Transgressions Read online

  Casey folded the twenties with his left hand and slid them under his mouse pad.

  "If I get in any trouble," he said, "I'm givin' your ass up first."

  After nearly a week of Ransome's absence, Echo was angry at him, fed up with being virtually alone on an island that every storm or squall in the Atlantic seemed to make a pass at almost on a daily basis, and once again dealing with acute bouts of homesickness. Never mind that her bank account was automatically fattening twice a month, it seemed to be payment for emotional servitude, not the pleasant collaboration she'd anticipated. Only chatty e-mails from girlfriends, from Rosemay and Stefan and even Kate O'Neill, plus Peter's maddeningly noncommittal daily communications (he was hopeless at putting feelings into words), provided balance and escape from depression through the long nights. They reminded her that the center of her world was a long way from Kincairn Island.

  She had almost no one to talk to other than the village priest, who seemed hard put to remember her name at each encounter, and Ransome's housekeeper. But Ciera's idea of a lively conversation was two sen-tences an hour. Much of the time, perhaps affected by the dismal weather that smote their rock or merely the oppression of passing time, Ciera's face looked as if Death had scrawled an "overdue" notice on it.

  Echo had books and her music and DVDs of recent movies arrived regularly. She had no difficulty in passing the time when she wasn't working. But she hated the way she'd been painting lately, and missed the stealth insights from her employer and mentor. Day after day she labored at what she came to judge as stale, uninspired landscapes, taking a palette knife to them as soon as the light began to fade. She didn't know if it was the creeping ennui or a faltering sense of confidence in her talent.

  November brought fewer hours of the crystal lambency she'd discovered on her first day there.

  Ransome's studio was equipped with full-spectrum artificial light, but she always preferred painting outdoors when it was calm enough, no tricky winds to snatch her easel and fling it out to sea.

  The house of John Ransome, built to outlast centuries, was not a house in which she would ever feel at home, in spite of his library and collection of paintings that included some of his own youthful work that would never be shown anywhere. These she studied with the avid eye of an archaeologist in a newly unearthed pyramid. The house was stone and stout enough but at night in a hard gale had its creepy, shadowy ways. Hurricane lamps had to be lit two or three times a week at about the same time her laptop lost satellite contact and the screen's void refleeted her dwindled good cheer. Reading by lamplight hurt her eyes. Even with earplugs she couldn't fall asleep when the wind was keening a single drawn-out note or slapdash, grabbing at shutters, mewling under the eaves like a ghost in a well.

  Nothing to do then but lie abed after her rosary and cry a little as her mood worsened. And hope John Ransome would return soon. His continuing absence a puzzle, an irritant; yet working sorcery on her heart.

  When she was able to fall asleep it was Ransome whom she dreamed about obsessively. While fitful and half awake she recalled every detail of a self portrait and the faces of his women. Had any of his subjects felt as she now did? Echo wondered about the depth of each relationship he'd had with his unknown beauties. One man, seven young women—had Ransome slept with any of them? Of course he had. But perhaps not everyone.

  His secret. Theirs. And what might other women to come, lying awake in this same room on a night as fierce as this one, adrift in loneliness and sensation of their own, imagine about Echo's involvement with John Leland Ransome?

  Echo threw aside her down comforter and sat on the edge of the bed, nervous, heart-heavy. Except for hiking shoes she slept fully dressed, with a small flame in one of the tarnished lamp chimneys for company and a hammer on the floor for security, not knowing who in that island community might take a notion, no matter what the penalty. Ciera went home at night to be with her severely arthritic husband, and Echo was alone.

  She rubbed down the lurid gooseflesh on her arms, feeling guilty in the sight of God for what raged in her mind, for sexual cravings like nettles in the blood. She put her hand on the Bible beside her bed but didn't open it. Dear Lord, I'm only human. She felt, honestly, that it was neither the lure of his flesh nor the power of his talent but the mystery of his torment that ineluctably drew her to Ransome.

