Selby came out of the library, and a moment later Sloan appeared in the doorway to greet the investigator. “Come in. What can I do for you?”
He didn’t invite Morganna to join them, to her relief. She started gathering up tissue paper so she could repack the ball gown enough to carry it upstairs.
Though the house was solid and almost soundproof, the investigator hadn’t quite closed the door behind him, so over the slight rustle of tissue Morganna could hear the two men’s voices.
“The employees you terminated the morning of the fire,” the investigator said. “It appears they’ve got a string of witnesses as to where they were all evening.”
Her hands stilled on the fuchsia taffeta. How could that be?
“But Joel saw them there,” Sloan protested. “One of them, at any rate.”
“I didn’t say they had unbreakable alibis. There could be gaps. And I didn’t say I wasn’t going to keep looking into it.”
“Good. Because until that’s settled, the insurance company is obviously not going to be cooperative about paying out so much as a cent.”
“Going broke, are you?”
The investigator sounded rather cheery about the possibility, Morganna thought.
Sloan’s voice was cool. “I’m overextended at the moment. Show me someone who wouldn’t be, under the circumstances.”
“I understand that was a pretty sizable policy you were carrying. It must come as a blow to see it held up. I’ll see what I can do to speed things along, sir.”
Morganna was standing in the hallway, the ball gown still cascading out of the box at her feet, when Sloan closed the front door behind the investigator. “Is that your new dress?” he asked. “It’s pretty. I’m going out—I’ve got an appointment with some real estate people to look at a couple of buildings.”
She was puzzled. “Are you looking for another site for the factory?”
“No. Just an office space I can rent for a while, till I decide where we’re going from here.”
“Then you don’t know if you’re going to renovate or start over?”
“Not yet. But in the meantime, I need a place to hook up some telephones and get mail delivery. That way the employees I’ve had to lay off will know where to come for straight information, and then we can start calling all our customers and trying to put things back together.”
“It really is a mess, isn’t it?”
“In some ways, it’s even worse than I expected. It’s hard to tell what records we might be missing because the daily computer backups have so much duplication that it’s going to take a week just to sort them all out. Just tracking down who had orders underway, who can wait for delivery till we’re up and running again, and how we’re going to satisfy the others, will take a while.”
Morganna said softly, “This is the kind of problem that makes you really miss Joel, I suppose.”
“Yeah. He’s a whiz at this sort of stuff.” Sloan smiled ruefully. “He’d have had us in temporary quarters with the computers running and every one of our customers notified of the new address before the fire was even extinguished. See you later.”
She stepped between him and the door. “Sloan, I heard you tell the investigator that you’re financially overextended just now.”
“I wish you hadn’t heard that.”
“I wasn’t listening on purpose.”
“I know you weren’t. But I didn’t want to worry you with it.”
“If we’re in financial trouble—”
“We’re not. I’ll grant you that right now cash is going out in a torrent, and there’s nothing much coming in. I’ve got workers to take care of, another office to set up, money to refund to customers who paid in advance for furniture that we can’t build till who knows when—”
“My father’s debts still hanging over your head,” she said flatly.
“Don’t worry about it, Morganna. It’s just business. We’re not broke.”
“I don’t want to make it worse.” She looked around, helplessly, and seized on the first item she saw. “I can send the dress back, Sloan. I don’t need it.”
He looked from the heap of fuchsia taffeta to her face, and smiled. “Yes, you do, sweetheart. How could one of the former queens of the Carousel Ball possibly show up for the big event in a dress she’s worn before? Not only would what’s-her-name Pendergast be horrified, but I’d come off looking like Scrooge.”
He kissed her cheek and was gone, leaving Morganna standing in the center of the hallway. Just one more confirmation—as if she’d needed another—that the only thing that mattered to Sloan was how things looked.
She felt like kicking the dress box all the way back to the store.
The office space Sloan rented was both small and spartan, but all he really needed was a place to spread out his paperwork and room for a half-dozen customer-service representatives to man the phones, reassuring clients as word of the fire damage continued to spread.
The thing that really annoyed him was having to pay good money to rent enough tables and chairs to furnish the place. The very idea of Sticks & Stones having to use a competitor’s product would have been enough to set his teeth on edge, even if the president of Furnishings Unlimited hadn’t tracked down Sloan’s cell phone number and offered, in a suspiciously solicitous tone, to loan him whatever he needed.
Sloan declined just as politely, but he swore as he dropped the cell phone back in his pocket. “If I’d been stupid enough to say yes, he’d probably have put us in a national ad campaign. ‘When Sticks & Stones needs desks and chairs, it turns to Furnishings Unlimited’—or some nonsense like that.”
Across the room, Jack Hamilton, who was using a radiator in lieu of a chair, shifted uncomfortably. “It’s too bad that proposal you sent me about putting your merchandise in Tyler-Royale stores went astray. If we’d put through that deal, we’d would have warehouses full of Sticks & Stones merchandise that we could sell back to you.” He grinned. “At retail prices, of course.”
Sloan shook his head. “It’s probably just as well that package got hung up in the mail and went to Omaha instead of directly to you. Even if the head office had jumped on the proposal, we wouldn’t have had time to build up an inventory yet.”
