The Inheritance

A short story that ran in Volkswagen Driver magazine.

The charcoal in the grille off the stern of Jack's sloop had just turned white hot as Sarah arrived. She pulled into the empty slip beside him, the twin outboards on her Mako muttering. Sarah was in her late twenties, a few years younger than he. She was tall, lean, with black hair and dark green eyes-a pretty woman by anyone's standard. To him, she was beautiful. She killed the engines, stepped out and quickly walked back to tie off a stern line, and then started forward to do the bow lines. "I'm starving," she said.

"I've got steak, but maybe I can find some peanut butter and crackers for you. If you'd only called..."

"Hah," she said, stepping on board Lila and into his arms. "You don't scare me."

They kissed, and she felt so good and right in his arms that he couldn't help but feel a twinge of regret knowing that it had been over a week since he'd last seen her and that another couple might pass before he would see her again. Maybe a few phone calls in between, but that was hardly the same.

Jack had no doubt Sarah loved him, but sometimes life was more complicated than that.

"All right," Jack said. "We'll split the steak."

"I'll make the salad. Clean up. I'll show you how much I appreciate you in every way that I can."

He smiled. "Stop selling, Ballard. I'm giving you half."

She put her head on his chest and said quietly, "I'm going to show you anyhow."

* * *

Jack and Sarah didn't talk much during dinner. They both took their food seriously.

Afterwards, Sarah declined another glass of wine. "I need to go back out."

Sarah owned a marine repossession business. Her work was mostly a matter of contracting with banks and mortgage companies to find, recover, and resell boats where the owners had defaulted on their loans. Not a particularly nice business, but it had been her father's and since he'd passed away she made it thrive. Jack was an ex-DEA agent with his own debts and dock fees to manage, and he worked for her from time to time as a freelance skipper doing traces and delivering boats.

This latest assignment was different: the owner's stepdaughter, Chloe, had taken off with the family sailboat, Fast Forward. Leslie Benjamin wanted the girl back before she got herself into "more trouble." In this case, that meant Chloe had sailed away with a boy who had a reputation for drug use, possibly dealing.

Sarah had set most everything aside to go after the boat and the girl. She'd told Jack over the phone it was because Leslie was paying her "extraordinarily well," but he knew it was more than that. Sarah had sailed with the family when Chloe was just fifteen.

"How's it going?" Jack asked.

"We'll see. I was up north looking for them until yesterday. Got a credit card charge for diesel fuel in Newburyport. But then there was a charge yesterday at the Naked Fish here in Boston and another in Charlestown today. I've been calling all the marinas, but I'm not getting much cooperation. So I'm just doing an old-fashioned pier-to-pier search. If I see the boat, I'll recognize it."

"The girl's underage, why aren't the police searching?"

"First of all, Chloe turns eighteen tomorrow, so she's practically an adult. Leslie's worried that when Chloe does turns eighteen she might marry this kid, Mark Holmes."

"Are we talking about Romeo and Juliet here?"

"Leslie doesn't think so, but it's hard to know what really matters to her. Chloe will inherit half of her father's estate on her birthday-she'll be worth just over ten million. And Leslie was never up for Stepmother of the Year award. She mentioned to me exactly three times that Mark Holmes must be after the money because, "Chloe is not that pretty a girl."

"Nice," Jack said. "I hope she had a better relationship with her dad."

"She thought the world of him," Sarah said. "It was a tremendous blow for her when he died."

"And how did that happen?"

"Sailboat accident about three months ago. This spring. Here, just a second..."

Sarah disappeared up the stairwell and Jack could hear her going to her boat. She returned with her backpack, and said, "I've got some pictures." She took out an envelope and spread a sheaf of prints onto the table. "I took some of these on that delivery trip I did a few years ago. Alex, her dad, hired me to bring Fast Forward back from Florida. He had me pick up him, Leslie, and Chloe in New York and I helped them sail back to Marblehead. So we were in close proximity for about four days. And Leslie gave me a few other pictures so I'd recognize Chloe and Mark now."

Sarah held out a picture of man who looked to be in his early forties. "Here, this is Alex."

He was at the wheel of a heeling sailboat. His daughter was next to him on the windward side, and an attractive blond woman was leaning against a cushion to the lee. She was wearing dark glasses and was not smiling.

Chloe wasn't either.

Alex, on the other hand, had a lively expression, as if he'd just said something funny.

"Let me guess," Jack said. "He's hitting on you instead of paying attention to his wife or daughter."

"His flirting was harmless, but he's one of those guys who can make you feel like the most fascinating person in the world when he focuses his attention on you."

