When Lightning Strikes Twice (36 page)

“Gee, I wonder why not?” mocked Aiken.

“I wanted to
give
Shawnie the money, but he insisted on a loan,” said Misty.

“Interest-free?” probed Wade.

Misty and Shawn looked at each other, and Wade knew
they hadn’t discussed the going interest rate on loans these days. Did they even know what interest was?

“Interest-free,” the two chorused together, heads bobbing in unison.

“What do you think of Shawn’s Garden Shop and Lawn Service as a name for my business, Sax?” Shawn wanted to know.

“Catchy. I can already see it painted on the outside of a fleet of vans. Have you discussed your plans with Quint yet, Mrs. Tilden?” Wade asked politely.

“Call me Misty,” she invited. “No, I haven’t told Quint. I’m sure he’ll be excited for us.”

“Oh, yes, he ought to be.” Wade was gleeful.

Wait’ll Cormack hears what they are planning!
He could only imagine how the executor of the Tilden estate would react to the news of
two
such high-risk-prone ventures, given the extremely high percentage of failure for new small businesses. And neither Misty nor Shawn struck him as entrepreneurially gifted. Both would need to be, or their projects would eat up Tilden capital without providing any return.

“And the funny thing is, Quint Cormack is my lawyer, too,” Aiken inserted himself into the conversation. “So the sale will be all in the family, kind of.”

“That is a funny thing.” Wade grinned broadly.

He wanted to laugh out loud. Cormack was stuck squarely in the middle of this mess! How could he talk two of his clients out of this insane sale if they both demanded it?

Wade lifted his mug of watered-down beer. “I’d like to propose a toast—to the future Grrrls Night Out and Shawn’s Garden Shop and Lawn Service.”

The others lifted their glasses containing their own particular drinks.

“Hear, hear,” Aiken seconded the toast.

The four glasses clinked together.

“See, sweetness, I told you Wade was cool,” Shawn said happily, squeezing Misty’s hand.

Dana arrived home in the middle of the eleven o’clock broadcast of Action News.

“Of all the nights for you to stay out late with Rich Vicker, why did it have to be tonight?” her mother greeted her with a maternal lament. “Wade was waiting here since dinner for you. He finally left a little while ago, and he didn’t look happy.”

“Why would he wait for me?” Dana asked cautiously.

“Oh, honey, you don’t have to pretend anymore. Wade isn’t.” Mary Jean crossed the room to give Dana a hug. “We know how you two feel about each other.”

“Mom’s been sniffing glue again.” Dana attempted a feeble joke. What had Wade said to her parents? Or had they become delusional with no assistance from him?

“So how’s the Library?” Bob Sheely tactfully steered the conversation in another direction.

“You could read
War and Peace
there while you’re waiting for the food.” Dana sighed. “That’s why I’m so late. The service was beyond terrible. Each course took forever to arrive. Rich was displeased but not enough to pass on dessert, so that added an additional forty-five minutes. Then he took a wrong turn driving me home and ended up going south on 70 instead of north.”

Frowning, she sat down on the sofa. “We ended up in Oak Shade and I saw the strangest thing.”

“Don’t go anywhere near those bars in Oak Shade,” her mother warned. “Too many drunk drivers on the road out there, it’s getting out of hand. Just the other day I heard Oak Shade worked out an agreement with the Lakeview Police Department to help patrol the area. Chief Spagna’s heading the joint unit.”

“Things will definitely improve with Nick Spagna in charge. The chief knows how to motivate young cops and how to intimidate drunken idiots,” Bob Sheely said admiringly.

“Speaking of the chief, I saw him at the Library tonight with Eve Saxon, of all people. They must’ve passed on
dessert because they left way before Rich and me.”

Dana didn’t add that she was certain the couple intended to have a different sort of dessert, not offered within the confines of the Library despite the private booths. The chief and the lawyer had been holding hands as they left the restaurant, Eve looking positively dreamy-eyed, Spagna appearing a little less menacing than usual.

