Night Whispers (6 page)

He interrupted her tirade in a pleasant, but no-nonsense tone. "Let's not argue in our first conversation. You can berate me in person for all my paternal shortcomings, in two weeks."

Sloan took the phone from her ear momentarily and glared at it in frustrated confusion, then returned it "In two weeks? In person? I'm not interested in anything you have to say!"

"Yes, you are," he said, and Sloan felt a flash of furious admiration for his sheer gall and the force of his will, which seemed to prevent her from hanging up on him. "Maybe I should have said it in a letter, but I thought a phone call would accomplish things more quickly."

"Just what is it that you want to accomplish?"

"I—" he hesitated. "Your sister and I want you to join us at the Beach for a few weeks so we can all get to know each other. I had a heart attack six months ago—"

The "Beach," Sloan surmised, was clearly the insiders' term for
Palm Beach. "I read about your illness in the newspaper," Sloan said, managing to convey studied indifference along with the reminder that all she knew of her own father was what she read. Geographically,
Palm Beach was not very tar away, but socially and economically,
Palm Beach was in another galaxy. To add to its own prestige, the Bell Harbor newspaper always carried the Sunday social section from its illustrious neighbor to the south, and it was there that Sloan saw frequent pictures and mentions of her socially prominent father and her accomplished sister.

"I want the three of us to get to know each other before it's too late."

"I can't believe your nerve!" Sloan exploded, angry and bewildered by the unexpected sting of tears she felt at the emotionally charged phone call. "It is already much too late. I have no desire whatsoever to know you, not now, after all these years."

"What about your sister?" he countered smoothly. "Don't you have any interest in getting to know her?"

Sloan's mind promptly conjured up the same photograph at the country club. Her sister, Paris, had been her father's tennis partner. With her dark head thrown back and her right arm extended in perfect form for a perfect tennis serve,
Paris hadn't looked as if her life was anything except… perfect. "I have no more interest in getting to know her than she's had in getting to know me," Sloan said, but she felt as though the words had a hollow ring.

"
Paris feels as if she's missed out on a very important part of her life by not having known you."

According to the frequent mentions of
Paris that Sloan had seen,
Paris's life had been an endless succession of glamorous and fulfilling events—from her tennis and equestrian trophies to the lavish parties she hosted for her father in
San Francisco and
Palm Beach. At thirty-one, Paris Reynolds was beautiful, poised, and sophisticated, and she hadn't needed or wanted Sloan in her life before this. That knowledge hardened Sloan's weakening resolve to avoid any contact with the wealthy branch of her family. "I'm just not interested," she said very firmly. "Good-bye."

"I spoke to your mother today. I hope she can change your mind—" he was saying as she hung up the phone. Her knees began to shake in delayed reaction, but she couldn't give in to weakness in front of everyone. "That's that," she said brightly. "I'd better get going; I have a class to teach."

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B
y the time Sloan reached her temporary classroom, she'd convinced herself that her emotions were firmly under control and that she could concentrate completely on what she had to do.

She walked into the room, closed the door behind her, and gave the group a bright, fixed smile. "We're going to be talking about correct ways for women to deal with several potentially dangerous situations… " she announced; then she realized she'd forgotten to greet them or introduce herself. "By the way, my name is Sloan Reynolds…" she began again.
And my father has just contacted me for the first time in my life
, she thought.

Sloan shook her head to clear it. The classes she was about to give were vitally important to the women in the room, and the women were all important to her. They needed her advice; they were counting on her. Carter Reynolds was nothing to her.

Sloan thrust him out of her mind and began the first of her lectures. "We'll start with one of the most common scenarios where a lone woman suddenly finds herself in danger. Let's suppose you're alone on the road at night and you get a flat tire," she said. "There's very little traffic and the nearest lights—the nearest sign of people—are three or four miles away. What do you do?"

Several hands went up and Sloan nodded toward an attractive middle-aged woman who sold real estate. "I'd lock the car doors, roll up the windows, and stay in the car until a police car, or tow truck, or some sort of trustworthy help arrives."

That was exactly the answer Sloan expected to hear, and it was the wrong answer. "Okay," she said, preparing to illustrate her point. "Now, suppose that while you're locked in your car, a vehicle pulls over to the side of the road. A man gets out, comes over to you, and offers to help. What will you do?"

"Does he look trustworthy?" the realtor asked.

"I don't
know
what honest looks like," Sloan countered firmly, "and neither do
you
. I mean, who looked more wholesome than Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy? But let's suppose the guy who offers to help you
doesn't
look trustworthy. What would you do then?"

"I'd keep the window up, and—and I'd lie and tell him help is already on the way!" the realtor finished with the enthusiasm of one who has come up with an inspired solution. "Is that the right answer?"

"Well, let's see if it is or isn't," Sloan said as she walked over to a table where she'd set up a television and video-cassette player. "If your man was a good guy who truly wanted to help, he'll leave. But what do you think he'll do if he's a bad guy who wants to rob or rape or murder you?"

"What can he do?" the woman replied. "I'm in the car with the doors locked and the windows up."

"I'll show you what he can—and will—do," Sloan said as she pressed the playback button on the VCR. The television screen lit up showing a nighttime scene exactly like the one Sloan had described, with an actress playing the part of the stranded motorist on the highway. On the screen, a second car pulled to a stop, and a clean-cut-looking actor got out and offered to fix her tire. When the woman politely declined his help, he suddenly grabbed the door handle and tried to open the car door. She began screaming in panic, and he ran to his car, but instead of leaving, he returned a moment later with a tire iron; then he bashed in her window, unlocked the door, and jerked the screaming, struggling woman out of the car, where he began bludgeoning her with the tire iron.

