Sooner or Later (14 page)

Ellie peered over the rail. Pancho was lying in the sand, demolishing the last of the filet mignon. “That is one thieving, conniving mutt you’ve got there, mister,” she said, awed. “He chose his moment perfectly. He’s pretty damned smart.”

Dan eyed him, exasperated. “I can’t send him back to the pound. He thinks he’s mine now. He’s even started to sleep on my bed.”

“You’re a sucker, Dan Cassidy. You have to train them from day one, otherwise they peg you for a soft touch and you’re a goner.” She grinned at the dog’s happy face as he rolled over in the sand, waving all four paws in the air. “He’s awfully cute, but it’s a good thing I brought bread and cheese. With a bottle of wine, who could ask for anything more?

“I forgot to ask you,” Ellie said, in the kitchen, cutting the baguette into hunks. “Weren’t you married?” The minute it was out of her mouth, she wished she hadn’t said it. The wine must be loosening her tongue. “I take that question back,” she added quickly.

Dan leaned against the white-tiled counter, arms folded. “I was,” he said, looking at her. “And as a friend, you have a right to ask. And no, I’m not married now. It wasn’t her fault, and I guess it wasn’t mine either. It was kid stuff, all romance and no reality, it could never have
worked. That’s when I went to New York and became a cop instead of a biologist.” He shrugged. “No regrets though. I guess I was cut out to be a winemaker anyhow.”

“Just the way I’m cut out to be a restaurateur, and not an idle society woman. I have my father’s genes, he was a wild Irishman too.” She carried the basket of bread into the living room and set it on the coffee table. “Maybe that’s why I like you.”

Dan put the plate of cheeses down carefully. “You like me?” He was laughing.

“Oh, I guess I like you enough,” she said, flirting with him. “You’re sort of okay, for the genre.”

He filled their glasses then sat on the floor next to her, helping himself to cheese and bread. “Tell me about your father. And your mother.”

Ellie sipped the wine, thoughtfully. There was so much to tell—and yet so little. So few years together for her to remember.

“I know she was beautiful,” she said at last. “I was only five when she died, but I can still remember her smile, and her perfume. Piguet’s Fracas. It smelled like all the lilies in the world melted down into a bottle. It’s so distinctive, I almost can’t bear it when I catch a whiff of it on another woman. Just thinking of it now, it’s as though she’s in the room.”

T
HE STORY OF HER PARENTS WAS ENGRAVED ON
E
LLIE
’
S
heart, she’d heard it so often. When she was a child, it was her favorite bedtime story. “Tell me again about my mother and my father,” she would ask, and Miss Lottie would repeat it one more time, often with tears in her eyes that Ellie would brush away with her small finger.

“When my mother was born,” she told Dan, “my grandparents couldn’t agree on who to name her for, so instead they named her Romany. Something Miss Lottie said she regretted ever after, because that girl lived up to her name. She was a wild gypsy of a young thing, always happy, giddy with the sheer pleasure of being alive and in love. And it seemed to poor proper Miss Lottie that from the age of fifteen, Romany was
always
in love.

“When my grandfather died unexpectedly, she was left to bring up Romany alone. Her standards were strict and Romany was wild, but she always assumed she would calm down and marry someone suitable. But times had changed. It was the sixties and the young had turned the
world as Miss Lottie knew it completely around. They lived for the moment. And on their terms.

“Then, when she was twenty-four, Romany ran off with Rory Duveen, penniless and a nobody. Plus he was fifteen years older, and divorced.”

“Why?” Miss Lottie had demanded, anguished.

“Because I love him, Ma,” her smiling, beautiful daughter had replied, her mist-blue eyes dancing with mischief because she knew her mother hated to be called “Ma” almost as much as she hated her unexpected new son-in-law.

“Anyhow,” Ellie told Dan, “the damage was done. Romany had her own money, inherited from her grandfather, and the happy pair flitted around the world in a haze of marijuana smoke and well-being, partying and enjoying life. Because, as Rory always said, what else was fife for?

“A few years later, Romany took time out to give birth to me and then they were off again, leaving me with Miss Lottie. Sometimes, over her protests, they would take me to Europe with them. Rory hated California in the summer, he said it was too hot.”

