Children of Dynasty

by Christine Carroll

  Nonetheless, his sweep of the room complete, Rory’s gaze fixed on her.

  It brought back the night of the accident. How many times since had she relived his kiss? She’d told Wendy the Campbells were here out of social obligation, but something in the set of Rory’s head said he’d come for her.

  Sure enough, he started toward her as though he didn’t care what anyone thought. Though her breath caught in her throat, she stood her ground, waiting.

  Before he could reach her, a blinding glare washed in from the hall. A video unit and TV lights preceded a hatchet-faced man with caramel skin who announced into his wireless microphone, “This is Julio Castillo, reporting for ‘On The Spot.’” The reporter approached Tom Barrett. “How much will you sue Grant Development for?”

  Tom’s face went red.

  “Are you planning to go soft on the company because you work for them?”

  Wendy shoved the reporter’s shoulder. “We’re not talking to you!”

  Mariah moved, but her father beat her to it, pulling the bereaved mother behind him.

  Recognition dawned on Castillo’s taut features. “It seems we have the privilege of interviewing John Grant.”

  “No comment.” John’s face was closed.

  “Now, sir,” Castillo went on. “This is your opportunity to defend yourself and your company’s safety record.”

  John set his jaw and stared right through the man with the microphone.

  Castillo continued. “It’s my understanding that the glazier, Andrew Green, leaves a wife and twin baby girls … Is it true Grant was negligent?”

  Mariah reached her father, seized his shaking arm, and turned on the reporter. “How dare you invade a time of grief with your accusations?”

  Tom grabbed Castillo and gave him a shove. “Get out.”

  Off balance, the reporter stumbled over the wire frame of a floral arrangement. With a hand out to catch himself, he knocked Charley’s picture off the casket. Glass shattered on the marble floor.

  Rory moved, acutely aware the video was still recording. John Grant’s pale face and an angry-looking Mariah stood out in the crowd as he cut through to the cameraman. “Turn it off.”

  The wiry man ignored him.

  “I said …” Rory stabbed a finger at his chest. “To turn it …” Another impact of index finger on breastbone. “Off.”

  The red light went out, the camera lowered.

  Rory saw his father staring at him, but they’d come to pay their respects, and respect it would be.

  He looked down at Castillo on the floor, bent, and grabbed him by the lapels. “Get out of here with your talk of lawsuits or you’ll be sued for lies and slander.”

  Castillo flinched, and the watchers seemed to hold their collective breath.

  Rory released his hold. When the reporter regained the confidence to start swearing at him, the full impact of what he’d done struck. His next foray into the limelight with “On the Spot” would not be pretty.

  Stepping back, he gave the fallen man space to get up. As though a spell had broken, a melee of speculation broke out. Grumbling to save face, the crew gathered their equipment and left.

  Rory put out a hand and rested against the wall to catch his breath. From the other side of the room he felt his father’s dark gaze on him. He reached to adjust his loosened tie, and someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  Hoping it might be Mariah, he turned to find John Grant with his hand extended. “Nice work, son.” The older man’s gray eyes were sincere in his drained face.

  This taste of approval from an unexpected quarter almost convinced Rory the consequences of his action might be worth it.

  He pushed himself upright. “Thank you, sir.”

  Mariah watched in disbelief as her father and Rory shook hands. She would never have expected DCI’s heir apparent to defend Tom and John, and, by implication, Grant Development. From the astonished look on his face, she didn’t think he quite believed it either.

  While John moved to help calm Tom and Wendy, she and Rory faced each other in the midst of the crowd.

  He jerked his head toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I …” She glanced around to indicate their public status.

  “It’s simple. I walk out. You follow me.”

  She couldn’t go with him. Yet, she wanted nothing more.

  “I’ll be waiting.” He walked away, his back straight. Accepting congratulations for the rout of “On The Spot,” he worked his way toward the exit. His progress was easy to follow; his patrician head stood out above the others.

  Mariah turned away from the door as though she’d forgotten she had even spoken to Rory. Kneeling, she picked up Charley’s picture, taking care not to cut her hands on the glass slivers stuck in the frame. Gently, she placed the photo back atop the casket and looked again at Charley’s likeness. Irreverent and brash, if he were here he’d tell her to grab life while she could.

  If that meant to walk out of this room, it was her prerogative.

  In the deserted hall, her heels echoed on the ancient marble floor. Hearing measured footfalls ahead of her, she rounded a corner and confirmed her partner in stealth was Rory.

  “There.” He gestured toward the entrance to a darkened chapel.

  Inside, gilt and dark wood framed a large Crucifix on the front wall. Murky, stained glass windows lined the outside walls. The only light came from a lamp left on over the speaker’s lectern. The air smelled faintly of incense.

  Once the door closed behind them, Rory drew Mariah past rows of empty pews to a spot against the back wall where no one looking in could see. There, he propped his hands on either side of her. “Are you all right?”

  Within the shelter formed by him and the wall at her back, she felt better than she had in days. “I’m making it.” She kept her tone even. “Thanks for helping out in there.”

  “I’ve been in Castillo’s sights, myself.”

  “You will be again.”

