The Jewels of Tessa Kent (50 page)

“One triple-strand ruby necklace, set in diamonds …” Monty Foy had reached the boxes and
boxes of rubies, carefully set aside in their own vault, not one of which Tessa had touched since Luke’s death. She would have gotten rid of them long ago, but even the idea of coping with their existence had been too much to face. She couldn’t stand the sight of them.

“I’m going out to get a cup of coffee,” she said, rising abruptly.

“But we can’t continue without you,” Monty Foy said. “I can’t touch these boxes unless you’re here to verify the inventory.”

“For Christ’s sake, Mr. Foy, I trust you. You’re not going to stuff them in your pockets! Or smoke them! Finish the inventory of every last ruby without me and I’ll initial each sheet of paper,” she ordered him.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, unless you appoint someone, a lawyer or an accountant, to do it in your place.”

“Send in one of those security people.”

One of Foy’s assistants opened the door and motioned to the first man standing against the door.

“What’s your name?” Tessa asked him.

“Bernie Allen, ma’am.”

“Mr. Allen, please witness the inventory of my rubies, sign each paper Mr. Foy gives you, and I’ll sign them again when you’re finished.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He raised an eyebrow at Monty Foy, who shrugged his shoulders and waved him forward.

Tessa left the room and headed for the ladies’ room at the end of the corridor. Suddenly, walking toward her, dark against the glare of the fluorescent light, was the tall, slender shape of a girl wearing the black outfit Maggie had had on this morning. Tessa’s hand flew to her throat. Maggie! Oh, Maggie! The girl approached, and quickly she realized that it wasn’t Maggie but a stranger, with dark red hair worn in close-cropped curls, dressed in that black quasi-uniform they all wore.

“Miss Kent, I’m Janet Covitz, Maggie’s assistant press officer. She sent me over to see if there was anything you needed. Can I get you a cup of tea or a Coke or some Perrier? Have they made you comfortable in
there? Are there any personal errands you’d like me to run for you while you witness the inventory? Any phone calls you’d like me to make? Maggie told me to tell you that from now on I’ll be totally at your disposal.”

“No, thank you, Janet, nothing. I’m just taking a breather. What do you mean, ‘totally at my disposal’?”

“Maggie’s going to be super busy for every minute of the next six months, Miss Kent. She’s formed a team with one of the other press officers and two floaters to work directly with her, and she’s delegated me to do everything she’d normally be doing for you herself if she had the time.”

“I see. I could use a cup of coffee. I’m just going to stand out here in the corridor for the moment. It’s claustrophobic in there.”

Her mind a blank, searching helplessly for a way around Janet Covitz, Tessa paced the hall, oblivious to the security team, until Bernie Allen reappeared.

“Mr. Foy’s finished with the rubies, Miss Kent.”

“Thank you, Mr. Allen. When a young lady shows up with coffee, please tell her I’ve changed my mind about it. She can go on back to her office.”

Tessa returned to her chair, just as Monty Foy lifted her Tiffany pearls from their box. “I’m keeping these,” she said, snatching them from his hands.

“Quite right,” he said understandingly. “They’re hardly in the same ballpark as the rest of the collection, are they? Some sentimental value, I assume.”

“No more value than your lungs, Mr. Foy.”

H
ow’d the meeting go?” Sam asked eagerly even before he’d kissed Tessa. All of yesterday evening, he thought, she’d been negotiating her way across a tightrope of nerves in a way that was completely foreign to his experience of her. She had been so wound up that she could talk of little other than the fact that today, this very afternoon, since all the jewels were now in the possession of S & S, she’d find herself in the same room with Maggie for the first time since the day when she’d signed the auction contract.

“I’m not sure,” Tessa answered in a white, muted voice, her vitality and conviction lost. “I’m just not sure at all. I may have blown it.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, tipping her lips up for a kiss. “You said this was just a preliminary strategy meeting. How could even you, with all your amazing ability to screw up your life, possibly blow a six-month effort right at the beginning, darling?”

Tessa gave him a smile that was no more than a faint attempt at smiling, so miserable that he felt genuine alarm. “Tell me everything that happened,” Sam
ordered, “from the beginning, so I can explain it to you, because you don’t make sense.”

“There were seven of us, sitting around a conference table—Lee Maine has lent the room to Maggie for the duration, and—”

“Who were they? Pretend you’re a historian, baby. I want details.”

“Besides Maggie and Juliet Tree and me, there was that girl Janet Covitz I told you about, and another I hadn’t met before, Dune Maddox by name, a rakish, very social blond with more brains than you’d think to look at her. Also there were two floaters Maggie recruited, kids, Sam, probably no more than twenty, and adorable, a matched pair of brunettes, both obviously bright and eager, named Aviva Beach and Joanne Corday.”

“Were you the only grown-up there?”

“No, Juliet Tree’s in her forties, a true professional who’s been at S and S for years, an elegant woman, the chignon and tailored suit type, who seems a bit square, especially compared to the others. Obviously Maggie’s a cult figure; the others are all Maggie clones, like Janet, even down to that haircut, and except for Juliet, they treat her word as writ.”

“So you’re sitting there with a bunch of females, and you’re looking … how?”

“Semi-movie-star. Oh, Sam, I was up half the night obsessing on what to wear, and I decided it would be affected to dress down the way I do for your department head, that I should look more or less the way they’d expect me to look, but not anything over the top, so I wore the same thing I had on the day I met you. I hoped it would bring me luck.”

“But remember, you had me in thrall from adolescence on. Then what happened?”

