Claim the Crown

by Carla Neggers

  And neither did Ashley and David Wakefield and the man who called himself their uncle.

  * * *

  Roger Shellingworth collected the tea tray. “I’ve reached Andrew Balaton in New York. He’s agreed to join you for dinner this evening, although it’s necessitated canceling plans of his own. I made it clear it was of the utmost importance to have him here tonight.”

  “Good. And what have you gotten on MacGregor Stevens?”

  “He hasn’t been in his office since last Friday. Supposedly he’s in Hawaii, but that’s unconfirmed. Jeremy Carruthers left San Diego over the weekend.”

  Crockett nodded, acknowledging that he’d heard. “And David Wakefield?”

  “His leg was broken earlier this week, and he was released from the hospital yesterday morning. Sarah Balaton is with him on the farm; she arrived there yesterday afternoon.”

  “Bartholomew Wakefield?”

  “There’s nothing whatsoever on him, sir. As far as we know, he’s fishing.”

  Crockett smirked. “Of course.”

  “Will that be all?”

  “Tell Lil I’d like her to give Ashley Wakefield a tour of Jude’s Paradise.”

  “Of course. When?”

  “I’d like them to leave at once so they can be back before dusk.”

  * * *

  o

  It was brisk and clear on Jude’s Paradise, an uninhabited, windswept island of scrub pines and oaks and low-lying bushes in Penobscot Bay, well south of Badger Island.

  Ashley followed Lillian Parker onto a huge flat rock that looked out at Penobscot Bay, and she found herself holding in check the dozens of questions she wanted to ask. She would follow Lillian’s lead. They were alone but for the taciturn islander who had piloted the boat. He waited for them at the dilapidated dock, the only evidence that humans had ever set foot on Jude’s Paradise. It was a haven for birds, which were everywhere.

  And it was an eerie place. As she watched Lillian’s auburn hair blow freely in the cold wind, Ashley wasn’t at all sure she should have come. But what choice did she have? She was playing an old man’s game now. J. Land Crockett, the billionaire, the host she had yet even to meet.

  “Judith used to love to come here,” Lillian said wistfully. “She could just be herself—no cameras, no press, no prying eyes of any sort. It was her refuge. When she was a little girl and her mother was still alive, they’d come here together on picnics. Crockett never joined them. I think he understood this was a place where mother and daughter could get away alone, out of the public eye—away from him, too. He knows he’s a difficult man.”

  Ashley suspected that was an understatement, but said judiciously, “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t had the opportunity of meeting him yet.”

  Lillian hunched her shoulders against the stiffening wind. It was even colder here than on Badger Rock, but Ashley supposed, in the middle of summer, it could be an inviting place, a haven for two women who wanted to have some time together, alone. In her mind, Ashley could almost see them, beautiful Judith Land and her mother, who must have been strong to have been attracted to a man like J. Land Crockett.

  “Oh, you’ll meet Crockett,” Lillian said, and smiled briefly, knowingly, adding, “when it suits him.”

  “What happened to Judith’s mother—Crockett’s wife?” Ashley asked, sensing Lillian wanted to talk.

  The older woman gazed back out toward the water, and her clear eyes squinted against the glare off the bay. “She died when Judith was just twelve—of breast cancer. I didn’t know her then, but it must have been devastating. Even after her mother’s death, Judith would come out here—to be with her, I think. She always said she could feel her mother’s presence here, talk to her. They were both named Judith, you know.”

  No, Ashley thought, I don’t know; I don’t know anything about Judith Land. She pulled her sweater more tightly around her, but she was still cold. And the eerie feeling wouldn’t go away. It clung to her and seeped into her bones, like the chill. “Why did Mr. Crockett want me to come here?”

  With a shrug, Lillian turned, her clear eyes focusing now on Ashley. “He’s been talking about turning Jude’s Paradise over to a group like the New England Oceanographic Institute for years—as a memorial to his wife and daughter.”