Sarah showed Jack several more pictures of Chloe and her dad. "I tried a few other shots, but it was hard. I mean, a lot of the time when he talked with Chloe it was throwing me up to her. You know, like once we were hit by a hard gust. It was enough to knock us down. He yelled for Chloe to release the jenny, but she froze, so I reached past her and let the sheet go. He said something like, 'Chloe, if you're going to sail with me, I've got to count on you, like I can with Sarah.'

"I cringed. Chloe was already trying to impress her dad every way she could, but he didn't even see it."

Sarah shuffled through some more pictures. "OK, now these photos were ones Leslie took over the years since. Alex and Chloe started racing Fast Forward quite a bit. This was last summer, she was doing the foredeck, and Alex had a pretty regular crew of these four guys."

There was a shot of Chloe on the bow as Alex brought the boat into dock. Chloe stood alone as the four teenage boys were apparently celebrating the win in the cockpit with her father. Sarah pointed to one of the guys in the cockpit, a tough, cocky face behind mirrored sunglasses. "That's Mark Holmes."

"The guy Chloe ran off with?"

"That's right. That's how she met him-he was a crew on her dad's boat."

"Not the typical place to meet your average drug dealer."

"Alex sponsored a youth sailing program for disadvantaged kids, and some of them made it onto his own boat. And I guess Alex saw Mark as a tough kid like himself growing up. He'd have him over to the house, said to Leslie that he was 'grooming' him. Even talked of giving him a job, helping him through college."

"How'd Alex die?"

Sarah went back to the picture of Chloe and her dad motoring toward the dock along with the crew. She pointed to the boom, the horizontal spar to which the mainsail was attached. "The topping lift broke. During a race they were dropping the sails a bit to reef the main. Mark had been slow earlier setting the reef, and so Alex had him take the helm, and was showing him how to do it. He was yanking on the jiffy reefing line, and the topping lift shackle opened. The boom came down, crushed his head. One minute, he's standing there barking orders, the next he's dead."

"And Chloe was on board?"

"Right up in the bow. The boat suddenly stalls, the guys are yelling, and she comes back to the cockpit to find her dad, blood all over the place."

"Was there an investigation?"

"The police interviewed everybody, and checked the hardware. It looked like the screw piece on the shackle had opened up."

"Ah, Jesus," Jack said. "Those things don't just loosen on their own. Nobody could prove Mark had a thing to do with it?"

"The police talked to everyone on the boat, plus the riggers at the boat yard. Leslie said no one's been implicated, but she feels certain Mark was involved."

"You trust her?" Jack asked.

"No. Even a few years ago, she struck me as being tired of Alex, but not his money. I've got no way of knowing if he felt the same about her, or if there was a prenuptial or anything like that."

"Did Mark have anything to gain from Alex dying?"

"Maybe. To hear Leslie tell it, Alex ran hot and cold on people. She said that sooner or later he'd get bored with Mark's troubles and just leave him by the wayside. So she thinks Mark figured that marrying into the family was the quickest way to the money. Mark started coming around to see Chloe, but Alex didn't buy it for a minute. He just laughed Mark off, like, "Don't try to pull this bull on me." And then Mark screamed some pretty ugly stuff from the front lawn. He came back begging for forgiveness a couple of days later, and maybe a week after that, Alex was dead."

Jack stood up. "Leslie may not be the stepmother of the year, but it sounds like she has reason to be worried. Let's go talk to Chloe and Mark."

* * *

The night had turned cool and they put on sweatshirts before heading out onto the glassy water of Boston Harbor. Jack took the wheel and they glided in and out of the Charlestown Navy Yard piers looking for Fast Forward.

"When did you last talk to Chloe?" he asked.

"At her dad's funeral."

"How was she?"

"Oh, she just looked so lost. Mark was beside her like they were a couple already. I talked to him for just a few minutes-but my radar was really going off with him."

"He's bad news?"

"Yeah," Sarah said. "Just the way he looked at me. He was sheparding Chloe around like he already owned the place." Sarah shivered, suddenly. "I remember the way it felt." A few years back Sarah had nearly married a man who'd turned abusive. Early one morning, he came after her and she killed him in self-defense. Which left her free, but frightened in more ways than one. First, in her judgment of men-even Jack. Second, and more importantly, in her own capacity for violence.

Sarah said, "God help Chloe if she's in love with him."

Jack put his arm around Sarah. "We'll find her."

* * *

Two hours later, just as they were leaving one of the hotel docks, Sarah said quietly, "There's the Fast Forward. Go along the stern, Jack, but I'm sure it's her."

Jack spun the Mako around and Sarah flashed her light briefly on the stern of a powerful sloop with a dark blue hull to confirm the name.

She was right.

A light was on in the cabin.

Sarah went to the bow locker of her boat and took out a short length of chain and a padlock. After they docked the Mako a few boat lengths away, they walked quietly up to Fast Forward and Sarah wrapped the chain around a stern cleat on the boat, and made it fast around a cleat on the dock, then bent down to snap the padlock shut on the links.

