Paradise (56 page)

"Tell you what I'll do," he said, picking up the phone and pressing a series of buttons. "Mr. Farrell instructed us not to call him about unlisted guests, but I'll call up there myself and tell him you're here."

"No!" she burst out, knowing what he was likely to hear from Matt. "I—I mean, rules are rules and you probably shouldn't break them."

"For you I'll break a rule," he said with a grin, then he spoke into the phone. "This is the security guard in the lobby, Mr. Farrell. Miss Meredith Bancroft is here to see you. Yes, sir, Miss Meredith Bancroft... . No, sir, not Banker. Bancroft. You know—the department store Bancroft."

Unable to bear seeing his face when Matt told him to throw her out, she closed her purse, intending to beat an ignominious retreat.

"Yes, sir," Craig said. "Yes, sir, I will. Miss Bancroft," he said as she started to turn away, "Mr. Farrell said to tell you—"

She swallowed. "I can imagine what he said to tell me."

Craig drew the elevator keys out of his pocket and nodded. "He said to tell you to come up."

Matt's chauffeur/bodyguard answered Meredith's knock, wearing rumpled black trousers and a white shirt with
the sleeves rolled up on his thick forearms. "This way, ma'am," he said in a gravelly, Bronx-accented voice that was right out of a 1930s gangster movie. Quaking with tension and determination, she followed him across the foyer, past pairs of graceful white pillars, down two steps, and halfway across an immense living room with white marble floors, to a trio of light green sofas that formed a broad U around a huge glass cocktail table.

Meredith's gaze bounced nervously from the checkerboard and checkers that rested on the table's surface to the white-haired man who was seated on one of the sofas, then back to the chauffeur, who she assumed had been playing checkers with the other man when she arrived. That assumption was reinforced when the chauffeur walked around the cocktail table, sat down on one of the sofas, spread his arms across the back of it, and eyed her with an expression of fascinated amusement. In uneasy confusion Meredith glanced at the chauffeur and then at the white-haired man who was watching her in wintry silence. "I—I've come to see Mr. Farrell," she explained.

"Then open your eyes, girl!" he snapped, standing up. "I'm right in front of you."

Meredith stared at him in blank confusion. He was slim and fit, with thick wavy white hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and piercing pale blue eyes. "There must be some mistake. I've come to see Mr. Farrell—"

"You sure have a problem with names, girl," Matt's father interrupted with biting contempt. "My name
is
Farrell, and yours
isn't
Bancroft, it's
still
Farrell, from what I hear."

Meredith suddenly realized who he was, and her heart skipped a teat at the hostility emanating from him. "I—I didn't recognize you, Mr. Farrell," she stammered. "I've come to see Matt."

"Why?" he demanded. "What the hell do you want?"

"I—I want
to see
Matt," Meredith persisted, almost unable to believe this towering, robust, angry man could possibly be the same brooding, dissipated person she'd met at the farmhouse.

"Matt isn't here."

Meredith had already been through a great deal this afternoon, and she had no intention of being thwarted or bullied by anyone else. "In that case," she replied, "I'll stay until he returns."

"You'll have a long wait," Patrick said sarcastically. "He's in
Indiana
at the farm."

She knew that was a lie. "His secretary said he was at home."

"That's his home!" he said, advancing on her. "You remember it, don't you, girl? You should. You walked around, looking down your nose at it."

Meredith was suddenly very frightened of the rage that was gathering force behind his rigid features. She backed away as he started toward her. "I've changed my mind. I—I'll talk to Matt another time." Intending to leave, she turned on her heel, then gasped in terror as Patrick Farrell gripped her arm and spun her around, his thunderous face only inches from hers. "You stay away from Matt, do you hear me! You almost killed him before, and you're not going to walk back into his life now and tear him to pieces again!"

Meredith tried to jerk her arm free, and when she couldn't, fury overcame her fear. "I don't want your
son,"
she informed him contemptuously, "I want a
divorce,
but he won't cooperate."

