The Arrangement

by Suzanne Forster

  In a matter of moments, Julia had the doctor’s office on her cell and an emergency appointment for Bret later that day.

  “Where’s your sister?” she said as she hung up the phone.

  “How would I know? The way she skulks around I barely know she’s in the house. Has it ever occurred to you that she may have suffered brain damage in that accident? She’s different. Hell, she’s creepy, and you don’t even seem to notice.”

  Julia stuffed her phone back in her purse. “I wonder what I would do if the members of this family ever supported each other. Probably die from the shock. Is there anything a mother loves more than to have her children splashing around in a cesspool of animosity?”

  “Maybe we needed better examples, Mom.”

  Julia was torn between killing him and protecting him. This morning, the darker impulse was winning. He hated her, and at moments like this she hated him, too. But she never stopped caring about him. She couldn’t help it. Despite everything, he was her child, and blood bonds were powerful. Her mother had adored him, too, though she’d known that to hand him a fund worth tens of millions would have been ruinous.

  “I need to find Alison,” she said. “I’m taking her and Rebecca shopping this morning. I really wanted it to be just Alison and me, a mother and daughter thing, but Rebecca insisted on coming, for some reason.”

  Julia picked up her new bracelet, snapped it on and held out her hand, admiring it. She adjusted her wedding rings, lining them up. “Do you think Rebecca might be jealous of Alison?”

  Bret groaned out laughter. “What’s there to be jealous of? Rebecca has the hots for me.”

  Julia gave her son a sharp glance. “What does that mean?”

  He winced and pressed the cold beer to his head. “She wants me, but she can’t have me. I’d never mess with the help. What are you going shopping for?”

  It didn’t escape Julia that he’d changed the subject, but she wasn’t too worried. Obviously little Rebecca could take care of herself. “Since when do I need a reason to go shopping?”

  Bret glanced over at the door to the terrace, and Julia followed his gaze. She was startled to see Alison standing in the open doorway, wearing a loosely fitting peasant dress. Her skirt was wet and her feet sandy, and her eyes were averted. She looked sullen and achingly beautiful, a waif with incredible bones.

  Julia’s heart skipped painfully. What she would have given to look like that, on any day of her life. Alison was perfection, even when she was trying hard not to be.

  The poor child also looked as if she needed a hug, and that wasn’t Alison at all. Julia felt a disturbing twinge, almost a premonition. Was Bret right? It was hard to imagine her prissy daughter wading in the surf and letting the wind whip her into this state. Alison had changed in ways that Julia couldn’t understand or relate to. But why wouldn’t she have? All that trauma and surgery, all that time with her suffocating husband.

  Bret cracked the beer and began to drink it. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked Alison.

  Julia cut him off. “Are you all right, dear? You do look a bit disheveled.”

  Alison glanced down, taking in the mess that was her skirt and her grimy feet. It didn’t seem to register. “Nothing,” she said. “Walking.”

  “Is there a problem?” Julia persisted. “You and Andrew?”

  Alison looked startled. “Why would you ask that?”

  “No reason. It’s just that I didn’t see either one of you this morning for breakfast, and I wondered—”

  “Well, stop wondering,” Alison snapped. “Andrew and I are fine.”

  From his vantage point, Bret shot Julia a knowing look. How’s that for creepy? it seemed to say. But Julia didn’t agree. Churlish behavior wasn’t out of character for Alison. She’d had a mercurial personality even as a young girl. With family, she’d had a tendency to be high-handed and demanding, as if life owed her something just because she was so beautiful. To the rest of the world, she was the fairy princess, the debutante. Even her adoring grandmother, Eleanor, hadn’t known about Alison’s darker side.

