Legacy of Secrets (53 page)

“I don’t remember you like this,” he exclaimed. “You were a pale, half-drowned waif. And now look at you.” He shook his head, marveling at her in her black lace and diamonds. “You’ve become a great lady.”

Lily laughed. “I was never humble,” she reminded him.

“You must tell me everything.” He grabbed her hands again and led her to the sofa.

He ordered champagne, and waving away the waiter, he opened it himself and poured her a glass. “A toast,” he said, smiling into her exquisite blue eyes, “to the wanderer’s return, to my darling Lily, to my wife-to-be.”

Lily put down her glass with a sigh. “I think I had better tell you, Ned, that I am a married woman.” He stared at her with disbelief as she told him about John and her life. “I’m dying of boredom,” she cried passionately. “Oh, Ned”—she flung herself into his arms, the pent-up tears of years of despair spilling from her eyes—“the blood is drying in my veins because I’m starved of youth and life and music and laughter. My life has shriveled to nothing. I’m still young. I need people and love and excitement. Whatever shall I do?”

Ned wrapped his arms around her, holding her in a grip so tight she knew he would never let her go. “I’ll help you, Lily,” he promised, kissing her scented black hair and her soft, wet cheek. “I shall find a way. You know I shall always look after you.” Her skin smelled of violets and her lips were soft under his kiss and she melted into his arms like ice under the sun. And he undressed her and made love to her with the trembling, passionate adoration of a man who has at last found the woman of his dreams. And all Lily’s old terrors faded, and the scars on her heart left by
Dermot Hathaway began to heal under his tender kiss and his loving touch.

Only later, lying awake in his arms, did the guilt and tears return, because she knew her husband was a good man who adored her, and she was cheating on him. But as she always had done, she acted first and regretted later.

Still, she couldn’t bring herself to return to Boston when she had said she would; she delayed her journey once and then again, telling her husband that she had met old friends and was enjoying herself. John thought about how he was always preoccupied with his work, and how badly his relatives and friends had treated her. And he smiled indulgently, just the way her father had, and told Lily not to hurry back.

Ned moved into the suite next to Lily’s at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and Lucky packed her things and moved out of his apartment. When Harrison told him she had left, Ned felt pangs of guilt and told him to make sure she had a nice apartment and enough money. But Lucky was lonely; her hopes and dreams of being Ned’s wife were gone. She had no friends of her own: everyone she knew was through Ned. Her life had revolved around him, his routine, his needs, his wants, and his work. Without him she had nothing.

A few months later, Lucky’s body was fished from the East River. It had been in the water for several days, but no one had reported her missing or questioned where she might be. No one had even missed her. She was finally identified from the furrier’s label on the little chinchilla jacket she was wearing, and it was traced to Ned Sheridan, who had bought it for her. Harry identified the body and the first taint of scandal touched Ned when the news hit the tabloid headlines:
ACTOR’S MISTRESS FOUND DROWNED IN EAST RIVER.

Ned mourned for his poor little “stray lucky black kitten” who had reminded him of Lily. He told Lily what had happened and how bitterly he regretted her death. But he had promised her nothing and now he had Lily and she
was all that mattered. Lily was horrified to learn that she was the cause of the girl’s death, and she wished she had never gone to the theater that night, because though she loved being with Ned, she knew she didn’t love him. Not the way Lucky had.

W
HEN HE SAW
L
ILY AT THE THEATER,
Finn O’Keeffe forgot all about his hunch that all was not well with a certain large public company, and the disturbing rumor of a bank failure. He did not dump his clients’ shares in the company, and he did not remove his own or his clients’ or any of James and Company’s money from the bank. A week later the company crashed amid howls of pain from its investors, and simultaneously the bank closed its doors and his clients lost a fortune and so did James and Company. Cornelius said gloomily, “You should have taken your own advice, lad, and not listened to me.”

“I was going to,” Finn said, staring morosely out of the window, his hands thrust deep in his pockets and his head bowed.

“Then why didn’t you? Was it because of me?” Cornelius sighed deeply, regretting his words. “Maybe I’m getting too old, Finn. I’m losing my touch, my instinct for the market. Maybe I should be handing the reins over to the younger generation.”

