Leslie LaFoy

by Jacksons Way

  They were both in the foyer. And judging by the noise ringing up the stairwell, Agatha had just flung the silver calling card tray against a wall. Jack drew a deep breath. Should he step into the sisters' confrontation? Or should he just stand back and let Lindsay handle the situation? The former seemed likely to make matters even worse than they already were. But the latter course seemed downright cowardly. He reached the top of the stairs and froze, gazing in amazement over the scene below.

  “You can't tell me what I can and can't have!” Agatha yelled, stamping her foot.

  Lindsay, near the far wall, straightened, the silver calling card tray in her hand. “We can't afford such extravagances,” she deliberately replied, returning the tray to the center table and placing it back beside the vase of flowers.

  Agatha suddenly snatched up the crystal vase and lifted it above her head. “Give me my necklace, Lindsay. Give it to me or I'll smash this to bits.”

  “Put it down,” Lindsay commanded with deadly calm, tapping the top of the table with a finger. “If you break it, you'll be the one going without the food it would have bought. I swear it.”

  Agatha gasped, blinked a full dozen times, then slammed the vase down on the tabletop. Her compliance was fleeting, however. In almost the same instant that she put down the vase, she grabbed the flowers, flung them to the floor, and then proceed to kick them around the foyer as she squealed in outrage.

  Jackson watched in slack-jawed astonishment as Lindsay leaned her hip against the edge of the table, crossed her arms, and said quietly, “When you're through with your tantrum …”

  Agatha didn't even so much as pause to gasp for more air; not that Jackson had expected her to. Instead, she reached for the silver calling card tray.

  Lindsay, her cheeks flooded with color and her eyes blazing, moved with lightning speed to swat her sister's hand.

  Jack choked back his laughter as Agatha jerked her hand back and blinked at Lindsay in stunned, sudden silence.

  “I'm sorry, but enough is enough, Agatha. You're behaving childishly.”

  Agatha lifted her chin with a huff, said, “I'm going to tell Henry what you've done,” and then turned on her heel, yanked up the hems of her skirts, and strode toward the front door. “He'll make you give me back my necklace.”

  The sound of the slamming door reverberated through the entire house. Lindsay's shoulders slumped momentarily, but she quickly recovered her resolve. “You were right,” she said quietly and without looking up at him. “She wasn't happy about the necklace being returned.”

  He stood there, not knowing what to say, but wishing there was something he could do to make Lindsay smile.

  She scrubbed her palms over her face briefly and then sighed before saying, “I suppose there's nothing to be done at this point but clean up the mess. Good night, Jack.”

  “I'll help you,” he offered, starting down.

  “Thank you, but no thank you,” she declared, looking at him for the first time. “If you don't mind,” she said quietly, her voice strained, “I'd prefer to be alone right now. I hope you can understand.”

  He didn't, but he nodded anyway and retreated out of respect for her wishes. As he slowly made his way back to his room, Jack realized that he now knew the answer to his earlier pondering. Lindsay didn't enjoy being abused. Neither did she have the patience of a saint. Unfortunately, it appeared that she deeply regretted that she didn't. All things considered, though, there was hope for her in the long run.

  She had a backbone of steel and her head was firmly set on her shoulders. She was a damn fine woman. A damn fine woman desperately trying to control a stampede of idiots.

  THE MOON WAS BEGINNING to set and Jackson stood at the window of his bedroom, watching, puzzling the dream that had ended his sleep. He'd been at his house in Texas and walked out on the front porch at dawn. Right by the front steps, he'd seen a rosebush that hadn't been there before. Its flowers were a thousand shades of pink and the fragrance that wrapped around him had been as velvet as the petals had been to his touch.

  And as he'd stood there, wondering where it had come from and who had planted it, it had begun to grow. Fast. He'd thought of that as he'd stood there in amazement and watched its canes wind around the porch railing, wrap up the post, and then stretch across the opening to spill across the railing on the other side.

