Transgressions Page 9

  "And here we are." She framed his his face lovingly with her hands. "What do you want to do now?" she said, looking solemnly into his eyes.

  Peter swallowed the words he couldn't speak, glancing at the four-poster bed that dominated the room.

  "I know what I want you to do," she said.

  "Echo—"

  She tugged him into the room and closed the door with her foot.

  "It's all right," she said as he wavered. "Such a perfect place to spend our first night together. I want you to appreciate just how much I love you."

  She left him and went to a corner of the room by the hearth where she undressed quickly, a quick-change artist, down to the skin, slipping then beneath covers, to his fuming eyes a comely shadow.

  "Peter?"

  He touched his belt buckle, dropped his hands. He felt at the point of tears; ardor and longing were compromised by too much drink. His heartbeat was fueled by inchoate anger.

  "Peter? What's wrong?"

  He took a step toward her, stumbled, fell against a chair with a lyre back. Heavy, but he lifted it easily and slammed it against the wall. His unexpected rage had her cowering, his insulted hubris a raw wound she was too inexperienced to deal with. She hugged herself in shock and pain.

  Peter opened the bedroom door.

  "I'll wait in the fuckin' limo. You—you stay here if you want! Stay all night. Do whatever the hell you think you've got to do to make yourself happy, and just never mind what it'll do to us!"

  Six

  The first day of fall, and it was a good day for riding in convertibles: unclouded blue sky, temperatures on the East Coast in the sixties. The car John Ransome drove uptown and parked opposite Echo's building was a Mercedes two-seater. Not a lot of room for luggage, but she'd packed frugally, only the clothes she would need for wintering on a small island off the coast of Maine. And her paintbox.

  He didn't get out of the car right away; cell phone call. Echo lingered an extra few moments at her bedroom windows hoping to see Peter's car. They'd talked briefly at about one A.M., and he'd sounded okay, almost casual about her upcoming forced absence from his life. Holidays included. He was trying a little too hard not to show a lack of faith in her. Neither of them mentioned John Ransome. As if he didn't exist, and she was leaving to study painting in Paris for a year.

  Echo picked up her duffels from the bed and carried them out to the front hall. She left the door ajar and went into the front room where Julia was reading to Rosemay from the National Enquirer. Julia was a devotee of celebrity gossip.

  Commenting on an actress who had been photographed trying to slip out of a California clinic after a makeover, Julia said, "Sure and she's at an age where she needs to give up plastic surgery and place her bets with a good taxidermist."

  Rosemay smiled, her eyes on her daughter. Rosemay's lips trembled perceptibly; her skin was china-white, mimicking the tone of the bones within. Echo felt a strong pulse of fear; how frail her mother had become in just three months.

  "Mom, I'm leaving my cell phone with you. It doesn't work on the island, John says. But there's a dish for Internet, no problem with e-mail."

  "That's a blessing."

  "Peter comin' to see you off?" Julia asked.

  Echo glanced at her watch. "He wasn't sure. They were working a triple homicide last night."

  "Do we have time for tea?" Rosemay asked, turning slowly away from her computer and looking up at Echo through her green eyeshade.

  "John's here already, mom."

  Then Echo, to her surprise and chagrin, just lost it, letting loose a flood of tears, sinking to her knees beside her mother, laying her head in Rosemay's lap as she had when she was a child. Rosemay stroked her with an unsteady hand, smiling.

  Behind them John Ransome appeared in the hallway. Rosemay saw his reflection on a window pane.

  She turned her head slowly to acknowledge him. Julia, oblivious, was turning the pages of her gossip weekly.

  The expression in Rosemay's eyes was more of a challenge than a welcome to Ransome. Her hands came together protectively over Echo. Then she prayerfully bowed her head.

  Peter double-parked in the street and was running up the stairs of Echo's building when he met Julia coming down with her Save the Trees shopping bag.

  "They're a half hour gone, Peter. I was just on my way to do the marketing."

  Peter shook his head angrily. "I only got off a half hour ago! Why couldn't she wait for me, what was the big rush?"