"I don't know why he wanted to marry you in the first place, and I sure as hell don't know why he'd want to stay married to you now!" Patrick Farrell spat out, flinging her arm away. "You murdered his baby rather than have a lowly Farrell in that hallowed womb of yours!"

Pain and rage ripped through Meredith, slashing at her like a thousand knives. "How dare you say a thing like that to me! I
miscarried!"

"You had an
abortion!"
he shouted. "You had an
abortion
when you were six months pregnant, then you sent Matt a telegram. A goddamned telegram, after it all was done!"

Meredith's teeth clenched against the hurt she'd kept bottled inside her for so many years, but it couldn't be contained any longer. It exploded from her, aimed at the father of the man who had caused all her suffering: "I sent him a telegram all right—a telegram telling him that I'd miscarried, and your precious son never even bothered to call me!" To her infuriated horror, she felt tears leap to her eyes.

"I'm warning you, girl," he began in a terrible voice, "don't play games with me. I know Matt flew back to see you, and I know what that telegram said, because I
saw
him and I saw that telegram!"

Meredith didn't immediately register what he said about the telegram. "He—he came back to see me?" Something strange and sweet burst into bloom in her heart, and just as abruptly, it died. "That's a lie," she said flatly. "I don't know why he came back, but it wasn't to see me, because he didn't do it."

"No, he didn't see you," he jeered furiously. "And you know
why
he didn't! You were in the Bancroft wing of the hospital, and you had him barred from it." As if he'd finally expended most of his rage, his shoulders slumped, and he looked at her with helpless, angry despair. "I swear
to God, I don't know how you could do a thing like that! When you murdered your baby, he was wild with grief, but when you wouldn't let him see you, it nearly killed him. He came back to the farm and stayed there. He said he wasn't going back to
South America. For weeks I watched him drowning himself in a bottle. I saw what he was doing—what
I'd
been doing to myself for years. So I sobered him up. Then I sent him back to
South America to get over you."

Meredith scarcely heard the last part of that; alarm bells were exploding in her brain and clanging in her ears. The Bancroft wing was named after
her father
because he had donated the money that built it. Her private nurse was employed by
her father;
her doctor was
her father's
crony. Everyone she'd seen or talked to in the hospital had been accountable to her father, and her father despised Matt. Therefore he might have ... he could have ... A piercing happiness shot through her, shattering the icy shell that had surrounded her heart for eleven long years. Afraid to believe Matt's father, and afraid
not
to believe him, she lifted her tear-glazed eyes to his stony face. "Mr. Farrell," she whispered shakily. "Did Matt really come home to see me?"

"You know damned well he did!" Patrick said, but as he stared at that stricken face of hers, what he saw was confusion, not cunning, and he had an agonizing premonition he'd been dead wrong; that she
didn't
know anything about any of this.

"And you saw that—that telegram I supposedly sent him—about my having an abortion? Exactly what did it say?"

"It—" Patrick hesitated, searching her eyes, torn between doubt and guilt. "It said you'd had an abortion and you were getting a divorce."

The color drained from Meredith's face, the room began to spin, and she reached out for the back of the sofa, her fingers biting into it as she tried to steady herself. Fury at her father pounded in her brain, shock shook through her, and regret almost sent her to her knees, regret for those anguished, lonely months after her miscarriage and all the years of suppressed pain at Matt's desertion that followed them. But most of all what she felt was sorrow; deep, fresh, wrenching sorrow for her lost baby and for the victims of her father's manipulations. It tore at her, ravaging her heart and sending hot tears pouring from her eyes and down her cheeks. "I didn't have an abortion, and I didn't send that telegram—" Her voice broke as she stared at Patrick through a blur of tears. "I swear I didn't!"

"Then who sent it?"

"My father," she cried. "It must have been my father!" Her head fell forward, and her shoulders began to shake with silent sobs. "It had to have been my father."

