“You always were ornery,” Sally said, but she did understand. Jane had always had that fierce pride, as long as she’d known her. Her father’s final abandonment meant she would need to try to stand up for herself. “Come on. We’ll go get a nice long lunch somewhere.”
“Sounds good,” Jane said.
Eventually, Sally dropped Jane off at her place in Malibu. Consuela was not there; not expecting Jane back this fast, she had bunked off to her brother’s house in the Valley. Jane did not mind in the least. She let herself in, switched off the alarm, and went to run a bath.
It would take her a week, just for the basics. Finding out how to get her things from Miss Milton’s, without setting foot in that hellish place ever again. She did not want to see the sneering faces of her enemies, or worse, have to hear their fake sympathy. She wanted to research what it would take to get her declared an adult, better yet, a naturalized U.S. citizen. Some of her father’s colleagues could help with that one. Jane was selfishly glad Helen was away for a little while. She was shell-shocked, and although she wanted to make a fresh start, sort out her life, for a few days she needed to recover. She wasn’t sleeping, and her appetite had gone.
You need some R & R, she told herself, then smiled grimly at the American turn of phrase. Sally was there for her, and she loved her all the more now, but Jane wasn’t sure she could take staying with Sal, enduring her bubbly, preppy optimism, seeing her with her own loving family. It would hurt far too much. No, Jane wanted to be out here, near the beach, to pull on her sneakers and run till she felt like throwing up, to walk by the sea, try to stay sane, numb out the pain.
Thomas Morgan had never loved her. He had abandoned her to nannies, and then to school far away in Los Angeles. But Jane had never stopped trying to impress him. And she’d hoped, maybe when she was an adult, so near, so near, she could have gone to Washington, been an academic in a think tank, even a diplomat….
If only she’d had time.
I could have made Daddy love me, Jane thought, desperately.
But there was no time. And he had abandoned her again, this time for good.
Exhausted, she put her head on her knees and wept.
Sal went over to Jane’s house every day that week to check on her. Her friend scared her; Jane was withdrawing deeply: sitting on the beach for hours, staring out to sea, or keeping herself frantically busy researching citizenship and her emancipation. Gossip didn’t interest her, clothes didn’t interest her. She flatly refused to go to a club or a rock concert, or even a ball game.
But Sally kept trying. She wanted to help Jane, and besides, it was pretty tense at Green Gables. Daddy was having some kind of business trouble, and he hung round the house with a face as red as a tomato, sweating and cussing as he went through his papers. He was drinking too much, and worked later and later hours. It made Sal uncomfortable. She’d rather be in Malibu, working on helping Jane.
“It’s Friday,” Sally said, finally, with a sense of relief. “Helen’s coming home.”
“She’s not there yet. I left a message.”
Sally had, too.
“Let’s go see. Maybe they just got back.” Anything to get Jane to take a ride; sitting in Malibu stewing in her grief was not good for her.
“Okay,” Jane agreed, looking at Sally with bloodshot eyes. She did want to see Helen again. And she was intelligent enough to see what her friend was trying to get her to do. “Let’s go.”
They pulled up outside the Yannas’ compact little house; Sally looked at it with interest, never having been there before. There was a car parked in the driveway. They smiled at each other—Helen was back.
Jane looked forward to seeing her friend. She was reassured by the modesty of the house; Helen Yanna’s parents must be reaching to send her to Miss Milton’s, just as her father had. Who knew? Maybe Helen’s dad could do with a bookkeeper.
“You stay here,” Jane suggested tactfully. “I’ll ring the bell.”
Sally was wearing one of her typical short skirts, just off the knee, with a sexy pleated kick to it, and an outrageous tight white T-shirt that played up her glorious breasts and golden skin. Somehow Jane assumed that her own plain black trouser suit would be more reassuring to their friend’s parents.
She climbed out and pressed the buzzer; there was the sound of footsteps, and a young girl wrenched the door open. She was pretty and slight, not more than ten, Jane guessed.
