Children of Dynasty

by Christine Carroll

  Rory sat behind the wheel in the parking lot with no destination in mind. The peaceful campus atmosphere he’d help to create and believed he could come back to mocked him. He’d planned that by now he’d be calling Mariah to tell her he was free.

  He started the car and drove west, down the long tree-shaded avenue that led to Stanford. When he met Mariah for the first time, he’d been a student here. That fall when they broke up his grades had been the worst of his life. He pressed the accelerator, speeding as he left the university for Interstate 280. Passing through seventy-five on a straight stretch of highway, Rory tried to formulate Plan B.

  At his desk at DCI that afternoon, he sat behind a closed door and tried to implement it. Using his cell phone, he didn’t risk anyone listening in on a landline. At the end of five hours, he’d talked to at least twenty company managers in the Bay Area. All were friendly and apologetic, but none were willing to discuss employment with Davis Campbell’s son.

  When he’d been through the list, he sat back and stared out the window at the skyline. If he wanted to be a design architect for a firm with deep pockets, he would have to look outside San Francisco, possibly even the state.

  Suddenly his office door opened with a bang and his father glared at him from the doorway. “You didn’t believe what I told you.”

  Rory rose. “Believe you about what?”

  “About finding another job.”

  His chest tightened. He should have known one of Davis’s spies would phone in a report.

  “Tell me it wasn’t Takei who told you.”

  “Not Takei.” Davis seemed to consider for a moment. “Actually, it was the man I’ve got inside Grant Development.”

  Rory knew there had been leaks about John’s company, but assumed they came from someone like Thaddeus Walker at First California. An insider, someone close to John. That Arnold guy had been at the hospital, but John could have spoken by phone to anybody last night and passed on the story of Davis’s son as gossip. He and Mariah had not told him it was a secret.

  “Who do you have in Grant?”

  Davis crossed his arms. “If I told you, you’d just run to Mariah with it. Then he would be of no further use.” He came farther into the room and gave Rory a curious look. “So, are you going to leave DCI without a safety net?”

  For a moment, Rory thought he sounded as though it mattered to him at a level other than exerting his power. Nevertheless, John and Mariah were being destroyed. “I’ll have to.”

  Davis’s expression hardened. “Don’t try it. You know Chatsworth can pull strings all over the country.”

  “I’m sick and tired of that one,” Rory said. “You said he was livid after I jilted his daughter in public. You think he’ll stay bought?”

  Davis slammed his palm on the desk. “Of course he will. This is business.” Without warning, he smiled. “You know there’s still plenty of time for you to make up with Sylvia.”

  “That will never happen,” Rory answered automatically.

  But it was as though no time had elapsed in eight years, his father still trying to block all escape routes.

  All that Tuesday, Mariah waited for Rory’s call. She tried his cell a dozen times but it rolled over to a mailbox. Finally, after another day in which nothing surfaced to stave off the company’s foreclosure, she drove to Stonestown in the rain.

  For dinner, she prepared her father’s favorite pasta, but a low fat vegetarian version. It took a lot longer with one person cooking. After dinner, he sat in his accustomed place in the recliner. When he reached absently to massage his chest, Mariah resisted asking him if it was chest pain or merely a muscle ache.

  “Everything seems to be winding down. My heart … Losing the company.” She could almost hear his thought that death was not far behind.

  “You mustn’t talk that way. Things will get better.” If only Rory would call.

  John looked doubtful. “Have you heard from anyone about our properties?”

  “No, but it’s only been a few days since I spread the word at McMillan’s.”

  He squared shoulders that were thinner since his illness. Losing a few pounds was probably good for him, but she longed to see him full and hearty again.

  “We’ve only got a few days,” he said. “Tomorrow, I’m coming to work. It will help morale, and I’ll make some calls. Find out the lay of the land.”

  She put up a hand, but he said, “Just for a few hours. And I’ll take it easy.”

