Alice At Heart (4 page)

Except for that one moment, when I touched the man, and the child.

Then I was real.

Alice, who are you? Where are you?

Griffin had very few lucid moments, and most were devoted to her. Some parts of him were ruptured, some parts were broken, some parts were merely bruised or torn. All would heal. But in spirit he was shattered.
Hell of a way to end a career
, he thought when the fear crawled through him.
Only thirty-nine years old and finished
.

He lay in a room in a private Spanish clinic available only to the rich and well connected, which included treasure-hunting scions of the merchant-shipping Randolphs of Savannah, Georgia, USA. His right leg was encased in a cast from knee to ankle, and his left arm from elbow to wrist. He was covered in bandages over sutured wounds. His veins were fitted with IV’s, his chest with electrodes, his nose with an oxygen tube. He was a tall, strong man, but the bizarre accident had ruined him. He drifted on a slow tide of medication, and when he could think, he sweated.

I can’t go back under the water. I can’t do it anymore. I’m seeing things. I’m losing my mind.

Few people realized he lived with such fear of the deep that he shook and vomited every time he made a major dive. His infinitely loyal crew insisted he wasn’t afraid, only suffering from a slate of very odd food allergies. He came out of the water ravenous and consumed whole bottles of pure vegetable oil. For meals he ate pounds of salted fish and had been known to scoop live oysters from the water, crack them with any blunt object handy, and suck them straight from the shell. He drank heavily but was never seen drunk, he gave his money away as often as he kept it, and he had no known home address other than an old cottage along an isolated stretch of the Georgia coast, near the town of Bellemeade.

He had always been a loner and circumspect about certain odd traits in himself, things that had only seemed more isolating to a rich southern boy growing up without parents. He hated the water but was the finest swimmer. He was a man of strange diets and quiet passions breaking women’s hearts without any cruel intentions, repulsed by how easy it was to lure people to him. He had a talent for finding things beneath the water, a vaguely disreputable ability to pry treasures from the wrecks of the world’s most forgotten ships. But he was always, always terrified of the water he commanded so easily.

Sometimes, he sang silently as he went down.

And the ocean sang back.

There had been no gold waiting for him in the wreckage of the
Excalibur
, no hidden jewels or other artifacts. Relatives of its long, lost crew had hired Griffin. Would he search the wreckage for the men’s personal belongings and remnants of their skeletons? It was a morbid, dangerous job, diving into a treacherous hulk edged with jagged metal, its innards a labyrinth of hallways and claustrophobic cabins. Every ordinary deep-sea salvage company had turned the families down or had demanded a huge fee.

Griffin took the job for nothing. He was famous as much for his quirky sense of honor as for his notorious luck in locating priceless artifacts beneath the waters of the world. Among the network of other reputable treasure hunters—those who didn’t simply loot sites, but brought along archaeologists and historians to study them—it was gossiped that his successes came from inside information, thanks to his family connections. The Randolphs of Savannah were one of the oldest cargo-shipping clans in America.

Now he lay in bed, dreaming in fluid fantasies that might be nightmares. This was not the first time he’d imagined women rescuing him from deep water.

In the midst of a storm, thirty-four years in the past, far beneath the surface of the cold Atlantic off the coast of Georgia, he saw the Bonavendier sisters, Lilith, Mara, and Pearl. They were his mother’s relatives, distant cousins, notorious and strange. Their hair floated in long curtains behind him. He was four years old, broken, bleeding, sobbing, with the ocean pouring down his throat. He was more than seventy feet below the surface of the Atlantic.

Mother
.
Father.
He struggled to point his broken arms toward the bottom.
Go get them, too
.

Hush, child, the water has fallen in love with them. They can’t come back
.

The sisters’ voices vibrated inside him, their music fearless in the vast, deadly deep, their souls at home in an ocean world where he would never feel safe again.

You hate my parents; you killed them
, he cried.

Rest, child. Rest.

“Whatever you’re dreaming about, stop moving, or I’ll get the nurse to pop you with some more painkillers,” demanded a familiar voice, deep, kind, Southern, and elegant, hoarse from decades of whisky, cigars, and the wrong women. Griffin woke in a groggy daze, tied down by tubes and wires. He looked up at a rugged older man in rumpled khakis and an old flannel shirt. A tiny gold crucifix gleamed in one of his ears. His silver hair was disheveled as always, framing a cynical face tanned brown by the ocean sun.