  The color and the fragrance had been magical and he'd breathed deep and grinned like a schoolboy. Until the rose reached the other end of the porch and he saw it twine around the straggling morning glory vines Maria Arabella had planted years ago. He'd started forward, determined to save the only thing he had left of her, but he'd gotten no farther than a single step when he realized that there was no saving to be done. The morning glories twined with the rose and were lifted higher, their blue cups tiny but soft islands in the riot of pink. He liked it. It seemed to be the way it was supposed to be. Right, somehow. It was all so wondrous, so unexpected. It made him happy. And just a little sad, too. As though he was giving up on something that had once been important.

  And it had been that realization that had brought him from his sleep and kept him awake since. Dreams were the strangest things, he mused, shaking his head. There were some folks who believed that they were chock-full of important meanings and that you were supposed to spend hours trying to figure them out so you could change your life for the better. He'd never been particularly good at understanding what he was supposed to, though.

  It was pretty obvious that this one had something to do with Maria Arabella, but God only knew what. She'd planted morning glories, but they hadn't survived the first summer's heat. And he'd held her in his arms as she'd died that winter. The rose growing so beautifully was just flat-out impossible. His mother had tried to grow them, but Texas had proven to be tougher than their thorns.

  “The women in my life haven't been gardeners?” he guessed with a wry chuckle, heading back to his bed.

  With his head cradled in his hands, Jack closed his eyes and focused on the memory of the roses running riot over his home in Texas. He still didn't know what it meant, but he liked it nonetheless. Roses. Wild roses. So impossibly, remarkably wondrous.

  CHAPTER TEN

  JACKSON PULLED ON HIS BOOT and then paused, straining to hear the noise that had caught his attention. It came again a few seconds later from behind a dark tapestry hanging on the inside wall of the room Lindsay had given him. He rose from the chair and strode across the thick carpet. Pulling back on the edge of the tapestry, he found a plain wooden door hidden beneath. Connecting rooms, he realized instantly. And someone was in the one on the other side. Who?

  The noise came again and this time he was close enough to hear it more clearly. It sounded like wood striking wood; perhaps a dresser drawer or an armoire door being closed. Had Agatha returned to go through her morning dressing routine? Was it Mrs. Kowalski looking for her cat? Lucy or Jeb Rutherford? Or maybe it was Lindsay. Jack half-smiled. There was a keyhole beneath the cut-crystal doornob; it would be a simple matter to look and satisfy his curiosity.

  Shaking his head, Jackson pulled the tapestry farther back and then knocked lightly on the door. There was no an- swer, no further sound from the other room. He knocked again and after waiting for a few seconds, indulged his curiosity. Surprisingly, the door was unlocked. The hinges squeaked only slightly as he inched it open and peered through the narrow opening.

  The morning sunlight coming through the windows barely illuminated the room, but he could see enough to note that the carpet, wallpaper, draperies, and bed hangings were the color of dark, dark red roses. Here and there were touches of ivory—the rumpled sheets, the padded seat on the bench before the dressing table, some pillows in a high-backed, burgundy chair beside the fireplace. It was as though someone had tried to force a bit of light and feminine ease into the cavelike room.

  Jackson considered the dressing table. The items on it were simple and few; a silver-backed mirror, a brush-and-comb set, a singl
e perfume bottle, and a small silver jewelry box. Jack stepped back and pulled the door closed. The things were too nice, too expensive to belong to either Lucy or Mrs. Kowalski. And he was willing to bet that they were too simple and few to belong to the Agatha he had met his first day here. Mrs. Beechum's room was downstairs. That left the room to be Lindsay's.

  He looked around the one he'd been given. It was just as dark as the other—as the whole house, for that matter— but more masculine. It was done up in dark greens and browns and plums and reminded Jackson, just a bit, of the main room in the house Billy had built his fourth year in Texas. That house wasn't dark, though. Billy had refused to put curtains of any sort on the windows. He'd once said that he didn't have any secrets.

  Jackson snorted. Billy had had some damn big secrets; they just weren't in that house in Texas. They were in New York and waiting to take a bite out of Jack's hide. Taking his coat from the dressing tree, Jack glanced back at the tapestry. It didn't take a great mental leap to figure out that Lindsay had put him in what had been Billy's room. And it didn't take any greater leap to guess that Lindsay's room had once been her mother's.

