by Sandra Brown
“Tate likes to fly as much as his father,” she remarked with a wistful smile. “He’ll enjoy the trip.”
“Will you accept a poor substitute for his company?”
The tentative invitation yanked Zee from her pensiveness. “You mean have lunch with you?”
“Would that be so terrible?”
Zee looked her daughter-in-law up and down, finding little about her appearance to criticize. Carole had refined her image considerably since her recovery. She still dressed with flair, but her emphasis was now more on style than sexiness.
Carole’s flamboyance had always repelled Zee. She was glad it had been subdued. The woman inside the impeccable clothing, however, was still just as distasteful as the first time she’d met her.
“I’ll pass.”
“Why?”
“You never knew when to let something drop, Carole.” Zee tucked her handbag beneath her arm.
“Why don’t you want to have lunch with me?”
She had taken up a position in front of the door, barring Zee from making a gracious exit. “My heart was set on having lunch with Tate,” she said. “I understand why he had to cancel, but I’m disappointed and see no reason to pretend that I’m not. We have so little time together these days, just he and I.”
“And that’s what’s really bugging you, isn’t it?”
Zee’s small body tensed instantly. If Carole insisted on a confrontation, Zee decided to give her one. “What are you implying?”
“You can’t stand that Tate is spending more time with me. You’re jealous of our relationship, which is stronger every day.”
Zee gave a soft, scoffing laugh. “You would love to believe that, wouldn’t you, Carole? You’d prefer to think that I’m merely jealous when you know that I was opposed to your marriage to my son from the beginning.”
“Oh?”
“Don’t act like you didn’t know. Tate does. I’m sure the two of you have discussed it.”
“We have. And even if we hadn’t, I’d know you dislike me intensely. You don’t hide your feelings very well, Zee.”
Zee smiled, but it was a sad expression. “You’d be amazed at how well I conceal what I’m thinking and feeling. I’m an expert at it.” Carole’s gaze sharpened quizzically, putting Zee on alert. She composed her face and said icily, “You’ve made an effort to patch up your deteriorating relationship with Tate. Nelson is delighted. I’m not.”
“Why not? I know you want Tate to be happy.”
“Exactly. And he’ll never be happy as long as you’ve got your claws in him. See, Carole, I know that all your loving ways are machinations. They’re phony, just as you are.”
Zee derived petty satisfaction from watching Carole’s face become pale beneath her carefully applied makeup. Her voice was faint. “Phony? What do you mean?”
“Shortly after you married Tate, when I first began to notice a rift between you, I hired a private investigator. Cheesy, yes. It was the most humiliating experience I’ve ever put myself through, but I did it to protect my son.
“The investigator was a repulsive individual, but he did an excellent job. As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, he provided me with an extensive portfolio on you before you became a legal assistant at Rutledge and Rutledge.”
Zee could feel her blood pressure rising. Her compact body had become an incinerator, fueling itself on her hatred for this woman who had, with the cold calculation of a KGB infiltrator, dazzled all the Rutledge men and duped Tate into loving her.
“I don’t believe I need to detail the disgusting contents of that portfolio, do I? God only knows what it omits. Only let me assure you that it encompasses your checkered stint as a topless dancer. Among your other careers,” she said as an aside, giving a delicate shudder.
“Your various stage names were colorful but unimaginative, I thought. The investigator stopped digging before he discovered the name you were given at birth, which isn’t important anyway.”
Carole looked as though she might throw up at any moment. Her difficult swallow could be heard in the silent office, vacant except for the two of them. Tate’s secretary had gone to lunch.
“Does anyone else know about this… this portfolio? Does Tate?”
“No one,” Zee replied, “though I’ve been tempted on many occasions to show it to him—most recently when I realized that he’s falling in love with you again.”
Carole drew a soft, whistling breath. “Is he?”
“Much to my dismay, I believe he is. In any case, he’s enchanted. Probably against his better judgment. He’s falling for this new Carole, who’s emerged as a result of the plane crash. Maybe the next name you assume should be Phoenix, since you’ve risen out of the ashes.”
Zee tilted her head to one side and considered her adversary for a moment. “You’re an extremely clever young woman. Your transformation from skid row topless dancer into a lady charming enough to be a senator’s wife was quite remarkable. It must have taken an enormous amount of planning, studying, and hard work to bring about. You even chose a surname enshrined on the walls of the Alamo—a Spanish name. Very advantageous for the wife of a political candidate in Texas.
“But this most recent change is even more incredible than the first because you seem to believe in it yourself. I could even think that you’re sincere until I compare what you were like the morning of the crash to what you’re like now, with Tate, with Mandy.” Zee gave her head a negative shake. “No one can change that drastically, no matter how clever she is.”
“How do you know I haven’t changed out of love for Tate? I’m trying to be what he needs and wants.”
Shooting her a look, Zee moved her aside and reached for the door. “I know as well as I know my own name that you are not what you want us to believe you are.”
“When do you plan to expose me?”
“Never.” Carole flinched with surprise. “As long as Tate is happy and content with you, I won’t disillusion him. The folder will remain our secret. But start hurting him again, Carole, and I assure you I’ll destroy you.”
