Embers (91 page)

"Maybe we should have him exorcized," Ivy said dryly.

"No, but I was thinking, an intervention. We all confront him when you come out to the Vineyard next week. We tell him—"

"I'm not coming out next week."

"What? Since when? You're bringing the girls to spend August here, just the way you do every year."

"Except this one. I won't be out until the last part of the month, if at all."

"Is something wrong?"

"No."

"Ivy—is something wrong?"

"I'm just very busy," she said, sounding vague.

"Busy doing what? You're a stay-at-home mom," Holly blurted.

It was a running stream that divided them, that issue of mom versus career. Most of the time the stream was a dried-up trickle, easily crossed, but sometimes it ran over its banks. This was one of those times. "The kitchen makeover is behind schedule, as you know," Ivy said in her supercilious older-sister voice. "I can't be everywhere at once."

"Well, this
stinks.
The family is in crisis, and you're worried about paint chips and cabinet knobs? Why can't Jack oversee the work? He only comes out here for a few days at the end, anyway."

"Jack? Please. Holly, honestly, I can't do it now," Ivy insisted, sounding harried.

"All right, fine. Then I'll just confront Dad on my own."

"And say what? That he's killing Mom? Do you suppose he doesn't know that?"

"I'll tell him that he's infatuated; that it will pass."

"Based on what? Your own experience?"

"I'll tell him what you just said: that he's bored; that he feels taken for granted."

"And he'll agree. Then what?"

"I'll tell him what a conniving, lying bitch
Eden
is!"

"Again, based on what?"

"Based on
... based on
... s
he vacated the apartment without giving notice."

Her sister didn't bother to respond to that. "The most obvious thing you could say is what we all think: that
Eden
is using her body to go after Dad's money. But so what? A lot of his friends have made the exact same deal, and it seems to suit them just fine."

"But Dad's not like that!"

"Holly," her sister said softly, "we don't know what Dad is like, deep down. No one does. Except Dad."

Deflated, Holly answered, "You're right. I guess. But I still have to try."

Chapter 2

S
am Steadman was struggling through his third piece of lemon meringue pie, wondering what the hell was up. All evening long, his mother and his father had been exchanging dire glances across the dining room table of their
New Bedford
bungalow. Something was obviously on their minds, but every time that Sam asked what, his mother jumped up and said, "More pie!"

Finally, too stuffed to move, Sam pushed his brown vinyl chair back on its casters and said, "Okay, you two: what's going on?"

His mother smiled nervously. "Oh, it's nothin' that can't wait. It's late. You'll be wanting to get back home to
Westport
."

"Is it money, ma?" he asked her bluntly. "Can you use some cash?" He hadn't been home in nearly a month; the medical bills must be getting away from them again.

"Don't be silly," said his mother, reddening. She began to clear the table of cups and plates. "We don't want you to give us no money. It's not about money. It's about—"

"Money," his father said flatly.

Millie Steadman gave her husband a look that would have quelled a lesser man; but stroke or no stroke, big Jim Steadman was not about to be silenced. "Sooner or later, he has to know," he muttered to his wife. "We already waited too long as it is."

Alarmed now, Sam said, "Ma, I'm
beggin'
you—"

"Well, all right," Millie concede
d, brushing crumbs into the pal
m of her hand. Without looking at Sam, she said, "It's about
Eden
."

"
Eden
!" Sam's chest constricted, the way it always did on those rare occasions when her name was mentioned. "What about her?"

"We don't like to bring her up, you being split up for so long now." She shook her head and gave him a look more sympathetic than critical, then took off on her favorite tangent.

"I just can't understand why your marriage couldn't work.
Eden
adored you; anyone could see that. And you were so proud of her. It seemed like the perfect match. You're both so good-looking, you're both so smart. Your children, oh, my goodness, what children, you could have had—"

"Ma,
don't.
Don't, or I swear
.
..."

"I know, I know," Millie said, her dark eyes welling with tears. "You've told me many times. All right. I won't dwell."

She sat back down in the chair at her husband's side. After his stroke, she had switched to that seat so that she could handfeed him during the devastating paralysis he had suffered. As he regained mobility, she had held his hand and helped him lift the forkful of potatoes, the spoonful of custard. Big Jim could feed himself now; but Millie still stayed close with a napkin.

"Every once in a while," she said to Sam, "
Eden
drops by."

"What!
You've never said boo about this!"

"Because look how you react. You get all squirrely. Anyway," she said, before Sam could respond to that, "
Eden
has been dropping by a couple of times a year just to say hi-how-are-you, and we always thought that was very nice of her. Sometimes, it's true, she was tight for cash. You know how it is when you're young and have car payments and rent and such. It's a tough situation."

Sam groaned and said, "You didn't give her
money,
Ma. Tell me you didn't give her money."

"Well, what if we did?" his mother answered defensively. "She used to be your wife. That made her our kin. You don't have to be blood relations to care about someone."

Sam didn't dare
ride roughshod over that argument. Millie and Jim Steadman had raised a series of foster kids before they'd taken in and eventually adopted Sam, and they loved every one of them as if they really were kin. They still stuck five bucks in their Christmas cards for each of the kids of those who kept in touch.
Eden
, however, wasn't a kid. She was a witch and a scam artist in a woman's very desirable body.

He said bitterly, "You know, you may as well have taken that hard-earned dough of yours and thrown it down a toilet."

