By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (5 page)

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Cindy thought she saw red blood even before
she hit them. That was what she remembered: blood, a supernatural
omen, a devil's promise of the deed to come. And then the horrible,
ghastly, sickening thud and the long, long screech of wet brakes.
Whose? Hers? And the door opened and she fell rather than jumped
out, tripping on her gown; and the rip of black silk as she fell to
one knee, the gown trapped under her shoe. When she stood back up
her teeth were chattering, or maybe they
had
been, all
night, all endless-nightmare night. There was no possible way that
Cindy could acknowledge or comprehend the act as she stood in the
drizzle, viciously squeezing and pinching her arms to force herself
into wakefulness. Nothing happened. She was still there. She stared
unblinking at a small white beam of light which lay flat on the
road, throwing her handiwork into dim, horrifying relief. There
were two ... lumps. Nothing moved, not the dark pile of clothing,
not the dark animal. Not her.

"Hello?" she whispered, instantly aware
through her fear that she would never be able to utter the simple
greeting again. "Are you ... there?" Nothing, nothing moved.

Cindy had no idea whether she rode home
under her own power or on the broom of a witch. All she remembered
was an overwhelming sense of paranoia as she kept a terrified
lookout for flashing sirens. At one point she was convinced that
she was clawing her way to the surface of the ocean from thousands
of fathoms down, waiting for breath. At another point a dazzling
sense of vertigo overwhelmed her as she negotiated the sharp turns
of the winding coastal road in the wet, horizon-less night. Still
dazed, she overshot the house, braked, and backed furiously up the
road and into the garage, hell-bent on reaching the asylum of her
bedroom.

Seacliff was no more a summer rental than a
Rolls-Royce is a second car for most people. It was one of the
dozens of Gilded Age mansions which were no longer viable as
private residences but which earned their keep as summer quarters
for the many America's Cup syndicates, both U.S. and foreign.
Seacliff was a vast and imposing Tudor built on a flat run of rocky
ledge with a view to the south of the hazy blue waters of Rhode
Island Sound. It housed not only the Setons but the ten
Shadow
crewmen, two of their wives, three children, and a
babysitter. When the group arrived in May there had been a polite
but fierce scramble for rooms with a view of the Atlantic.

Everyone had scrambled but Cindy. She had
demanded, and gotten, a suite facing away from the hated ocean. It
was in fact the ground floor of a pentagonal tower of soaring
height completely enclosed by stained glass windows. Alan, who was
rarely home and cared little where he slept, had nonetheless
predicted that his wife would tire eventually of the lurid colors
and long for a glimpse of real sky.

Alan was wrong. Cindy, who shunned the other
wives and their children, spent many long afternoons curled up in a
wide window seat covered in green velvet, her arms hugging her
knees tightly, staring entranced at the men and maidens and odd
mythical and quasi-religious creatures in the vaulting
stained-glass panels, inventing fantasies about them.

Now, having stripped herself of her torn
black gown, she sat cocooned in a cloud-soft robe of palest pink
cashmere on the tufted window seat, with only one conscious
thought: she could not, she must not, sleep through the dawn. So
intense was her focus that she did not hear the running steps along
the Persian-carpeted hall outside her room.

"Cindy! For God's sake! Why didn't you
answer me? Are you all right?"

Sweeping her damp, straw-straight hair from
her face, Cindy turned slowly and vaguely to the breathless, angry
figure in the doorway. He was soaked completely through, and his
khakis and
Shadow
-emblazoned windbreaker clung in wet
hollows to him, making him seem to loom even taller.

"Alan? Why are you here?" Cindy looked
genuinely puzzled.

"What happened? Cindy, what happened?" His
voice was anxious, but he made no move to come into the room that
had been hers exclusively, at her insistence, after the first
month.

"Happened? Nothing," she answered
briefly.

"Then why the
hell
is the front of
the Mercedes covered with blood?"

"Blood? Oh, that. I hit a dog."

"A dog? How fast were you going? The grill
is bent."

"It was ... a big dog." She bowed her head
to her knees, her arms still wrapped tightly around her shins.

"How is it?" he asked quietly.

"It's dead."

"Did you do anything? Call anyone?"

