by Sandra Brown
Daniel set the pipe aside and picked up his tumbler. As he contemplated the amber contents, he asked, “Did Noah tell you that he had a meeting with Howard the afternoon he killed himself?”
The manner in which he had posed the question caused her throat to constrict. This wasn’t a casual inquiry. “He mentioned it.”
“It took place only a couple of hours before Howard ended his life.”
Maris lost all appetite for the wine. Setting the crystal stem on the end table, she wiped condensation, or perspiration, off her palms. “What was the nature of their meeting?”
“According to Noah, Howard needed him to sign off on the final draft of a contract between us and one of our foreign licensees. Noah approved the amended language and that was the extent of it.”
That’s what Noah had told her, too. “Do you…” She cleared her throat and began again. “Do you doubt that?”
“I have no reason to. Although…” Maris waited in breathless suspension for him to continue. “Howard’s secretary told me that his meeting with Noah was his last for the day, and that when he left the office, he wasn’t himself.”
“Specifically?”
“He seemed distressed. I think her exact words were ‘extremely upset.’ ” Daniel took a sip of whisky. “Of course, one event probably has nothing to do with the other. Howard could have been upset over any number of things, something in his personal life, something that didn’t relate to Matherly Press or Noah.”
But her father didn’t believe that. If he did, they wouldn’t be having this conversation. “Dad, do you think—”
“Good. I see you started without me.” Noah pushed open the double doors and breezed in. “Darling, I apologize again for making you come over alone.” He bent down and kissed Maris, then smacked his lips as though tasting them. “Good wine.”
“It is. Very.” She got up and moved to the wet bar, trying to hide from the men and herself that her knees were wobbly. “I’ll pour you some.”
“Thanks, but I’d rather have what Daniel is having. Rocks only. It’s been that kind of day.”
Noah crossed the room to shake hands with his father-in-law, then rejoined Maris on the love seat and placed his arm around her as she handed him a highball glass. “Cheers.” After taking a sip of his drink, he said, “Maxine sent me in with the message that dinner is in ten minutes.”
“I hope her pot roast isn’t as dry as it was last time,” Daniel grumbled.
“Her pot roast is never dry,” Maris said, wondering how they could be discussing something as trivial as pot roast when only moments ago the topic had been a man’s inexplicable suicide.
“Dry or not, I’m going to wreak havoc on it,” Noah said. “I’m starving.”
Of course, one event probably has nothing to do with the other.
She clung to her father’s statement, desperate to believe it.
This was Noah they were talking about. Her husband. The man she had fallen in love with, and the man she still loved. Noah. The man she slept beside every night. The man with whom she wanted to have children.
She placed her hand on his thigh, and he, without even a pause in his conversation with Daniel, covered her hand with his own and pressed it affectionately. It was an absentminded, husbandly, and reassuring gesture.
* * *
Dinner was delicious and the pot roast lived up to Maxine’s standards of excellence. But by the time the lemon tarts were served, Daniel was yawning. As soon as Maxine removed the dessert dishes, he asked to be excused.
“Stay and enjoy another cup of coffee,” he told his guests as he stood up. “But I should retire. I’ll be up early to attend Howard’s funeral. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it.”
“I need to say good night, too, Dad. Today was long and strenuous.”
As they left the dining room, Maris held back and detained Noah. Laying her hands on his lapels, she went up on tiptoe to kissed him tenderly on the lips. “I think I’ll go home ahead of you.”
He placed his hands at her waist and drew her closer. “I thought you and I had plans for later this evening.”
“We do. But I’m about to ask a favor. Would you please stay and help Dad get to bed? I know it’s not your place—”
“I don’t mind at all.”
“He’s prickly on the subject of his instability, and it’s already come up once tonight. But if you invent an excuse to walk upstairs with him, it won’t appear that you’re escorting him. I would appreciate it.”
“Consider it done, sweetheart. I’ll follow your lead.”