“Are you Jasmine?”
The little girl nodded, eyes wide.
Jane offered a hand. “I’m Jane Morgan, Helen’s friend from school. Is she in?”
“Helen’s never coming back,” Jasmine said, and her eyes brimmed with tears.
CHAPTER 5
“Excuse me?” Jane asked, bewildered, but an adult figure filled the door, a stocky, bearded man, and he was gazing at her very coolly.
“Mr.Yanna—I was just telling Jasmine that I’m Jane, Helen’s schoolfriend. Is she about?”
“No.”
Jane tried again. Maybe his English wasn’t too hot.
“It’s just that she hasn’t been answering her phone, and we wanted to—”
“My daughter is not here anymore. She has gotten married.”
He obviously wasn’t joking.
“I—I don’t quite understand. We went to a party last week together.We thought she was on holiday… .”
“No holiday. Honeymoon. She decided to get married to her second cousin Ahmed and they have gone back to Cairo to set up house,” Helen’s father replied flatly. “She may not be back here for many years.”
“But she didn’t say anything to us.”
“A wedding is a private family matter,” Ali Yanna said. “If she wishes to call you, she can.”
Jane digested this.
“If she speaks to you, will you tell her Sally and I would like to talk to her?” Jane asked.
He shrugged. “Good-bye, then.”
The door closed.
Sally wound down the car window and poked out her head.
“What happened?”
Jane got back in the car, her face troubled, and motioned for Sally to drive off.
“He said she left the country. Got married to some distant relation and left for Cairo.”
“You’re messin’ with me. She was going on vacation.”
“Apparently while she was out there, she decided to get hitched. I don’t think her father approves of us, Sal. He didn’t seem to want to talk.”
Sally’s face was a picture of dismay.
“That can’t be true. She never said a damned thing to us.”
“Mr. Yanna told me it was a private family matter.” Jane chewed on her lip. “I know Helen… . Still waters run deep, but I don’t think she would do that.”
“She’s been hanging out with us long enough to get her some street smarts,” Sally said. “She knows our numbers. Guess we’ll just have to wait for her to call.”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, man,” Sally breathed. “It just hit me. I’ll be all alone at school now. No you and no Helen. I don’t want to go back.”
They both contemplated Julie Manners and Maureen Smith.
Don’t,” Jane said, boldly. “Sal, just don’t. Get your dad to pay for a private tutor, or go to a different school.You don’t have to take that. I wouldn’t.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Sally said wearily.“I should think about it. But that’s about all the change I can handle for one day.” She grinned at Jane. “We still got each other. Let’s go get some coffee.”
“So.” Paulie Lassiter shook his head. He was getting worked up. Here in the Century City offices of his extremely high-priced corporate lawyers, he was surrounded by suits, and not one of them was coming up with any damn solutions!
“What do we do? We gotta fix this.” His stare said, You gotta fix this.
“I don’t know, Paulie.These accounts … they’re fiction.”
“Fiction!” he snorted. “Three a
ccounting firms signed ’em.”
“Yeah, but your CFO was cooking the books.”
“I told you, I fired the sonofabitch.”
“That won’t do it.” Lionel Javits, head of the lawyers, pushed his horn-rimmed spectacles up on his nose. “You have to notify the feds … the SEC … the regulatory authorities. The stock is going to go through the floor. Jack Lessing is going to jail.”
“Damn right he is,” Paulie snorted, as the lawyers exchanged looks. “My concern now is to save the stock. Nobody’s selling, not while this is going on.”
Ugh. He hated delegating. A month away to look at a new field, some possible strikes in northern Canada, and what happens? His asshole executives cook the books. Paulie Lassiter was an oilman, not a damned accountant. Billion-dollar company and he was having to do every little thing himself. He mopped his brow, struggling with his breath. Anger was not his usual emotion.
“Paulie, they already did. Most of your board, even the nonexecs. They’ve been quietly dumping stock for the last eighteen months. It’s your workers who are going to be ruined.” Javits paused. “And if you haven’t been selling, then it doesn’t look good for you either.”
