Off Season (22 page)

He smiled. “In case you declined the offer, I needed to use what I knew as leverage.”

“Blackmail, you mean.”

He was quiet for a moment. He stroked her hair again. “Jill, I cannot stand Lizette. I never could. All that time you thought I was fucking her, believe me, I was not. And now I want you back on our show. Where you belong.”

He moved his hand to her neck, then ran it down her throat. Despite herself, Jill felt her breasts swell, her nipples grow firm. She wondered if he could see their outline through the terry robe. “Why did you sign the contract, Jill? Why did you agree to come back?”

She knew she should get up. She knew she should get up off the couch and ask him to leave. But his hand felt so warm and her heart ached so much. “Because I wanted to
use Addie’s connections to find Ben a good lawyer,” she admitted.

“Then it seems we need each other,” he said. “You need to save your husband. And I need
Good Night
, USA. I’m a washed-up baseball player with no family and no life. The show’s all I have.” His hand had stopped moving, but her heat had not abated.

“You never married,” Jill said. “Was that my fault?”

He laughed. “Despite what the tabloids say, I do not take commitment lightly.”

Sometime in the past three years, she’d stopped paying attention to the tabloids, for there no longer had been a need. “You could go back to sportscasting,” she said.

“No. That would be like you returning to local street news.”

“You could find someone other than me. A new face. No entanglements.”

“You’re a proven commodity. You’ll give the show a big boost.”

She wished he would move his hand again. She wished he would slide it inside the terry cloth and fondle her breast, squeeze her nipple, make her feel a woman’s velvet heat again, remind her that there was life and love and ecstasy out there, and that she deserved it again. She arched her back a little in response to her growing need. “So now you only want me for my ratings,” she said with an attempt at humor that rang oddly true.

His hand remained steady, it did not move. “That’s all,” he said, “I promise. I don’t want to interfere in your personal life. Besides,” he added, “I do care about you, Jill. I do want you to be happy.”

She closed her eyes again, and her back relaxed. She wished she did not wish that he would interfere, that he would whisk her off on his white horse for good, that she could forget what it meant to love Ben and could return to the land of TV-make-believe and be quite happy there.

But she’d learned long ago that no man rode a white horse. And even if Christopher did, he would not whisk her away, because he only wanted her so his ratings would soar.

On her skin his hand now felt chilled. She slid from under his touch and slowly sat up, wondering why it seemed she now had so much more to lose than when she’d arrived.

“You promised you’d help paint and wallpaper the kitchen,” Amy whined to Ben on Monday morning, when she called him at eleven and got him out of bed. He briefly wondered why he didn’t just leave the answering machine on and pretend he wasn’t home. But for some reason, leaving on an answering machine while one was in the next room seemed deceitful.

“I don’t remember that I did,” he told Amy truthfully. These days Ben found he forgot many things, like the date and the time and often his name.

“It’s bad enough I had to order cable. Charlie never did anything to spruce up this place,” Amy said. “Anyway, the new wallpaper I ordered is in. You’ve got nothing else to do, and Rita said she’d help. Are you reneging on the deal?”

He rubbed his beard growth, then looked down at his sweats. He couldn’t be sure if he’d changed his clothes since Jill left days ago. Going to Amy’s would mean he’d have to shower. And shave. And look human again, no matter how bad he felt.

“I don’t know, honey,” he said. “I haven’t wallpapered in years. Besides,” he added in what really wasn’t a lie, “I planned to go Christmas shopping today.”

“We’re not doing it today. We’re doing it Wednesday. Can I count on you, Ben? Please, please?”

Well, Wednesday was two days from now, forty-eight
hours. Maybe he’d feel up to it by then. Besides, Jill would be home at the end of the week, and sooner or later he’d have to buck up.

“Okay, you win. But only if Rita or her mother makes some food. I can’t stand my own cooking another day.”

“I’ll cook!” Amy exclaimed, which was not the greatest culinary news.

