Authors: Roberta Latow
‘I will
become
that man.’
‘Never.’
‘Then what have these last few days been about?’
‘Burying a ghost. And not just mine. Yours too. You have found your lost love, the one you never really wanted. If you had wanted to, you could have found me. By your own admission, you never even made the effort.’
‘I don’t think I can let you go. I do love you. I fell in love with you the night you broke into my house.’
‘Then love me, and live with it. I did, and so do millions of other people. You are luckier than most. At least your love was not unrequited.’
‘You’re hard.’
‘I don’t mean to be. It’s just that I have come to understand that love dies, whether we want it to or not.’
Kane took Cressida in his arms and they kissed. They needed no further words. That kiss told them what they already knew. Love may or may not be dead for them but their sexual attraction for each other, that would never die.
‘Over is over. The fat lady has sung. The curtain has been rung down. Let’s just think of it as a great romantic opera, maybe one you will put to music one day,’ Cressida told Kane. She squeezed the hand she held, released it, and walked away.
Cressida slept on the
Sea Hawk
that night. And she slept there alone. In the morning she was hurting. For herself and for Kane. For Valentina and Nancy. For the unlovingness that bound those three together. For warped emotions and selfishness and greed, not least of all her own.
From the deck she had a view of the open ocean, the bay and the shore, the cliffs rising in a crescent of scrubby pines, and zig-zag wooden stairs and rails, and wild flowering bushes. Next to her coffee cup stood a pad and a soft pencil she was using to go through her list of things to be done. She tore the page off and on a blank page began to sketch the cliffs above Amiable Bay. Several pages later she had incorporated into her drawings of the cliffs a large and beautiful spider’s web that nestled in the scrubby pine. A sculpture more than a building, nature more than architecture, that spread over the surface of the cliffs. The drawing, the concept, Amiable Bay, seemed if not to heal, to soothe the hurt she had been feeling. The spider’s web studio was good, very good. She felt a surge of excitement and switched her gaze from the cliffs to the ocean, imagining what it would look like from a boat out at sea sailing into Amiable Bay. A spider’s web spun on a bush.
She tore off that page and began again and again, expanding on the original concept. Then she was there. That, for the moment, was it. Until she could get it on the drawing table. She had found the place to build her studio and offices. Cressida rose from the table and walked to the rail and sat on it, holding the paper at arm’s length. She squinted, imagining the finished building. She would set up her temporary offices in one of the outbuildings, start things moving at once. Her legs were hanging over the water. Now she swung them back over the rail and was about to hop down on to the deck. She was taken off guard by the sight of the sheriff sitting opposite.
‘Oh, you gave me a fright! I didn’t hear you come on board.’
‘Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to frighten you. You were so absorbed, I thought I would just sit here and enjoy you for a while.’ And he gave her a broad and warming smile.
It was the first personal thing he had said to Cressida. She liked it. So much it made her blush. ‘Some coffee?’
‘That would be welcome.’
She hurried from the deck down to the galley and when she returned it was with a tray and a coffee pot, a mound of toast, a plate covered with thin slices of ham, a cup and saucer and side plate. He went to her and took the tray from her hands. They gazed into each other’s eyes. Again she thought how very blue his were. Below she had kept slicing bread and making toast, trying to get over the childish embarrassment his compliment had caused her. It was his niceness, a straightforward simplicity about the man, his strength and honesty. Everything about him warmed her.
‘That’s an awful lot of toast,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘Yes, I guess it is. I got carried away at the idea of feeding you. The ham is lovely, leftover from last night.’
He continued to hold the tray while she removed the things from it and placed them on the table. He leaned the tray against the side of the boat and sat down. Not opposite her where she had set a place for him but next to her, moving his place setting with him.
‘You didn’t make the party.’
‘I wanted to. The talk at the Candy Kitchen is that it was a great party, a great event. Was it for you?’
‘Memorable. A happy evening for me but it did have an off moment or two.’
‘Soon dispersed, I hope?’
‘Eliminated.’
He had that way of asking her one question and forming two which she wanted to answer. Police tactics or personal interest? It would have been nice to know which. She wondered, dare he ask if she had slept in her own bed? She doubted he would, but thought he would like to know. She waited. He didn’t ask. Instead he buttered some toast and she filled his cup with black coffee.
She watched him fork some slices of ham on a piece of toast and eat it as an open sandwich. ‘Good ham. Great coffee.’
