The Ice Cradle (23 page)

“Which were …?” Mark prompted.

“The end of life on earth as we know it, the minute those windmills go in.”

Then it hit me! The name!

“Excuse me a minute,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I got up and headed toward the stairs.

“Everything okay?” Lauren called, apparently startled by my abrupt exit.

“Just checking on Henry,” I responded. And I did. I looked in. He was sitting right on the couch where I’d left him, and Vivi was nowhere in sight.

I raced up the stairs and down the hall. I opened the door to our room, located my purse on the floor near the bathroom, and rummaged through it until I found a copy of the report the senator’s aide had handed out. I turned the brochure over and scanned the back page. The top of my scalp began to prickle.

I hurried back downstairs, report in hand, and threw it on the table.

“What?” Mark said. “What
is
this?”

“The summary of the findings,” I said. “Look on the back, on the bottom. Look who paid for the study.”

“The Lenox Consortium,” Mark read.

Lauren grabbed the paper out of his hand.

“Who do you think they are?” I asked.

“I’ll find out, believe you me.” Mark was leaving on the morning ferry for his trip to Boston. He was working on an article for the
Wall Street Journal
, something to do with stimulus
funds and the national infrastructure. He would stay in Boston Friday night, meet the Australian ghost detectives in Providence on Saturday morning, and accompany them back to the island on the midday boat.

“How can you find out?” I asked.

“I have my ways,” he replied.

H
ENRY FELL ASLEEP
during
The Parent Trap
, and for once, I was able to get him upstairs and into bed without his waking up.

I had hoped that the evening would end with Bert and me having a little time alone, but that didn’t happen. And it was probably just as well. I had some issues to resolve, and plans to make, and I wasn’t even sure where to start.

First, there was the matter of the ghost detectives. They might exaggerate their findings and work digital magic aimed at thrilling their audiences, but sensors like the ones they carried
did
actually register temperature variations and changes in energy fields. If, on Saturday night, the Grand View were filled with angry spirits, the gear would definitely vibrate, blink, and squeal. This wouldn’t be the end of the inn—the publicity might well fill every bedroom—but Lauren and Mark didn’t just want to fill the rooms, they wanted to fill them with a certain class of vacationer. The kind that read
Town & Country Travel
.

I could rely on Baden to make himself scarce while the TV guys were here, but I definitely couldn’t count on Vivi. She
was probably furious, or scared, and either way, I could imagine her acting out defiantly, purposely doing the opposite of anything I asked her to do. I had to make a deal with her, but the only thing she seemed to care about was Jamey.

I lay in the low light, listening to the sound of the waves from across Water Street. As I reached for
Inn of Phantoms
, longing for a break from my troubled introspection, I heard footsteps in the hall. Someone had paused outside my door, and I heard a quiet, tentative knock. I sat up, then got up and padded across the room in my stocking feet.

“Hello?” I whispered through the door.

“Hi,” came the quiet reply.

I felt a little burst of happiness—not fireworks, exactly, but at least the lighting of a sparkler. I opened the door.

It was Bert.

“You weren’t asleep, were you?”

I shook my head, thinking,
And even if I were, I’d be thrilled to be woken up by you
.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

“Nothing.”

“Henry asleep?”

I nodded.

“Kind of clips your wings, huh?”

That
was an understatement. “Depends on what you had in mind.”

He did a Groucho Marx imitation, making his eyebrows flutter up and down.

“Right,” I said.

“Only kidding,” he insisted. With one hand, he held up a
squat and unfamiliar bottle, and with the other, two brandy snifters. “Sit on the porch?”

“It’s freezing!”

“We could build a fire.”

“And wake everybody up?”

“I was thinking, on the beach.”

I looked back at Henry and sighed. I’d been freewheeling it ever since I’d gotten here, leaving him on his own, entrusting him to other people, talking myself into believing that he really didn’t need me as much as he obviously still did. I didn’t want him waking up and finding me gone, again, down on the porch or on the beach. It didn’t make any difference that I wouldn’t be far away; he would still be upset to discover that I had left him all alone at night, when he had fallen asleep trusting that I would be here.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Okay.” Bert nodded toward the little sitting area at the end of the hall, and I pulled the door almost closed behind me. Fortunately, I was still dressed, and I hadn’t washed off the makeup I’d applied earlier, so I allowed myself to imagine that I resembled a sultry French starlet, the kind with long, mussy hair who lights cigarette after cigarette and drinks coffee from a cup that was somebody’s grandmother’s and who always seems to be just out of bed, or just about to fall in.

Nah
. I probably looked like—me.

