Five for Forever (16 page)

“With all the trimmings,” Britta said, inspecting the huge living room.

“And fiberglass,” muttered Rick. But even he had to admire the various amenities, like big-screen TV with the latest model Xbox, full-size living quarters, and a real kitchen. The boat was big enough that they weren’t on top of one another, and most importantly to the kids, you didn’t have to jump around all the time to adjust sails, course, or side on the command of your father.

Emile stood on the mooring with a rope in his hand. “You sure don’t need me with you guys?”

Louise looked at him, feeling almost sorry. “No, take the rest of the day off and I’ll see you tomorrow. We have everything we need.”

“See you then,” he said, circling the rope dutifully, then giving a small wave.

Britta and Charles stood beside Louise while Agnes made a super careful takeoff; it was her first time with this boat, and she wanted to make a good expression.

“Isn’t that a bit strange to have a person taking care of personal things for you? It’s as if the babysitter were doing my homework,” Britta said while Emile’s silhouette grew smaller and smaller.

Louise shrugged. “At first, yes. But Emile lets me concentrate on the important parts of my job and not worry about anything nonessential, like shopping or keeping my schedule. He is my personal assistant, but he is not my husband.”

“Thanks! Where would that have left my dad?” Charles said.

“It drives like a car,” Agnes said, when Louise came into the cockpit. “Just not that agile.”

“You are aware that we make our living from boats that do not sail like a car, most of which don’t even have a motor?” Rick said, standing beside her.

“But you restore wooden motor yachts, too,” Agnes pointed out. “Admit it, you don’t like the fiberglass hull.”

“Or the Xbox,” Rick mumbled.

“We heard that,” Britta and Charles chimed over from the TV set, where their Lego Leia was slugging it out with the Brick Emperor.

Louise was preparing the Flints for the inevitable media discovery. Their under-the-radar existence wouldn’t last, even though Lady Luck had been on their side for the first weeks of Louise in their lives. She had arranged a training session for the kids on how to handle the media. Louise warmed up the gang with highlights of some hilarious interviews she had experienced over the years, and then introduced them to a soft-spoken fellow named Serge, sanguine, with tight brown curls, who could play-act five different reporters and various media victims from sneakily mousy to in-the-face arrogant, all at once. The first half hour with Serge was hilarious when they met him on Tuesday evening in Casa Flint’s living room. Then Serge got down to business and asked Agnes to step forward. “Let’s pretend you run into a journalist who is waiting for you right in front of the school. I am the journalist, and you are you.”

Agnes stood opposite him, grinning at her siblings.

Dana, who hadn’t fully gotten the concept yet, yelled at her, “Kick the bad repota!”

The other Flints laughed, and Serge smiled at her. “Now, that would get you lots of news. Just not good news.” Turning to Agnes, he morphed into a hectic
repota
. “Agnes, Agnes, what do you have to say about Louise as your father’s new girlfriend?”

“I think it is great, thank you.”

“What did you say?”

“Um, I said awesome!”

“Do you think she will be a good mother to you and your siblings?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I mean, we hardly know her. She’s with us . . .”

“No? I would have never thought that! She’s not good with kids, right?”

“No, that’s not what I mean.” Agnes was on the defensive. “She is good with us, and I never said that she is not a great ersatz mother.”

“Give it to him!” Charles cheered her on, and Dana and he were doing a mock ‘the wave’.

“All right, let’s stop here.” Serge smiled. “You see what I did?”

“You twisted Agnes’s words,” Britta said from behind her hair.

“And you looked like an a...” Charles started but stopped when he saw Agnes’s look.

“So, objective number one: don’t let them do that. Objective number two: don’t come across like a naked bottom.” The kids giggled. “Any ideas?”

“No idea,” Agnes admitted. “Be more firm?”

“No, no, no, my lovely. Much simpler. First rule of survival: Ignore the question. Answer your own question. You are not at school, right? So there are no teachers expecting a correct answer.”

“But isn’t that rude?” Charles asked, adjusting his glasses.