"There was nothing to do, Alan. It's dead.
No lights were on in any of the nearby houses. It can wait until
morning," she said wearily into the soft folds of cashmere. "I'm
very tired." She heard him take two or three steps across the
marble floor and her head jerked up. "No, Alan."

He stood still. His face was haggard with
fatigue, and wet dark curls tumbled over his forehead nearly down
to his eyebrows. The bloodlines of his English ancestry were
apparent in the Roman nose and in the square jaw, but most of all
in his bearing. There was something indomitable about the way he
carried his extra inch over six feet. Surrounded as he was by all
the stained-glass windows, it flashed through Cindy's mind that a
knight who had shed himself of a suit of armor after heavy battle
might look as Alan Seton did now: soaked through, exhausted, but
with an unmistakable sense of destiny.

"You need a haircut," she said.

"Cindy—"

"And a shave. Alan ... you shouldn't be
here," she said. "Nothing's changed."

"Cindy, it must have been bad. Don't tell me
it wasn't. You look terrible. I can't leave you like this. You're
shivering, wet—"

"Not
wet!" she interrupted with
sudden ferocity. "Damp.
You're
wet, clear through! I had
enough sense to come in out of the rain. What's your excuse?" It
frightened her, the seething anger in her voice. She had to
maintain control, now if ever.

"You knew we had to keep working—"

"Of course.
Of
course." It was a
dismissal, but she couldn't help adding, "And did you finish work
on your precious new mast?"

"No," he admitted. "There's no way we can be
ready to sail tomorrow. I've asked for a day's postponement. The
Race Committee was very good about it."

"So you
could
have gone to the Ball
tonight, after all," she said instantly.

With that Alan parked his hands on his hips
and gave her a look of wonder, blurred by a half-smile of sorrow.
"You just don't get it, do you? Why I'm in Newport."

"I know perfectly well why
you're
here: to throw two years of your life and most of your fortune
after an eight-pound silver cup with a hole in the bottom. What I
don't know is why
I'm
here. I'm getting out, Alan. Out of
this godforsaken marriage." Her voice had risen high, like a
cresting wave, and was about to break. One more word and she would
burst into tears. Slowly she swung away from him and resumed
staring at her favorite window panels. And to think she once had
thought she loved him.

"Cindy," Alan said softly, and he was beside
her, lifting bits of blond hair between his strong, blunt fingers,
rubbing the strands over one another, trying to reconnect the
frayed ends of their torn relationship. "Poor Cindy."

She pulled her head away, but softly,
gently; the strands he was holding tugged at her scalp, sending
little shock waves of pleasure-current over her head and shoulders.
"No, Alan," she said, but there was confusion in her voice. This
was how she'd become enthralled to him in the first place: because
Alan Seton had a magician's touch. After their first night together
he had known exactly what she wanted, how much she wanted, where
she wanted it. She hadn't even been a challenge for him.

Now he slid his hand through her hair,
rubbing the cool, damp thickness into the back of her neck with
warm, firm fingertips. "Alan, don't," she said, closing her eyes.
"You know it won't work." But it
was
working, and quickly
too.

She must break off the contact; then the
spell would be broken too.

"I'll make it up to you when this is over,
Cindy; I will," he said on a sigh. He slid his hand from the back
of her neck, along the line of her shoulder, and down, inside her
soft robe, over the front of her breast.

The convulsive events of the last few hours
had whipped Cindy's senses to fever pitch, and her moan—almost a
sob—said that the fever was about to break. "Oh, God,
Alan—
stop
it."

"Stop? And yet you say I don't pay enough
attention to you," he said. His voice was low, seductive, and
completely unnerving.

She stood up, breaking the allure of his
voice, of his touch. "Not tonight," she said firmly.

His blue-gray eyes held her in a look of
curious appraisal. "It's been more than a month, Cindy."

"That long? It doesn't seem like it." And
why should it? She'd been making love nearly every day during that
month. "Time flies when you're having fun, I guess," she added,
aware of the irony in her remark.

Did he know? He had certainly suspected, she
knew that much. Again he looked at her, hard, and this time it was
clear that he knew there was someone else.

He snorted. "You know what? Your loss," he
said briefly. He turned and walked out of the room without looking
back.

For a moment Cindy was too taken aback to
respond. He'd never walked out on her before. She knew why, of
course: guilt, because he had been spending so much time ignoring
his marriage to chase the Cup. But that was then.