“But at least it proves you’re honest,” a junior suit piped up brightly. “You won’t be going to jail!”
Javits glared at him.
Paulie glanced outside at the bright blue sky. It seemed such a normal day in L.A. How could everything look normal when his world was coming apart?
“That can’t be right,” he explained patiently. “We’re not some paper company, not some pyramid scheme of a crooked trader on Wall Street.We got assets. Oilfields. Six in Texas, one in Ghada, maybe a new one in Canada …”
“Doesn’t cover the expansion into natural gas … the pipeline in Kazakhstan that was smashed by terrorists.Your corporate policy was breached.”
“Not enough security.”
“And four of the Texas fields have dried up.”
“Lassiter Oil’s been trading pretty much on its reputation. And some fancy footwork.”
“Your executives have been living pretty high on the hog, Paulie.”
Well, he knew that.
“But the money was there,” he said weakly. His heart started thumping. A picture of his wife, doing the breakfast cooking herself, chattering about Sally’s party, floated into his vision. How the hell would he explain this to her? He’d never disappointed Mona.
“No, it wasn’t, Paulie,” Lionel Javits said gently.
“It was a fraud by the finance division.”
The junior suit was piping up again. Eager to explain in mostly words of one syllable. “Bad accounting. Debt off the books. It created a false market in our shares.”
“Fraud?” Paulie ignored Javits’s death stare at his employee. That was something he did understand. “We hid debt? You mean my workers … the pension fund …”
“It’s bankrupt, Paulie. In fact it’s looking to me like the entire company is going belly up.We’ll need to show you are an innocent party.You didn’t sign off on the accounts personally. Don’t speak to anyone. I’ll contact the authorities myself … you say, ‘On the advice of counsel I assert my fifth amendment rights not to incriminate myself …’ ”
Paulie Lassiter felt needles in his left arm, then a huge stabbing pain in his chest. He couldn’t breathe.
“Ugggh,” he groaned, and struggled to his feet. A glass-topped coffee table crashed to the ground.
“Paulie!” Lionel Javits shrieked.“My God! He’s having a heart attack!”
“Call 911!”
“Aspirin—it’s in the cupboard—get it,” the lawyer screamed.
But it was too late. Paulie, clutching ineffectually at his chest, gasped and tumbled forward, the blocked blood rushing to his face. Two lawyers dived on him and attempted to roll him over, start CPR.
“Leave it,” Javits said. He found he had tears in his eyes. That was a massive coronary—you didn’t need to be a doc to see it.
Paulie Lassiter was very dead.
And Lionel Javits knew what was coming—for Lassiter Corporation and for Paulie’s family. Ruin—lawsuits—total humiliation—ostracism.
He liked Paulie. Paulie was dead now. And Javits thought he was better off that way.
Paulie Lassiter’s heart attack was big news.
But the bigger news was the collapse of the company.
Jane watched, horrified, on her TV, as the squad cars proceeded to Green Gables; as a black-clad, half-fainting Mona was taken into police custody, accompanied by her lawyer; as Sally, a blanket thrown over her head to protect her from the paparazzi, joined her.
She’d called—of course. But the phone had been disconnected. Sally eventually called Jane, too distraught to speak much; her bubbly vivacity, her lightness, her optimism—everything Jane loved about her—was extinguished, just gone.
Jane almost envied her her agony. Sally was mourning a beloved, kind, attentive father—her grief, welling up from the depths of her soul, reflected real love. Real family. And at least Sally still had a mother.
But there was no doubt her best friend was facing trouble. Very serious trouble.
“The feds are taking everything,” Sally confessed to her, once she’d stopped sobbing.
“What do you mean, everything?”
“We’re bankrupt. They froze Dad’s accounts … it all belongs to the creditors.”
“But what are they leaving you to live on?”
“The auditors gave us a payment of twelve thousand dollars for the year.”
