Children of Dynasty (14 page)

No, he didn’t know where this was headed, but after last night, Rory knew he wanted her in his bed … and his life.

Two hours later, as Rory pulled onto Vallejo Street where he lived, Mariah wished she could have kept her part of their pact to escape. Though he had been quiet on the drive, she could tell from the aggressive way that he accelerated and braked that Rory was upset at her caving in to doubts.

In his garage, he helped transfer her things to her car. The packing done, she turned to him.

“Thanks for …” For sailing, dinner, a night in paradise? Things other couples took for granted. Blindly, she reached to open her car door.

He put a hand out and pulled her to him. She couldn’t really feel him through her new leather jacket.

“Oh, God, Rory, what’s going to happen to us?”

He took her in his arms and squeezed her so tightly she believed he was as desperate as she. “All I know is this isn’t the end. You’ve told your father, and I’ll tell mine.”

Getting into her car, she blinked back tears. “I just pray Dad’s all right.”

He tapped at her side window, and she lowered it. “Let me come with you.”

She looked up at him and saw what must be truth in his gaze. What different roads might they have traveled if he had taken this attitude eight years ago? She didn’t want to leave him, but a confrontation with her father was something she needed to handle alone. The only way to make amends was to brew her and him a good strong cup of Oolong, to sit with him on a bench in his well-tended garden and talk.

Mariah shook her head. “I’ll handle it. We’ll need to discuss … things.”

Rory cupped her cheek, stroked her skin with his thumb, and stepped back to let her go. “After you see him, call me. Instead of this hiding out, let’s turn the tables and go someplace the columns will see us together.”

Buoyed by Rory’s wanting to be seen in public with her, she pulled out of his garage. However, as she searched the Saturday afternoon traffic for a news van, she felt the weight of trouble once more descend. She, her dad, and Tom might have evaded the media’s questions for a day, but the Fourth Estate would not lose their taste for blood overnight.

Sure enough, as she turned off Vallejo onto Mason she noticed a dark sedan distinguished by a flaking paint job on the hood pull in behind her. Something in the way the driver looked at her vehicle, an intentness, put her on guard. Perhaps he was a reporter, out cruising without a satellite crew. On the other hand, Tom’s suspicions about the accident came back to haunt her.

A narrow-faced man in his late twenties or early thirties, she inventoried, dark hair pulled back from his face as though he wore a ponytail. The car was an older model Taurus.

She sped up, changed lanes, and took the next turn onto Broadway. He followed.

Without signaling, she made another turn onto Stockton and headed into Chinatown. This time the guy, if he were pursuing her, missed it.

In the heart of the Oriental quarter, slow traffic caught Mariah. Half a dozen times, she braked for jaywalking pedestrians. Horns honked, and fists were raised. Forced to a crawl, she lowered her window to cool her heated cheeks. Succulent aromas of seafood and rich sauces blended with salt air and car exhaust. Souvenir shops displayed porcelain tea sets and exquisite paper lanterns. Open-air markets sold live tilapia, shellfish on ice, and whole ducks suspended by their feet. It was difficult to believe she could be followed through this bustle, but she kept glancing behind her.

Finally, she managed to cut around several blocks. Wondering now if she’d imagined the whole thing, she zigzagged a few more times. When a check of her rearview mirror said she was clear, she turned south toward Stonestown.

As she drew closer to her father’s, she wasn’t feeling as good about her stalwart stand that she and Rory were going to be together. Rather, a wave of guilt lapped at her. She could have called home last night, tried to smooth things over, instead of shopping, dining, and hot tubbing. Parking in the drive, she thought how difficult facing him was going to be, her only excuse that she’d been under Rory’s spell when she made that quick, cold call.

Straightening her shoulders, she got out of her car. A peek in the garage window told her Dad’s wasn’t there. With a frown, she checked the time and found it half past ten. On the way to the front door, she plucked the Friday and Saturday
Chronicles
from under the arborvitae.

Inside, the high-pitched wail of the security system greeted her. She silenced it by entering the date of John’s marriage to Catharine. The quiet sense of the house, dust motes floating, confirmed that she was alone.

Without pausing to look at the chessboard in the entry, Mariah went into the kitchen, lifted the phone and dialed. Cellular customer Grant was still out of range. No one home at Tom and Wendy’s. She tried John’s direct number at Grant Development, Tom’s line, and the one in the conference room. When there was no answer, a renewed prickle of unease touched her spine.

She went to the sink and drew a glass of water. The ruby Rory had given her sparkled in the sun coming through the east window over the sink. Not an hour since she’d seen him, and already she felt an aching void. This rising certainty that something had gone wrong with Dad compounded it. No one could have reached her, for she’d put her purse and phone in Rory’s trunk when they went sailing.

She called Tom Barrett’s cell. He answered on the second ring, sounding worse than he had at the funeral. “Where’ve you been, Mariah? I tried to call.”

