Brooding, he took a moment to grab a cup of coffee from the still-warm carafe and take a few sips. He knew Sarita would be expecting him at the center, but rather than subject her or her people to his foul mood, he drove to his office instead.
Clark Nelson sat in his plush hotel room looking at the newspaper. The photo of a man from his past froze him in place. Mykal Chandler. The age-old hate Clark felt for his former employer rose up from the depths of his psyche and manifested itself in the contempt twisting his face. Had it not been for Chandler, Clark would never have gone to prison and been crippled. The leg ached as in sympathy, but Clark ignored it and read on. It seemed Chandler had just gotten married. The picture of the couple was taken at a reception given by the mayor. Clark studied the bride. Even though the picture was black-and-white, her beauty radiated. Clark wondered how Chandler would feel if she were snatched and shipped to a man Clark knew in South Africa whose brothel specialized in Black beauties? Would the pain of losing her equal Clark’s years of misery in the Honduran prison Chandler had been so instrumental in sending him to?
The charge had been rape. It hadn’t been rape. The girl had been coming on to him since his first day as an employee of Chandler’s construction company, so he simply took what she’d been offering. She turned out to be the granddaughter of the local magistrate. During the trial, Chandler had offered no assistance, and when the guilty verdict was returned, Chandler washed his hands of the affair, and Clark never saw him again.
Now, their paths had crossed again. Did Clark really want to tangle with Chandler after all these years? The answer was yes. Even though the contacts he’d made in the Honduran prison had been instrumental in the building of his illegal empire, affording him a life he never could have imagined, he’d never been able to forget or forgive Myk Chandler. Even though Clark had come to Detroit for other purposes, he looked upon it as fate, and an opportunity for payback.
With that in mind, he picked up his cell phone and placed a call to the policeman who’d handled the party girls. Clark needed to know all there was to know about Mykal Chandler and his beautiful new bride, and once he did, the game would begin.
By evening, the men from Chandler Works had pumped out the center’s remaining water, but it took Sarita and her Army another three days to rid the basement of the smelly sludge left behind. On the fourth morning, the mayor arrived, bringing with him the director of the Water Department, who assessed the broken main and promised his workers would be out to start repairs before the end of the day. The children were awed by the visit from the downtown dignitaries, and Sarita gave her brother-in-law, a big hug for his help.
Over the next several days, Sarita saw very little of Chandler. Walter became her daily companion, telling her only that Chandler was catching up on his work. Sarita assumed he was mad at her for leaving like she did, but frankly, she was tired of his phone ringing every time things started heating up. She told herself she didn’t mind his absence, especially after the new furnace sent over by his foundation was delivered and installed, but she found herself thinking about him more often than not.
She threw herself back into the center’s routine, and into getting the drafty old building ready for winter. Courtesy of the Chandler Foundation the center received new vinyl windows, roofing materials, carpeting for the bare cement floors in the upstairs rooms, computers for the library, two new phone lines, and, for the kitchen—a brand-new stove, fridge, and dishwasher. Thanks to his generosity, she and her people no longer had to pray over the ancient furnace, or heat cold water to make it hot, as there was a new hot water heater, too.
He even took care of her back bills, and had his foundation’s financial officer, a young woman named Juanita Mason, set up an account for the center at Eastern Market, the city’s largest, thus making it possible for the Army to purchase a fresher and wider variety of fruits and vegetables for the meals that were taken to the neighborhood’s senior shut-ins. Having the account was fine, but when Sarita explained to Ms. Mason that the center had no reliable transportation to get to places like Eastern Market, she promptly leased them a van.
To keep up her part of the bargain, Sarita cooked dinner for Chandler every night; she told herself she might as well since she and Walter had to eat, too, but inside it stung knowing Chandler never showed. The standard excuse from Walter remained the same: Chandler was working.
She did see him one morning. It was very early, and she and Walter were heading out of the door on their way to the center. Chandler walked into the kitchen just as she was grabbing her coat.