  "Would you mind sittin' with Rosemay while I'm out? Because it's goin' down hard for her, Peter."

  He found Rosemay in the kitchen, a mug of cold tea between her hands. He put the kettle on again, fetched a mug for himself and sat down wearily with Rosemay. He took one of her hands in his.

  "A year. A year until she's home again. Peter, I only let her do this because I was afraid—"

  "It's okay. I'll be comin' around myself, two, three times a week, see how you are,"

  "—not afraid for myself," Rosemay said, finishing her thought. "Afraid of what my illness could do to you and Echo."

  They looked at each other wordlessly until the kettle on the stove began whistling.

  "Listen, we're gonna get through this," Peter said, grim around the mouth.

  Rosemay's head drooped slowly, as if she hadn't the strength to hold it up any longer.

  "He came, and took her away. Like the old days of lordship, you see. A privilege of those who ruled."

  Echo didn't see much of Kincairn Island that night when they arrived. The seven-mile ferry trip left her so sick and sore from heaving she couldn't fully straighten up once they docked at the fishermen's quay. There were few lights in the clutter of a town occupying a small cove. A steady wind stung her ears on the short ride cross island by Land Rover to the house facing two thousand miles of open ocean.

  A sleeping pill knocked her out for eight hours.

  At first light the cry of gulls and waves booming on the rocks a hundred feet below her bedroom windows woke her up. She had a hot shower in the recently updated bathroom. Some eyedrops got the red out. By then she thought she could handle a cup of black coffee. Outside her room she found a flight of stairs to the first-floor rear of the house. Kitchen noises below. John Ransome was an early riser; she heard him talking to someone.

  The kitchen also had gone through a recent renovation. But the architect hadn't disturbed quaint and mostly charming old features: a hearth for baking in one corner, hand-hewn oak beams overhead.

  "Good morning," John Ransome said. "Looks as if you got your color back."

  "I think I owe you an apology," Echo mumbled.

  "For getting sick on the ferry? Everybody does until they get used to it. The fumes from that old diesel banger are partly to blame. How about breakfast? Ciera just baked a batch of her cinnamon scones."

  "Coffeecoffeecoffee," Echo pleaded.

  Ciera was a woman in her sixties, olive-skinned, with tragic dark eyes. She brought the coffeepot to the table.

  "Good morning," Echo said to her. "I'm Echo."

  The woman cocked her head as if she hadn't heard correctly.

  "It's just a—a nickname. I was baptized Mary Catherine."

  "I like Mary Catherine," Ransome said. He was smiling. "So why don't we call you by your baptismal name while you're here."

  "Okay," Echo said, with a glance at him. It wasn't a big thing; nicknames were childish anyway. But she felt a slight psychic disturbance. As if, in banishing "Echo," he had begun to invent the person whom he really wanted to paint, and to live within a relationship that he firmly controlled.

  Foolish, Echo thought. I know who I am.

  The rocky path to the Kincairn lighthouse, where Ransome had his studio, took them three hundred yards through scruffy stunted hemlock and blueberry barrens, across lichen-gilded rock, thin earth, and frost-heaves. At intervals the path wended close to the high-tide line. Too close for Echo's peace of mind, although she tried not to appear nervous. Kinca
irn Island, about eight and a half crooked miles by three miles wide with a high, forested spine, was only a granitic pebble confronting a mighty ocean, blue on this October morning beneath a lightly cobwebbed sky.

  "The light is fantastic," she said to Ransome.

  "That's why I'm here, in preference to Cascais or Corfu for instance. Clear winter mornings are the best.

  The town is on the leeside of the island facing Penobscot. There's a Catholic church, by the way, that the diocese will probably close soon, or Unitarian for those who prefer Religion Lite."

  "Who else lives here?" Echo asked, blinking salt spume from her eyelashes. The tide was in, wind from the southeast.

  "About a hundred forty permanent residents, average age fifty-five. The economy is lobsters. Period. At the turn of the century Kincairn was a lively summer community, but most of the old saltbox cottages are gone; the rest belong to locals."

  "And you own the island?"

  "The original deed was recorded in 1794. You doing okay, Mary Catherine?"