Jane gasped. “A thousand a month?”
Damn—that wouldn’t even cover rent on a one-bed in their old neighborhood.
“And they took the cars, the artwork—everything. Mom’s still under investigation, but they think she’ll likely get off with innocent spouse defense.”
“You sound angry.”
“Innocent spouse? Makes my dad seem guilty. And he wasn’t a crook.” Sally sobbed. “Do you know what Julie Manners said to me today?”
A tear rolled down Jane’s own cheek, and she fiercely brushed it away. “Don’t … just don’t.You can’t go back there… .”
“Without you and Helen … no way.”
And without the cash that had always protected her.
There was a pause.Then Sally said timidly, “Jane, Mom wants to leave town. But I wanted to know if you’d be okay.”
Jane made an instantaneous decision, as she heard Sally grieve, and shoved her own mourning aside.
“Sal, I’ll be absolutely fine. I decided to move to Washington after all,” Jane said. It wasn’t true, but she didn’t want Sally to worry about her. And she had to figure out her future. Now Sally wouldn’t be able to help, Jane had to deal with this. On her own.
“Yeah.” Sally sounded so dull, so depressed.“We have to leave, too. Mom’s friends—her so-called friends—they’ve all vanished. Ever notice that in this town they treat failure like a disease? One that might be catching?”
A grim smile. “Yes, I have.”
“Lucille Wasserman and Kimberley DuPont won’t even return Momma’s calls, Jane. They’re supposed to be her best friends. I told her she needs to get out of Dodge. We got family in Texas we can go to.”
“You’ll like Texas, right? That’s home.” Jane desperately tried to put a positive spin on things.
“Was once.” Sally sighed. “I think it’s better, away from the press.They live in a small town. I’ll write you with our new address, okay?”
“Okay,” Jane agreed.
“I’ll send it care of the embassy.”
“Sure.That works.”
There was a long, wretched pause. Neither of them wanted to leave the other. But they both knew they had to. Sally needed to take care of her mother, and Jane had to find a future.
“Take care of yourself, hon.”
“And you, Sally.” Jane was unused to the emotion that washed through her now. First Helen, now Sally. She was losi
ng everything. “Be kind to yourself,” she said. Her voice cracked a little, and she hurriedly replaced the receiver.
“Who is it?”
Jane had the door on the chain.
“Repo!”
The man’s voice was gruff. She put her head to the fish-eye lens in the door. Yeah—they were repossession guys, uniforms, van, everything.
Jane swallowed hard and opened the door.
“Hi, there!” She gave them a bright smile. “Come on in.You guys want coffee?”
The guy entered with three other men.
“No, thanks.” He couldn’t meet her eye. “Which way is the living room?”
“Right in there. I unplugged everything. It was mostly too big to move by myself, though, I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine.” Now he looked at her. “You work here …you the maid?”
Well, you could hardly call it living here. “Sort of,” Jane agreed.
“Let’s start with the TV.”
The men moved into her living room and got to work.They moved fast—probably used to doing it while under attack. The big-screen TV, the stereo system, the furniture, the statues and antiques—just like house movers, they took everything. Efficient as ants at a picnic.
Jane withdrew into the kitchen and put the kettle on; they had already removed the cappuccino machine.
“Sure you won’t take that coffee?”
“No, thanks. We got to get to West Hollywood.” The leader sighed and wiped away some sweat. “At least they didn’t have the family here; that’s the worst. Crying and begging, you know? Like, have a little dignity. Not my fault you fucked your life up.”
“Right,” Jane agreed. “That’s so pathetic.”
“The bed …” He looked back into her room. “That’s not on my sheet—the inflatable bed.”
“Yeah, I think that belongs to the daughter. She picked it up after the dad bought the farm.” Jane smiled. “Maybe she knew you guys were coming!”
“Cool—we can leave that, I guess. And you can keep that kettle!” He grinned generously at her. “They won’t notice a sixteen-buck kettle in my office.”
“Thanks.You guys have a great day.”
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