Sarita was so surprised to see him, it took her a moment to find her voice. “Morning,” she finally said.
“Good morning.”
He was dressed for work. Dark tailored suit, crisp white shirt, beautiful tie. To Sarita he looked like he’d just stepped off of the cover of a Fortune 500 business magazine. She was dressed in jeans, athletic shoes, and a Michigan State University sweatshirt.
He asked, “How are you?”
“I’m well. You?”
“Busy.” Myk held himself at a distance by the sheer force of will. He wanted to apologize to her, but being who he was, he didn’t know how. He’d never had the need or the desire to explain himself to anyone, yet deep inside an urge to make things right between them was gnawing at him. Being around her was changing him, and he wasn’t sure how to handle that either. “Things going okay at the center?”
“Yes. Everything you’ve sent over has been well appreciated.”
“Good.”
Their eyes held, and Sarita got the impression that he wanted to say more, but all he said was, “I should get to work.”
She nodded.
And he was gone.
By the second week, Myk’s employees were starting to complain to each other about what a bear he’d become, growling at the secretaries, barking at his foremen, chewing out staff members for making honest mistakes. Dr. Drake diagnosed his half brother as bordering on crazy. Everyone else in Myk’s sphere agreed and prayed the storm would blow over soon.
Faye paced her apartment nervously. Today was the day she’d meet her new secret admirer. She didn’t have a clue as to mystery suitor’s identity; but from all the flowers he’d been sending over, and the expensive little baubles that were arriving daily, she was sure he was rich. It had occurred to her that he might be a toad, but with all the problems she was having trying to make financial ends meet—thanks to that bastard Myk Chandler, Faye didn’t care if he looked like a cartoon ogre as long as he let her spend his money.
When the doorbell buzzer went off, Faye looked over at the clock. Noon. He was right on time. Only discipline kept her from dashing to the door and flinging it open. It wouldn’t do to appear too eager; she didn’t want him to think she was desperate. She had an image to maintain. Instead of answering the door, she fussed over the beautiful lilies that he’d had delivered to her that morning. She always made her men ring twice; it was her way of telling them Faye Riley was worth the wait.
Still admiring her flowers, Faye prayed this new sugar daddy wasn’t deformed or disfigured. Old and ugly she could handle, but not a freak. Intruding into her self-centered thoughts came the tingling sensation that something was wrong. She raised her eyes to the door. She didn’t remember hearing another buzz from the bell. Good Lord!
She ran to the door and pressed her eye against the peephole, but saw no one. Throwing open the door she looked up and down the carpeted hallway. Nothing. She hurried out into the hall just in time to see a group of finely dressed brothers getting into the elevator, but before she could reach it, the doors slid closed. She hurried back to her apartment, but realized that in her haste to catch the men on the elevator, she hadn’t set the lock, and it had locked behind her; a small problem compared to the anxiety roaring through her.
Being locked out meant she couldn’t phone down to the lobby and have the doorman stop the men from leaving the building. Her only hope was the fire stairs, and her
heart pounded not only with panic, but blanched at the prospect of running down fourteen flights of stairs to beat the elevator to the lobby.
She made it down as far as the tenth floor before disaster struck. The heel of one of her olive green Italian pumps slipped on the metal fire stairs. She stumbled and, with a scream, went sprawling. She hit the landing on floor nine, hard. For a moment, she thought she’d killed herself, but when she looked down at herself she wished she had. Her hands were all scraped up, the heel on her pump was only partially intact, her green skirt had a big streak of dirt across it, and she wanted to cry when she saw the huge hole in the knee of her twenty-five-dollar-a-pair imported, silk hose.
There was no time for pity though. She had a man to catch.
