Night Over Water (56 page)

“A business mistake, or a personal one?” he said, and there was an edge to his voice that betrayed underlying resentment.

“Business,” she said lightly. His departure had ended a romance that had hardly begun: she did not want to talk about that. “Congratulations on your marriage,” she said. “I saw a picture of your wife—she’s very beautiful.” It was not true: she was attractive at best.

“Thank you,” he said. “But to revert to business, I’m rather surprised that you’ve resorted to blackmail to get what you want.”

“This is a takeover, not a tea party. You said that to me yesterday.”

“Touché.” He hesitated. “May I sit down?”

Suddenly she was impatient with formality. “Hell, yes,” she said. “We worked together for years, and for a few weeks we dated, too; you don’t have to ask my permission to sit down, Nat.”

He smiled. “Thanks.” He took Mervyn’s deck chair and moved it around so that he could look at her. “I tried to take over Black’s without your help. That was dumb, and I failed. I should have known better.”

“No argument here.” That sounded hostile, she realized. “And no hard feelings, either.”

“I’m glad you said that—because I still want to buy your company.”

Nancy was taken aback. She had been in danger of underestimating him. Don’t let your guard down! she told herself. “What did you have in mind?”

“I’m going to try again,” he said. “Of course, I’ll have to make a better offer next time. But more important, I want you on my side—before and after the merger. I want to come to terms with you, and then I want you to become a director of General Textiles and sign a five-year contract.”

She had not expected this, and she did not know how she felt about it. To gain time she asked a question. “A contract? To do what?”

“To run Black’s Boots as a division of General Textiles.”

“I’d lose my independence—I’d be an employee.”

“Depending on how we structure the deal, you might be a shareholder. And while you’re making money, you’ll have all the independence you want—I don’t interfere with profitable divisions. But if you lose money, then yes, you’ll forfeit your independence. I fire failures.” He shook his head. “But you won’t fail.”

Nancy’s instinct was to turn him down. No matter how he sugared the pill, he still wanted to take the company away from her. But she realized that instant refusal was what Pa would have wanted, and she had resolved to stop living her life by her father’s program. However, she had to say something, so she prevaricated. “I might be interested.”

“That’s all I want to know,” he said, standing up. “Think about it and figure out-what kind of deal would make you comfortable. I’m not offering you a blank check, but I want you to understand that I’ll go a long way to make you happy.” Nancy was faintly bemused: his technique was persuasive. He had learned a lot about negotiating in the last few years. He looked past her, toward the land. “I think your brother wants to talk to you.”

She looked over her shoulder and saw Peter coming. Nat put on his hat and walked away. This looked like a pincer movement. Nancy stared resentfully at Peter. He had deceived her and betrayed her, and she could hardly bring herself to speak to him. She would have liked to mull over Nat Ridgeway’s surprising offer, and think about how it fitted in with her new feelings about her life; but Peter did not give her time. He stood in front of her, put his head on one side in a way that reminded her of his boyhood, and said: “Can we talk?”

“I doubt it,” she snapped.

“I want to apologize.”

“You’re sorry for your treachery, now that it’s failed.”

“I’d like to make peace.”

Everyone wants to do a deal with me today, she thought sourly. “How could you possibly make up for what you’ve done to me?”

“I can’t,” he said immediately. “Never.” He sat down in the chair vacated by Nat. “When I read your report, I felt such a fool. You were saying I couldn’t run the business, I’m not the man my father was, my sister could do it better than me, and I felt so ashamed because in my heart I knew it was true.”

Well, she thought, that’s progress.

“It made me mad, Nan—that’s the truth.” As children they had called each other Nan and Petey, and his use of the childhood name brought a lump to her throat. “I don’t think I knew what I was doing.”

She shook her head. That was a typical Peter excuse. “You knew what you were doing.” But she was sad now, rather than angry.

