Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  She lifted the Alençon-laced nightgown, letting it slither silkily across her fingers as it unfolded, laughing at herself for the silly way she had let herself be annoyed in the plane because Grant had talked to Lory all the time … and he hadn’t mentioned her since. Nor Cash McCall either … but, of course, Grant didn’t know about yesterday.

  The tremor of her hands sent shimmering ripples down the length of the nightgown. Should she have told Grant … Lory hadn’t said a word about it but she had been gone all that time and she must have been with Cash because she hadn’t come home until after the plane came back. Yes, she should have told Grant. At least it would have been something to talk about, a warm confidence to share. But not now … no, it was too late to tell him now … only make him think of Lory.

  She tested the appearance of the nightgown draped airily across the counterpane, felt as foolish as if she had heard herself giggle, started to put it in the closet, changed her mind, went into the bathroom and hung it on the back of the door. The towels on the bar were crooked and she refolded and rehung them, pausing a moment to polish a greasy smudge from the mirror with a piece of cleansing tissue. In the mirror, reflected through the open door, she saw Grant standing at the living-room window, looking out.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” she said as she hurried to him. “I didn’t hear you come back. Did you find whoever it was you wanted to see?”

  He nodded, glancing at his watch and then up at the sky. “They ought to be there by now.”

  “I think the driver said the train was due at one-ten,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant Lory and Mr. McCall.”

  She muffled the little cry that threatened to escape … she wouldn’t let it happen again … she had learned her lesson.

  Grant was marking his watch dial with a pointing finger. “Same time to get back as we took to get down—that would put them back in Suffolk again just about now. Nice of him to do it, wasn’t it—asking her to come along?”

  “Very nice.”

  “You bet, that’s the way you can always tell a really big man—thoughtful.” He ended with a little nod that said that was the end of that. “Well, what do you think of Moon Beach?”

  “It’s wonderful, dear, it really is. Everything you said it was.”

  “Heck, you haven’t even seen it yet. Come on, how about taking a look around. The gang ought to be getting in before long. Lot of people I want you to meet.”

  “Just give me a minute to change my shoes,” she said, not because her shoes needed changing, but because she needed an excuse to hide her brimming eyes. Grant wasn’t worrying about Lory … he was thinking about her!

  10

  This was a good day, one of the best. It was only seven minutes after one and Maude Kennard had already surmounted the Fontainebleau Room’s daily turnover crisis. The twelve o’clock crowd had been safely evicted, every one o’clock reservation had been filled, and her guess as to the number of unrejectables who would turn up without reservations had proved precisely accurate. So adroitly had she juggled people and tables that there was only one empty chair in the entire dining room. Resentfully, she turned toward it. But what could she have done? General Danvers had walked in demanding a table for two, claiming that he was expecting a guest, even telling her to watch out for a “Dr. Bergmann,” a phony if she had ever heard one. Of course, he’d tried to bluff it out, waiting to order, but now he’d given up after his second double Martini and the waiter was serving his soup.

  Unexpectedly the president of the Andscott Instrument Corporation glanced in her direction and their eyes met. She returned his smile with bland innocence, thinking how shocked he would be if he knew that she had been in the serving pantry of Cash’s suite all during dinner last night and had heard every word that had been said. Reminiscently, she felt a resurgence of the anger that had been aroused by his accusations against Cash. Afterwards, of course, Danvers had belly-crawled and begged that everything he had said be forgotten. But she wouldn’t forget … and neither would Cash. He had paid only two million for that Suffolk company and Danvers was giving him three hundred thousand shares of Andscott common … 10½–10¼ in the morning paper … that was more than three million dollars. Before it was over, she and Cash would be paid a million dollars for that empty seat at Table 17.

  General Danvers began to eat his soup—Créme d’Epinards Florentine—and she let her gaze drift to the gold-laced screen that hid the swinging door at the back of the dining room, visualizing the dank tunnel that connected the Fontainebleau Room to the kitchen. Only a tenth of that million dollars would do everything that needed to be done. She would rip out the back of the old building, extend the kitchen area, add another refrigerator room …

  Louis was coming toward her, the look of crisis on his drawn lips. She waited for him, counseling herself to patience with whatever petty complaint he was relaying, attempting to trace it to its origin by back-tracking the headwaiter’s path across the room, smiling a blanket reassurance to the whole area beyond the center pillars.

  “Oeufs Moulés à la Nicollet,” the headwaiter said, the identifying name spoken as a curse.

  “They’re not on the menu but you may order them,” she ordained, her benevolent smile less for Louis than for whoever might be watching her.

  “I have order them,” he said with a Gallic hiss. “I, Louis, give the promise! Now the kitchen say they cannot make because Max is not there.”

  “Not in the kitchen? Where is he?”

  Louis’s blazing eyes raised to the ceiling. “He say he must make special dish for Mr. McCall. Cannot be cook in kitchen, must make upstairs. So he go. How you like that?”