  A shutter she had tried to secure earlier was loose again to the incessant prying of the wind, admitting an almost continual flare of lightning centered in this storm. She picked up the hammer and a small eyebolt she'd found in a tool chest along with a coil of picture wire.

  It was necessary to crank open one of the narrow lights of the mullioned window, getting a faceful of wind and spume in the process. As she reached for the shutter that had been flung open she saw by a run of lightning beneath boiling clouds a figure standing a little apart from the house on the boulders that formed a sea wall. A drenched white shirt ballooned in the wind around his torso. He faced the sea and the brawling waves that rose ponderously to foaming heights only a few feet below where he precariously stood, waves that crashed down with what seemed enough force to swamp islands larger than Kincairn.

  John Ransome had returned. Echo's lips parted to call to him, small-voiced in the tumult. Her skin crawled coldly from fear, but the shutter slammed shut on her momentary view of the artist.

  When she pushed it open again and leaned out slightly to see him, her eyelashes matting with salt spray, hair whipping around her face, Ransome had vanished.

  Echo cranked the window shut and backed away, tingling in her hands, at the back of her neck. She took a few deep breaths, wiping at her eyes, then turned, grabbed a flashlight and went to the head of the stairs down the hall from her room, calling his name in the darkness, shining the beam of the light down the stairs, across the foyer to the front door, which was closed. There was no trace of water on the floor, as she would have expected if he'd come in out of the storm.

  "ANSWER ME, JOHN! ARE YOU HERE?"

  Silence, except for the wind.

  She bolted down the stairs, grabbed a hooded slicker off the wall-mounted coat tree in the foyer and let herself out.

  The three-cell flashlight could throw a brilliant beam for well over a hundred yards. She looked around with the light, shuddering in the cold, lashed in a gale that had to be more than fifty knots. She heard thunder rolling above the shriek of the wind. She was scared to the marrow. Because she knew she had to leave the relative shelter afforded by the house at her back and face the sea where she'd last seen him.

  With her head low and an arm protecting her face, she made her way to the seawall, the dash of waves terrifying in the beam of the flashlight. Her teeth were clenched so tight she was afraid of chipping them.

  Remembering the shock of being engulfed on what had been a calm day at the Jersey shore, pulled tumbling backwards and almost drowning in the sandy undertow.

  But she kept going, mounted the seawall and crouched there, looking down at the monster waves. It was near to freezing. In spite of the hood and slicker she was already soaked and trembling so badly she was afraid of losing her grip on the flashlight as she crawled over boulders. Looking down into crevices where he might have fallen, to slowly drown at each long roll of a massive wave.

  Thought she saw something—something alive like an animal caught in discarded plastic wrap. Then she realized it was a face she was looking at in the down-slant of the flashlight, and it wasn't plastic, it was Ransome's white shirt. He lay sprawled on his back a few feet below her, dazed but not unconscious. His eyelids squinched in the light cast on his face.

  Echo got down from the boulder she was on, found some footing, got her hands under his arms and tugged.

  One of his legs was awkwardly wedged between boulders. She couldn't tell if it was broken as she turned her efforts to pulling his foot free. Hurrying. Her strength ebbing fast. Bat-ding him and the storm and sensing something behind her, still out to sea but coming her way with s
uch size, unequaled in its dark momentum, that it would drown them both in one enormous downfall like a building toppling.

  "MOVE!"

  Echo had him free at last and pushed him frantically toward the top of the seawall. She'd managed to lose her grip on the flashlight but it didn't matter, there was lightning around their heads and all of the deep weight of the sea coming straight at them. She couldn't make herself look back.

  Whatever the condition of his leg, Ransome was able to hobble with her help. They staggered toward the house, whipsawed by the wind, until the rogue wave she'd anticipated burst over the seawall and sent them rolling helplessly a good fifty feet before its force was spent.

  When she saw Ransome's face again beneath the flaring sky he was blue around the mouth but his eyes had opened. He tried to speak but his chattering teeth chopped off the words.

  "WHAT?"

  He managed to say what was on his mind between shudders and gasps.

  "I'm n-n-not w-worth it, y-you know."