The boat wasn't going anywhere without her say-so.

Sarah hadn't been quiet about attaching the chain, and before she was finished, Chloe Benjamin came up from the cabin below. "What're you doing?" the girl cried. Her thin face was first shocked, then angry. She was even smaller than Jack envisioned from the photos. "Who do you think you are?"

Sarah straightened.

Chloe, apparently just recognizing her, said, "Sarah! What're you doing?"

"This is still your stepmother's boat," Sarah said. "And she wants you and it back."

The girl stood stunned for a half beat, and then said, "Look, in two hours it'll be midnight, and I'll be eighteen. Then it will be my boat because I know my dad left it to me. I've seen the will. So get that chain off right now or I'll call the cops."

"Please do." Sarah said. She took her cell phone off her belt. "You can use my phone if you want, right after I call Leslie."

Chloe stared at her and then said, "This is so stupid. I know you think you're helping, but just please leave me alone. I'll pay you whatever you want."

Sarah hesitated, then turned off the phone. "You don't have to pay me a thing, but I do want to talk with you, Chloe. Can we come on board?"

"Not now."

"We want to talk with Mark, too" Jack said. "Where is he?"

"He's asleep."

Jack looked at Sarah, who said, "Through this noise? The chain, you yelling?"

Jack moved forward alongside the hull. There were curtains over the open portholes, so he couldn't see in. But although the smells that came through the curtains were out of context in the fresh air of the waterfront, they were all too familiar to him. The smells of a shooting den: of sweat and sickness. The vinegary scent of heroin, just cooked.

Jack didn't say a thing. He just looked at the girl.

He saw her glance back at the cabin. He couldn't tell if her expression was fearful or simply evasive. Jack climbed up into the cockpit.

Chloe said. "You can't do this! You need a warrant."

"I'm not a cop, Chloe. Did you shoot up, too? Or just him?" He went down into the cabin, tensing himself. But Mark was in no position to cause trouble.

In fact, Jack thought he was already dead. He was lying back against the bulkhead. The smell of his sickness was overwhelming in the small space. On the table, there was an open tinfoil package revealing the twisted black heroin tar. Also a candle, a blackened spoon and a syringe. Mark was a muscular young man, but now his body was slack. His skin was pale and his lips bluish. It looked as if he'd gone beyond the heroin nod into a full overdose.

Jack quickly crossed over, and felt for a pulse in the boy's neck. It was barely there. "We need an ambulance," Jack called out to Sarah.

He grabbed his cell phone, and was about to dial 911 when Sarah said, right behind him, "Jack."

She was coming down the stairs, Chloe behind her.

The girl held a gun.

Chloe said, "I told him we were going to be rich and he could have whatever he wanted." She nodded to his works on the table. "And this was it."

The girl's face was pale, but she didn't look like she was on drugs to Jack. More than anything, she looked angry and determined.

"He's going to die if we don't get help," Jack said.

"That's the idea, genius."

"Why?" Sarah said. "Was he going to leave you?"

"He never wanted to be with me. Just the money."

Sarah said, "Chloe, I-"

"Shut up!" Chloe said. "I don't give a damn about whether he wants me or not! He's got to pay for what he did."

"And what was that?"

"My dad." At tear streaked down Chloe's cheek, which she angrily brushed away.

"He killed your dad?"

"My dad would've been alive if not for him."

"Do you have proof?" Sarah asked.

The girl shook her head. "You don't understand."

"Then you can't know for sure."

"Yes," she said. "I know. Believe me, I know."

Sarah started to say something else, and then she got it. She said, "Oh, Chloe."

Jack got it too. He said, "You did it. The boom was supposed to hit Mark, wasn't it? You were sick of your father treating him like the son he didn't have."

Chloe raised her eyes from watching Mark struggle for breath. She looked at Jack directly, saw the accusation coming. She pointed the revolver at his chest. She was forgetting Sarah for the moment; the gun was within her reach.

"Daddy barely even looked at me," Chloe said. "I'd be right there, and it was like he couldn't even see me."

"That's a sad story, Chloe," Jack said. "But killing him was a hell of a way to get his attention."

It was as if Jack had punched her the breath right out of her. She jerked the gun up to his face.

Despite the flame and the deafening noise of the gun going off in the small cabin, Sarah wrenched the gun away. The bullet splintered the porthole trim just inches from Jack's left eye, but missed him altogether. Sarah shoved Chloe across the cabin. Without the gun in her hand, the girl seemed to cave inside herself.

She slid to the floor and began to cry silently.

Sarah's face had gone white, and Jack could see she was trembling.

"We're OK," he said, putting his fingers to Mark's throat and again feeling for a pulse. It was still there.

Luckily for both of them, Sarah was a woman you could count on.