  The ledge they were crossing was only about fifty feet above the breakers and a snaggle of rocks close to shore.

  "I get a little nervous . . . this close."

  "Don't you swim?"

  "Only in pools. The ocean—I nearly drowned on a beach in New Jersey. I was five. The waves that morning were nothing, a couple of feet high. I had my back to the water, playing with my pail and shovel.

  All of a sudden there was a huge wave, out of nowhere, that caught everybody by surprise."

  "Rogue wave. We get them too. My parents were sailing off the light, just beyond that nav buoy out there, when a big one capsized their boat. They never had a chance."

  "Good Lord. When was this?"

  "Twenty-eight years ago." The path took a turn uphill, and the lighthouse loomed in front of them. "I'm a strong swimmer. Very cold water doesn't seem to get to me as quickly as other people. When I was nineteen—and heavily under the influence of Lord Byron—I swam the Hellespont. So I've often wondered—" He paused and looked out to sea. "If I had been with my mother and father that day, could I have saved them?"

  "You must miss them very much."

  "No. I don't."

  After a few moments he looked around at her, as if her gaze had made him uncomfortable.

  "Is that a terrible thing to say?"

  "I guess I— I don't understand it. Did you love your parents?"

  "No. Is that unusual?"

  "I don't think so. Were they abusive?"

  "Physically? No. They just left me alone most of the time, as if I didn't exist. I don't know if there's a name for that kind of pain."

  His smile, a little dreary, suggested that they leave the topic alone. They walked on to the lighthouse, brilliantly white on the highest point of the headland. Ransome had remodeled it, to considerable outrage from purists, he'd said, installing a modern, airport-style beacon atop what was now his studio.

  "I saw what it cost you," Ransome said, "to leave your mother—your life. I'd like to think that it wasn't only for the money."

  "Least of all. I'm a painter. I came to learn from you."

  He nodded, gratified, and touched her shoulder.

  "Well. Shall we have a look at where we'll both be working, Mary Catherine?"

  Peter didn't waste a lot of time taking on a load at the reception following his sister Siobhan's wedding to the software salesman from Valley Stream. Too much drinking gave him the mopes, followed by a tendency to take almost anything said to him the wrong way.

  "What've you heard from Echo?" a first cousin named Fitz said to him.

  Peter looked at Fitz and had another swallow of his Irish in lieu of making conversation. Fitz glanced at Peter's cousin Rob Flaherty, who said, "Six tickets to the Rangers tonight, Petey. Good seats."

  Fitz said, "That's two for Rob and his girl, two for me and Colleen, and I was thinkin'— you remember Mary Mahan, don't you?"

  Peter said ungraciously, "I don't feel like goin' to the Rangers, and you don't need to be fixin' me up, Fitz." His bow tie was hanging limp and there was fire on his forehead and cheekbones. A drop of sweat fell unnoticed from his chin into his glass. He raised the glass again.

  Rob Flaherty said with a grin, 'You remind me of a lovesick camel, Petey. What you're needin' is a mercy hump."

  Peter grimaced hostilely. "What I need is another drink."

  "Mary's had a thing for you, how long?"

  "She's my mom's godchild, asshole."

  Fitz let the belligerence slide. "Well, you know. It don't exactly count as a mortal sin.''

  "Leave it, Fitz."

  "Sure. Okay. But that is exceptional pussy you're givin' your back to. I can testify."

  Rob said impatiently, "Ah, let him sit here and get squashed. Echo must've tied a knot in his dick before she left town with her artist friend."

  Peter was out of his chair with a cocked fist before Fitz could step between them. Rob had reach on Peter and jabbed him just hard enough in the mouth to send him backwards, falling against another of the tables ringing the dance floor, scarcely disturbing a mute couple like goggle-eyed blowfish, drunk on senescence.

  Pete's mom saw the altercation taking shape and left her partner on the dance floor. She took Peter gently by an elbow, smiled at the other boys, telling them with a motion of her elegantly coiffed head to move along. She dumped ice out of a glass onto a napkin.

  "Dance with your old ma, Peter."

