A Ruling Passion

by Judith Michael

  buoyancy. There was still too much tension between them, too much readiness to leap to battle stations over relatively minor disputes, and he didn't know how they would resolve that, or even if they could, but for now the air was clear. And if they could find a way to share the important things of their lives...

  "Something else," he said. "If Les approves, and you do a full-scale study of Lily Grace, and Graceville, I'd like to work on it with you."

  &kd

  Chapter 25

  I M M he grand opening of the Hotel Grace was sched-

  ^"^^ ^^d for July, and workers were scrambling to fin-

  ^k ^m ish it when Sophie and Valerie visited Graceville

  ^^^^r for the second time. The shops along Main Street

  were almost finished; their glass fronts reflected

  the summer sun and gave glimpses of the workers inside, painting and

  installing shelves and carpeting and computerized cash registers. The

  streets were lined with antique lampposts and old-fashioned hitching

  posts; landscapers were laying squares of grass and planting flowers

  and shrubs; workers were installing street signs. Some distance away,

  rows of town houses were in various stages of construction; one row

  was almost complete.

  "Marrach Construction," Sophie read on the first trailer they passed. "I wonder who owns it." She looked down Main Street, at other trailers with the same name. "It's a goldmine, building a whole town. Mr. Marrach, whoever he is, really lucked out."

  Valerie wrote the name in her notebook; then they walked on, down Main Street and into the hotel. The workers paid no attention to them as they wandered through the lobby, into the dining room

  and then up a stairway to the mezzanine, where meeting rooms and offices were being painted. "What is it I'm supposed to be looking for?" Sophie asked.

  "I don't know." Valerie contemplated the workers, and the view beyond the windows of groves of trees, and green, somnolent fields. Everything looked peacefiil and ordinary, and she felt a little foolish for imagining scullduggery. "I just thought I ought to see it again before we start digging into how it works."

  They turned to walk back the way they had come. "I thought I heard Nick say he wanted to work on this one," Sophie said.

  "I suppose he will, if he can find the time."

  Sophie shook her head. "I give up. For a whole week, ever since you got back, I've been hoping for a tale of pasta and passion, and all I get is a travelogue of churches and museums and the palaces of Siena."

  Valerie glanced at her. "Why did you think there would be any more?"

  "Because you've been working up to it for months. All those intimate moments in the corridors, leaning toward each other like trees about to topple over... The intelligent staff of E8cN tends to notice things like that."

  Valerie gave a small laugh. "We didn't look like trees about to topple over."

  "How about two people having trouble staying apart? Anyway, when you flew off to Italy, we thought good things were about to happen."

  "Good things did," Valerie said, her voice low. "We had a wonderful time. We had one perfect day and night."

  "And then?"

  They reached Valerie's car and she was silent until she pulled onto the main road. "We don't see things the same way. We quarrel about something, and then we laugh and feel wonderful about each other, and then we're snapping at each other again. We were together forty-eight hours and it was like a roller coaster. Half the time I didn't like him at all and the other half I thought I might be in love with him. I never knew how I'd be feeling from one minute to the next."

  "Why, do you think? Nick's a terrific guy; I used to have fantasies about him. If we'd gotten together, I would have worked pretty hard to ignore anything I didn't like."

  "Oh, you don't know what you would have done," Valerie said a litde crossly. She drove at a sedate pace, slowing for more impatient

  drivers to pass. "It was as if we were trying to score points, to prove to each other that our way is the right way, and it always has been. I knew Nick a long time ago, in college, and we didn't see things the same way then either, and ifs as if we're still stuck there, having the same arguments we had then. I wish we could wipe out our memories and just think about now. Though I'm not sure anything would be very different. We're both so stubborn..."

  "Stubborn, but never bored."

  Valerie smiled. "A litde boredom might be a relief right now."