She lifted her shoulders in a little shrug that somehow expressed her sadness. “And that’s the way life was. Until the day their white Bentley convertible threw an unexpected snit, and hurled them into a rocky canyon in the Los Padres mountains.

“It’s so strange,” she added with a frown. “I can see us on that mountain road, I can hear my father singing, I can see him turning to smile at me. I can feel the car doing this funny little shimmy … I can even remember them smiling at each other, his voice, still singing … and then they were gone.

“I was tossed out onto the grass and bushes at the side of the road. They found me later, sitting there with
the straw sun hat still crammed on my head and a big cut on my face. But that was all.”

Dan saw her shiver. Wondering if it was the sad memories or the mist creeping in, he closed the windows, and then put a match to the fire. He gave her his sweater and Ellie snuggled into it, curling her coral-toed feet under her. The sweater felt good, soft and masculine scented.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” she said, looking at him across the coffee table. “I’ve never really talked about it with anyone, except Miss Lottie and Maya. I figured it was nobody’s business but my own. The odd thing is though, I have the feeling something is missing from that memory. It’s on the edge of my mind, out there in the blackness of eternity.” She sighed, wistfully, then added, “But I remember their funeral as though it were yesterday.

“It was one of the biggest and most memorable in Montecito’s history, because Miss Lottie wanted it that way, for Romany. The church and Journey’s End were covered in white roses, and she decked me out in a pretty white organdy dress, and shiny black Mary Janes, as though I were going to a party.

“Crowds gathered at the graveside and a choir sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ while the two coffins were lowered into the ground. I remember I cried when they sang. It just didn’t seem possible that my vivid, life-loving parents could be gone. I felt so sure they were going to pop out from behind a tree calling ‘Surprise, surprise,’ the way they used to when they came back from their travels.

“Still, it was a fact and Miss Lottie said we’d both better get used to it. But for a long time afterward, in my dreams I heard the shriek of steel ripping apart and the sound of shattering glass. And then just that deep, endless silence. Even the crickets had stopped their chirruping,
and the birds their singing. It was as though the whole silent mountainside had gone into shock.

“It wasn’t until I was much older that Miss Lottie told me that, in ten years, Romany had frittered away the inheritance it had taken three generations of Stamfords to accumulate. Ten years of the high life, running round the world first class on chartered planes and luxury yachts. It was deluxe all the way for them, because, as my father always said, life was meant to be fun and what else could money buy, if not pleasure? That was their philosophy. They lived by it, and they even died by it. In a hundred-thousand-dollar automobile.”

“I’m sorry.” Dan leaned across and took her hand. “That was a tough break, and you were so young.”

Firelight bathed them in a soft reddish glow, leaving the corners of the room in darkness. From outside came the roar of the breakers, curving along the shoreline. Ellie felt suspended in time, as though she had stepped back and saw things clearly, events that had happened that she had chosen not to remember. Dan’s eyes were dark with sympathy as she looked at him.

“I learned all about violence, that year,” she said quietly. “First, with my parents, and then with my grandmother.”

She hesitated. “I’ve never told anyone about this before, not even my friend, Maya. Miss Lottie asked me not to, she said I had to erase it from my mind like chalk from a blackboard and never speak of it again. I tried, but I’ve never forgotten it. And how terrified I was.”

He took a sip of wine. Seeing the remembered terror in her darkened eyes, he said, “Do you want to tell me?”

It had been locked inside her for so long, Ellie knew it would be a relief to speak of it.

“It happened a few weeks after the accident. Miss Lottie always put me to bed herself and then she would
read me a story. Of course, I know now how hard it must have been for her, trying to cope with Romany’s death, putting on a brave face in front of me, though I suspect she cried herself to sleep too. And I hated being alone at night….”

Telling Dan about it, Ellie could see herself, alone in her blue-and-white-gingham room, in the narrow French sleigh bed that had been her own mother’s when she was a child. The curtains were not drawn and Miss Lottie had left the window open, as she always did, rain or cold, for “health reasons,” because she said a child needed fresh air when she was sleeping. But the branches of the juniper tree tapped scarify against the window and Ellie couldn’t sleep, so she did what she often did those days. She climbed from the high bed and ran, in her bare feet and pajamas, along the hallway to Miss Lottie’s room.

