Hot Shot

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  "Your mother left some earrings here."

  "Earrings? Might they be blue?"

  "Yes. They're sapphires. Why? Have you seen them?"

  "Yesterday I saw Mother put some earrings in that bowl on the mantel."

  Joel went over to the bowl and pulled out the sapphires. He smiled at her. Her lips curled in response. It was a trembling, uncertain attempt at a smile, but it was a smile nonetheless.

  "What a good girl you are," he said softly. "What a very good girl." And then he hugged her.

  Without either of them realizing it, six-year-old Susannah had taken the first step toward becoming the efficient wife that Joel Faulconer so badly needed.

  Chapter 2

  The next year was magical. Joel legally adopted her so that she was now his real daughter-no longer Susannah Lydiard, but Susannah Faulconer. She went to school for the first time, and the teacher praised her because she was the smartest student in the class. She stopped wetting the bed and began to smile more. Everyone except her mother seemed to like her.

  Although Susannah tried hard to please her mother, nothing seemed to work. She kept herself as neat as a shiny new penny and did everything that was asked of her, but Kay still complained.

  "Don't sneak up behind me like that!" Kay shrieked at least once a day. "I've told you a hundred times! It gives me the creeps!"

  Susannah perfected a quiet little cough when her mother was around so Kay would always know she was there.

  Kay liked Paige much more than she liked Susannah-not that Susannah could really blame her. Paige was so adorable that Susannah immediately made herself a willing slave to her baby half sister. She fetched toys for her, entertained her when she was bored, and placated her when she had a temper tantrum. The sight of her sister's chubby pink face crumpled in tears was more than she could bear.

  "You're spoiling her," Kay complained one afternoon as she looked up from the society pages and flicked her cigarette ash. "You shouldn't give her everything she wants."

  Susannah reluctantly withdrew her new Barbie doll from Paige's destructive grasp. Paige's blue eyes darkened and she began to howl in protest. The howls grew louder as she ignored all of Susannah's attempts to distract her with other toys. Finally, the newspaper snapped closed.

  "For God's sake!" Kay screeched. "Let her play with your Barbie. If she breaks it, I'll buy you another one."

  Only her father remained immune to Paige's charms. "Paige has to learn that she can't have everything she wants," he told Susannah in his most severe voice after observing several of these exchanges. "You need to start exercising some judgment. God knows your mother won't."

  Susannah promised him she would try to do better, and the very next day she walked out of the room when Paige threw a temper tantrum, even though it nearly broke her heart.

  By the time Susannah had finished first grade, the wounds inside her were beginning to mend. Ironically, Kay's criticism proved to be nearly as healing as Joel's affection. From Kay Susannah learned that she wouldn't be shoved in a closet simply because her mother didn't like her. As the world became a safer place that summer, she gradually began to relax her diligence and behave like a normal child.

  It was a terrible mistake.

  Falcon Hill was set at the end of a long tree-bordered drive sealed off at the entrance with iron gates. In the late afternoon when the adults gathered on the terrace behind the house for martinis, Susannah developed the habit of wandering down the drive to the gates where she played with a doll or climbed up on the filigreed ironwork to extend her view. After having spent so many years being restricted to prescribed walks around the same city block, she found her new freedom dazzling.

  She was jumping rope at the bottom of the drive one June afternoon when the balloon man appeared. Even though she was seven years old, jumping rope was a new skill for her-one requiring all her concentration-so at first she didn't see him. The soles of her leather sandals scuffed on the blacktop as she counted softly under her breath. Her fine auburn hair, neatly secured back from her face with a pair of barrettes shaped like cocker spaniels, lifted off her shoulders each time the rope snapped.

  When she finally looked up and saw the balloon man, she didn't find his presence along the narrow residential road unusual. A magician had entertained at Paige's birthday party, and an Easter Bunny had personally delivered their baskets. California was an enchanted place where all sorts of magical things could happen.