Cressida leaned back in her chair drinking her coffee and watching him. It gave her an inordinate amount of pleasure just sitting there on the boat, the sound of the water lapping against its sides, the sun warming her, watching him eat.
‘I used to breakfast here often, on this very spot, with Byron. Or in the boathouse. It’s good to be back.’ And he gave her another dazzling smile. He had a dimple. She had never noticed that before.
They sat in silence listening to the seagulls and watched them trailing a series of small sailboats. People on the beach were cleaning
up the remnants of the party. It was a lazy and easy feeling, just sitting there with him.
‘Do you plan to paint the cliffs?’
‘No. To build a studio in them.’ And she handed him her most finished sketch of the spider house. ‘My studio and the offices of my architectural firm.’
‘A spider’s web spun over the cliffs? I like it. Architectural art, is that what you would call it? It sure is innovative and doesn’t abuse the landscape. Beautiful and clever. But then, I already knew that.’
Now he
was
being personal. He left no doubt about it with the intimate look he gave her when he handed the drawing back to her. ‘How about a walk on the beach? We can look at the site you’ve chosen and imagine how your spider’s web will look from there.’
At the end of the pier the sheriff leapt down on to the sand. He reached up and, taking Cressida by the waist, swung her next to him. He removed his shoes and socks and, leaving them set neatly next to hers on the pier, rolled up his trousers. They walked along the edge of the water staying on dry sand for some five minutes or so before he spoke. ‘I have some good news, some bad news.’
‘For me?’
‘Yes.’
Cressida stopped and so did he. They looked at each other while she waited for him to say something. He guided her with a hand on her elbow in from the shore. ‘Hence seeking you out this morning. Taking this walk, the need for privacy.’
‘And when I found you on board I thought you had come to say how sorry you were that you’d missed my party.’
‘Oh, I’m that too. Nothing could have kept me from it but work.’
‘What’s this about, Sheriff?’
‘Edward. I’d like you to call me Edward. Every time you call me “Sheriff” I think you’re talking to someone else.’
‘Edward, not Ed?’
‘No, not you. Edward.’
Again they had stopped and once again they resumed walking. ‘This good news, bad news. Let’s sit down over there.’
It was on a small rise sheltered by a dune with the cliffs rising high behind them. They faced the sea. He took a cigar from his inside pocket, bit off the end and spat it into the sand. He licked the end of the cigar, sucked on it a few times, and after placing it in his mouth, put the flame of his Zippo lighter to it. He rolled the cigar between his fingers until the end was burning evenly. ‘You don’t mind?’ he asked. ‘That I smoke cigars?’
‘I had noticed, and no, I don’t mind.’
‘About this good news, bad news. The good news is there’s no police car watching over you as of this morning.’
‘Not even a sheriff?’
‘No. Not in a professional capacity anyway.’
There it was again: a hint of personal interest in her. She felt a spark of delight about that. ‘The bad news is that there was a five-car pile up last night and Carol Vine was in it. Your step-mother is dead, Cressida, and she took three more people out with her. Four others are in hospital with serious injuries. It happened near the junction where route 39 runs into route 28, just opposite the old Hollihocks rear drive. That drive has been closed for years. It’s grown over, the wooden gate lock rusted solid. Carol would have known that.
‘There were witnesses to the accident. She was in a line of traffic, two cars behind some old boy who was driving at a turtle’s pace. A bad night driver. She must have seen the gates coming up and stupidly, without any signals, swerved hard out into the road and put her foot down on the accelerator. The car shot forward passing the two that had been in front of her. She then cut across the old boy. She was trying to make her turn into the Hollihocks drive. She misjudged everything. The car coming in the opposite direction was moving too fast to stop in time. He crashed into the side of her. The impact was horrible. The old boy panicked and hit the accelerator instead of the brake. So she got it from both sides. A five-car pile up. Two cars burst into flame almost on impact.
‘My deputy, Harv, was five hundred yards behind. He called the accident in even before he pulled up to the scene. He’s a good man, Harv. He closed off the road at once and set up a detour in both directions. It took hours to cut the bodies out.’
Cressida dropped her head on to her knees. She felt sick. Horrified. ‘Those poor people. She was coming to Hollihocks, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes, trying to get in through the old back drive.’
‘What is there in me to inspire so much hate?’
‘Love. A kind of specialness, an inner glow, that lesser people can’t cope with. They can recognise it and want it and suffer all their lives for never attaining it. In my work I’ve seen it more times than you might imagine.’
