Power Games (39 page)

She couldn’t believe it.

One morning, something changed. Joan woke up and the sun was shining. As usual her body was sluggish, but her mind was awake. She felt alert, unusually engaged, and the clock by her bed read ten—the earliest she had been up in weeks.

She made her way to the bathroom. Trey sniffed at her heels, watching seriously at the door while she took a pee. On autopilot, she opened the cabinet for Xanax, and when she closed it again she caught her reflection.

A woman she did not recognise stared back at her. The time since Sketch’s bombshell had taken pounds off her. Her face was thinner than it had been in years, her eyes wider and her lips fuller. Her roots could do with a touch-up, but on the whole she had an Olsen-twin thing going on and, despite her mood, she liked it.

‘Hello,’ she said, to no one in particular.

Over the next forty-eight hours, Joan came to a decision. She began, methodically, to sort through Kevin’s belongings. She wasn’t fighting it any longer.

She started answering the phone, cataloguing messages from reporters and deleting the ones from Sketch. It was strange to hear such a powerful man reduced to tatters. Sketch had always been the one to impress, the guy with the muscle, but all he had become was a mid-life crisis with a fuckload on his conscience.

Now Joan was the one in charge. That made her important. Over the years Kevin had eclipsed his mother as an accessory to his cash and success, offering her a snack but never the full feast, which seemed grossly unjust since she was the one who had brought him into this world. So when the phone calls changed tack, a splurge of agents and managers seeking to back Joan ‘through this heart-wrenching time’, she paused to consider what a month ago would have been impossible.

Why
shouldn’t
she claim some of Kevin’s legacy?

Didn’t she deserve it, after the years of struggle and toil?

All the encouragement she had given him, putting her life on hold, tidying away her own concerns and desires—wasn’t she entitled to her share?

What could her life have been without Kevin? What might
she
have become?

The decision was made easier by the fact that she no longer recognised memories of her son. The Kevin she grieved had been lost to her way before the Challenger jet disaster. For years Sketch and his cronies had stunted their protégé as one would a Bonsai: no wonder they had borne so many tears and tantrums, as Kevin chased the eternal carrot of puberty. No one could deny the treason—yet somehow, it became a fringe of comfort. The Kevin who had used to crawl around
her hallway carpet and giggle as she tickled him in the tub was not the same as the one she had lost: that Kevin had been twisted by hormones, pumped full of pills and switched into a circus freak. All in the pursuit of fame, to appease generation upon generation of Little Chasers—the ultimate prince who would never grow old, who would always be their boyfriend, cute and playful and safe.

What would have happened had he lived? In what state would he have ended up? Would Kevin have been doing the same when he was forty, fifty, older? What kind of a mutant would they have raised by then?

Perhaps Kevin’s death had been merciful, in its way. Joan clung to that hope because she needed to believe it. She couldn’t accept that his loss had been in vain.

On Thursday morning she signed with an agency on Sunset. Within hours, they were inundated with offers for talk shows, magazine interviews, panel appearances, a book about Kevin, an autobiography, a film script of the crash in which Joan would play herself, a commercial, even her own reality TV show. Every party affiliated with the victims had juice that was ripe to be squeezed—and, in her capacity as mother of one of the biggest heart-throb pop players of the twenty-first century, none more so than Joan. She was given a stylist and an assistant, and was pledged a new woman.

Joan Chase was ready to become a star—this time in her own right.

At the weekend she stepped out of the mansion for the first time. Her hair was piled high on her head and her killer heels struck the drive. In her arms was Trey, nude except for a studded diamond collar whose tag bore the words: KEVIN RIP.

She was heading to her first ever TV show.

The paps leaped to life, frantic to snap the money shot
they had been waiting for weeks to secure. Joan’s name was shouted from the ranks. The fans rushed at her, their hands grasping through the gate, begging for a word or a glance.

She gave them neither.

Joan climbed into her BMW and slammed the door, negotiating a path through the photographers, their cameras pressed up against the window.

It couldn’t help but be a sign when she hit the radio and one of Kevin’s songs blared out of the speakers. This was what her son would have wanted.

