“What fool would come down here in weather like this?” I mustered some humor and gave him a shaky smile over my shoulder.
Nolan still frowned. “We’re afraid for your safety.”
“So am I,” I said lightly. “Which is why I went to the police. Do you mind if I zap some coffee instead of making fresh?”
“I don’t care. Laurie—”
“Look, I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I’m not helpless. Why does everybody treat me as if I am? The police will take care of Dennis. We have to let the legal system work.”
Nolan caught my arm and pulled me around. “Forget about coffee. Talk to me.”
Looking up into his worried face, I tried to recall how long I’d known Nolan. He’d been in my orbit since before I could remember — the son of family friends in a rarified social circle. When my grandfather died the year I was sixteen, he’d come solemnly to the funeral with his father — both in suits and ties — and we’d eyed each other with covert interest. Months later, he smuggled me a drink from the bar at a cousin’s wedding at a swanky country club. When he gave me the glass, Nolan noticed the paint under my nails, and we’d gone outside to talk about art in the evening air while the music played.
His older brothers went into business and law, but Nolan had grown up artistic and intuitive. With a discerning eye and passion too. Playing rugby evolved into building gigantic steel mobiles — the kind corporations bought to display in their impressive headquarters. He and I had gone our separate ways, but there had been potential between us. For a while.
Nolan watched me, his expression going very still. “Tell me the truth. Did Dennis come here to see you?”
“Heavens, no.”
Whether he believed me or not, I couldn’t be sure. He released my arm and said, “Your mother says there’s a gun on the boat. Is that true?”
“I have no idea. There might have been one years ago, but surely not anymore.”
“I have one, if you need it.”
That surprised me. But I said, “I wouldn’t know how to use a gun.”
Nolan’s gaze didn’t waver. “I made some calls after your mother contacted me. I talked to his brother. Laurie, Dennis phoned from this location last night.”
Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. “How do you know that?”
“He has a fancy app on his cell phone — a GPS. So does his brother. He made the call, Laurie. Did you see him?”
“Of course not.”
“But the call.”
“He might have come around the marina.” Uncertainly, I glanced out the window and tried to remember. How long had I left the curtains open last night? I gathered my wits and said, “Nolan, I don’t want you mixed up in this.”
“In what?”
“Dennis and me.”
“Jesus, are you back together with him?”
“God, no.”
“Then why—?”
“Please, I don’t want you to — Dennis will go away eventually, but until then, you need to keep your distance.”
Nolan seized me by the elbows, his hands insistent. “I can help, Laurie. I’ll break his neck if he hurts you again.”
I smiled. For all his size, I couldn’t see Nolan hurting anyone. He was too sweet. Sometimes so sweet my teeth ached.
But Dennis? He had swept into the city like a pirate from New York and conned a local art dealer into giving him a share in a gallery. Then the hoodwinking started. Nothing could ever be proved, of course, but there were commissions stolen, artists cheated, buyers angry. The gallery owner retired hastily and fled to Florida. Dennis’s life-of-the-party personality and undeniable sex appeal — for both men and women, it turned out — kept him riding high a little longer.
He’d come courting me before his real trouble started. The reputation of my family — painters, all of us, especially Daddy, a portraitist and teacher at the university — made me a kind of blue blood in the city creative class, something Dennis needed to keep going. Respectability, that’s what I’d brought to the match. And he’d brought — well, something I had avoided since a stormy love affair fell apart two years ago. Sex, at first. The kind that made me lose my head. And more excitement too — one temptation after another to lure me deeper into his world.
But Dennis soon ran the gallery into the ground and took my good name with it.
The first time he hit me had been at Thanksgiving. His frustration boiled over. Somehow his financial problems were all my fault. He knocked out my eye tooth — humiliating as much as painful.
“Are you in some kind of trouble, Laurie?” Dr. Feingold had asked, there in his dental office. His gentle eyes were worried behind his round-framed glasses.
I lied to him. Told him I’d fallen off a ladder while setting up the Christmas tree.
During the holidays my family intervened — expressing genteel concern and dismay. A restraining order, they urged. So I went to the police station and blushed the whole time I told impassive officers my dirty story. They asked awful questions. About the sex. Had I liked it at first and then got second thoughts? What else? I told them as much as I could stand, and that he’d begun to hit me. The police took photos of my bruises. I admitted that he’d threatened to do worse.
The restraining order didn’t stop Dennis, though. I’d called 911 and had him arrested twice — the first time during a Twelfth Night party where friends watched aghast — which only made him more furious with me.
My mother started having angina attacks. What could I do but move off the family estate to spare her? So I’d come to the boat and hoped I could resolve things myself.
In a hard voice, Nolan said, “Did you see him last night, Laurie? You can trust me.”
“No.”
“Because...”
I saw a change in Nolan’s face. “What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
Nolan turned his head away. “He was supposed to meet me last night. To give me something.”
“Give you what?”
After a heartbeat, Nolan said, “He had pictures.”
“From the gallery?”
“No.”
It didn’t take much to figure out what he meant. Photos. Blackmail. The word made my insides twist with pain. I’d brought ugliness into so many lives. First Dennis had gone to my family and now to Nolan, threatening to show my mother what I’d become. All this awfulness because I’d yearned to walk on the wild side.
I said, “He wanted you to pay him for pictures.”
“Yes.”
“Of me.”
“Yes.”
I knew exactly which photographs he meant. A night long ago, when Dennis was still deliciously naughty and fun, he’d snapped a few shots in bed. After I’d had too much wine. When it hadn’t taken a lot of convincing. Dennis brought out something in me that I then realized had been lurking inside all along.
My face burning, I said, “Did he show them to you?”
“Only one.” Nolan’s voice sounded hollow.
“Well, I hope it was a good one.”
I shoved through the door, and slammed it back on its hinges. On the deck, I gulped fresh air to fight down nausea. The water was rougher than before, but the rain had let up a little. I grabbed the railing for support. The tree had rolled away from the boat, I thought. Maybe the thing that snagged it had shifted too. I fought down the nausea that rushed up from inside me Nolan came out of the cabin and said nothing.
He’d never think of me the same way again, that was for sure. I’d never be the pretty girl at the country club, sipping cocktails on the veranda and talking about the Impressionists. Him brushing a ladybug from my yellow dress, thinking I was the kind of girl he could take home to his family.
In a while, I said, “How much were you going to pay him?”
“It doesn’t matter.”