“Nick would be good for Eve,” Mary Jean decided, nodding her approval. “And vice versa. He is strong enough to stand up to her but can accept her own strength.”

“Didn’t you say the same thing about Erica and Dimitri on
All My Children?
” teased Dana.

“The weather’s on,” her father announced, bringing an end to the conversation. Both her parents quickly turned to watch the weather forecast.

Dana started to go upstairs to her room and ended up outside on the front porch. She hadn’t told her parents what the strangest thing she’d seen in Oak Shade happened to be, but she couldn’t put it from her mind.

While lost on Route 70, Rich had driven past a cheesy dive called the Doll House, and she’d seen a dark green Mercedes in the parking lot outside. It looked enough like Wade’s car to actually be his car, but Wade would never venture into a dump like that.

Parked next to the Mercedes was a big black Range Rover like the one in Pedersen’s Car Shoppe window. Rich had seen the cars, too, and remarked on the folly of parking such valuable vehicles in front of such a low-scale place. He quoted the statistical odds of car theft in relation to car models and locations.

A short while later, after Rich had turned around to head in the right direction, they passed the Doll House again. This time Dana saw the first three letters SAX of Wade’s vanity plates on the green Mercedes.
It was Wade’s car!
Stolen? That seemed more likely than Wade as a Doll House patron.

“It’s supposed to be warm and sunny tomorrow,” her
mother reported, standing in the doorway. “Are you coming inside, dear?”

“I think I’ll sit out here and wait for Shawn,” said Dana.

To keep her mind off Wade, she might as well concentrate on her brother. She decided to try a different approach with Shawn tonight. To be friendly and accessible instead of furious and condemning. Last night she and her sisters had deepened Shawn’s loyalty toward Misty by forcing him to defend her while they attacked her. Just what Tim’s Lisa had predicted would happen.

“Shawn is staying over at Chad’s tonight. Dad and I are heading to bed now. Good night, hon.”

“ ‘Night Mom.” Dana sounded calm but she was not.

Shawn was not at his pal Chad’s tonight; she would wager a whole year’s salary on that, and she wasn’t a gambling woman. He was with Misty Tilden and suddenly various images fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to clearly reveal the entire picture.

Wade actually was at the Doll House, and now Dana knew why—because Shawn and Misty Tilden were there. That black Range Rover parked next to Wade’s car had to belong to Misty; she must have bought it right out of Pedersen’s showroom window.

At the office today, Quint had mentioned that his star client was going to Pedersen’s Car Shoppe to buy herself a set of wheels. Helen had speculated Misty would insist on a bubblegum pink Ferarri. “Something like Barbie drives,” she’d added, uncharacteristically snide.

But if Misty had taken Shawn along on the car-shopping trip, he would direct her toward something like the Range Rover, because it was big and dark and hulking like the military vehicles he admired.

That Misty Tilden would go to the Doll House seemed unremarkable to Dana. A place like that probably felt like home to the former nude lap dancer. And somehow Wade had learned Shawn and Misty were there and gone to take his turn talking some sense into the younger Sheely brother.

Dana knew that no matter how Wade Saxon might currently
feel toward her, he cared deeply for her family. He would do anything for her parents, for Tim. He’d want to help Shawn. So he had gone to the Doll House to try.

She didn’t think any further than that. Acting on sheer impulse, she went back inside to grab her purse and car keys and drove straight to the Doll House.

When she pulled into the lot, the Mercedes and the Range Rover were still parked side by side, their undisturbed presence a challenge to Rich Vicker’s car-theft statistics.

Her courage faltered when she reached the Doll House door. Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure what she was going to say to either Wade or Shawn. Nor was she eager for any kind of a face-to-face confrontation with Misty, with whom she’d always dealt politely in Quint’s office.

She could hear the music from within, a blaringly loud rendition of En Vogue’s “Never Gonna Get It.” Dana tried to tell herself it wasn’t prophetic, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that coming here had been an excruciatingly bad idea.

She stood there, paralyzed by indecision, unable to make herself enter the Doll House but unwilling to give up and go back home.

