Sleeping Beauty (78 page)

They were silent for a long time. Thank you, Grandpa, Anne said silently. Thank you for understanding what
happened that day, and for loving me, and for wanting me home. “Thank you,” she said aloud, to Charles. “I'm so glad to know that.”

Charles began to say that he'd been afraid of failing as a father, too; that he'd wanted someone to show him how to be one, to point the way. But he did not. There had been enough excuses; he owed his daughter more than that. He moved closer to her and took her hand. “I've always loved you, Anne. That was one of the things I never said often enough, or in the right way. I know I said it when I kissed you good-night or left for business trips, but I'm not sure it ever came out as if I really meant it. I did, though; I always loved you, and I admired your spirit and your marvelous mind. Do you remember, I went to some of your spelling bees, and you always won? I was so damned proud. I'd sit in that auditorium and watch you stand so straight and spell those incredibly long words that I'd never heard of—and I didn't have the faintest idea what they meant—and I'd tell myself I'd always take care of you and keep you happy. But I didn't know what you needed; you seemed to be doing fine by yourself, and I was proud of you for that, too. I'm so sorry; I don't even know how to begin telling you I'm sorry. I don't know how much I could have done for you, because I'm not exactly a hotshot at anything, but I could have tried; I could have tried my damndest, and then maybe you would have had a father and I would have had my daughter Anne for all the years of your growing up. Instead of that I failed you in just about every way one person can fail another. I wish I could make it up to you: it's so damned . . .
feeble
just to say I'm sorry.”

Anne leaned toward him and laid her cheek against his, and they sat still, their hands clasped. “Thank you,” she said again.

An enormous love for his daughter filled Charles; the force of it astonished him. He drew back and smiled at her. “And that business of not forgiving me, and not loving me . . .”

“I do forgive you,” Anne said.

Charles waited. But that was all she said. He felt as if a
light had dimmed. Well, then, later, he thought. Next month, next year, someday. Someday she'll say it. Someday she'll mean it. It will all work out. It has to. Whatever we all did, we can get along; we can all love each other. We're not bad people, after all.

“We're not bad people,” he murmured.

“One of us is,” Anne said. She tested the teapot and finding it still warm, poured more tea for both of them.

Charles looked surprised. “I thought you said you didn't want to talk about—”

“I don't. This is something else.” She walked to the window, looking out at the flat, white landscape below her, with the two antennas thrusting through it. “Do you know why the highway to Deerstream was never built?”

“The highway to—? No, no one knows why. Some committee changed its priorities, I suppose. We never did find out what happened.”

Anne turned to face him. “Vince killed it.”

Charles stared at her. “What are you talking about? He didn't kill it; he tried to save it.”

“He killed it. He told Zeke Ruddle, the senator from Utah, that the people in Illinois couldn't decide how to route it, so you didn't deserve it and the money ought to go to Colorado and Utah. Which it did. Senator Ruddle told me all about it a week ago; I have his telephone number if you want to call him.”

Charles was still staring at her. “Why?”

“I don't know. If I were to guess, I'd say he wanted to hurt you, perhaps destroy Chatham Development. I think he's wanted to harm the family for a very long time.”

“I don't believe it.” He was shaking his head. “I don't believe it; Vince was worried about me; he'd never—” He jumped up and began to walk about the room. “Ruddle told you? He said it, just the way you told me?”

“Close. He thinks Vince is a hero for doing it. Giving up a highway his brother was interested in, for the good of the country. Something like that.”

Charles bumped into a corner of the desk, and cursed, rubbing his thigh. “We talked it over and over; he knew how
everything depended on that; how desperate I was . . .” There was a silence. “Ruddle
told
you.”

“Yes,” Anne said.

“I want his phone number.”

She went to Charles' desk and copied it from the address book in her purse.

When she moved back to the window, Charles leaned over and read the number. “He said he was trying to help me. But then we lost it. And he was right there, right in the middle of things. Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He straightened up. “What did you mean, he's wanted to hurt the whole family?”

