Chapter 9 - The Surfacing and the Unraveling
The gray daylight on the terrace of the Salt Pine Resort was the brightest thing Maggie had ever seen.
She was hauled over the stone coping of the tidal well by four Cape May township police officers who had finally arrived by boat from the harbor side. She rolled onto the wet grass on her hands and knees, coughing up bitter pints of seawater and bile, her lungs burning as if they had been scrubbed with wire wool.
Beside her, two paramedics were already doing chest compressions on Arthur Sterling.
“Clear!”
A defibrillator whined. Arthur’s heavy chest jolted off the grass.
A second passed. Then the old man took a long, wet, rattling gasp of air, his eyes flying open, his fingers clawing at the paramedic’s yellow slicker.
“Pulse is back!” the paramedic shouted. “Sinus rhythm! Get the oxygen mask on him! Move the gurney!”
Ten feet away, Elise was wrapped in four wool shock blankets, sitting on the edge of a garden bench. Little Leo was in her lap, wrapped in Maggie’s dry terrycloth robe, sipping hot broth from a paper cup with both hands.
When Elise saw Maggie sit up on the grass, the bride stood, dropped the blankets, and ran.
She hit the ground on her knees beside Maggie, throwing both bare, shivering arms around Maggie’s neck, burying her face in the cold, wet rubber of Maggie’s torn drysuit. Elise wasn't speaking; she was sobbing with such total, unreserved grief and gratitude that the police officers turned their heads away to give them peace.
“You came back,” Elise wept, her voice muffled against Maggie’s shoulder. “You came back for us... after what he said... after everything...”
Maggie rested her bruised, bleeding hand on the back of Elise’s neck. She didn't say anything. She just let the younger woman shake against her until the paramedics brought a third blanket and wrapped it around both of their shoulders.
Then Maggie looked across the lawn.
Ryan was standing by the ruined glass doors of the lower terrace.
He had not come near the well. He had not helped pull the ropes. He stood with his back pressed against the brick wall, his hair plastered to his forehead by the pouring rain, watching the paramedics load Arthur Sterling into the back of an all-terrain ambulance.
Arthur’s eyes, clear now behind the plastic oxygen mask, found Ryan across the lawn.
The old man raised one trembling, liver-spotted hand from the stretcher. He didn't point at Ryan with anger. He pointed at him with an expression of cold, absolute, and total annihilation.
Arthur turned his head toward the Chief of Police standing beside the gurney. Even through the clear plastic mask, his voice carried across the silent lawn:
“Arrest him,” Arthur whispered.
Ryan’s face didn't go pale; it went completely slack, like a man whose skeleton had suddenly turned to liquid.
“Arthur!” Ryan shrieked, taking two staggering steps forward into the mud. “Arthur, it was an accident! The valve failed! Maggie knows—tell him, Maggie! Tell him the intake was old!”
Two township officers stepped in front of Ryan.
One of them was Officer Kowalski, a man who had known Sarah Vance for thirty years, a man whose kids had learned to swim in Sarah’s shallow-end classes at the harbor.
Kowalski didn't look at Ryan with anger; he looked at him with profound disgust.
“Hands behind your back, Ryan,” Kowalski said.
“No! Elise! Elise, look at me!” Ryan screamed, thrashing against Kowalski’s grip as the cuffs clicked around his wrists. “I did it for us! I wanted the photos to be beautiful! Elise, tell them! Tell them you love me!”
Elise didn't stand up. She didn't look at his face.
She reached down, unclasped the two-carat platinum engagement ring from her left ring finger—the ring that Ryan had bought with her father’s stolen escrow money—and dropped it into the mud between Maggie’s boots.
She didn't say a single word. She just pulled little Leo closer against her chest and turned her back on him.
May you like
Ryan was dragged across the wet gravel toward the police cruiser, his patent-leather shoes leaving two deep, ugly trenches in the lawn of the eighty-thousand-dollar wedding that had ended before the vows could even be spoken.
***