The brief film clip was so realistic that Sloan's students were silent and shaken after she turned off the VCR.

"Lesson number one—" Sloan said firmly, but with a smile to ease the tension in the room. "Do
not
stay in a disabled vehicle. If you do, you're turning yourself into a potential victim and advertising your plight to every criminal and creep who drives by."

"Then what should we do?" a pharmacist's wife asked.

"You have several choices, depending upon how far away you are from the nearest house or business. None of your alternatives are convenient, but they're not as 'inconvenient' as being robbed or worse. If you're within walking distance of a house or business, even if it's several miles away, start walking. If you can't go cross-country, then you'll have to walk along the highway, but be prepared to duck behind a bush or crouch in a ditch if you see car lights coming your way. If it's too far to walk, or if the climate would endanger your health, then you'll have to stay in the car, but be prepared to get out of it and hide somewhere as soon as you see headlights coming your way. If someone stops to check out the car, stay hidden."

Sloan paused to let all that sink in; then she said, "If there's some reason why you absolutely must remain in your vehicle until morning, then wait until you see headlights coming, get out of the car and go to your hiding place. From there, you can watch and see what he does and how he acts. If he tries to break into your vehicle, or vandalize it, or steal your hubcaps—or if he has a couple drunken buddies with him—then at least you'll know you're safer where you are."

Sloan reached behind her and picked up a small black object on the table. Smiling, she said, "If you really don't like hiking down highways and across fields in the dark—if you'd rather not spend a terrifying night jumping in and out of your car, hiding and fearing for your life—then I'm happy to recommend an alternative." Lifting her arm, she held up the cellular telephone she'd taken from the table, and her smile vanished. "Please get one of these," Sloan implored. "Please," she said again for emphasis. "You can buy one for under one hundred dollars, and if you only use it for emergencies, the monthly cost for airtime isn't much. I realize that for some of you the cost of a cheap cell phone and monthly service may put a strain on your budget, but you can't put a dollar value on your life, and it's your life you're risking without one. If you have one of these when you're stranded at night in a car, you don't have to spend the night hiking or hiding. You can phone a tow truck, or the police department, or your husband or boyfriend and tell them you'll be waiting near the car. After that, all you have to do is stay out of sight until the help you're expecting arrives.

"Oh, one more thing," she added as Jess walked into the room. "If you've phoned the police, stress that you'll be near the car, not in it. Don't just leap out from behind a bush when we get there."

"Why not?" Sara challenged, smiling directly at Jess.

"Because," Jess said dryly, "it scares the hell out of us when that happens."

Everyone laughed, but Sloan had a much different impression of that ostensibly innocent exchange between Sara and Jess. Sara, who was always nice to everyone, had actually meant to force Jess into admitting to fear in front of a roomful of women. Sloan knew that as surely as she knew that Jess, who never took any gibe—or any woman—seriously, had truly resented Sara's "joke." They were two of the most attractive, most personable people in all of Bell Harbor. And they couldn't stand each other. They were Sloan's closest friends, and the undercurrent of animosity between them had finally risen to the surface and was bursting out into the open.

Sloan finished her lecture with a reminder that the next session would include some physical self-defense moves and reminded them to wear suitable clothing; then she turned off the television set and removed the video cartridge from the VCR. She'd completely forgotten that Carter Reynolds had reared up out of the dark highway of her own past.

Unfortunately, her respite lasted only until Sara got her alone.

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"I
can't believe Carter Reynolds is your father!" Sara burst out excitedly the moment the heavy doors of city hall swung closed behind them. "I can
not
believe it," she repeated, thinking of the articles she'd seen about him in the "Palm Beach Social Section" of Bell Harbor's Sunday newspaper.

"I've never been able to believe it myself," Sloan said wryly. "Actually, I've never had any reason to believe it," she added as they walked across the parking lot toward her car.

Sara scarcely heard that; her thoughts were racing down another track. "When we were little kids, you told me your parents got divorced when you were a baby, but you forgot to mention your father is… is… Carter Reynolds!" she said, lifting her arms to the sky, palms up, as if addressing heaven. "My God, just his name makes me think of yachts and Rolls-Royces and banks and… money. Mountains and mountains of glorious money! How could you keep a secret like that from me all these years?"

Sloan hadn't had a private moment to think about his call, but Sara's awed exuberance only hardened her own determination to remain unaffected by Carter Reynolds's illness, his tardy attempt to get to know her, and especially his money. "He
isn't
my father, except in the biological sense. In all these years, I've never received so much as a birthday card or a Christmas card, or even a phone call from him."

"But he called you today, didn't he? What did he want?"

"He wanted me to come to Palm Beach for a visit so we could get to know each other. I told him no. Absolutely no," Sloan said, hoping to eliminate any debate from Sara. "It's too late for him to try to play father," she said as she slid her key into the lock on the door of her car.

Sara was intensely loyal to Sloan, and under ordinary circumstances she would readily have empathized with Sloan's decision to reject a parent who had rejected Sloan since babyhood. However, from Sara's point of view, there was nothing "ordinary" about being the daughter of a man who could make Sloan into an heiress. "I don't think you should be so hasty," she said, thinking madly for some sort of excuse she could offer for the inexcusable. She voiced the first lame possibility that came to mind.