Caroline’s motives were becoming as clear as her vodka tonic. Mother was dying and these people, the Church of the Divine Light, were helping to ease her through it. The fact that the old man was dipping into company profits to finance this spiritual care had got under Caroline and her husband’s skin. Greed had diseased this family for generations. The old man’s drive to acquire wealth and to turn the Yellow Beach Corporation into one of the worlds largest and most successful precious stone marketers had cost him the life of his first born son, lost him the respect of his second son, and had left the old man an embittered wheelchair bound cripple. Maybe, at long last, Randolph Stock had discovered there was more to life than turning a quick profit. Spiritual care for his wife, Marlene, however off the wall and unorthodox as it appeared to be, was a step in the right direction. Well, hurrah for that!
“Look, Caro, this is none of my business. I came here tonight to see my mother, to give what comfort I can. I’ve been away a long time, and, God knows, my quarrel wasn’t with her, and I dare say my absence has hurt her. But if I get involved in a fight between father and you and Martin, I don’t really see that my coming back will have achieved anything.”
“The only thing you wanted to achieve was to soothe your own sense of guilt!” Caroline spat.
“Maybe,” Ray said, turning around slowly to face her. “But that’s something I’ve got to live with.”
The library door opened and Martin Devereaux stalked into the room, making straight for Caroline and ignoring Ray completely.
“Caroline, do you know how long you’ve been away from the party. People are beginning to notice. Senator Cole’s wife was asking if you’d been taken ill.”
Caroline rolled her eyes. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Martin, don’t make everything into a crisis.” She stared at her brother for a long moment and said, “I’ve finished here anyway.”
“Does your father know he’s here?”
“I didn’t tell him I’d invited him.”
“You should have done,” Devereaux said. “You’re just giving him more ammunition to use against us.”
“My God, you two are entrenched, aren’t you,” Ray said.
“It’s none of your business,” Devereaux snapped at him.
“Couldn’t agree more,” Ray said with a smile, and went to sit down by the fireplace.
“How much have you told him, Caroline?” Devereaux demanded.
“Enough, and he won’t help. My dear brother wants to keep out of family squabbles.”
“Well there’s a first time for everything,” Devereaux said sarcastically.
“Good evening, Martin,” Ray said. “I’d like to say how good it is to see you again…but I was always brought up to tell the truth.”
Devereaux coloured slightly but ignored him, turning once more to his wife. “I can’t find Paula either. I mean, for Christ’s sake, it’s her party.”
“Yes,” Caroline said. “And it’s about time we got back to it. Excuse us, Ray. As I said earlier, your room is still upstairs if you intend to stay the night. And I would ask you not to go into the ballroom until all the guests have left. God knows, you’ve embarrassed me enough in my life, I’d prefer it not to continue, at least not tonight.”
Ray grinned and raised his glass to them as they left the library arm in arm.
The door closed and his face darkened. The anger that had been simmering inside boiled over and he hurled the glass into the grate, smashing it into a thousand glittering pieces. Much of the anger was directed at Caroline and Martin, but he reserved a lot of it for himself. For a moment back then he had allowed himself to be taken in by his sister. For a moment, when the tears started to flow, he’d forgotten what a devious and manipulative bitch she was, and always had been.
It had been hard for the both of them growing up in their elder brother Frank’s shadow. Their father had always made it clear that, in his eyes, Frank was number one and Caroline and Ray were also rans. The accident had changed all that. With Frank in his grave, and their father hospitalized with a broken spine, Caroline had seen her chance and made a grab for it with both hands. Ray was away at college so Caroline had a clear run.
She took over the day-to-day running of Yellow Beach, and within six months had several major coups under her belt. Buying into a Thailand based pearl giant and eventually taking it over; the acquisition of several of the smaller German stone dealers and establishing a firm base in Idar Oberstein from which to attack the European market. Soon Yellow Beach was one of the leading exporters of opals, aquamarines, peridots and pearls.