  Tossing down her jump rope, she stepped up on the bottom rung of the gate and watched his approach.

  "Balloons for free!" the man called as he came nearer.

  He was wearing dusty brown shoes along with a workman's gray pants and gray shirt. Unlike a workman, however, his face was covered by a merry clown mask with a cherry nose and fuzzy purple hair.

  "Balloons for free! They never pop, they never stop. Best balloons around."

  Balloons that didn't pop? Susannah's eyes widened in amazement. She hated the angry noise balloons made when they broke, and she was entranced with the idea of possessing one that wouldn't frighten her.

  As the man approached, she pushed a small hand through the fence and, gathering her courage, said, "Could I please have one of your free balloons, sir?"

  He didn't seem to hear her, "Balloons for free. They never pop, they never stop. All my balloons for free."

  "Excuse me," she repeated politely. "Might I have a balloon."

  He still didn't look at her. Maybe he couldn't see her through his clown mask, she thought.

  "All my balloons for free," he chanted. "Come and follow me."

  Follow him? Although no one had ever spoken to her about it, she wasn't certain she was permitted beyond the gates. She gazed longingly at the multicolored bundle of balloons dancing on their strings, and their beauty made her feel giddy.

  "All my balloons for free. Come and follow me."

  The balloon man's chant seemed to sing in her blood. Her parents were drinking martinis on the terrace, and by the time she ran back to ask for permission, the balloon man would be gone. It seemed silly to lose her chance to own one of these magical balloons, especially since she was certain her father wouldn't mind. He kept telling her to have fun and not to worry so much.

  "All my balloons for free. Come and follow me."

  She pulled the gate key from its hiding place in a little tin box tucked inside one of the stone urns. Precious seconds elapsed while she fit it into the lock. "Wait," she called out, afraid the balloon man would disappear. She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and concentrated on making the lock work. The key finally turned. Planting the heels of her sandals firmly on the blacktop, she dragged open the gate far enough to slip through.

  She felt enormously pleased with herself as she began running beside the high row of hedges that had been planted next to the fence to give the estate privacy from the road. "Please wait for me!" she cried.

  It was a warm June day. The hem of her bright yellow sundress slapped her legs and her hair skipped out behind her head. In the distance the balloons bobbed on their strings, gay splashes of color spangled against the open sky. She laughed at the beauty of them, at the distant music of the balloon man's cries, at the joyous feeling of being a child and running free along the narrow road. Her laughter sounded strange and wonderful to her ears. Although she was too young to articulate it, the heavy weight of her past no longer seemed so burdensome. She felt happy, secure, and wonderfully carefree.

  She was still laughing when a strange man jumped out from a stand of sycamores and grabbed her.

  Fear coagulated in her throat, and she made a horrible animal sound as his fingers dug into her arms. He had a big, fleshy nose and a bad smell. She tried to scream for her father, but before she could utter a sound, another man-the balloon man-came up beside her and pressed his hand over her mouth. Just before he covered her with a blanket, he yanked off his mask and she caught a glimpse of his face, as thin and sly as the head of a fox.

  Th
ey shoved her down on the floor of a paneled van. One of them kicked her and told her to be quiet. The heavy weave of the blanket snagged a cocker spaniel barrette and pulled a clump of her fine hair from its roots. She bit through her bottom lip to keep from crying out. The heat inside the blanket was suffocating and her cramped position agonizing. But it was fear rather than pain that finally forced her into unconsciousness.

  Hours later, the harsh jolting of the van awakened her. She tasted the rusty blood in her mouth and knew she was going to die, but she didn't make a sound. The van jerked to a stop. Her body began to tremble. She curled tighter, instinctively protecting the fragile organs that supported her life. The hinges of the rear doors squealed like a dying animal as they opened. The blanket was snatched away and she squeezed her eyes shut, too young to look bravely at what she feared.

