First Sight (18 page)

She had just finished sending off the last e-mail, and was both nervous and excited as David grinned and she giggled, when Timmie walked in.

“What are you two kids up to?” she asked. She had seen the mischievous look on the faces of both of her assistants. She was sure that whatever it was, it was harmless. And it did them good to take a break when she was out, once in a while. There were no major crises at the moment, and she looked relaxed too. Her legal meetings about the pension fund had been informative and had gone well. “Okay, fess up. You look like two cats who ate the canary,” she said, smiling at them.

“Not one canary. Six,” Jade confessed. She knew Timmie was leery of dating services, Internet or otherwise, but Jade had no secrets from her.

“Explain that,” Timmie said, and then saw what was on the screen. There were rows of photographs of men with a few lines of description, and she looked at both of them with a motherly expression. “Watch out, you two! No ax murderers, please. I need you both.”

Jade wanted to tell her to try it too, but she knew Timmie couldn’t. Even if she didn’t give her real name, her face was known all over the world, and she was a very distinctive-looking woman. The long red hair and green eyes would have given her away anywhere, and her face had appeared in articles and ads for years. She was a success story in business schools everywhere, and an icon in the fashion world. She would have wound up in the tabloids in about ten minutes if she put her photograph up on an Internet dating service, or even discreetly with a matchmaker, which were becoming the rage too.

The era of mail-order brides had been modernized and come into its own again, which only proved how hard it was for anyone to meet a mate these days, no matter how young, good-looking, or successful you were. The men Jade had written to all fit into that category and all claimed they were looking for long-term relationships and obviously hadn’t been able to find them on their own. Timmie was not unique in her inability to find an equal partner, although her limitations were more specific, due to age and fame. She had a handicap, and had to settle for what she could find on her own, which wasn’t much, as witnessed by the likes of Zack and the men who had come before him in the past eleven years. And Timmie hadn’t been willing to go on blind dates for years. She said they were too humiliating and too much trouble.

“Just be careful,” Timmie reminded her, and then went back to her own office, as Jade followed her.

David had promised to let Jade know if any responses came in. He said he’d check his e-mail over the weekend. Jade grinned excitedly as she went to go over some notes with Timmie, who seemed in good spirits too.

She left the office at six o’clock, which was early for her, and Zack showed up around seven. It was the week before Thanksgiving, and they had a quiet weekend planned. She had plans the following day, even though it was Saturday, and Zack was good-natured about it. He knew that roughly once or twice a month she had commitments that kept her busy on Saturday mornings and into the early afternoon. She said it was related to work, and it gave him a chance to go to the gym, or work out at her place, and have lunch with friends.

They had dinner at the Little Door that night, which was one of her favorite places, and went to a movie afterward. They saw a thriller Zack had wanted to see. Timmie didn’t love it, and on the way out afterward she teased him that the popcorn had been good at least. She didn’t mind how bad the movie was, it was fun being out with him. And they were both in a good mood. He had gotten a minor acting job that week, and was waiting to hear about a major national commercial that could open other doors to him. He was always happy when he got work, and depressed when he got passed over. It was the nature of what he did. He was lucky he looked as young as he did, and she knew he’d gotten help with that. He had had his eyes done several years earlier, and got Botox shots regularly. He had had collagen shots, and lightened his hair. He wasn’t quite as naturally blond as he looked, and he was far vainer than she was. She had never done any of that to herself, nor would she. She was far more willing to age gracefully, and her work didn’t depend on it as his did.

Timmie was up at seven o’clock on Saturday morning. She worked out in the gym for half an hour, showered, and made herself a light breakfast of yogurt, cereal, and tea, and she was just about to leave the house when Zack came downstairs with a towel around him. He kissed her lightly on the lips, picked up the newspaper, and headed for the kitchen. It was a peaceful little domestic scene, which gave her the illusion of intimacy with him, which was more fantasy than fact.

“I left you a pot of coffee,” she called back to him.

“Thanks. What time will you be finished?”

“I should be back here by three,” she answered.

“I’ll meet you here,” he said easily. He knew where the key was, and she closed the front door gently behind her. It always intrigued her that he never asked her what she did on the Saturday mornings she didn’t spend with him. He figured it was her business. He didn’t tell her everything he did either. The time she was gone never seemed that long to him. He didn’t mind her being busy.

She had left the house in jeans, sneakers, and an old sweater with a denim jacket over it, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore no makeup, and looked surprisingly good, given the hour of the morning. She rarely worried about her looks, and as a result looked beautiful and real, despite her age.

She drove to Santa Monica, listening to music and smiling to herself. She felt good. She loved the mornings she spent like this, and looked forward to them for weeks. She didn’t have time to do it often, but she carved out time whenever she could. It fed her soul, and was something she wanted to give back to the world, although it gave just as much to her, sometimes more. She knew this was something she could never give up, for anyone. It touched the deepest part of her heart.

Twenty minutes after she left Bel Air, she pulled up in front of a freshly painted building. It was a Victorian house that had obviously been renovated and enlarged. It had an old-fashioned front porch, and a bicycle rack out front, well stocked with bright new bikes. There was a handsome climbing structure in back. It was obviously a house inhabited by kids, and she smiled as she let herself in through the unlocked front door. Two women with weathered faces, kind eyes, and short hair were talking in the front hall, and another sat at a desk.

“Good morning, sisters,” Timmie said easily. The two women talking to each other were considerably older than she was, while the one at the desk looked like a kid herself. All three were nuns, although nothing about their dress would have suggested it. They were wearing sweatshirts and jeans. They looked up with broad smiles as Timmie walked in. “How’s everyone?”

