Executive Suite (14 page)

“Fred, are you all right?” Edith Alderson asked anxiously. “You sounded so tired and worn out when you called before that I've just been sitting here worrying that—”

“There's nothing to worry about, nothing at all,” he said. The words were bright and crisp, not tonelessly automatic as they usually were.

6.18 P.M. EDT

Julia Tredway Prince jabbed the sharp heel of her satin slipper into the white fur rug and spun herself around on the old Victorian piano stool that she used as a dressing table seat. A second heel jab abruptly braked the turn so that she stopped facing the wide window through which she could see the distant white shaft of the Tredway Tower.

An errant thought suggested the possibility that Miss Martin might not have told her the truth about Avery's not being home from New York yet, but she quickly dismissed the suspicion. The woman was a bitch but she wouldn't have dared to go that far … unless, of course, Avery had asked her to do it. She would do anything he asked … and probably had!

“Stop it!” It was a command to herself, said aloud, a device that she had learned to use to keep her thoughts from straying into forbidden zones. Any thoughts of the relationship that might exist between Avery Bullard and Erica Martin was completely off limits. Even thinking of Avery Bullard alone was usually over the border line, but today the call from Pilcher had given it an eagerly grasped legitimacy. It was the first sustainable reason that she had had in a long time for calling him.

The recognized sharpness of her disappointment when she had found that she couldn't talk to him had made her enforce the self-discipline of asking Mr. Alderson to relay the story, but there still remained the thin thread of hope that Avery might call her back. It was such a remote possibility that she could risk the danger of thinking about it. She knew he wouldn't. There had been too many times before when he might have called but hadn't. At least he could say, “Thank you, Julia.” Even that would be something, a pale echo of what he had once …

“Stop it!”

“What was that, dear?”

She was startled by the unexpectedness of her husband's voice, not having noticed that he had come into the adjoining bedroom.

“Just talking to myself,” she said with a quick laugh, tossing the words over her shoulder as she spun the stool to face her dressing table again.

“Did you get Mr. Bullard?”

She could see him in the mirror, standing in the doorway like an unbidden guest, polite as he was always polite. “No, I talked to Mr. Alderson.”

“Oh?”

“He advised me against selling.”

“I suppose that's best then?”

“There's no reason why I should sell.”

“No, I don't suppose there is.” He hesitated and then, as if he were trying to make conversation, asked, “Have you called back the man in New York?”

“No,” she said, starting to brush her hair.

The door in the mirror began to close.

“Oh, Dwight?” She turned now, pleasing him. “We're having strawberries for dinner and I told Nina that I might be able to persuade you to make the sauce.”

His face lighted. “Of course, my dear.”

“I should have asked you before.”

“There's still time. I'll do it at once.”

When she turned back he was gone from the mirror but the image of his smile still lingered in her mind. It was a smile of gratitude and she returned it. She, too, was grateful—most grateful that he was so easy to please.

At thirty-eight, Julia Tredway Prince was still filling in the blank pages of a lost life. At seventeen, in the month of her father's suicide, overwhelmed by the enormity of her loss, and almost as much by her mother's attitude that the disappearance of their fortune was even more of a tragedy than Orrin Tredway's death, Julia had been unable to hold her mind under a tight enough rein to prevent a headlong flight from the world of reason.

She had spent the next seven years in a sanitarium for the mentally ill. Those seven years had been lost in the mists of a clouded mind, so completely lost that she could trust none of her memories of those endless months. She could never be sure that some remembered thing had actually happened. There had been a long time when reality was undistinguishable from fantasy. She could not even be certain of when Avery Bullard had started coming to see her in the sanitarium because there had been a vast expanse of dayless months when he seemed to cross fade in and out of her vision, changing places with her father's image on the chair beside her bed.

Her trustworthy memories went back no farther than the day when she had finally come to the unshakable realization that Avery Bullard was not her father. His hand holding hers was too strong, his voice too uncompromising in its demand that she rise and walk and think and talk again.

Sometime near the end—she could not know exactly when because she had not progressed far enough yet to link the days with numbers on a calendar—she had talked to Avery Bullard about the payment of her bill at the sanitarium. Actually, what she said had begun only as the parroting of the overheard conversation of another patient, but he had been so pleased at this evidence of rational thinking that he had talked to her about her financial situation. Driven by a terrific urge to earn more approval, she had somehow forced her mind to understand. The old Tredway Furniture Company had grown into the Tredway Corporation. A part of her father's holdings, valueless when the company had been faced by the bankruptcy that had forced a pistol to his temple, had been salvaged for her and already had considerable value. Some day, he told her, she would probably be wealthy. The old house on North Front Street—the home that she had loved as a child, not the Cliff House mansion whose vast loneliness was a part of her terror—was ready and waiting for her. “You can go home any time that you can make yourself want to do it,” Avery Bullard had said. A month later she had done it, walking out of the sanitarium alone and unaided, her body miraculously relieved of torture, her mind as clear as the rain-washed sky of that windy April day.

Julia Tredway was twenty-four years old when she returned to the normal world, but in many ways she was still seventeen. Seven years had gone by as a blank. Nature, in minor repayment for its major cruelty, had aged her mind to a maturity beyond seventeen—as it ages wine in a hidden and neglected cask—but she was still far from a normally developed person of her age. She had not accumulated the myriad interlaced impressions that usually accompany the transition from adolescence to womanhood, so her mind was poorly stocked with the raw materials of thinking, but there was some compensating advantage in the lack of mental clutter and the added receptiveness and impressionability of a young mind. As a net result she was, in those first months after she left the sanitarium, like a precocious child with unusual maturity and a startling capacity for learning.

