The Daughter-in-Law (10 page)

He shuffled. “I didn’t want to open until I saw you deploy. You know, if you were late, I didn’t want to be sitting up there watching you fall.”

“But I lost you,” she countered. The hurt was gone and now she was near tears. “I didn’t know if you were okay ...”

“I knew for both of us.”

She reached out to him and once again their helmets banged together. “I love you,” she told him.

He seemed surprised, and for an instant even confused. Her admission required a response. A joke, making light of it, like, “Of course you do. I’m very lovable.” A simple acknowledgment that might be, “I know, and there are some things we ought to talk about.” Or a dismissal, “You don’t mean that. You’re just happy to find me still in one piece.” But before he could decide, he simply blurted out the truth: “And I love you.”

He took her hand and they walked back to the shed. They didn’t stay to celebrate their dive with the other jumpers.

FOURTEEN

I
T WAS
just a week later when Nicole found out that Jack and Alexandra were investigating her. Harold Lloyd, her boss, called her into his office, shut the door, and asked her if she were planning on leaving the firm.

She was agape for an instant. “No, of course not,” she managed, and then with more conviction, “I’m doing very well here. I’m planning on doing even better. Why would I be leaving?”

“For a government job?”

“Government? You can’t be serious.”

“Something that requires a security clearance?”

“Harold, if it were after lunch I’d swear you had too many martinis. What are you talking about?”

He laughed and shook his head. “It didn’t make sense, but I had to ask. An FBI investigator was in last week. All very hush-hush. But he wanted to know a lot about you. I thought it was none of his business so I asked if you were under investigation for anything. And he told me it was just a routine security clearance.”

“Security clearance? What for?”

“That’s what I asked. He told me he wasn’t at liberty to say. Just that you had applied for a security clearance, and that a background check was mandatory. ”

It didn’t take her long to convince him that she wasn’t planning a job change. Nor had she joined anything or applied for anything that would require a security clearance.

“I suppose I should have called his office,” Harold apologized. “But he looked like a Fed. Plain suit, no jewelry, his hair styled by his wife. And he had credentials.”

Nicole asked him to call the local bureau office right then and there.

“No, I believe you. Like you said, it doesn’t make sense. Probably some credit bureau that wants to lend you money.”

She made it a point to call the FBI uptown office, and pressed ahead until she got someone in authority. As she suspected, the Feds didn’t know what she was talking about. They hadn’t run a security check on anyone. But they wanted all the details she could provide. The FBI didn’t like normal citizens impersonating its agents.

Two nights later a friend from her brief theatrical career called. They had kept in touch and met for lunch once a month. “Do you have some big news to share with a friend?” the young woman teased.

“Now how did you find out?” Nicole asked, assuming that somehow she heard about her serious relationship with Jonathan.

“This guy from your firm called me. He said it was a routine check, but when I said I needed to know more before I’d say anything, he told me you were in the zone to become a partner.”

“Partner?”

“Yes, partner! Were you keeping it from me just because I’ve stooped to doing commercials?”

Nicole insisted that she was not up for partner, and asked about the person from her firm. There was no one with the name he had given. Then she pressed about his questions.

“Sleazy stuff,” her friend told her. “Like, did you do any centerfolds or men’s magazines. Did you sometimes work for an escort service?”

Nicole dialed other friends. Two of them had been interviewed by investigators. “Don’t worry,” one of them said. “I made you out to be Martha Stewart. I didn’t say a thing about that bachelor party we did together.”

Someone was looking, with lots of detectives, into every phase of her life. This career, her earlier career, maybe even back to her cheerleading days in Muncie. She called the high school music teacher who had encouraged her into the school musicals. “What a coincidence,” the teacher shouted into the phone. “I was just talking about you. I hear you’re up for a big promotion, and I couldn’t be happier for you ...”

It had to be Jonathan’s parents. She thought of phoning Alexandra at the house on Long Island. “If you want to know, just ask me,” she wanted to challenge. “You don’t need idiots pretending to be government agents.” But she could almost hear Jonathan’s mother
reply in a bored voice, “My dear, what on earth are you talking about? If I were hiring detectives, they would be the very best. You wouldn’t know anything about it.”