And that, he thought grimly, was yet another big job that would be long gone into the mists by the time he had a factory back on line. It was just one item on a list that would get longer with every day the insurance company delayed.
He reached into his briefcase for an antacid tablet but came up with only an empty wrapper. For a moment he forgot where he was, and without looking he reached to open the top drawer of the sample-size bureau which had sat under the window in his old office, the spot where he had always kept a few aspirin and cough drops and vitamins. When his fingers brushed only air instead of polished wood, the pain of loss swept over him anew.
Odd, how it hit in waves instead of all at once. But then, he supposed, the reality of everything he had lost was simply too huge to absorb in one blow, so from time to time he recalled another thing that was gone forever. And the half-dozen pieces of sample furniture, left from his predecessor’s day, which had sat in a neat line under the window were certainly gone. They had probably exploded in the same blast that had blown Joel out of the office.
Strange, though, that there hadn’t even been any recognizable scraps of the small-scale bureau or chair or sideboard, because his desk—though it was badly damaged—had been left standing precisely in its regular spot. Of course it was larger and heavier, but it had also been closer to the blast.
Jack slid off the radiator and rubbed his tailbone. “Give me a list of what furniture you want and I’ll see what I can find in our stores. We’ll even make you a deal on the rental fees.”
Sloan grinned. “You’re a pal, Jack. I knew I could count on you.”
“And that’s why you invited me over,” Jack agreed. “I’ll call you at home tonight.”
With nothing else he could do at t
he new office, Sloan picked up his briefcase and headed for home. Dusk had set in early, and Pemberton Place was already aglow. Lights spilled from the Tudor Revival house next door to the Georgian mansion, and cars were starting to line up in the street, waiting to pull into the driveway. The publisher of the Lakemont Chronicle was hosting a cocktail party, Sloan deduced. He waited patiently till the traffic cleared enough to let him pull into his own driveway.
A shadowy figure standing under an oak tree between the houses caught Sloan’s attention, and instant suspicion flooded over him. Was this the sort of thing that Joel had seen? There must have been some odd activity around the place that had drawn him into the factory that night.
But a moment later the figure moved off toward the Tudor house and climbed the steps to the front door, and Sloan relaxed. Probably just a guest having a cigarette before going inside, he told himself.
He let himself into the house. No one was in sight, but the door of Morganna’s miniature room was half-open. He wondered if he was being foolish to interpret that as a kind of invitation. Maybe, after he put his briefcase away, he’d go visit and see what happened.
He stopped dead on the threshold of his library when he saw his desk blotter heaped with boxes. Flat velvet cases, small square containers, plain white cartons, cubical boxes. All sizes and shapes, they were piled into an irregular pyramid. And he had seen each one of them before. Though he hadn’t actually kept a count, he’d bet the fire insurance check that every last piece of jewelry he’d ever given her was somewhere in that stack.
“Morganna!” he bellowed.
He heard the scrape of her stool against the hardwood floor, so he knew she’d heard the order in his voice. But she took her own sweet time to appear in the hall. “If you want to talk to me,” she said sweetly, “you might try asking instead of summoning next time.”
He was not about to apologize. “What the hell is this stuff doing on my desk?”
She looked past him toward the pile of boxes, as if, he thought irritably, she didn’t remember what he was talking about. “I don’t need diamonds and sapphires and emeralds and pearls,” she said quietly. “And apparently, right now you do need money. So since I’ve never thought of these things as mine, I’m returning them to you.”
“I don’t need money badly enough to hock your jewelry.”
“Hock?” She looked thoughtful. “I hadn’t considered pawnshops, exactly. I brought it all to you because I thought you’d remember which jeweler each item came from so it could simply be returned.”
“It’s not that easy, Morganna. Jewelry doesn’t come with a money-back guarantee.”
“Of course. I hadn’t thought of that. Well, if it comes to hocking it, I suppose I could do just as well as you could, and I’m much less busy. In fact, there’s nothing else on my calendar for tomorrow.”
Annoyed as he was, he had to admire how neatly she had gone around him. “You can’t go from pawnshop to pawnshop with all this in tow.”
Morganna considered. “Well, not alone, certainly. But Emily Hamilton might look at it as an adventure.”
He stared at her for a long moment, eyes narrowed. She didn’t blink.
“You’d probably both end up in jail on suspicion of fencing stolen property,” he growled, “and Jack and I would have to come and bail you out. All right—you win. Leave the boxes where they are.” Obviously, he told himself, he’d better hang onto the jewelry, if only to protect her from her own crazy impulses.
She didn’t relent. “And you’ll use it to make things easier on you?”
“Every last chip of it.” It wasn’t exactly a lie; he’d be much more relaxed if he knew that she wasn’t out trolling pawnshops. “Are you happy now?”
“You’re welcome, Sloan,” she said quietly and turned away. The door of the miniature room closed behind her with a click.
He felt like a heel. She’d made a grand gesture—a selfless sacrifice—and he’d greeted it with anger at her and suspicion of her motives.
