Children of Dynasty (17 page)

His exhausted face brightened, and he tried to reach for his wife’s photo.

“Rest now,” she soothed.

Lapsing into silence, he closed his eyes. A few minutes later, his chest rose and fell evenly.

For the rest of the precious allotted half-hour, Mariah looked from the photo of Catharine, frozen forever in youth, to the character lines in John’s face. Her mother must have been something for a man to love her for so many years.

When the loudspeaker announced the visiting period was over, she looked at the clock with the same reluctance she saw on the faces of other family members and friends. She bent and kissed Dad’s cheek and his pale eyelids trembled like a moth’s wings. As she had each time she’d been forced to leave his side, she memorized his features in case it was the last time. A snippet of a child’s prayer … if he should die before he woke …

Wiping tears from her cheeks, she went through the wide double doors of the CCU.

Outside, Rory leaned against the wall.

Her fist went to her mouth. She should have expected him, but the suddenness was a shock. He looked as though he’d not slept, bluish shadows beneath his eyes.

Thinking only of protecting her father, she waved him away. “He mustn’t see us together,” she insisted despite the closing doors. “You could give him another attack.”

Rory straightened. “I didn’t give him the first one.” With a glance at the crowded waiting room, he nodded toward the elevators. “We’ll talk over coffee.”

She planted her feet. “No.”

Rory might attract her with a power that left her weak; the only man who made her tremble with need and fulfillment, but how could she trust him?

“You told your father what hospital Dad was in,” she accused. “Davis called Dee Carpentier at the
Chronicle
and tipped her.”

Rory’s jaw set. “I swear to God I have neither seen nor spoken to my father since last night.”

“How else could he know?”

“He’s been closeted in his office making calls. You’ll have to blame it on one of his many sources.”

Mariah hesitated. Once more, she wanted to believe him, but …

Rory took her shoulders, his hands warm against the hospital air conditioning. “Talk to me. Then, if you still want me to, I promise I’ll go.”

Her determination weakened at the distress in his dark eyes. He deserved to understand. When he realized how direct a role they’d played in Dad’s heart attack, he’d see they couldn’t go on. With a last look over her shoulder toward the CCU, she let Rory lead her into the elevator.

In the hospital cafeteria, he bought coffee in paper cups, doctoring hers with the precise amount of creamer she’d always taken. When they were seated at a large round table in the nearly vacant room, he looked at her with concern. “How is he?”

“Still touch and go.”

“I’m sorry.” He glanced toward the steam tables. “Have you eaten anything? Slept?”

His gaze came back to rest on her.

She ducked her head and tried to straighten her hair.

He reached, and took an errant strand between his fingertips. For a moment he held it, then tucked it behind her shoulder. “I am sorry about your dad. Ever since this morning when I heard, I feared, too, that something we did …” He trailed off, then went on, “But we can’t really be to blame for John’s illness. Did he watch his diet? Did he exercise? Isn’t he a workaholic?”

“His work is all that matters to him.” She faced the issue that conspired to drive them apart. “And your father is laughing right now, thinking he’s beaten Dad. Maybe you didn’t tell Davis what hospital, I don’t know …”

“I did not tell him,” Rory said, too evenly.

Once more, despite the damning evidence, her instinct said to believe him.

But not his father. “Davis calling in the
Chronicle
to make matters worse for Grant Development is despicable.”

Rory’s expression hardened. “I came here for you,” he said. “And because I needed to see you. Let’s don’t fight.”

“I’m not fighting. I’m telling you the way it is. I told my father about us, and look what happened.”

“He could have gotten sick any time, and you know it.” Rory gripped his cup and sloshed coffee onto the table. Looking down at the spreading stain, he reached for napkins. “I’ve already told my father to mind his own business about us. When we go public, it’ll only make it more clear.”

She’d waited eight years for him to stand up to Davis and win her trust … but with Dad near death, it was too late. “There is no us.”

“The hell there isn’t.” He crumpled the stained napkins.

She shook her head. “When he woke up, the first thing he did was start up about you. Don’t you see, every time we try this it goes wrong?”

“You think what we did last Friday was wrong?” His voice rose. “My God, for me there was never anything more right!”

Though she wanted to go into his arms and let him unravel the hard knot of hurt in her, she couldn’t shake the image of her father’s relief when she had promised not to see Rory. “I can’t upset him like this. I told him we wouldn’t be together again.”

The lines beside Rory’s mouth carved deeper; a crease slashed between his brows. With horror, she watched the shutters she knew so well in his father come down over his eyes.

“Very well,” he said.

Miserably, Mariah watched him shove his way between tables and pass through the outside door.

N
ine days later, Mariah’s father came home from the hospital. She arranged for Mrs. Schertz, a kindly retired nurse, to take care of him while she spent days at Grant Development. To cover night duty, she moved back home, calling it “temporary.”

Though she’d visited often in the intervening years, now she found the bungalow somehow shrunken, as though the walls of her old bedroom were closer together.

On the first Saturday morning after he came home, Mariah dressed in her oldest well-washed jeans and tired sneakers. “I’m going to take care of your plants and get those weeds out of your garden.”

“You’re a stickler for perfection like me.” He moved toward his recliner with evident care for the stitched-up incision down the center of his chest. If she found the house smaller than she’d remembered, that was nothing compared to the way the past few weeks had changed him. At least fifteen pounds lighter, his pajamas and robe hung on him. The furrows beside his nose cut deep grooves.

