The Arrangement
Authors: Suzanne Forster
The Arrangement
This book is dedicated to my mother, who breathed her last on February 2, 2006, and who, despite tremendous physical challenges, managed to come through it all with her dignity, her compassion for others and her lively sense of humor intact. Every life should end so gracefully.
Rest in peace.
Edith Mary Stephenson-Bolster
1916–2006
A
ndrew Villard couldn’t remember when he’d last closed his eyes. Waves pounded his sixty-five-foot sloop like fists, hammering his senses as mercilessly as they hammered the hull. This wasn’t just a storm at sea. It was an assault on his world. He was searching for a body, his wife’s—and God help them both, he had to find her alive.
Andrew had a life most men would have killed for—enough wealth to wield influence, enough power to attract privilege. In a world split between winners and losers, he had won big. But as of seventy-two hours ago, his streak was over. He was a murder suspect.
Prime.
Lightning ripped a hole in the black-and-blue sky. Wind lashed Andrew’s hair. He hugged the mast, bracing as another wave crashed over the bow. He’d hired a small crew so he could be free to search. He had an experienced skipper at the helm, as well as a crewman who had already reefed the main sail and trimmed the storm jib to help stabilize the boat.
His wife, Alison, had disappeared at sea three days ago. The sun had gone down, and they’d been heading back to port when a squall had blown up. Andrew had gone belowdecks to hunt for life preservers that weren’t in the cockpit locker where they should have been, and while he was down there, something slammed into the yacht almost hard enough to capsize it. By the time he got back on deck, a storm was raging, and Alison was gone.
Searching for her had been virtually impossible. He’d been alone on a big yacht in the dark with a fierce storm blowing. High winds had driven him back into port, where he’d radioed the Coast Guard, but their search of the coastline had yielded nothing. They’d found no trace of her, even though they’d continued searching until last night, when gale-force winds had made them call it off.
Andrew had been out in the storm every day since she vanished, but that hadn’t stopped the Coast Guard from questioning whether it was an accident. They’d gone over his boat, seen the damage and called in the county sheriff’s office. It was no secret that sailing was Andrew Villard’s passion. In his twenties, he’d been part of the team that raced Lasers for the summer Olympics. Andrew knew the waters, was a seasoned navigator. He was too good to lose someone at sea.
A team from the sheriff’s office had searched his sloop,
Bladerunner,
and they were treating him like a suspect. They’d found the damaged lifeline and the scuffed deck. It was only a matter of time until they’d find the insurance policy. And there was the tragic way his ex-fiancée had died. The media had made sure everyone knew about that. It was hailed as more proof of the Villard Curse.
If he didn’t find Alison, he would be charged with her murder. Tomorrow or the next day. Soon. He would be arrested.
The bow rose and crashed down. A wall of water knocked Andrew to the deck and nearly ripped him away from the mast. When he dragged himself back up, he couldn’t see any sign of his crew. Dread sent him crawling toward the cockpit, where he spotted the pilot crouching and clinging to the wheel. The other man had taken shelter in the doorway of the pilot house.
“Come about!” Andrew shouted, gesturing to the man at the wheel. “We’re heading back in.”
He saw relief on both men’s faces and knew he’d done the right thing. This was his desperate mission, not theirs. He had no right to endanger their lives.
Another wave lifted them into the air. They were sailing like the
Flying Dutchman
when the crewman began to gesture wildly. “There!” he bellowed, pointing southeast. “The rock reefs. Look at the reefs!”
Andrew couldn’t see what the man was talking about. The reefs were obscured by mist, and before he could get back to the mast, the
Bladerunner
had sunk into another deep trough. Water poured over them in sheets, but as they rose again on a crest, Andrew could see that the seas to the southeast were less wild. The storm seemed to have moved past them, heading out to the Pacific.
He spotted a white speck in the black claws of the reefs. As they headed toward it, Andrew forgot all about the danger. The waves were still heavy as they neared, but he was mesmerized by what looked more and more like a human body. The yacht’s engines roared to life, helping turn the boat into the wind. Andrew didn’t have to instruct the pilot. He knew exactly what to do.
As they came within range of the rocks, Andrew realized that it was a body, a woman, either unconscious or dead. She wasn’t impaled on a reef as he’d feared. She was floating on the surface, nearly naked. It looked as if the clothes had been ripped from her body, probably by the force of the storm. But somehow she’d gotten caught on a large piece of driftwood.
She was battered, too. His gorge rose as he saw that there was little left of her face but bloody pulp. He could discern what might be her mouth, her nose, but other than that, she was virtually unrecognizable. The driftwood may have kept her afloat, but it hadn’t kept her from being dashed against the rocks.
