Off Season Read online

  “What is going on, Ben?”

  “First you, then Rita. You’re both acting so strange,” Jill said.

  Ben’s palms began to sweat. Could Rita know?

  Oh, God, did everyone already know?

  “Ben?” Jill moved her hand up to his cheek.

  He touched her fingers and drew them to his mouth. He kissed them. “I love you,” he said.

  She didn’t move. He knew that she knew there was more, that he was holding on to something.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Something’s happened.”

  Other books by Jean Stone

  BEACH ROSES

  TRUST FUND BABIES

  THE SUMMER HOUSE

  BIRTHDAY GIRLS

  PLACES BY THE SEA

  TIDES OF THE HEART

  SINS OF INNOCENCE

  FIRST LOVES

  IVY SECRETS

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Off Season

  A Bantam Book / January 2001

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2001 by Jean Stone.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78521-3

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

  v3.1

  In memory

  of my parents—

  who would be pretty amazed.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Sgt. Flora Bergeron of the West Springfield, Mass., Police Department; Lydia Kapell, M.D.; Meg Mastriana, L.I.C.S.W., Crisis Program Director at the Psychiatric Crisis Center, Springfield, Mass.; and special thanks to Cindy Smith, M.S., Learning Solutions Partner, Motorola University, Boynton Beach, Fla.

  Also thanks to Dana and Marilyn of Bickerton & Ripley Books, Edgartown, Mass., for their on-going support!

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Mindy Ashenbach sat in the middle of her quilt-covered bed, yanking red yarn from her Raggedy Ann’s head.

  “Bastard,” she muttered with each pull, feeling bittersweet satisfaction in using a swear word that would have made her grandfather mad. She tugged another clump, then squeezed her eyes shut. “Rotten bastard.”

  She sat quiet a moment, half-holding her breath, half-waiting for punishment. But the room was silent—the whole house was silent, the same way it was after school every day when she came home from helping at Menemsha House.

  What made her think today would be different?

  What made her think that even if anyone knew what had happened, they would have cared?

  She flung the now hairless doll across the small room. It bounced off the windowsill and landed with a thud beneath the slant-roof dormer. It wasn’t as if she needed the dumb doll anymore. She was ten, after all. Too old to believe that I-love-you-heart crap.

  She sucked in her lower lip and folded her arms. Then somewhere inside her a tremble began, like the rumblings of a volcano she’d seen on TV. It started in her belly, the place where it ached sometimes when she was scared. It started in her belly and stuttered its way up her chest to her throat. Then she opened her mouth, and out it came: one big wailing cry.

  “Bastard!” she cried out. “Bastard! bastard!” She wondered if this was what it felt like when you died, if your insides ended up coming out, if all of your hurt ended up on the floor, facedown and alone like Raggedy Ann.

  Suddenly, the door opened.

  “Mindy? What the hell are you doing?” It was her grandfather.

  She clutched her aching belly and tried to lick the wet places that were on her cheeks.

  “You were supposed to make meat loaf for dinner,” he snarled. That’s when she smelled his familiar seascent, the warning that he’d been fishing today and he would be tired. “The last time I checked,” he continued, “meat loaf takes more than an hour. Now quit your daydreaming and get downstairs.” He started to close the door, then stopped, as if sensing something was not right. “What’s the matter with you, girl? You hear from your mother again?”

  Anytime Mindy was upset, Grandpa figured it was because her ne’er-do-well mother, as he called her (his ne’er-do-well daughter-in-law, reckless widow of his ne’er-do-well son, Mindy’s father), had phoned or sent a postcard from an exotic port-of-call like Exuma or Caracas or wherever the yacht she was captaining that week or that month or that year had taken her now.

  But no, it was not her mother who had upset Mindy.

  It was that bastard. Who hadn’t ended up caring about her any more than anyone else.

  Grandpa stood at the half-open door, waiting for an answer. If Mindy said yes, Mom had called, she knew it would end the conversation: Grandpa would groan his grumbly, cigar-smoked-up groan, and go away. All she would have to do was lie. Then everything would be back to normal.

  But her belly ached.

  And throat had closed up.

  And her doll no longer had hair.

  “Ben …,” she said quietly.

  Grandpa sighed and stepped inside the room. “I can’t hear you, girl.”

  She sniffed. God, she hated that she’d sniffed like Lisa Pendergast, the crybaby of the fourth grade. She closed her eyes. “Ben Niles,” she managed to say.

  He grabbed her shoulders. Her eyes flew open. Grandpa’s face was all of a sudden in her own. “What about Niles?” he barked.

  It was no secret to Mindy or half the damn world that Grandpa and Ben were not friends. But the way Grandpa’s steely eyes bored into her now was as scary as the night she’d come face to face with a big ugly possum.