Later, Dana wondered how long she would have remained there and what she eventually would have done, if the decision hadn’t been made for her by the arrival of an Oak Shade police car. Its siren was silenced, but the blue-and-red lights on top flashed ominously.

Though the urge to dash to her car and peel out of the lot was powerful, Dana didn’t cede to it. The officers had already seen her. Better to take the initiative and approach them first.

She walked toward them as they advanced to the door, their guns drawn.

“My little brother is in there,” she told the taller, meaner-looking one of the pair. The courage she’d failed to summon earlier was suddenly there. Or perhaps talking
to policemen, even stern-faced ones, was preferable to entering a pit like the Doll House.

“I’ve been standing here, trying to work up the nerve to go in and get him but I couldn’t do it,” Dana forged ahead bravely.

“Is the kid underage?” the cop asked grimly.

Dana shook her head. “But he’s a very impressionable twenty-three. He told our folks he’s staying with a friend tonight, but not the one he’s really with. And I’m sure he’s in there with her.”

“You’re right to be concerned about your brother if he is in there,” said the other officer. “This place isn’t supposed to be open. Judge Jackson ordered it closed, but Sweaty Eddie doesn’t like to obey court orders.”

“Are you going to raid it?” Dana asked, wide-eyed. “Oh, please, let me take my brother home first.”

“I’m sorry, we can’t do that, miss,” said the tall cop. “We’re here to close down this place and we’re taking everybody inside to the station.”

“And arrest them?” Dana was horrified.
Shawn and Wade arrested!
“Are they going to be put in jail?”

“Sweaty Eddie, sure. And maybe the dancing girls because we heard they dance topless or less, and that’s a zone violation. The others—depending on how it goes—maybe we’ll just put a scare into them,” confided the younger, shorter, more friendly cop. He seemed to be trying to reassure her.

Dana knew enough about the law to surmise they had no grounds to arrest the patrons of an illegally open bar. But she wasn’t positive, and even if no charges were ever filed, getting hauled to the Oak Shade Police Station where a “scare” was to be deliberately induced struck her as bad enough.

“If people keep coming to this place, Aiken will keep defying the orders to close it,” continued Officer Friendly. “As long as this place makes money, it’s cheaper for him to stay open and pay the fines.”

And his lawyer’s bills, Dana thought but didn’t say.

“But if the customers are taken to the police station and held there a while, even if no charges are brought against them, they just might decide it’s not worth it to come back to this dump.” She nodded her comprehension of the strategy, trying to stall the raid, although she knew it was hopeless.

“You come on down to the Oak Shade Police Station in a couple or three hours and possibly, we’ll release your brother to you,” the meaner-looking cop said. “Now take yourself out of here. This is no place for a nice kid like you.”

Dana decided maybe he wasn’t so mean, after all. She headed slowly to her car. She felt like a traitor, abandoning both Wade and Shawn without even sounding a warning. But already a plan was beginning to formulate, a plan requiring that she’ remain free to summon help.

Eve Saxon wouldn’t want her beloved nephew to undergo a scare at the Oak Shade jail, would she? And as long as Eve was springing Wade, she might be talked into getting Shawn out, too. Misty, Dana decided, was on her own.

Dana pulled out onto Route 70 as the officers entered the Doll House. There was a convenience store just down the highway, where she could place a call to Eve. She wondered if Chief Spagna would be there, and a nervous shiver rippled through her. The chief didn’t seem as if he suffered lawbreakers gladly, and if he and Eve were—
busy
—he would resent the interruption even more. Not that Wade or Shawn were lawbreakers but even so …

Dana pulled into the convenience store and headed straight for the phone booth before she could talk herself out of placing the call for help.

R
achel’s eyelids kept fluttering shut. She would force them open, though each time required greater effort. She was lying with Quint, spoon-fashion, his arms around her, her bottom tucked into the cradle of his thighs in a king-size bed in their Philadelphia hotel room.

They’d just spent the past hour and a half experiencing the most profound and primal pleasure, and she wanted to savor this fantasic glowing aftermath. But her own body was fighting to lapse into an exhausted, sated sleep.