“No, this is the media; there are different rules. Just give them something to show or to print. They won’t waste time repeating a question on TV. They’ll only show your answer. So you can say what you want. No one will ever notice as long as you look good.” Turning again to Agnes, he said, “Do you think Louise will be a good mother?”

“Eh.” Agnes stopped and thought for a second before answering. “Louise is great to be with. And she makes our dad very happy.”

“Excellent.” Serge applauded. “What about you, Britta?”

She didn’t look motivated; she got up but didn’t show her face from behind the mountain of black curls. “I understand the first rule. What’s the second one?” she asked suspiciously.

“Ah, that is easy. Rule two of survival: Talk positive. Ignore what you really think or feel, instead give a positive answer. The questions and answers are not about you, they are about making the TV viewer feel good. Britta, what do you hate about Louise?”

Britta’s hair wagged left and right. “Um, there is nothing to hate . . .”

“Beep.”
Charles played a buzzer. “Remember rule number one, sister!”

“Oh, you’re right. Okay, here is my answer: We all adore Louise. She has the best jokes around and can tell great stories.”

“Awesome answer. Good catch, Charles. Now it’s your turn.” Charles got up and stood opposite Serge. “Charles, as the only boy in the family, are you in love with Louise?” The girls started to giggle, and Charles turned red.

“No, a little bit. Maybe? What was the question?” he stuttered.

“Beep!”
Britta returned the volley. “Rules one and two,
brother
!” Charles held his head in both hands.

fifteen

Clues

Over the weeks Hal and Rick pieced together the history of the unknown boat in their yard. Josh came in one afternoon for an update.

“Your boat has a name now,” Hal opened the briefing.

“What’s its name?”

“It’s a her, and her name is
Vera
.”

“Vera! After Vera Folsom?” Josh exclaimed and pushed back his chair.

Rick put his head on the desk, and Hal stared at Josh. “You knew? Why do you let us dig for weeks?”

Josh looked agitated but sat down again “Sorry, guys. I had no idea that the boat was named
Vera
. But there is a Vera Folsom in my old coach’s past.”

Hal sighed and continued. “The son and granddaughter of your old coach were able to provide us with copies of old diaries. John Scott was born in the 1930s to Irish immigrants. In the late fifties, he worked as an engineer and designer for one of the small shipyards along the Maine coast—Folsom Boats—his first job after university. And he met a girl.”

“A romantic start,” Rick commented.

“Her name was Vera Folsom, and she was the daughter of the shipyard owner. They fell in love, and John Scott became infatuated with her. We don’t know her side of the story, but after a year or so, she married someone else. It broke John’s heart.”

“When I was coached by John Scott, he was married—that much I remember—to some Norwegian lady,” Josh said.

“His son told me that he was actually married four times. But let’s continue. He left Folsom Boats in the early sixties and became a sought-after boat designer for other shipbuilders, specializing in racing boats and yachts, always under the names of the yards. He never opened his own shop, never became a brand name himself. It appears he built the
Vera
in the middle of the sixties, an uncompromising boat named for a woman who was no longer his. I quote John Scott’s diary here: ‘A racing yacht like a wild stallion, dancing on the waves.’” Hal looked at Rick. “That’s what you said when we saw pictures of the
Vera
for the first time.”

“I also said difficult to sail.” Rick nodded.

“And that’s about what we could draw from the diaries. With the information we had, I tried to contact various harbors on the Maine coast, but no one remembered a spectacular boat named
Vera
.”

“Aren’t there historical societies on the East Coast that could help?” Josh asked.

“Yes, but they concentrate on the immigration period and the time of the whalers. They don’t care about regattas of the swinging sixties, where everyone was busy getting laid or high. So the trail ends.”

“That’s a pity,” Josh said.

“However, what we do know after some Internet research is that the boat’s namesake, Vera Folsom, is still alive, living in Nantucket. Same address as a schoolteacher named Vicky Wallace.”

Josh said nothing, color moving from his face.

“Should we make a follow-up with Vera Folsom in Nantucket? We have the story but no photos or design documents yet,” Rick said.

Josh became nervous. “Absolutely not, I forbid it. I . . . I trust you guys to come up with an equally brilliant design. No need to waste time hunting down an old lady.”

