Time After Time (51 page)

She walked a little away
from the group; Jack followed.

"What the hell's going
on?" she asked in an undertone. "Why would David Penny want to
bring down the yard? He quit here on his own; Netta told me that,
on the day of the picnic. Besides, you throw him work whenever you
can. What would he have against
you?"

"My father, that's what,"
Jack said bitterly. "After David got a job here, he brought in
Cynthia when he heard we had an opening for a secretary. Right
after that, he quit, hoping to free-lance. But the timing was bad;
he couldn't find work. So they needed Cynthia's job more than
ever."

"And your
father—?"

"—couldn't pass her up,"
Jack said, his voice filled with disgust. "Cynthia didn't say
anything for a while, but eventually my father made the job
unbearable for her; she told her husband about it. David came here
in a jealous rage. We cooled things down with a lot of reassurances
— my father was getting out of the business by then, anyway — and a
healthy raise for Cynthia."

"Why didn't Cynthia bring
a lawsuit instead?" said Liz, surprised. "Isn't that how it's
usually done?"

"They needed the medical
that came with her job," Jack said without irony. "Also, my father
had evidence of employee theft by David and — I hate to admit this
— was willing to use it. Anyway, we had an uneasy truce going. I
thought. Obviously I thought wrong."

Liz remembered Cynthia's
state of distress earlier. "Did your father try to start something
up with her this afternoon? Is that why David was here
tonight?"

"Who knows?" Jack said
wearily. "From what Cynthia told me, it didn't sound like it,
frankly. But David walked in on them and must've thought so. Ah,
Christ, I'm sick of all this!''

He glanced again at the
droopy huddle of people a few feet away and said to Liz, "I'm sorry
you got caught in the cross fire; and look, don't worry about any
of it. I'll take care of David. I'll take care of my father and the
others. I'll—"

"Am I going to be in
trouble over this?" she asked, suddenly aware that she was the one
who'd done all the actual assaulting.

"No. David has no proof,
any more than we do. David's the one I'm going to—"

"Jack!" cried
Deirdre.

Jack and Liz turned to see
Deirdre helping Cornelius stagger over to a small pile of blocking
timbers and sit down on them.

Everyone gathered around
him. Cornelius said thickly, "It feels like someone's ... sitting
on my chest."

It never ends,
Liz thought, shocked, as she circled Susy with
one arm. "Should I call an—?"

"No," said Jack, making a
decision on the spot. "I can get him there in five minutes. Don't
move, Dad," he ordered his father, who didn't argue this time.
"I'll get the car." He turned to Liz. "You can get home
okay?"

"Of course," she said.
"Go!"

Jack ran and got his car,
and they helped Cornelius into it. Liz saw Jack punching a number
into his phone as he pulled away. Then she and Deirdre, obviously
feeling vulnerable despite the presence of a security guard at the
entry gate, got into their respective cars and drove their
respective charges home.

****

As it turned out, the
proof against David Penny came at dawn.

That was when a
half-million-dollar sailboat, propped up on boat stands while it
awaited work at Jack's shipyard, fell over onto the asphalt,
crushing in its starboard side. Besides the hull damage, the boat's
extensive, sophisticated electronics got zapped into oblivion when
the boat's aluminum mast, crashing through a power line on its way
down, caused a massive power surge.

Liz found out about it
because, like a fair number of Newporters, she woke up to discover
her power was out. After it was restored, she heard a report on the
radio that said the sailboat, buffeted by high winds all night, had
wriggled its boat stands loose and had fallen over.

Sure,
she thought.
With a little help from
a friend.
But how would Jack ever prove
it?

Truly, the night before
had been the night from hell. Her mind refused to dwell on any of
it for the simple reason that there was too much to dwell on. She
felt just like the electronics on the sabotaged sailboat: zapped
into oblivion.

She poured the last of the
coffee into the last of the clean mugs and dragged herself over to
the kitchen table, waiting for the caffeine to jump-start her
brain. Despite her exhaustion and maybe because of it, she found
herself mesmerized by the beauty of the view through her kitchen
screens. The nor'easter had roared through, leaving a crystal-clear
morning in its wake.

Fall was on the way.
Everything about the scene in front of her suggested it — from the
bright pink impatiens that were making their final headlong spurt
to eternity, to the gang of finches fighting over the sunflower
seeds, trying to fatten up for hard times ahead.

It seemed too soon. She
wasn't ready. She eyed the scattering of dried leaves on the lawn
with dismay. Once Fall came to Newport, the rich went south. Maybe
for a month, maybe for the season. But they didn't stay north. They
didn't stick around to work things out.

Snowbirds. Newport had a
lot of them.

The phone rang. Liz
answered it, as always, with her heart in her throat until she
learned, as usual, that it wasn't Jack.

This time it was Tori.
"That was really tough luck about the boat falling over," she said.
"Naturally you've heard."

"On the radio," Liz said
dully. "Not from Jack."

"Uh-oh. So you haven't
seen him since ... you know. Since the restaurant?"

Liz laughed a weary,
ironic laugh. "Oh, I saw him, all right. We went out on the
Déjà Vu
for an evening
cruise yesterday."

"Wow! That's
great.
So it doesn't
matter to him. I
told
you it wouldn't. That's great, Liz. I'm so happy for you
both."

"Your happiness is
somewhat premature," Liz said in the same flat voice. "It wasn't
that kind of cruise." She gave Victoria a brief summary of the
nonstop run of horrors they'd all been through.

By the time she finished,
it was a much more sober and subdued Victoria who said, "Is Susy
okay with all of it?"

