Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (35 page)

     While Miss Ralston reviewed the myriad details for the Scadudos' upcoming Christmas party, Hannah could barely keep still. She was anxious to get upstairs and be alone. And she had to make a phone call. An urgent, life or death phone call.

     "Nearly everyone has RSVP'd," Miss Ralston went on in her crisp way. "Only three couples have said they can't make it. That brings the guest count to a hundred and seventy-five."

     Hannah raised her drink again and was startled to find that the glass was empty. Fighting to keep her hands steady, she mixed another, a little heavier on the vodka this time, and tried not to gulp it down. She glanced at her watch.

     Why was Philippa calling the meeting in Palm Springs? What was wrong with the Starlite offices, so near and convenient for everyone? Palm Springs was going to waste an entire day; it was at least a two-hour drive each way.

     She wants to get us on neutral ground, Hannah thought. She wants to bring us out of the familiarity and security of our offices, out into the open where we will have no advantage. She wants to see if we can survive out of our comfortable corporate environment.

     Hannah was shocked by her thoughts. They seemed so cynical, so uncharitable. But then wasn't that how Philippa's sudden return to Los Angeles appeared? As though everyone at Starlite—her friends—were criminals?

     Oh God, Hannah thought as she clenched her glass. Let it just be the business with Miranda International that has brought her back. Don't let it be the other—not until I've taken care of it.

     Miss Ralston was saying, "The special Christmas tree ornaments you ordered from Saks are ready, Mrs. Scadudo. And the twenty-foot Ponderosa pine has been reserved for the morning of the party."

     Hannah paused with her drink, realizing that her secretary was staring at her, waiting for an answer to a question Hannah had not heard. There was so much to do—the Christmas party, her children and their families coming for the holidays, the special surprise she had planned for Alan...

     She put her glass down abruptly and said, "Yes, it's all very good, Miss Ralston. Thank you. I'm going to go upstairs for a few minutes." She looked at her watch again. "Mr. Scadudo should be home soon."
And I must make that call before he gets here.
"So if you don't need me for a little while..."

     Before Miss Ralston could say anything, Hannah left the library.

     She climbed the great curving staircase and went down the hall to the master bedroom suite, where she took care to close the large double doors behind her.

     She turned on the lights and leaned against the door, trying to calm herself. Was she really feeling pressure in her chest, or was it just her imagination? Hurrying across the plush carpet, she picked up the phone that stood on her ornate Louis XV correspondence desk and, with trembling hands, dialed. Realizing she had dialed the wrong number, she hung up and tried again. While she listened to the ringing at the other end, she was afraid she wouldn't be able to hear whoever answered, her heart was pounding so loudly in her ears.

     And then the phone at the other end was picked up.

     Talking softly so as not to be overheard, she said, "We need to make the transfer right away. Philippa suspects something. She's back in L.A. She's called a board meeting. She's going to go over
everything.
Please, we must do it as soon as possible, before she finds out."

     She listened to the reply. Then the line went dead. Suppressing a sob, she hung up the phone and looked around the room.

     It did not strike her as strange to suddenly think now, after all the years that had passed, of another bedroom in another house, a bedroom that had been one-sixth the size of this with a cramped double bed, threadbare chenille spread, braided rug on the floor, and a secondhand dresser that Alan had refinished. This bedroom in the Bel Air mansion had a large circular bed with a satin canopy spreading down from the ceiling like the kind one saw in fairy tales. The carpet was so thick it retained deep footprints; the furniture was all custom-made, imported.

     There was no comparison between that smaller, dismal bedroom of years ago and this suite that could house royalty. And yet it was the other one Hannah wished she were in now.

     As tears stung her eyes, she thought that she had never felt so helpless, so trapped. In four days the board meeting was going to be called and the company records were going to be examined. And every member of the board, including Hannah and her husband, were going to have to be prepared to answer questions.