  He shrugged. “Along with you and Grant Development. The press won’t let the accident go without sensationalizing it.”

  “We’ve been running the gauntlet from home to office for days,” Mariah agreed.

  His brow furrowed. “Any theories how that elevator managed to fall? I thought they had redundant safety mechanisms, rack and pinion … and why didn’t the emergency brake work when the cable failed?”

  On top of Tom’s worries, Rory’s words brought back the clutch inside Mariah. Despite it, she said, “Our engineer says these things happen. OSHA will insist on an independent lab report.”

  “Do you think it’s possible someone’s out to get Grant?” Rory mused.

  “Other than your father?” she blurted.

  His stunned look made her realize how that sounded.

  “I mean …” she trailed off.

  His silence was louder than an outburst. At last, he said, “Given what you’re going through, I’ll let that pass.” He drew a deliberate breath. “I’m talking about something else. When I was in the Grant Plaza construction trailer, I heard the men talking about a welder, a guy gone missing?”

  “I haven’t heard that.” She made a mental note to find out.

  “Ah.” He looked as though he wanted to say more, but subsided again into silence.

  After a moment, he touched the bandage over her left eye so gently she barely felt it. “Take care of yourself. Since I can’t.”

  Though he wasn’t pressing her against the wall, he was close enough that she dared to imagine him taking one tiny step closer. Glancing up, she caught him looking at her mouth.

  The gossip columns said he was a notorious skirt chaser, but she felt safe, and alive with the strumming tension between them. It might be in the worst possible taste to feel this way when Charley lay dead, but she’d heard losing someone brought out the survival instinct. Maybe the Irish had it right, a wake with music, dance and drinking. Before she knew she had made a decision, Mariah raised her hand
and placed her fingertips against Rory’s lips. The shaking that had troubled her for days had gone.

  He exhaled softly. “I know this is not the time or place, but … later.” The last word was rich with promise.

  From outside the chapel came a racket of heels on the stone floor. A filtered female voice reached them. “I’ll show you where we have the services.”

  “Come on.” Rory grabbed Mariah’s hand.

  They exited the other side of the chapel before the first door opened. In the hall, the lights seemed too bright.

  “Let’s go someplace,” Rory urged.

  “I can’t. I drove my father.”

  “Then tomorrow. We’ll go sailing on the Bay.”

  “You must be out of your mind.”

  “Then go crazy with me.” His eyes were dark velvet.

  “The funeral is at ten in the morning.”

  “And we’ll both be there.” He grimaced. “But watching them put Charley in the ground isn’t my idea of a proper tribute. He’d rather that tomorrow afternoon we were out on the water, thinking about the time he was with us.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not going on your father’s …”

  “We’re taking my boat.” He grabbed both her hands. “I want to show it to you.”

  “I don’t know, Rory …”

  Yearning surged. Concern over family feuds and real estate seemed petty when life could end so randomly. She thought of Tom Barrett’s gambling and knew each choice, no matter how small, was a dice roll, like letting Charley and Andrew Green take the hoist first.

  Was she ready to roll her own dice?

  CHAPTER 5

  El Camino Real was the street where San Francisco buried her dead. Monument companies, their lawns covered with sample tombstones, did business cheek by jowl with private Italian, Jewish, and Chinese cemeteries, as well as the larger multi-ethnic memorial parks.

  Mariah stared out the side window of the limousine on the way to Charley’s grave. Today was another of what her father called a perfect, sharp blue day. He and she rode with Charley’s parents, both Tom and Wendy red-eyed from weeping.

  The procession entered Cypress Lawn Cemetery through a granite archway. Marble mausoleums marked the resting places of the wealthy, while fields paved with flat stones stretched away toward the edges of the hillside park. The limousine pulled up near the highest point of the burial ground where a crowd waited beside the open grave. Rumpled crimson carpet ineffectively camouflaged the irregular mound of earth.

  Mariah and her father emerged from the car, and he offered his arm. Placing her hand above his elbow, she wondered who needed to lean on whom. After four terrible nights of silence from Charley’s empty apartment, it was beginning to sink in that he’d not be back.

  Approaching the graveside, she caught sight of Rory standing straight and alone, sunlight gleaming on his hair. Though she’d seen him only last night, her heart quickened. Thankfully, she didn’t see his father.

  Mariah and John took a seat with Tom and Wendy beneath a canvas awning. The laden pallbearers placed Charley’s casket on a dais above the vacant vault.

  The reverend, a beanpole of a man in a long black robe, began speaking sonorously of saying farewell to Charley at his eternal resting place. “And so we commit his body to the earth, and his spirit to Heaven. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”

  The cold from the metal chair seeped into Mariah as the assembly joined in reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he restoreth my soul.”

  Across the lawn, a life-sized angel in flowing marble robes knelt atop a headstone. The sculptor had eschewed the usual ethereal and unmoving portrayal. Rather, this angel had been dragged to earth. Her long white wings hung limply, brushing the ground. Her head bowed in what looked more like despair than prayer. Stone tears marked her pale cheeks.

  Mariah swallowed, a hard ache in her throat, for in a plot near the angel lay her mother. Carved onto a granite headstone alongside his wife’s was her father’s name.