Or, maybe she should storm right into Jack Donner’s office. Everyone else might founder in his wake but she had heard that he really respected a fighter. “Jack, when your detectives send you the report I’d like to have a look at it. I’ll be happy to fill you in on anything they miss.” Except there was always the possibility that he would explode into one of his legendary rages. “Get your ass out of here before I kick you all the way out to the elevator. And take my wimp of a son with you.”

But the snooping had to stop, and there was one person who might be able to stop it. Nicole phoned Jonathan making no attempt to hide the anger in her voice, and demanded a lunch date the next afternoon. “In fact, make it a breakfast date,” she said. “If I wait until lunch I’m apt to kill somebody.”

“Me?” he asked in surprise.

“Among others,” she snapped.

At eight in the morning, he was waiting by the maître d’ stand at the Plaza dining room. He smiled as he saw Nicole approaching, but realized from the determination in her stride that a smile might be dangerous. Instead, he greeted her with serious demeanor and a brushed kiss as if she were a distant cousin at a funeral. They followed a waiter to a table with a single rose in a silver vase, set for two. Then they waited quietly while coffee was poured.

“Did you know your family is having me investigated?”

“No . . . well, yes, I suppose. I mean I don’t know but I’m not completely surprised.”

“You’re not surprised? Does that mean you approve of them pushing their noses into my private life?”

“No, of course not. I don’t approve. I didn’t approve when they investigated a girl I was dating in college, or when they ran background checks on Ben Tobin. But they’re protecting a ten-billion-dollar estate. They think anyone who comes near them is a potential kidnapper—”

“I’m a potential kidnapper?”

“No, it’s not about you. You remember the suits at the gate to the house? They were screening everyone arriving. And I’ll bet at least
three of the waiters were really with the security firm and had guns down the backs of their pants.”

Nicole’s eyes were widening. “Doesn’t that strike you as a bit paranoid?”

“It did, until last October, when a fake deliveryman tried to drag Pam into the back of his truck. He had already mailed the ransom note.”

The waiter came with the menus, and then fled under Nicole’s fiery gaze.

“I’m not a deliveryman,” she hissed at Jonathan as soon as the man was out of earshot. “I’m someone you say you love, and I expect that your mother and father are planning on loving me, too. If you trust me, then they should trust me ...”

“They do. You’re taking this too personally. They—”

“It is personal,” she snapped, cutting him off. “So far their investigators have suggested to my boss that I’m looking for another job, which could well get me fired. They’ve asked friends about my career as a porno star, and even called my high school teachers. They’re digging for dirt and getting mud all over me in the process. I—”

“Nicole, they did the same kind of research on Pam’s college boyfriend. The works—right back to his childhood when it turned out he had been an altar boy. Joyriding in a borrowed car when he was in high school. Drunk and disorderly at a frat party after a football game. When they added up all the crimes of his youth he turned out to be just a normal kid, not nearly as dangerous as I was. But by the time they gave him a clean bill of health, Pam had changed her mind. The guy wasn’t ambitious enough for her.”

“Is that what you’re saying? That none of this will matter because you’ll probably change your mind?”

Jonathan exhaled deeply in his frustration. “Of course not. I’m just saying that my parents are very defensive about everything. Their house has more security than the White House. It’s not about you any more than it was about Pam’s boyfriend. Or Ben Tobin, because he’s been showing an interest in Pam. For them, it’s just business as usual.”

“Business as . . .” She stopped, her voice choking in her throat. Her eyes flooded, not with rage but more with despair. She shook
her head, then jumped to her feet and darted for the door. He bounded up after her, hesitated for an instant to wonder what he should do about the check, and then walked rapidly across the lobby. When he reached the top of the steps, he saw her running past the fountain toward Fifth Avenue. By the time he reached the street she was already into a taxi.