  Despite her concern for his health, she realized it would be useless to argue. He needed to see for himself that nobody was coming to his company’s rescue.

  “All right, Dad.”

  He brightened and gestured toward the chessboard. “How about a game?”

  She didn’t feel like it, but agreed to pass the time while she itched with curiosity about what was going on with Rory. At nine o’clock, after declining to play a second time, she casually left the living room and used her blue Princess phone to call his townhouse. She turned her purse upside down on the bed, but she could not locate the card with his cell number and realized she had left it at the office. God, she should have programmed it into her phone.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and tried to remember it, then dialed and got his voicemail again. This time, she didn’t leave a message.

  By ten, John was asleep in his recliner, snoring lightly.

  Mariah shook him awake and saw him to his bedroom, bending to help remove slippers and socks. Since she’d been away overnight at McMillan’s he’d been more vocal about doing things for himself, so she left him to undress. This insistence upon going to the office fit the pattern.

  She had refused to agree with his doom scenario, but that had been the sheerest bravado. He’d aged at least ten years in a few weeks, going from a reasonably healthy, if not youthful, fifty-seven, to a man who appeared to be around seventy. Even though he dressed each morning in street clothes on the doctor’s orders, he looked as though he belonged in bed.

  Out on the front stoop, she found the rain had stopped. Fog rolled past, the drifting tendrils wearing an orange cast beneath the streetlights. Up the way, Stern Grove rested in forbidding darkness.

  The stand of redwood held a memory of Rory, for Sunday morning had not been the first time he’d come knocking on John Grant’s door. One summer night when she should have been planning her future at UCLA, she’d been trying to watch a TV program through flickering mental images of Rory. It had been exactly a week since she’d gone to Sausalito on a Sunday morning mission. As she stared at the TV, her first awareness of a visitor was that her father stood in the archway to the hall with his mouth set in a hard line. “Someone for you.”

  She’d gone to the screen and found Rory leaning against the jamb. Even better on the eyes than she’d remembered, he stood hipshot in snug jeans and a Stanford Kappa Alpha T-shirt. Without telling John, she opened the door and disappeared. A block up to Stern Grove; the stand of redwoods preserved as a city park provided twilight shadow.

  “I tried to stay away.” Rory tipped her face up and the heat in his eyes melted away the lonely days and nights.

  Where was he this evening?

  About to go inside and try to sleep, Mariah suddenly heard the familiar growl of a Porsche turning off Sloat Boulevard. She leaped to her feet and by the time Rory pulled to the curb, she waited on the sidewalk.

  He got out of his car in jeans, rain parka, and running shoes. Looping two fingers into the waistband of her jeans, he tugged her toward him.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. “I thought I’d hear from you sooner.”

  Rory’s arms wrapped her. She’d been with him only this morning, yet it seemed like an eon. The rain started again, steady and dismal, but it took a long moment before the cold dripping registered.

  He snuggled her inside his coat and pulled up the hood. Against her mouth, he murmured, “Come with me, we’ll go somewhere.”

  She wanted to drive back to her apartm
ent, or his townhouse, and make long, slow love. She needed to taste the salt of his skin while they lay spent and rubber-limbed. Yet, what if her father woke and needed her to take him back to the hospital? The thought of him calling into the darkness gave her pause.

  “Come inside,” she told Rory. To his questioning look, she said, “I don’t want to leave Dad alone.”

  Rory went with her across the lawn and up the front steps. In the entry, he twined his arms around her and kissed her until his support was the only thing that kept her upright.

  Despite the familiar rise of passion, she detected something different about him. This morning he’d been full of hope while he printed a copy of his résumé on his home computer. “Dirt simple,” he’d said. “Golden Builders, DCI, and back again.”

  Rory continued to kiss her as though a great void had opened inside him and he needed her to fill it. She wanted to ask what was wrong, but he held her fast. Her arms went around him underneath his coat and she stroked his back. Tenderness for his dark mood, and the desire to draw him closer made her hands urgent.

