed such a clean punch. She was as nearly incognito
as a woman with dazzling skin who stands five feet nine inches tall
can be.

The magnified thump of a finger being tapped
against a hot mike told Mavis that the press conference was about
to begin. Boisterous exchanges died to excited chatter and finally
faded to a subdued murmur as the Chairman of the U.S. Selection
Committee made a few introductory remarks. Mavis scanned the hall
and found six or seven of the
Shadow
crew gathered in a
small knot near the front, looking glum.

Mavis knew what was coming, of course. So
did just about everyone else in the Armory, but that didn't stop
them—and her—from staring with unconcealed expectation at the
dark-haired skipper who sat stonily behind the podium, about to
read his statement.

"Mr. Chairman, members of the press, ladies
and gentlemen," Alan Seton began in a voice resonant with
self-control. "It must be obvious to most of you why I've called
this press conference. Four days ago my wife, because of her
involvement in a tragic accident, chose to ... take her own life.
It came as a severe shock to me, and now I don't think I can summon
the intense, total concentration needed to compete seriously for
the right to defend the America's Cup."

An electric murmur generated through the
crowd. Mavis couldn't see the crew any longer, but it took little
imagination to picture the bowed heads, the inevitable sadness.

"I know that my superb crew, despite their
deep sympathy for my situation, could nonetheless rally and turn in
the flawless performance that has characterized their effort during
the last fourteen months of constant, grueling practice. I know
they
can, but I am sorry to say, I simply ... cannot. And—at
the risk of sounding arrogant—I'm the one who must steer the boat.
It would be counterproductive, not only for me but for my crew, to
continue on with a dispirited performance."

He
was
arrogant, Mavis thought,
damned arrogant. But he was certainly right.