At the door, she pretended to remember that she wanted to retrieve an old address book from her third-floor bedroom. “I’ll have to look for it. I’m not sure where I left it.”
Noah offered to get it for her and suggested that she go ahead of him while he searched. She wasn’t sure Daniel believed their playacting, but he went along with it.
When they said their good nights, Daniel hugged her tightly. Then he set her away from him and peered closely into her eyes as though trying to decipher the troubling thoughts behind them. “I want to hear more about this new book and the complex man who’s writing it.”
The reminder of how she’d gone on and on about Parker brought color to her cheeks again. “I always value your input, Dad. I’ll have a copy of the manuscript sent over by courier tomorrow. We’ll get together later in the week to discuss it.”
He squeezed her hand with a confidentiality and caring that made her want to crawl up into his lap as she had when she was little, seeking comfort and assurance that everything was going to be fine, that all her concerns were needless, and that there was no basis for her undefined disquiet.
But, of course, she couldn’t. She’d outgrown his lap, and her confidences were a woman’s, not a child’s. They couldn’t be shared with her father.
Daniel moved aside and Noah stepped up to hug her. “Daniel’s looking a little down in the mouth tonight,” he whispered. “Once he’s tucked in, I think I’ll offer to have a bedtime brandy with him.”
“Do. But make it a short one. I’ll be waiting.”
* * *
Maris didn’t go straight home. She had never intended to. Using her father as a pawn to delay Noah made her feel guilty, but only a little. She would never have deceived them if she weren’t desperate to rid herself of nagging doubts that had taken a tenacious hold on her.
She took a taxi downtown to the apartment in Chelsea. By the time she reached the door of the apartment, her heart was beating hard, and not because of the steep staircase. She was anxious about what she might find inside.
She unlocked the door with the key she’d had in her possession since the night of her surprise party and, remembering where the light switch was, flipped it on. The air-conditioning unit was humming softly, but otherwise the apartment was silent. She noted that the cushions on the sofa looked freshly plumped.
Moving into the kitchen, she looked into a spotless dry sink. There were no dishes in the dishwasher, not even a drinking glass. The wastebasket beneath the sink was empty, its plastic liner as pristine as when it had been placed there.
Maid service? Noah hadn’t mentioned retaining anyone to clean this apartment, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t.
Back in the living room she moved toward the room designated as Noah’s office. Hand on the doorknob, she paused and said a prayer, although she couldn’t specifically say what she was praying for. She pushed open the door.
In a single glance she took it all in, then slumped dejectedly against the doorjamb. The room looked exactly as they’d left it that night. Nothing had been disturbed or changed. There were no paper balls in the trash can, no reference books with pages marked, no notes stuck to the computer screen or scrawled on ruled legal tablets.
She knew what a writer’s work area was supposed to look like. Parker’s would have cost an obsessive-compulsive years of therapy. It was strewn with coffee-stained notes, and red pencils whose leads were
worn down to nubs, and tablets filled with thoughts and diagrams and doodles, and file envelopes with curled, fraying edges, and unstable pyramids of reference material, and paper clips bent out of shape during periods of torturous concentration.
Yet if one thing were touched or moved on Parker’s desk, he would bark at the offender. He knew exactly where everything was, and he wanted it left the way he had it. Mike was forbidden to clean in the area, as though the disarray contributed to Parker’s creativity.
Noah’s writing space was immaculate. Although, upon closer inspection, Maris saw that his computer keyboard sported a fine layer of dust. The keys had never been touched.
Her heart wasn’t beating fast now. In fact it felt like a stone inside her chest as she turned off the lights and left the apartment. She conscientiously locked the door behind her, although she didn’t know why she bothered. There was absolutely nothing of value to her inside.
She exited the building and descended the front steps, lost in thought, her motions listless. She was weighted down with dread for the inevitable confrontation with Noah. When he returned from her father’s house, he would be expecting his docile wife to be waiting for him at home, eager and ready to make love to him.
That’s what she had deliberately led him to expect.