  They dragged her from the van. The cold night air hit her skin, and she gazed hopelessly at the flat desert landscape around her. The darkness was as thick as the inside of her grandmother's closet, its blackness penetrated only by a thin icing of stars and the dim glow of the van's interior light.

  The sly-faced balloon man had her in his grasp. As he carried her toward a wooden shack, her instinct for survival took over and she tried to free herself. She screamed over and over again, but the emptiness of the desert absorbed her little girl's cries as if they were nothing more significant than the whisper of a few grains of blowing sand.

  The man with the fleshy nose unfastened a padlock on the door of the shack and thrust her inside. The interior smelled like dust and rust and oil. Neither man spoke. The only sounds were her own broken whimpers. They wrapped a heavy chain around her neck as if she were a dog and bolted the other end to the wall. Just before they left her alone, one of them thrust the bundle of balloons inside. But the balloon man had lied. By the second day the heat in the shed had popped every one of them.

  Newspapers all over the country carried the story of the kidnapping of little Susannah Faulconer. The police guards found a ransom demand for a million dollars in the mailbox. Kay sealed herself in her bedroom with Paige and refused to go near the windows, even though the draperies were tightly closed. Joel was wild with fear for the small, solemn stepdaughter he had grown to love so deeply. As he paced the rooms of Falcon Hill, he asked himself how something like this could have happened. He was an important man. A powerful man. What had he done wrong? She meant more to him than any person on earth, but he had not been powerful enough, he had not been ruthless enough, to protect her.

  On the third day of the kidnapping, the FBI received an anonymous tip that led them to the shack on the edge of the Mojave Desert. The agents found Susannah chained to the wall. She was curled on the floor in her soiled yellow sundress, too weak to lift her head or to realize that these men were friends instead of enemies. Her arms and legs were raw with scrapes, and the strings of a dozen broken balloons were wrapped through her dirty fingers.

  Susannah was so severely dehydrated that there was some concern among her doctors about brain damage. "She's a fighter," Joel said over and over again, as if repetition would make it true. "She'll make it. She's a fighter." Holding her hand, he willed his strength to pass into her small body.

  The men who had kidnapped Susannah were betrayed by a former cellmate, and less than a week after Susannah's rescue, they were caught at a roadblock. The balloon man pulled a gun and was killed instantly. The other man hung himself in his cell with a length of twisted bed sheet.

  To Joel's joy and Kay's relief, Susannah's body gradually grew stronger. But her spirit didn't heal as quickly. There had been too much evil in her young life, too many battles to fight. Weeks passed before she would speak, another month before Joel coaxed a smile from her. If she had been kidnapped when she had been living with her grandmother, the effect might not have been as devastating. But kidnapping a child who had finally begun to feel secure enough to behave like a child left permanent scars.

  Every school morning for the next ten years, she was driven in a securely locked limousine from Falcon Hill to the portals of one of San Francisco's most exclusive girls' academies. She grew tall and coltish. The other girls respected her because she was always willing to help them out of whatever scrape they might have gotten themselves into, and she never spoke badly of anyone. But she was too reserved to make easy friendships, and so serious that she sometimes reminded them uncomfortably of their mothers.

  Kay found Susannah's quiet efficiency and perpetual composure irritating, but Susannah spared her so many tedious burdens that she developed a detached affection for her oldest daughter. Still, she couldn't understand how it was possible for Joel to favor his adopted daughter over his own flesh and blood. Unfortunately, the more he criticized Paige, the more rebellious her second daughter became. Without Susannah to act as a shield, Kay knew that her beautiful child would have constantly been at the mercy of her father's displeasure.

  By the time Susannah was seventeen, she had become as indispensable to Joel as one of his senior vice-presidents. She kept track of his social schedule, dealt with his servants, and was the perfect hostess-never making her mother's mistake of greeting someone with the wrong name. With Susannah sitting capably at the helm of his household, Joel was spared the more disastrous effects of Kay's incompetence.