  How long had it been since the door between the two rooms had been opened? Jack wondered. Billy had walked away seventeen years ago. Had the wife he'd left behind been a chaste martyr of abandonment? Had Lindsay given this room to the man who had been the not-so-accomplished lover? The latter possibility rankled. Telling himself that it wasn't any of his business if she had, Jack crossed to the door leading into the hallway. There was business to tend, decisions to make and see executed. Thinking about Lindsay in any respect beyond that wasn't in either of their best interests.

  “I shall be gone only a few minutes, sir.”

  Jackson stopped, halfway across the threshold, and watched as a short but slender, crisply dressed man stepped backward out of the room into which Jackson had carried Richard Patterson's limp form two days earlier.

  “I'll bring you some tea when I return,” the other man said, pulling the door closed. He turned away, never seeing Jackson, and walked off toward the servants' stairs.

  Havers, Jackson thought. Havers of the extravagant expectations. How'd he come to have them? Servants didn't usually feel so secure in their employment that they were comfortable in making demands for the continuance of it. What kind of leverage did he have on Patterson? Or was the leverage on Lindsay? So many questions … Jack glanced toward the back stairs and then moved resolutely toward the other door.

  The drapes were drawn and the room was as dark as night. Jackson closed the door behind him and gave his eyes a moment to adjust. When they did, Jack found Patterson lying exactly where he'd been placed when he'd brought him in. The slow, shallow rise and fall of his chest was the only sign of life. Jack walked to the end of the bed and stood there in silence for a long moment.

  “Lindsay thinks you're a paragon of business, you know,” he said quietly. “And a wonderful human being who's taken care of her all these years. Is it the truth, old man? Are you really that kind, that astute? Or are you like everyone else in her life, sucking everything you can out of her?”

  There was no answer, of course, and Jack settled his shoulder against the carved post of the footboard. “Damn convenient for you to have that stroke when you did, by the way. Keeps you from having to answer some tough questions. Four buyers—just four and the same four—for fifteen years. Now that's interesting. Seems to me that they've got to be real grateful to you for selling them failing properties that they could so quickly turn around. If they weren't damned good friends of yours to begin with, they sure ought to be by now.”

  In Patterson's continued silence, Jack began to slowly pace the width of the room, talking more to himself than to the other man. “You know, the books are telling me that something's way off the mark here. I know what you took as an annual salary before the Panic set in. In my mind, it wasn't enough to pay for the kind of life that includes a manservant and a French chef. And you've managed to keep them employed the last year and a half even though you haven't taken your salary. Where's the money coming from, old man?

  “I'm going to figure it out, you know,” he said, pausing to study the ghostly white face surrounded by white linen. “I see three possibilities right up front. In one, you're a gullible old fool who's been taken time and time again. Frankly, I'm not going to put any money on that one. Lindsay's an intelligent woman and she wouldn't have gone along with you all these years if she thought you weren't pitching from a full loft. It takes someone smart to con someone smart.

  “Which means there's really only two possibilites left to consider,” Jack said, resuming his pacing. “In the first one, you're deliberately sabotaging a property, selling it low to one of your friends, then either taking a kickback or getting a percentage of the profits when they start to come in again. In the second one, you're playing a shell game, sabotaging the properties and then selling them to businesses you secretly own. That way all the profits are yours. In both cases, all the losses are Lindsay's.

  “Yeah,” Jack drawled quietly, stopping and facing his silent adversary. “I think you're a conniving, thieving son of a bitch, Richard Patterson. And by the time I'm done digging and sorting through this mess, I'm going to know the truth of it. If I'm wrong, I'll apologize. But I don't think I'm going to be wrong. Do you?”

  Silence.

  “And I figure you didn't manage all this on your own,” Jack went on. “You had to have had some help, one way or the other. Someone had to do the dirty work of sabotage for you. And if it's a shell game, someone has to be at the other end of the post road and someone had to do the legal work in setting up the companies. Otis Vanderhagen comes to my mind on that last one. How about yours?”