  She waited out the moment of first shock, rigid with anger, ready to start for the kitchen the instant she could be certain of self-control. The uniformed arm of a bellboy stabbed into her field of vision, his hand holding a note for her. She took it without acknowledgment, not reading it.

  Inside the kitchen, her eyes hurriedly canvassed the white-clad horde, seeing cooks of every size and shape but no figure that even remotely approached Max’s unmistakable proportions. This was absolutely the last straw … if Max thought he could get away with running out right in the middle of the lunch hour when the whole Fontainebleau Room was jammed with …

  The flame of anger suddenly sputtered out, quenched with the cold-water realization of helplessness. Cash owned the hotel … if he wanted Max, there was nothing she could do to …

  Her eyes caught a white flutter and she looked down. Her fingers had loosened their grip and the note had fallen. She bent to pick it up, frustrated by the clinging hold of the wet floor on the thin paper. Then the dampness came through, blackening the single penciled line, and she read the message:

  1:09 P.M.—He went up with Miss Austen.

  For an instant she stared without comprehension. Then she remembered that she had instructed Nathan at the desk to let her know the moment Cash returned to the hotel.

  She felt suddenly dizzy and straightened to full height, trying to convince herself that she was nauseated because of the steam and heat of the kitchen … that little bitch … up in his room!

  The note was still on the floor but she dared not risk bending again to retrieve it. Instead, she ground the white paper under the sole of her shoe until the words were obliterated in a gray smear.

  11

  Cash opened the door and Lory was inside the foyer and turning left toward the arch of the living room before she realized that she had crossed the threshold without an interrupting recollection of that night in Maine when she had come to Cash’s room at the Inn. Now, even consciously recalled, that memory was only the faint scar of a well-healed wound. She walked boldly forward, slipping out of her coat without waiting for Cash to help her, opening a door in the corner of the foyer, not tentatively as she would have done in a strange house but with the sureness of familiarity. And she was right. It was the coat closet. There was no strangeness in these rooms. She
had been here before.

  Nor was there strangeness in this man. Nothing of accountable importance had happened on the flight up from Moon Beach, nor as they had driven into Philadelphia from the airport. There had been only the simple fact of presence but that, in an odd reversal of anticipation, had proved a calming inducement of reasoned thought. There had been, and still was, the response of acknowledged excitement but it had rapidly become an emotion cleansed of adulterating fear or apprehension. There was nothing unusual, she told herself, in a woman having lunch with a man—thousands upon thousands of men and women were lunching together at this very minute, sensibly free from any expectation beyond the sharing of a pleasant hour.

  As she entered the living room, her eye was caught by her frontispiece illustration for the Knight of the Hawk, white-matted and black-framed, its presence on Cash’s wall another proof of the normality of her being here in his apartment.

  Aware that Cash had seen her glance at the drawing, she said, “I’m very flattered.”

  He looked at her with an enigmatic smile. “Is it—or isn’t it?”

  “Isn’t it what?”

  “Several people have imagined a resemblance. Jefferson Clark was the first, but there have been others since.”

  “Resemblance?”

  “They think I was your model.”

  “But I didn’t have a model,” she protested quickly, too quickly, and then was forced to go on. “It was just an imaginary face, something that came to me—”

  “Out of your memory?” he added, linking his words to hers.

  “Perhaps,” she said, side-stepping the threat of a loss of composure by adding, “But I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. I didn’t mean it to be your portrait, honestly I didn’t.”

  His expression was a gay mockery of disappointment. “Now you’ve spoiled everything. I’ve been imagining myself as that romantic fellow, dashing around on a white charger with a falcon on my wrist, rescuing fair damsels in distress and whisking them off to my princely castle.”

  She amazed herself by being able to match his banter. “Oh, it’s much more romantic to do your dashing around in a B-26 and bring your damsel to a lovely apartment in the Ivanhoe.”

  “And, anyway, it wasn’t the damsel who was in distress—it was the rescuer. I was frightened that you might decide to stay at Moon Beach.”

  “Really frightened?” she teased.

  “I’m not a very brave knight. I was even afraid to ask if you wanted to be rescued.”

  “Oh, that wouldn’t have been right at all,” she laughed. “Who ever heard of the knight asking the damsel’s permission!”

  So suddenly that there was no chance for even the split-second decision of submission, she found herself in his arms, the crush of his lips a sensation that instantly spread through her body, all pervading, without focus, sustained through the long blanking of perception until she was finally aware that somewhere in the distant outer world there was the sound of knocking. Cash had left her but there had been no consciousness of the moment of parting—and, apart, there was no diminution, no loss, no wrenching tear that left a wound to be healed, no guard of caution that needed to be raised. Passion was no longer a caged animal clawing at iron bars. There were no bars. The only restraint was the knowledge that restraint was no longer necessary.

  She heard the sound of Cash’s voice and saw that he was whispering to someone through the half-opened door of the living room. The door closed and he turned back to her. “Lunch in ten minutes—all right?”