  Hot showers, dry clothing. Soup and coffee when they met again in the kitchen. When she had Ransome seated on a stool she looked into his eyes for sign of a concussion, then examined the cut on his forehead, which was two inches long and deep enough so that it would probably scar. She pulled the edges of the cut together with butterfly bandages. He sipped his coffee with steady hands on the mug and regarded her with enough alertness so that she wasn't worried about that possible concussion.

  "How did you learn to do this?" he asked, touching one of the bandages.

  "I was a rough-and-tumble kid. My parents weren't always around, so I had to patch myself up."

  He put an inquisitive fingertip on a small scar under her chin.

  "Street hockey," she said. "And this one—"

  Echo pulled her bulky fisherman's sweater high enough to reveal a larger scar on her lower rib cage.

  "Stickball. I fell over a fire hydrant."

  "Fortunately. . . nothing happened to your marvelous face."

  "Thanks be to God." Echo repacked the first aid kit and ladled clam chowder into large bowls, straddled a stool next to him. "Ought to see my knees," she said, as an afterthought. She was ravenous, but before dipping the spoon into her chowder she said, 'You need to eat."

  "Maybe in a little while." He uncorked a bottle of brandy and poured an ounce into his coffee.

  Echo bowed her head and prayed silently, crossed herself. She dug in. "And thanks be to God for saving our lives out there."

  "I didn't see anyone else on those rocks. Only you."

  Echo reached for a box of oyster crackers. "Do I make you uncomfortable?"

  "How do you mean, Mary Catherine?"

  "When I talk about God."

  "I find that. . . endearing."

  "But you don't believe in Him. Or do you?"

  Ransome massaged a sore shoulder.

  "I believe in two gods. The god who creates and the god who destroys."

  He leaned forward on the stool, folded his arms on the island counter, which was topped with butcher block, rested his head on his arms. Eyes still open, looking at her as he smiled faintly.

  "The last few days I've been keeping company with the god who destroys. You have a good appetite, Mary Catherine."

  "Haven't been eating much. I don't like eating alone at night."

  "I apologize for—being away for so long."

  Echo glanced thoughtfully at him.

  "Will you be all right now?"

  He sat up, slipped off his stool, stood behind her and put a hand lightly on the back of her neck.

  "I think the question is—after your experience tonight, will you be all right—with me?"

  "John, were you trying to kill yourself?"

  "I don't think so. But I don't remember what I was thinking out there. I'm also not sure how I happened to find myself sitting naked on the floor of the shower in my bathroom, scrubbed pink as a boiled lobster."

  Echo put her spoon down. "Look, I cut off your clothes with scissors and sort of bullied you into the shower and loofah'd you to get your blood going. Nothing personal. Something I thought I'd better do, or else. I left clothes out for you then went upstairs and took a shower myself."

  "You must have been as near freezing as I was. But you helped me first. You're a tough kid, all right."

  "You were outside longer than me. How much longer I didn't know. But I knew hypothermia could kill you in a matter of minutes. You had all of the symptoms."

  Echo resumed eating, changing hands with the spoon because she felt as if her right hand was about to cramp; it had been doing that for an hour.

  She had cut off his clothes because she wanted him naked. Not out of prurience; she'd been scared and angry and needed to distance herself from his near-death folly and the hard reality of the impulse that had driven him outside in his shirt and bare feet to freeze or drown amid the rocks. Nude, barely conscious, and semicoherent, the significance of Ransome was reduced in her mind and imagination; sitting on the floor of the shower and shuddering as the hot water drove into him, he was to her like an anonymous subject in a life class, to be viewed objectively without unreliable emotional investment. It gave her time to think about the situation. And decide. If it was only creative impotence there was still a chance she could be of use to him. Otherwise she might as well be aboard when the ferry left at sunrise.

  "Mary Catherine?"

  'Yes?"

  "I've never loved a woman. Not one. Not ever. But I may be in love with you."

  She thought that was too pat to take seriously. A compliment he felt he owed her. Not (hat she minded the mild pressure of his palm on her neck. It was soothing, and she had a headache.