  “Yea, though I walk though the valley of the shadow of death …”

  From somewhere behind her, she recognized Rory’s deep voice. “I will fear no evil.”

  But she was beginning to be afraid. Of Davis Campbell’s machinations, of the voracious appetite of reporters like Castillo for “On The Spot,” of the look in Tom Barrett’s eyes when he suggested she might have been targeted to die.

  When the service ended, Mariah joined the receiving line between her father and Tom, greeting men and women who were mostly strangers. All the while, she waited for Rory.

  When he got to Tom, she heard him say, “I hadn’t seen Charley in years, but I’ll miss knowing he’s there.”

  “Thanks for what you did last night, Campbell.” Tom sounded grudging. “Those ‘On The Spot’ people are scum.”

  Rory moved to stand before Mariah, compassion and sorrow in his dark eyes. She took an instinctive step forward into his arms. Though by now she’d hugged a dozen people she didn’t know, casual yet intimate connections forged by common grief, Rory’s embrace was different. Warmth, not of desire, but of comfort, seeped through her. The same sense of relief she’d not been ready to accept the night of the accident. Drawing a shuddering breath, she felt how tightly wired she was and tried to relax. One of his hands rubbed between her shoulder blades.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered.

  Fresh tears for Charley welled. Rory’s arms tightened. With her cheek against his wool lapel, she caught her father’s gray gaze.

  Despite John’s obvious disapproval, when Rory set her away from him she wasn’t ready. Perhaps he wasn’t either, for he bore an expression of frustration like the one she was trying to hide. Drawing a business card from his jacket pocket, he pressed it into her hand. “My cell number’s there. If you decide to go sailing, call. I’ll be at my place until around noon.”

  Rory stepped away to face her father. Mariah watched the two men shake hands briefly and with less warmth than the evening before. “Sir,” Rory said before turning away.

  Her fingers clutching his card, she watched him leave without looking back at her. Only then did she glance down at the crisp white paper with black lettering: Davis Campbell Interests.

  When the receiving line began to break up, it was too soon. For once the last car was out of sight, the gravediggers’ backhoe would cover Charley’s vault with earth.

  Her father took her arm and drew her away from the open hole. Without discussion, they both turned their steps in the direction of the Grant family plot. At the base of the headstone on her mother’s side rested a sheaf of white roses wrapped in florist’s paper. The offering was as familiar as the granite’s texture, for whenever the previous flowers began to wilt a fresh bouquet replaced them.

  John bent and touched a creamy petal, then straightened and bowed his head.

  Mariah ran her gaze along the words carved below “beloved wife.” “Catharine Mariah Stockton Grant,” she murmured.

  He must know she had heard it a thousand times, but, “We named you for her middle name, also her mother’s name.”

  Mariah might be the end of the line; if she continued as she had for the past eight years, devoted to career and loving no man, there might be no more passing on of family names.

  She came out of her reverie to find Grant’s director of public relations April Perry at her elbow. Copper-haired, with a porcelain complexion and prime time television makeup, April wore a bright blue dress that looked out of place among the mourners. She had not attended the funeral, staying behind at the office this morning.

  “What are you doing here?” Mariah asked.

  “There’s a pack of news crews camped out at Grant,” April said. “Not the usual one or two lurking reporters. I couldn’t reach your cells.”

  John reached to his belt to turn his electronic leash back on. “After ‘On The Spot’ failed to run that footage from the funeral home last night, I was
hoping things were settling down.”

  April looked troubled. “I guess they want to make hay out of the service being today.”

  “I’m surprised that Cypress Lawn security kept them out of here,” Mariah said.

  John sighed. “We’ll have to show our faces sooner or later. How about if we go and get it over with?”

  Wendy clutched Tom’s arm. “Not you.”

  “Not you today either, Dad.” There wasn’t any use in putting it off, but she thought he needed at least the weekend of rest. “What if we all check into a hotel until Monday morning?” she suggested.

  “How about the Nikko?” Tom agreed. The tall white tower with its modern décor and exclusive Japanese restaurant was a common stop for Oriental travelers. “We locals ought to be able to hide out there.”

  The mention of hiding out made her think of Rory’s invitation. From their position on the hill, she could see blue ocean, hazy in the distance. Charley would never again see the rippling of the bay or a sail’s billow, but for her, life, motion, and the man she once loved beckoned.

  A few minutes later, after the limousine had returned to the Barrett’s house, she told her father casually, “I’m going to run by my place for an overnight bag. I’ll see you at the Nikko later.”

  “Watch out for the press,” John cautioned.

  She flashed a grin. “What can they do to me? If I see them I’ll say I have ‘no comment’.”

  Leaving the Barretts, she did drive toward her Marina District apartment. Though it was eleven thirty, she thought there’d be time to change into sailing clothes and pack for the weekend at the Nikko before phoning Rory.

  Turning into her street, she saw two TV vans parked in front of her house.

  “Full court press,” she muttered, slamming on the brakes.

  With a fast U-turn she headed back the other way. She couldn’t tell if they’d seen her as she went around a corner.