He sat down at his desk and opened the top box, the one shaped like a firecracker that had been her Fourth of July gift—a two-carat sapphire set in a gold star, hung on a long rope chain. He set it aside and picked up a small white velvet box which held the engagement ring he’d given her—a four-carat marquise diamond, deceptively simple and insanely expensive.
He sat with the box cupped in his hand, staring at the cold fire that lay within the stone.
Of course, he had good reason for suspecting her motives. Never in the entire six months of their marriage had one of his gifts been greeted with genuine pleasure or joy. Instead her reaction had usually been something more like resignation.
Morganna had made a grand gesture, yes, but not a selfless sacrifice. Instead, he suspected, she had felt nothing but relief when she handed his gifts back to him. She’d been pleased to have the excuse to get rid of them.
She had rejected his gifts, just as she would like to reject Sloan himself.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT HAD taken her the better part of half an hour to study all the different sorts of artists’ clays on display in the university bookstore, but Morganna had finally made her decision and was lifting the largest available carton from the bottom shelf when Emily Hamilton came around a corner and almost bumped into her.
“I thought I heard you over here talking to a salesclerk,” Emily said. She eyed the carton in Morganna’s arms. “That’s a lot of clay. Are you going to start throwing pots?”
Morganna shook her head. “It’s the wrong kind to use on a potter’s wheel. There’s a special clay for everything these days—or at least the store is carrying more varieties than when I was in art school. What are you doing hanging out at the campus bookstore?”
“Taking an advance look at the textbooks for a few classes I’m considering signing up for.”
“You’re going back to school? But you have a degree, and it’s even in a field that will let you earn a living.”
“A very boring living. And I was in such a hurry to get through school that I never deviated from the classes that were required for my major. So now I’m going to start taking the interesting things I missed back then. I was thinking of linguistics, maybe, or a class called The Politics of Waste Recycling, but—”
“I wouldn’t call either of those an amusing little hobby,” Morganna mused.
“Judging by the reading lists the professors have posted,” Emily said, “I’ll have to agree with you. I was also thinking of art appreciation, even though the textbook needs to be outfitted with its own set of wheels. Hey, why don’t you come and take something with me? Not art appreciation, of course, because you’d make the rest of us look bad. But we could both sign up for the seminar about who really wrote Shakespeare.”
“I don’t think so, Emily.”
Emily gave a little sigh. “I know Sloan doesn’t like the idea of you working, but he surely couldn’t object to you taking a class one night a week.”
Right now he might, Morganna thought. Nicolet University was one of the ten most ruinously expensive institutes of higher education in the nation. A single class there could cost as much as an entire semester at another university. And when the class was only for entertainment’s sake, the fact that the university was also one of the ten best in the country didn’t help to justify the cost.
She wondered exactly what Sloan had meant when he’d said he was overextended. Could she believe his reassurance, or was he simply trying to keep her from finding out how bad things really were?
In her own way, Morganna realized, she’d been just as foolishly trusting as her mother had been in leaving money matters entirely to the man of the family. Of course, the situations were a little different—there’d never been any question of her marriage to Sloan being a true partnership. Trophy wives didn’t ask questions; it was one of the rules.
Emily obviously interpreted her failure to answer as a refusal. “How long are you going to let Sloan keep you shut up
in that house, Morganna?”
Her innate sense of fairness made Morganna protest. “He doesn’t do anything of the sort.”
“Right.” Emily’s voice dripped sarcasm. “He lets you go out to play bridge, to go shopping, or to make a good impression for him at events like the Carousel Ball. Otherwise he expects you to be right there waiting for him like a proper little Victorian wife.”
“What’s the matter, Emily? It’s not like you to snipe at Sloan. He hasn’t shut me off from my friends, and you know it. He’s never tried.”
“Well, whoever set up the rules, you’ve certainly paid the price.”
Morganna took a deep breath. Saying it aloud wasn’t going to be easy, but it was important that she not run away from the truth Abigail had forced her to face. “The fact is I’ve kept myself isolated, because it’s been easier to hide and luxuriate in self-pity than it has been to face everyone and pretend to be happy.”
“You can’t live like this forever, Morganna. When are you going to put a stop to it?” Emily sighed. “Not that I expect to get an answer. Come on, let’s get out of here before the weight of that block of clay stretches your arms clear to the floor. I’ll buy you a hot-fudge sundae.”
She waited nearby while Morganna paid her bill, and they walked down the row of shops to the avant-garde ice-cream parlor. The lunch rush was over and only a few patrons remained, but most of the antique twisted-iron tables in the center of the room were still covered with used dishes. Emily headed for the most isolated booth in the shop, one of the few that had already been cleared.
Morganna ordered a cappuccino instead of ice cream, and she cradled the cup in her hand while she thought about what Emily had said. When are you going to put a stop to it? Emily had been talking about Sloan and their marriage, but even Emily didn’t know all the details. She didn’t know how impossible it was for Morganna to call a halt.
But her question was still just as valid. When was Morganna going to stop hiding and wallowing in self-pity? To stop burying herself in her miniatures and rejoin the world?
His Trophy Wife Page 10