Ben sighed and really wished he could drop the whole thing.

From doing a stint on a morning news show to being photographed at Rockefeller Center with its famous skaters and its festive tree, Jill had pretended to love this reunion for the good of the show.

By Wednesday she was ready to ask Addie for the favor. With Christopher’s coaching, Jill had dreamed up a story that should seem plausible, as long as Addie didn’t ask many questions.

They were having lunch at Tavern on the Green, because Addie felt that the more tourists who saw them together, the better. It was part of the limelight that Jill had once relished.

In the bright daylight of the garden room, though, Jill felt oddly self-conscious. She looked at Christopher for support: his unnerving wink made her feel a little bit naked.

She danced her fork through the salad of spring greens. “A friend of Amy’s has himself in hot water,” she said as nonchalantly as she could. “Would either of you know a decent lawyer?” She chewed a piece of lettuce and slowly swallowed.

“Seems to me you had a decent lawyer who got you out of your contract with me,” Addie remarked, not lifting her eyes from the piece of bread that she slathered with butter. It amazed Jill that the woman had not died of overconsumption—or tactlessness. She was still as fat and
brusque as ever, but now the brusqueness was more bothersome to Jill. Perhaps living back on the Vineyard had weaned her off barracudas, emotional and otherwise.

“What kind of a lawyer do you need?” Christopher asked, stepping up to the plate, the baseball-player-celebrity still pitching.

“Well,” Jill replied, not daring to look at him for fear of revealing her anxiety, “a thirteen-year-old girl says he touched her in an ‘inappropriate place.’ He denies it.”

“They all do,” Addie said, gazing at the salmon in parchment that had just arrived.

Jill waited until the food was served before she continued. “Anyway,” she added, “the girl claims he only touched her breast.”

“He didn’t rape her?” Christopher asked.

“He claims no. And there’s no physical evidence that says otherwise.”

Addie apparently wasn’t interested. She dove into her meal.

“He needs a good criminal lawyer,” Christopher said, glancing at Addie. “Don’t you agree?”

The agent shrugged and took a huge forkful of garlic mashed potatoes. “Sounds like the kind of thing no one should get involved with.”

“He’s a friend of Amy’s. And our whole family,” Jill said. “And he lost both his parents in a car accident not long ago. He’s got no one to go to bat for him.” The “going to bat” term had come from Christopher. Jill hoped Addie didn’t recognize the language.

“Aren’t there any good attorneys on that island of yours?” the agent asked.

“Not who can help. Not with something this serious.”

Addie swigged her wine as if it were water.

“Addie,” Christopher said, “aren’t you friends with Herb Bartlett?”

Jill tried not to show her surprise. Christopher had not
even hinted that Addie knew the famous Atlanta attorney who’d successfully defended a rock star on a murder-one charge. She wondered what other tricks her co-host had up his French-cuffed sleeves. She did not want to look at him. She was afraid he would wink again.

“I hardly think Herb would want to defend a nobody-kid for something he probably did.”

Silence hung over the table. Jill looked at her plate.

“Well, I think Jill’s doing us a favor by filling in for Lizette,” her former co-anchor, lover, and fiancé said. “And I think a call to Herb Bartlett is the least we can do.”

“Or?” Addie asked.

“Or
Good Night, USA
is history, Addie. Jill will pack up her Manhattan clothes and go back to her little island, and I will not break in a new anchor. It will be Jill, or I’ll be gone.”

Addie swigged more wine and moved her gaze from Christopher to Jill. “I hate it when I feel I’ve been had,” she said.

“Jill is my best friend,” Rita announced, as if it were news to anyone in the room: Hazel, Ben, and Amy. They had just polished off huge helpings of Hazel’s beef stew.

Rita stood on a chair, guiding a plumb line so that Ben could hang up the next strip of prepasted wallpaper. She’d suggested that Jill would be a better assistant for Ben, but Amy explained that her mother was gone. Again.

