The Daughter-in-Law (12 page)

“From the plane, while you were getting dressed. I just said you and I were married and that we were on a charter flight bound for heaven. Oh, and that you were a better piece of ass than he’s ever had . . .”

She poked him in the ribs. “You did not. But what did he say?”

“Oh, all the usual things. Congratulations . . . good luck ...”

“That doesn’t sound like your father. What did he really say?”

“You want his exact words?”

“Yes! Every word.”

He did a fair imitation of Jack’s crackling voice. “ ‘Damn it, Jonathan, how stupid can you get? You screw a girl like that. You don’t marry her.’ ”

“That sounds like your father. And what did Alexandra add?”

“Just that she’d call her lawyers right away and have them get working on the annulment.”

She punched him again. “You’re lying. She never said that. That’s probably what she’s doing but she’d never tell anyone. What did you call it? Deniability?”

“You’re right, I’m lying,” he admitted. “She had already gone to bed and Jack didn’t want to disturb her. He’s probably telling her right now.”

“Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall? What do you think she’s saying?”

“Something not too committal. ‘That money sucking little bitch,’ or maybe, ‘If he’d just use his brain instead of his pecker.’ ”

“Are you beginning to have doubts?” Nicole asked.

“After this morning? How could I have doubts? I’m too tired to have anything.”

She twisted out of the hammock, setting it rocking and nearly dumping him out. “I’m going for a swim.” She tossed off the oversize T-shirt she was wearing and raced across the hot sand.

“Didn’t you bring a bathing suit?” Jonathan called after her.

“We’re the only ones on the island,” she shouted back, and plunged into the crystal water.

SIXTEEN

“L
AST NIGHT
, about eight-thirty. He was calling from a plane he had chartered.”

“A plane to where?”

“He didn’t say, but it will be easy to find out. It won’t take Greg Lambert long to run down all the charters that left New York yesterday.”

Jack and Alexandra were having breakfast on the back terrace, looking down the hill to the cabana, and then out to the Sound. A huge market umbrella shaded their table.

“You should have awakened me.”

“Why?” Jack asked. “If they’re really married there’s nothing we can do about it. And if they’re not, there’s no reason to care.”

He went back over the details of the telephone call he had received from his son. Jonathan had started by announcing that he wouldn’t be at work on Monday, and Jack had asked cynically how anyone would know whether he was there or not. “It’s not as if people were depending on you.”

“Well, then if I take the whole week it wouldn’t put you out of business?”

“Take a month,” Jack had answered.

“Okay, a month. Or maybe two. You see, I’m on my honeymoon and I don’t want to rush it.”

“Your honeymoon? Who in hell would go on a honeymoon with you?”

“My wife, Nicole. We got married this morning.”

“The one in the catcher’s mask?”

Alexandra shook her head slowly. “I was afraid of something like this. I knew that girl was different.”

“Different? She must be out of her mind.”

“Or else very, very shrewd. I just hope that she checks out.”

SEVENTEEN

T
HEY MOORED
at one of the marked diving trails inside the reef, a mile-long canyon of pristine coral in ten to twenty feet of water.

“Are you sure I’m ready for this?” she asked. Nicole had once taken lessons in the swimming pool of a fitness club, and Jonathan gave her a day’s worth of training just off their beach.

“Just stay with me, and breathe the way you did yesterday. If you have a problem, get your hand in front of my face and point up.”

She still wasn’t convinced. “But I’ve only been in six feet of water...”

“This isn’t deep. And there’s sunlight all the way to the bottom. You could read a newspaper down there.”

He did a final check of her equipment, fitted her mouthpiece, and watched her take several breaths from her tank. Then he bit onto his own mouthpiece, dropped his mask, and took her hand. Together, they dropped backward over the side.

She was instantly lost in a cloud of bubbles, something she hadn’t experienced when they practiced in shoulder-deep water. It took her just an instant to get herself righted, and one kick with her flippers to clear the boat. She descended quickly, down into an explosion of color animated by ridiculous looking fish. Then she let go of Jonathan’s hand, and took up the same tracking position she had learned in skydiving: her head down slightly, her arms by her side. With just a gentle kick of her feet she moved effortlessly, down into the canyons of plants and waving grass that grew between the spires of coral.