In those six months she had done enough, if not to earn her father’s love, then at least to earn his grudging respect, and to secure herself a place in his affections, albeit several notches down from the position Frank had enjoyed.
Over the next year or so Randolph Stock grew fit enough to re-establish himself as head of the corporation. Caroline married Martin Devereaux, at that time the owner of a small string of elite fashion jewellery outlets on the east coast. They had a daughter, Paula, and Caroline, while maintaining a certain interest in Yellow Beach, was content to stay at home and play the good mother, while her husband ensconced himself as vice-president of the company and acted as her surrogate.
Ray remained in the shadows. He graduated from UCLA with a Ph.D and was given a job by his father. A low-key position in Yellow Beach’s San Francisco based P.R. department, looking after domestic advertising, under the supervision of Walt Freeman, an old wartime buddy of Randolph Stock. In many ways the job suited Ray well. He lacked ambition; for some reason the raison d’etre behind the Stock family had passed him by. To his father’s immense disappointment and annoyance Ray could find nothing about the precious stone and jewellery business to interest him enough to make him want to devote his life to it. And the philosophy of having money for money’s sake left him with a curiously cold feeling inside.
His office was situated close to Fisherman’s Wharf and he spent many of his free hours down there developing a love for the sea all things oceanic. He bought his first boat, a small skiff with an outboard motor. He learned to scuba dive, learned to fish. He’d spend many of his weekends watching the fishing fleet come in and disgorge their cargo. In those leisure hours he decided where his future lay and the Yellow Beach Corporation didn’t figure much in his plans. He knew he was on a direct collision course with his father, but kept delaying the moment of impact.
The years living second-class to Frank had brought him and Caroline close together. They shared with each other their secrets, their desires, their dreams. They trusted each other – at least he had trusted her. Perhaps he’s just been naïve. Perhaps he’d loved her too much as a sister to recognize that as individual human beings they were growing away from each other. She had Martin and Paula, a family of her own, and she wanted the very best for that family. And she was prepared to go to any lengths to safeguard their interests; watching over them with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs.
When Randolph Stock mooted the idea of bringing Ray back from the coast to sit beside him on the board Caroline panicked. She saw Martin’s position in the firm becoming vulnerable and with it her power and influence in the running of Yellow Beach waning. In a head to head with her father she betrayed every secret, every desire Ray had ever shared with her, precipitating the long deferred collision between Ray and Randolph Stock, and leading, ultimately, to Ray’s rejection of the family business and with it the rejection of the entire Stock family.
In a perverse way he felt grateful to her. Without her intervention the life he was leading now might always have been a half-glimpsed dream, an unattainable goal. But grateful or not, he could neither forgive nor forget his sister’s betrayal, and he doubted that he would ever fully trust another human being for as long as he lived.
He stared morosely at the smashed glass in the grate. He would stay the night, see his mother in the morning, and then he’d leave. This time he didn’t think he’d be
coming back.
Phil Ryker stood on the doorstep, his arms folded. “I’m sorry, but without an invitation I can’t let you inside.”
The fat man in the white robe beamed at him benignly and spread his hands in a gesture of supplication. “Of course, I wouldn’t want you to do anything that might get you into trouble with your employer, but I would like to speak with Mr. Randolph Stock. It’s a very important matter, you see. The utmost urgency.”
Phil Ryker sniffed and looked implacable. The two smaller figures stood silently throughout the discussion, with their hooded heads bowed. Ryker couldn’t even tell if they were male or female, though he guessed female as they were dressed the same as the sisters he’d seen moving around the house.
“Would you just contact Mr. Stock, and tell him I am here. I’m sure he will see me.” The fat man’s voice was mellifluous, and laced with just the faintest trace of a foreign accent. Phil Ryker was pretty hot on accents, as a cop he’d trained his ears as well as his eyes to take in details and store them up for later use, but he couldn’t find a tail to hang onto on this one. It could have been European, but equally it could belong to the Indian sub-continent. The opaque sunglasses weren’t giving any clues either. They were Ray Bans, US issue.
“I can see you are wavering,” the fat man said. “You think that perhaps I might be right.”
