The Senator’s Daughter (6 page)

The one bright thing in his young life, Mama been the one to bring library books from town, which his father said interfered with his chores. Without white sugar and flour to bake with like other kids' mothers, she had concocted delightful sweets from windfall apples waiting to rot on the neighbor's lawn and honey cadged from hives at the edge of the onion fields. She'd kept an immaculate house and sent Lyle to school every day wearing a threadbare but clean shirt because, “Pride is all poor people got.”

Twenty-two years later, Lyle still had dreams the phone would ring and he'd hear her smoker's gravelly voice. “You there, son?”

There was something particularly terrible about not knowing. It set the restless mind to concoct a thousand stories.

Maddie had fled from poverty and a husband who didn't appreciate her and ended up in prostitution. Or she'd run off with a man, one who treated her like a queen and hired a maid so her callused hands healed. The one Lyle hated most was the scene in which an enraged James Thomas hit his wife too hard and disposed of her body.

Because Lyle chose to think his father incapable of such evil and couldn't believe his mother would have gone without a word, the nightmare receiving the most votes was that some drifter or deviant had murdered her.

Every time Lyle heard or read of someone disappearing, it all surged back.

Take Tony Valetti. Last night's recap by “On the Spot” had Lyle thinking about him again.

Every day since Tony's wife had filed a missing persons report, Lyle had expected to hear he had a case. There would be a body, or parts, found and identified. The DA's office would open a file.

Truth to tell, Lyle had opened his own two days ago. He wanted this one for several reasons, not the least of which was it could not fail to advance his career. Antone … Tony … Valetti, was one of the newest movers and shakers in the Bay Area developers' community.

He'd shown up only a few months ago after spending some years back east and opened a flashy office suite downtown. Rumor had it he played scratch golf, held his liquor, piloted his own helicopter, and was involved in a number of high-powered deals.

The other reason Lyle was concerned was that he liked Tony. They'd met at a charity auction a couple of weeks ago. The same night he'd decided to ask Sylvia out again.

When Lyle had walked in to The View Lounge on the thirty-ninth floor of the San Francisco Marriott, there was no mistaking Tony Valetti, the center of a convivial group near the bar. His picture had been in both the business and society pages, and of course the petite brunette who managed to make a short man look tall was his wife, Janine.

Lyle took his time scoping out the rest of the crowd and making a round along the outer perimeter, looking out through the giant fan-shaped window walls. With the last lavender of sunset fading, lights in tall buildings sparkled all around. Beyond, the towers of the Bay Bridge marked the way to points east.

Checking out who was with whom, Lyle found himself, as he had at every gathering this summer, keeping an eye out for Sylvia Chatsworth.

He didn't see her, but noted her father in a blue pinstripe. The Senator wore his light brown hair a bit long in back, probably to appeal to younger voters. A high energy man, his pale sharp eyes roved over the room.

What would it be like to be that man's daughter, to have him attempt to broker her in marriage to the son of another powerful developer?

The politician fixed on Tony Valetti and moved in.

Trying to appear nonchalant, Lyle sauntered in their direction. He circled around and came in to the bar behind the two men.

Tony was speaking to Chatsworth. “… Prime oceanfront …” Lyle had trouble catching it all with the background chatter. “… Going to call it Emerald Cliff.”

“Fine … just fine …” Chatsworth approved.

“… Really more interested in the situation up north …”

The Senator interrupted. “If you asked the Regional Planning Commission to set aside Napa County zoning, I couldn't help you without creating a conflict of interest.”

Lyle hadn't come to eavesdrop. If he couldn't break in and introduce himself, he'd move along. But first, he took a moment to catch the bartender's eye.

“What can I do for you?” The man wiped the polished counter with a rag.

“A glass of Chardonnay.”

“Is Villa Valetti okay? It was donated for the evening.”

“Make that two.” The voice was accented with the distinctive cadence of Italian; accenting every other syllable created a musical effect.

Lyle turned and looked down into a sun-bronzed face with a spiderweb of lines at the corner of alert black eyes. Up close, one realized how solidly Tony was built, like a bantam wrestler. A glance beyond his tuxedo-clad shoulder revealed the receding back of the Senator. That had been a short conversation.

Tony picked up on it. “You come over to meet Chatsworth?”

“No, I …”

“Look there.” Tony took Lyle's elbow and turned him. Sylvia had just entered with a couple of other women. All dressed expensively, with stiletto-heeled sandals and skirts that barely covered their backsides. “Perhaps you want to know the Senator because …”

Though Lyle would have liked to keep checking out how Sylvia's smooth fall of black hair brushed her shoulders, bare above a strapless crimson cocktail dress, he took the opportunity to ignore the comment by thanking the bartender and taking the first sip of Andre Valetti's wine.

Cold, crisp, with a touch of green apple and a buttery finish. “Cheers,” he told Tony.

The smaller man laughed and raised his glass.

The bartender watched him sample and grinned. “Like it, sir?”

“My brother, he made it.” Tony saluted him and spoke to Lyle. “Come meet my wife.” He turned and tapped the sequined shoulder of a brunette in black velvet. “Janine, this is …”

“Lyle Thomas,” he supplied.