  Both of Julia’s children had been adept at hiding their private selves, and maybe Bret was right that they’d learned by example. Julia sometimes felt as if she’d grown up incubating a pack of demons in the dark corners of her psyche, and she wasn’t entirely sure who to thank for that. She’d never been abused or grievously neglected. Her mother and father had been preoccupied with their charitable work, but they’d always insisted on quality time with their only daughter, had always drummed their values into Julia’s head. It was just that their standards were so impossibly high—and nothing but the best had ever been good enough.

  You were a paragon or you were nothing.

  Over the years, Julia had realized that the closer she got to paragon status the more she felt like nothing—and the more she felt as if she was living in two different realities, neither entirely of her own creating.

  Perhaps she had passed on her own peculiar brand of schizophrenia to her children, because Bret didn’t seem to be dealing at all well with reality these days. He refused to see the truth about his sister—and worse, he seemed unusually agitated by her presence. Julia would have been tempted to think this had something to do with the trust that Alison had walked away from, except that Bret knew the money passed from woman to woman on the Driscoll side. He wasn’t in the line of succession, and Julia had taken pains to make sure he understood that. She’d even had one of the family’s very accommodating attorneys talk to him.

  As Julia stood there, looking at her two children, driven apart by their rivalries and yet so alike in stature and temperament, she felt another jolt of apprehension. But this was physical, as if a cosmic hand had reached down, grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and given her a shake.

  Suddenly her heart was racing and her thoughts whipping. She could smell fire and hear a child crying. The sound came from somewhere nearby, a baby wailing as if it were dying, and the piercing sharpness of its cries made her blood run cold. Something was wrong, and she had caused it. She had allowed herself to look back, like Lot’s wife—a terrible mistake. Turning into a pillar of salt was nothing compared to the devastation she had just glimpsed.

  20

  Andrew’s morning had been a bitch. It had started with an urgent voice-mail message from his assistant about problems with a rock concert in Mexico. After he’d returned Stacy’s call and put out the fire, he’d taken care of some nagging details that had to do with his own fallback plan. He’d come up with the plan months ago, but had hoped he would never have to use it. Now, he had no choice. Tony Bogart was tailing him.

  Andrew had spotted him this morning when he’d left the compound and driven into town. He’d managed to lose him, but he had a bad feeling that Bogart was closing in. Maybe the G-man wasn’t bluffing. Andrew had assumed the newspaper threat had come from one of the Fairmonts, but Bogart couldn’t be overlooked. If he had evidence, he could be waiting for the right moment to blow the lid off—which meant Andrew had to move. Now.

  He’d used up the rest of the morning hunting for a needle named Josephine Hazelton in a haystack roughly the size of San Diego County. Unfortunately, no one had been able to tell him anything more than he already knew about Marnie’s Gramma Jo, but everyone had expressed concern.

  It seemed she was a loner, well-liked by those who knew her, but close to no one but her missing granddaughter. Andrew had not wanted to be obvious by asking too many questions. He’d already picked up on the avid curiosity among the locals about Alison’s condition and her return to Mirage Bay. When questioned, he’d said it was a family reunion, long overdue. But some of the looks he’d gotten had made him wonder what rumors were circulating about the Fairmonts. He knew from Alison that the family had always been fodder for gossip, which was why he might have to hire a discreet P.I. after all. A true missing-person’s search was beyond his capability, and that’s what this seemed to be turning into.

  And
then there was the other reason he’d left the house at dawn. He’d needed some time to clear his head and try to figure out what had happened between him and Marnie last night. She’d caught him by surprise in the shower, and maybe his guard had been down. All he knew was it would have taken a much better man than him to resist her.

  She’d insisted she was all right afterward, but she’d seemed shaken and hadn’t wanted to talk about what they’d done, so he hadn’t pushed it. She’d rolled to her side, as if she were sleeping, but he’d been awake all night. Their sex had opened floodgates for him. His body may have been designed to do the penetrating, but something about hers had touched him more deeply than he wanted anything to go. He’d lain there, vibrating, haunted by it.