Anne told him. Beginning with Bud Kantor at the EPA—and writing his telephone number below Zeke Ruddle's—she went through all that she and Leo and Josh had discovered about the dynamite blast, what had caused the gondola accident, and what they knew about Keith.

“Wait,” Charles said. He was leaning against his desk, frowning. “The EPA . . . that's Vince's job, part of it, anyway. His committee is responsible for the environment, for hazards. . . .” He paused. “This guy. Kantor. He said Vince pushed it, wanted them to exaggerate the danger and speed up the whole thing?”

“Yes,” Anne said.

“Well, there could have been reasons . . . you'd have to know everything that's gone on. Anyway, that's all you know. The rest—the dynamite, the gondola—that's just guesswork.”

“It's not guesswork that someone deliberately caused them. We have no proof of who it was. But there are a few other points. One is a pattern that begins with the highway, which hurt you and Chatham Development and the whole family; and goes on to the EPA, which is hurting Tamarack and The Tamarack Company and the whole family; and goes on to the drainage ditch and the gondola accident, which badly hurt Tamarack and The Tamarack Company and the whole family. Then there's the fact that Ethan kicked Vince out after I left, the sort of thing that might lead someone who is capable of monstrous acts to plan others, in
revenge. And finally, there's the strange coincidence of the connection between Vince and the buyer of The Tamarack Company.”

“Ray Beloit,” Charles said.

“It never bothered you that he was so close to Vince?”

“Why should it? Vince told me Beloit wanted to buy a glamorous company, and he knew I had one I wanted to sell. He made the contact with Beloit; he was helping me out. What was there to be suspicious about?”

“Even after everything that happened to Tamarack? One thing after another that made the family panic and agree to sell at a terrible price. You know it's terrible; you know you could get more than twice what
Vince's friend and campaign manager
has offered if the value of the company hadn't been lowered by all those so-called accidents. And we know now they were not accidents. They were deliberately caused by someone who calculated the effect they would have on the town, and the company, and the family.”

The office was very quiet. “You think we were manipulated into selling,” Charles said at last.

“Yes,” Anne said.

Slowly, heavily, he shook his head. “It's too filled with hate, too . . . evil.”

“Yes,” Anne said again. “And there's something else. The gondola accident. We have no proof of this, either, and it's possible we never will. And it may simply be another coincidence. But we don't think so. There are one hundred sixty-eight cars on the gondola, and the one that was jammed was the one Leo and I had just stepped into.”

Charles slumped against his desk, his eyes closed. “No,” he groaned. He lifted his head. “What are you saying? He wouldn't. It was a terrible coincidence, an accident, a random . . .”

“We found the piece of wood,” Anne said. “It wasn't an accident; it was planned.”

“Well, yes, I understand, that part was planned, but not with a particular car. Whatever else he's done, he wouldn't . . . for God's sake, he's not a murderer!” His gaze moved from Anne; he was remembering that she had told him
Vince had threatened her before. “Why?” he burst out. “You and Leo? What would he . . . my God, my God, I can't believe it; there's no reason . . .”

“I don't know why. Except that Leo's always been against selling The Tamarack Company, and I have a story about the past that could end his political career.”

“That's not a reason to kill two people!”

“I wouldn't think so. But if you were planning to cause an accident anyway, and you had a chance at the same time to get rid of some people you thought were in your way, and you were the kind of person who could make such plans in the first place, it might seem quite reasonable.”

“Reasonable!”

“To someone capable of monstrous acts,” Anne said evenly.

“My God!” Charles cried. The horror of it all, the accumulation of facts and guesses, struck him, and he felt he could not bear it. His daughter had been raped; his daughter had almost been murdered. And so many people had been hurt in between those two crimes—himself, the family, the entire town of Tamarack—how could anyone fathom that in someone he thought he had known, and admired, and loved? Too much, too much, Charles thought; too much to comprehend, too much to accept. But he had no choice in that; he had to accept it. Even if it were not all exactly as it seemed, what they knew for sure was damning enough.