“We thought you’d come today,” the oldest of the three women said. She had been in a Carmelite order in her youth, and had left them to join the Dominicans, and work in Watts. She had worked with underprivileged inner-city kids for forty years, first in Chicago, then in Alabama and Mississippi, and finally in L.A. She ran the house they called St. Cecilia’s.

It was a home for children who had been orphaned but for one reason or another, often health issues or age, were ineligible or inappropriate for adoption, or had been unsuccessful in being adopted out of the system, and had also not done well in foster care. It had been Sister Anne’s idea from the beginning, and having heard of Timmie’s charitable bent and soft spot for children years before, she had come to present her dream to her. She had never expected what had happened next. Without a word of explanation or argument, Timmie had written a million-dollar check and handed it across her desk, to buy the house, staff it, and run it. That had been ten years before, and she had supported it ever since. St. Cecilia’s existed on the benevolence of Timmie O’Neill, although that fact was kept strictly confidential. Only David and Jade knew of her involvement with them. Timmie didn’t like recognition for the charitable works she did.

The house was run by six nuns, and inhabited by anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five kids. There were twenty-one there at the moment, and she knew that two more were due in within the next few weeks. They ranged in age from five to eighteen. The balance of sexes was always about equal, as was the racial balance. It varied, and some of the children had been there for as long as five years. Their goal was always to place the children, if possible, but by the very nature of the situations that brought them there, most stayed at St. Cecilia’s for several years. Their longest-term resident had been a blind girl who had been with them for seven years, and had graduated and been accepted at USC on a scholarship the year before, with Timmie’s help. She had been impossible to place through the system, and St. Cecilia’s had been a haven and godsend for her, as it was for the others. There were three children who had juvenile diabetes, which made them equally difficult to place, and another with emotional problems as a result of severe abuse. Several had been chronic bed-wetters when they arrived, for similar reasons, and had stopped wetting their beds within months. Some just weren’t attractive children, others had been oppositional. Several had stolen from their foster parents and been sent to juvenile hall. Some were just extremely shy, or didn’t get along with their foster families’ natural kids. Whatever their reasons, they had been rejected again and again, and sent back like fish thrown into a pond of rejects, and one by one the sisters who ran the house had lovingly fished them out. They provided the children who lived there love, safety, and a good home.

Timmie loved coming to visit, and did so at every opportunity, almost always on Saturday mornings. The children all called her Timmie, and even they had no idea what her connection to the house was, or that she was in fact providing all the bounty that came to them, and their home.

“We heard you had your appendix out in Paris,” Sister Margaret said with a look of concern. She was the twenty-five-year-old nun at the front desk. She had gone into religious orders at eighteen, which was rare these days, and had only recently taken final vows. She had called Timmie’s office to talk to Jade and check on when she was coming back from Europe, and they had all been worried and frightened to hear that she was sick. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Timmie said with a broad smile. “As good as new. Although it was a little scary when it happened. I’m okay now.” She had forgotten about it entirely in the past two weeks. It was as though it had never happened. “Anyone new?” she asked with interest. She loved knowing which children were there, and why. She took a deep personal interest in each case. St. Cecilia’s was dear to her heart, for reasons most people never knew, although years before she had told her own story to Sister Anne, as they worked side by side, restoring the house. She had helped them put the place together, only two years after her own son had died, and the year after Derek left. She readily admitted it had saved her life.

“We’re still waiting for the two new kids to arrive, but I don’t think they’ll be here till next week. There’s been some sort of technical delay in the system. We’re trying to get them here by Thanksgiving.” The holiday was only five days away. They fought hard to pull kids out of the system, and give them a home that could potentially change their lives, and almost always did. Once in a while, it was too late, and the children sent to them were too hardened, too damaged, or too sick, and had to be placed in medical facilities that offered either medical or psychiatric treatment that they could not. St. Cecilia’s wasn’t a jail or a hospital or a psych ward for children, it was in fact a loving home, provided for them by Timmie, where the children who lived there could thrive and enjoy opportunities, both educational and emotional, that they would never have had otherwise. It was what she wished she had had forty years before, and would have altered the course of her life at the time.

As she always did, she wandered through the house all morning, stopped and talked to the children who were familiar to her, and tried to become acquainted with those who had arrived in the past month or two, whom she had seen, but not yet talked to. She approached them all with respect and caution, and gave them the choice as to whether they wanted to open up to her or not. And after that, she sat on the porch with the nuns, and watched the younger ones play in the back garden, while the older ones went off to visit friends or do weekend jobs. It was just like having twenty-one children, with all the work, patience, and understanding that entailed, and love.

Just before lunchtime, one of the children she knew well came and talked to her. He was nine years old, an African American boy with one arm. His father had beaten him so badly, and then shot him and his mother, that the child had lost his arm. The mother had died, and the father had gone to prison for life. Jacob had been with them since he was five, and managed extremely well with one arm. He had come to them straight from the hospital after the shooting. The social workers in foster care had felt it was pointless to try and place him through them. He was unable to be adopted, as his father refused to sign the relinquishment papers, but he would have been nearly impossible to place anyway. The nuns of St. Cecilia’s had been quick to embrace him and bring him home. He handed Timmie a drawing he had made, of a cat with purple hair and a big smile. Those who had been at St. Cecilia’s for a long time were, for the most part, happy kids. You could easily see the ones who were recently arrived, who still looked frightened, and had wounded eyes. It took time for them to understand that they were safe, after the terrors many of them had survived.

“Thank you, Jacob,” Timmie said, smiling at him, holding the drawing. “Does the cat have a name?”

“Harry,” Jacob said, looking pleased. “He’s a magic cat. He speaks French.”

“Really? I was just in France last month. In Paris. I had my appendix out,” she informed him, and he nodded, with a serious expression.

“I know. Did it hurt when they took it out?”