It infuriated him to think that
Eden
had borrowed money from folks in need of it themselves. He wondered which of her many get-rich-quick schemes the cash had gone to finance. Maybe an afternoon's thrill at the tables at Foxwoods? The one thing he knew
wa
s that it didn't go to pay bills.

"Wasn't much money, Sam," his father said. "Few hundred, here or—"

"Well, there was that one time when she needed more than that," Millie admitted. "But
Eden
insisted on giving us a, whatddyacallit, a promissory note that time. She wouldn't take no for an answer, wouldn't even hear of it. I can show you the note!"

Sam kept a lid on his anger. He said softly, "Even after Dad's stroke? She took money from you even then?"

Please let the answer to that one be no.
For whatever reason, he didn't want to think that
Eden
was capable of stealing from the infirm.

His mother's answer was to smile lamely. Millie Steadman was a stout woman who, even in her seventies, had a big, life-affirming laugh. The woman never did
anything
lamely, least of all smile. Sam's heart sank.

"It gets a little complicated," she said. "The first thing you do, Sam, is you have to promise not to get mad. Or feel hurt. We couldn't tell you, all this time, because we were sworn to secrecy."

"By
Eden
?"

"
Eden
? She wasn't even born!"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Start over, Mil," her husband said tiredly.

"You're right, I'm making a mishmash of this," said Millie. "It's just I'm nervous, thinking about the possibilities. Because if it's gone, oh, Lord, if it's gone for good I don't know
what
we'll do."

The
panic
on her face and in her voice made Sam sit up straight. Throughout the trauma of the stroke and its aftermath, Sam had never seen in his mother anything like panic. Concern, yes; anguish, definitely. But not panic.

His mother took a deep breath, fixed her dark gaze on the
Lady of Fatima
print that hung opposite one of Sam's award-winning photographs, and started over.

"Fifty-two years ago, my Uncle Henry left us an inheritance.
I
was his only niece," she explained, "and he liked Jim because Jim worked with his hands as a carpenter. Uncle Henry used to say that people who actually made things deserved more than people who made things happen, but that life didn't usually work that way. Anyway, he left us this
... this
..."

She turned from the Lady of Fatima to her watchful husband, leaning helplessly, inexorably, to the left. "Is it okay if I say what it was, Jim?"

"We been through all that," he said, nodding permission.

"Okay. This engraving. It was an engraving. It was done by a man called Albrecht Durer. We looked him up. He died in 1528, so you know the engraving was old. It was of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It wasn't very large, about the size of a sheet of notebook paper, but it had a frame just like the one on your photograph of that fishing boat
Sandra D.
wrecked on a beach—you know, the one in the Whaling Museum that I like so much? That was really nice of you, donating that one to them. The frame must've cost you a pretty penny alone. Whenever we take visitors there, I always—"

"
Ma
."

"Yes, yes. Anyway, Uncle Henry's will specifically said that we weren't supposed to—let me just get this right—'divulge ownership.' We
never did understand why. The lawyer couldn't tell us, and if I'm not mistaken, he wasn't supposed to divulge anything, either. I don't know if he ever did or not. I think he's dead now. We were confused by the whole thing, almost frightened. When we got the engraving home, we didn't know what to do with it. So we hid it in the attic."

"The attic!"

"Well, where did you expect me to keep it? The people in it were practically naked. A couple of leaves—that was
it!"

"Ma, they're Adam and Eve. Clothes weren't invented yet."

"I don't care who they are. How would that look, hanging something like that on the wall next to Our Lady? The attic is where we put it, and the attic is where it stayed."

In a softer voice she added, "In his will, Uncle Henry referred to the engraving as our 'nest egg.' That's what we thought it was, all these years."

Sam's knowledge of the sixteenth century artist was marginal, but he knew enough to realize that an engraving by Durer would be worth a considerable sum. He was afraid to pose the next question.

"Where is it now?"

His father grimaced
and said, "There's your sixty-
four thousand dollar question."

"We were watching
Antiques Roadshow,"
Millie went on. "You ever see it? I suppose not; you're not very big on television. My word, the money the stuff in your attic can be worth! They had this chair—it looked like a piece of junk and yet they said it might fetch thirty thousand dollars! You couldn't very well sit on it; it wouldn't hold a ten-pound puppy."

When his mother felt self-conscious, she babbled. Sam knew that, and yet it was all he could do not to scream
"
Eden
!
For God's sake, tell me about
Eden
!
"

Instead he made himself say calmly, "So you saw—something? On the
Antiques Roadshow?"

"They had another engraving by this same man Durer," his mother said. She covered her face with her hands and said in a muffled voice, "And it was worth more than a hundred thousand dollars."

That should have been good news to them. Great news.
Oh, damn. Oh, hell.

"What did
Eden
do with it?" Sam asked in a low and dangerous voice.

His mother shook her head. "We don't know. We don't know. Your pa and I decided it was a sign,
Eden
popping in l
ike that right after the
Roadshow.
We were still so excited. We told her all about it and showed her
our
Durer. We told her that we were faithful to Uncle Henry's wishes all these years, but that we surely needed to cash in our nest egg now if ever we did. We told her how amazed we were that it might be so valuable, but
Eden
wasn't surprised at all. She was so nice, so helpful
.
.. she knows a lot about art, you know. She's a very smart woman."