A group of people stopped near the door to the airline building, chatting. Peter looked irritably at them and said to Nancy: “Come and walk along the shore with me?”

She sighed. He was, after all, her little brother. She got up.

He gave her a radiant smile.

They walked to the landward end of the pier then stepped across the railroad track and descended to the beach. Nancy took off her high-heeled shoes and walked along the sand in her stockings. The breeze tossed Peter’s fair hair, and she saw, with a little shock, that it was receding from his temples. She wondered why she had not noticed that before, and realized that he combed his hair carefully to conceal it. That made her feel old.

There was nobody nearby now, but Peter said no more for a while, and eventually Nancy spoke. “Danny Riley told me a weird thing. He said Pa deliberately set things up so you and I would fight.”

Peter frowned. “Why would he do that?”

“To make us tougher.”

Peter laughed harshly. “Do you believe it?”

“Yes.”

“I guess I do, too.”

“I’ve decided I’m not going to live the rest of my life under Pa’s spell.”

He nodded, then said: “But what does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll accept Nat’s offer, and merge our company into his.”

“It’s not ‘our’ company anymore, Nan. It’s yours.”

She studied him. Was this genuine? She felt mean, being so suspicious. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

He looked sincere as he went on. “I’ve realized I’m not cut out for business, and I’m going to leave it to people like you who are good at it.”

“But what will you do?”

“I thought I might buy that house.” They were passing an attractive white-painted cottage with green shutters. “I’m going to have lots of time for holidays.”

She felt rather sorry for him. “It’s a pretty house,” she said. “Is it for sale, though?” ,

“There’s a board on the other side. I was poking around earlier. Come and see.”

They walked around the house. It was locked up, and the shutters were closed, so they could not look into the rooms, but from the outside it was appealing. It had a wide veranda with a hammock. There was a tennis court in the garden. On the far side was a small building without windows, which Nancy guessed was a boathouse. “You could have a boat,” she said. Peter had always liked sailing.

A side door to the boathouse stood open. Peter went inside. She heard him say: “Good God!”

She stepped through the doorway and peered into the gloom. “What is it?” she said anxiously. “Petey, are you all right?”

Peter appeared beside her and took her arm. For a split second she saw a nasty, triumphant grin on his face, and she knew she had made a terrible mistake. Then he jerked her arm violently, pulling her farther in. She stumbled, cried out, dropped her shoes and handbag, and fell to the dusty floor.

“Peter!” she cried out furiously. She heard him take three rapid steps; then the door banged and she was in darkness. “Peter?” she called, fearful now. She got to her feet. There was a scraping sound and then a knock as if something was being used to jam the door. She yelled out: “Peter! Say something!”

There was no reply.

Hysterical fear bubbled up in her throat and she wanted to scream in terror. She put her hand to her mouth and bit the knuckle of her thumb. After a moment the panic began to recede.

Standing there in the dark, blind and disoriented, she realized he had planned this all along: he had found the empty house with its convenient boathouse, lured her here and locked her in so that she would miss the plane and be unable to vote at the board meeting. His regrets, his apology, his talk of giving up business and his painful honesty had all been faked. He had cynically evoked their childhood to soften her. Once again she had trusted him; once again he had betrayed her. It was enough to make her weep.

She bit her lip and considered her situation. When her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she was able to see a line of light under the door. She walked toward it, holding both hands out in front of her. When she reached the door, she felt the wall on both sides of it and found a switch. She flipped it up and the boathouse was flooded with light. She found the handle of the door and tried, without any real hope, to push it open. It did not budge: he had jammed it well. She put her shoulder to the door and heaved with all her might, but it would not move.

Her elbows and knees hurt where she had fallen, and her stockings were torn. “You pig,” she said to the absent Peter.

She put on her shoes, picked up her handbag and looked around. Most of the space was taken up by a big sailing boat on a wheeled dolly. Its mast hung in a cradle from the ceiling, and its sails were folded in neat bundles on the deck. At the front of the boathouse was a wide door. Nancy examined it and found, as she expected, that it was securely locked.