  He needed to let it go now, but he was finding it impossible to get back to whatever “normal” had been for him and Marnie, impossible not to think of her in sexual terms. And neither one of them needed the situation to get more complicated.

  As he pulled through the gates of Sea Clouds and parked the car in the grand portico, he saw that Julia’s Mercedes and the sedan Bret drove were both gone. The house felt empty as Andrew let himself in. His first stop was the kitchen where he found a note from Julia, explaining that she, Alison and Rebecca had gone shopping, and that Bret was at the doctor’s.

  Andrew checked his watch. Julia’s note said the women would be back later that afternoon, which would give him plenty of time, except that he didn’t know how long Bret’s appointment might take. It was ten-thirty now, and there wasn’t a minute to waste. He had a unique opportunity to search the entire house—and he knew exactly where he was going first.

  He reached into the coin pocket of his jeans and touched the fake amethyst gemstone, making sure it was still there. He knew what he was searching for, but that wasn’t what had his adrenaline pumping. He’d been waiting six months for this.

  Julia’s office was immaculate. That was no surprise. Everything else about her was, too, at least to the eye. The decor was similar to the rest of the house—shimmering marble floors with tiles so precisely laid you could barely detect the seams. Palladian doors led to the terrace overlooking the ocean, and everywhere, elegant palms threw fronds that touched the floor.

  Her desk was an antique secretary with a glass top that reflected Andrew’s pensive expression with as much detail as a mirror. He couldn’t imagine getting any actual work done in a showplace like this, but it was clear that she was a busy woman. Her appointment book was tightly scheduled. He also noticed that she’d circled certain months at the top of the pages. The current month, July, then February, April, August and November.

  It may have caught his attention because of the circled words in the blackmail note he’d received. A coincidence? He didn’t see anything to explain it. Most of the copious notes she’d made in the appointment book had to do with her schedule, but there was something printed in the top margin of the month for July that he didn’t understand. The letters B.C. were followed by an arrow pointing to the letter S, all in caps.

  Andrew made a mental note of it and kept looking.

  The inner workings of her desk were not immaculate, he discovered. The drawers were jammed with bulging file folders, mostly filled with newspaper clippings of her accomplishments, hard copies of correspondence and financial records going back several years. She also had a collection of Montblanc pens and enough pricey office paraphernalia to open her own stationery store.

  The drawers were packed, but not messy. They looked tight, tense and disorganized. Like the woman. Julia did seem tightly strung beneath all the makeup and designer clothes—one twist away from snapping like a watch spring.

  Among other things he was looking for self-sticking mailing labels, the kind that were computer-generated. He found a rollout cart, designed to match the desk, that housed a laptop computer and a printer. No labels, however, nor had he seen any indication since he got to Sea Clouds that Julia subscribed to the Mirage Bay newspaper, but it couldn’t have been that difficult to get a hold of a six-month old issue.

  He didn’t bother searching her equally immaculate bedroom. He went straight to her dressing room, which was part of the huge walk-in closet. He checked her shoes first and found several pairs studded with fake gemstones, but none with a missing amethyst. Some of her clothing also had gemstones glued to the fabric. One casual top had amethysts, but they looked intact.

  He turned his attention to the mirrored vanity table, wasting no time on anything else. The drawers yielded nothing but an array of cosmetics and accessories, but the framed mirror had a secret. One of the rosebuds in the lower right corner of the gilded frame was actually a button. Andrew pressed it, and the entire mirror slid up to reveal a home safe.

  He was well-versed with the various options of home safes. He had one hidden in the wall paneling of his closet in Long Island, and he’d recommended them to his clients in the music business.

  Right now Andrew was looking for any evidence that Julia or someone in this house had been involved in trying to frame him. A copy of the insurance policy on Alison with him as beneficiary was the sort of document people kept in a home safe, but he was no lock pick, and the safes were impossible to open without a combination.