"Goodbye, Alan," Cindy murmured to the empty
room. "Goodbye and good luck."

Four years of her life down the drain. A
tear, the first of the night, rolled down her high fine cheekbone,
but Cindy wiped it away; it was hardly the time for regrets. No,
she told herself, she would not miss Alan. And certainly not anyone
else connected with the
Shadow
campaign.

But how sad never again to see the
beautiful, colorful characters in the stained-glass panels. For the
last time she gazed at her favorite. For the last time she tried to
fathom the mystery of the woman in the flowing blue gown, her arms
outstretched toward the next panel. Who was the tall young man with
shoulder-length hair in the adjacent panel? In his simple robe, he
made it impossible to tell. Why did he have one hand on his breast
and the other raised, palm forward, toward the woman? Was the
maiden fleeing from the serpentine creatures and gargoyles in the
panel on the other side of her? Reaching out for the man's blessing
or guidance? Since the room once had been a chapel, he was probably
a holy man. But Cindy had always chosen to believe that he was
Lancelot, warning Guinevere not to follow him. But Guinevere loved
him desperately and would do anything to be with him. Anything.

The clock on the bed stand told her that it
was three a.m.—time to pack. Cindy locked her door, and from under
the massive four-poster she pulled a soft dark blue duffle bag.
She'd spent part of the last few weeks in an intense and
comprehensive shopping spree, and the fruits of her effort lay
neatly folded, still with price tags attached, in two drawers of
the armoire: a whimsical but undeniably chic selection of travel
wear.

Unfortunately the circumstances had forced
Cindy to shop exclusively among the ready-to-wear lines. Once they
got to Europe she would have plenty of opportunity to replenish her
wardrobe from among her favorite couturiers. For now she tried to
stay brutally practical, stuffing her bag with American designers:
a plain little skirt and trench jacket from Bill Blass; a
front-button white linen dress by Calvin Klein; a lace-trimmed
blouse and earth-toned ruffled skirt by Ralph Lauren—initially they
would be heading west, after all. Cindy winced as she jammed a
couple of Oscar de la Renta silks into the duffle; probably they
would never be wearable again, but tissue-paper packing was out of
the question.

Should she take the pearl and crystal beaded
bed jacket? So pretty, but no. She tossed it reluctantly back into
the drawer. The jogging suit was more of a problem—bulky, but she
squished it ruthlessly into a corner. She'd always meant to try
jogging, though not at six in the morning, when Alan ran.

Accessories. She had dreaded this moment,
having bought wildly and with little regard for the space shoes and
handbags took up. After several false starts Cindy settled on a
small ring-lizard clutch in a carefully neutral shade; a shoulder
bag of snake and calfskin; another in dove grey lambskin. The
cobalt-blue high heels—Paris—went in and out of the bag several
times, remaining, with much sorrow, out. All the other shoes
stayed. Finally, she dressed herself in jeans and a pale green
pullover of cotton weave. She couldn't get more unobtrusive than
that.

Time to go. Cindy pulled open the bottom
drawer of a miniature antique carved rosewood chest, lifted the
silk lining, and removed the cash she had so assiduously scraped
together in the last few weeks. It wasn't much—ten thousand dollars
in hundred-dollar bills—but it would be convenient. She had savings
bonds, too: twenty thousand dollars' worth (on maturity), an
inheritance gift from her grandmother, the only lump of money she'd
ever received that wasn't designated to that odious trust fund. But
could she cash them if she were dead? On the whole, she thought
not; but she took them along anyway.

She must not take any of her jewelry, of
course; that she understood. Nearly all of the heirloom pieces were
in a safe deposit box, anyway—and out of sight, in Cindy's case,
was definitely out of mind. Still ... she fingered the double
strand of gray Tahitian pearls and diamonds that she had so nearly
worn tonight and sighed. Such a waste to leave them behind when she
so often wore black. She threw the necklace into her duffel bag
with the cash and the bonds, zipped up the canvas bag, and hurried
to the door, forgetting that she'd locked it. In the split second
that it took to dump her bags on the floor and turn the key, she
reconsidered about the cobalt shoes, ran back to her closet,
scooped them up and jammed them into a side pocket of the duffel.
If they hadn't been the exact color of her eyes, she would not have
bothered.