"Susy was amazing. I'm
much more worried about Caroline. She didn't handle the storm well,
and later she must have realized that there was something badly
wrong with her father. As far as I can tell, the girl has
absolutely no one she can count on now. No one at all."

"There's her
mother."

"Wherever she is." Liz
sighed and said, "Any tally on ticket sales? Tell me we've sold
more than eleven."

"Okay. We've sold more
than eleven. Two more than eleven."

"My god. Well, this is
just perfect. What're we going to—? Oh! Tori, let me call you back.
I see Jack out there. I want to find out how his father
is."

Liz hung up and went
flying out her back door before Jack got out of shouting distance;
she knew by now not to expect him to stroll too close to the
chain-link fence.

Respecting my privacy, no
doubt,
she told herself with a grimly
ironic smile.

She flagged him down with
a whistle and a wave of her arms, and he came over, with Snowball
bouncing along behind him. He was wearing the same clothes he had
had on the night before. It didn't bode well.

"How is he?" Liz said
through the fence.

Jack looked terrible. His
eyes were rimmed and bloodshot; his voice was taut with fatigue as
he said, "Doing okay. It
was
a heart attack. They're doing some tests on him
now. They seem guardedly optimistic. He'll have to stop smoking, of
course. But he's always watched his weight, and he's fairly regular
in his exercise."

"That's good news, then,"
Liz said — especially considering that Jack looked as if his father
had just died. "Will your mother cut her stay in Italy short?" she
ventured to ask.

The look of pain on Jack's
face etched itself more deeply. "Hard to say. Before this, she'd
pretty much made up her mind not to come back to him at all. But
besides everything else, now we've had some other news — bad news —
for Caroline, anyway. Her mother — Stacey Stonebridge, you never
met her — is dead."

"What?"

"Three days ago. Pills and
alcohol. They've only just found her. Apparently she checked
herself out of that clinic and ... it's just incredible, that's
all. It's not surprising, really; just ... incredible."

"But what about Caroline?
What about Bradley?" Liz asked, overwhelmed with sympathy for the
children. She wrapped her fingers around the chain links of the
fence, like some internee in a camp. She felt so separated from
Jack, from his problems; so powerless to help.

Jack shook his head,
obviously not sure himself what would happen. "The kids have an
aunt — Stacey's sister — in Phoenix. She's the one who called. She
sounds a little flaky, but maybe I was misreading her over the
phone. I'm flying out there with Caroline today. There'll be a
memorial service in a couple of days."

"But ... what about your
father?" asked Liz, unable to comprehend it all. "Does he know?
Will you be able to leave him?"

"He knows. As for leaving
him — I'm not about to stick Caroline on a plane with a note pinned
to her collar. That's why my mother becomes so—" He sighed and
said, "Netta's a better nurse than I am, anyway."

"And ... David Penny?"
Selfish, she may have sounded; but she had to know about David
Penny. He might well have a score to settle with her.

An echo of an ironic smile
played on Jack's lips and then died away. "There, at least, we have
closure. Cynthia took him to the emergency room sometime before
dawn. The police were there on another matter; David saw them,
panicked, and tried to bolt. After that, with Cynthia's prodding,
he confessed to everything — even the ants were his inspiration.
But it came too late to save the boat from falling over. You know
about the boat?"

Her smile was a pale echo
of his own. "Everyone in your power grid knows about the
boat."

He nodded. "The
electricity. I forgot."

It wasn't surprising. He
did look shell-shocked. Liz wanted desperately to put her arms
around him, to comfort him. But he wasn't making any effort to
scale the fence; and though she would've done it gladly if he'd
asked her to — he wasn't asking her to.

"You haven't been to bed,"
she said in a gentle, beaten voice.

He snorted and said
tiredly, "Bed? I'm not sure I'll ever be in one again."

If the moment hadn't been
so sad; if their relationship hadn't been so far along; if the
fence between them hadn't been so high and wide and deep — she
might've come back with a quip and a promise.
Oh, you'll be in a bed, all right,
she might've said with a saucy smile.
Trust me.

But this was not the
moment, and theirs was not the relationship.

"Well ...." Jack plunged
his hands into his pockets and shrugged haplessly, then turned and
stared for a long, strained moment at his ancestral home, brooding
and dark under its canopy of ancient trees. "I guess I'll go tell
Caroline."

"I'm so sorry, Jack," Liz
said, still holding on to the fence.

She wanted, despite
everything, to say, "But what about us? What about
us?"
But she might just
as well have bayed at the moon.

He smiled in bleak
acknowledgment and walked a few steps away. Then, on an impulse, he
turned back and said, "You were great in the storm last night. If
you hadn't been there, I hate to think what might've
happened."

She knew it was a high
compliment, coming from him. She flushed all over with pleasure and
said, "Then it's true what they say?"

He gave her a puzzled
look. "What's true?"

"That gentlemen prefer
Hanes?"

He laughed out loud at
that, and shook his head in despair, and smiled, and laughed more
softly.

"Good-bye, Liz," he
whispered, and then he walked away.

For a while Liz considered
the disasters to be plain bad luck.

"But bad luck," she told
Victoria, "is when you're walking down a street minding your own
business and a flower pot falls on your head. These tragedies are
beyond bad luck. These are—"

"—retribution," said Tori.
"For the sins of the great-great-grandfather." She punched in the
next phone number on her list. While she let the phone ring, she
added, "How
is
the great-great-grandfather, by the way? Have you had any
sense of him being around?"

Liz shook her head.
"Nothing. Maybe he flew off to Phoenix with Jack and
Caroline."