So there stood Rita, lovely, pregnant Rita, substituting for her best friend, with her best friend’s daughter holding one side of the chair and the husband, the other. Hazel sat at the table carefully reading today’s newspaper in case the ink fell off before she got home.

“Jill’s been my best friend since either one of us can remember, but for the life of me I don’t understand why she keeps taking off.”

“It’s her job,” Ben said flatly. Rita recognized that he was an unhappy man. He had lost a lot of money in the Menemsha fire, she knew; Jill was working to support them until the museum could turn a profit—and Sea Grove began paying its dues. She also knew that Ben Niles was not the kind of guy to take his wife’s continued absences lightly. Not many on the island would.

Which was why Rita wanted to ask why he had closed the museum for the winter, but did not feel she should. Her curiosity could wait until Jill returned, assuming her best friend had time for her.

“When’s she coming back?”

Neither Ben nor Amy answered.

“Is she in Los Angeles?” Hazel asked, her head bent closely to the paper. “It says here ‘Jill McPhearson to host
Good Night, USA.
’ ”

Rita stopped what she was doing and looked down at Ben, who did not speak. “You must be reading that wrong, Mother.”

“My eyesight is perfectly good,” Hazel snipped. “ ‘Jill McPhearson to host
Good Night, USA
. An unidentified source recently reported that island native Jill Randall McPhearson will grace national television in February as her ex-fiancé’s co-anchor on the popular newsmagazine,
Good Night, USA.
’ ”

Rita’s gaze stayed on Ben. He shrugged. “Addie Becker must have planted that story to whet the audience’s appetite. The truth is, we decided it would be a smart move for Jill’s career.”

Although he said “we,” Rita wondered otherwise.

“She’s in New York City right now,” Ben continued, “doing prepublicity photos.” He laughed a short, unenthusiastic laugh.

“What else does the article say?” Rita asked.

Hazel returned to the paper. “That’s it.”

“I hate this,” Amy muttered. “All this publicity. It’s going to surround her again. It’s going to surround
us.”

“Well, don’t worry about the Vineyard,” Rita said. “Your mother has always been the island’s sweetheart. Long before even you were aware, her face was front page news here.”

“Yeah, well,” Ben said, adjusting his Red Sox baseball cap, “maybe next time Addie will remember to tell them her name is Niles now.”

“Oh, stop whining,” Hazel said, turning the newspaper page, “all of you. Jill is a very talented girl. She works hard and deserves everything she gets.”

Rita went back to the wall.

Amy turned to the table and measured, then cut another sheet of wallpaper. She handed it to Rita.

Ben said nothing more, as if he, too, knew that Hazel would have the last word, because she was the oldest, because that was how it worked.

“Besides,” Hazel-of-the-last-word added, “things could be worse, Ben. You could end up like your friend Dave Ashenbach. Doesn’t he live next door to your museum?”

Amy had just bent to get another roll of paper when Ben let go of his side of Rita’s chair. The chair wobbled. Rita grabbed the counter, but slipped and landed on top of Amy, who cushioned her fall—luckily for Rita, painfully for Amy.

“Yeow!” Amy cried, as Ben shot across the kitchen and snapped the newspaper from Hazel’s hands.

“What about Ashenbach?” he asked tightly, while Rita and Amy untangled themselves from each other and stood up to catch their breath.

“Up there,” Hazel said, pointing to the open page. “In the top corner. It says his granddaughter found him yesterday, and that the guy is dead.”

The house smelled like fishermen because that’s what the men were: Bruce Mallotti, Verge Benson, Frankie Paul. They had been Grandpa’s friends: they’d worked with him on the boats for years, and they’d played cards with him in winter when there was nothing else to do.

They were fishermen whose fathers and grandfathers before them had been fishermen, too, or at least that’s what Grandpa always said.

And like fishermen, they stuck together, which was why Mindy sat now in the living room of Bruce Mallotti’s small cottage on Lobsterville Road. She wished everyone would stop talking in whispers, like she was a little girl.