While he rested, Mariah tended to his houseplants, taking the smaller ones to the sink for a deep watering. She dusted the leaves of his rubber plant and picked fallen impatiens blossoms from the carpet without disturbing John’s pile of papers and magazines on the floor. The
Chronicle
stories of Dee Carpentier continued to run as a series.

Though construction was a dangerous business — personal injury lawyers advertised on billboards to handle on-the-job accidents — and fatalities did happen, Dee wrote, the Grant accident was different in its spectacular nature. People related on a visceral level to free-falling from great height. Especially so for John Grant, the paper suggested, who had a heart attack after burying one of the victims.

Mariah wished she could censor his reading material.

The one strange note was that neither Dee nor “On The Spot” had gone public with anything on her and Rory. After the reporter’s prediction that her private life was about to be aired like soiled laundry, she read the
Chronicle
each morning with trepidation and watched the news show every evening, expecting images of Rory shutting Julio Castillo down at Charley’s viewing, or of her driving into Rory’s garage.

She could only hope his threat of lawsuits was keeping them at bay. Yet, there were other possibilities. The most benign was that the media’s spying had discovered she and Rory had not seen each other again. For, after he had walked away from her in the hospital cafeteria, she had not heard a word. And, of course, with Dad still so ill, she would not contact him.

The other, more dire scenario was that the reporters were biding their time, following Rory. One of these days, Julio Castillo might get his payback with a juicy story on roving playboy Campbell, using footage of him and Mariah as well as Sylvia Chatsworth, or whatever woman he had now taken up with.

Despite that she and Rory could never be, the thought of him with another woman brought tears, blurring the ivy plant she was setting down near her father’s recliner. Quickly, before he could see, she grabbed up an African violet and took it into the kitchen.

On the Monday morning after her father’s homecoming, three weeks after the accident, Mariah entered her office early as usual. Crossing to place her purse in the desk drawer, she suddenly stopped and looked around.

Something prickled her skin.

She told herself not to be silly. Just because she was one of the first at work was no reason to imagine she was vulnerable. The company had cardkey access security; she had presented her own to get a green light onto the twenty-ninth floor.

Mariah stood in her office filled with morning light and tried to breathe normally. Feeling spooky was normal after witnessing Charley and Andrew Green’s death, and getting chased by reporters.

Reassured, she walked forward around her desk and nearly stepped on several CDs scattered on the carpet. She recognized them as ones she’d left loose on her desktop last Friday, some plans sent over from an architectural firm.

Opening the side desk drawer, she remembered the Zaragoza CD was in her bag. She stopped, unsnapped a brass clasp and drew the unmarked plastic case from the side pocket of leather.

Looking from it to the mess on the floor, her chill returned. What if it hadn’t merely been a bad weekend for the cleaning staff? What if someone had been in here pawing through her things? Looking in particular for a CD that wasn’t on the company network.

“Hey, there,” said a deep voice from behind her.

Mariah jumped and turned from gathering the fallen discs to find Tom Barrett in her doorway. Although John was doing better, Tom still looked so bad she worried he might follow his friend into the hospital. She wondered if he struggled like her with the recurrent sense of the bottom dropping out, of being poised on the verge of a screaming acceleration.

Leaning a big shoulder against the jamb, Tom looked at the CDs as she placed them on the desk, or perhaps his eyes just followed the movement of her hand.

Despite that they were in the office and should be businesslike, Mariah went and hugged him.

“Ready to face the new week?” he said over the top of her head.

“Ready,” she lied.

When the Monday morning meeting began, Arnold Benton gave his usual self-important report. Using a series of number slides, he showed that all was well on the financial front. To hear him talk, you’d think nothing had happened to the company’s reputation.

Impatient to hear about the Grant Plaza inspections, Mariah said dryly, “Thank you, Arnold. I’m sure all our loans are being serviced and our bills paid. Let’s hear from Ramsey about the accident.” She turned to Grant’s chief engineer.

Ramsey Rhodes crossed his burly arms over a pocketful of pens and pencils. “I’m afraid I’ve got nothing new this week. The metallurgy lab is backed up analyzing an oil tanker spill on the north coast, the one that polluted a federal preserve.”

“People died at Grant Plaza,” she protested with a regretful glance at Tom. “It should take priority.”

Ramsey’s usually studious look sharpened. “I was told by the head of the lab that Senator Chatsworth contacted them personally to emphasize the priority of the environmental issue.”

“Chatsworth?” she echoed, her mind racing. “He shouldn’t be able to interfere. Time’s wasting, and the police can’t pursue a criminal inquiry without lab results saying there was something suspicious about the accident.”

Arnold Benton put down his coffee cup with a clatter. “Sounds like you believe in looking for bogeymen under the bed.”

Ramsey said in his patient, engineer’s tone, “Before we jump to conclusions, we have to wait for test results. The best that could happen for Grant’s reputation is to have the investigation point to a design flaw. Unfortunately, that would mean a lot of workers all over the world are at risk using the same model hoist.”

Tom looked stricken. “I hate to think of other men’s sons in the same peril.”

April Perry spoke up. “The hoist company is now pointing the finger at Grant. They want to know exactly how many sheets of glass were on board.”

“The last thing we need to find out is that the car was overloaded,” Ramsey said.

Charley had stuck out his arm and warned her away. “Weight limit.” If it were so close that a hundred-fifteen pounds would have made a difference …

Mariah straightened her back and looked around the table.

April brushed a lock of coppery hair from her forehead. “At least we have one thing going for us. The longer it takes, the better chance the press and public move on to other stories.”

But, was that true? While Davis Campbell’s senatorial chum held up the metallurgy work, the press’s interest in Grant Development had not flagged.