  Somewhat shamefaced, he allowed himself to be led to the dance floor, holding ice knotted in the napkin to his lower lip.

  "It's twice already this month I see you too much in drink."

  "It's a wedding, Ma." He put the napkin in a pocket of his tux jacket.

  "I'm thinking it's time you get a grip on yourself," Kate said as they danced to a slow beat. "You don't hear from Echo?"

  "Sure. Every day."

  "Well, then? She's doing okay?"

  "She says she is." Peter drew a couple of troubled breaths. "But it's e-mail. Not like actually—you know, hearin' her voice. People are all the time sayin' what they can't put into words, you just have to have an ear for it."

  "So—maybe there's things she wants you to know, but can't talk about?"

  "I don't know. We've never been apart more than a couple days since we met. Maybe Echo's found out—it wasn't such a great bargain after all." He had a tight grip on his mother's hand.

  "Easy now. If you trust Echo, then you'll hold on. Any man can do that, Petey, for the woman he loves."

  "I'll always love her," Peter said, his voice tight. He looked into Kate's eyes, a fine simmer of emotion in his own eyes. "But I don't trust a man nobody knows much about. He's got walls around him you wouldn't believe."

  "A man who values his privacy. That kind of money, it's not surprising." Kate hesitated. "You been digging for something? Unofficially, I mean."

  'Yeah."

  "No beefs?"

  "No beefs. The man's practically invisible where public records are concerned."

  "Then let it alone."

  "If I could see Echo, just for a little while. I'm half nuts all the time."

  "God love you, Peter. Long as you have Sunday off, why don't the two of us go to visit Rosemay, take her for an outing? Been a while since I last saw her."

  "I don't think I can, Ma. I, uh—need to go up to Westchester, talk to somebody."

  "Police business, is it?"

  Peter shook his head.

  "Her name's Van Lier. She posed for John Ransome once."

  SEVEN

  The Van Lier residence was a copy—an exact copy, according to a Web site devoted to descriptions of Westchester County's most spectacular homes—of a sixteenth-century English manor house. All Peter saw of the inside was a glimpse of slate floor and dark wainscotting through a partly opened front door.

  He said to the houseman who had answered his ring, "I'd like to see Mrs. Van Lier."

  The houseman was an elderly Negro with age s
pots on his caramel-colored face like the spots on a leopard.

  "There's no Mrs. Van Lier at this residence."

  Peter handed him his card.

  "Anne Van Lier. I'm with the New York police department."

  The houseman looked him over patiently, perhaps hoping if his appraisal took long enough Peter would simply vanish from their doorstep and he could go back to his nap.

  "What is your business about, Detective? Miss Anne don't hardly care to see nobody."

  "I'd like to ask her a few questions."

  They played the waiting game until the houseman reluctantly took a Motorola Talk-about from a pocket of the apron he wore over his Sunday suit and tried to raise her on a couple of different channels. He frowned.

  "Reckon she's laid hers down and forgot about it," he said. "Well, likely you'll find Miss Anne in the greenhouse this time of the day. But I don't expect she'll talk to you, police or no police."

  "Where's the greenhouse?"

  "Go 'round the back and walk toward the pond, you can't hardly miss it. When you see her, tell Miss Anne I did my best to raise her first, so she don't throw a fit my way."

  Peter approached the greenhouse through a squall of copper beech leaves on a windy afternoon. The slant roofs of the long greenhouse reflected scudding clouds. Inside a woman he assumed was Anne Van Lier was visible through a mist from some overhead pipes. She wore gloves that covered half of her forearms and a gardening hat with a floppy brim that, along with the mist floating above troughs of exotic plants, obscured most of her face. She was working at a potting bench in the diffused glimmer of sunlight.

  "Miss Van Lier?"

  She stiffened at the sound of an unfamiliar voice but didn't look around. She was slight-boned in dowdy tan coveralls.

  'Yes? Who is it?" Her tone said that she didn't care to know. 'You're trespassing."

  "My name is Peter O'Neill. New York City police department."

  Peter walked a few steps down a gravel path toward her. With a quick motion of her head she took him in and said, "Stay where you are. Police?"