Charles Anthony Randolph, known as C.A., first cousin to Griffin’s father, Porter, gently wiped Griffin’s sweating face. “Whatever the hell you’re dreaming about, stop it.”

“Trying, but I can’t,” Griffin mumbled, floating in a dream world where the Bonavendier sisters and a phantom named Alice sometimes gazed at him with amazing green eyes. Alice in Wonderland. “Tired of looking though the looking glass to find nothing. Nothing. Where’s Alice?”

C.A. grunted gently at his drugged musings. “You’re not making any sense. If I take you back to Savannah babbling like this, well, hell, the family will think you’re as crazy as me.” C.A. laughed ruefully. As a young man, everyone had expected him to become Porter Randolph’s right hand at Randolph Shipping. But then Porter had drowned off Sainte’s Point and C.A. had gone off some deep end of his own.

“Randolphs aren’t mean-spirited,” he told Griffin. “They’re just stuck in their own damned belief system, full of rules and order, proper etiquette and sensible duty, not maudlin sentiment. I’m not going to tell any of them the details of this little event of yours. Because you know it’s a miracle you survived.”

“No . . . miracles in the water. Except Alice.”

“Look, mister, I don’t know who the hell this Alice is—some lady-friend you left behind or not—but God bless her if the memory kept you fighting. You were under water for over ten minutes before your crew was able to find you. The doctors don’t understand why you don’t have brain damage. They don’t understand why you’re not crippled. Hell, there’re nuns in the hospital chapel who cross themselves every time your name is mentioned. A religious man would say you’ve gotten a second chance. Time to change your life, hmmm? Toe the straight and narrow? Come in from the sea and settle down? You don’t want to end up like your ol’ cousin C.A, do you? A salty drunk with strange ideas.” C.A. dabbed a cool washcloth on Griffin’s head, his touch gentler than his voice. “I don’t recommend it. “

“I think . . . ” Griffin murmured, “I can breathe underwater.”

“Okay, we settled one question,” C.A. said with great patience. “So you’re already crazy. I won’t tell anybody, I promise. But that’s no reason for you not to thank God and haul your ass back into the family fold. Just use me as a bad example. You can change.”

Change into what
? Griffin thought and tried to remember what he might have been when the water loved him like blue sky.

“We’ve forgotten to take chances,
to love passionately, to be different,” Lilith said. “We’ve created a fantasy, here, on this island. But we are real, Sisters.”

“The world comes to us,” Mara said, scowling. “We haven’t been lonely. We have our kind. That’s all we need.”

“Liar,” Pearl said gently.

“We’re going to get Alice,” Lilith said firmly. “And then we’re going to sing Griffin home, too.”

4

In our version of Noah’s Ark, the world was destroyed by a great drought.

—Lilith

After a week of public humiliation and private interrogations, the governor and his minions still can’t decide what to do about me, so they’ve decided to give me an award for heroism. It is ludicrous, infuriating, insulting. I have politely declined the ceremony.

“You will go, Alice, and you will accept,” my mother’s eldest sister orders. “Or the people in this town will drive you out like a sick bird in their house. And I’ll be at the head of the crowd.”

She’s told me all my life that I’m a burden, that servitude and gratitude are my only hope of paying back the misery I represent. She has pointed out time and again that my mother won the Miss Riley County Pageant the year before I was born. That she had a scholarship to a state university and had planned to become a teacher. That the son of our Baptist minister was in love with her and they had planned to announce their engagement when she turned eighteen. That she had gone to the coast that summer to work as a counselor at a church camp. And that there, under the sultry sun of the beaches and coves and magnolia-scented ocean, some perverted stranger had ruined her and all she would have been.

I have no doubt my mother was beautiful and beloved and chaste and foolish, and that the family’s adoring memories of her makes her downfall and suicide too painful to forgive. They don’t have anyone else to blame, so they blame me. “Go to the damned ceremony, Alice,” her eldest sister says now. “Or else.”

Where would I live if I’m driven out of Riley? Where would anyone else give me a job? My name’s been in all the state newspapers and on television and even on an Internet website about odd news of the world. I look at myself and see a notorious outcast. Since I don’t know who or what I am, I have no idea how I could go someplace new and start over as someone else.

