Hale's Point (14 page)

“No, I’ll do the cooking,” Tucker said. “That’s really not a
problem.”

“I don’t mind. Really,” she insisted.

“Neither do I. In fact, I’d prefer if you’d let me.”

The exchange was interrupted by excited voices from the beach.
They all looked down to see Lily squatting at the edge of the water, dipping
Mimi’s book purposefully in and out of the waves. Jamie and Brenna hovered over
her, he laughing, she wringing her hands.

“I’m sorry, missus,” Brenna called up.

Mimi groaned, but managed a smile. “I’d better go down and
supervise. Ever since I got an au pair to help out, I haven’t had a second’s
peace.” She waved goodbye and descended the boulder stairway.

Phil said, “I’d like to go down there, too. I’ve been wanting
to take a walk on the beach, but I want company. Harley—would you join me?”

She said, “Do you think I should? After the heatstroke?”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Phil said, “if you feel up to it,
you should do it. You’ll know if it’s too much. Besides, I’ll be there if you
start to feel sick.”

She shrugged. “All right.”

Phil shot a triumphant look in Tucker’s direction, then
added, “Too bad Tucker can’t join us, but given his handicap, any kind of
strenuous activity’s pretty much out of the question.”

Tucker rolled his eyes. “You don’t play fair,” he growled as
Harley turned away and headed for the drop-off to the beach.

Phil grinned puckishly. “I warned you.” He followed Harley to
the beach.

Tucker lit another cigarette and watched them pick their way
down to the shore. Phil assisted Harley with a hand on her arm, which probably
served no purpose other than to slow her down, but annoyed the hell out of
Tucker—no doubt Phil’s sole intent.

Tucker reflected on that surprising openness in Harley’s
expression, which had turned out to be temporary. As quickly as it had come, it
was gone, replaced by the old familiar distance.

He expelled a stream of smoke in a long sigh. It had been
like a brief, unexpected thaw in the middle of January. It tantalized you with
its warmth and then the cold set in again. The only thing that kept you going
through the rest of the winter was the eventual promise of spring.

Chapter 6

“Tucker Hale has marched
to a different drummer from
a very young age,” Liz said.

Harley shifted the receiver to the other ear and turned her
head to listen for sounds in the hallway outside the closed door to the study,
but all she could hear was the light rain that had just begun pattering against
the windows. Tucker was presumably in the kitchen, making a salad to go with
the lasagna Mimi had brought over, but he might start wondering where she was
and come looking for her. It would not be good for him to overhear her talking
on the phone about him.

“He thinks, and will tell you, that his rebellion began at
sixteen.” Liz spoke the way learned people write, in complete and
well-thought-out sentences, with no awkward pauses, not even the occasional “uh”
or “um.” She spoke slowly, and with a pronounced Hale’s Point drawl that made
her sound almost British.

“In fact,” Liz continued, “he’s been something of a wild card
since much earlier—since the age of eleven, to be precise.”

Liz loved to be precise—it was in the nature of
statisticians, Harley acknowledged—but still… “Since the age of eleven?”
Harley asked. “How did you pick that age?”

“I didn’t just pick it,” Liz snapped, and Harley realized
belatedly what an insult that would be to a woman who had spent her career
quantifying facts in order to prove how factual they were.

“I know, Liz,” Harley began. “I didn’t mean—”

“Tucker was eleven years old when he found out that his
mother committed suicide,” Liz said. “He hasn’t been the same since.”

It took several seconds for the older woman’s words to sink
in. Harley sat perfectly still with the phone to her ear, mentally replaying
the words over and over to make sure she had heard them right:
His mother committed suicide… His mother
committed suicide….
She was still a little dazed from the heatstroke, but
she didn’t think she had heard wrong.

Liz’s voice snapped her out of it. “Harley? Dear?”

She said the words out loud. “His mother committed suicide?”

“Yes, of course. I assumed you knew.”

“No. I knew she had died. When he was five, he said.”

“It was suicide,” Liz stated with finality. “Of course, he
wasn’t told the truth. He was deemed too young.
R.H.
told him her appendix had burst. Still, it affected him profoundly. He was
despondent for quite some time. As he got older, I begged
R.H.
to tell him what really happened before he found out on his own, but
unfortunately he didn’t take my advice.”

“How did he find out?”

“When he was eleven, he stumbled across her death
certificate. The cause of death was asphyxiation by hanging.”

Harley felt as if she had been kicked softly in the stomach.
All the air went out of her lungs. “My God.” she whispered.

There was a pause at the other end. Harley could sense Liz’s
puzzlement. “It does happen, my dear. People do kill themselves. It’s a sad
fact of life.”

“I know,” Harley said quickly. “I know. I just…” She closed
her eyes and saw the darkly beautiful
Anjelica
as she
appeared in the photograph on Tucker’s desk, and the baby in her arms, the baby
with her eyes. “Why? Why did she… Why would she—”

Liz’s words were measured. “My understanding is that she was
unhappy in her marriage.”

Another face materialized over
Anjelica’s
,
also young, also sad-eyed, but fair and pale—Jennifer Sayers, Harley’s mother.
She rubbed her eyes to dispel the image.

“When Tucker found out,” Liz continued, “he took complete
leave of his senses. Children that age are notoriously irrational, especially
the male of the species. He came to the conclusion that
R.H.
was responsible for her suicide, that he somehow drove her to it. He was also
furious at having been misled for so many years about the cause of her death.”
She sighed. “He never did regain his trust in his father, and from then on, he
pretty much went his own way.”