“You can’t do that without destroying Tate, too.”
“I don’t intend to make it a public disclosure. Showing the portfolio to Tate would be sufficient. He wouldn’t let a whore, even a reformed one, rear his daughter. It’s intolerable to me, too, but I have no choice at this point. Rarely are we given real choices.”
A look of sheer desperation came over Carole’s face. She closed her hand around Zee’s arm. “You can’t ever tell Tate. Please, Zee, please don’t. It would kill him.”
“That’s the only reason I’ve resisted so far.” Zee wrested her arm free of the younger woman’s touch. “But believe me, Carole, if it came to seeing him suffer through a scandal temporarily, or living in misery for the rest of his life, I would spare him the latter at any cost.”
On her way out, she added, “I’m sure you’ll search for this dossier I have on you. Don’t bother destroying it. There’s a duplicate in a private safe deposit box, which can be opened only by me, or, in the event of my death, Tate.”
* * *
Avery unlocked the front door with her key and stepped inside the house. “Mona? Mandy?”
She located them in the kitchen. The cheek she pressed against Mandy’s was cold. She’d driven all the way from San Antonio with the car windows down. Her face had been flaming after her unsettling encounter with Zee. The cool air had also warded off the nausea she experienced every time she thought of Carole Navarro’s incriminating history.
“Is the soup good, darling?”
“Uh-huh,” Mandy replied, slurping up a spoonful of chicken and noodles.
“I didn’t expect anyone home for lunch, Mrs. Rutledge, but I can fix you something.”
“No thanks, Mona. I’m not hungry.” She shrugged out of her coat and sat down in one of the chairs at the table. “I could stand a cup of tea if it’s not too much trouble, please.”
She nervously wrung her hands until
the housekeeper set the steaming cup of fragrant tea in front of her, then folded her bloodless fingers around the mug.
“Are you feeling all right, Mrs. Rutledge? Your cheeks are flushed.”
“I’m fine. Just chilled.”
“I hope you’re not coming down with the flu. There’s a lot of it going around.”
“I’m fine,” she repeated, smiling weakly. “Finish your fruit cocktail, Mandy, then I’ll read you a story before your nap.”
She tried to respond to Mandy’s constant chatter, a sign of her continuing progress, but her mind kept wandering back to Zee and the damning information she had collected on Carole.
“All done?” She praised the two empty bowls Mandy held up for her inspection. Finishing her tea, she led Mandy to her bedroom. After helping her untie her shoes, she lifted her into bed and covered her with a quilt. She settled down beside her with a large picture book.
Her father had read to her from such a book when she was a girl. It was filled with beautiful illustrations of damsels with long, wavy, golden hair being rescued from distress by handsome, brave heroes who overcame impossible odds. Her memories of lying beneath covers or sitting on her father’s lap while his voice lulled her to sleep were some of her earliest and most precious memories of childhood.
Those had been coveted moments, when Daddy was home and paying attention to her. In the fairy tales he read, the princess always had a doting father. Good was always victorious over the forces of evil.
Perhaps that’s why they called them fairy tales. They were a departure from reality, where fathers disappeared for months on end and all too often evil was the victor.
When Mandy fell asleep, Avery slipped from the room and quietly closed the door behind her. Mona retired to her quarters every afternoon for a couple hours of watching soap operas and resting before preparing dinner.
No one else was at home, but Avery stealthily tiptoed along the tile flooring straight from Mandy’s room toward the wing of the house Zee shared with Nelson. She didn’t weigh the rightness or wrongness of what she was about to do. It was a ghastly invasion of privacy and would have been unthinkable under other circumstances. The circumstances being what they were, however, made it necessary.
She located their bedroom with no problem. A very pleasant room, it was shuttered against the bright autumn sunlight. The floral fragrance she associated with Zee was redolent.
Would Zee keep such explosive documents in the dainty Queen Anne desk? Why not? It looked as innocent as a novice nun. Who would think to violate it? Nelson conducted ranching business at a massive desk in the den down the hall. He would have no reason to go through his wife’s seemingly innocuous desk.
Avery took a nail file from the dressing table and applied it to the tiny gold lock on the lap drawer of the desk. She didn’t even try to cover her crime. Zee expected her to check. She had said as much.
It wasn’t a very sturdy lock. Within seconds, Avery pulled the desk drawer open. Inside there were several thin boxes of stationery engraved with Zee’s initials, a book of stamps, an address book, two slender, black Bibles, one with Jack’s name embossed in gold block letters, the other with Tate’s name.
The manila folder was in the back of the drawer. Avery removed it and pried open the metal bracket.
Five minutes later, she left the room, pale and trembling. Her whole body shook as though she had palsy. Her stomach was queasy. The harmless tea had turned rancid in her stomach. She hastened to her own room and locked the door behind her. Resting against it, she drew in draughts of cleansing air.
Tate. Oh, Tate. If he ever saw the revolting contents of that folder…
She needed a bath. Quickly. Immediately.
She kicked off her shoes, peeled off her sweater, and slid open her closet door.
