Time After Time (4 page)

She was on her last joist
when the doorbell — a handcranked, ear-splitting contraption from
long ago — jangled loudly, jolting her upright into the ridgepole
again.

"Ow!"
she cried, reeling from the pain. She leaned down through the
opening into the hall and yelled loudly, "C'mon up,
dammit!
It's
open!"

Expecting Victoria and
Susy, Liz was surprised when a male voice called politely, "Anybody
home?"

If he was a serial killer,
he wasn't a very bright one. "Up
here,
I said," she repeated, rubbing
the goose-egg on her head. "Who is it?"

"Your neighbor to the
east. Jack Eastman," he answered as he ascended the bare, varnished
stairs.

The voice was rich and
deep and had that touch of Ivy League affectation that Liz so
disliked. Clearly he wasn't there as part of any Welcome Wagon. She
wondered why he'd driven all the way around to her side of the
barbed wire. It never occurred to her to climb down the ladder to
greet him. Instead, she waited for him just the way she was.
Upside-down. Like a bat.

She was still hanging
there when Eastman reached the landing beneath her.

"I'm looking for Liz
Coppersmith," he said, clearly refusing to believe he'd found her.
"Of Parties Plus?"

"Yessir! May I help you?"
asked Liz, snapping to attention at the magic word
parties. Nuts.
This was
a business call, then.

"Let me just get down from
here," she said hurriedly. "I'm sorry about the mess. I was poking
around, and. . ."

Still gripping her
red-lacquered box, she scrambled onto the top rung of the
stepladder — the one all the signs said not to step on — and
promptly sent it flying out from under her as she fell backward,
more or less into her new neighbor's arms.

He staggered under the
weight of her fall but recovered gracefully, which was more than
Liz could say for herself. She felt like Lucy Ricardo after a bout
with Ricky. It didn't help that her head was wrapped in a ratty
bandanna, her jeans were torn, and her face was covered with
plaster dust.

He held her by her
shoulders longer than he needed to.
"You're
Parties Plus?" A half-smile
— too condescending by half — relieved the sternly handsome lines
of his face. "Really?"

A shiver — indignation?
resentment? — rippled through Liz. "Yes. Really," she said coolly,
reacting as she always did to condescension. She knew she should be
used to it; Newport had more snobs per cobblestone than any other
town in New England. On the plus side, they formed a solid base of
customers for businesses like hers.

Smile,
she told herself over the annoying hammering of her
heart.
You need the business.

"I tried the number in the
Yellow Pages," Eastman said, "and I got a not-in-service message."
His tone suggested consumer fraud.

"Oh, that," said Liz. "I
was in the process of moving my Middletown office to Touro Street
here in town, but a sprinkler went nuts in the new place, so I
won't be able to move in for a month. In the meantime I'm operating
out of my house. The business phone goes in tomorrow. All of my
clients know my home phone, of course," she added, implying that
she had lots and lots of them.

It was obvious to her that
he wasn't impressed. Why should he be, when they were standing in a
pile of construction rubble?

Liz suggested that they
continue their discussion downstairs. On the way down she tried to
convince herself that she was in fact wearing a smart linen suit
and that he was buck naked—anything to level the playing
field.

The living room, with its
charming brick fireplace, was only twelve feet square. Earlier in
the day Liz had been regarding the room as cozy; suddenly it merely
seemed small. And that was Jack Eastman's fault. Right-side up, he
looked truly formidable: six-two, broad shoulders, arms that
convinced her he worked out regularly. His thick brown hair was
sun-bleached and surprisingly untidy for the impeccably casual
clothes he wore. He was deeply tanned.

Another rich and idle
yachtsman, without a doubt.

She thought of her father,
still saving up for an aluminum skiff and an outboard motor, and
had to repress one of her frequent surges of resentment for the
moneyed class.
Why him and not Dad?
was her thoroughly blue-collar
thought.

"Have a seat," she said,
reminding herself one more time that there was money to be made
from that moneyed class.

Eastman opted for the
damask wing chair that went so well with her country-cottage
chintz, but — she couldn't believe it — he didn't fit. The wings
crowded his shoulders.

"Maybe you'd be more
comfortable on the sofa," she suggested.

"It doesn't matter," he
said impatiently, glancing at his watch. "I understand from Netta
that you do birthday parties. We have a five-year-old, ah, guest
who's staying with us. Can you arrange a party on the premises for
a week from tomorrow?"

Ta-dah! Exactly
according to plan. Liz grinned broadly—and tasted
plaster dust. She'd forgotten all about looking like Lucy Ricardo;
it was obvious that she was going to have to go all out to overcome
this disaster of a first impression. "I'd be
delighted
to do it," she said
enthusiastically.

"I know it's short notice;
are you sure you'll be able to fit us in?" he said, irony flashing
in his sea-blue eyes.

Clearly he thought she had
no other business at all. It stung.

"Well, that depends," Liz
said, slipping mentally into that smart linen suit. "Some themes
are more elaborate than others. But we should still be able to do
something nice in that amount of time. I was thinking that the
little girl — it
is
for that adorable little blonde girl, isn't it? — I was
thinking that, like most kids, she's probably into
dinosaurs."

It was the first thing
that popped into Liz's head, but she quickly warmed to the idea.
"Oh, I don't mean some big purple Barney hulking around and passing
out party hats, but something more fun. Your grounds are
so
extensive .... maybe
we could do something with big cutout dinosaurs placed all over ...
a kind of Jurassic Park. We could create an entire prehistoric
—"

"Hold it." Eastman stood
up. Frowning, he said, "Nothing prehistoric. Nothing historic. I
had in mind some balloons and streamers, that sort of thing. And a
cake — even though Caroline's already had one. Some little nonsense
presents. And I guess food of some sort. They eat at these things,
don't they? Plan on — Netta tells me — about half a dozen kids and
an average number of their parents. If you need anything else, talk
to Netta." He glanced at his watch again. "Now. What's this going
to run me?"