Finn turned from the window and looked at him. Cornelius was offering him an unheard-of opportunity. If Cornelius left, he would become the youngest head of a Wall Street brokerage house. A few short weeks ago he would have felt on top of the world. He would have said triumphantly that life could offer him nothing more. That he had achieved his ambitions and all that was left was to make more and more money. Now he felt nothing. The position was being offered only because he had failed to do what he knew he should have done, and Cornelius was taking the blame.

And right this minute he did not care about the position. All he could think of, all he had thought of, all he ever
wanted to think of, was finding Lily. Though what he would do once he had found her, he did not yet know. Make love to her? Marry her? Kill her?

He told Cornelius that it was not his fault. That he alone was to blame for the losses and that Cornelius should not think of quitting when the chips were down. “You’ve had a long and honorable career on Wall Street,” he said. “You can’t leave now, when things are bad. You have to leave on top, the place you’ve always been and the place you belong.”

Cornelius knew he meant every word. He smiled paternally at him. Finn had turned out to be more than just a business and social experiment; he had more than fulfilled his potential and he had not lost his values on the way. So Cornelius agreed that it was better if he stayed on and he treated Finn even more like his own son than a clever young employee to whom he had given a chance.

F
INN PUT A PRIVATE DETECTIVE ON
L
ILY’S TRAIL.
He was a thickset, red-faced, secretive-looking man and he came well recommended for his skill in seeking out errant husbands or wives for juicy divorce cases. The theater where Finn had seen her was his only clue, but it was more than enough, and the man was back before too long with the information that the woman in question was Mrs. John Porter Adams, that she lived in Boston, and that she was Ned Sheridan’s new mistress. She traveled back and forth between Boston and New York, spending more time with Ned than she did with her rich upper-crust academic husband at their splendid home on Mount Vernon Street.

Finn paid the man off. He was alone in his office and he thought of Lily in the actor’s arms and groaned out loud. Then he thought of Lily’s unsuspecting husband, and he knew she had not changed her old selfish ways. But god-damm it, she was the woman in his head, the girl in his heart, the wound in his guts.

The name Lily was engraved on his heart, and it would be until the day he died. But that didn’t mean he was not
going to seek his revenge. It would take time. He had to plan it out carefully. First he needed more money. He needed to be richer than John Porter Adams. Richer than Lily. Then he would make his move.

S
TATE
S
ENATOR
D
AN
O’K
EEFFE WAS SURPRISED
to see his brother in Boston, because they were both such busy men leading such complicated lives that there was little time for family get-togethers. If Finn worked fourteen hours a day, then Dan worked the full twenty-four. He spent the normal working days at the State Senate, and put in extra hours seeing his constituents. Whenever he found free time he would make a surprise call on one of his shops, to check on how things were being run, and so far he had no complaints. As his fame grew, his business boomed. He had opened six more shops in different cities, the first two in New York. He stayed up thinking about politics and business when he should have been sleeping, and he often had his best ideas over a glass of whiskey at the Telegraph Inn, or immediately after making love to the particularly attractive cigarette girl, in one of the upstairs rooms set aside for such a purpose.

Dan was discreet: he never gambled though there was an illicit roulette wheel at the inn, nor did he ever make an overt play for any girl. He was a big, handsome man and there was no need; girls found his good looks attractive and his Irish blarney and fund of stories entertaining.

“It’s like this,” he told Finn, who had warned him to be careful because as a state senator he was a target. “I’m a fella who likes a drink and a fella who likes women. My problem is that all the girls I meet socially are ‘good’ girls. They come from good Catholic families and they all want to get married. I’m not ready yet to set my feet on the path to the altar. So what alternative does the Lord leave a fella like meself, virile and in his prime? But I’ll tell you this, Finn, give me a choice between a woman or politics, and I would choose politics every time. Set me up with the most charming female in Boston and then tell me there’s a caucus
out in Pokestown, and I’ll be at that caucus. I can take women or leave ’em. And when the day and the woman comes along that I cannot, then I’ll marry her.”