  A drip of rainwater spilled from the hood of his jacket into her eye. She shoved his wet parka off his shoulders and it landed in a heap on the hardwood floor. The zipper thunked on landing.

  Her father called, “Mariah?”

  Reluctantly, she slid out of Rory’s embrace and went down the hall to open the bedroom door a crack. “Rory’s here.”

  “Fine,” John said mildly.

  When she returned, Rory was studying the chessboard in the hall. He picked up a pawn and turned it in his hands. “This past month, I’ve been thinking that to my father I’m no more than one of these.” He picked up two more. “Here’s you and Sylvia Chatsworth.” He replaced the pawns. “All of it so he,” Rory touched the black king, “can checkmate,” he moved his finger to tap the white one, “your dad.”

  Mariah stood for a moment looking at the board. Somewhere there in the bishops and knights were men like Thaddeus Walker and the senator.

  With a shake of her head, she led the way to the kitchen. Rory picked up his wet parka and followed, draping the dripping coat on a kitchen stool. He grabbed paper towels, wiped the hall floor, and laid more towels out beneath to catch the drops. Mariah watched his domestic skills with a smile.

  “Something to drink?” It was warm and stuffy in the kitchen, even with the window open. John’s house had never been air-conditioned, and most of the time it was not needed.

  “Glass of milk?”

  She poured for him and got herself a Diet Coke, feeling that the counter looked unusually bare since John had taken the picture of Catharine to his bedside.

  Rory sat at the kitchen table and she took the chair opposite. “Where have you been?” she asked again.

  He swallowed milk. “Driving … thinking. This afternoon Father bragged of having a spy inside Grant. It wasn’t just Walker who told him your loan payments were late.”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” Mariah said bitterly. “In fact, I should have known.” No one new had joined the company since she’d been there. Therefore, it must be somebody entrenched in the developer’s community and playing both sides.

  Her first instinct was that it must be Arnold, but she hated to jump to conclusions. If he wanted to be groomed by John to head up Grant Development, why would he work against him?

  She thought aloud. “Public relations director April Perry is a single mother. Maybe Davis somehow got to her.” The thought of them in bed together sickened her, but it could have happened.

  “He did say it was a man,” Rory offered.

  “Chief engineer Ramsey Rhodes has money troubles with both his parents in long-term care, but I can’t see him taking a payoff.”

  Rory drained his glass and wiped away his milk moustache. “Let’s think this through. If your dad was in the hospital all night, whom could he have told I was leaving DCI? That’s what Father said the spy passed along.”

  “It must be Arnold.” She hated to think of John’s trust being so badly misplaced. It was one thing for Arnold to be jealous of her, but another for him to betray her father. She envisioned him jollying his way into the hospital room with cheeseburgers and leaving with information. Long exchanges of confidence over the chessboard, and pretending to take the high road by leaving Mariah to reveal her and Rory being featured on TV.

  Icy fingers plucked her nerve strings. Arnold, Davis … If Davis really had worked a deal with First California, and planted his spy in Grant, where might he draw the line? The elevator plunged in her mind and she dove away from it, as she’d imagined doing so many times since it happened. “It was almost you,” said Tom’s voice in her head.

  Mariah slid her hand over Rory’s. “How did your father take your quitting DCI?”

  He drew away and brushed back the errant damp curl that had fallen over his brow. “I haven’t yet.”

  “You’re kidding.” Uncertainty replaced the feeling of freedom she’d had knowing Rory was going to resign. “Takei didn’t jump at the chance to have you back?”

  Rory’s shoulders lifted disconsolately. “He, like everybody else in town, saw ‘On The Spot.’ Said his directors would never let me come back after working at DCI and being involved with you. Too much conflict of interest.” He fiddled with his empty milk glass. “My father told me long ago never to try finding another job, not in this city. I called everybody in the region this afternoon and no one will talk to me.”