The hell I am, Phil Ryker thought, but said, “Just wait there. I’ll ring through and see if it’s okay. But I assure you that if Mr. Stock burns my ear I’ll kick you in a special place so hard you’ll have three Adam’s apples.”
The fat man smiled broadly and bowed his head obsequiously.
“Who shall I say wants to see him?”
“Please say that it is Brother Simon, on a matter of great urgency.”
“Brother Simon? You sure about that?”
The fat man bowed his head again, this time in assent.
In the vast oak lined study that took up the entire upper east wing of the Stock mansion, Randolph Stock sat in his electric powered wheelchair facing a bank of video screens. During a three week period two years ago when Caroline and Martin were vacationing in Europe, Stock had brought in a security firm to install hidden cameras and listening equipment in every room of the house. The cameras were cunningly disguised, and two years on neither Caroline nor her husband were aware that every move they made and every conversation held within the walls of the house was being monitored by Randolph Stock in his study.
He had learned a great deal about his daughter in those two short years that he found distasteful, and his opinion of his son-in-law, never very high, was now at ground zero. He’d watched and listened to the conversations in the library with growing interest. But he was already aware of Caroline and Martin’s objections to what he was doing so there were no real surprises.
“Ah, Ray,” he said softly to himself, as he watched his son sitting alone in the library getting slowly drunk. Randolph Stock felt an acute sadness in the fact that his son and daughter despised him, but life had taught him many hard lessons, and he’d survived them all. Despite their shortcomings he loved them both, although he was never able to express that love, and if they felt they had no affection to offer him then it was tough. Life was tough. That was one of the first lessons he’d ever learnt.
He turned his attention to the screen showing the entrance hall and front door, and watched Phil Ryker walk across to the internal phone and pick it up. A few seconds later the white telephone on the desk started to ring. He flipped a switch on the arm of his wheelchair and a panel slid down from the ceiling with a hiss, hiding the video screens from plain sight. When it was fully down, the panel blended with the surrounding woodwork so well it was unnoticeable. He flicked another switch and the wheelchair started to move across the thick piled black carpet towards the desk.
He picked up the phone and said, “Yes?”
“Phil Ryker here, sir. Downstairs at the front door. You have a visitor, sir, name’s Brother Simon. You want I should let him in? It’s gone midnight, sir.”
“I know what time it is, Phil. Call Edwards and have him show Brother Simon up to the study. Oh, and Phil, how much longer is that god-awful party going on for? I can hear the din from here.”
Ryker’s voice crackled over a bad connection on the line. “It shows no sign of dying down, sir. I was speaking to a member of the band during their last break, the guitar player. He says they’re booked until two.”
“Ah well, there go my plans for an early night,” Stock said with a chuckle. “Okay, thanks, Phil.”
“I’ll attend to your guest, sir. Goodnight.”
Stock put the phone down. He liked Phil Ryker, always had. Ryker was the type of man you could rely upon. Hard as a diamond and as honest as a Puritan. He was the only man Randolph Stock trusted.
The desk at which he sat was as large as a billiard table and made from solid mahogany. Dark and richly grained it shone in the subdued lighting of the study in a way that made Stock think of old leather. The desk was uncluttered. A simple blotter, a desk tidy containing only three pens and a few paper clips, a brass goose-necked reading lamp, three telephones, and in pride of place to the left of the blotter, a plain silver frame containing two photographs. The first, a black and white shot of his wife, Marlene, taken thirty years ago, showing her in a swimsuit, reclining against the aft rail of the Heracles, the yacht they’d rented that summer. The second was a color photograph of a young man wearing the cap and gown of a graduation student. A handsome young man with clear blue eyes, bright with the hopes of a successful future; the square chin up-tilted, almost defiantly, challengingly, ready to meet the world head on and cope with whatever it set against him. The graduation student was Stock’s first-born son, his beloved Frank. Randolph Stock reached out a hand that was unmarked by the passage of time and touched the silver frame with a long carefully manicured index finger, stroking it lightly along its length. For a moment tears glistened in his faded blue eyes but he blinked them away impatiently. Hopefully his visitor tonight would be bringing him news. News that would ease the searing agony of his son’s untimely death forever.