  Echo looked around at Ramsome. "You're bipolar, aren't you?"

  He wasn't surprised by her diagnosis.

  "That's the medical term. Probably all artists have a form of it. Soaring in the clouds or morbid in the depths, too blue and self-pitying to take a deep breath."

  Echo let him hold her with his gaze. His fingers moved slowly along her jawline to her chin. She felt that, all right. Maybe it was going to become an issue. He had the knack of not blinking very often that could be mesmerizing in a certain context. She lifted her chin away from his hand.

  "My father was manic-depressive," she said. "I learned to deal with it."

  "I know that he didn't kill himself."

  "Nope. Chain-smoking did the job for him."

  "You were twelve?"

  "Just twelve. He died on the same day that I got—my—when I—"

  She felt that she had blundered— Way too personal, Echo—and shut up.

  "Became a woman. One of the most beautiful women I've been privileged to know. I feel that in a small way I may do your father honor by preserving that beauty for—who knows? Generations to come."

  "Thank you," Echo said, still resonant from his touch, her brain on lull. Then she got what he was saying. She looked at Ransome again in astonishment and joy. He nodded.

  "I feel it beginning to happen," he said. "I need to sleep for a few hours. Then I want to go back to that portrait of you I began in New York. I have several ideas." He smiled rather shyly. "About time, don't you think?"

  NINE

  After a few days of indecision, followed by an unwelcome intrusion that locked two seemingly unrelated incidents together in his mind, Cy Mellichamp made a phone call, then dropped around to the penthouse apartment John Ransome maintained at the Hotel Pierre. It was snowing in Manhattan. Thanksgiving had passed, and jingle bell season dominated Cy's social calendar. Business was brisk at the gallery.

  The Woman in Black opened the door to Cy, admitting him to the large gloomy foyer, where she left him standing, still wearing his alpaca overcoat, muffler, and Cossack's hat. Cy swallowed his dislike for and mistrust of Taja and pretended he wasn't being slighted by John Ransome's gypsy whore. And who knew what else she was to Ransome in what had the appearance, to Mellichamp, of a folie a deux relationship.

&nb
sp; "We were hacked last night," he said. "Whoever it was now has the complete list of Ransome women.

  Including addresses, of course."

  Taja cocked her head slightly, waiting, the low light of a nearby sconce repeated in her dark irises.

  "The other, ah, visitation might not be germane, but I can't be sure. Peter O'Neill came to the gallery a few days ago. There was belligerence in his manner I didn't care for. Anyway, he claimed to know Anne Van Lier's whereabouts. Whether he'd visited her he didn't say. He wanted to know who the other women are. Pressing me for information. I said I couldn't help him. Then, last night as I've said, someone very resourceful somehow plucked that very information from our computer files." He gestured a little awkwardly, denying personal responsibility. There was no such thing as totally secure in a world managed by machines. "I thought John ought to know."

  Taja's eyes were unwinking in her odd, scarily immobile face for a few moments longer. Then she abruptly quit the foyer, moving soundlessly on slippered feet, leaving the sharp scent of her perfume behind— perfume that didn't beguile, it mugged you. She disappeared down a hallway lined with a dozen hugely valuable portraits and drawings by Old Masters.

  Mellichamp licked his lips and waited, hat in hand, feeling obscurely humiliated. He heard no sound other than the slight wheeze of his own breath within the apartment.

  "I, I really must be going," he said to a bust of Hadrian and his own backup reflection in a framed mirror that once had flattered royalty in a Bavarian palace. But he waited another minute before opening one of the bronze doors and letting himself out into the elevator foyer.

  Gypsy whore, he thought again, extracting some small satisfaction from this judgment. Fortunately he seldom had to deal with her. Just to lay eyes on the Woman in Black with her bilious temperament and air of closely held violence made him feel less secure in the world of social distinction that, beginning with John Ransome's money, he had established for himself: a magical, intoxicating, uniquely New York place where money was in the air always, like pixie dust further enchanting the blessed.