She screamed.
Reeling away from the grotesque sight, she covered her mouth with both hands, though retching noises issued from her throat. Opening the closet door had caused the campaign poster to swing from the end of its red satin cord like a body on a gallows.
In bright red paint, a bullet hole had been painted in the center of Tate’s forehead. The paint trickled down his face, hideously incongruent with his smile. Written in bold red lettering across the poster were the words, “Election Day!”
Avery bolted into the bathroom and vomited.
Forty-Two
“It was ghastly. So ugly.”
Avery sat with her head bowed over a glass of brandy that Irish had insisted would help calm her down. The first unwanted swallow had burned a crater in her empty stomach, but she kept the glass because she needed something to hold on to.
“This whole frigging thing is ugly,” her irascible host declared. “I’ve thought so all along. Didn’t I warn you? Didn’t I?”
“So you warned her. Stop harping on it.”
“Who asked you?” Irish angrily rounded on Van, who was sipping at a joint that Irish had been too upset to notice wasn’t an ordinary cigarette.
“Avery did. She called and told me to haul ass over here, so I hauled ass.”
“I meant who asked you for your opinion?”
“Will the two of you please stop?” Avery cried raggedly. “And Van, will you please put that thing out? The smell’s making me sick.”
She tapped her fingertips against her lips, as though contemplating whether or not she was going to throw up again. “The poster terrified me. He really means to do it. I’ve known so all along, but this…”
She set the glass of brandy on the coffee table and stood up, chafing her arms. She had on a sweater, but nothing helped her get warm.
“Who is it, Avery?”
She shook her head hard. “I don’t know. Any of them. I don’t know.”
“Who had access to your room?”
“Earlier this morning and before I came home at noon, anybody. Mona says they should install a revolving door. Everybody’s in and out constantly. As the election approaches, they come and go at all hours.”
“How do you know someone didn’t follow you here?”
“I kept one eye on the rearview mirror and doubled back several times. Besides, no one was home when I left.”
“No clues from the folder you found in the old lady’s desk?”
Avery answered Van’s irreverent question with a dismal shake of her head.
“She’s a strange one,” he observed.
“What makes you say that?”
“I’ve got lots of her on tape. She’s always smiling, waving at the crowds, but damned if I believe she’s all that happy.”
“I know what you mean. She’s a very private person and says little. At least until today.”
“Tell us about Carole Navarro,” Irish said. “She’s more to the point than Zee Rutledge.”
“Carole, or whatever her original name was, was a tramp. She danced in the seediest nightclubs—”
“Tittie bars,” Van supplied.
“… Under a number of spicy and suggestive names. She was arrested once for public lewdness and once for prostitution, but both charges were dropped.”
“You’re sure of all this?”
“The private investigator might have been slime, but he was thorough. With the information he supplied Zee, it was easy for me to track down some of the places Carole had worked.”
“When was this?” Irish wanted to know.
“Before I came here. I even talked to some people who knew her—other dancers, former employers, and such.”
“Did any mistake you for her?” Van asked.
“All of them. I passed myself off as a long-lost cousin to explain the similarity.”
“What did they have to say about her?”
“She had severed all ties. Nobody knew what had happened to her. One drag queen that I spoke to, in exchange for a twenty-dollar bill, said she told him she was going to give up the night life, go to business school and improve herself. That’s all he remembered. He never saw her after she quit
working at the club where they shared a stage.
“This is pure conjecture, but I think Carole underwent a complete transformation, finessed her way into the Rutledge law firm, then once on the inside, saw a way to take her self-improvement campaign one step further by marrying Tate. Remember the piece I did several years ago on prostitutes, Irish?” she asked suddenly.
“While you were working at that station in Detroit? Sure, I remember it. You sent me a tape. What’s it got to do with this?”
“The personality profile of those women fits Carole. Most of them claim to hate men. She was probably no different.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No? Look how she treated Jack. She flirted with him to the extent of damaging his marriage, but I get the impression she never came across. If that isn’t malicious, I don’t know what is. For the sake of argument, let’s say she didn’t view men too kindly and set out to ruin one whose future looked the very brightest, while at the same time elevating herself.”
“Wasn’t she scared that someone would recognize her, that her shady past would eventually catch up with her?”
Avery had thought of that herself. “Don’t you see, that would have iced the cake. Tate would really be humiliated if it was revealed what his wife had been before he married her.”
“He must be a real dunce,” Van muttered, “to have fallen for it.”
“You don’t understand how calculating she was,” Avery said, leaping to Tate’s defense. “She became everything he could possibly want. She laid a trap, using herself as the perfect bait. She was pretty, animated, and sexy. But more than that, someone who knew Tate well coached her on the right buttons to push to elevate lust to love.”
“The one who wants to kill him.”
“Right,” Avery said, nodding grimly at Van, who had voiced her hypothesis. “He must have sensed, as Zee did, that Carole was an opportunist.”
“When he approached her, why didn’t she run to Tate?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “My theory isn’t without holes. Maybe being the bereaved widow of a public official held more allure than being a senator’s wife.”