‘That it should end like this, in tragedy. I can’t bear it. I think I’m going to be sick.’
Cressida rose to her feet and rushed over the sand to the edge of the cliffs and a flowering bush. Edward followed her and walked her back towards the bay where he dipped his handkerchief in the water, wrung it out and handed it to her. They walked back to where they had been sitting.
‘Are you all right?’
‘A great deal better than those poor people.’
‘You have no idea what a profound statement that is.’
‘There’s more?’
‘Mrs Vine never received the court order. They could never find her to serve it.’ Edward reached underneath his jacket and behind him. From the small of his back and tucked under his belt he removed a small hand gun. He placed it on the sand between them. ‘Not mine, Carol Vine’s.’
‘The gun’s existence will not be made public knowledge. That Carol Vine was the cause of the accident will be. It’s well known that she was a bad driver. That she was here in New Cobham? She had many friends, could have been on her way to visit any one of them. She’s dead and you’re not. Sympathy will ride with her. Beginning and end of the story.’
Edward clasped his hands on Cressida’s waist and pulled her to her feet to walk her back and sit her on the pier next to their shoes. He hoisted himself up to sit next to her. ‘You haven’t said anything.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Well, the whole town will be saying it for you.’
Shoes on their feet, he helped her up. ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. The house, I guess.’
‘The word is out. By now they’ll know at the house that she’s dead. Everyone will be talking about it. I have to get back to the station, but I hate to leave you alone.’
‘I’m fine, just shocked. Upset for those dead people. That it should all have come to this.’
‘You are in greater shock than maybe you even realise. There’s shock and then there’s an inner, unexpected psychological shock that can surface. I think you need some quiet, real rest, and no thinking about anything.
‘I
know
I need rest.’
‘Let me take you to my house. There’s no one there. No one to call in and disturb you. I’ll come home as soon as I can.’
‘That’s very kind.’
‘It’s not
just
kindness. If I could, I would stay with you.’
He took her hand and they walked from the pier to the weatherworn wooden stairs and mounted the cliff. They were in his car and in the lane leading away from Hollihocks when he told her, ‘There’s one more thing. Carol was conscious for only a few minutes. Her last wish was to be buried next to Byron. She didn’t say anything else, just that. So we’ll be shipping the body to Venice as soon as possible.’
‘Oh, God.’ Cressida dropped her chin to her chest and placed her hands over her face.
Edward pulled the car up and took her in his arms to comfort her. ‘This is a lot to handle, Cressida. Shush, shush.’
He kissed her lightly on her cheek, then her lips. She placed her arms round his neck and leaned her body further into his. A need for warmth, human contact. He kissed her now with more passion and caressed her hair.
‘From the very first time I saw you walking down the lane early that morning of the eviction, I wanted you.’ He kissed her again. This time sucking on her lips, licking them. She opened his lips with the point of her tongue and kissed him back. Slipping her hands under his jacket, she wrapped her arms round him, her hands caressed.
Edward slipped across the seat away from the wheel to cradle her in his lap. He slipped a hand under her skirt. A look of surprise and pleasure as he caressed naked hips, a flat tummy, a voluptuous mound of Venus, then between her legs. He sighed and removed his hand. Placing its palm over his mouth, he kissed it.
Cressida was filled with emotion for this big man. She wanted to weep. It was such an erotic gesture and one made with true love and admiration for her. There was no doubt in her mind as to that.
‘I said you were trouble, but this is the kind of trouble I’d like you to be for me.’ He kissed her once more and then slipped out from underneath her and slid along the seat to behind the wheel again. ‘Another time, another place. How do you feel about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just yes?’
‘I might be falling in love, Edward.’
They kissed again. ‘I
know
I am, and if you’re only thinking you are, then I’m in trouble.’
‘You said it. Not the time nor the place. Edward, there’s no point sending Carol’s body to Venice. I’ll be bringing Byron’s body home, to rest in the ancestral graveyard.’
‘It was her dying wish, Cressida.’
‘Then I have to grant it. She will be buried in the Vine family plot next to Byron and my mother Rosemary. Never mind what she was to me, she was my father’s wife, a Vine by marriage. I’ll not deny her her last wish.’
‘That’s generous. Under the circumstances, very generous.’