“But we still don’t know what the
Vera
deck, mast, and rigging looked like. I can make it up, of course, and I trust my abilities. But we have the real chance to make it look like the original.”

“No. That’s the end of this. I want design options from your own pencil.”

With that, he got up and left the two boatbuilders in their office.

“Now that’s what I call serious issues with a rotten boat,” Hal muttered.

“Or with something in his own past,” Rick said.

Rick told Louise about the conversation when they prepared dinner that night. “It was as if he had some personal beef with the visit.”

Louise looked up from her tomato slicing. “Maybe there is an angle we don’t know about. From Josh’s past, before he became a movie star. Something he doesn’t want to become public.”

“But all I want to know is whether an old lady remembers an old lover and a wooden boat. I don’t care about drunk-driving accidents, secret abortions, or whatever else might fall out of the closet.”

“Us superstars are peculiar about what is private and what is not.”

“Do you have skeletons in your closet?” Rick asked, not really serious.

To his surprise, Louise again stopped the slicing and cocked her head. “My life has been investigated and written about over and over again. But still, yes. There are things I am not proud of from my early days that mercifully have not appeared. Not appeared yet!”

“You have my interest,” said Rick, but Louise remained serious.

She cleaned her hands and looked Rick in the eye. “We are together, and I trust you enormously. But relationships break. In my position, I never really open up completely, to no one. There are events and decisions in my past that will remain unspoken between us. For better or for worse. This is something you will need to accept.”

“You actors are surely a complicated bunch,” Rick said and tested the pasta. “Done! You may bring in the crowd.”

sixteen

The Newsbreak

In late May, Ivana Voda died on a Saturday night while going out to the movies with the Flint family. It was the latest Pixar movie, to make the trip Dana-compatible, and the gang queued up to buy popcorn. Louise in her Ivana disguise was arguing with Britta over whether to get one small salty and one small sweet or go for a large sweet instead, as only Louise and Charles were the salt types.

They did not notice that a fifteen-year-old girl named Emma McDonald with braces and a Miley Cyrus–like upper-arm tattoo was thinking that this lady with the straight black hair and the big glasses looked a bit fake and then found the skin of the woman much too good and her voice much too artificial. Her mother was a failed actress who had become a real-estate agent in Oxnard but still used her stage skills to reel in clients, so Emma could spot fake from real. She took out her phone and did one candid video and some photos of the family in front of her. Twenty megapixels zoomed-in exposed the real facial features of this lady.
OMG! Louise Waters!
No doubt!

Louise had already paid up at the concession stand and was walking over to the theater entrance. Emma gave up her place in line and hurried after the family, leaving her friends behind without comment. Her phone had a quick-shot function, and she simply pushed down the button to grab as many frames as possible. Mostly it was all backs but the man with Louise and one of the bigger girls each turned at least once. Then they vanished into the dark theater of the latest Pixar movie. Immediately Emma forwarded the material to her mom, who was home, preparing packets for a showing.

Spotted Louise Waters in disguise with unknown boyfriend and a family. Think we can sell this somewhere?

Emma’s mom looked at the images and agreed with her daughter’s assessment. She called up an old agent contact who dealt with this sort of material. The agent was excited and started offering the material. After short negotiations cable channel
hot!
paid $100,000. Emma’s college education was secured while the Flints were still watching their film.

When Rick, Louise, and the kids arrived back home, Rick’s mobile phone rang.

Hal, out of breath: “Go online, switch on the TV, you’re blown!” He hung up without further explanation.

Rick looked at Louise, then went over to the windows and let down all shades. “Ivana got made.” He switched on the TV while Louise ceremoniously took the wig from the coat hanger and threw it in the trash. Then she called up Izzy.

“Izzy? I am blown—the news is coming out now. If they did a half-decent job, they will be at Rick’s place within the hour.”

“On it!” Izzy had prepared various statements and communications to handle the upcoming situation and had additional security on standby. “Hang in there, it will be a ride. You know it, but your dearest won’t!” Even though Izzy hadn’t been happy about Louise’s decision, he was all on board for his client.