Echo watched Taja back the cruiser from the dock and turn it toward the mainland, pour on the power.
She decided to take a minute to go into the empty church. Was it time to ring the bell for a confession of her own? She couldn’t make up her mind about that, and her heart was no help either.
Cy Mellichamp was using a phone at a gallery associate’s desk in the second-floor office when Peter was brought in by a secretary. Mellichamp glanced at him with no hint of welcome. Two more associates, Mellichamp’s morale-boosting term for salespeople, were working the phones and computers. In another large room behind the office paintings were being uncrated.
Mellichamp smiled grievously at something he was hearing and fidgeted until he had a chance to break in.
“Really, Allen, I think your affections are misplaced. There is neither accomplishment nor cachet in the accident of Roukema’s success. And at six million—no, I don’t want to have this conversation. No. The man should be doing frescoes in tombs. You wanted my opinion, which I freely give to you. Okay, please think it over and come to your senses.”
Cy rang off and looked again at Peter, with the fixed smile of a man who wants you to understand he could be doing better things with his time.
“Why,” he asked Peter, “do otherwise bright young people treat inherited fortunes the way rednecks treat junk cars?” He shrugged. “Mr. O’Neill! Delighted to see you again. How can I help you?”
“Have you heard anything from Mr. Ransome lately?”
“We had dinner two nights ago at the Four Seasons.”
“Oh, he was in town?” Cy waited for a more sensible question. “His new paintings sell okay?”
“We did very, very well. And how is Echo?”
“I don’t know. I’m not allowed to see her, I might be a distraction. I thought Ransome was supposed to be slaving away at his art up there in Maine.”
Cy looked at his watch, looked at Peter again uncomprehendingly.
“I was hoping you could give me some information, Mr. Mellichamp.”
“In regard to?”
“The other women Ransome has painted. I know where one of them lives. Anne Van Lier.” The casual admission was calculated to provoke a reaction; Peter didn’t miss the slight tightening of Cy Mellichamp’s baby blue eyes. “Do you know how I can get in touch with the others?”
Cy said after a few moments, “Why should you want to?” with a muted suggestion in his gaze that Peter was up to no good.
“Do you know who and where those women are?”
An associate said to Cy, “Princess Steph on three.”
Distracted, Cy looked over his shoulder. “Find out if she’s on St. Barts. I’ll get right back to her.”
While Cy wasn’t watching him Peter glanced at a computer on a nearby desk where nobody was working. But the person whose desk it was had carelessly left his user ID on the screen.
Cy looked around at Peter again. “I could not help you if I did know,” he said curtly. “Their whereabouts are none of my business.”
“Why is Ransome so secretive about those women?”
“That, of course, is John’s prerogative. Now if you wouldn’t mind—it has been one of those days—” He summoned a moment of the old charm. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks for taking the time to see me, Mr. Mellichamp.”
“If there should be a next time, unless it happens to be official, you would do well to leave that gold shield in your pocket.”
EIGHT
Peter got home from his watch at twenty past midnight. He fixed himself a sardine sandwich on sourdough with a smelly slice of gouda and some salsa dip he found in the fridge. He carried the sandwich and a bottle of Sam Adams up the creaky back stairs to the third floor he shared with his brother Casey. The rest of the house was quiet except for his father’s distant whistling snore. But with no school for two days Case was still up with his iMac. Graphics were Casey’s passion: his ambition was to design the cars of the future.
Peter changed into sweats. The third floor was drafty; a wind laced with the first fitful snow of the season was belting them.
There was an e-mail on the screen of his laptop that said only missyoumissyoumissyou. He smiled bleakly, took a couple of twenties from his wallet and walked through the bathroom he shared with Casey, pausing to kick a wadded towel off the floor in the direction of the hamper.
“Hi, Case.”
Casey, mildly annoyed at the intrusion, didn’t look around.
“That looks like the Batmobile,” Peter said of the sleek racing machine Casey was refining with the help of some Mac software.
“It is the Batmobile.”
Peter laid a twenty on the desk where Casey would see it out of the corner of his eye.
“What’s that for?”
“For helping me out.”
“Doing what?”
“See, I’ve got this user ID, but there’s probably gonna be a log-on code too—”
“Hack a system?”
“I’m not stealing anything. Just want to look at some names, addresses.”
“It’s against the law.”
Peter laid the second twenty on top of the first.
“Way I see it, it’s kind of a gray area. There’s something going on, maybe involves Echo, I need to know about. Right away.”
Casey folded the twenties with his left hand and slid them under his mouse pad.
“If I get in any trouble,” he said, “I’m givin’ your ass up first.”
After nearly a week of Ransome’s absence, Echo was angry at him, fed up with being virtually alone on an island that every storm or squall in the Atlantic seemed to make a pass at almost on a daily basis, and once again dealing with acute bouts of homesickness. Never mind that her bank account was automatically fattening twice a month, it seemed to be payment for emotional servitude, not the pleasant collaboration she’d anticipated. Only chatty e-mails from girlfriends, from Rosemay and Stefan and even Kate O’Neill, plus Peter’s maddeningly noncommittal daily communications (he was hopeless at putting feelings into words), provided balance and escape from depression through the long nights. They reminded her that the center of her world was a long way from Kincairn Island.
She had almost no one to talk to other than the village priest, who seemed hard put to remember her name at each encounter, and Ransome’s housekeeper. But Ciera’s idea of a lively conversation was two sen-tences an hour. Much of the time, perhaps affected by the dismal weather that smote their rock or merely the oppression of passing time, Ciera’s face looked as if Death had scrawled an “overdue” notice on it.
Echo had books and her music and DVDs of recent movies arrived regularly. She had no difficulty in passing the time when she wasn’t working. But she hated the way she’d been painting lately, and missed the stealth insights from her employer and mentor. Day after day she labored at what she came to judge as stale, uninspired landscapes, taking a palette knife to them as soon as the light began to fade. She didn’t know if it was the creeping ennui or a faltering sense of confidence in her talent.
November brought fewer hours of the crystal lambency she’d discovered on her first day there.
Ransome’s studio was equipped with full-spectrum artificial light, but she always preferred painting outdoors when it was calm enough, no tricky winds to snatch her easel and fling it out to sea.
The house of John Ransome, built to outlast centuries, was not a house in which she would ever feel at home, in spite of his library and collection of paintings that included some of his own youthful work that would never be shown anywhere. These she studied with the avid eye of an archaeologist in a newly unearthed pyramid. The house was stone and stout enough but at night in a hard gale had its creepy, shadowy ways. Hurricane lamps had to be lit two or three times a week at about the same time her laptop lost satellite contact and the screen’s void refleeted her dwindled good cheer. Reading by lamplight hurt her eyes. Even with earplugs she couldn’t fall asleep when the wind was keening a single drawn-out note or slapdash, grabbing at shutters, mewling under the eaves like a ghost in a well.
Nothing to do then but lie abed after her rosary and cry a little as her mood worsened. And hope John Ransome would return soon. His continuing absence a puzzle, an irritant; yet working sorcery on her heart.
When she was able to fall asleep it was Ransome whom she dreamed about obsessively. While fitful and half awake she recalled every detail of a self portrait and the faces of his women. Had any of his subjects felt as she now did? Echo wondered about the depth of each relationship he’d had with his unknown beauties. One man, seven young women—had Ransome slept with any of them? Of course he had. But perhaps not everyone.