“Which brings us around to his leaving home twenty years ago—”

“Twenty-one,” Liz corrected.

“Twenty-one, and suddenly showing up now. Which, in turn,
brings us around to the reason I called. Would
R.H.
approve of his staying on here for the summer? I pretty much invited him to
stay, and I certainly don’t want to have to take back the invitation, but this
is
R.H.’s
home. If I have to, I will.”

“You must understand, my dear, that in personal matters,
R.H.
has not always exercised the best judgment.”

Harley marveled at Liz’s diplomacy while deeply regretting
the meaning behind the smooth words:
R.H.
would not
want Tucker to stay.

“Therefore,” Liz continued, “I suggest that you rephrase the
question in order to inquire whether
I
would
approve of Tucker’s staying on.”

“Oh.” Was this strictly ethical? Harley quickly searched her
conscience and concluded that it was close enough. “Then, is it all right with
you if he stays?”

“But of course, my dear! I’m delighted if he stays! Tucker’s
happiness means more to me than my own. He’s the son I never had.”

“Oh. Good.”

Several muted electronic beeps came from Liz’s end of the
line. “And now, if you will excuse me, it appears that my microwave has
finished wreaking havoc with the molecules in my frozen veal
marsala
. Goodbye.”

Harley dropped the receiver back in its cradle, slumped down
in
R.H.’s
leather swivel chair, and rubbed her hands
over her face.

His mother had committed suicide. She supposed she could have
told Liz why that information had stunned her so, but although she liked Liz
very much, their friendship had never been on that personal a level.

She uncovered her eyes. The study was a masculine enclave of leather,
wood, and books, dappled with rain-silvered light from a big,
multipaned
window. Directly across from her, behind a
tufted green leather couch on a table all its own, sat a large, exquisitely
detailed model of a sailboat. Harley recognized it as an oversize twin of the
one Tucker had been handling the other day in his room upstairs. It had been
crafted of varnished wood with canvas sails, and she could tell from the scale
that the boat it represented was a large one. It had two masts and four sails,
and the word
Anjelica
was painted across the stern in neat maroon letters.

She looked at the two photographs on the desk, the
photographs of Tucker, wondering why
R.H.
had kept
them there, given their estrangement: the happy, clean-cut young boy at the wheel
of the
Anjelica
and the worldly, disenfranchised teenager with the sailplane. Before and after.

She rose and walked around the room. The walls were covered
in mustard-colored silk and crowded with framed pictures, a good half of them
drawings or photographs of the
Anjelica
. She knelt backward on the couch in order to face
the model, and ran a finger along the hull. It was a beautiful piece of work.

The door opened and she jumped.

“Did I startle you?” Tucker said. “Sorry. The lasagna comes
out in twenty minutes.” He sat on the arm of the couch and nodded toward the
model. “My father and I made that. I was seven or eight, I guess. It took
months.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“
So’s
the original. The real
Anjelica
. She’s
an incredible boat. A forty-foot schooner, custom-made. The most perfect boat I’ve
ever seen.”

“Your father told me it was the
Anjelica
he’d be sailing in the
Caribbean this summer, he and a friend of his, one of his retired law partners.”

“She’s a lot of boat for two men that age to handle alone. I’m
glad to hear he’s still sailing her, though. I’d wondered if she was still
around—she’s about thirty years old. But he always did take real good care of
her.” He reached over to touch one of the sails.

“I don’t know much about these things, but are they going to
actually
live
on it?”

“On
her
. Of course.”

“And they’ll be comfortable?”

He chuckled. “When he had her built, he was extremely
particular about the living quarters. They’re better-appointed than most people’s
homes.”

“Did he have it—
her
—built
for your mother? I mean, he did name her the
Anjelica
.”

His eyes grew opaque. “He built her after she—after she died.”

“After?”

He was staring at the model. “He became obsessed with her
after she was gone—when it was too late. If he’d paid that much attention to
her while she was alive, she probably never would have…” His jaw clenched. “But
that’s in the nature of marriage, isn’t it?”

She turned around, tossed her sandals off, and sat with her
back against the other arm of the couch, legs stretched out and crossed. “What
do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I mean, it’s kind of a perverse institution,
isn’t it? You take two people who are madly in love, then they get married, and
nine times out of ten, it goes sour. My parents were typical. The things he
loved about her, that made her so different, suddenly looked like flaws that
needed fixing. He took a quirky, artistic, impulsive Greek girl and tried to
turn her into an uptight Hale’s Point matron.”

“Mimi’s not uptight.”

“She’s the exception,” he said.

“Do you really believe nine out of ten marriages are like
that?”

Tucker kicked off his moccasins and slid down so that he was
sitting against the opposite arm from Harley. He stretched his good leg out
adjacent to hers, then lifted his bad leg next to it. The hair on his right leg
softly tickled her left leg from thigh to ankle. “Enough of them are so you
have to wonder why any sensible person would ever want to do it. The facts
argue loud and clear against it. Marriage is for people who can’t think
straight.”

“And you, of course, are a straight-thinking, sensible
person.”

“Absolutely.”

“Much too sensible to be influenced by one bad marriage—your
parents’—into condemning marriage as a whole.”

Again he shrugged. “We are the sum total of our experiences.
Our characters are forged in fires we didn’t build, and there’s little we can
do to change them. Or, as Popeye so succinctly put it, ‘I yam what I yam and
that’s what I yam’”

She stared at him. “Popeye.”

He grinned. “I don’t just quote Thoreau, you know. I’m a
well-rounded guy.”