He glanced conspiratorially at Finn. “And I’ll tell you something else, brother. A secret I’ve been keeping, but now you’re here I can tell you; I intend to run for the congressional seat.” He laughed at Finn’s astonished face. “Your old brother is entering the race for Democrat candidate to the House of Representatives, boyo. Whoever would have thought it? ‘The boy wonder’ they’re calling me over at the State Senate House. Sometimes I think maybe what our old dad said was true: that we are descended from the High King Brian Boru. Or where else are we gettin’ our brains?” He grinned. “But I shall need your help, Finn. I’ll need all the support I can get. Are you with me, brother?”

“I’m with you,” Finn promised. He had come to Boston to catch a glimpse of Lily, because he could no longer keep away. He had been working twice as hard as he had before, throwing himself into the race to make money. He thought of little else but his goal, and when he took time off to play in order to keep his sanity, he no longer escorted the darling daughters of New York’s rich men to the opera. Instead he sought out chorus girls and the dancers in cheap Broadway bars, who were jolly and happy-go-lucky and no strangers to hardship, and who were therefore eager just to party and make love and forget their problems for a little while. Exactly the way he was himself.

Finn drove through Beacon Hill and up and down Mount Vernon Street observing everything. The house where Lily now lived was very imposing and he thought of another time he had seen Lily, on the
Hibernia,
with nothing to her name but her clothes and the fifty gold sovereigns and the diamond love-knot necklace he had stolen from her. His fingers closed around it now in his pocket. The stones were cool under his fingers, as hard and bright as Lily herself.

As he watched, the door opened and a man came out.
He stood on the steps for a minute or two, blinking in the strong sunlight, and Finn saw that he was older. He was well dressed but not in quite the same carefully smart way Finn was himself, yet somehow, with his very casualness, he bore the stamp of wealth.

Finn waited. The long, tedious hours ticked by, but still the black lacquered front door did not open. Noon came and went, then one and two. Just before three o’clock, a violet coach pulled in front of the house and on the stroke of the hour the shiny black front door opened again and Lily emerged into the sunshine.

Finn’s eyes fastened on her like a hawk on its prey. She was exactly the way he remembered: tall, slender, graceful as ever. Just the way she turned her head, lifted her chin, smoothed her skirt, filled his head with a thousand memories. The look of delight on her face when she patted the pair of dapple-grays as she gave them a cube of sugar and, typically Lily, tucked a bunch of violets into their harnesses, made him smile. She stood for a while, gazing up and down the empty street, and then with a huge sigh she climbed into her open carriage and drove past him down the street.

Finn followed at a discreet distance. She drove to a jewelry store on Boylston and emerged half an hour later with a small parcel. She waved the coachman on and walked unhurriedly along the street, looking in shop windows, a little smile on her face. He was puzzled by the fact that she did not look like an unhappy wife embroiled in the throes of an affair with another man. Lily looked like a happy woman.

Then she climbed back into her carriage and drove through the streets of Beacon Hill back to her home.

As she walked up the steps the door was opened by a maid, then it closed. Finn was left on the outside once again. Shut out from her life, the way he had always been.

He stayed a few days longer in Boston, helping Dan plan his campaign and talking over the financing of the new shops Dan was planning on opening in Chicago.

Dan told him about his other new project. “I’ll never forget, Finn lad, when we first came here, all those little Irish kids thronging the streets, trailing helplessly after their mothers, freezing in winter and broiling in summer, with no escape from the miserable disease-infested North End slums. Now I’m planning on doing something about it. I’ve raised the money and I’m building the Dan O’Keeffe Summer Camp for Catholic Children.

“They’re nothing but simple wooden shacks on the shores of a lake, but it’s a beautiful spot in the heart of the countryside. It’s surrounded by farms and those poor kids will have enough fresh air to last them through the winter. They’ll have good food in their little potbellies, because they are all potbellied from malnutrition. They will eat good fresh brown eggs laid that morning on the farm, and vegetables and fruits grown on the spot. Sure and thanks to the money I’ve raised, they may even have cake.” He paused and looked at Finn, seeing he was impressed.