“Just let yourself go to sleep, Rachel.” Quint had been observing her struggle to stay awake. He kissed the top of her head lovingly, indulgently.

“I don’t want to go to sleep. Because when I wake up, it’ll be morning and time to check out of here. We’ll be back to dealing with the Tildens and Saxon Associates, back to Cormack and Son, and Laurel and Carla.”

She much preferred this private fantasy they were living, the two of them naked and alone in their own sensual world.

“And Brady?” Quint asked carefully. There was a sudden air of alert edginess about him.

Rachel sat up. “I’m sorry you have to ask, Quint. But since you did—No, I don’t consider Brady an intrusion or an obstacle.”

“Sure he is.” Quint chuckled, relaxing once again. “But at least he’s a small one. The others are full-grown.”

“I want to be with Brady, but I freely admit that I could use a vacation from the others.”

“Same here.” He pulled her back down to him. “There’s no chance of that vacation anytime soon, but we can both be with Brady tomorrow. It’s Sarah’s night off. Come over after work, and the three of us will have dinner together. We can go to—”

“Why don’t I cook dinner at your place?” Rachel suggested. “Brady seems to eat out a lot for a child his age. Maybe staying home for dinner will be a welcome change of pace for him.”

“It’ll be a welcome change of pace for me,” stated Quint, kissing her lingeringly. “It’s a deal. I’ll grill us something but if you make macaroni and cheese, especially the kind from the box, Brady will be ecstatic. Mommy.”

Rachel lay his arms, facing him. The room was dark but a shaft of moonlight shone through the gap in the curtains, providing some illumination. She traced her fingertips over the features of his face.

“I should have corrected him the first time he called me Mommy, but I liked hearing him say it too much,” she confessed softly.

“I wish you really were his mother. Maybe if I had come to Lakeview a few years earlier and met you then, you would’ve been.” Quint allowed himself a revisionist fantasy, a practice he rarely indulged. His arms tightened around her.

Rachel thought of little Brady and how much she wished things had happened that way. But that meant obliterating the existence of the woman who really had given birth to Quint’s son and taken care of him for nearly a year before turning him over to his father. Had she meant her exit to be permanent? And if not, then what?

“When Sharolyn comes back and asks to see Brady—” she began.

“
If
she comes back and
if she
asks to see him,” corrected Quint. “Both are unlikely.”

“Are you really going to keep Sharolyn from ever contacting
Brady or were you just saying that to shake up Laurel?” Rachel felt Quint tense, and she snuggled closer, to soothe him. “We can’t just pretend she doesn’t exist, Quint. It wouldn’t be fair to Brady in the long run.”

“It isn’t fair to Brady that she does exist, and that I was stupid enough to hook up with her in the first place,” Quint growled.

“Which is something of a paradox,” Rachel felt obliged to point out. “If you’d never hooked up with Sharolyn, you wouldn’t have Brady. Do you intend to keep her away from him forever, Quint? Can you, if she should want to see him?”

“God, Rachel, don’t play devil’s advocate now! The last thing I feel like doing is debating custody issues.”

“I don’t want to debate either.” She trailed her forefinger down his chest. “But you know how lawyers are, we can’t quit arguing till we’ve gotten in at least one token point.”

Quint groaned. “Okay, get it over with.”

“It’s just that Brady isn’t always going to be a little boy. What happens when he becomes a teenager and—”

“I see where you’re going with this,” Quint cut in. “Believe me, if anybody knows that little kids will tolerate parental mistakes a lot better than adolescents, it’s me.”

“You were the epitome of the angry teen, hmm?” Rachel brushed her lips across his throat. “Who can blame you with Frank Cormack for a father?”

She drew back a little and met his eyes. “I want to know everything about you and your life, but I don’t want to aggravate you with a barrage of questions.”

“You’ve got me pegged, sweetie. A barrage of questions would definitely aggravate me.” He took her hand and kissed her palm, teasing it with the tip of his tongue. “But I might make an exception for you.”