  She wondered if Grandpa was going to have a heart attack like he did last year after the bluefins stopped running.

  He shook her a little. “What about Niles?”

  She tried to swallow. She wanted him to let go. “Nothing,” she whispered.

  His grip grew tighter. “What about him?” he shouted. “Did he hurt you?”

  Mindy lowered her eyes, thinking that, yes, Ben had hurt her. Not the way Grandpa was hurting her now, but he’d hurt her. Her eyes were filling with tears again. She blinked. The tears fell on her jersey.


  Grandpa began to pant. “Did he touch you?” he hissed. “Did that son of a bitch touch you?”

  And then she realized why he was so upset. She’d seen those movies at school, the ones about sex. The ones that warned you not to let yourself be vulnerable, and what to do if some man (or woman) touched you there. She looked at her grandfather but did not respond.

  The hissing grew silent. Then Grandpa said, “Where, girl? Where did he touch you?”

  She looked up at Grandpa. He didn’t look like his heart was going to attack. Instead, he looked almost as if, like her, he was going to cry, like he was sad and worried and afraid all at once. All for her. For half a second Mindy thought he was going to hug her. The only one who’d ever done that was Ben. And he hated her now.

  “You can tell me,” Grandpa said. His voice was softer now, his grip less intense. “Please, Mindy. Just tell me. Goddammit. Where did he touch you?”

  She looked across the room to hapless, hopeless Raggedy Ann, then back to her grandfather, who still waited for an answer. And in that instant she decided that even though Ben hated her now, maybe Grandpa did not. Maybe somebody loved her, after all—her grandfather, her own flesh and blood.

  Mindy slowly put her hands on her chest, on top of her red-and-white-striped jersey, right where her nipples were trying to grow breasts. “Here,” she said quietly. “He touched me here.”

  Chapter 2

  Ben Niles sat on the floor of his Menemsha House museum and stared at the pile of cedar and oak wood sticks that he would craft into an old-fashioned lobster trap as soon as he figured out how.

  He raised his Red Sox baseball cap, ran his hand through his thinning hair, and laughed. This was, he reminded himself, his dream. No longer the premier restoration guru of old Yankee houses, Ben now played with sea-weathered sticks instead of smooth-polished black walnut, collected two-buck admission fees instead of five-figure paychecks, and savored eager smiles of elementary school kids instead of kowtowing to arrogant rich folks who wanted their million-dollar houses upgraded to two.

  Since he’d met his wife, Jill, he’d given it “all” up. The same way she’d given up her high-profile television career to be with him on Martha’s Vineyard. And now, thanks to Jill, Ben had found passion in both his life and his work, which included finding new ways to teach kids the crafts of their ancestors. The latest was the damn lobster trap, which he was staring at hopelessly when the telephone rang with blessed distraction.

  It was his wife, calling from the mainland—Vermont, to be exact.

  “I miss my new husband and I love him and I can’t wait to come home,” Jill said, her voice as soft as the silk of her nightgowns that he loved to feel brush his skin in their bed, that he loved to slide off her to make room for him. He looked down at his jeans, grateful that fifty-three was not too old for the enormous erection his wife could unwittingly produce. His glamorous, second-chance, seven-years-younger wife, his friends had teased. Ben had smiled at their envy, but silently was often stumped that a city-savvy, classy lady like her saw anything at all in a common rogue like him.

  “I miss you and I love you and I can’t wait for you, too,” he said, and realized that he’d never have talked to his beloved Louise that way, but then, they’d been the same age and had grown more sedate than romantic in the years before her death. He cleared his throat. “Do you know how to build lobster traps?” he asked his new, city-savvy wife. Her forefathers, after all, were native islanders. He was merely a transplant from Baltimore, though he’d now lived on the Vineyard more than half of his life.

  “I watched my father make them.” The softness in her voice now sounded even softer, a little depressed maybe, a little bit blue.

  Lonely, he figured. Like him.

  “I thought he owned the great 1802 Tavern,” he said, trying to lift her mood, trying to pretend that talking on the phone was as good as sitting next to each other, sharing the same air.

  “He owned the tavern, and he sold the traps to the tourists. To use as coffee tables.”

  Yes, her voice was definitely depressed.

  A pretend laugh came from Ben’s throat. “No! Not lobster trap coffee tables! Did he paint on velvet as well?” He unlaced his boots and took them off.

  The laugh she returned was too late and out of sync, a laugh with an edge not just of loneliness, but of something … else. He wanted to ask what was wrong, but she said, “You’ll thank me when I show you how the kids can use different colors and patterns to customize their lobster trap ‘trademarks.’ And you’ll be glad when I show you how to load them with bricks so they won’t sink in the water. The traps, not the kids. Oh, and you might want to call them lobster pots. It’s more—authentic.”

