Then, perhaps, she could start again with him. She had no real competition: the only women she had ever seen him with or heard him mention were Marigold and Louisa Hayward, and they were no competition. Louisa was the sort of woman a man kept around because there would be no danger of becoming involved with her in any way other than sexually, and judging by what Jake had said about diamond bracelets, Marigold was the same.
Her worst enemy was her own past. It might take him a while to absorb what she had told him, till he could see her again clearly, without all those bitter memories clouding his vision. But he had to do it, he had to.
Somewhere inside her Vanessa knew that if there was going to be any hope for her, Jake would, in some way, come to her this weekend. Even if only to ask her a question or to rail at her for her submissive stupidity.
She must be here when he reached for her, because Jake Conrad wasn't the sort of man to reach a second time.
There was plenty to keep her busy inside for a weekend. Vanessa pottered and cleaned and polished, and painted the bathroom a lighter, because dark rooms depressed her.
Her confident anticipation peaked late Saturday afternoon and began a slow decline. By Sunday afternoon she had lost hope.
He was not going to come to her.
* * *
Monday morning she was late leaving the house for work, and the mail had arrived by the time she got downstairs.
There was an official-looking letter from a development company: her former landlord had sold the property and her rent was now payable to the new owners. From October first, would she please make her cheques payable to Conrad Property Development Limited and send them to the above address?
Blackness pressed in on Vanessa for a moment and she clutched the wall for support: Conrad Property Development was a name she had seen many times on Concorp letterhead. It was part of Conrad Corporation.
Jake had not forgiven her, hadn't come to terms with what she had told him. He was still out for revenge, and she felt the net of his power drawing tighter and tighter around her.
* * *
At five past one on an October afternoon Vanessa walked off the elevator at the floor that held the Concorp executive offices, said an unremarkable hello to one or two people and moved straight to Jean's unoccupied post outside Jake's office.
Glancing around with a little flutter of fear, she moved with outward assurance to tap on Jake's office door. If he were inside she would say she was looking for Jean; but there was no one inside. Vanessa slipped silently in and shut the door, then glanced around the room to be sure there was no one lurking in the corners. Then she moved to the desk, pulled open the right-hand lower drawer she had seen him take the file from.
There were a number of file folders, all neatly inside green hanging files; her eye was drawn immediately to the only one with a blank label. Her heart beating wildly, Vanessa pulled out the buff folder and dropped it on the desk.
The first item was the photostat of the management contract. She shut the drawer with a bang, pushed the file into her leather design portfolio and crossed to the door in a space of seconds. In another few seconds she was in the elevator; minutes later she was in the street. She took a deep shuddering breath and hugged the portfolio case tightly under her arm.
Every way she turned, she was fighting for her life.
* * *
Vanessa pulled the sitting-room draperies against the twilight and closed the door. She felt threatened and insecure, like a criminal who doesn't know whether or not the police are chasing him.
Her portfolio case lay beside her on the couch, and Vanessa was as frightened of it as if it did contain the snake of her dream.
She suddenly desperately wanted a cup of coffee, but she pushed the need impatiently aside, recognizing it as her mind's delaying tactic. She didn't want to know what it was that Jake had thought so important; she would have liked nothing better than to bury her head and forget it.
But it was more than business ruin that threatened her: if Jake drove Number 24 into bankruptcy she would be forced to leave the country, for all the reasons he had mentioned.
Leaving the country meant not getting another chance with Jake. Her happiness now hinged on whether she could make Number 24 a success. She had only one tiny slim chance with Jake now: that time would heal.
She could buy time with Number 24. Vanessa zipped open the portfolio and reached through sheaves of sketches of the summer line down to the thick file deep inside. Please, God, let it be something she could fight!
He had copies not only of her management contract but also of the debenture agreement and the lease of the premises at Number 24. Vanessa turned them all over. There was nothing to be gained from reading them again, though she might take them to David and see if he could find some other danger she wasn't aware of or some loophole that would save her....
Next came the letter that had been written by Conrad Corporation to the Canadian consulate in New York, asking that she be granted an immediate temporary visa in Canada. Almost unconsciously she noted the date: June twenty-fifth. She had been granted her six-month temporary visa on June twenty-ninth. Within about two months she would have to fly down to Seattle to apply for a permanent one.
Vanessa bit her lip. Time was so short. She did not believe that Jake meant to let her go on and build Number 24 into a real success before he destroyed her. He had the power to do it at any time. Why would he wait?
I'll write my own letter from Number 24, she resolved now. Or I'll get Robert to write it. And I'll go down to Seattle this month, before Jake expects me to go....
A copy of the letter she had received on Monday, informing her that the apartment she lived in and loved so much now belonged to Jake... but that could not be his trump card, once she knew about it. Had the dream been wrong? She laughed a little, feeling foolish. Since when had her dreams been oracles?
A list of names and addresses, many of them looking Chinese, all in Vancouver. Vanessa wrinkled her forehead in perplexity. None of the names meant a thing to her. She couldn't recall ever having heard them before. She turned the page. On the next sheet were only two names and addresses: Ronnie Pardeh and Mrs. V. Spears, both in Vancouver.