     Panic swept over her again, sending her flying across the room to where a large Impressionist oil painting hung in a gilded frame. Pushing it aside and shedding light on the small wall safe that was hidden behind it, Hannah quickly worked the combination, fumbling with it several times before she got it right. When the safe was open, she drew out a locked metal box, a small leather case with brass buckles, packets of envelopes bound with ribbon, and finally, from the very back of the safe, a portfolio made of greenish black eelskin, polished to such a high shine that she could see her face reflected in it.

     She went to the bed and emptied the contents onto the satin bedspread. There was a pile of stock certificates of various colors, each denoting different face values. The most valuable ones—the silver certificates—were worth a thousand shares each. Hannah spread them out so that she could read her name on each one. They were all signed and dated, the earliest ones going back to over twenty years ago. All together they totaled a hundred thousand shares. Of Starlite Industries.

     People didn't keep stock certificates anymore, of course, but Hannah cherished these certificates, which represented only a portion of her interest in the corporation, because they were special. They had been gifts over the years, given to her by her husband for birthdays and anniversaries; the thousand-share certificates had come from Philippa. Combined, they represented more than money or a chunk of a company that was worth hundreds of millions; for Hannah they symbolized an important part of her life, the most important part, perhaps. And now she was going to have to give them up.

     She felt almost as if she were selling a child.

     How had it come to this? she thought unhappily, thinking of that crude little bedroom in the San Fernando Valley where she and Alan had spent many rapturous nights making love. She wished they were back there again in the creaking secondhand bed, lying in each other's arms and wondering where the next mortgage payment was coming from. Hannah thought she would give anything—the house in Bel Air, her maids, even her precious Corvette—to be able to undo the mess she was in.

     But she couldn't go back. The disaster that had been brewing was about to break, and she felt helpless to stop it.

     When the phone rang, she jumped. She stared at it for a moment. Could it be...?

     She ran to answer it. "Hello?"

     "Hi, Mom!" came a chirpy voice. Her youngest daughter, Jackie, calling from college.

     Hannah forced herself to sound cheerful. "Jackie darling, how nice of you to call. Is everything all right?"

     "Everything is wonderful, Mother! Vincent and I have decided to get married."

     "Oh...how marvelous..."Hannah placed a hand on her chest. Her heart quivered for a moment, then resumed its normal rhythm.

     "I want the wedding in June," Jackie said, "in the garden, and it must be absolutely the biggest wedding that the world has ever seen! Esther's going to be my maid of honor, and four of my sorority sisters are going to be bridesmaids, as well as Sue and Polly. And guess what! Vincent's parents are going to give us a trip to the south of France as a wedding present! They have a villa there, and Vincent and I thought we would..."

     As she listened to Jackie's excited speech, Hannah's eyes strayed to the collection of photographs in many different frames standing on her writing desk, on the dresser, on her nightstand. They were mostly of her children—when they were babies, or starting school, wearing Halloween costumes, graduating from the sixth grade, high school, and finally college. But there were older photos, of a very young Hannah shyly holding hands with Alan, love shining in both of their eyes. On her nightstand there was a portrait of Alan taken just two years ago, with an inscription that read: "To Hannah
My Love, Forever and Always." And finally, there was a black and white picture of three crazy young women making faces at the camera— Hannah, Charmie, and Philippa—in their twenties, desperate, penniless, and struggling, but hopeful. Hannah had always thought of Philippa as the glue that bound them together.

     Continuing to listen to her daughter chatter over the phone, she looked at the photos and knew that she was going to fight to make everything right again. She had never believed in doing anything the easy way just to get it done; that was what had made her and Philippa and Charmie such fast friends from the start. They were all determined to overcome their handicaps and take on the world. But this fight now would be for more than to save her friendship with the other two. It would also be for Alan, and for her children, to keep them proud of her. Hannah had once overheard her daughter tell some friends, "My mom is the greatest fashion designer that ever lived. She was the first one to give large women permission to wear bright colors and bold prints. She liberated them from tents and dark colors." Hannah didn't want to destroy that.