He made himself comfortable in the wheelchair and opened a drawer in the desk. The drawer contained a bottle of whisky, two crystal tumblers, a box of Havana cigars and a Colt Python .357 revolver with a four inch barrel and an engraved mother of pearl grip. He opened the cigar box and withdrew a hand rolled Havana, took a small gold penknife from the pocket of his vest and clipped off the end. There was a polite tap at the door. Randolph Stock lit the cigar and let the smoke roll over his tongue, finally blowing it out through his lips in a thin stream that eddied upwards to the ceiling. “Come in,” he said loudly.
In the pool house Paula Devereaux was giving Dean Rulski his first lesson in lovemaking. Normally she wouldn’t have bothered with anyone as young as Dean; she preferred her men older, men like her college tutor for example, or the salesman at the car rental place she used a month ago. But tonight she was feeling horny and there was no one else at the party who even vaguely interested her. Typical of her mother really, to throw a party for her daughter’s eighteenth birthday and to then go and invite her own adult friends to it. Paula’s friends had enjoyed a poolside brunch earlier in the day, under the careful supervision of at least three sets of watchful parents. So here she was now, bored with the party, sharing the quiet seclusion of the pool house with Dean Rulski, son of Senator John Rulski of Arizona. Dean Rulski, a sixteen year old kid who got a hard on if anyone mentioned the word brassiere.
Still he was kind of cute in a paedophilic sort of way. He had short blond hair with the sides gelled into place, quite a nice body, lean and suntanned, and retainers on his teeth…well, a girl couldn’t have everything!
Paula was lying on a cane sun lounger and he was sitting at her side, blushing fiercely as he stroked her leg through the midnight blue satin of her ball gown.
“Christ, Dean! I’m not a pet spaniel. You’re going to stroke me
to death at this rate.”
Dean pulled his hand away sharply. “Sorry,” he stammered. “It’s just that…well I guess I…I’m kind…”
“Inexperienced?” she offered helpfully.
“I guess.” He lowered his head and his eyes searched the floor seeking the hole he hoped would open up and swallow him.
“Christ, don’t kids do this kind of thing in Arizona?” she snapped impatiently.
“Sure they do. It’s just that…well, what if we get caught?”
“Oh, they’ll hang us up from the nearest tree and pull our toenails out with engineer’s pliers. Jesus, Dean, no one’s going to come down here! They’re all having too good a time getting drunk on my old man’s champagne. Besides I’ve locked the door. Here.” She lifted his hand and laid it down on her left breast.
“Oh shit,” Dean said breathlessly.
“Thanks a bunch!”
“No, I didn’t mean…oh shit!”
Paula sighed and closed her eyes. “This isn’t working, is it?”
“I guess not. Maybe we should go back to the house.”
Paula was silent, lying there, breathing deeply, and trying not to lose her temper. She’d never had this much trouble getting laid before. It was a new experience for her. Any day she could go down to Archie’s, the coffee bar on Frazier Avenue, and guys would be fighting each other just for the privilege of sitting at the table next to hers. She knew she wasn’t beautiful, she’d never win Miss America, but what she had she knew how to package expertly enough to make most men have the hots for her.
She was five feet five, with a slender body, hips that were too big and legs that were too short. In her opinion her best features were her breasts, her hair and her face in that order. Her mouth was too small and lips too thin for her face to be called beautiful or even pretty, but her large brown eyes, helped out with subtle shading, made hers a face that stood out in a crowd. And she’d learned early in her teens how to disguise her shortcomings in the mouth department with the careful application of lipstick and gloss. Her hair was raven black and hung halfway down her back, teased and tousled, a wild unfettered mane that belied the hours she spent with mousse and curling tongs, getting it to hang just so. On hot California days when she went without a bra, her breasts could stop the traffic on San Diego freeway.
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