70

Las Vegas

‘Y
ou can’t do this to us. She’s not even been declared dead yet, Zenetti, and you’re making this call. This screwed-up, soulless,
sonofabitch
call …’

Carmine Zenetti had expected the brothers to kick off. After all, this was the glittering Silvers fortune they were talking about. Orlando and Gianluca had found themselves destitute, from heroes to zeros in less than a week.

‘I won’t accept it.’ Orlando leaned in, his palms splayed across Carmine’s mahogany desk and his eyes full of fire. ‘Even if Angela never returns, you’re not getting your dirty hands on a cent of our money and that’s the end of it.’

Carmine tried to be patient. Naturally, it was a shock. The brothers had arrived in town full of ideas for growth and progress, for recouping their share of the business and putting their father’s legacy back on the map. But Lady Luck hadn’t been smiling down that day. Orlando had raged; that faggot Gianluca trailing him out of here like a sick pup. There had been threats of lawyers.

Carmine wasn’t concerned. The deal was in black and white.

‘Orlando, Orlando,’ Carmine smiled, ‘you keep forgetting.
Why do you keep forgetting? We have a contract. One your sister
and
your father signed.’

‘Screw the damn contract.’

‘That kind of defeats the point, doncha think?’

‘So that’s it: Angela’s gone and we don’t see a penny.’

‘Got it in one.’

‘I swear to God, Zenetti—you and me, right now, outside.’

Carmine laughed. Orlando went to strike.

‘You’re through,’ he growled, as Luca drew him off. ‘Do you get that?’ Rage he had kept in check since the plane went down—since before, since the night he had walked out on Eve and said all those things he didn’t mean—made him want to smash and smash until there was nothing left of Carmine Zenetti but a shivering pulp. He had lost his sister and his lover and the promise of his child. Protecting their dynasty was his final hope, the only thing that stood a chance of keeping him afloat.

‘Don’t you care?’ Luca said. ‘Aren’t you hurt that Angela’s gone?’

Carmine sat back. The tycoon thought it a moot point in light of their exchange before realising it was his son being addressed, not him. Dino was sitting on his father’s cream couch and picking his thumbs. ‘Sure I do,’ he grumbled. ‘But we gotta face facts, don’t we? There ain’t no point wishing for something that can’t happen.’

Carmine smiled.

‘Angela
is
coming back,’ said Orlando. He was adamant, as deluded as the rest. It was tragic to see. Carmine would have wept if he were a crying man; as it was, he hadn’t shed a tear since Juliet Caretta had stood him up by the bike sheds in fifth grade.

‘How long’s it gonna take,’ said Carmine, wondering the
same about this rendezvous, ‘a week, a month, before it sinks in? You gotta start makin’ plans.’

‘It’s our money.’

‘Not what my papers say.’

‘Fuck your papers—and fuck you.’

‘This, my friend, is business.’ Carmine stood, the pumping heart of the Strip rolling out behind him. ‘And this is the end of our meeting. Goodbye, boys, and good luck. Something tells me you’re going to need it.’

71

Washington, D.C.

P
aparazzi circled her husband’s apartment like scavengers. They had heard Melinda Corrigan was coming. At last, friends and relatives of the deceased were crawling from the woodwork: a dream for those savvy enough to know where to find them.

Melinda had already attended the Farley Senate to pack up his office, where she’d encountered the usual stricken faces. ‘Are you sure it isn’t too soon?’

Like hell was it too soon. The weeks since the incident had spelled purgatory. Time abandoned its usual order, morphing and dissolving until the days and nights became inseparable, part of the endless cycle of her grief. The sooner she could clear Mitch away, the sooner she could come to terms. She had been widowed.

She missed him. God, she missed him.

‘How are you, Melinda? How are the kids?’ Photographers bleated their frivolous questions, assailing her as she fumbled the key code. ‘What do you make of Noah Lawson’s rescue expedition? Do you intend to join him out there?’

Melinda hurried inside the building and closed the door.
Shaking, she located the card to Mitch’s opulent quarters and took the elevator to the penthouse.

