Sunset Shadows -- 3
Date: 7/28/98
From: DSRules

{He should be coming out any second now,} Maria thought as she lurked outside the Sunset Beach Police Department building.

He came out and took off, heading east on 8th street.* She stayed a discreet distance behind him until he went into a four-flat. As she walked through the door, hands reached out from the shadows in the hallway, grabbing her around her chest and throat. "Who are you and why are you following me?"

The hands spun her around. "You're Torres' sister, Maria, aren't you?"

She nodded. His hands had been so tight around her, that she feared that she'd have a bruise on her neck.

"Did someone hire you to follow me?"

{Wow, he's even more paranoid than he used to be,} she thought, but she said, "Don't be ridiculous. I'm following you because I think I'm going to need your help, Quentin."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"It just isn't natural!"

"What isn't?" Derek asked, feigning innocence.

"This!" she indicated her young charge, "he's only been with me three days, and he already looks like he's six years old! I'd sign him up for school, but he'd have to advance a grade every few hours!"

"Now, look, Bette," the man reassured her, "I never promised he'd stay a baby forever."

"Yes, but I expected him to be a baby just a little longer than two days!"

Anton stood to one side, watching the exchange between his wife and the Englishman without comment.

"What does Anton think about all this?" Derek asked.

"He's of the same opinion that I am." Bette responded levelly.

"Oh. Well, in that case, I've got a little something here that should answer all of your questions." Derek picked up a cardboard box and opened it to reveal an ornately-carved box with a multiple-headed snake on the lid.

"Why, it looks just like my pin!" Bette exclaimed.

"Yes, it does, doesn't it?" Derek responded with a smirk.

Then Derek opened the box, and Bette's curiosity was satisfied.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"Look, lady, you obviously have me confused with someone else. My name is Eddie Connors. Got it?"

"You can drop the act, Quentin. I know that it's you. I remember the events of 1897 far too well to not recognize you."

"1897?" he laughed deprecatingly. "You're insane! I'm 27 years old. That means that I was born in . . ." Maria looked at him levelly while he did the math in his head, "1966?"

"Well, that depends on when your birthday is, doesn't it?"

"Oh. That's a point. I guess I could have been born in 1965, then, couldn't I?"

"{Eddie,}" she emphasized the name, "has it ever occurred to you that {most} people can name the year they were born?"

"So? Does that prove that I'm this Quentin guy?"

"No, but this does," Maria reached out and grabbed Eddie's right wrist. She turned his arm over and pointed at a scar in the shape of an X on the underside. "I remember the day that I gave that scar to you. It was the day that I worked the spell that cured you of Andreas' curse."

"What?!?"

{Maybe he doesn't remember.} She squared her shoulders and looked at Eddie. "What if I can tell you more about you than you know about yourself?"

"Like what?"

"Like the fact that you have three siblings, two brothers and a sister. Your sister's name was Judith. Your brothers -- No, {one} of your brothers was named Carl. What was the other one's name?"

"That's easy," he scoffed. "Edward."

"Your family had two children named Edward?"

"No. . ."

"Then Eddie is short for Edwin, maybe? Edmund?"

"No. It's short for Edward."

"Then your parents had two sons named Edward -- you and your brother."

Eddie looked perplexed at this. Then his expression brightened. "I've got it! My brother's name was. . . Edward," he finished lamely.

"OK," she ventured gamely, "what if I told you that you never need to get a haircut, that you never need to shave, and that," she grabbed his hand and looked at his fingernails, "you cut your fingernails *once* and that they never grew back?"

"How could you possibly . . . ?"

"If you eat too soon after a meal, you get very, *very* ill."

He seemed completely flummoxed by this, and she whispered, "Come on, Quentin, remember! I think I'm going to need the favor that you promised me!"

"Favor?" he exclaimed, "I already did you a favor when I helped you bump off your husband!"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Derek let himself in with the spare key to Ben's house that he had made back before he married Maria. He walked up the stairs to Ben's bedroom, where he stashed the cardboard box inside the hidden compartment in Ben's closet. Derek would have kept the box in his room at the Seabreeze Motel, but this box was, frankly, just too valuable to leave in a seedy motel like that one.

Derek thought that the box would be safe here. He doubted that Ben even knew that the hidden compartment was there.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Eddie** took a step towards Maria. "It *is* you, isn't it, Beth?"

Unable to break the spell cast by his blue eyes, Maria merely nodded.

Eddie put his hand on her chin and lifted her face up towards him, then his mouth descended on hers for a kiss.

They stood that way for several minutes, there in the dark foyer of the apartment building. Their physical relationship had always been wonderful. Emotionally, however. . . .

Then a single word found its way through Maria's brain, {Ben.} She stepped back from Eddie. "I can't. Not this time."

"Why?"

"I'm married."

He laughed. "That never stopped us before. In fact, you always liked it more when there was a chance that we'd get caught."

"Yes, but I didn't love Pedro. I *do* love Ben."

"Then why did you follow me?"

"Remember when I arrested the curse that Andreas Petofi put on you when he found you in bed with his wife? You promised me *anything* I wanted to ask of you?"

Eddie got that faraway look in his eyes that told Maria he was thinking about a beautiful woman, and she suspected she knew which one. "Would you stop thinking about Natasha? What I'm telling you is *important*!"

He sighed. "OK, well, what do you want me to do?"

"My mother just predicted that something terrible's about to happen, and I think I'm going to need your help to stop it."


* I've been to Seal Beach, CA, where they do the location shoots for Sunset Beach, and the building they use as the outside of the SBPD is the old Seal Beach City Hall building, which is on 8th Street in Seal Beach. The numbered streets run perpendicular to the ocean.

** I'm still calling him "Eddie," because it's simpler to keep him in a Sunset Beach frame of mind that way, just like "Vicki" makes me think of Alexandra Moltke and "Victoria" makes me think of Joanna Going (when "Roz" doesn't make me think of Joanna Going -- see http://www.stillbreathing.com for more details on *that* one). Likewise, if I want to keep Peter Barton from turning into David Selby, I'm going to have to keep calling the character "Eddie."