“My phone wasn’t on.”

“I knew you’d want me to find you,” he plowed on. “I even called Kiki Campbell last night and got Rory’s cell number.”

The sound of the ringing phone, so out of place in the forest darkness, returned to jar her. “You called last night?”

“Around ten.”

Her creeping dread intensified. “Where are you?”

“Cal State Med Center, out smoking in the courtyard.”

Her heart a trip hammer, her palm suddenly slick on the phone receiver, she heard her voice speak with surprising clarity. “Something’s happened to Dad.”

“God, Mariah, an hour after he talked to you yesterday, he had a heart attack.”

As she barreled down Highway 1 past the Stonestown Galleria, Mariah deserved a dozen speeding tickets. She tried to keep her mind on driving, but an image of her father in a coffin floated between her and the rest of the world.

Tom waited for her outside the closed double doors of the ICU, his expression grave. “He’s all right,” she insisted.

“He’s in surgery. A few minutes ago he took a turn for the worse, and they decided to crack his chest.”

Taking her arm, Tom guided her to a waiting room where families sat vigil amid scattered newspapers and foam take-out boxes.

Mariah sank into a chair. “This isn’t right. People have heart attacks and come home the next morning. They use that balloon thing to clear out your arteries.”

Tom didn’t answer.

Once at home, she’d turned on a medical TV show as a surgeon dumped a load of ice onto a human heart to stop it. With the chest covered in plastic sheeting and the ribs pulled apart, it hadn’t seemed to be happening to a real person. Yet, beyond those swinging doors, the chest she’d been cradled against as a little girl lay cleaved in two. The arms that had swung her high bore taped-in needles. His lips lay slack, those that had smiled at her ten thousand times. Each time she’d taken for granted ten thousand more.

Hours passed. She kept upright through determination and vending machine caffeine. Tom went periodically to join the banished smokers outside, wreaths of cigarette smoke surrounding the joyless gathering. This was too much for him … and for her. First Charley, and now this.

Dad had to live.

Always when they were parted, she had a feeling he was out there somewhere, asleep or awake. Now, with his heart stopped, or God forbid, because the doctors had lost the battle, thinking of him felt like sending a message into the void.

Day crept into evening. Each time Mariah consulted her watch, she became more convinced it was running backward. The ruby from Carmel began to remind her of blood.

She pulled off the ring and put it in her purse.

The silence between her and Tom was by now deafening. Though neither spoke of Rory, she felt like a pariah. If there were a higher power that lent an ear to human suffering or some pattern to fate, then she must make a bargain before her father was taken.

“Let him stay here,” she thought with bowed head. “If he lives, I promise I’ll never see Rory again.” Painful the penance might be, but not too great a price to pay.

At half past ten, a slight, dark-haired doctor with liquid eyes came in wearing blood-spattered greens. He went to Tom, who introduced Dr. Patel.

“Your father is in recovery,” the doctor said. “For the moment, he’s critical and I won’t mince words. If he makes it though the next few days, he’ll have a long rehabilitation ahead.”

With a sidelong glance at Tom, she had to ask. “Can you tell me what might have brought on his attack?”

“If I could tell you, I’d be a god. A heavy meal, a hormone fluctuation …”

“Anger?” Mariah asked.

Dr. Patel smiled gently beneath his silky dark moustache. “Every family member I meet asks, but who knows what happened last night to put things over the edge? All I can tell you is his arteries did not get plugged overnight.”

“Thank you,” she murmured.

The doctor left her with Tom, who wiped his tear-stained cheeks and turned to her. “I know why you were asking.”

“Please,” she whispered.

He shook his shaggy head, rebuke in his normally smiling blue eyes. “Girl, I don’t know what you were thinking … a Campbell.”

Hot tears welled. Now that Dad had come through surgery she must make good on her pact with fate. “It was a terrible mistake,” she told Tom. “I won’t see Rory again.”

Late Sunday night Mariah let herself into her apartment, weighted with exhaustion. She had only felt able to leave the hospital because her father remained unconscious. A red light blinked on her answering machine, reminding her that Rory had asked her to call yesterday; he’d planned on dinner. Now, it seemed as though she’d had that conversation in an alternate universe.

Unable to bear hearing his voice if he had called, she walked into her bedroom and closed the door.

When her head finally rested on the pillow, she expected to close her eyes and see horrific images of surgery. Instead, she saw the man she’d called “Daddy” when she was small.

Even then, his hair was prematurely salt and pepper, giving him a distinguished look that made her proud of him at grade school functions. In the evenings after homework, they played Chinese checkers, or in summer, badminton on the back lawn. When she reached the seventh grade, he taught her chess.

In high school, she won tournaments, finding most opponents no challenge after playing her father. In addition to the board at home in his hall, since she was at Grant Development he’d set up a game in his office so she could go in, see what move he’d made, and counter. Their first match had gone on for weeks when both were caught up in projects.