“Thanks,
sweetie
.”

They smiled at each other.

“It doesn’t sound quite so offensively sexist when you say it here,” Rachel admitted.

“So you’ll grant me permission to call you ‘sweetie’ in bed?”

“Permission granted.”

“I’m deeply grateful,” he said dryly. “And ready for question number one.”

“It’s funny but with some people, you don’t even have to ask a single question, they pour out their entire past the first hour you spend with them.” Rachel cuddled closer, thinking back on years of dating, listening to one life story after another. Feeling safe from that now. “But not you. I don’t even know your sister’s name or where she and your mother live.”

Quint was quiet for so long, Rachel wondered if he’d fallen asleep. She hoped not, because she was wide-awake now and eager to talk.

“Quint?” she prompted in a low whisper, not wanting to wake him if he really was sleeping.

“The way you phrased it,” Quint murmured his response. “So easily, so normal. I was thinking how much I’ve missed that, in reference to Mom and Colette.”

An uneasy Rachel tried to remember exactly what she’d said. Something about where his mother and sister lived … Her heart caught in her throat and her eyes flew to his face. She knew it before he said it.

“My mother and Colette, my sister, don’t live anywhere. They’re both dead, Rachel.”

“Oh God Quint, I’m so sorry.” She hugged him hard. “What happened? And when?”

“They were in a freeway accident near Santa Monica five years ago. Colette’s husband Daniel was driving, Colette was in the passenger seat and Mom in the back. A tractor-trailer rear-ended their car and threw it across four lanes of traffic. All three were killed, along with another driver and two passengers in other cars. The highway patrolman told me it was one of the worst accidents he’d ever seen.”

“I don’t know what to say except I’m so sorry, again.” Rachel clung to him, as if to warm him with her own body
heat for his voice and his words were chilling. “It must have been terrible, losing your whole family.”

“That’s exactly what happened. In one instant, my whole family was gone. Mom and Colette and Daniel, too. Colette was five months pregnant with their first baby.” Quint felt Rachel draw a sharp, shocked breath, and her reaction pleased him in a perverse way. He liked people to be horrified and shocked by the scope of the tragedy; his family deserved nothing less.

“Oh, Quint,” she murmured sadly. There were no words.

“I wasn’t one of those people who are ennobled by loss. I’d been self-centered before, commitment-phobic but not owning up to it, running through women and relationships, deliberately charming and deceptive. You know the type.” Quint grimaced wryly.

“Very well. But you don’t fit that profile, Quint.”

“I used to, and after the accident I was even worse. It wasn’t until Sharolyn turned up at my office demanding money for an abortion when it finally hit me. Despite my mother’s valiant attempts to raise me to be the right kind of man—like her older brother, my uncle Joe—I was no better than Frank Cormack, whom I’d despised all those years.”

He sat up against the pillows, and she moved up, too, staying close, her arms around him.

“Once I got over the initial shock, it dawned on me that Sharolyn’s
problem
was my child. I thought of Colette’s baby that never had the chance to be born. I convinced Sharolyn to marry me and go through with the pregnancy. To do otherwise meant losing another member of my family, and I couldn’t take that.”

Quint smiled mirthlessly. “When I finally got around to calling my father to tell him I was married and going to be a father, he told me I was an idiot. I tried to explain the baby’s connection to my mother and Colette, but he just didn’t get it.”

“Was Frank always so—” Rachel paused. There were
too many pejorative words to choose from. “So—”

“Yeah, always.” Quint already knew them. “He walked out on my mother when I was four and Colette was two. We lived near Trenton then, and for the next eight years, he went through women and marriages and stumbled in and out of our lives. As a little kid, I was always thrilled when he remembered Colette and I existed. I enjoyed every minute of those visits with him. He was extravagant and fun, and he didn’t act like any other adult we knew. He was almost a fantasy figure.”

“More like a phantasm. But a child wouldn’t be able to understand the difference.”