  It was horribly insufficient as an explanation, given everything else that had happened, but Lillian Parker seemed to make little attempt to make her words believable. Ashley said, “And you think that’s why I’m here.”

  Lillian turned sharply away.

  “It isn’t, is it?” Ashley asked gently. Demanding answers now, she felt, would do no good.

  “I don’t think so.” The reply was barely audible, but there was a wistfulness in Lillian Parker’s expression that was impossible not to miss.

  Ashley no longer knew what to feel. “Tell me more about Judith,” she said suddenly. “You were friends?”

  “Best friends.” Lillian smiled and seemed reassured by the return to the subject of Judith Land and her memories. “We met when we were about thirteen, at a private girls’ school. Judith was the rebel from Texas and I was the blue blood from Philadelphia. That’s what we called each other, anyway. We were so different, and yet we got along right from the start.” She smiled, lost in memory. “We were infamous for our exploits.”

  “What was she like?” Suddenly Ashley very much wanted to know.

  Lillian’s shoulders went up as she laughed up at the sky, as if she were laughing at the cloud where Judith Land sat watching them. “Judith was incredible— beautiful, even as an adolescent, and just the biggest hot shit around. You’d have liked her, Ashley.”

  Ashley wasn’t sure if that was a compliment. She said nothing, hoping Lillian would continue.

  She did. “She was tremendously talented. But she was so much more than her public image ever allowed her to be. I suppose we all are.”

  “I know what you mean.” And that surprised her because, after four years of eluding the press, Ashley didn’t consider herself a public person. But she was. Just having to hide, wanting to, proved that.

  Lillian hugged herself against the biting wind. “In so many ways, Judith was ahead of her time: one of the first of the superwomen. She was independent, stubborn, sanctimonious at times. She’d do anything on a dare—which often got us into heaps of trouble.”

  Despite the slicing wind, the tide lapped the rocks with a surprising gentleness, and the sea was calm, stunningly beautiful in the late afternoon sun. Lillian turned inland, and Ashley followed her through the brush into a stand of pines, where they were protected from the brunt of the wind.

  “You still miss her, don’t you?” Ashley asked, sensing Lillian’s lingering melancholy. “Even after all these years.”

  Lillian turned her handsome face upward, looking into the sun, and she gave a slight nod, her eyes telling more. They were large, wide and sad. “It’s just this place,” she said.

  Ashley could understand that. Isolated and bleak, strangely beautiful, Jude’s Paradise was the sort of place that forced one to remember.

  “But Judith wasn’t perfect. You know that, don’t you?”

  There was an intensity in Lillian’s look that told Ashley the question was one meant to be answered. She said, “No one is.”

  Lillian nodded, not so much in agreement as just satisfied that Ashley had spoken, understood. “She was only nineteen when she made her first film—six in all before she died. That’s a lot for one so young. In some ways, she was terribly worldly and sophisticated, and in other ways, she was absolutely impossible. Her father had taught her she could do everything and have everything; she only had to want it.”

  “Was she spoiled?” Ashley asked, plucking a handful of pine needles, just to have something to do, something real to hang on to.

  “I suppose it might have made someone else spoiled and unpleasant, but it seemed to add a touch of vulnerability to Judith. She had such blind faith in everyone around her—herself inc
luded. She believed that if she liked someone, he or she must therefore be a good person. She assumed that everyone around her lived up to all her high expectations. And she believed all her dreams would come true.”

  “She was young,” Ashley reminded her, keeping her tone neutral. She had no desire to defend a dead woman. She only wanted information; she couldn’t get enough of what Lillian Parker had to say.

  Lillian shrugged as she ducked under a low-hanging pine branch and stood in a patch of blueberry bushes. “I suppose when you’re young it’s difficult to recognize and accept your own limitations—or those of the people around you. But I’m not sure Judith would ever have really changed. Grown wiser with time, perhaps, but not changed. It wasn’t in her to be a cynic.”