  When they’d been young, she’d thought nothing could ever be as painful or as serious as Rory leaving her. Now she knew she’d been naïve.

  He hesitated. “I’m going to stay at DCI a while.”

  “Stay?” Her voice rose. “You promised me you were leaving!”

  “Actually, I promised me that.”

  “Don’t you see that if you do that, you’ll never be free?”

  “Mariah.” He gave her a steady look. “I’m doing this for us. Until things are settled with Grant, this week if that’s all it takes. If I can find out who the spy is, look around for other evidence of dirty tricks …”

  “It’ll still be too late to save Grant.” She was certain Davis was behind a calculated plot to incinerate her dream of carrying on her father’s tradition and became more certain he must have resorted to sabotage at Grant Plaza.

  “Think,” she told Rory. “If he’s got a spy, what else might he have done? What if he hired that welder who disappeared to disable the elevator Charley was on?”

  Rory pushed back his chair with a scrape. His face turned tense. “You hinted at that at the funeral home. At the time I thought you were overexcited, but now …” He seemed to catch himself and shook his head. “No. Can you, can I … believe Father is capable of murder?”

  “I don’t know.” The memory of that night on Privateer, his eyes hooded like a cobra’s … “When he caught us together that summer …”

  Leaning against the counter, Rory crossed his arms over his chest. “That was a long time ago.”

  The wavering candlelight had made things surreal in the yacht cabin; she and Rory naked, his sex shriveling, she trying to cover her breasts and pubic hair while Davis raged. His fist drawn back and she knew he was about to smash Rory’s face. “When he dragged you off me,” her voice raised, “I thought for a minute he was going to kill you.”

  From the rear of the house, John called out weakly.

  She went to his door. “It’s all right, Dad.”

  When she came back to the kitchen, Rory was putting on his parka with jerky movements.

  “Where are you going?” He couldn’t leave now.

  “I need time to think.” He gave his attention to joining the zipper and pulling it up with a rasp. At the front door, he paused and looked back at her with a distant expression. “I’m not sure I can accuse the man who raised me of such a thing.”

  CHAPTER 21

  On Wednesday morning, Mariah woke before six. Truth to tell, she had never really sle
pt, pummeling her pillow and kicking the covers away from her feet every few minutes.

  In her comfortable old bathrobe that had been seen on a million TV sets, she ran water into the kitchen kettle and put it on for tea. Outside the window, a gray dawn came late as the continued rain sheeted down the glass.

  Yesterday she had been so full of hope that things were working out at last. Yet, Rory had not yet left DCI, albeit he couched it in terms of helping save Grant Development. And when she dared to accuse his father of plotting the Grant Plaza accident he had not only refused to consider it, he had walked out of the house.

  She busied herself with the blue ceramic teapot she’d chipped when she was eight. Last week Dad had confessed he’d kept the pot all these years because the little white mark on the rim reminded him of her. From the healthy products she’d introduced to his kitchen, she selected white tea reputed to be high in antioxidants.

  Warm smells of steeping tea leaves and lemon soon filled the room. Morning finally brightened the windows and Mariah turned off the overhead light. Taking her cup to the kitchen table, she settled into the chair Rory had taken the night before. Outside the window, tired and sodden flowerbeds surrounded a patch of ragged lawn. She’d have to insist on a hired gardener to do what John could not.

  She felt torn about letting him go to the office. He wasn’t strong enough … if he got sick again … Did she dare tell him there might be a corporate spy in-house?

  Assuming so many things, that Davis had told Rory the truth about the spy and that he had repeated it with accuracy, that it had not been some kind of planted story — by father or son — a lie designed to create discord in the already disordered ranks of Grant … there were a lot of “ifs.”

  If it were true, who could it be but Arnold? And if that were true, could he have used his position as financial vice-president to torpedo the company with late loan payments?

  “How about some eggs?” John spoke from the doorway. His business suit hung loosely on his diminished frame.