Her adjustment to society was difficult for she had neither anchorage nor reference points. Her mother's death—now only a formless cloud in those hazy lost years—had left her with no close relatives. The thin bonds of childhood friendship had long since been broken. There was only Avery Bullard.

During the first year she left the house and its grounds only to attend an occasional social affair, and always because he insisted. Except for pleasing him, she found little pleasure. The too bright smiles of the people she met, coupled with the way that everyone so pointedly avoided any mention of her years in the sanitarium, were barriers to comfortable friendship. She felt that way even about Avery Bullard's wife and he was understanding enough to realize it. After a few months he no longer asked her to his home, but then he came more often to hers.

The house was an important part of her first happiness. One of the strongest of her new impressions was of the day she came home from the sanitarium. Despite her remembered love for the old house, she had been terrorized that seeing it again might recall dangerous memories. But no fear of terror could stop her from responding to his demand that she walk through the gate in the white wall, up the bricked path, and into the house. Miraculously, there were no memories. She had been afraid to ask him how much the house had been changed for fear of betraying herself and disappointing him, so it was months before she learned that he had completely redecorated and refurnished the house. When she had finally been able to talk about it, he had brushed aside her thanks. “You've nothing to thank me for, Julia. Everything was bought with your own money.”

Nina had been there waiting that first day, a strange little woman with a sharp nose and a tight-drawn Psyche knot and a stiffly starched never-spotted apron, but with great black knowing eyes that always mirrored understanding. It was Nina who guided her to comfort and security and provided the constant flow of warm affection that she needed so much—and it was Avery Bullard who had given her Nina. No one else could have found her, no one else could have known that it was Nina she needed.

In the early days of her recovery, when she had not yet made the transition from thinking of herself as a child, Avery Bullard had seemed an elderly man. She had broken through the confusion that tended to identify him with the image of her father, but he still evoked something close to filial response. Later, when she finally awakened to the realization that she was a mature woman, the years that had been so quickly added to her age seemed to dissolve the span of years between them. By that time her affection for him had grown to such proportions that it was undeniably the love of a woman for a man, no longer the adoration of a child that loved without hunger for consummation. The hunger grew until it became such an overwhelming passion that she was afraid her mental balance might again be lost.

Looking back now, remembering, it seemed that there were times when her sanity had been lost. Only insanity could have driven her to do what she had done. A reasonable mind would have known that Avery Bullard, despite the momentary physical response that her guile produced, could never be trapped against his will. The year after his wife had divorced him, Julia had made the most insanely desperate try of all. There had been moments when she thought she would hold him forever—but years afterward she knew that what she had really done had only served to push him away from her.

Desperation had lingered on after he had stopped coming to see her except when some business affair demanded it. Even seeing him under those circumstances still carried a hope and she went to wild ends—shamefully remembered—to make him come to her house. When he made her a director of the company she suspected, with a suspicion born of frustration, that it was done only to force her to come to the office and to wipe out any excuse that she might ever have to ask him to come to her home. In consequence, she had never attended a directors' meeting.

It was out of a chance remark that she had discovered Avery Bullard's fear that the control of the company might be challenged if she ever sold her stock to someone else. Thus the threat to sell her stock became a new way to make him come to her and, in the last throes of her desperation, she had used it over and over again, hating herself for her shamelessness but unable to restrain her desire.

When she called him it was always Erica Martin who answered and her voice was a constantly harrowing reminder that it was she who was with him from morning until night—and it was an easy step to the suspicion that Erica Martin was with him in the nights as well.

In the end, Julia Tredway had won the victory of defeat. Avery Bullard had shocked her into it. One night when she had made him come to her with a ruse so transparent that she was forced to admit what she had done, he had said, “Julia, remember that you lost seven years of your life. If you keep on the way you are going, I'm afraid you'll lose the rest of it.”

His demand for sanity was irresistible, as all of his demands had always been irresistible, and she had started a new life. Her marriage to Dwight Prince was the real beginning. She had not been in love with him nor, she suspected, he with her. Dwight's greatest asset was that there was nothing about him to remind her of Avery Bullard. He had neither strength, dominance, nor the ability to demand subjection. Furthermore, he needed her—needed her money to live the gracious but useless existence which was all that his inheritance and training had fitted him to live. He paid for it with an understanding and a gentle kindness that had given her more happiness than she had expected and there had grown up between them something that was not true love but was, at least, a relationship that she recognized as more desirable than what passed for love in many marriages.

Through the exercise of tight control she had kept herself from thinking of Avery Bullard and, as the years had gone by, it had become easier and easier to do—until today when Bruce Pilcher's call asking her to sell stock had been a too sharp parallel to the memory of other times when she had called Avery Bullard with that same threat.

She pivoted on the stool again, her eyes on the tip of the Tower. Yes, she had been right in giving the message to Alderson. Avery might remember … probably not … but he might.

5

NEW YORK CITY

6.22 P.M. EDT

Bruce Pilcher, debating a third Martini, decided against it. Alcohol gave him false courage and that wasn't what he needed now. He had to
think
. Mrs. Prince had promised to call him back within an hour. It was almost an hour now and she hadn't called.

After he had telephoned the hospital and been told that Avery Bullard was not there, Bruce Pilcher had wasted no time in searching the Final editions of the newspapers that had been brought to the library at his request.

Now, more as an aftermath of an earlier desire than anything else, he absent-mindedly crossed to the table where Andrew had dropped the papers. His thoughts were occupied with the just made decision that he would wait another fifteen minutes for Mrs. Prince's call. If it had not been for his eyes' being caught by the name of the building in which he had his office, he would have missed the little item that was tucked in to fill the bottom of a first-page column.