  As Joel's kingdom grew, so did his arrogance. Not even Susannah escaped the chill of his displeasure when something wasn't arranged to his satisfaction, but this only made her try harder. She pleased him by becoming the most successful debutante San Francisco had seen in years-at least in the eyes of the social matrons who arranged the events. They were enraptured by her reserve and graciousness. The old ways weren't dying, they agreed-not with a young woman like Susannah Faulconer to carry forth the torch.

  Susannah loved mathematics, and her excellent academic record would have guaranteed her admittance to any university in the country, but she enrolled in a local college so she could continue to manage the household at Falcon Hill. From the beginning her grades suffered because she missed so many classes while taking business trips with her father and tending to her ever-increasing responsibilities at home. But she owed Joel Faulconer everything, and the glow of living in the warmth of his approval more than compensated for setting aside her own vague dreams of independence.

  When she was twenty, she fell in love with a thirty-year-old investment analyst and they began to discuss marriage. Free love floated in the air of the early seventies like oxygen molecules, but the man was so intimidated by her father that he attempted no more than chaste kisses. When she finally gathered enough courage to tell him that she wasn't averse to deepening their relationship, he said he had too much respect for her to sleep with her and she would only hate herself afterward. Several months later she discovered that he was sleeping with one of Paige's friends, and she ended their relationship.

  She tried to accept the fact that she was the sort of woman to inspire respect rather than passion, but as she lay in bed at night, she lost herself in sexual fantasies. Not proper fantasies with soft music and romantic candlelight, but raunchy scenarios involving swarthy desert sheiks and brutally handsome white slavers.

  And then Kay developed lung cancer, and nothing else mattered. Susannah dropped out of college to care for her mother and tend to her father's increasing demands. Kay died in 1972, when Susannah was twenty-one. As she watched her mother's coffin being lowered into the ground, she experienced both grief and the terrible foreboding that her own young life had just ended with as much finality as Kay's.

  On a sunny April day in 1976, two months before her wedding to Calvin Theroux, Susannah met her sister Paige at a small, weathered restaurant tucked away from the city's tourists on one of San Francisco's commercial fishing piers. It was an unusually busy day for her, but she didn't appear either rushed or flustered. Her sage-green suit looked as fresh as if she had just put it on minutes before, instead of at seven that morning. She wore simple gold clips at her ears, and her aubu
rn hair was pulled back into a soft French twist that was a bit severe for a woman who had only the month before turned twenty-five.

  Although Paige was already ten minutes late, Susannah didn't fidget as she waited. She gazed at Russian Hill in the distance and mentally rearranged her schedule.

  Paige's voice interrupted her reverie. "I've got a million things to do, so this had better not take long."

  As she looked up at her sister, Susannah firmly repressed her irritation. Paige was prickly at best, and it would do no good to antagonize her before they'd even had a chance to talk. Her mind flashed back to the time when they were young children, and she had smuggled Paige small toys and chocolate-covered cherries after Joel had punished her. But then one day Paige had told him what Susannah was doing, and Joel had put a stop to any more errands of mercy. Susannah still didn't understand why her sister had tattled.

  Paige tossed her knapsack on the floor and took the opposite chair. While she was getting settled, Susannah studied her sister's appearance. Even in worn blue jeans and a faded Mexican cotton top, Paige was extraordinarily beautiful. Her nose was petite, her lips as pouty as Kay's had been. She had Joel's blue eyes, and lush blond hair that fell halfway down her back and always managed to look as if some lusty young man had just rumpled it with vigorous lovemaking.

  At the age of twenty-two, Paige was as modern as Susannah was old-fashioned. She was tough and cocky, with a longshoreman's mouth and apparently unlimited self-confidence. Susannah ignored the familiar stab of envy that always passed through her when she was with her sister. She gestured toward the menu. "The abalone is really wonderful here. Or you might enjoy the avocado stuffed with crab."