Two upholstered chairs formed an inviting reading alcove at the end of the hall, and Bert chose the one that looked less comfortable. He held up the bottle and I nodded.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Rémy Grand Cru. My weakness.” He poured about an inch into the bottom of a snifter and handed it to me. Then, with a
surprising lack of self-consciousness, I mentally prepared to do what Earl, a pompous ass I once dated in college, had taught me to do with a snifter of brandy. Though I’d had several opportunities in the past ten years, I hadn’t actually gone through the steps of the ritual.

I waited for Bert to pour his own glass and we clinked.

“Sláinte,”
I said, the Irish toast to good health.

“Saúde,”
he replied, which probably meant about the same thing.

I wrapped my hand around the bowl of the snifter. This, I had been informed, allowed the cognac to be heated slightly from the radiant warmth of the palm. I held the glass up to the light, admiring the clarity of the amber fluid, and I sloshed it around gently, watching for what Earl had called “legs”—little rivulets that testified to the precious liquid’s age. I waved the glass under my nose and inhaled, then had a sip.

This was where my cognac knowledge ended abruptly. It just tasted hot and strong and burny. But I could tell that Bert was impressed by my performance, and this made me want to confess to him immediately that it had all been for show, a hollow and affected act picked up from a hollow and affected blowhard, and that I knew absolutely nothing about Rémy Grand Cru or any other cognac. I didn’t even like it!

But I didn’t get to say any of this, because I took another fraudulent sip, a much bigger one this time, and this one met an obstacle in my tense and overexcited throat and ended up going down the wrong way. What ensued was a coughing fit so severe that I was surprised, later, when I examined my appearance in the bathroom mirror, that I hadn’t managed to pop a couple of blood vessels in my eyes.

It served me right.

Bert hopped up, trying to help, but there was nothing he could really do. I wasn’t choking, so he couldn’t perform the Heimlich maneuver (though I was sure he would have known how, being the kind of guy who was comfortable with a harpoon). But my windpipe wasn’t obstructed. Even the water he hurried away to get me didn’t help, because it went down the right way, which was to say, down my throat.

We just had to wait it out. It took almost five minutes before I returned to normal, the only upside of the whole, embarrassing episode being that my coughing extravaganza hadn’t woken up Henry.

“Well,” Bert said, when I finally took a deep breath and wiped away the tears I had been unable to check.

I smiled weakly.

“Bet you’re glad I came by.”

I
was
glad! I just couldn’t talk yet. But I started to laugh. It was ridiculously funny, when you came right down to it, how one minute we were living out a romantic French movie, and the next, we were washed up on the shores of a cheesy cable melodrama. It must have been nerves, because once I got started, I couldn’t stop laughing, and soon Bert was laughing with me, and before I knew it, we were back in Paris and my hair was all mussy and we had to keep stopping to listen, to make sure that in all our laughing and moving furniture and getting down to some serious hanky-panky, we hadn’t awakened Henry.

FRIDAY

H
ENRY WAS POURING
way too much syrup onto his French toast, but I was far too blissful to interfere. I dawdled over my coffee and toast, reliving every delicious detail of the minutes between eleven or so last night and 12:07 this morning. Had Bert and I really been together for only an hour?

“Mama?” Henry looked up.

I hit the Pause button on the delectable little film that had been playing in my mind.

“What?”

“Can we call Daddy?”

“Right now?”

Henry nodded. He looked a little glum.

“How come you want to talk to Daddy?”

“Because I
do.”

I glanced at my watch. I knew Declan’s schedule, and I knew that if we caught him on his cell phone right now, he wouldn’t be able to talk. It would be frustrating for both of them.

“Well the thing is, sweetie,” I launched in, “Daddy’s on the day shift today, so he’s probably still at roll call. He wouldn’t be able to pick up right now.”

“Why not?”

“Because he can’t be talking on the phone while his boss is talking.”

“Why not?”

I sighed and had a sip of my coffee. “What does Miss O. do when you guys interrupt her?”

“She gets mad.”

I smiled and nodded. “That’s what happens at roll call, too.”

Henry took a minute to chew and to absorb this. Then he put down his fork. “Daddy’s coming to my play, though, right?”

Oh
. I sighed. There was no way to soften the blow, so I didn’t try.

“No, honey. He isn’t.”

A look of surprise appeared on his face, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Declan came to everything: every T-ball practice, teacher conference, end-of-something picnic. It had never occurred to me that Declan would come to see Henry in
Grease
, but it had probably not occurred to Henry that he wouldn’t.

Or maybe it had.

“It’s a pretty long trip,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, on the boat.”

I nodded. “I brought my camera. I’ll take a ton of pictures.”

“Okay,” he said sadly.

“And we’ll call Daddy tonight. I promise.”

“Yeah, we don’t want him to get in trouble.”

I gave him a puzzled look.

“For talking out,” he explained.