Charity could hardly breathe. She was reeling from the shock of her own actions, but she could not pull back from the brink. A devil’s brew of guilt, anger, and fear scalded her insides.
“He’s too big.” She flung out her hands in a helpless, desperate gesture. “Don’t you see? I can’t marry him, Meredith. He’s too big.”
“Are you crazy?” Meredith gave Charity a small shake. “Brett is a wonderful, wonderful man. You’re the luckiest woman alive.”
“If you think he’s so damn wonderful, why don’t you marry him yourself?” Horrified at her loss of control, Charity jerked free of her stepsister’s grip. She hurtled straight into the crowd.
The stunned onlookers dodged this way and that to clear a path for her. Charity dashed across the Oriental carpet and out through the French doors of the lounge.
She did not pause in the mellow, old-world club lobby. A startled doorman saw her coming and leaped to open the front door for her. She rushed past him and went down the front steps, precariously balanced on her three-inch heels. She was breathless when she reached the sidewalk in front of the club.
It was five minutes after eight on a summer evening. Downtown Seattle was still basking in the late sunlight. She spotted a cab that was just pulling up to the curb.
The rear door of the cab opened. Charity recognized the middle-aged couple who got out. George and Charlotte Trainer. Business acquaintances. Invited guests. Important people.
“Charity?” George Trainer looked at her in surprise. “What’s going on?”
“Sorry, I need that cab.” Charity pushed past the Trainers and leaped into the backseat. She slammed the door. “Drive.”
The cab driver shrugged and pulled away from the curb. “Where to?”
“Anywhere. I don’t care. Just drive. Please.” From out of nowhere, an image of the open sea flashed through her mind. Freedom. Escape. “No, wait, I know where I want to go. Take me down to the waterfront.”
“You got it.”
A few minutes later, Charity stood at the end of one of the tourist-oriented piers that jutted out from Seattle’s busy waterfront. The breeze off Elliott Bay churned her red silk skirts and filled her lungs. She could breathe freely at last. At least for a while.
She stood there clutching the railing for a long time. When the sun finally sank behind the Olympic Mountains, briefly painting the sky with the color of fire, Charity forced herself to face reality.
She was burned out at the age of twenty-nine.
At a time in life when others were just getting their careers into high gear, she was going down in flames. She had nothing left to give to the family business.
She could not go back to the presidential suite of the Truitt department store chain. She hated the very thought of ever stepping foot into her own office.
Wearily she closed her eyes against the guilt and shame that seized her. It was almost unbearable. For five long years, ever since her mother and stepfather had died in an avalanche while skiing in Switzerland, she had tried to fulfill the demanding responsibilities she had inherited.
She had done her best to salvage her step-siblings’ legacy and preserve it for them. But today she had reached the limits of whatever internal resources had brought her this far.
She could not go back to Truitt, the corporation that she had never wanted to run in the first place. She could not go back to Brett Loftus, whose bearlike embrace induced panic.
She had to escape or she would go crazy.
Crazy.
Charity gazed down into the dark waters of the bay and wondered if this was how it felt to be on the edge of what an earlier generation would have called a nervous breakdown.
Prologue: Elias
Revenge and deep water have much in common. A man may get sucked down into either and drown before he understands the true danger.
—“On the Way of Water,” from the journal of Hayden Stone
Elias Winters looked into the face of the man he intended to destroy and saw the truth at last. With a shock of devastating clarity, he understood that he had wasted several years of his life plotting a vengeance that would bring him no satisfaction.
“Well, Winters?” Garrick Keyworth’s heavy features congealed with irritation and impatience. “You demanded this meeting. Said you had something to discuss concerning my company’s business operations in the Pacific.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s hear it. You may have all day to sit around and shoot the breeze, but I’ve got a corporation to run.”
“This won’t take long.” Elias glanced at the deceptively thin envelope he had brought with him.
Inside the slim white packet was the information that could cripple, perhaps even fatally wound, Keyworth International. The contents represented the culmination of three years of careful planning, endless nights spent studying the host of variables involved, countless hours of cautious maneuvering and manipulation.
Everything was at last in place.
In the next few weeks the big freight-forwarding firm known throughout the Pacific Rim as Keyworth International could be brought to its knees because of the information contained in the envelope. The company would likely never recover from the conflagration Elias was ready to ignite.
Elias had studied his opponent with a trained patience and discipline that had been inculcated in him since his sixteenth year. He knew that Keyworth International was the most important thing in Garrick Keyworth’s life.
Keyworth’s wife had left him years ago. He had never bothered to remarry. He was estranged from his son, Justin, who was struggling to build a rival freight-handling company here in Seattle. What friends Keyworth had were the type who would disappear the moment they heard that he was in financial trouble. He could not even take satisfaction in his renowned collection of Pacific Islands wood carvings. Elias knew that Keyworth had collected them because of the status they afforded, rather than because of any intrinsic interest they held for him.