Tony slid an arm around his wife and she beamed up at him before looking at Lyle.

“You play golf?” Tony went on.

“Every chance I get.”

“You will play with me. Next weekend at the Marin Club. After, you bring …” He inclined his head at Sylvia. “We will have dinner, the four of us.”

“I don't…” He didn't mention she'd already turned him down.

Tony fixed him with an almost hypnotic gaze, white showing all around his intense dark eyes. He raised his arms in an expansive gesture as though imparting a blessing.

If any other man in the room had done it, Lyle thought, including the Senator, it would have come off as ridiculous. “Lyle. The world is full of people who will tell you why you cannot do a thing. It has never been done before, they say. It may offend someone's sense of order or right.” Tony lowered his arms and voice and leaned in toward Lyle, who had lost all sense that the man was smaller in stature. “You want something bad enough, you make it happen.”

Though Tony hadn't even known Lyle, he'd made him feel special and included. For the rest of the evening, Lyle had noted how he worked the room; everyone seemed to find him a hail-fellow-well-met.

And he had offered to take Lyle under his wing.

Tony disappeared the day before their golf date.

Lyle tried to tell himself it didn't matter; he'd met the man once, but he'd been looking forward to his Old World manners and brash, new age cheerleading.

It did matter.

And with the headlines came the old questions. All those he'd asked about his mother, rewritten to fit the developer's situation. Had Tony slipped out of his office without anyone seeing him? Had he pulled off some criminal act people said couldn't be done, directed the cash to the Caymans, and arranged to meet Janine in Marrakech?

Lyle didn't believe it for a minute.

Had one of his big money deals, despite being handled with all ethics on Tony's part, offended an opponent's sense of “order or right”?

How was Janine making it through each day … each hour, while every tick of the clock lowered the odds her husband would be found unharmed?

Those two had been in love, Lyle believed. For the rest of the evening at the charity auction, even when Tony and Janine were talking to different people, they managed to brush shoulders and direct glances each other's way.

Love.

The word gave pause to a fellow raised by a father who failed to express that emotion. Now a man, for Lyle the word
love
conjured its aftermath … gut-twisting aches and living with a hole in one's heart.

O
n Sunday afternoon, Sylvia sat in her family's glass-walled house overlooking Sausalito. The view of the harbor marina, with the weekend contingent of sails on blue water, had never before failed to lift her spirits.

Drifting across the walnut-paneled family room, she hoped their cook had stocked the refrigerator with an adequate supply of iced tea and sliced lime.

The glass door of the wine compartment next to the Sub-Zero threw back Sylvia's reflection, her spa tan dark against a white peasant blouse over hip-slung jeans. Without the use of nicotine, alcohol, or other substances, she teetered on a razor edge between collapsing into laughter or tears. As it had been tears Friday night after Lyle left her, she voted for laughter, testing the kitchen acoustics. Dark green Norwegian rock floors and counters threw back the sound nicely and echoed in a way that emphasized she was the only one there.

Sylvia hadn't phoned ahead, and when she pulled her red Jaguar convertible into the four-car garage, her mother's BMW had been absent from its slot beside Lawrence Arthur Chatsworth III's Maserati … Sylvia thought the chichi sports car looked like a late model Buick.

Boston bred, her father was filthy rich, and, as former commissioner of the Bay Area Planning Group, he rubbed elbows with plenty of well-heeled people.

Having expected him to be home—he had stayed on the West Coast after the August recess—Sylvia now noticed the note on the counter.

Laura, I've taken the ferry to San Francisco for a political meeting.

Probably planning strategy to help his party's House members gain reelection in November.

How typical that Sylvia's parents were not together on a weekend afternoon. Her throat tightened at the games men and women played. Look at the way her folks had leapt at the chance to announce her engagement to Rory Campbell, whose father seemed cut from the same ambitious cloth as Lawrence Chatsworth. Too bad Rory hadn't actually asked her.

For a while, she'd been into him. But he'd held apart some essential essence of himself she later realized was reserved for his childhood sweetheart. Thankfully, that hesitation on his part had made it possible for her not to be deeply wounded by the end of their relationship. Yet, it had made her aware how much she detested the dating game.

What would it be like to have a man who was not?

only an athlete between the sheets but who loved her, somebody to watch sunsets with and snuggle against when dawn grayed the sky? If Lawrence and Laura had felt that way once, that made it even more depressing. Most of Sylvia's circle had parents who'd divorced, some more than once. And though she wasn't even thirty, she knew plenty of people who'd been through the divorce mill. Everybody agreed the worst was when a kid was involved.

She had some thoughts on whether it was worse for people to tear the family apart or stay together.

The sound of the automatic garage door preceded the tapping of heels toward the laundry room entry.

Laura, the perfect politician's wife in public, made an entrance. One of the Cabots, rooted in New England, whose great-grandfather went South, Laura's Sweet Briar education had prepared her for a life of hostessing and fund-raising in the best tradition.

Dark eyes inherited from a passionate Greek maternal grandmother matched her daughter's, flashing as she tossed her twelve-hundred-dollar Carolina Herrera purse onto the counter. “What are you doin' here?” The liquid music of the South still accompanied her every word.