She turned the door handle and peeked in. No one was there, so she trotted to the top of the stairs and looked down.

A fire blazed in the big fireplace in the hall, and the lamps were lit. It looked warm and cheerful, and a lot less lonely than her room. Clinging to the oak banisters, she walked slowly down the wide, shallow steps and through the hall. She knew where Miss Lottie would be and she headed, like a homing pigeon, to the library.

Often, those nights, she would sneak in and just sit quietly, watching her grandmother while she opened her mail, or wrote letters, or made telephone calls. Miss Lottie would pretend for a while not to see her, then she’d glance up and catch her eye and say, “Now, be off with you, child. It’s late. Come, I’ll take you up myself and tuck you in again, if you promise you’ll go to sleep.”

Nodding solemnly, Ellie always promised, and the little respite in the calm of the library, with its ticking clock
and the crackling logs slipping in the grate, and the sound of Miss Lottie’s pen scratching across the thick cream notepaper as she wrote, somehow worked its soothing magic, and she slept.

Only not that night. Voices came from the half-open door and she peeked interestedly at the visitor. Unnoticed, she slipped into the room and took her usual seat on the oversized Chinese elmwood chair that Miss Lottie always called “the Mandarin’s chair.” Its smoothly polished wood felt cold through her thin pajamas and she shivered, watching the man and her grandmother, wondering what they were talking about.

Suddenly the man stood up. He towered over Miss Lottie. He was yelling at her in a hard, furious voice. Ellie had never heard anyone speak like that before, harsh, angry words. Then he leapt at Miss Lottie, clasped his big hands round her throat. He was shouting at her, saying something over and over again …
“bitch, old bitch, I’ll get you and I’ll get what’s mine …”

Ellie clutched the chair arms tightly. Her mouth fell open in silent panic and her eyes were round with terror. She was shaking unable to move, to speak. “Gran,” she cried out at last, “Gran …”

He turned and saw her. Their eyes met and she shrank back into the chair, transfixed by the naked evil in his. She began to scream.

Suddenly the door burst open. The menservants ran in, Gustave and the chauffeur. Behind them were the security guards, weapons drawn. In an instant, they had him down on the floor, his arms twisted behind his back, his face pressed into the carpet.

Ellie watched, numb with terror, while a guard held a gun at the man’s head, and Miss Lottie walked slowly across the room and stood, looking down at him. She was pale, trembling, angry. But she was not afraid.

Then Maria had come running in. She grabbed Ellie and carried her off, still crying, still terrified, to her room.

Later, Miss Lottie came to speak to her. “It was just a crazy man,” she explained. “He’s gone now, and I want you to forget you ever saw him. He’ll never bother us again. Promise me, Ellie, that you will forget tonight, and that you’ll never speak of it to anyone.”

And Ellie had nodded, crossing her heart, promising.

“And until tonight,” she said to Dan, sitting opposite, watching her through hooded dark eyes, “I’ve kept that promise. I was too young to understand what was going on, but I knew he was hurting her. She said, afterward, it was just lucky I was there. And that I saved her.”

“Did you ever find out who he was?”

She shook her head. “I told you, we never spoke of it again.”

He sighed. “That was a hell of a year, for a five-year-old. All credit to your grandmother for getting you through it.”

The log sputtered in the grate, and she yawned, exhausted. “I’ve talked half the night away,” she said apologetically. “Thanks for listening.” She reached for his hand. “Friends?” She smiled into his eyes.

“Friends.” Her hand felt firm and cool in his. “And as a friend, I’m not about to let you drive home. You’ve drunk too much wine, talked yourself out, and you’re about the tiredest woman I ever saw. The sheets are clean and the bed is comfortable. And I guarantee it’s all yours. Please, be my guest.”

Ellie shook her head. “Can’t,” she said, yawning. “Sorry, it must be the sea air.” She slithered farther down in the comfortable sofa, her eyes half closed. “I
have to get back,” she mumbled. “I’m expecting deliveries at the cafe tomorrow at eight.”

Dan grinned, she would be asleep before she even knew it. He walked into the bedroom and came back with a blanket. As he had guessed, she was down for the count. He tucked the blanket round her, letting his hand rest lightly on her soft hair for a second. Sleeping, she had the face of an innocent child. Awake, she was all woman.