Yes, she had been tempted to follow Noah. Yes, she had considered it. And then she had hit her face with cold water, slammed to her senses and instructed herself not to be so goddamn ridiculous. It was all well and good imagining Mitch setting up shop on a desert island somewhere and finding a cow or two to milk, or to picture him growing a beard in a cave, indulging in home dentistry and winding up naming a fucking basketball, but the reality was here. It was in this phantom of an apartment. It was at home, with her two kids who had no daddy. It was in bed, where his side remained cold. It was at Thanksgiving, when there would be no Mitch to carve the turkey and toast marshmallows by the fire.

Melinda worked through his belongings, stacking them in boxes and gathering them in bags. Each time the tears brimmed, she swiped them away.

The last time they had been in Washington she had been a bitch. Saddened by his lack of interest in her sexually, Melinda had thrown out cruel ultimatums. No wonder he didn’t get turned on. For all the ways in which Mitch had changed over the years, she had changed too. For starters, she had begun fucking Gary Stewart.

It was a release to get away from her neighbour. Since their confrontation in Gary’s gym, he had eased off, but that didn’t mean she was immune to the occasional revolting message.
I miss your pussy
, the last one said. She had promptly changed her number.

After an hour, Melinda fell onto the bed. Her bones were weary. Her heart was tired. Her head was sick of wondering. She lay on the side where Mitch used to sleep, trailing a finger across the pillow before lifting it and pressing it to her
face, inhaling it in the hope that his scent would still be there. It smelled of detergent.

When she put her head back down, it met with something hard.

Melinda sat up. Beneath Mitch’s pillow was a book. It was narrow and leather-bound. A diary? A journal? She frowned and picked it up. What was it?

It felt wrong opening it, without Mitch here to defend himself—for what lay in these pages was clearly private. It was reams and reams long, scattered with capital letters and explanation marks and hectically underlined passages. She flipped to the front.

The first line read:
August 4, 2012 was when it all began …

Melinda sat back and started to read.

72

Day 30

B
lame landed at her door like a sack of coal and there was nothing she could do to lift it. Tawny had brought them to this island. The fire in the hold had been her fault.

She saw it in their eyes: umbrage, bitterness, wrath.

Finally their misery had a name, something to attach itself to, something they could touch and see and throw it all on: something to hate.

She could hardly hold it against them. She would feel the same. She
did
feel the same. To think of her cherished appliance being responsible for the crash was the biggest mindfuck of the century. How had it happened? Had she left them switched on?

It made no difference. The facts were there. They had overheated, started a flame …

The rest was history.

‘You stupid bitch!’ Eve had pounced. ‘What were you thinking?’

Angela had pulled her off. ‘Stay calm. Let’s think about this. Get it straight before we jump to conclusions—’

‘This is pretty conclusive, don’t you think?’

Kevin had been nonplussed. ‘No point freaking about it
now,’ he’d said. ‘We’re here, aren’t we? Who cares whose fault it was.’

That magic word:
fault.
It gave them permission to assign guilt; it told them there was a reason. The existential questions died. Why them? Why now? How was this part of the grand design? Was it a divine intervention, intended to teach them a lesson?

No—because now it was someone’s fault.

Eve raged, restrained by Jacob, whose look had been one of a healthy man staring into the eyes of another with a terminal illness: pity, disbelief, sadness, fear.

Thank God that isn’t me.

‘I didn’t mean to!’ Tawny threw back. ‘How was I supposed to know? It’s not like I did it on purpose!’

‘We’re on Death Row, all of us,’ Eve had said. ‘If you hadn’t been so fucking obsessed with what you look like, if you hadn’t come in the first—’

‘If
you
hadn’t come we wouldn’t even be having this conversation so shut your face up, slut. You should have stayed at home anyway.’

‘What did you call me?’

‘You heard. Coming out here knocked up because you couldn’t resist a chance to wreck another person’s life. Let me tell you, you’ve done a great job already with your baby, that kid’s sure gonna thank you for this—’

That time it had taken both Angela and Jacob to wrench them apart.