The company was Keyworth’s sole creation. With the monumental arrogance of an ancient pharaoh, he had built his own version of a modern-day pyramid, a storehouse of treasure on which he sat alone.
But Elias had loosened several of the support stones that sustained the massive weight of the Keyworth pyramid. All he had to do now to ensure that the dark waters of vengeance flowed was to keep the contents of the little envelope secret for a few more weeks.
All he had to do was walk out of Keyworth’s office right now. It would be so easy.
“You’ve got five minutes, Winters. Say what you have to say. I’ve got a meeting at eleven-thirty.” Garrick leaned back against his gray leather executive chair. He toyed with the expensive inlaid pen that he held in one beefy hand.
The hand did not go well with the elegant pen, Elias thought. For that matter, Garrick Keyworth did not go very well with his own office. He clashed with the sophisticated ambience the designer had created.
He was in his mid-fifties, a bulky, burly figure in a hand-tailored suit that could not camouflage the thickness of his neck.
Elias met Garrick’s shrewd, predatory gaze. It would be such a simple matter to bring him down, now that every piece on the chessboard was in place.
“I don’t need five minutes,” Elias said. “One or two should do it.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Damn it, Winters, stop wasting my time. The only reason I agreed to see you is because of your reputation.”
“You know who I am?”
“Hell, yes.” Garrick tossed aside the pen. “You’re a major player in the Pacific Rim trade. Everyone here in Seattle who is in the international market knows that. You’ve got contacts, and you’ve got the inside track in a lot of places out in the Pacific where no one else can get a toehold. I know you’ve made a killing consulting for off-shore investors.” Garrick squinted slightly. “And word has it that you’re also a little weird.”
“That pretty well sums up my life.” Elias got to his feet
. He set the envelope carefully down on top of the polished surface of the wide desk. “Take a look inside. I think you’ll find the contents—” He paused, savoring the next word with bleak amusement. “Enlightening.”
Without waiting for a response, he turned and walked toward the door. The knowledge that Hayden Stone had been right closed around him like the icy waters of a bottomless lake. Years had been wasted. Years that could never be recovered.
“What is this?” Garrick roared just as Elias reached the door. “What game are you playing? You claimed you had something important that you had to tell me about my Pacific business operations.”
“It’s all in the envelope.”
“Goddamn it, people are right when they say you’re strange.”
Elias heard the sound of tearing paper. He glanced back over his shoulder and watched as Garrick yanked the five-page document out of the envelope. “There’s just one thing I’d like to know.”
Garrick ignored him. He scowled at the first page of the report. Anger and bewilderment twisted his broad features. “What do you know about my business relationship with Kroy and Ziller?”
“Everything,” Elias said. He knew that Keyworth had not yet realized the import of what he held in his hand, but it wouldn’t take him long.
“This is confidential information, by God.” Garrick raised his head and regarded Elias with the kind of stare a bull gives a matador. “You have no right to possess information about these contract arrangements.”
“Do you remember a man named Austin Winters?” Elias asked softly.
“Austin Winters?” Astonishment and then deep wariness appeared in Garrick’s eyes. “I knew an Austin Winters once. That was twenty years ago. Out in the Pacific.” His eyes hardened with dawning comprehension. “Don’t tell me you’re related to him. You can’t be.”
“I’m his son.”
“That’s impossible. Austin Winters didn’t even have a wife.”
“My parents were divorced a couple of years before my father moved to Nihili Island.”
“But no one ever said anything about a boy.”
The knowledge that his father hadn’t even talked about him to his friends and acquaintances was a body blow. With the discipline of long practice, Elias concealed the effects of the direct hit Garrick had unwittingly delivered.
“There was a son. I was sixteen years old when you sabotaged my father’s plane. I arrived on Nihili the day after they recovered the wreckage. You had already left the island. It took me a long time to learn the truth.”
“You can’t blame Austin Winters’s death on me.” Garrick heaved himself to his feet, his florid face working furiously. “I had nothing to do with the crash.”
“You cut the fuel lines, knowing it would take months to get replacement parts from the mainland. You knew that Dad only had one plane and that if he couldn’t fly, he wouldn’t be able to fulfill his freight contracts. You knew his business would collapse if it was put out of action for several weeks.”
“A pack of goddamned lies.” A dark flush rose in Garrick’s jowly cheeks. “You can’t prove any of that.”
“I don’t have to prove it. I know what happened. Dad’s old mechanic saw you leaving the hangar the morning that the problem with the fuel lines was discovered. You wanted to take over my father’s new freight contracts, and the easiest way to do it was to make it impossible for him to meet his delivery deadlines.”
“Austin should never have taken off that day.” Garrick’s hands clenched into broad fists. “His own mechanic told him the plane wasn’t fit to fly.”
“Dad patched up the fuel line and took his chances because he had everything riding on those contracts. He knew he stood to lose his entire business if he failed to make the deliveries. But the fuel line cracked open when the Cessna was a hundred miles from land. My father never had a chance.”