She had led him to believe that she was as moldable as warm clay, gullible, blindly accepting, and he had been easily deceived, because up until recently that’s exactly what she’d been.
He would arrive home thinking that their argument about WorldView was a forgotten episode, that she didn’t question the nature of his meeting with Howard Bancroft, that she had no reason to doubt him when he told her he had resumed writing.
Meek and mild and malleable Maris. Stupid Maris. That’s what he thought of her.
But he thought wrong.
As she reached street level, she noticed a passenger alighting from a taxi half a block away. She hadn’t expected the good fortune of finding a cab so soon and raised her hand to signal the driver.
As soon as he received his fare, he drove the short distance to where Maris stood at the curb. But she was no longer looking at the taxi. Instead she was watching the man who had alighted from it as he jogged up the steps of another brownstone, entering it with an air of familiarity, as though he belonged.
Gradually Maris lowered her arm, until then not realizing that it was still raised. She motioned the taxi driver to go on. Walking briskly, she quickly covered the distance to the other apartment building.
It was as quaint as the one she’d just left. There was no doorman or other form of security to prevent her from entering the vestibule. She checked the mailboxes. All except one were labeled with a name. Either the apartment was vacant… or the tenant in 2A received mail at another location.
Again, she climbed stairs. But it was with amazing calm that she approached the door of apartment 2A. She rapped smartly and looked directly into the peephole, knowing that it was probably being looked through from the other side.
Nadia Schuller opened the door, and the two of them stood face-to-face. She was dressed for romance, wearing only a silk wrapper, which appeared to have been hastily tied at her waist as she made her way to answer the door. She didn’t even have the decency to look alarmed or shamefaced. Her expression was one of smug amusement as she stepped back and opened the door wider.
Maris’s gaze slid past her to Noah, who was coming from a connecting room, presumably a kitchen, with a drink in each hand. He was in shirtsleeves, having wasted no time in removing his jacket and tie.
Upon seeing her, he stopped dead in his tracks. “Maris.”
Nadia said, “I hope this doesn’t turn into one of those dreadful farces à la a Ronald Reagan movie.”
Maris ignored her. Nadia was insignificant. The only thing she signified was Noah’s bad taste in mistresses. She didn’t waste any contempt on Nadia. Instead she directed it all toward the man she had married less than two years ago.
“Don’t bother apologizing or explaining, even if that’s what you had in mind to do, Noah. You’re a liar and an adulterer, and I want you out of my life. Out. Immediately. I’ll have Maxine come over and pack up your things because I can’t bear the thought of touching them myself. You can arrange with the doorman a time to pick them up when I’m not there. I don’t want to see you again, Noah. Ever.”
Then she turned and jogged down the stairs, across the small lobby, down the steps, and onto the sidewalk. She wasn’t crying. In fact, her eyes were dry. She didn’t feel angry, or sad, or miserable. In fact, she felt surprisingly unshackled and lighthearted. She had no sense of leaving something, but rather of going toward something.
She didn’t get far.
Noah gripped her arm from behind and roughly jerked her around. He grinned down at her, but it was a cold and frightening grin. “Well, well, Maris. Clever you.”
“Let go of me!” She struggled to pull her arm free from his grasp, but he didn’t yield. In fact, his fingers closed more tightly around her biceps. “I said for you to let—”
“Shut up,” he hissed, shaking her so hard that she bit her tongue and cried out in pain. “I heard what you had to say, Maris. Every single word. Brave speech. I was impressed.
“But now let me tell you how it’s going to be. Our marriage has been and will remain on my terms. You don’t order me out of your life. You don’t order me to leave. I leave you only when I’m goddamn good and ready. I hope you understand that, Maris. Your life will be so much easier if you do.”
“You’re hurting me, Noah.”
He laughed at that. “I haven’t begun to hurt you yet.” To underscore his point, he squeezed her arm tightly, cruelly, his fingers mashing muscle against bone. Although tears of pain sprang to her eyes, she didn’t recoil.