Patrick stared at the weeping girl his son had once loved to distraction. Torment was etched in every line of her body, torment and anger and sorrow. He hesitated, shattered by what he was seeing, and then with a violent oath he reached out and pulled his daughter-in-law into his arms. "I may be a fool to believe you," he muttered fiercely. "But I do."

Instead of haughtily rejecting his touch, as he half expected her to do, his daughter-in-law put her arms around his neck and clung to him while deep, wrenching sobs racked her slender body. "I'm sorry," she wept brokenly, "I'm so sorry—"

"There, there," Patrick whispered over and over again, holding her tightly, helplessly patting her back. Through the moisture gathering in his eyes, he saw Joe O'Hara get up and walk into the kitchen, and he held her tighter. "Go ahead and cry," he whispered to her, fighting back his rampaging fury at her father. "Cry it all out." Holding the weeping girl in his arms, Patrick stared blindly over her head, trying to think. By the time she quieted, he knew what he wanted to do. He wasn't so sure how to get it done. "Feel better now?" he asked, tipping his chin down to look at her. When she nodded a little sheepishly and accepted his handkerchief, he said, "Good. Dry your eyes and I'll get you something to drink. Then we'll talk about what you're going to do next."

"I know exactly what I'm going to do next," Meredith said fiercely, dabbing at her eyes and nose. "I'm going to murder my father."

"Not if I get to him first," Patrick said gruffly. He drew her toward the sofa, pushed her down, and vanished into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a steaming cup of hot chocolate.

Meredith found his gesture completely endearing, and she smiled as he handed it to her and sat down beside her.

"Now," he said when she'd finished the chocolate, "let's talk about what you're going to tell Matt."

"I'm going to tell him the truth."

Trying unsuccessfully to hide his delight, Patrick nodded emphatically. "That's just what you should do. You're still his wife, after all, and he has a right to know what happened. And because he's your husband, he has an obligation to listen and believe you. Both of you have other obligations too—to forgive and forget, to comfort and solace. To honor your wedding vows—"

She realized then what he was getting at, and she paused in the act of putting her cup on the table. Patrick Farrell was the son of Irish immigrants. Obviously he had deep convictions about people being bound to each other for life, and now that he knew the truth about what had happened to his grandchild, he was prodding hard. "Mr. Farrell, I—"

"Call me Dad." When Meredith hesitated, the warmth faded from his eyes. "Never mind, I shouldn't have expected someone like you to want to—"

"It isn't that!" Meredith said, her face burning with shame as she recalled the contempt she'd felt for him before. "It's just that you mustn't get your hopes up about Matt and me." She needed to make him understand that it was much too late to salvage their marriage, but after the pain she'd just put him through, she couldn't bear to hurt him more by telling him bluntly that she did not love his son. What she
did
want was a chance to explain to Matt about the miscarriage; she wanted to ask for his understanding and forgiveness. And she wanted to give him hers. She wanted that desperately. "Mr. Farrell—Dad—" she corrected herself awkwardly when he frowned, "I know what you're trying to accomplish, and it won't work. It can't. Matt and I knew each other for only a few days before we separated, and that isn't enough time to—to ..."

"To know if you love someone?" Patrick finished when Meredith trailed off into helpless silence. His bushy white brows lifted in mockery. "I knew the moment I laid eyes on my wife that she was the only woman for me."

"Well, I'm not that impulsive," Meredith said, and then felt like sinking through the floor because Patrick Farrell's eyes suddenly gleamed with knowing amusement. "You must have been pretty impulsive eleven years ago," he reminded her meaningfully. "Matt was with you in
Chicago for only one night, and
you were pregnant. He told me himself you hadn't been intimate with anyone before him. So it looks to me like you must have made up your mind pretty fast that he was the one for you."

"Please don't go into that," Meredith whispered shakily, holding her hand up to fend off his words. "You don't understand how I feel—how I've felt about Matt all this time. Lately, some things have happened between Matt and me. It's all so complicated—"