  They walked back toward the dock, and Ashley sensed this was why J. Land Crockett had sent her here, to this hauntingly beautiful place. Not just to see the island, but to learn about the women for whom it was named, especially about one woman, Judith Land.

  She didn’t want to ask herself why.

  “Was she happy?” Ashley asked. The wind had softened into a murmuring breeze, and the birds pranced and sang in the brush and trees.

  “God, I hope so.”

  “Didn’t she marry before she died?”

  “Oh, yes—most definitely. She’d met her Prince Charming, except he was a dashing, penniless Hungarian count of little or no importance—except to Judith, of course.”

  Andrew Balaton, Ashley thought. Father of Sarah Balaton, the owner, perhaps, of the collection of jewels Ashley and David had found in a vault in Switzerland more than four years ago.

  “Where did they meet?” she asked.

  “In the refugee camps,” Lillian said quickly. It was obviously not something she wanted to discuss.

  But Ashley did. “What were they like? The camps, I mean.”

  “Crowded and sad and dreary, and yet somehow filled with hope and determination. Hungarians are a difficult people to understand, and I don’t pretend to.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  She sighed. “Judith and I were on a whirlwind tour of Europe. At the time, I was a would-be journalist whom no one took seriously. When the uprising in Hungary hit world headlines...well, I wanted to be where the action was. I dragged Judith out to see the camps. I found my first story there; Judith found her husband.”

  Somehow Ashley suspected that wasn’t even close to everything, but Lillian was already beginning to pull back. “They were married soon after?” Ashley asked innocuously.

  Lillian walked ahead of her; the dilapidated old dock was in view now, but Ashley wasn’t ready yet to leave. “They were married the day after Christmas, just a few weeks after they met.”

  “And she died when?”

  “The following August.”

  “How tragic.”

  For a long time, Lillian would say nothing, and they came to the dock. Taking the lead, Ashley walked out onto a cluster of jagged rocks, which radiated the warmth of the afternoon sun. She couldn’t bear to get back on the boat and skid off to Badger Rock Island, to a gruff old man and more unanswered questions. She thought of Jeremy, and the image of him surprised her, not just because of its being there, unbidden, but also because of its intensity. He was a difficult man, once met, to forget. But how would she even begin to tell him all this? And how could she stand to listen to him guess what it all might mean?

  “But at least she had a few months of happiness,” Ashley said, hoping to egg Lillian on once more.

  Lillian shook her head sadly, but there was a touch of humor, too, in her expression. “You don’t keep up on the tales of Hollywood legends, do you, Ashley?”

  “I’m afraid not,” she admitted, climbing farther out onto the rocks. “The latest in eel research, yes, but actors and actresses—I’ve just never been a gossip-monger.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” To Ashley’s relief, Lillian followed her instead of turning back toward the boat. “I’m not sure how close the Hollywood version of Judith and Andrew’s marriage is to the truth, anyway. Andrew...he’s not an easy man to understand. He adored Judith from the beginning. There’s no question of that. But he’d been denied so much in his own country for so many years. He was a member of the hated aristocracy, you see, and so although he was very well educated and energetic, the Communists didn’t trust him—and therefore he had no opportunities in Hungary. So when he came to this country, he was determined to make something of himself.”

  “Which he did.”

  “Yes, but not without sacrifice. He and Judith went on a long honeymoon, and when they came back, she insisted they live in her house in Beverly Hills—which she’d tell anyone she’d bought with her own money, not her father’s, and certainly not Andrew’s.”

  Ashley shrugged. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Andrew’s a proud man. It bit.”

  “But that must have been minor—”

  “It was the beginning,” Lillian said. “Crockett didn’t help matters. Being the dutiful father-in-law, he offered Andrew a position at what was then Crockett Oil.”

  “Did the company have Los Angeles offices?”