     She was suddenly startled when, as she gazed at the precious objects around the room, they began to disappear, one by one—a photograph from the dresser, the pen set from the desk, the amethyst-handled letter opener. Blink, and then gone. The artifacts of her life, the things that made Hannah Scadudo, vanished one after the other, as if she were trapped in a
Twilight Zone
episode. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. Everything was still there, as it had been; it was only her fear, her imagination that was sending these precious mementoes into the void. Her life, slowly slipping away until she too vanished and the world went on as if she had never existed.

     "Well, I have to go, Mom!" Jackie said, reminding Hannah that she was standing there with a phone to her ear. "There's a
massive
barbecue down on the beach. And moonlight swimming, for those brave enough!" Jackie was a marine biology major at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "Bye. See you in a few days."

     As Hannah hung up the phone, she tried to feel excited over her daughter's news. Jackie, the last of her children, finally getting married. It completed a perfect picture. And, yes, they would have the biggest, most
sensational wedding the world—or at least Bel Air—had ever seen. Nothing must spoil it for Jackie. Nothing.

     When Hannah heard a chime downstairs, the signal that a car had come through the main gates, she hurried to the window, parted the drapes, and held her breath as she watched the long driveway that wound up the hill from the street. After a moment, she saw the headlight beams emerge from behind the trees, illuminating the red bricks that paved the drive, and then she saw the shiny grille of Alan's Mercedes. She dashed back to the bed and frantically gathered up the stock certificates.

     She ran to the safe, dropping half of them, scrambling to pick them up and stuff them in haphazardly. Alan mustn't know;
he mustn't know.
She heard the front door downstairs, muffled voices. "Good evening, Rita, has Mrs. Scadudo come home yet?" And then footsteps across the black and white tiles in the foyer.

     She thrust the last of the stock certificates into the safe and then frantically shoved everything else back in. They didn't fit. She took it all out and tried again—the metal box, the leather case, the ribbon-bound envelopes.

     She imagined Alan coming down the hall, approaching the doors to the master bedroom suite. She fumbled and dropped things. She looked over at the doors. She pictured his hand reaching for the gold knob. Finally, everything fit. She slammed the safe shut, twirled the lock, and swung the painting back into place.

     The bedroom door opened. "There you are, dear," Alan said with a smile on his face.

     She spun around. "Alan!"

     "I'm sorry," he said, the smile turning into a frown. "I didn't mean to startle you. I thought you might have heard me coming up the drive."

     "I—I was just about to get into the bath," she said, moving quickly away from the wall.

     Alan's eyes flickered to the painting, which hung slightly askew. Then he looked at the bedspread, which was disheveled. "Is everything all right, Hannah?" he said, coming in and closing the door. "You look pale."

     "I'm fine," she said, going to the bathroom and turning on the light, "It was just, well, such a shock to see Philippa today. I wasn't expecting her, were you?"

     "No, I wasn't. But she was bound to come home some time. I knew she wouldn't stay buried in Australia forever. Darling, are you sure you're all right?"

     She poked her head through the open doorway of the bathroom and gave him a winning smile. "Of course I'm all right. But we're running late. We've got to get you to the airport. I wish you didn't have to dash off to South America tonight. We have something to celebrate! Jackie telephoned with wonderful news!" Then she disappeared back into the bathroom.

     "What about Jackie?" Alan called, but his voice was drowned out by the sound of water running into the tub.

     He dropped his newspaper and briefcase onto the rumpled bed and went to the painting. He studied it for a moment, then reached up and straightened it. Hannah came up behind him suddenly and put her arms around him, resting her head on his back and saying, "I love you, Alan. I love you so very much."

     "Hey," he said, laughing softly as the turned and took her into his arms. "What's all this?"

     "I'm just so happy with you," she murmured against his neck. "We have such a good life together. I'll miss you while you're in Rio. Will you miss me?"