  “Don’t ask me, just tell me,” she said, laughing away the tiny fear that tears might be showing in her eyes, sitting down on the edge of the great green couch, bracing her arms behind her, looking up at Cash.

  His nod of understanding was barely perceptible—but all that it needed to be—and then he turned away from her and walked to the window. Intuition warned her that something was wrong and for a frantic instant she faced the fear that her brashness had been a mistake.

  But he turned suddenly and said, “I’m a little concerned about your father, Lory.”

  “Concerned?” she asked blankly, her relief at the reprieve from blame instantly replaced by surprise that Cash would force the intrusion of something so foreign to the moment.

  Cash walked back to her. “I may be wrong, Lory—you know him so much better than I do—but I couldn’t escape the feeling this morning that those nerves were stretched very tight. Or didn’t you notice it?”

  The question startled her and the necessity of fumbling for an answer made her realize that she dared not be completely honest. A moment before it had seemed that there was nothing within her that could not be shared with Cash. Now she recognized that she dared not admit to anyone, even herself, how she had felt about her father this morning in the plane.

  “Well, he was keyed up about going to the convention,” she said guardedly. “I don’t know why it meant so much to him—he’s completely out of it—but I know that it did.”

  “Then he doesn’t have any plans for going back into the plastics business?”

  “No, I’m sure he doesn’t have anything like that in mind.”

  Cash sat down beside her. “What is he planning to do?”

  “Well, he was talking about a trip around the world. I’d suggested it and at first he seemed interested, but he hasn’t mentioned it for several days now.”

  “You don’t think he’ll do it, do you?”

  “I wish he would—for Mother’s sake, too—but I just don’t know what he’ll do.”

  “It’s my guess that he doesn’t know either,” Cash said soberly. “I may have done the wrong thing in suggesting that he go to that convention.”

  “Oh, but you didn’t! You can’t imagine what it meant to him—and having you take him down in your plane.” She paused, waiting hopefully, but there was no lightening of his expression. “Why do you say that it might have been the wrong thing to do?”

  “If he’s getting out of the business, the best thing would have been a clean break. This is just dragging it out, making it all the more painful.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said positively. “It isn’t as if he’d had to sell the company—or if it was something that he didn’t want to do—”

  “I may be wrong,” he cut in stubbornly. “But I can’t get over the hunch that he isn’t fully awake yet to what it’s really going to mean. That’s a difficult transition for any man to make—spending his whole life building up a company and then suddenly discovering that he doesn’t have it any more. Sometimes it works out easily enough—if a man has been thinking about it for a long time and more or less adjusted himself to a new frame of mind—but I gather that wasn’t the case with your father.”

  “He did decide in a hurry,” she admitted, feeling herself somehow criticized by the contrast of Cash’s obvious sympathy for her father. “But it isn’t as if it were something he hadn’t considered. I talked to him about it that night before we came down here—even asked him if he was sure he could be happy without the company—and there wasn’t the slightest doubt in his mind, not the slightest. You see—well, the company hasn’t meant so much to him these last few years. It did in the old days—and it was exciting during the war, all the new things—but it’s never been quite the same since. It’s been almost as if—well, if you could have seen him this last week, I’m sure you’d realize how relieved he is that he’s out of it now.”

  “But still he ought to have something to do,” Cash said, not as argument but as a supplement. “And you don’t really think he’ll take this trip around the world, do you?”

  “He might. I just don’t know.”

  “It’s my guess that he won’t,” Cash said crisply, standing abruptly. “And if he doesn’t we ought to have something else up our sleeves.”

  Cash had walked to the window again but this time Lory felt no separation. They were linked by the still echoing sound of that one wonderful word … we … not you, not I, but we! He had s
poken it without special emphasis but it was no less a commitment, and there was no doubt that he had meant it to be just that.

  Never in the wildest fantasy of her dark-of-the-night dreams had Lory Austen’s imagination carried her beyond transient ecstasy, an adventure somewhere outside the boundaries of reality, the moment sufficient unto itself, stolen, lived through with an awareness of imminent ending. Now there would be no ending. Her life had suddenly acquired substance and solidity. It seemed that a miracle had taken place, accomplished in the split-second voicing of a single syllable. But nothing so indisputably right could have happened without preamble and now, in the odd way that the human mind is capable of rationalizing the blindest of hopes into the most clear-eyed of truths, she fully believed that she had always known she would someday marry Cash McCall.

  In the lost moment when her attention had been totally inward, she failed to notice Cash walking back from the window. He was standing in front of her and there was the realization that she had missed his first words.

  “—and I have no idea whether it would interest him or not,” he was saying. “But I happen to know the man in Washington who’s organizing it. It’s one of those good-will deals—partly window-dressing and hoopla, of course, but still more substance to it than there’s been to some of the others. They’re pulling together a group of men with both management and specialized technical experience to spend a couple of months down there advising some of their new industries. Venezuela and Brazil are definitely scheduled, possibly Argentina. It ought to be a nice junket—ten or twelve key men, most of them taking their wives. What would you think?”