Jonathan was in and out of her sight, slightly behind her where he could watch her every move. She kept getting lost in her adventure, once following a ray as it swam away from the reef, and then tracking a turtle that moved among the spires and led her out of the preserve area. Twice he had to cut in front of her and turn her back in the general direction of the boat.

She gushed with excitement when they were back aboard, begging to return as soon as they had filled their tanks. Scuba diving was suddenly the most important calling in her life. Jonathan had bought extra tanks so that they wouldn’t have to go back to the mainland every day to get air for their ventures. By midweek, he had weaned her out of the underwater park and out into deeper water beyond the barrier. They dove off Half Moon Cay, skimming by the jagged coral heads and over the soft coral gardens. Eagle rays, menacing to behold but playfully curious, glided by them. They had gone to the Blue Hole, a four-hundred-foot-deep cistern of eerily blue water with hundreds of caves in its sides. Then they had motored to a shelf where there was an old wooden wreck lying in fifty feet of water. By the end of the week, Jonathan had booked their island cottage for an additional three weeks.

Nicole had used a trip to nearby Ambergris Cay to call her office. “Married, that’s what I said. So I’m going to take a few weeks. I’ll apologize in person as soon as I get back.” Harold was screaming mad until he learned that she had married Jack Donner’s son. Then he warmed up to his affable old self. “Why do I think that in a few weeks I’m going to be working for you?” he asked. He chuckled, but he wasn’t really laughing.

Jonathan called his mother at the house to tell her that he was extending his honeymoon.

“Honeymoon?” she said with mock surprise. “I don’t recall you telling me that you were planning to get married.”

Pam jumped on the line. “This is great! When are you coming back so that I can throw you two a party? I think Nicole is terrific. It will be such fun to finally have a sister.”

Jonathan was relieved. No one seemed to be very angry with him.

But as they got through their second week, he noticed a change in Nicole. Nothing dramatic. She was still thrilled when they were diving and enthused enough to review the day’s events each evening as they motored from the sunset to the dark intimacy of their island. And she was still an eager and exciting lover, in their midnight swims from their dock as well as in their oversize bed. But increasingly, and at the oddest times, there were sudden bouts of anxiety.

“Don’t be silly! What could be bothering me?” she told him each time he asked. But on two occasions he had awakened and found
her standing on the porch, her arms folded across her chest, her face set and staring out to sea. “Go back to bed,” she had told him. “I’ll be right in.”

She had snapped at him when he was checking her expansion valve. “Leave it alone. I know what I’m doing.” Later, she apologized, saying that she had just been nervous about the dive. Her explanation didn’t ring true.

Over the last few nights, Nicole had seemed ominously quiet. She hadn’t really been part of their conversation, but more of a spectator, answering with nods and grunts and proposing few topics of her own.

“Why do you keep asking?” she had demanded when he raised the question again. “There’s nothing wrong.”

“You’re worried about the reception we’re going to get when we get back to New York, aren’t you?”

Nicole launched into an angry denial, but then broke it off in mid-sentence. “A little, I suppose,” she admitted. “Eloping seemed very romantic at the time. Now, it seems inconsiderate. They’re not going to be happy with me.”

“I’m happy with you,” he shot back. “Besides, we didn’t have much choice. As I remember, you were packing to leave me when I came up with the idea. It was either marry you or lose you, and I couldn’t bear losing you.”

She nodded to accept the compliment. He was right. She hadn’t given him a lot of options. But her expression remained grim. Nicole seemed more and more troubled as the time of their return grew nearer.

EIGHTEEN

“S
HE HAS
a lot to explain,” Alexandra was telling Jack as they lounged in the shade of the cabana. “And the investigators aren’t nearly finished.”

He grunted. “Everyone has a lot to explain. When you dig for dirt, you find dirt.”

“Do you know what her profession was before she got into finance?”

“Sure,” Jack cackled. “She was a catcher for the Yankees.”