"Oh." Utterly deflated,
Liz could think of nothing else to say, so she said it again:
"Oh."

This wasn't exactly the
commission she had in mind. Jack Eastman was not only a surly host,
he was a cheap one. She sighed and thought that he must be from old
money. Newport had plenty of that.

Still, it was a start. She
did some quick calculations and came up with a rock-bottom
estimate.

He frowned and cut it in
half.

"Oh, I don't think so,"
Liz said, breathless at his insulting counteroffer.

Eastman shrugged. "I'm
sorry to have taken up your time," he said, and he headed for the
door.

It was all happening so
fast. Her entrée to Bellevue Avenue — boom! Gone! Just like
that.

"Wait!" she
cried.

He turned around. Liz
swallowed hard and said, "Okay. Since you're a neighbor. But I
don't mind admitting —"

"Oh, don't do it as a
favor to me, Miss Coppersmith," he said quickly. "Do it because you
want the business."

She did. Damn him. She
did. "I'll do it," she said with a tight, offended
smile.

"Fine I'll leave you to
it, then. G'day."

He let himself out. Liz
marched up to the door, threw the bolt, and muttered, "G'day
yourself, you cheapskate."

The whole interview was
too embarrassing to dwell on; Liz pushed it from her mind and went
back to retrieve the red-lacquered box from the floor of her
bedroom, where it had landed after flying out of her hand when she
fell from the ladder. She carried it over to the west-facing
windows for a closer look. How odd that her visitor hadn't been the
slightest bit curious about it. Or perhaps he was, but was too
well-mannered to show it.

It was a beautiful box,
lacquered to a slippery, brilliant finish and covered with an
all-over pattern of intricately painted flowers and twining vines,
all in deeper, richer colors than the Chinese red background. Its
hinges were hidden, and its lock, the size of a fingertip, was
recessed into the wood. An exquisitely made thing, and probably
valuable. She would not be able to open it without damaging it
unless she had a key.

Or some little tool? She
held the box to her breast and stared absently out her bedroom
window, trying to think of what might do.

As usual, she got caught
up in the view. From her hilltop perch she could see glimpses of
Newport Harbor and of Narragansett Bay beyond it. At the moment, a
big freighter was picking its way through a flock of tiny, feathery
sails as it headed down the bay for other ports of call. The ship
was high in the water. Whatever its cargo — cars, electronics,
clothing — it had been emptied at the Port of Providence; now the
ship was going back, probably to Asia, for more.

Liz tried not to think of
the lost jobs the freighter represented and daydreamed instead
about the magic of maritime trade. She knew — every Newporter knew
— that much of Newport's old wealth had come from its deep
involvement in trading with eighteenth-century China. From teas to
trees to silks to willoware, everything pretty once seemed to have
come from the Far East. Shipowners put the best pieces aside for
themselves, and sold the rest, and got richer and richer. No one
begrudged them back then, not if it meant they could have pretty
blue dishes on their tables and silk dress goods for twenty-five
cents a yard.

And red-lacquered boxes
like the one Liz held in her hands. That it came from China, she
had no doubt. Probably it had been offloaded from some
square-rigger right here in Newport harbor in the days when Newport
was still a major port of the United States. She was cradling a
small token of the commerce that had enabled more than one man to
build himself an imposing mansion on Newport's Gold
Coast.

She thought of Jack
Eastman and wondered where
his
money had came from. He had a certain Captain
Bligh glint in his eye that made her think he could easily take a
ship around the Horn. On the other hand, he looked like he'd be
just as comfortable in the give-and-take of a trading session
dockside. Heck, hadn't he just proved it?

Well, he might have his
empire, but she had her red box. And she had no intention of
destroying it, only to discover it was empty.

But it
wasn
't empty. It couldn't be. What
Liz needed, she decided, was a locksmith; he'd be able to pick the
lock in two seconds flat. She dusted herself off, changed, and was
on her way out the door when she saw Victoria pulling onto the
graveled parking area in front of the rose arbor — the rose arbor
that had sealed Liz's decision to buy the house.

Victoria had Susy in the
back seat of her BMW. As always, Liz's heart sang a bright song at
the sight of her five-year-old daughter. As always, the thought
hurtled through her mind that, if Keith had had his way
....

But he hadn't, and for
that, Liz was more grateful than anyone else on earth.

"Hi, honey," she said to
the child.
"You
must've had a good time."

Her daughter waved through
the open window and unbuckled her seat belt in a very grown-up way,
then got out and skipped over into her mother's waiting arms for a
hug.

"Aunty Tori let me get a
milkshake for dessert!"

"And you were able to
drink it all?" asked Liz, glancing at Victoria with
amazement.

"Well, no," Susy
confessed. "Aunty Tori had to help me a little."

Victoria reassured Liz by
holding her thumb and forefinger two inches apart. Two inches of
milkshake wasn't so awful; Susy'd have her appetite back by
suppertime. "Well, just so you know you can't have a special
dessert like that
every
day," Liz said gravely.

"Oh,
Mommy,"
said Susy, as if she were
well aware that she didn't have a prayer.

For Liz, one of the the
hardest things about sharing Susy with her parents and Victoria on
a regular basis was trying to keep Susy's diet honest. It was so
tempting to let them ply her with treats, so tempting for Liz
herself to bribe Susy whenever she had to farm her out on a sunny
weekend or a big holiday, which was inevitably when Liz had to
work.