  "You don't mean that, not for a minute. Boredom kills everything: friendships, marriages, jobs, vacations, hobbies... even wars: when the generals get bored they sign treaties. If you and Nick strike sparks, you ought to give thanks. God, I could use some sparks with Joe; we're so predictable you'd think we were married. I can't imagine why you're fussing; you're not bored and you keep making an impression on each odier."

  "Are those the only alternatives?" Valerie asked with another smile.

  "I don't know, but what if they are and you have to choose one? How could you not choose sparks? Can you imagine never giving a damn, one way or the other, and if one of you left, the other one would hardly notice any change in the way you live?"

  Valerie thought of Carlton. When he died, her life changed because her money was gone, not because he was no longer there. It had been one of the discoveries that saddened her the most: that she could not miss him; she could only feel sorrow for an untimely death.

  She nodded, more to herself than to Sophie. "I'll have to think about that."

  Sophie's thoughts had already moved on. 'Tou two are gorgeous together, you know that? You're both beautiful and you move together like you're dancing. Things have to be awfully good between two people when they look like that; it's your inner selves speaking. If you ignore that, you risk ruining your life."

  Valerie laughed. "You're a true romantic, Sophie. It sounds so simple there's probably a hook somewhere, but I'll give it some thought. Lef s talk about Graceville, and Lily. Can we use any of the research you've done on the Bakkers and others?"

  "I don't know yet. It all comes down to money, and either they play games with money at Graceville or they don't. I'd start at the beginning, with the land for the church and the town—who bought it, how much did they pay, where'd the money come from—and I'd dig into

  Lily's background and how she's living now, and die same for die board members of die Hour of Grace Foundation. I got their names yesterday, from one of my foundation listings."

  They talked about the newspapers, magazines and television tapes they would use to get information on the members of the board, and whichever of its dealings had been public. Not many had to be; Valerie was always amazed at how much could legally be secret in what she had thought was an open society.

  When they returned to the EScN building, they went to the research department and Valerie pulled a chair to Sophie's desk. They were there for the next two days, Sophie searching board members' backgrounds while Valerie made telephone calls to realtors in the Culpeper area and the county clerk's office to see if the sale of the land had been recorded.

  "Well, now, how about this," said Sophie at last. They were eating sandwiches at her desk, and she was skimming a newspaper story on her computer screen. "Floyd Bassington, president of the board of the Hour of Grace. He was a minister in Chicago—big church, big congregation—until some guy named Olaf Massy found him in bed with Massy's wife, Evaline. She sang in the choir. No, better than that: she was choir director. Olaf went on a crusade to expose the saindy minister and found out that Bassington not only slipped in and out of a lot of beds—did I say he was married, with lots of kids.>—he'd also been embezzling over the years, a litde here, a litde there; he had about two hundred thousand bucks in his bank account. How's that for a resume for Lily's president?"

  "Was he in jail?" Valerie asked.

  Sophie read further, and shook her head. "Paid back the money, resigned from the church. His wife
divorced him. He moved to Virginia, and found grace."

  Their eyes met, and they smiled. "I'd like a copy of that story," Valerie said.

  "Sure," said Sophie. "Now for the others. Nothing crooked, I'm afraid. Vice-president: Arch Warman, president of Warman Developers and Contractors. Treasurer: Monte James, president of James Trust and Savings. They're all over the Eastern seaboard, headquartered in Baltimore."

  '7ames," Valerie repeated, and wrote it down beside Warman's name. "Sophie, can we find out who holds the mortgage on the land under Graceville?"

  "Maybe. Usually you can't. I'll check. Did you find out who bought it?"

  "Yes, it's odd. It was sold twice. The first time, when it was all small farms, the farmers sold to a Panamanian corporation called the Beauregard Development Company."

  "The what?"

  "I know, it's a strange name. Beauregard bought it for thirteen million dollars—I got that from the realtor who handled the sale—but only held it for about three months. Then it was sold again, this time without a realtor, to the Hour of Grace Foundation. And, according to the realtor, there were rumors that the Foundation paid thirty million dollars for it."

  "Thirty million?^^

  "It's only a rumor, and it has to be wrong. No one would pay that for land that was worth thirteen only three months earlier."