The house was set back from the beach a little, but there was a chance that passengers from the Clipper, or even someone else, might meander past. Nancy took a deep breath and shouted at the top of her voice:
“Help! Help! Help!”
She decided to yell at one-minute intervals so that she would not get hoarse.

Both the front and side doors were stout and well-fitting, but she might be able to break them open with a crowbar or something. She looked around. The owner was a neat man: he did not keep gardening tools in his boathouse. There were no shovels or rakes.

She shouted for help again, then climbed onto the deck of the boat, still looking for a tool. There were several closets on deck, but all had been locked shut by the tidy owner. She looked around the place again from up on the deck, but she saw nothing new. “Damn, damn, damn!” she said aloud.

She sat on the raised centerboard and brooded despondently. It was quite cold in the boathouse, and she was glad of her cashmere coat. She continued to call for help every minute or so but, as time passed, her hopes diminished. The passengers would be back on board the Clipper by now. Soon it would take off, leaving her behind.

It struck her that losing the company might be the least of her worries. Suppose nobody came by this boathouse for a week? She could die here. Panicking, she began to yell loudly and continuously. She could hear a note of hysteria in her voice, and that scared her even more.

After a while she got tired, and that calmed her. Peter was wicked but he was not a murderer. He would not leave her to die. He probably intended to place an anonymous call to the Shediac police department and tell them to let her out. But not until after the board meeting, of course. She told herself she was safe, but she still felt deeply uneasy. What if Peter was more wicked than she thought? What if he should forget? What if he fell ill, or suffered some sort of accident? Who would save her then?

She heard the roar of the Clipper’s mighty engines sounding out across the bay. From panic her mood switched to total despair. She had been betrayed and defeated, and she had even lost Mervyn, who would be on board the plane by now, waiting to take off. He might wonder idly what had happened to her, but since her last words to him had been “You fool!” he probably figured she was through with him.

It had been arrogant of him to assume she would follow him to England, but to be realistic about it, any man would have made the same assumption, and she had been silly to get mad about it. Now they had parted angrily and she would never see him again. She might even die.

The roar of the distant engines rose to a crescendo. The Clipper was taking off. The noise persisted at high volume for a minute or two, then began to fade as, Nancy presumed, the plane climbed into the distant sky. That’s it, she thought; I’ve lost my business and I’ve lost Mervyn, and I’m probably going to starve to death here. No, she would not starve, she would die of thirst, raving and screaming in agony....

She felt a tear on her cheek, and wiped it away with the cuff of her coat. She had to pull herself together. There must be a way out of here. She looked around again. She wondered if she could use the mast as a battering ram. She reached up to the sling. No, the mast was much too heavy to be moved by one person. Could she cut through the door somehow ? She recalled stories of prisoners in medieval dungeons scratching the stones with their fingernails year after year in a vain attempt to dig a way out. She did not have years, and she would need something stronger than fingernails. She looked in her bag. She had a small ivory comb, a bright red lipstick almost used up, a cheap powder compact the boys had given her for her thirtieth birthday, an embroidered handkerchief, her checkbook, a five-pound note; several fifty-dollar bills and a small gold pen: nothing she could use. She thought of her clothes. She was wearing a crocodile belt with a gold-plated buckle. The point of the buckle might be used to gouge away the wood of the door around the lock. It would be a long job, but she had all the time in the world.

She climbed off the boat and located the lock on the big front door. The wood was quite stout, but perhaps she would not need to scratch all the way through: when she had made a deep groove it might then break. She shouted for help again. No one answered.

She took off her belt. Her skirt would not stay up without it, so she took that off, folded it neatly and draped it over the gunwale of the boat. Although no one could see her, she was glad she was wearing pretty panties with a lacy trim and a matching garter belt.