  Lillian shook her head. “And Judith was to begin work on a new film that spring. I don’t blame her for not wanting to give up her career and move to Houston, but neither of them was willing to make any compromises—out of love, they said. They insisted they wanted to be around each other all the time.”

  Ashley tried to envision the circumstances and found that she could. It was all so depressingly common. “So one had to win and one had to lose,” she said.

  “I think they both lost.”

  “The film was never made, was it?”

  Again Lillian shook her head, her energy for the topic seeming to fade. But she said, “Judith went into a blue funk and threatened to retire if the studio didn’t postpone the start of the film. Well, God knows why, but they did. She packed up and left—to find herself, we’d call it today. She said that while she still loved Andrew, she needed some time to herself, to be alone and find out who she was, who she wanted to be, where she would go from there. It was a radical thing for a woman to do in the fifties, but that was Judith.”

  “What did her husband do?”

  “What could he do? He agreed to leave her alone and give her some time. Crockett couldn’t understand Judith at all, and he talked Andrew into coming to work for Crockett Oil while Judith was meditating on her fate.”

  “What about you?” Ashley asked. “Did you see Judith during this time?”

  “No.” There was no hesitation.

  “But you were best friends.”

  Lillian’s expression hardened, her mouth tightening as she said, “The last time I saw Judith was at the Christmas ball in Vienna—unless you want to count her funeral.”

  Abruptly, Lillian started out onto the narrow point beyond the dock. It was all rock, with waves splashing up on either side of them, and the huge, loose boulders looked as if they had just been dropped there carelessly, to be picked up later.

  “We scattered her ashes here,” Lillian said in a voice curiously devoid of emotion. She was looking out at the water. “Crockett and I. He hasn’t been here since. I come here when I can. When I’m here, I feel as though I can be close to her again—the way she was with her mother.”

  “I understand,” Ashley mumbled, although she wasn’t sure she did.

  “We were good friends, and I failed her in so many ways. I don’t know if she died hating me. I like to think not. I like to think of us as giggling thirteen-year-olds, plotting to put frogs in Babs Goodworth’s bed.”

  For a while, neither woman spoke, and Ashley listened to the sounds of the sea and the birds. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask Lillian Parker, but not here, not now. First she had to dispel this strange melancholy, the eeriness of Jude’s Paradise, and sit quietly and add these new pieces to the puzzle and see how they might fit.

  Lillian t
urned, standing close to Ashley, the bright sun emphasizing the years in her face. “When you get back to the house, go into the dining room. There’s a portrait of Judith there. Look at it. Get to know her.”

  Ashley’s heart began to pound. “Why?”

  “Because it’s the only image of her—portrait or photograph—that does her justice.”

  “But why do you want me to feel as if I know her?”

  Lillian gave a small, curious smile. “Look at the portrait, Ashley. Then you tell me.”

  26

  David watched as Sarah wrung her hands and dug her top teeth into her lower lip, leaving a mark. They were sitting out on the trailer, among the pumpkins, looking out across the valley. The leaves were turning rapidly now. Sarah said, “I don’t suppose this place has changed much since you and your sister were children.”

  “Barky doesn’t like change.”

  “He must be an interesting man to have raised you.”

  David shrugged. He hadn’t told Sarah about the call from Ashley in Maine, which had come while Sarah was out following Iggy around while he fed the animals. Iggy was gone now, with promises he’d be back later. Aside, he’d told David he wanted to know all about the Texas flower with the “bazooms.” Iggy was a jerk, but reliable; David had known him since they were five. “I guess Barky has his points,” he said.

  “David—” Pausing, she touched his arm. “I know you weren’t hurt in a farm accident—and I know it wasn’t a rampaging cow or chicken. Don’t joke with me please. I want to know the truth.”

  He looked at her. The slight breeze lifted her hair a few strands at a time, casting them into the sunlight, reminding him of childhood fairy tales. He held one of his crutches by the crosspiece and squashed a dandelion leaf. “What do you think happened?”