“That I could handle,” Alexandra said. “But I think her actual title was ‘hostess.’ ”

He sat up abruptly. “A hooker? No kidding?”

“I didn’t say ‘hooker,’ I said ‘hostess.’ But, one of her responsibilities was jumping out of cakes at stag parties.”

He exploded into laughter. “Well that’s a first. Maybe you can hire her for one of your symphony openings.”

Alexandra found herself laughing. Whatever else it might be, that would be an opening everyone would remember. “That’s about the only way she would get into the hall,” she said. “Her career in theater was a complete bust. She didn’t get a single part. Not even in a touring company.”

She went on with her recitation of the detectives’ preliminary report. When Nicole arrived in New York she had lived in a woman’s hotel for a few weeks, and then found an apartment with another aspiring actress. “Not really an apartment, but half a flat in Hell’s Kitchen. The building has since been knocked down with no loss to the city’s architectural heritage. They waited tables in a coffee shop and then in a Midtown restaurant. In their free time they took dance classes and acting lessons.”

“Half the actors in New York are waiters,” Jack said, already losing interest in his wife’s report. “The other half are bartenders.”

“And a few of them are apparently opportunists,” Alexandra
added. “After a few months Nicole left her girlfriend and moved in with an aspiring director. David Hanna, to be exact. He’s gone on to great things, but he didn’t take Nicole along with him. He doesn’t even remember who she was.”

Jack was paying attention again. “Why should he? Last thing he needs is an old bed partner showing up with a brat. Only thing he can do is swear that he never heard of her.” He sat up and threw his legs off the chaise. “But none of this surprises me. Lots of young people make bad starts. The important thing is that she got her act straight. I wish I could say as much for Jonathan.”

“She’s still friends with a call girl. One of the women they interviewed had nothing but good things to say about Nicole. But it turned out that the lady was turning tricks in an Upper East Side apartment. She even has her own Web site.”

Jack had started toward the pool but he stopped and turned back. “One of my boyhood friends is doing life for murder. Does that mean I’m a murderer?” He turned and dove in, creating a shock wave that splashed up on Alexandra.

He was right, of course. All she knew was that in her first few years in New York, young Nicole Pierce had done some questionable things in the company of some seamy people. Nothing shocking or criminal. All it proved was that not every young woman went straight from the family home to the altar. Suppose she had done some exotic dancing to pick up rent money? Or maybe modeled lingerie in storefronts? It might be embarrassing if someone turned up erotic photos of her new daughter-in-law, but it wouldn’t be devastating. And her live-in affair with the director could be laughed off; lots of young people give married life a try without the benefit of clergy.

Give her credit. As Jack had said, she had certainly gotten her act together. The people at her brokerage firm raved about her. She was on the way up to handling bigger and more promising accounts. If her theater career had been a failure, her budding business career showed every sign of success.

But still, Alexandra was anxious. Nicole had arrived on the scene too suddenly and become deeply involved too quickly. She was just a bit too perfect, and much too blasé about the staggering fortune she had married into. Certainly you could fall deeply in love with
someone who had Jonathan’s millions. But you couldn’t pretend the money didn’t matter. Money always mattered.

She was also concerned about the gaps in Nicole’s background. Two years were missing between her exit from junior college and her arrival in New York. There was a whole blank year between the end of her theater career and her first appearance on Wall Street. And then there was the contradiction that still had to be explained. Nicole had told Jonathan at their meeting that it was her first solo jump without her instructor. But she had been certified by a school upstate in the Adirondacks two years earlier. Why pretend she was a novice? There were many questions about the new Mrs. Donner. And where her son was concerned, Alexandra was determined to find the answers.

NINETEEN

N
ICOLE WASN’T
sure what she had heard. The far end of their tiny island was a mangrove forest, alive with birds during the day, turtles and gators at night. There were constant noises. The air was never truly silent. But something had caught her attention as she lay wide-awake in bed, her head resting on Jonathan’s rising and falling chest. It was a water sound—a gentle splashing coming from the direction of the dock. A wave, she thought. The wake of a distant boat or a ripple pushed by a change in the wind, breaking against their boat.