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“It’s her own damn fault,” John snapped. “He was beating her before they got married, still she went ahead with it. It was a stupid thing to do.”

Pam turned on him. “She had her reasons for marrying him.”

“Sure. She wanted someone to warm her bed, so she picked the first man who came along.”

“Maybe she was lonely. Maybe she was scared. Marcy was just a baby. Honestly, John, can’t you imagine what she was feeling?”

“Frankly, no. It was a stupid thing to do. So now she’s living with the decision.”

“She doesn’t deserve what he does to her.”

“Then she should kick him out.”

“She does, and he keeps coming back.”

“Then she should go to court.”

“She doesn’t have the money to do that.”

“So she sits there and takes it. She’s as stupid now as she was back then. Some people just don’t learn.”

Pam made a face. “You’re a pill, John.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” John said and stepped on the gas.

He made record time back to Boston. While the speed took the edge off the worst of his anger, enough remained to keep him geared up. He kept thinking of Cutter, then of Eugene. Then he thought about Patricia, and kept thinking about her, so that by the time he parked the car in the courtyard of the townhouse on Beacon Hill, he was sexually excited.

Pam and Marcy took off as quickly as they could, which was just fine with John. Dropping his bag by the back door, he took the stairs two at a time. Patricia was in the parlor, sitting at the roll-top desk, writing out invitations for a party she planned to give. Having already paused to greet Pam, she raised her eyes when John appeared at the door.

Tossing his head toward the upper floor, he turned and took those stairs two at a time also. He went straight to Patricia’s bedroom—Patricia and Eugene’s—and began to strip. By the time Patricia slipped through the door, he was naked and fully aroused. She barely had time for a whimsical smile before he pulled her to him and began to shove her clothes aside.

“John?” she asked.

He knew that she was puzzled; he was usually more urbane in his approach to her. He also knew, as he tugged one piece of clothing after another from her body, that she was a little frightened, and that suited him well. He was the one in charge. Eugene could do whatever the hell he wanted with his will; he could be smug and cocky, make fun of John, put him down without a care. But the final laugh was on Eugene, because here in his bedroom, on his bed, between his sheets, his wife was putting out for John.

Over the next few months, John sought out Patricia more and more. She became a vindictive compulsion for him, the only source of satisfaction he had in his war with his father. Eugene wouldn’t change his will; John argued and argued, tried reason again and again, but the more he went at it, the more it seemed Eugene dug in his heels. Likewise, Eugene dug in his heels when it came to the business. He wouldn’t hear of branching off into activities other than mining, and when John even mentioned the possibility of taking the company public, Eugene left the room.

So John left, too, and took out his frustration in Eugene’s bedroom, on Eugene’s wife.

Sometimes she protested. On the day he returned from Maine with Pam and Marcy, when he took her without even a moment of foreplay, she complained that he wasn’t considerate.

“I’ll stop,” he said tightly, holding himself up on his fists while he was buried deep inside her. “I’ll stop if you want. I’ll get out of this room and never come back. I’ll even move out of the house and take a place of my own. That’s long overdue.”

But she quickly relented, as he’d known she would. Just as she’d become an obsession for him, he was her addiction. With Eugene rarely there, John gave her peace of mind. She depended on him. He was her ally, the one who was going to convince Eugene to take the steps necessary to provide her with the security she needed.

John didn’t always agree with her on what those steps should be. She remained fixated on real estate. She saw men in Boston making millions buying property and then renovating or tearing down and building from scratch. Restoration of the waterfront was just beginning. She was sure that St. George Mining could thrive in property development.

John had other ideas. Those men making millions in real estate were, in his opinion, relative upstarts. Some were from out of town. Others were local lawyers and politicians who had spotted a good thing and were capitalizing on it. None had real class, and he had no intention of aligning himself with people like that.

What he had in mind was something more sophisticated. He spent enough of his time with the upper crust to know the kinds of things that impressed them. Old wealth impressed them, but he didn’t have that. Excessive wealth impressed them, but he didn’t have that either. What he had was access to some of the finest tourmaline in the world, and while it wasn’t worshipped as diamonds, rubies, and sapphires were, he had become deeply enough involved in the gem trade to know that jewelers were beginning to branch out. Tourmaline was a rising commodity. He could deal with it and other gemstones as well.

He wanted to build something exclusive and elegant, an establishment that would be to jewelry what Dior was to clothing, Gucci to leather, Chanel to perfume. Patricia thought he was dreaming far too narrow a dream, but he knew that given the choice between one of their plans or nothing, she would opt for his against Eugene’s insistence on the status quo.

In the meantime, she grew more and more dependent on him, and he encouraged it. When they were in bed, she clung. He wouldn’t have stood it from another woman. God only knew Hillary didn’t.

In the end, Patricia’s dependence brought things to a head in a way he would never have dreamed. She wanted him, and with his anger toward Eugene at a high during those few months following the altercation over Cutter, he wanted her right back. So they were careless. Rather than waiting until Eugene was out of town, John came home from work early one day, pointed Patricia toward the bedroom, and made love to her long and hard.

Eugene found them there. Whether it was coincidence or whether he’d begun to suspect something, John never knew. Apparently, he had finished a meeting, learned that John had left for the day, and followed him home.

The look on his face when he opened the door and discovered what was taking place wasn’t quite what John would have expected. There was neither humiliation nor defeat. He stared at the two in the bed, John lounging with measured nonchalance while Patricia jumped up and frantically began adjusting the clothes she’d never completely removed, and his features twisted into open disgust. “How long has this been going on?”

“It’s not what you think,” Patricia cried as she pushed her skirt down from her waist and turned her back to return her breasts to her bra. “It’s not at all what you think.”