  "Oh, I don't know. What do religious boards know about business .>"

  "This religious board has the president of a bank as its treasurer, and the president of a construction company as its vice-president, and an embezzling minister as its president."

  Sophie nodded. "Not your typical religious group. Well, if they weren't stupid or naive, what were they?"

  "I don't know." Valerie scribbled absentmindedly on the pad in front of her. "What's the number of James Trust and Savings in Baltimore?" she asked suddenly.

  Sophie found it and gave it to her. "What are you looking for?"

  "It occurred to me they might hold the mortgage; we could get the real purchase price that way."

  "Not necessarily. And even if they do hold it, they won't tell you."

  "Mortgage department, please," Valerie said into the telephone, and, when a loan officer answered, said, "Good afternoon, this is Valerie Sterling; I'm researching a television report on the relationship of savings-and-loan institutions to nonprofit organizations, especially in rural America." She met Sophie's wide eyes with a mischievous smile. "I understand you provided financing to the Hour of Grace Foundation to buy land near Culpeper, Virginia; could you tell me something about that?"

  "It was a standard mortgage," said the loan officer. "It didn't come under the category of good works, or anything like that. The land was their collateral; it's prime land; we took no unusual risk at all."

  "And the price of the land?" Valerie asked.

  "We don't give out that information."

  Valerie cut the call short and went back to her absentminded scrib-

  bling. "The treasurer of the board gave the mortgage," she murmured. "But so what? That's not illegal." She looked at her scribbling. "Sophie. Look at this."

  Sophie craned her neck to read what Valerie had written. "Arch. The vice-president. Warman. So?"

  "Marrach. The last four letters are an anagram of Arch."

  Sophie grabbed the pad. "And the first three are in Warman." They looked at each other. "That's no coincidence," Sophie said.

  "But why do it?" Valerie asked. "Unless he wanted a separate company just to build Graceville. I don't know why he would, but that's what it looks like. So the treasurer funds it, and the vice-president builds it, and Bassington does... something. One big happy family. Interesting, but not illegal."

  Sophie gathered together the papers on her desk. "Well, let's put Arch and Monte away for now and think about—"

  "Wait a minute." Valerie looked at her, frowning. "What did you say?"

  "I said let's put Arch and Monte away—"

  'Who's Monte?"

  "James. Didn't I say that?"

  "Maybe you did; I guess I didn't hear it. Arch and Monte. Sophie, Fve heard that before. Somewhere. I remember thinking it sounded like a vaudeville act."

  "It does. But you didn't hear it from me."

  Valerie gazed unseeing at the wall of shelves piled chaotically with newspapers and magazines and annual reports. "It was in an office," she murmured. "I was standing and someone was sitting at a desk and saying something—on the telephone; she was on the telephone—saying something about a meeting." She struggled with the memory, and then she had it, all of it: part of a day she would never forget—the day Sybille fired her. She had stormed into her office to demand a different job, and Sybille had been on the telephone. / told you to schedule a board meeting for the day after tomorrow. Call Arch and Monte right now, we have to —^She had hung up when Valerie came in.

  Sybille demanding a board meeting with Arch and Monte? But last November, at Graceville, she had said she only worked for the Foundation, producing Lily's show.

  There's often a chasm, Nick had said, between the truth and what Sybille says. He also said, if there was corruption in the Hour of Grace ministry, Sybille might be involved.

  'What is it?" Sophie asked.

  Valerie told her. "There's nothing illegal about it," she said. "Though it's peculiar that she was demanding a board meeting and she's not a board member. I don't know what it means, but I think I'd better tell Nick."

  He was in New York, but as soon as he returned Valerie went to his office and told him what she and Sophie had learned. It was the first time they had seen each other since their trip to Italy, so they had had no time to discover how they would now behave together. The office made them feel formal, more self-conscious than before their trip, and Nick listened to Valerie carefully, nodding, agreeing that there seemed to be much more for them to consider than they had thought, while all the time he was waiting for a chance to say what he had been thinking about the whole time in New York. He found his chance as soon as she finished telling him all she had learned. He asked her to come to dinner the next day.