“In the meantime, I’ll fuck Nadia, I’ll fuck whoever I want to, and I don’t care if you watch. But you’ll stay the obedient little wife, understand? Or I’ll make your life, and the lives of everyone dear to you, a living hell, Maris. I can, you know. I will.” His eyes glinted with an evil light as he leaned even closer and whispered, “I will. I promise you.”
Then he released her so suddenly she staggered and fell against the iron fence that enclosed trash receptacles, painfully banging her shoulder.
As he turned away from her and started back toward the brownstone he shared with Nadia, he called cheerfully, “Don’t wait up.”
Too stunned to move, Maris watched him go and continued to stare at the empty doorway long after he had disappeared inside. She wasn’t so afraid as dumbfounded. Incredulity kept her rooted to the concrete. Although her arm was throbbing and she could taste blood in her mouth, she couldn’t believe what had just happened. Noah? Threatening her? Physically threatening her with an icy calm that glazed his threats with certainty and made them terrifying?
She shivered then, violently and uncontrollably, her blood running cold with the sudden but unarguable realization that she was married to a total stranger. The man she thought she knew didn’t exist. Noah had assumed a role, that’s all. He had mimicked a character in a book because he knew she’d been infatuated with that character. He had played the part well, never stepping out of character. Not once. Until tonight.
She was jolted by the fact that just now, for the first time, she had been introduced to the real Noah Reed.
“Envy” Ch. 15
Key West, Florida, 1987
“Roark?”
He rubbed sleep from his eyes as he juggled the telephone receiver in the general direction of his ear. “Yeah?”
“Were you sleeping?”
It was four-thirty in the morning. He hadn’t gotten to bed until after three. The nightclub where he and Todd worked didn’t close until two. One of his responsibilities was to close out the registers, and he couldn’t do that until the last customer left. After writing all day, then putting in an eight-hour shift, he hadn’t merely been sleeping, he’d been comatose.
“W
ho is this?”
“Mary Catherine. I hate to bother you.”
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. His bare foot knocked over an empty drink can and it noisily rolled across the concrete floor toward Todd’s bed. He growled a protest into his pillow.
“What’s up?” Roark asked in a whisper.
“Can you come over?”
“Uh… now?”
The strip joint was only a few doors down from the nightclub for which he tended bar and Todd parked cars. Occasionally, during their breaks, they could catch their neighbors’ acts. He and Todd had come to know the girls well enough to be admitted gratis. A bouncer let them in through a rear entrance. They watched from backstage. Sometimes they went together, sometimes separately, and they were rarely able to stay longer than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, but those few minutes relieved the drudgery of their lives.
Their limited budgets had reduced dating to a bare minimum. Thankfully, the trio of exotic dancers had been “neighborly” to them in more ways than giving free peep shows.
One day Roark had volunteered to take Starlight’s car to a garage for an oil change and tune-up. What the mechanic did for the car’s engine was nothing compared to what Starlight did to Roark’s. As thank-yous went, Starlight beat Hallmark all to hell.
But this telephone call didn’t have the tone of a come-on, and, much to his regret, Mary Catherine had never shown any romantic interest in him. She’d treated him in a brotherly fashion, while she flirted shamelessly with Todd and had graced him with several sleepovers.
“Could you, Roark? Please? I’m here by myself and, well… I need a favor.”
His heart thumped with optimism. “Sure. Be right there.”
“Don’t mention it to Todd, okay?”
That dampened his enthusiasm somewhat, because he would enjoy ribbing Todd about getting a middle-of-the-night call from one of his regular lays. Where women were concerned Todd was a cocksure bastard.
He pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, pushed his feet into a pair of sandals, and let himself out without waking Todd. He hurdled the foul-smelling moat surrounding the apartment building and followed the now-familiar and well-worn path to the girls’ building. He took the stairs two at a time, arriving at their door slightly out of breath. Mary Catherine opened the door before he could even knock.