“Even the possibility,” Charles muttered, “the chance that he might have . . .” He shook his head, talking to himself as if he were alone. “But even if he didn't . . . even if he had nothing to do with the gondola—or maybe he did but he didn't mean to hurt anyone—even then, the other things he's done that were aimed at all of us . . . and he lied to me. About everything. For
years
 . . . Playing with me, with all of us, as if we were his puppets. And my God, we were. We almost were. Ruddle. Kantor. Everyone he knows. I can call them . . . I will call them . . . but I know it won't change anything, because I believe Anne. Because she's telling the truth; she always has. The goddam son of a bitch, he knew how I felt about him, he knew I depended on him,
and he let me trust him, and he lied, played his games with me, almost ruined me. Left me hanging out there with everybody thinking I was the ass who blew the company. . . .
Son of a bitch.
”

He moved around his desk. He pushed his chair out of the way and still standing, reached down to take a folder from the bottom drawer. He laid it on the desk and opened it. On the top was a letter with his signature. He picked it up, read it, and held it for a moment, wavering. It meant sixty million dollars that he needed so badly he could taste it. “But I can't do it,” he murmured. “I can't be part of this.
I won't let him do it.
” And with one sharp motion, perhaps the most decisive he had made in his life, he tore it in half. “I have to talk to him,” he went on, still to himself. “I have to hear it from him.”

He took the ripped letter to his secretary, and Anne watched through the open door as he placed it on her desk. “Write a letter to Ray Beloit at this address, telling him I'm canceling the sale of The Tamarack Company. Send it by fax; tell him I'm returning his earnest money by wire this afternoon, with interest for the few days we've held it. If he has any questions, tell him to talk to my lawyer; as far as he's concerned, I'm out of the office indefinitely.”

He returned to the office, shutting the door behind him, and looked at Anne with a little start, acknowledging her presence. “I don't know what happens next,” he said. He walked back to his desk, as if that was where he felt most secure, and attempted a smile. “I keep botching things. Now I've even failed at selling a company to help keep this one alive.”

“This was a victory, not a failure,” Anne said. “We'll find a way to help you here; we'll all do it together. It won't be a battle anymore.”

Charles smiled at the confidence in her voice. Once again, a great love for her swept through him, and he wondered how he had survived for so many years without it; his life before this day seemed dreary and meaningless. “I wish that was enough,” he said ruefully. “I wish I could walk away from here, with you and the family on my side, and say I had
everything I wanted. But I can't do it; I can't let this company die, even though I've done more than my share to kill it. I still think I could bring it back, you know. Not to what Dad made it; I can't fool myself any longer about that. But if I had time, and money, I could make it solid and respected again. Money!” he exploded. He kicked shut the file drawer he had left open; the sound reverberated through the room. “Money! Money! Christ, I'm buried under so many goddamned debts, I can't move! I'm behind ten million dollars in overdue interest and the banks will foreclose if I don't pay it this week: I can't put them off any longer. I've been all over town looking for that money. All over the country. I haven't got any credit left. All I had was The Tamarack Company, and I just tore that up, and I haven't anywhere else to go. I'm sorry, Anne; you deserve a father you can look up to. What you've got is a failure who hasn't got any options left. Unless you believe in fairy tales: the good prince who writes one check and says, ‘It's all yours.' I haven't believed in fairy tales for a long time.”

Anne walked across the office to Charles' desk. She picked up a glass paperweight and gazed at it thoughtfully, tilting it. An elf stood in the center, hands on his hips, a sly grin on his face. “How about an evil prince?” she asked.

“What?”

“You said you wanted to talk to him anyway,” Anne said softly. “To ask him about the highway, about the EPA, about the gondola . . .”