But he was looking at John. “How long?”

John shrugged. His heart was pounding far louder than it had earlier, at the moment of climax. “A while.”

“You scum.”

Fumbling now with the buttons of her blouse, Patricia tried again. “Gene, I can explain. I know this must look fishy—”

“If I’m scum,” John said, “what does that make you?”

“Nothing. No relation. I’ve had it. You’re out.”

“Don’t
say
that, Gene! John is crucial to the company. He wasn’t feeling well, that’s all, and—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Eugene said.

He didn’t look at her once, but kept his eyes on John, who was beginning to worry. In all those times that he’d imagined the pleasure of telling his father that he was screwing his wife, it had never occurred to him that he’d end up on the street. But that was just what Eugene was saying.

“I want you out. Out of this house, out of my life. Today.”

“Gene, no—”

“I don’t think so,” John said, ignoring her to answer his father. He drew himself slowly up on the bed. “I’m the one who’s been holding things together both at the office and here, while you’ve been playing pool and poker with the guys up in Timiny Cove. You owe me.”

“Seems to me,” Eugene said with the briefest of glances at Patricia, “you’ve been paid.”

“Not enough.”

“John, explain it to him,” Patricia pleaded.

But John wasn’t listening to her. What was happening, what had happened, was between him and his father more than it had ever related to her. Wrapping the sheet around his waist, he rose from the bed. “I want more. If you want me out of this house, I’ll go. I’ll even resign from the company. But it’ll cost you.”

“You get nothing,” Eugene barked.

“It’ll cost you a lot. I want money.”

“You get shit.”

“If I leave, I’ll take most of the management with me. I haven’t been twiddling my thumbs all these years. You may have bent over backward to treat the miners like gold, but I’m the one who took the time to see that the movers and shakers around the office were greased. They’ll come with me. One word and you’ll lose them. There’s your chain”—he snapped his fingers—“broken in a minute. It’ll take you a while to get it fixed.”

“By God, you’re arrogant as ever. Well, it won’t work this time,” Eugene informed him, flushed with rage. “If anyone wants to leave, I’ll give him a push out the door. I place loyalty above lots of other things. If their loyalty’s to you, you can have them.” His jaw grew even tighter. “I’m going out now. By the time I get back, I want you gone.”

“Gene, you can’t—” Patricia began, running after him.

“It’s done!”

John didn’t move, couldn’t move, but listened while Patricia tried to stop Eugene. She followed him down the stairs, her voice growing frantic in a way that mirrored the feeling in John’s stomach. He heard the slamming of doors—once, twice, again—interspersed with Patricia’s pleas and Eugene’s terse replies. Still John didn’t move, not even when there was a final loud slam and then total silence. For an interminable time he stood there in his father’s bedroom wearing nothing but a sheet, fighting the panic that brought a cold sweat to his lip.

There was a feeling of déjà vu in it—the panic, the fear, the sense of having the floor knocked out from under his feet. He’d felt that way when his mother died, and he hadn’t intended ever to feel it again. But there it was. His future hung in a limbo that was the antithesis of the satisfaction he’d expected.

Stunned, he let the sheet slip to the floor and reached for his clothes. He was pulling on his pants when he heard the first of the sirens. Life in the city was filled with sirens, and since he was embroiled in an emergency of his own, he ignored them.

With his shirt buttoned, though hanging loose, he scooped his tie and jacket from the floor, drove a hand through his hair, and went to his own room long enough to drop his things. He needed a drink. He couldn’t think straight. He had to decide whether to stay or go, what to say or do, how to handle Eugene. It wasn’t possible that his father had meant all he’d said. He was angry and upset. A man didn’t just write off his son—his vice president—that way.

Mired in confusion, he was halfway down the stairs before he felt the draft from the door. Marcy had opened it and was leaning out, looking down Mt. Vernon in the direction of Charles. The sirens were louder than ever.

John wasn’t sure what drew him to the door, whether it was a premonition, a need for diversion, or simple curiosity. But he found himself looking over Marcy’s shoulder at a jumble of blinking red lights.

“Fire?” he asked.

Marcy shook her head. It was a minute before she said, “The lights are in the middle of the street. Looks more like an accident.”

John felt odd. “Where’s Patricia?”

In the pause that followed he was convinced that Marcy knew precisely what had been going on behind her mistress’s closed doors so many afternoons and evenings. But he was past the point of caring. “Is she in the living room?”

Eyes on the blinking lights, Marcy shook her head.

“The kitchen?”

“Isn’t she with your father?”

“I don’t know. Is she?”

“I heard them talkin’, then they were gone. Maybe they’re down there stuck in that mess.”

John’s heart was pounding again, not so loudly, but heavily. “Where’s Pam?”

“At her friend Cindy’s. She’ll be home b’fore long.”

He turned back into the house and called, “Patricia?” When there was no answer, he went to the foot of the stairs. He was sure he’d have known if she’d gone back up after Eugene had left, but he had to check. “
Patricia?
” The only answer was another siren.

Swearing softly, he grabbed his coat from the closet and threw it on as he trotted down the stone steps outside.

The closer John got to the lights, the faster he walked. There was something too familiar about the blue of the car that was crushed between the Mack truck that had rammed it and the unyielding brick wall of the corner drugstore.

“Jesus,” he breathed as he wove through the emergency vehicles. “Jesus.”

“Hey, fella,” the police officer called, “better stay back.”

“I know them,” he managed to say. Breathing hard, he watched as the truck was hauled back from the wall.

“You know who they are?” the policeman asked, but John couldn’t take his eyes from the mess that had once been his father’s car.