‘Edward, I can’t be a hypocrite about this. I will not be involved. The whole town knows about the bitter feud that existed between us. I will grant her her wish but I will stay away and well out of it.’
‘Leave it with me,’ he told her.
* * *
It had been a long time since Edward Cornwell had been in love. What he and Derinda had together was sex and companionship. Affection for one another, and the fun of playing happy family with her children once a week. But neither of them ever pretended that it was love. There was an unspoken understanding between them that convenience not passion kept them together and that it was never enough.
In the police station, in spite of all the work and the dreary details being handled as a result of the accident, Ed found time to think of Cressida. How she felt in his arms. Her kiss. No woman had ever kissed him like that. Married at nineteen, love had been over for him at twenty-four, but the marriage lingered on until his wife’s death. From Kane Chandler to the Sheriff of New Cobham County – was he being too optimistic? It was a question that had to be addressed. Not a man to linger in doubt, he would ask her when he returned home.
The sheriff was having a bad day. Just as he had surmised, the telephone never stopped ringing with inquiries about the funeral arrangements for Carol Vine. At five o’clock, Carlos walked into the New Cobham Police Station and asked for him.
The two men shook hands. ‘My name is Carlos Marias Arriva and I am trying to locate a Miss Cressida Vine at her house, Hollihocks. I have been trying to call her for several days but the telephones are out of order. Would you give me directions to her house?’
‘Can I assume you are a friend?’
‘Yes. A very close friend.’
‘A friend of the family?’
‘Yes, I knew her father Byron, but I was always more close to her. Why do you ask? Is something wrong?’
‘No. No. She’s fine. And the phones have been out. May I suggest that you check into the New Cobham Inn and I will have her call you there?’
‘What’s going on, Sheriff? I am someone who she has been speaking to almost every day for the last ten years. This is the longest period we have not been in touch. She is all right? I do insist you tell me if she is not.’
‘Yes. Though I think this homecoming has been not what she quite expected. And now Carol Vine is dead, an accident. Miss Vine has only just heard and I think it has come as a shock, so she has gone off for the day to be quiet. I will have her there for sure at the New Cobham Inn. Shall we say eight o’clock?’
‘Eight, for dinner, tell her. Now where is this New Cobham Inn?’
Edward gave directions and the two men shook hands and Carlos was gone. Edward went to the window. He saw Carlos help an
exceptionally beautiful and glamorous woman from the Mercedes he had been driving. Together they walked towards the New Cobham Inn.
Edward arrived home with a surge of excitement. Cressida was there, in his house waiting for him. It seemed so natural. So many years of no Cressida, that seemed unnatural. It was obvious from the moment he entered the house she had not slept all the day away. She had straightened up the house. The dishes were washed. The rooms had lost their dishevelled look.
She was standing at the top of the stairs. He took them two at a time. ‘How do you feel?’
‘I am never lonely. Never. But all day I have been lonely for you. Does that sound crazy?’
‘Not to me it doesn’t,’ he told her as he swept her off her feet and into his arms.
‘I’ve never been made love to by a sheriff.’ And she kissed him.
Cressida wrapped her legs round his waist and clung to him with her arms around his neck. He raised her skirt and fondled her naked bottom while walking down the hall to the bedroom. Her nakedness was overpowering sexuality. He wanted it. Craved Cressida. He had to have her instantly. The bedroom would have to wait. He pressed her back against the hall wall and unzipped and lifted her to impale her in one mighty thrust upon his large, hard, and needy penis.
She was tight, so very tight and warm, and soon moist. He pressed her against the wall, held her there, and fucked her without ceremony or tenderness, just urgency, need. Cressida pulled her dress over her head and threw it to the floor. Now she saw the sheriff as she had not seen him before. All lust. A marvellous being, part beast, part man. A great handsome bull of a man with the bluest eyes she had ever seen. Edward Cornwell the Sheriff of New Cobham County. At last she had found the right Minotaur and she was the Circe she had wanted to be, the Circe of the Picasso painting she had seen when she was eighteen years old.
An hour later Cressida was on her knees making love to Edward. The taste of him so appealing. The shape and size of him so perfect and very manly. He filled her mouth. The way she licked and kissed and used his balls to excite passion in him, to arouse their lust, was bringing him out of the sexual wilderness he had been living in without a woman like Cressida. He came in her mouth and saw the delight in her face as she swallowed and licked her lips, not to miss a drop of his orgasm.