  He glanced at his watch, aware that he had more ground to cover and was running out of time. He gave Julia’s walk-in closet, her bedroom and her office a last visual once-over. On his way out, he looked again at her desk and her appointment book. He wasn’t quite sure what he’d found here, but he was going to commit it to memory for future reference.

  Bret Fairmont’s bedroom had its share of surprises, but no way did Andrew expect to find a cache of women’s clothing in his closet. The room was situated in a second-floor corner of the house that Bret had managed to make darker than doom with light-blocking shades. It could have been a sports bar with all the neon liquor signs on the wall; however, there wasn’t a hint of sports memorabilia to be found.

  Evidently Bret wasn’t a sports fan, nor was he into cars or any of the other things that most twenty-five-year-old males liked, although the computer workstation wedged in the corner against the shaded windows looked as if it was loaded with high-tech equipment.

  The room wasn’t as immaculate as Julia’s, but there wasn’t much out of place. Like mother, like son? A scary thought. Andrew did a quick search of the workstation, but found nothing to implicate Bret in the newspaper threat. That didn’t surprise him. Bret would hardly have left evidence lying around, knowing that Andrew and Alison were coming for a visit. Time was tight, so he went straight to the walk-in closet, which was also neat and orderly. Dress shirts hung on an upper rack, slacks on the lower. A rotating device displayed belts and ties, and clear acrylic containers held folded sweaters. Even his casual clothes were sorted and stacked—jeans, T-shirts, shorts.

  Bret was a mess, but his personal space didn’t seem to reflect that.

  Andrew searched for a safe first, but came up empty-handed. He had better luck with the hanging garment bags. The second was full of women’s clothes. Andrew was looking at frilly dresses, skimpy skirts and tops, high-heel shoes, even women’s underwear, and something that might have been a hairpiece. He didn’t find anything with amethysts, but Bret definitely had a few fake-gem-studded items in his collection. The first thing that came to mind was that Bret was a cross-dresser, except that one of the blouses had Alison’s initials embroidered on the pocket.

  Andrew didn’t know what to make of it. Were these all Alison’s things? Sibling rivalry run totally amok? He checked his watch. He’d been here fifteen minutes, but hadn’t found what he was looking for. Maybe there was still time to check out the computer.

  He saw the framed posters as he came out of the closet. Three of them hung on the opposite wall, each lit from below by a small spotlight. They looked like print ads, blown up to poster size, and the model in each of them was Bret, looking rakishly handsome and masculine. Apparently he’d been serious enough about modeling to have
some portfolio shots taken. It really was impossible to imagine this guy wearing a frilly dress.

  Andrew turned his attention to the computer—and discovered another facet of Bret’s personality when he touched the computer mouse. The monitor must have been in sleep mode because it flashed on immediately. Andrew’s jaw went slack at the pictures on the screen.

  Pornography. Hard-core. Women with men, other women, mixed groups, and some very friendly animals.

  Andrew clicked on Favorites and the list that dropped from the menu bar was almost entirely of X-rated sites. No wonder Bret kept it dark in the room.

  He had an Internet porn collection worthy of a true freak. But he’d made no real attempt to hide what was on the screen. Sleep mode meant the screen went dark after a period of time. An accidental brush of the monitor could activate it, or even the vibrations of someone walking into the room.

  Andrew tried the workstation’s top drawer and found it locked. The second, deeper drawer was half filled with files in hanging folders. Behind the folders were stacks of magazines and videos that looked like a mix of porn and legit films.

  Andrew was working with a paper clip to jimmy open the top drawer when he heard footsteps coming down the hallway. The house’s marble floors let you hear someone coming for miles, and he was back inside the closet before the door opened. But he’d left the closet door ajar, which allowed him to see Bret enter, kick the door shut behind him and drop his jacket on the nearest chair.

  He was sporting a good-size bandage above his temple, and he may have had a black eye; it was hard to tell in the dark room. Andrew was curious how he got the injuries, but he was more interested in what Bret intended to do at the computer.