“It wasn’t my fault, Winters. No one held a gun to Austin’s head and made him climb into that old beat-up Cessna that day.”
“Have you ever studied the nature of water, Keyworth?”
“What’s water got to do with any of this?”
“It’s a very unusual substance. Sometimes it’s incredibly clear, magnifying everything viewed through it. I am looking through that kind of water now. I can see you sitting on a pyramid built on the ruins of my father’s Cessna that lie on the floor of the sea.”
Garrick’s eyes widened. “You’re crazy.”
“The broken pieces of the plane are beginning to disintegrate, aren’t they? The whole structure will eventually crumble beneath you. And when it does, your pyramid will collapse and you will fall into the sea, just as my father did.”
“The rumors are right. You’re really out there in the ether, aren’t you?”
“But I see now that there’s no need for me to rush the process. It will all happen in good time. I wonder why it took me this long to understand that.”
Garrick looked torn between fury and incredulity. “I don’t have any use for this nonsense. Or for you. Get the hell out of my office, Winters.”
“When you read those papers you’re holding, Keyworth, you’ll realize how close you just came to disaster. I’ve decided not to sabotage your Pacific operations the way you sabotaged my father’s plane. It will be interesting to see what you do with your reprieve. Will you tell yourself that I was weak? That I didn’t have the guts to carry out my plans? Or will you look down into the water and see the rot on which you’ve built your empire?”
“Get out of here before I call security.”
Elias let himself out of the plush office and closed the door behind him.
He took the elevator down to the lobby, walked outside, and came to a halt on Fourth Avenue. It was the last week of July, and it was raining in Seattle.
He turned and started down the sidewalk. His reflection watched him from the windows of the street-front shops.
He could see the past clearly through the painfully transparent water that covered it. But the gray seas that hid his own future were murky and opaque. It was possible that there was no longer anything left of value to seek in that uncharted ocean.
But he had to start the search. He no longer had a choice. Today he had finally realized that the alternative was oblivion.
Without conscious thought, he turned at the corner and started walking down Madison Street toward the waterfront. As he gazed out over Elliott Bay, he made a decision.
He would begin his new life by accepting the legacy that Hayden Stone had left to him: a pier known as Crazy Otis Landing and a small curiosity shop called Charms & Virtues, both in the northern part of the state in a little town named Whispering Waters Cove.
1
Only the most discerning observer can sense the deep, hidden places in the seas of another’s life. And only the unwary or the truly brave dare to look into those secret depths.
—“On the Way of Water,” from the journal of Hayden Stone
He waited deep in the shadows at the back of the poorly lit shop, a patient spider crouched motionless in his web. There was something about the very stillness emanating from him that made Charity believe he would wait as long as necessary for his prey to venture too close.
“Mr. Winters?” Charity hesitated in the open doorway, clipboard in hand, and peered into the gloom-filled interior of Charms & Virtues.
“Ms. Truitt.” Elias Winters’s voice came out of the darkness behind the cash register counter. “Please come in. I had a feeling you might show up sooner or later.”
He had spoken softly from the far end of the cavernous old wharf warehouse, but Charity heard every word. A tiny tingle of combined interest and alarm went through her. His voice was as deep as the sea, and it beckoned her with the same dangerous allure. She took a cautious step through the doorway and tried to shake off the strange mix of wariness and excitement that gripped her. She was here on business, she reminded herself.
“Sorry to bother you,” she said briskly.
“It’s not a problem.”
“I’m the owner of Whispers, the bookshop at the other end of the pier.”
“I know.”
An extraordinary quality underlay the very ordinary words. Charity had the feeling that she was being summoned. Uncertainty made her pause.
When in doubt go into full executive mode, she told herself. She had been out of the intense, competitive corporate world for a year, but she could still tap the old skills when she needed them. The important thing was to take charge immediately. She cleared her throat.
“As the President of the Crazy Otis Landing Shopkeepers Association, I want to take this opportunity to welcome you to our little group,” she said.
“Thank you.”
Elias Winters did not sound particularly impressed. On the other hand, he did not sound unimpressed, either. There was something unnaturally calm about that dark, velvety voice. She wondered if he was tanked to the gills on tranquilizers and then decided that was highly improbable. No one who was stuffed full of sedatives could have managed to infuse so much subtle power into such softly spoken words.
She took a step closer. A floorboard creaked. The gentle lapping of the waves beneath the aging pier was clearly audible in the solemn quiet. Another step produced a ghostly moan from a protesting timber. Dust motes danced in the air.
Whenever she entered Charms & Virtues, she thought of haunted houses and old cemeteries. As she had occasionally pointed out to the previous owner, Hayden Stone, a little dusting and some decent lighting would do wonders for the place.
Elias stood, unmoving, behind the counter. He was cloaked in the false twilight created by the weak lamps and the little slits of windows located high on the walls. She could not make out his face. In fact, she could barely distinguish him from the looming bulk of the antique fortune-telling machine positioned just behind the counter.