Emotion broke him down. There were deep sighs between the kisses he placed over her face, her lips, her breasts. Later, while lying in each
other’s arms enjoying the aftermath of sexual bliss, he remembered and told Cressida, ‘Carlos Marias Arriva wants to meet you at eight o’clock at the New Cobham Inn.’
‘Carlos is here? He’s a great friend.’
‘And lover?’
‘Oh, yes. A great friend and lover for many years. But not like us.’
‘Now I am your lover?’
‘Oh yes, I hope so. What time is it?’ She did not wait for an answer but continued, ‘You’ll have to take me back to Hollihocks so I can change. Oh, no you don’t. I still have clothes in my rooms at the inn. We’ll go directly there.’
‘
We’ll
go there?’
Cressida bent over and placed a kiss on one of his nipples. ‘Well, I’m not going without you.’
There was a special light in her eyes: excitement, real joy to be seeing Carlos. But she wanted him. Edward Cornwell felt like a giant.
In the inn, he waited for Cressida in one of the small rooms stuffed with New England memorabilia. He was drinking scotch on the rocks. When Cressida appeared he was once again stunned by how sensuous and exciting a woman she was. He wanted her all over again.
Almost everyone who passed the couple on the way to the dining – rooms stopped to say, ‘Good evening, Sheriff,’ and ignored Cressida. Except for raised eyebrows, surprise that she should be out with their sheriff. Edward kept rising from his chair and saying, ‘Have you met Miss Vine from Hollihocks?’ Edward Cornwell in or out of uniform was formidable, and he was making his point. Cressida was not to be sent to Coventry because her step-mother had killed herself. ‘I did warn you, they won’t make it easy for you until she is well under the ground and they have had their period of mourning and gossip. But they’ll come round,’ he told her.
‘You’ll see to that?’
‘Good sheriffs are hard to find.’
‘I told them at the desk to tell Carlos we’re here.’
Cressida had hardly finished her sentence when Carlos and Romi Richebourg appeared. A man in love but not a fool in love, it was clear to Edward from the way that Carlos and Cressida looked at each other, the way they touched each other, that it wasn’t over for Carlos. But was it over for Cressida? Then again Carlos looked at the dynamically beautiful and provocative Romi in just the same way. The man had an erotic charm that was seductive, hard to resist.
The two men were sizing each other up, checking each other out. The evening was amusing, the conversation rich, the wine flowed, the laughter rang. Then at just the right moment Carlos delivered the
coup
de grâce
. ‘I need you to come away with me, Cressida. I won’t take no for an answer.’
‘Have I ever said no to you?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Because you’ve never said no to me.’
What was this play between them? That was what was on Edward’s mind. Carlos was brief but to the point about the tented city in Somalia that was a matter of many lives or many deaths. ‘Sami is, as we speak, on his way to Mogadishu. I don’t want to bust in on your new life, Cressida, but this is an emergency. I want you to take on the job with Sami.’
‘Let him handle it. I’m just getting settled in here, I have plans too, a life to begin again.’
‘I won’t take no for an answer,’ he repeated. ‘I could have, had I not made a stupid mistake and allowed the commission to go to competition. The entries were dreadful, all of them. Now time is running out and I must get a team together to give me what is right, not just more monumental architecture. If you won’t take it on, at least come in on a consulting basis. We leave tomorrow and I know you will crack the problem for us. You care more about people-architecture than most of your peers. Conversation finished. You simply have to take it on.’
Carlos was surprised when Cressida turned to Edward and said, ‘I can’t say no to Carlos. I won’t say no to him.’
It was only then that Carlos realised that something that might be serious was happening between Cressida and the sheriff.
‘Maybe it’s not a bad thing, your going. By the time you get back, your house will be in order. The funeral and remembrance services for Carol Vine will be over, and the gossip will have settled down,’ Edward told her.
‘If I can be charitable for the suffering families of Somalia, how can I be less so for the woman who loved my father? She did make him happy. I want the demise of Carol over and done with before my return. Let her friends give her a good send off. Byron would have, and so will I. Tell whoever decides to take care of her funeral arrangements that the body can rest in the drawing-room of Hollihocks before they proceed to the church. It must not be known that I made the offer. Guilt, gloating over her death, that’s how her vile friends would interpret any gesture I might make.’
‘She wouldn’t have done it for you, Cressida,’ that was Carlos, ‘but you are right and I think I have come at the best moment to sweep you away from all this.’