  "Chad will be there," he said with the brusqueness that came into his voice when he was tense or nervous. "Not for dinner, but before, so if you could come early, say about five, we'd both be very pleased."

  "Who does the cooking?" Valerie asked. "You or Chad?"

  "Elena," he said. "I haven't cooked much lately. But I'll cook for you, if you'll come."

  "Thank you," she replied easily. "I'd like to very much."

  Georgetown was cooler than most of Washington the next afternoon, a hot, humid Saturday, when Valerie arrived at Nick's house. It was larger than she had imagined, beautifiilly proportioned and cared for, its heavy front door and wooden shutters newly painted in a glossy black that contrasted with its mellow red brick exterior. The leafy arcade above the sloping street, the long row of gracefiil houses and old-fashioned streetlamps, the air of serene confidence that came with antiquity and wealth gave Valerie a stab of pain: all of it a reminder of what she had lost, and not so long ago that she could not recall ever}^ luxury, every small pleasure, every invisible comfort of that cushioned life. She had not visualized Nick in such surroundings.

  Chad opened the door before she rang the bell, and Valerie, about to greet him, stopped short. She had been thinking of Nick as a student and it was as if he stood before her. Of course Chad was much younger—twelve? thirteen?—but still it was as if her memories had come to life: he was almost as tall as Nick, with the same eyes, the same shock of hair, the same wonderful mouth. His skin was darker than Nick's, and his cheekbones were sharper, but the rest was the

  young, handsome, raw, eager Nick she had loved for six magic months.

  "Hi," said Chad, holding out his hand. "Nice to see you again."

  His grip was strong and his gaze direct, but Valerie felt she was being scrutinized with more intensity than was called for.

  "If s good to be here," she said, and followed Chad into the air-conditi
oned coolness of the house. It was everything she had imagined: the nobility of another age when ceilings soared, moldings were intricately carved, and rooms were harmoniously proportioned, with space for a grand piano and groupings of furniture on lustrous Oriental rugs.

  "Dad's in the kitchen," said Chad, adding confidingly, "which is really weird, 'cause he hasn't cooked since we moved here. I thought he'd forgotten how, but it smells okay so I guess we're safe."

  Valerie smiled at the love in his voice, mixed with the attempt to seem critical and worldly wise, and she was still smiling as Chad led her into the kitchen. Nick watched her walk toward him, smiling, her beauty glowing in the sunlit room, and he went to meet her. He felt as if his body was leaning forward, ready to embrace her.

  "Hello, Nick," Valerie said. She wore a peasant skirt and a white blouse with a low neck; her hair was tied back with a ribbon, leaving the beauty of her face unadorned, as if in a Renaissance painting.

  "Welcome." His hands on her shoulders, he kissed her lighdy on the cheek. Valerie felt herself lean toward him, and then she thought of Sophie—... like two trees about to topple over —and consciously stood very straight. She looked around, trying to think of something to say. 'What an amazing kitchen," she said. Nick had had it remodeled as a wonder of modern technology, and she focused on a Cuisinart and a KitchenAid mixer, neither of which she had ever used, admiring their mysterious, sleek design.

  "I once dreamed of a kitchen like this," Nick said, "but this is really Elena's; she helped design it. I'm just about done here; I've delegated Chad to entertain you while I finish up. There are drinks in the garden, unless it's too warm. You choose."

  "I'd like to see the garden."

  "Come on," said Chad. "I'll tell you what's there; I help Manuel do it."

  "Who's Manuel?" Valerie asked.

  "Elena's husband."

  "And Elena is the cook."

  "She's sort of everything. She cooks and cleans house and grocery-

  shops and sews on buttons... like a mother, you know, only she isn't. Not mine, anyway. She is a mother, though; she has Angelina, that's her daughter; she's eight. Here's the garden."