By the time Faye pushed her way through the door leading to the lobby she looked like hell. Never having been one to exercise, she could barely breathe after the fourteen-flight ordeal. She stood unsteadily on the one good olive pump, and only the grip she had on the doorknob kept her upright. She was too exhausted and outdone to care about the shocked looks from the people milling about. Her only concern was stopping the small entourage exiting the elevator and heading toward the large glass front doors. “Wait!” she yelled with what she knew had to be the last breath she’d ever draw. “Wait!”
Her call made everyone in the lobby look up.
Clark sent his bodyguards to retrieve the car, then turned around and viewed the obviously distressed Faye. She was tall, light-skinned, and even more beautiful than the pictures in the file his cop had compiled, but she already had one strike: She had not answered her door after he’d given her his standard fifteen-second wait. It was a trick most women of Faye’s breed pulled or attempted to, but Clark Nelson played by his own rules. He had not gotten to the top of the food chain catering to the game-playing Fayes of the world. Where he came from, only a woman rang more than once, never a man.
He could see her moving toward him, and the closer she got, the more he smiled inside. She looked like a car wreck. The once carefully styled hair spilled crazily about her face. There were large rips beneath the armpits of her fancy green blouse. The darker green skirt was stained, and the front hem sagged as if it had been ripped free. The shoes and stockings were indescribable, yet she limped toward him like a queen.
When she faced him, she stuck out her hand, “I’m Faye Riley.”
One of building’s maintenance women passed by and cleared her throat to cover her laugh. Faye ignored her.
Clark did not clasp her scraped dirty hand. Because of his leg’s susceptibility to infection, he avoided dirt whenever he could. “Miss Riley. I didn’t think you were home.” Taking a moment to visually assess her, he added, “You look like you had a small accident.”
“I—I was in the back of the apartment.”
“I see.”
Faye ignored the strong sensation that he knew she was lying and tried not to break into tears over this ridiculous and, yes, humiliating situation. Should she explain why she looked so bad? She didn’t think he’d want to go anywhere with her considering the way she looked, but she thought maybe he was as classy as he dressed and would be moved by her unfortunate chain of events. Faye tried to explain, “I came to the door just in time to see you and your friends getting back on the elevator. And then I was locked out of my apartment, so I had to take the stairs. Clumsy me, I tripped, tore my stockings…”
His dark eyes never wavered. A chill ran up Faye’s spine. He didn’t appear to care a bit about her humiliation or that she’d nearly killed herself trying to catch him. In fact, he acted like her mad dash was par for the course, expected.
“Well, Miss Riley, if you can be ready in say, fifteen minutes, we can still have lunch.”
Faye felt slapped. She knew how bad she looked. It would take her twenty minutes just to fix her hair.
Without another word, he and the ivory cane headed toward the doors, leaving Faye alone to field the still-curious stares of the gawking lobby crowd.
But she did it. With the help of a spare key from the desk so she could get back into her place, twelve and a half minutes later, Faye was beside him in the long gray limo as it pulled away from the curb.
Over lunch in a quiet, expensive restaurant downtown, they toasted their new partnership. He’d told her about the raw deal he’d gotten at Chandler’s hand in Central America, and Faye told him her own story of woe, so in exchange for twenty-five thousand dollars up front, Faye agreed to help him bring Myk Chandler down and be Clark’s hostess for the duration of his stay in Detroit.
Fourteen
The weeks leading up to Thanksgiving were hectic ones at the William Lambert Center. Thanks to the Chandler Foundation, Sarita and her Army had for the first time ever the means to provide full holiday dinners for every homebound senior and needy family on their list. There’d be no turning people away because the money had run out. Turkeys and hams were purchased along with fresh veggies and canned foods. They spent a week filling baskets, and with the help of the new van and the teenagers of the Guard, got everything delivered. Sarita didn’t even think about her own holiday plans until the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. She had no idea how or if Chandler celebrated the holiday, so she asked Walter about it on the way to the center that morning.
“He won’t be here for Thanksgiving,” Walter confessed solemnly.
For a moment, Sarita was confused. “Is he going to visit his grandmother?”