So, tomorrow I will accept my
award
.

That’s what they call it, anyway.

“Please slow the car down, Barret
. These unnatural heights make me dizzy,” Pearl announced.

Barret filled the car’s driver seat next to her like an aging, Teutonic wrestler, though dressed in the finest of dark suits. “Yes, my darling,” he answered, embroidering the affection with a thick German accent. She gently patted his shoulder in thanks.

The Bonavendiers’ classic silver Mercedes lumbered toward a bridge high over a mountain creek bed strewn with boulders and lush green rhododendron. Ice glinted on the boulders in the cold winter sunshine.

Lilith tilted her head near a backseat window and stared down into the creek gorge grimly. What an unfriendly part of the world this was, where water was reduced to sneaking between huge hummocks of land like a tiny, living vein in a dull stone. She spread a hand over the opalescent gray weave of her dress suit. She, too, felt breathless.

“Oh, I’m dizzy, yes, I am. I’m going to be ill from these heights,” Pearl moaned again.

“You can’t possibly feel air sick,” Mara snapped. Seated beside Lilith in the Mercedes’ backseat, Mara faced straightforward, nonetheless, as she twirled one long end of a sheer, emerald-green shawl over her soft white suit. “These are not the Alps or the Rockies. People can’t even ski here; there isn’t enough snow. It’s just all ordinary and rude and
low
.” Her blush-pink mouth flattened. She, too, avoided glancing at the deep mountain ravine beneath their car. “You see?” she went on. “I’m not air sick. Lilith’s not airsick. And our new mystery ‘sister’ doesn’t get air sick, obviously, since she’s lived all these years up here in these godforsaken termite mounds. I say Alice Riley is nothing but a typical, senseless land-lover.”

Pearl coughed. “Breathing is not about altitude, Mara. It’s about
attitude
.” Pearl steepled a fragrant, manicured hand to the throat of her silk jacket, the nails deep peach against the material’s brilliant sapphire blue. Colorful. Lilith’s sisters were as colorful as tropical fish. “I can only assume poor little Alice has adjusted as best she can to her circumstances, surviving by inherent strength of character. It’s a great testament to her lineage if she’s managed to survive on such thin air.”

“You’re assuming poor little Alice has a lineage,” Mara retorted. “I say ‘poor little Alice’ is going to be a huge, ordinary disappointment. She’s not one of us. It just can’t be.”

“Oh, you’re such a cynic! You have the heart of a shark. Yes, a shark.” Pearl fluttered her hands. “Keep away! I’m as heartless as a Killer White! I’m Menacing Mara, Queen of the Unimpressed.”

“Oh, go swim up a sewer pipe. And take ‘poor little Alice’ with you.”

“I’ll hear no more of such nonsense,” Lilith said quietly. “Pearl, restrain your whimsies. Mara, hold your sarcasm. I’m tired of you both. This is about our family honor. Our family’s past, our family’s future. We’re going to meet Alice Riley and determine precisely where she belongs. And if what I suspect is true, we’re going to beg her forgiveness. Now,
be quiet
.”

Pearl and Mara traded accusing glares as if they were teenagers scolded by a teacher. Both were startlingly beautiful, and far younger looking than their ages. Pearl’s long locks remained the color of flame, and Mara’s thick mane, when unleashed, made a luxurious mahogany river down her back.

Don’t encourage Lilith’s noble guilt
, Mara hissed silently to Pearl.

I like noble guilt
, Pearl glared back.

Neither old nor young, neither this nor that, the sisters glided across the mountain bridge with the strained dignity of royalty visiting an inferior neighboring kingdom.

Barret guided the car with mysterious German precision up a twisting mountain road that crested a forested ridge. He devotedly managed the sisters’ cars, their boats, their home. He had loved Pearl nearly all his life. Life, Barret Anzhausen mused, ebbed and flowed with the gift of extraordinary unknowns and the deepest of faith. He moved his crippled right leg gingerly as he braked the car.

“There is the town of Riley,” Barret announced. In the small valley ahead of them, the plain, pragmatic town of Riley peeped from among trees and pastures, a sterile mountain burg anchored to bone-dry land surrounded by hulking, dry mountains.