Free By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs by Antoinette Stockenberg Page B

still I miss her, Henry.
Beau Rêve seems so empty without her."
    Mavis knew that they were speaking of her
Great-Aunt Maggie, but she herself did not know Great-Aunt Maggie,
and, furthermore, she was worried about her knee after falling down
the boulder.
    "Will I walk funny, like Grandmother does?"
she asked the physician in self-absorbed innocence.
    Doctor Henry Whitman had frowned at her and
said, "If you are very, very good, you will someday follow in your
grandmother's footsteps."
    Which didn't really answer the question for
Mavis. It wasn't until after she had her scrape bandaged and the
ice cream for dessert that she knew she would walk and run the way
she always had. As for following in her grandmother's
footsteps—that, she doubted. No one could. Tess Moran was bigger
than life, a self-made woman who rose above circumstances. Mavis
had inherited wealth and had more luck in marrying well. Her
grandmother had had neither advantage. Tess Moran was a hard act to
follow.
    Mavis and the rest of the Armory audience
had exited into a stream of pedestrian traffic that flowed
endlessly up and down Thames Street nowadays. The afternoon sea
breeze had died away, leaving yet another balmy summer evening,
perfect for yet another dinner party aboard yet another yacht.
Tonight Mavis's host would be the vice-president of AER Industries,
a major sponsor of the syndicate that Mavis's husband had been
supporting. The list of corporations throwing their money behind
the various American syndicates was growing daily. The races had
become far too prohibitively expensive for something like Alan
Seton's one-man band. The America's Cup Races had gone commercial,
and major individual contributors like Mavis and her husband were
sharing center stage with cans of coffee and bottles of
shampoo.
    If this were an average evening, Mavis might
first stop by the crew house for cocktails and an update on
waterfront scuttlebutt. She would be filled in and fawned on, with
the hope that she'd follow through on her deceased husband's
commitment to the syndicate. But today she was feeling tense and
dissatisfied for more than one reason; it was best to avoid the
crew house altogether in her present foul mood. Still in disguise,
she chose to saunter instead through Bannister's Wharf. Besides
being the site of boutiques, bistros, and an immensely popular
cookie store, the Wharf was the location of the Black Pearl, the
Candy Store, and the Raw Bar, watering holes where hundreds of
yachties, groupies, and tourists gravitated each day to mill inside
and out, sipping sundowners.
    The evening was hopelessly fine, which meant
that the Wharf was hopelessly mobbed. Mavis wandered incognito
through the crowds on the pier, taking in the still-bustling harbor
that lay before her. Launches and water taxis were zipping back and
forth, coolly dodging sailboats from eight to eighty feet that were
tacking up or running down the channel. Family powerboats chugged
along while corporate yachts trundled slowly and windsurfers darted
like dragonflies in and out of all of them.
    Idly, Mavis tried to estimate the total
worth of the yachts gathered there, but the same image kept
drifting in and out of her thoughts—Alan Seton, with his lopsided,
rueful smile, withdrawing from the America's Cup competition. All
in all, it had been a graceful exit, although there wasn't any
doubt in Mavis's mind that he'd be back to race another year. She
should be happy that he was out of the running; it made it that
much more likely that her own syndicate would be chosen to defend.
Good news, yes ….
    With a sigh, Mavis decided, after all, to go
back to Beau Rêve—when a voice, very loud and very drunk, hailed
her.
    "Miss Ma-vis ... yooo-hooo ... oh Miss
May-y-vis." Mavis swung around, annoyed by the assault on her
anonymity. She was surprised to see a certain America's Cup
skipper, retired from the competition less than an hour earlier,
more or less hanging out of one of the low, double-hung