“True. For every time Frank took us out, there were ten times he didn’t show up when we were expecting him to. Finally my mother decided to take her older brother Joe up on his offer to help her move to California and put some distance between us and Frank. We left Jersey when I was twelve and Colette was ten and moved into the same town as Uncle Joe. He was a cop, a good one. A good man with the patience of a saint. He needed it because a year later I became one of those furious adolescents, acting out all the rage I’d swallowed when I was a kid trying to make excuses for Frank Cormack.”

“But you managed to be a high achiever at the same time,” Rachel said thoughtfully. “Stanford Law School, Law Review. You certainly beat your father at his own game professionally.”

“I know. I guess I intended to. I wanted to be different from him and at least professionally, I was. I took pride in that difference until my marriage to Sharolyn ended up being even shorter than any of Frank’s. That shocked me into facing some very unpleasant truths. I seemed to be following in the footsteps of the man I professed to loathe. Was I going to keep on marrying and having kids, over and over again?”

“How many times has your father been married?” Rachel was curious. “Does he have other children besides Austin and Dustin?”

“Frank’s second marriage, three years after he divorced my mother produced twin boys and lasted nearly two years. I remember them as infants, they were identical with dark hair and dark eyes. They looked a lot like their mother Julie.”

“Where are they now?”

“I don’t know. When Frank and Julie divorced, the twins were a year old and she moved to Miami. Not long after, she met and married the son of Cuban refugees who owned a chain of appliance stores and were quite successful. Julie called my mother and told her that Frank had relinquished parental rights to the twins and that her new husband was going to adopt them. She’d decided never to tell the twins the truth about Frank, that everybody in the new family agreed it was best for the babies to believe they were their stepfather’s real sons. Julie asked my mother to tell Colette and me never to contact the twins; we were part of their past which she intended to erase. Mom agreed to Julie’s wishes and didn’t maintain contact with them. I have no idea who or what or where the twins are today.”

“It seems like a bad idea, trying to reinvent the past like that.” Rachel frowned. “Imagine what a shock it would be for the twins to find out the truth after years of believing something else. There are books written about that trauma, talk shows devoted to it.”

“I know. I’ve warned myself not to be surprised if someday they turn up on my doorstep, furious that they’re not Cuban, and demanding to know all about the jerk who actually fathered them. For their sake, I hope the truth never comes out.”

“Who was the next Mrs. Cormack?”

“Someone named Madeline. A real bitch. Even as a kid, I could tell. I’d liked Julie but I detested Madeline. She and Frank had a daughter Zara that Colette and I only saw twice as a baby because we moved to California not long after she was born. Frank visited us a few years later and said Madeline was long gone, that she’d moved to Texas with Zara. He didn’t know where she was and didn’t care, he
was just glad he was out of the reach of child support.”

“Back then, he was.”

“Yeah, those federal laws made to mandate child support payments across state lines are the antidote for the Frank Cormacks of the world. Sometimes I think that’s why he’s stayed with Carla this long, because he knows he’d still have to pay for the kids, that he could be tracked down and his wages garnisheed. Maybe Frank’s finally grasped the concept that he can’t financially maintain multiple households.”

“That, and the fact he’s getting older and it would be harder to attract women,” suggested Rachel.

“Age won’t stop Frank. He still sees himself as irresistible, a prime specimen of manhood. Truth is, he never was, not with that raging personality disorder of his—which keeps getting worse.”

“Poor Carla.” It wasn’t the first time Rachel had thought or said it. She knew it wouldn’t be the last. “More than ever I admire your commitment to come to Lakeview after your father’s accident, Quint. To help Carla with Austin and Dustin.”

“I had a long talk with my uncle Joe after I got the news of Frank’s accident. I thought about the way Joe had stuck by me, even when I was a hellion teen and a total embarrassment to him. He was always there for me, and I knew it. That’s probably why I didn’t completely screw up, why I did make it through college and law school. I saw a chance to repay Uncle Joe, to do for somebody else what he’d done for me.”

“And by then, you were a father yourself. You were able to see Brady in Austin and Dustin, and you just had to help them.”