Jonathan took his own cab downtown to her office building and searched the lobby. Then he rode up to her floor and inquired politely. She hadn’t come in yet. He waited until almost 9:30, and then went back down to the street and hailed another cab, this time to her apartment.

He pressed her doorbell and heard her voice on the intercom.

“It’s me—”

The intercom clicked off but the door didn’t unlock. He rang again.

“Let me come up. We have to talk—”

It clicked off again. He was ringing it for the third time when the lock buzzed, letting him into the lobby. He punched the elevator button for her floor, and found her door ajar when he reached it. He passed the tiny kitchen, crossed the living room in three strides, and found her in the “L” that she used as her bedroom. Her suitcase was on the bed, and she was dragging four seasons worth of clothes out of the bulging closet.

“What are you doing?”

She kept packing. “Getting out of here. What does it look like I’m doing?”

“You can’t just. . . leave. What about us?”

She pulled open a dresser drawer and began loading stacks of underwear into the suitcase. “I’m in way over my head, Jonathan,” she said. “I’m running for my life.”

“Then I’ll run with you,” he announced.

She stopped abruptly and looked up from her packing.

“I mean it,” he continued. “You pack what you need and then we’ll go to my place while I get some things together.”

“Pack for where?” Nicole asked suspiciously.

“Anywhere you say. Just as long as it’s a place where we can get married tomorrow.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“I’m serious,” he insisted. “I’m asking you to marry me. Right now! Tomorrow at the latest.”

Nicole took a deep breath. “I can’t do that. I don’t want to live under surveillance. And I can’t let you do it. It would cost you your family.” She went back to her packing.

Jonathan waited until she had turned away and then slammed the lid down on the suitcase. “I’m not going to let you go. You asked me at the party what I would do if I had to make a choice. Well I’m choosing. I’m going with you to get married. And whatever happens, happens. Nothing at home is as important as you are.”

Her eyes filled again, but this time with a glow of joy. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“Let’s go,” he said. “Forget the packing. We’ll buy whatever we need.”

“Don’t you need to call your father?”

“We’ll send him a postcard.”

FIFTEEN

T
HEY SPENT
the morning at City Hall and then the afternoon shopping while they were waiting for their license to be processed. They spent the night at his apartment where he ignored two calls from Alexandra that were on his machine, and then went back down to City Hall in the morning. A Marine and his girlfriend stood up for them, and then they changed places so that Nicole and Jonathan could witness their marriage. On the steps, Jonathan reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of rice, and tossed it in the air over their heads. Then he rushed Nicole into the waiting limo that pulled away without any instructions from him.

“Where are we going?” Nicole asked.

“On our honeymoon.” He pulled her into an embrace.

She resisted. “Where’s that?”

“In heaven ...” He turned her face to his.

“No, tell me. Where are you taking me?”

“I told you. Straight to heaven. Nonstop ...”

The car climbed the ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Jonathan, am I being a brat?”

“No, you’re being impossible. I’m trying to consummate our marriage and you keep pushing me away.”

“I mean, have I dragged you into this? Because that’s not why I was packing. I wasn’t trying to force a proposal.”

He pulled back. “You mean you would have settled for an ordinary proposition? I could have just thrown your suitcase off the bed and pulled you under the covers?”

“No, I mean are you sure that this is what you want?”

He slid his hand under her skirt. “You know exactly what I want.”

She grabbed his wrist, keeping him well short of his goal. “Can we be serious for just a minute?”

“I’m dead serious,” he said, tugging at the edge of his mustache and trying to look villainous.

The car came down in Brooklyn and turned onto the expressway that ran east toward Long Island. Jonathan reached for her but Nicole slid away across the sofalike seat. “I love you, Jonathan,” she said in a factual, businesslike tone.

He laughed. “Well, I should hope so. We haven’t been married long enough for you to start hating me.”

“Your mother doesn’t think I love you. That’s why she’s investigating me. She thinks I’m in love with your fortune.”

He feigned despair. “Ah, the curse of being rich. Does she love me or my money?” He slid across the space that was separating them. “Fortunately, I don’t give a damn as long as you hurry and get out of your clothes.”