  He waited a second, knowing that there wouldn't be a reply, and then said, “You know what the worst thing is about all this? It's not the money. It's that there isn't any way that I can keep Lindsay from knowing that you've betrayed her trust. Billy left her behind and that was cruel and it was wrong. And Billy sure pulled the rug out from under her feet when he left the MacPhaull Company to me. On the surface of things, that looks to be just as mean-spirited as his having walked out on her all those years ago.

  “But as an aside and just between us, I think he thought he was going to be upending Henry's world, not Lindsay's. Now why he'd want to do that to Henry is an intriguing question, but it's more of a curiosity than it is pressing in the big scheme of things.

  “The whys of what Billy did can't be known for sure. What I do know is that when all the dust settles, Billy's sins are going to be nothing compared to yours. At least Billy didn't pretend to be the cornerstone of Lindsay's life, didn't pretend to have her best interests in mind. And handing the MacPhaull Company to me is going to turn out to be the wisest decision Billy ever made, whether he knew what he was doing or not. I'll salvage something for Lindsay out of all this. You can bank on that.”

  Jackson sighed and shook his head sadly. “But her heart's going to be broken when she learns that you've betrayed her more blackly and deliberately than her father ever did. I can't do anything about healing that wound, Patterson. All I can do is be satisfied with the certainty that your soul is going to rot forever in hell.”

  Richard Patterson remained still and deathly quiet, wholly unaffected by the sureness of his fate. Jackson watched him breathe for a while, willing the old man to rouse from his oblivion and answer all the accusations and suspicions that had been laid before him. In the continuing silence, Jack turned to leave, but paused, his hand on the doorknob, to quietly, earnestly add, “Just so you know, Patterson … I'll see justice done. When I have sufficient proof of what you've done to Lindsay, I'm going to put a pillow over your face and send you on your way.”

  Jackson had barely pulled the door closed when he heard the slight rattle of china on the back stairs. He stepped squarely into the hallway and waited. Havers appeared only seconds later, bearing a tray with a tea service.

 
; “Sir,” Havers said as he became aware of Jackson's presence.

  “We haven't met, Havers. I'm Jackson Stennett.”

  Havers continued to advance, saying, “It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir.”

  “Allow me to disabuse you of that notion,” Jack countered. Havers instantly stopped. Jack nodded briefly. “I understand that you have a list of demands regarding the continuance of your service to Mr. Patterson and that you expect to communicate them to Miss Lindsay. Kindly put them in writing, submit them to me, and be advised that I will be the one making the decisions about them. Henceforth, should you have any concerns, you'll come to me with them and not Miss Lindsay. Understood?”

  In the long-standing tradition of servants the world over, Havers quickly stuffed his shock behind a mask of cool indifference. “Yes, sir,” he replied blandly. “You will have my list this afternoon.”

  “Have Mrs. Beechum put it on the desk in the study.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good day, Havers,” Jack said, stepping around the man and walking away without a backward glance. One bit of order on the way to being imposed, he told himself as he went. Now to see what kind of chaos and crisis awaited him downstairs this morning. God knew there would be one. In Lindsay's world, it was guaranteed.

  LINDSAY CAME INTO THE DINING ROOM to find both a covered plate and Abigail Beechum waiting for her. The look on her housekeeper's face didn't bode well.

  “Good morning, Miss Lindsay.”

  “Is it?” Lindsay asked, taking her seat and reaching for her napkin.

  “Well, let's see,” Abigail mused aloud as she lifted the silver dome off Lindsay's plate. “Primrose and Emile have managed to find a degree of cooperation sufficient for preparing a decent breakfast.”

  “It looks good,” Lindsay offered, as she began to cut the thick slice of ham.

  “Mrs. Rutherford thought it the most wonderful food she'd ever eaten,” Abigail contributed, setting the cover on the sideboard. “Mrs. Kowalski, however, after inspecting the kitchen, decided that she couldn't bring herself to consume foods prepared in a manner that doesn't meet her religious proscriptions. She and her cat left just a little while ago, saying—Mrs. Kowalski saying, not the cat—that she would prevail upon the kindness of the synagogue for her bodily sustenance. I do believe that she's going to see if she might prevail upon its members for lodging as well.”