Andrew and the crewman rushed to lower a lifeboat. Moments later they climbed down the ladder and pushed off. But even when they were close enough to pick her up, Andrew wasn’t able to identify her. Her injuries were a grisly sight, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He thought he’d seen her move her hand. Was she alive?
As he freed her limp and bleeding body, he saw that she’d been snagged on the driftwood by a delicate gold wristlet—Alison’s birthday gift. Andrew didn’t know whether it was relief or horror that made him shudder. His wife had been found.
Andrew was ready to rip the No Smoking sign off the hospital wall. Every time he turned around that plaque was in his face, reminding him how badly he wanted to smoke. He’d quit his pack-a-day habit over a year ago, having no idea how desperately addicted he was. Desire had finally begun to wane in the last couple months. Now it was back with a vengeance—and this sign was a constant reminder, lest it slip his mind.
At the moment he was the only addict pacing the floor of Providence Saint Joseph’s VIP lounge. A concert promoter by profession, Andrew knew all about such lounges. Celebrities required green room treatment wherever they went, and that included hospitals. This one had a concierge during the day, free coffee, gourmet snacks and flat screen TVs. It also had sleeping quarters, but Andrew was too wired for that. He could only guess what had earned him VIP status. Maybe the ten thousand dollars he’d donated to the hospital benevolent fund.
He checked his watch. It was 6:00 a.m., and he was waiting for an update on Alison’s progress. She’d been in surgery twelve hours, and Andrew had heard nothing since three that morning, when they’d told him she should be able to resume a normal life, but it would take several more hours to reconstruct her face. He’d also been warned that this would be the first of several surgeries.
Thank God he’d insisted she be Medevaced to Saint Joseph’s. He’d called from the yacht on the way back into port, and there’d been an ambulance there to meet them. The paramedics had taken her directly to the trauma center at San Diego General, but after it had been determined that she had no serious internal injuries, Andrew had arranged for her to be transferred to Saint Joseph’s, where the reconstructive surgeons were the best in the world.
The trauma center’s surgeons could easily have repaired the broken bones in her body, but he knew it would take virtuosos to put her exquisite face back together.
Alison’s face. Andrew could see it so clearly in his mind, fine-featured and fair, the Rapunzel of her generation, which happened to be X. She would rather have lost a limb than her looks. As beautiful as she was, she was also deeply insecure and sought constant reassurance, which may have explained her crazy dreams of superstardom, and her belief that Andrew could use his connections to make those dreams come true. It wasn’t the only reason their marriage had fallen apart, but it was one of them.
A flash of blue in Andrew’s periphery caught his attention. A young female plastic surgeon, still garbed in scrubs, came through the waiting room door and approached him. Andrew recognized her as one of the operating room team.
He couldn’t read her expression. Obvious exhaustion masked whatever emotion she might be feeling. And doctors weren’t supposed to telegraph those things, anyway. Alison could be dead, and this doctor’s face would show nothing more than professional compassion. Right now, he didn’t even see that.
“How is she?” he asked.
She wiped her brow, and he saw the bloodstains on her sleeve.
“It’s delicate work,” she said, “but it’s going well.”
Andrew felt light-headed, probably from relief. “She’s going to be all right?”
“As you know, the worst damage was to your wife’s face,” she told him. “We’ve reset her jaw and reconstructed her nose. She’ll need more surgery in the future, possibly several operations, but there’s a good chance we’ll be able to restore not just the structure, but the character of her face.”
“You’re working from the pictures I gave you?” Alison had been nearly unrecognizable, even after they cleaned her up, so Andrew had described her at length and given them the wallet-size pictures he carried, most of them close-ups of her face. His hobby was boat design, precision work that made him very aware of details.
“Yes, from the pictures.” She smiled, seeming pleased despite her obvious fatigue. Her expression said that this was a victory for medicine, and for her personally. “We’ve even managed to remove what was left of the birthmark on her throat,” she said proudly.
“The birthmark?” Another wave of light-headedness caught Andrew, rocking him back on his heels. The room got very bright, and he didn’t realize he was staring at the doctor until he heard her calling his name.
“Mr. Villard? Are you all right?”
“Yes, fine.” He forced himself to smile at her as if everything
was
fine, but he was still unsteady. He kneaded his forehead, warding off the threat of a blinding headache. “It’s been awhile since I slept.”
“We won’t be much longer.”
“I’ll get some coffee,” he said, aware that he sounded out of breath. It
had
been several days since he’d slept, and he was exhausted. If he was acting strangely, that was the reason. And it was the only reason he was going to give, especially to this doctor.