Read By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs for Free Online

his arms under the dog's back, not without a fear that the
dog might lunge for him. But the animal's pain was too great, or
perhaps she understood, because she lay limply as Neil adjusted his
own weight to lift the load.
    That was when the sound of a car registered
somewhere deep, deep inside his brain. It was too fast, it was too
late, for him to form any other thought than, "This dog is having
the rottenest luck." Too late, even, to look up and see a silver
Mercedes bearing down on them both.
    ****
    Cindy thought she saw red blood even before
she hit them. That was what she remembered: blood, a supernatural
omen, a devil's promise of the deed to come. And then the horrible,
ghastly, sickening thud and the long, long screech of wet brakes.
Whose? Hers? And the door opened and she fell rather than jumped
out, tripping on her gown; and the rip of black silk as she fell to
one knee, the gown trapped under her shoe. When she stood back up
her teeth were chattering, or maybe they had been, all
night, all endless-nightmare night. There was no possible way that
Cindy could acknowledge or comprehend the act as she stood in the
drizzle, viciously squeezing and pinching her arms to force herself
into wakefulness. Nothing happened. She was still there. She stared
unblinking at a small white beam of light which lay flat on the
road, throwing her handiwork into dim, horrifying relief. There
were two ... lumps. Nothing moved, not the dark pile of clothing,
not the dark animal. Not her.
    "Hello?" she whispered, instantly aware
through her fear that she would never be able to utter the simple
greeting again. "Are you ... there?" Nothing, nothing moved.
    Cindy had no idea whether she rode home
under her own power or on the broom of a witch. All she remembered
was an overwhelming sense of paranoia as she kept a terrified
lookout for flashing sirens. At one point she was convinced that
she was clawing her way to the surface of the ocean from thousands
of fathoms down, waiting for breath. At another point a dazzling
sense of vertigo overwhelmed her as she negotiated the sharp turns
of the winding coastal road in the wet, horizon-less night. Still
dazed, she overshot the house, braked, and backed furiously up the
road and into the garage, hell-bent on reaching the asylum of her
bedroom.
    Seacliff was no more a summer rental than a
Rolls-Royce is a second car for most people. It was one of the
dozens of Gilded Age mansions which were no longer viable as
private residences but which earned their keep as summer quarters
for the many America's Cup syndicates, both U.S. and foreign.
Seacliff was a vast and imposing Tudor built on a flat run of rocky
ledge with a view to the south of the hazy blue waters of Rhode
Island Sound. It housed not only the Setons but the ten Shadow crewmen, two of their wives, three children, and a
babysitter. When the group arrived in May there had been a polite
but fierce scramble for rooms with a view of the Atlantic.
    Everyone had scrambled but Cindy. She had
demanded, and gotten, a suite facing away from the hated ocean. It
was in fact the ground floor of a pentagonal tower of soaring
height completely enclosed by stained glass windows. Alan, who was
rarely home and cared little where he slept, had nonetheless
predicted that his wife would tire eventually of the lurid colors
and long for a glimpse of real sky.
    Alan was wrong. Cindy, who shunned the other
wives and their children, spent many long afternoons curled up in a
wide window seat covered in green velvet, her arms hugging her
knees tightly, staring entranced at the men and maidens and odd
mythical and quasi-religious creatures in the vaulting
stained-glass panels, inventing fantasies about them.
    Now, having stripped herself of her torn
black gown, she sat cocooned in a cloud-soft robe of palest pink
cashmere on the tufted window seat, with only one conscious
thought: she could not, she must not, sleep through the dawn. So
intense was her focus that she did not