  “Like your father’s?” He pushed aside the pile of sticks with his wool-socked foot. Maybe she was just tired.

  “If I didn’t love you,” she said with a feeble attempt at nonchalance, “I would hang up now.”

  “Please do,” he replied. “Hang up and come home. I miss the hell out of you.”

  Her tender, small moan said more than a million words could have.

  “Honey?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”

  She paused a moment, then said, “Sure. I’ve lined up the last two interviews for tomorrow. I’ll be home the day after that.”

  He nodded as if she were there in the room. He was proud that Jill was an independent producer now, even though it meant she was away too often, putting together “video features,” she called them, then trying to sell them, if not to the networks then to feeder services that passed them on to television stations to use in their news slots. He was proud, yet frustrated for her, because the work was slow going and success had not yet kicked in.

  Sort of like with Menemsha House, a dream in the making.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Good,” he said. “Great.” He did not tell her that a busload of paying autumn tourists had canceled their trip to the museum today; he did not tell her that he and Mindy Ashenbach had had a misunderstanding and that she’d run home in tears; he did not tell her that he’d spent the last two hours reviewing the museum’s pitiful books. He did not tell her these things because he did not want her to worry any more than she already did.

  She paused another minute, and Ben was not sure if she was thinking of him or of that something “else” again. Then she asked, “Anything on Sea Grove?”

  Sea Grove. He’d almost forgotten. “Shit,” he said, “this is the first of October. I have to try and get another building permit this week.” Sea Grove was a proposed development of exclusive waterfront homes whose construction could generate local jobs and boost the island economy, including his own. But the town was meagerly doling out the permits, eight per month, on the first Tuesday of each month, first come, first serve. So much for overbuilding on the island. “Hey,” he said, hoping humor would help, “I have an idea. Maybe I should put a lobster trap coffee table in every living room.”

  “Get out of that place and go home,” Jill said, her voice once more forcing cheer. “Maybe my daughter has made you a gourmet dinner.”

  “Ha!” he responded, knowing that eighteen-year-old Amy was less capable of cooking than Ben was of making lobster traps. Pots. Whatever they were.

  “I love you,” they told each other before hanging up. Ben returned to his work. For their dreams to come true, one of them had to have a good grip on life, and he guessed that right now, that one needed to be him.

  It would have been easier to have told him, right then on the phone before she went home from Vermont. It would have been easier, but then he would have worried and there might be no need for that, not now or not ever.

  There might be no need because she could simply say no.

  Then again, Jill thought, moving from the small round table to the hard hotel bed, saying no to Addie Becker was tantamount to not feeding a pack of hungry lions: you’d have to learn quickly how to get out of the way.

  She turn
ed back toward the phone, deciding to listen to the message again.

  It had come only thirty minutes ago to Ben’s house in Oak Bluffs, the place he’d converted, in part, to a studio for Jill, a postproduction facility in honor of her new career.

  She dialed the number, then the code to retrieve saved messages.

  “Jill, it’s Addie. I need a favor.”

  Her tone was not acerbic, not like the last time they’d spoken, three years ago, when Jill had been struggling to surgically extricate herself from the agent’s acrylic-fingernailed clutches. At a huge financial expense, she’d finally succeeded.

  “The network wants to reformat. Maurice Fischer—remember him?—has asked if you’d consider a temporary slot in February, as a fill-in for Lizette. February,” she repeated. “Sweeps, darling. Remember them?”

  Addie paused, and Jill braced herself for what she knew was coming next.

  “Before you say no, Jill, think about your flagging career. Then call me. Pronto.”

  Addie’s voice stopped, and the machine beeped three times to signify that there were no more messages, no eager requests from networks or feeder services for packages of Jill’s own production, no other offers of fame or fortune.

  Once, of course, she could have had it all. But it had been her choice to walk out on Good Night, USA, the network “good news” television newsmagazine that had been conceived by her, but had gone on to Emmy-award-winning acclaim without her.

  It had been her choice to have Lizette French replace her as the on-air TV co-anchor to Christopher Edwards—the man dubbed by the media as “the sexiest man alive” and, by Ben, “Mr. Celebrity.”

  It had been her choice to bail out on her partnership with Christopher off-air, too, trading in his huge pear-shaped diamond and international renown for Ben’s plain gold band and life on an island.

  They were choices she had not once regretted.

  Soon after she left the show, Jill spent two years healing, coming to terms with the loss of both of her parents, and helping Ben restore her legacy, the white sea captain’s house in Edgartown that had been in her family for generations. She and Ben turned the widow’s walk into a spectacular Jacuzzi room and added a long back porch for red geraniums and Adirondack chairs and a great view of the harbor. She’d even brought her mother’s gardens back to life, and now blue hydrangea and pale yellow beach roses and tall wonderful wildflowers gently swayed in the breeze that drifted in off the water.