“No, he’s out of town. He had a presentation to give for a hotel project Chandler Works is bidding on in Milwaukee.”
“Oh.”
Walter heard the dejection in the single word and wished he could make things better. Myk had flown to Milwaukee that morning, apparently without telling her his plans. He’d told Walter to expect him the day after the holiday.
“Well, then,” Sarita declared with false brightness, “if you don’t have any plans, would you like to come over and have dinner with me?”
“Just you and me, my lady?”
She smiled, “No. You, me. Silas probably, and Jerome and his mother, Shirley.”
“Shirley’s coming?”
Sarita heard his eagerness. “Yes, she is. So, should I set a place for you?” she asked innocently. Everyone knew how well he and Shirley were getting along.
“Oh, yes, ma’am.”
They laughed and spent the balance of the ride discussing the menu and other possible invitees. By the time they reached the center, Sarita’s bruised feelings were better.
On the Thanksgiving Eve flight back to Detroit, Myk had run out of excuses. Initially, he’d had no intentions of flying home until Friday, but once he learned that the dates for the bidding had been changed at the last minute, he had no reason to stay. He told himself he could spend freed-up days at the office catching up on some of the other proposals and bids he’d let lie the past few hectic weeks. In the end, however, he had to face the truth. He’d flown back for one reason, and one reason alone: Sarita.
Sarita and her crew were in Chandler’s fancy kitchen having a good time working on the preparations for Thursday’s Thanksgiving feast. Keta and Jerome were washing greens. Silas and Walter had decided to add chittlins to the table’s bounty, and were cleaning 150 pounds of the innards in the counter sink. Shirley, famous for her sweet potato pie, had enlisted Drake as her assistant, and the two had enough of the golden, seasoned filling for a dozen of the traditional pastries.
Sarita’s role was bread maker. She was wrist deep in dough for yeast rolls, and the front of her silver-and-blue Detroit Lions apron was covered with flour. The home team would be playing as they always did on Turkey Day. She doubted her beloved Lions would be able to do a thing with the juggernaut St. Louis Rams, but stranger things had happened in the world of football, so she was wearing her colors to show her support. Working on the far end of the marble island, Keta’s grandmother, Mrs. Kennedy, cut up celery and onions for the dressing. The corn bread she needed for the base was in the oven
, almost ready to come out, and its fragrance added to the rich aroma permeating the air.
The tantalizing smell of the food caught Myk’s attention as soon he entered the house. Why in the world is she up, cooking at this hour? Pulling his key from the lock, he also wondered about all the voices and laughter he could hear. Puzzled, he closed the door, set his luggage down, then hung up his coat.
When Sarita glanced up and saw Chandler standing in the kitchen doorway, she dropped the small glass bowl of flour in her hand and it hit the tiled floor with a crash.
“Glad to see you, too,” he told her, while watching her scramble to grab a broom and clean up the mess. He was greeted by smiles and hellos from everyone except Keta, but that was to be expected, so Myk ignored Keta for the moment and focused his attention back on the apron-wearing Little Touissant in her black leggings, bunny slippers, and too-big sweatshirt. His pulse leapt at the sight of her.
Chandler’s vibrant eyes made Sarita remember everything that had gone before, and she had the urge to say something, anything, to cover her wild nervousness. “I—I thought you weren’t going to be back for a couple more days.”
“Change in plans.”
As Sarita swept up the glass and flour, she couldn’t help herself. She kept glancing at the long thin box in his hand. The box was wrapped with beautiful silver paper and sported a large, dark blue bow.
Myk noted her curiosity and her attempts not to appear so. Inwardly, he smiled. “Are we having a party?”
Sarita couldn’t gauge his mood. He looked harmless enough, but she knew better than to assume anything. Was he going to be angry with her for inviting her friends to dinner without his permission? “I—well, yes. Thanksgiving dinner, tomorrow.” She finally managed to get up all the glass, walked the dustpan to the trash container, and dumped it in.
The Edge of Midnight Page 22
