Below decks of the Coast Guard cutter as it returned to the station on Mount Desert Island with the cruiser in tow, a change in pitch in the cutter’s engine and a shudder that ran through the vessel caused Echo to wake up in a cocoon of blankets. She jerked violently-
“Easy,” Peter said. He was sitting beside her on the sick bay rack, holding her hand.
“Where are we?”
“Coming in, I guess. You okay?”
She licked her chapped lips. “I think so. Peter, are we in trouble?”
“No. I mean, there’s gonna be a hell of an inquiry. We’ll take what comes and say what is. Want coffee?”
“No. Just want to sleep.”
“Echo, I have to know—”
“Can’t talk now,” she protested wanly
“Maybe we should. Get it out of the way, you know? Just say what is. Either way, I promise I can deal with it.”
She blinked, looked at him with ghostly eyes, raised her other hand to gently touch his face.
“I posed for him—well, you saw the work Taja took a knife to.”
“Yeah.”
She took a deep breath. Peter was like stone.
“I didn’t sleep with him, Peter.”
After a few moments he shrugged. “Okay.”
“But—no—I want to tell you all of it. Peter, I was getting ready to. Another couple of days, a week—it would’ve happened.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“I just needed to be with him. But I didn’t love him. It’s something I—I don’t think I’ll ever understand about myself. I’m sorry.”
Peter shook his head, perplexed, dismayed. She waited tensely for the anger. Instead he put his arms around her.
‘You don’t have to be sorry. I know what he was. And I know what I saw—in the eyes of those other women. I don’t see it in your eyes.” He kissed her. “He’s gone. And that’s all I care about.”
A second kiss, and her glum face lost its anxiety, she began to lighten up.
“I do love you. Infinity.”
“Infinity,” he repeated solemnly. “Echo?”
“Yes?”
“I looked at a sublet before I left the city a few days ago. Fully furnished loft in Williamsburg. Probably still available. Fifteen hundred a month. We can move in by Christmas.”
“Hey. Fifteen? We can swing that.” She smiled slightly, teasing. “Live in sin for a little while, that what you mean?”
“Just live,” he said.
On a Sunday in mid-April, four weeks before their wedding, Peter and Echo, enjoying each other’s company and one of life’s minor enchantments, which was to laze with no purpose, heard the elevator in their building start up.
“Company?” Peter said. He was watching the Knicks on TV.
“Mom and Julia aren’t coming until four,” Echo said. She was doing tai chi exercises on a floor mat, barefoot, wearing only gym shorts. The weather in Brooklyn was unseasonably warm.
“Then it’s nobody,” Peter said. “But maybe you should pull on a top anyhow.”
He walked across the painted floor of the loft they shared and watched the elevator rising toward them.
In the dimness of the shaft he couldn’t make out anyone in the cage.
When it stopped he pulled up the gate and looked inside. A wrapped package leaned against one side of the elevator. About three feet by five. Brown paper, tape, twine.
“Hey, Echo?”
She wriggled into a halter top and came over to look. Her lips parted in astonishment.
“It’s a painting. Omigod!”
“What?”
“Get it! Open it!”
Peter lugged the wrapped painting, which seemed to be framed, to the table in their kitchen. Echo followed with scissors and cut the twine.
“But it can’t be! There’s no way—! No, be careful, let me do this!”
She removed the thick paper and laid the painting flat on the table.
“Oh no,” Peter groaned. “I don’t believe this. He’s back.”
The painting was John Ransome’s self-portrait that had been hanging in the artist’s library on Kincairn when Echo had last seen it.
Echo turned it over. On the back Ransome had inscribed, “Given to Mary Catherine Halloran as a remembrance of our friendship.” It was signed and dated two days before Ransome’s disappearance.
She turned suddenly, shoving Peter aside, and ran to the loft windows that overlooked a cobbled mews and afforded a partial view of the Brooklyn Bridge, with lower Manhattan beyond.
“Peterrrr!”
He caught up to her, looked over her shoulder and down at the mews. There were kids playing, a couple of women with strollers. And a man in a black topcoat getting into a cab on the corner where the fruit and vegetable stand was doing brisk business. The man had shoulder-length gray hair and wore dark glasses.
That was all they could see of him.
Peter looked at Echo as the cab drove away. Touched her shoulder until she focused on him, on the here and now.
“He drowned, Echo.”
She turned with a broad gesture in the direction of the portrait. “But—”
“Maybe his body never turned up, but the water—we nearly froze ourselves on the boat. His hands were tied. Telling you, no way he survived.”
“John told me he swam the Hellespont once. The Dardanelles strait. That’s at least a couple miles across.
And hypothermia— everybody’s tolerance of cold is different. Sailors have survived for hours in seas that probably would kill you or me in fifteen minutes.” She gestured again, excited. “Peter— who else?”
“Maybe it was somebody works for Cy Mellichamp. That slick son of a bitch. Just having his little joke.
Listen, I don’t want the damn picture in our house. I don’t want to be reminded, Echo. How you got short-changed on your contract. None of it.” He waited. “Do you?”
“Well—” She looked around their loft. Shrugged. “I guess it wouldn’t be, uh, appropriate. But obviously—it was meant as a wedding gift.” She smiled strangely. “All I did was say how much I admired his self-portrait. John told me all about it. There’s quite a story goes with it, which would make the painting especially valuable to a collector. It’s unique in the Ransome canon.”
‘Yeah? How valuable?”
“Hard to say. I know a Ransome was knocked down recently at Christie’s for just under five million dollars.”
Peter didn’t say anything.
“The fact that his body hasn’t been recovered complicated matters for his estate. But,” Echo said judiciously, “as Stefan put it, ‘it certainly has done no harm to the value of his art.'”
“You want a beer?”
“I would love a beer.”
Echo remained by the windows looking out while Peter went to the refrigerator. While he was popping tops he said, “So—figure we just put the portrait away in a closet a couple years, then it could be worth a shitload?”
“Oh baby,” Echo replied.
“Then, also in a couple years,” Peter said, coming back to her and carefully fitting a can of Heineken into her hand, “when Ransome’s estate gets settled, that cottage in Bedford, which looks like a pretty nice investment, will go on the market?”
“Might.” Echo took a long drink of the beer and began laughing softly, ironically, to herself.
“All this could depend on, you know, he doesn’t turn up.” Peter looked out the window. “Again.”
The last Ransome woman was silent. Wondering, lost in a private rapture.
Peter said, ‘You want to order in Chinese for Rosemay and Julia tonight? I’ve still got a few bucks left on my MasterCard.”
“Yeah,” Echo said, and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Chinese. Sounds good.”