“Oh, I behaved myself. I pushed my chair just far enough away from the table so I wouldn’t seem to be intruding on Maggie’s turf, since she was running the meeting, and I shut up and listened. She explained how
they announce an important auction, keeping it totally secret until the actual morning of the press conference, so it makes headlines all over the world. She said Hamilton Scott would make the announcement of the sale and then I’d speak, explaining why I’d decided to auction my jewels and telling the press that the proceeds would go to cancer research and answering questions … the usual stuff. Dune Maddox seemed surprised that I was going to be doing that, as if somehow a movie star wouldn’t be able to open her mouth without a script, and I told her public speaking didn’t bother me.”

“So far, so good.”

“Oh, Sam, you said to start at the beginning, damn it! So don’t keep giving me progress reports on what I tell you.”

“Don’t you think you want a drink?”

“Not particularly. It’ll just make me more depressed and worse tempered than ever.”

“Don’t you think you need a drink?”

“Probably. Thank you, darling. Why do you take such good care of me?” Tessa asked plaintively.

“Why shouldn’t I? You’re my designated lifetime sweetheart, and on top of that, you’re a good provider. Now drink this and tell me more.”

“Juliet wanted to know if I had any scrapbooks and I told her that Fiona had made them of every picture ever published of me since my first film and I’d let her know to send them here right away. They need the pictures for the catalog and to distribute to magazines.”

“But there must be thousands upon thousands of photographs.”

“There are. The idea is that every magazine that does a story on me will get entirely different photos from different movies and different occasions when I was photographed in real life wearing my jewels. Maggie’s trying for cover stories in most of the magazines I read—like
Vogue, Town and Country
, and
Vanity Fair
—and in some I don’t, like
People
and
Hello!
and
Life
and even in some of the decorating magazines like
Architectural Digest
or
House and Garden
—she says they rarely do celebrity covers but if they can come here to photograph me at home they almost certainly will. And she’s hoping for
Newsweek
and maybe even
Time
the actual week of the auction.”

“Isn’t that publicity overkill? Almost the only ones she’s left out are
Spy
and
Rolling Stone.
”

“Apparently she doesn’t think overkill exists. She’s going after the big television interview shows too. I didn’t question it, just said I’d be available for anything except lying in my tub with bubbles up to my armpits.”

“Will you mind if anyone gets wise to us? You’ve kept it so quiet all year.”

“Mind? I’d take out an ad in
Publishers Weekly
if you’d let me. Will you mind is more the question.”

“I wish everybody knew,” Sam answered. He understood Tessa’s discretion intellectually. He realized that she didn’t want them to be the focus of worldwide gossip and speculation, but he yearned for an official romance. Hard to have with a public figure, he told himself impatiently. If only she’d marry him! She’d been on the verge, before the auction came up, but now all her emotional focus was turned toward Maggie.

“Your study’ll be off-limits anyway,” Tessa continued. “Photographers won’t want me in front of a desk.”

“You can do this stuff in your sleep, can’t you?”

“Just about. I publicized every picture I made, but I never did an interview just for the sake of keeping my name in front of the public. That’s probably why I’m supposed to be something of a recluse. Anyway, I gave all the press department an open invitation to come on and take a good look at this place so they’ll have an idea of how it could photograph. Janet and Dune jumped at it, the two floaters didn’t quite dare speak up yet, though they’ll get here sooner or later.”

“What about Maggie, doesn’t she want to see it too?”

“Clearly no. She told them she was delegating all questions photographic to Dune and Janet. She gave Juliet Tree first choice of pictures for the catalog. They think there’s a good chance they can sell it in the hundreds of thousands, what with the serious buyers, the merely curious, the Irving Penn fans and my own fans. It can sell as a gift book since it’ll be out in time for Christmas. I told them that S and S was donating all their profits on the catalog to cancer research too.”

“When did that happen?”

“When I called Liz Sinclair this morning and suggested it.”

“Do they know it’s your idea?”

“Of course not; it’s got to be perceived as Liz and Hamilton’s gesture.”

“So far, strictly as a historian, I don’t see where you blew it.”

“The next thing that happened was I took a really good look around the table and I decided that whatever I said, no matter how informal or available I was, and believe me, I was giving my all, they were still looking at me—all but Maggie, that is—with a Stifling mixture of awe and curiosity and disbelief and oh-me-oh-my-she’s-really-Tessa-Kent stuff. They all called me ‘Miss Kent,’ of course, even Juliet Tree, and they couldn’t stop darting tiny sideways glances at me, checking me out over and over, all of them except for Maggie.”

“But she knows what you look like,” he said reasonably.

“No, Sam, that’s not the point. She made absolutely no eye contact with me,
none
, Sam, even though we had been in that meeting for at least two hours. She looked at all the others whenever she talked to them, but I could have been completely invisible. When she looked around the table she’d skim way above the top of my head, moving her eyes so quickly that no one could tell. She never once,
not once
, used my name, Sam, she referred to me as ‘the consignor’ as if I weren’t right there in the room, and managed to make it sound as if she were just being
terribly correct and polite. She was actually
ceremonial
, as if I were the hundred-year-old hereditary ruler of some feudal country.”

“So then you blew up?”

“No, nothing that sensible. Then I suggested that since we were all going to be working together for a long time, we should be like people on film sets, at least my sets, and use first names. I asked everybody to call me Tessa, because that way Maggie would have to go along with the rest of them.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?”

“They all looked at Maggie, as if for permission, and she raised her eyebrows slightly as if I’d said something embarrassingly over-friendly, like a puppy dog wagging my tail, and that’s when—oh, shit, Sam, I was so frustrated by the icy, determined way she was giving me the invisible treatment, I was so desperately anxious for her to
acknowledge
me in some way, yes, Sam,
just
like a puppy jumping up and down for attention, and planting his muddy paws all over a white skirt, that I explained, in an entirely natural, casual way, that Maggie had been leaning over backward to be proper because she didn’t want to trade on or presume on the fact that we were sisters.”