These names seemed familiar, but where...? Vanessa's eyes flew open in startled surprise. Of course! Ronnie and Mrs. Spears were the sub-contractors who did outside work for Number 24! Then what were the other names? The home sewers they used?
What on earth was this?
Vanessa's heart was beating now in loud urgent thumps as she turned to the next sheet of paper. It was covered with typing. At the top of the page a line of capitals read, "TRANSCRIPT OF A CONVERSATION WITH MRS. WAN CHU...."
A hand seemed to close on her throat, cutting off breath. Vanessa shut her eyes for a moment, not wanting to read. But she had to read, and she forced her eyes open and onto the page: "I make lining for inside skirt... they bring me pieces all cut out, I sew here, and here, then I turn this like this... I start work eight o'clock, I work to late, very late at night, sometimes ten-twelve hour a day... that's right, that's right, about forty cent an hour... I can't get other work. I got children at home, I no speak good English... I don't tell anybody I work like this, they find out they take away welfare money...."
There were four statements in all, and they all said much the same thing. One woman had her three children help her with the pinning and folding and counting. One still had not paid for the sewing machine she had bought on time in order to get the work, and the money she earned wasn't enough to cover the monthly payments on the machine. All the women were supplementing either welfare money or income from part-time work that wasn't sufficient to live on.
Doggedly Vanessa read the statements through and turned the last page. Underneath were several photostated pages that seemed to be an excerpt from the federal statute governing minimum wage in Canada.
After that there was only one more page, and it was almost blank. First there was a woman's name, and
then, "c/o the fifth estate," with a post-office-box number in Toronto.
The name meant nothing to her, although after the impact of what she had just read Vanessa felt wooden, as though her brain were hardly functioning. And what was the fifth estate? The fourth estate she thought was journalism, but she always forgot what the first three were—the clergy, the nobility and... the law, perhaps? Or was government in there somewhere?
She had never heard of a fifth estate. Vanessa looked at the printed letters on the page. They were beginning to swim before her eyes. Maybe it was a secret society, like the Freemasons or the Rosicrucians. Maybe they were putting vengeful curses on her every night in a secret ritual, at the behest of Brother Jake Conrad.
Or maybe this was a secret pipeline to the government for anonymous tip-offs about lawbreakers. She could imagine thousands of dirty little white envelopes, and inside each the scrawled name of someone who wasn't paying his or her fair share of income tax—and on one of them her own name, but her name wouldn't be scrawled, it would be written in Jake Conrad's sharp clear handwriting, and underneath, "Violating federal wage statutes."
She began to see how love could turn to hatred. That primal force in her that would have destroyed the world for Jake Conrad might easily turn its dark necessity toward rage. She began to see how Jake had ended up hating her... by how easily she might end up hating him.
She had to think. She had to think what to do. Leaving the file on the sofa, Vanessa got up and went to the kitchen. It was dark now; she had been reading by the light of one small lamp, and she turned the lights on as she went.
In the kitchen she filled the electric kettle and plugged it in. She was still not used to the appliance; she marvelled every time she used it. The first one she had seen had been Maria's, the day she moved into this apartment. Maria's emergency moving supplies had included mugs, coffee and an electric kettle.
"Never seen one before?" Maria had repeated. "What do you boil water in, then?"
"In a kettle on the stove top," Vanessa had replied, and after she finally convinced Maria that most Americans did the same, Maria laughed incredulously. "You mean to tell me that there is a great untapped market of 100 million American households, none of which has an electric kettle? My gosh, someone should tell Jake. He'd make a fortune!"
Vanessa never told Jake; she'd supposed he knew. Anyway, somebody, somewhere, surely, had already tried to sell electric kettles in the United States on a large scale.
Or maybe that was the difference between millionaires and ordinary people: perhaps millionaires tried the ideas that ordinary people assumed had already been tried.
Vanessa unplugged the kettle and made coffee, adding larger amounts of sugar and milk than usual, as comfort. Then she went to the bedroom and undressed, slipping on her black robe. She couldn't get her brain to function. She kept thinking that she had to think, but her mind was like a mule: no matter how she whipped it, it couldn't be forced toward that dark abyss.
Child labour. Slave labour. She was exploiting the weakest of society in order to make money, like any nineteenth-century capitalist. "Well, that's three quarts of milk I wouldn't be able to give my kids otherwise, isn't it?" one of the women had said, in response to the interviewer's comment that the young single mother of two worked all day for enough money to buy three quarts of milk. She wondered if the interviewer had been Jake.
Vanessa's mind balked again, and numbly she carried her cup back into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa.
She stared at the papers. She was a criminal, wasn't she? Was she? Morally she was a criminal, but legally? God, what were the penalties for being in contravention of the minimum-wage laws? Was it a criminal or a civil offence? A slow prickling fear began to creep over her. What had Jake said all those months ago? "The laws are there... half the population could be in prison if they were enforced."
He would want that, wouldn't he? she thought grimly. That would be the ultimate revenge: have her locked up in prison. Yes, that would be the kind of thing Jake would think of. That would be why he called this "the best of all." She would be condemned to hell by her own actions. She would not even be able to blame him. That would make the revenge perfect.
My God, she thought, prison. Suppose it really came to that? How could she bear that? How did anyone bear it? Her heart began to thump frighteningly. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Or maybe they would simply deport her as an undesirable. Then, if Canada's laws were anything like the States', she would never be allowed back into the country. That would suit Jake just as well, she supposed: either way he wouldn't be seeing her again unless he came to her.
He had told her he hated her, but somehow she hadn't believed him. She had believed him angry, believed she had hurt him unbearably, believed he had long ago stopped loving her. But even though she had thought she was accepting that he hated her, even though intellectually she had accepted it, emotionally she had refused to believe it, had rejected the reality of it.
Now she had to believe it. Vanessa looked down at the proof of his hatred, the trap so delicately baited, so carefully laid, the evidence so painstakingly gathered, lethal.
A kind of blackness was filling her, a hurting horrid blackness that she couldn't remember ever feeling before. Jake hated her. She couldn't evade the realization any longer. He hated her, wanted to hurt her, wanted her to suffer the worst human-devised torment possible in the so-called civilized western world. He wanted her to be branded a criminal, to go to prison. He wanted her to be beaten and spat on and maltreated and shackled whenever a tormentor felt the whim. He wanted her life to be permanently blighted, wanted her scarred. Believe it, she told herself, forcing herself to accept it. He wants this.
Lou Standish had told her about prisons once, when she had asked him why he had abandoned criminal law and moved into corporate. He had told her of the hopeless waste of humanity, the irreversible personality damage that such degradation caused. He had discovered that he could do nothing to change it, and he was, he had said, too much of a coward to face that information day after day.
After that Vanessa had never again hoped anyone would go to prison. She knew it was a nearly insoluble problem. She knew that there were some people who couldn't be left free in society, but she could not be vengeful enough to wish to subject a human being to that.
But Jake Conrad was wishing that on her. He had not engineered it—she had given him the opportunity on a plate—but he was prepared to make use of it.
Every time she thought of it, it was as though a bludgeon fell on her heart. Nothing had ever hurt her like this, not the death of her mother or her father, not the pain of her wedding day, nor anything in the long years since. Not even the moment when she had heard that Jace was dead.
There was a sudden knock at the door at the bottom of the stairs, and Vanessa made a quick instinctive move toward the incriminating papers beside her, her heart beating in her mouth. Then she laughed and forced herself to relax. It could only be the downstairs tenant, since anyone else—even the police—would have had to ring the outside doorbell.
She didn't know her neighbour downstairs very well, except to know that he had two beautiful pedigreed cats named Barney and Jezebel and that he was a private person and did something bookish for a living. She had spoken to him briefly once, on a day when Barney had come up for a visit and stayed the whole day.
Vanessa jumped up, pulling the terry robe more snugly around her. She glanced around the room, wondering if Barney had come up without her noticing, then padded barefoot down the stairs.
The door opened rather awkwardly outward, and Vanessa pushed it slowly, in case she caught her visitor behind it.
But she needn't have worried: her visitor knew enough to stand to one side, and his dark overpowering shape filled the opening immediately.
Jake.
Chapter 16
Vanessa tried to pull the door shut, but Jake slipped his shoulder inside with a violent move that made the han
dle fly out of her grasp. The door hit the wall with a loud bang, and Jake started up the steps toward her.
She flew at him like a wild animal whose lair is invaded, feeling as though she must protect her home from him at all costs. The force and unexpectedness of her attack drove him across the small foyer and up against the entrance door, but she was hampered by the full sleeves and long skirt of her robe, and he was stronger.
They fought, extraordinarily, in a grunting silence, neither of them saying a word until, having forced her back up the stairs, he held her heaving body at the top.
"Get out of my house!" she wailed, her voice a long high animal cry interrupted by a sobbing gasp for the air she needed. "Get out."
"No," he said flatly, his breathing just as erratic, and then he loosened his clasp to let her go. Without a second's hesitation she raised both arms and thudded them against his chest to push him downstairs. Jake caught the railing to regain his balance, then lurched forward, grabbing her angrily and forcing her around the gallery and into the sitting room, where a push sent her headlong onto the sofa.
It was insane, the rage they ignited in each other. Vanessa glared up at him through the tangle of hair spilling over her face, aware but uncaring that her robe had pulled open over her breasts and that her long legs were uncovered. She clawed her hair savagely off her face, her burning stare not leaving his.
"I'd like to kill you!" she rasped.
"I'd like to kill you, too," said Jake, breathing with exertion and glaring down at her. "Little hell-cat."
There was tension humming in the air between them, as though that violent confrontation had turned on a distant power source that now gripped them both in its heavy field. With trembling, clumsy fingers Vanessa pulled the black robe over her breasts and legs, helplessly watching his eyes watching her every move.
"What do you want?" she demanded, her tongue feeling thick in her mouth.
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