by Jaime Maddox
“Yeah, as I said, he was quite mature and handled himself very well.”
“That’s nice to know, J.R. The Bennetts were good people. What’s the boy’s name?” Sandy thought Jane must have hired a nanny to raise her child.
“It’s Bobby Berkavich. I think the spelling is B-E-R-K-A-V-I-C-H, but I’m not sure. An Irish guy like me is at a loss when it comes to Polish names.”
Sandy had to agree with him on that one. “Do you have a phone number?”
“I do. Remember, this is going back a few years, but it’s worth a shot.” He gave her the phone number he had on record. It began with a Philadelphia area code. So Jane had fled town after all.
“Remember me when you’re buying the headstone,” J.R. said.
Sandy promised to do just that. Disconnecting the call and not missing a beat, she dialed the phone number he’d given her. She could hardly contain her excitement! In only a few hours she’d been able to make contact with one of the Bennetts. She just knew this was going to work out! She’d obtain the necessary permission and settle this once and for all.
The phone didn’t even ring. Instead, it immediately went to voice mail. Damn! Sandy left a simple message. “Hi, Bobby. My name is Sandy Parker, and I was a friend of your aunt. We grew up together in West Nanticoke. Anyway, I’d like to speak to you when you have a moment. Can you please call me?” She left the number and, after thanking him, said good-bye.
*
Traveling always excited Bobby Percavage. Throughout his parents’ dysfunctional marriage, the one thing they did well was travel. As a child and teenager he’d visited most of the capitals of Europe and some in Asia. Attending the Olympics in Seoul had been one of his greatest life experiences. He was looking forward to Rio for the next Summer Games. He hadn’t been to Antarctica but was doing well on the other continents. It made his pulse race, thinking of the people he’d meet—their accents, their dress, the way they carried themselves. Over the years he’d gotten great with accents and enjoyed playing detective when he met foreigners, trying to figure out their origins from their names and the particular way they expressed themselves.
He loved food, and eating in foreign countries was such an awesome experience for his palate. Whether in a gourmet restaurant with hundred-dollar wine when he was with one of his parents, or from a street vendor with whom he could share a little conversation, it was all so flavorful and decadent and different.
His heart had been beating at a rapid pace for the past week as he prepared for this trip to Paris. As a marketing expert for a pharmaceutical company, he often traveled internationally, and the travel was one of the reasons he had sought this job. When he was older and settled he would opt for something more conventional, but for now, this was perfect. He was seeing the world and it didn’t cost him a cent.
Clearing security at the Philadelphia airport’s international terminal, Bobby slipped back into his shoes and repacked his electronic devices before heading toward his gate. En route, he powered up the smart phone he’d turned off at the security checkpoint and called his mother. He’d been playing phone tag with her all morning, and the game was still on.
“Hey, Mom, sorry I missed you again. I’ll e-mail you when I check in at the hotel. Love you.”
Before he could turn the phone off again, it beeped, indicating he had a message. He punched the appropriate keys on the phone and within seconds was listening to Sandy Parker’s voice. He jotted down the number and then dialed. After a few unanswered rings, he was directed to voice mail. A sweet and trusting young man by nature, he didn’t question why someone would reach out to him about his aunt after forty years with no contact. He simply left a message and followed the signs for his gate.
*
On her end, Sandy had just hit the send button on her phone, and within seconds, Pat answered. “Hello, there. Where are you? Getting close?” she asked.
“Delaware Water Gap.” Pat had just passed through that breathtaking wedge in the mountains where the Delaware River cut through, separating Pennsylvania from New Jersey.
“We’ll get there at the same time,” she said as she entered the stream of trucks traveling east on Interstate 80. They spent the next twenty minutes talking. When Sandy rounded the bend of her long driveway and her house came into view, she was delighted to see Pat’s car parked in front. Pat was on the front-porch swing, looking quite appetizing in tan shorts and a sleeveless golf shirt that showed off the arm muscles she developed with twice-weekly gym sessions.
They exchanged a sultry kiss, but knowing they had a tee time, Sandy pulled back playfully. “Save that thought,” she commanded.
She quickly changed into golf clothes, and they left the house again within half an hour, wanting to squeeze in lunch before their round of golf. It wasn’t until the round was completed, six hours later, that Sandy noticed she had a message.
A deep voice that she didn’t recognize greeted her. “Hi, Sandy. Bobby Percavage returning your call. I’m actually in the departure lounge at the airport at this very minute, and I’ll be here for about two more hours. After that, I’m out of the country for the next week. So call me back soon, or next week. Okay, bye for now.”
“Damn,” Sandy said softly. She’d just missed his call. Now she’d have to wait another week! At least, though, she’d made contact.
“What’s up?” Pat asked.
She hadn’t shared her mission with Pat. Jeannie had always held a special, almost sacred place in Sandy’s heart, and this wasn’t a topic she would share easily with anyone, most especially with her lover. Putting a smile on her face she eased Pat’s concerns. “Nothing to worry about. I just missed a call.”
She’d waited forty years, Sandy figured. How hard could it be to wait another week?
Chapter Eleven
Next of Kin
After Sandy Parker left his office, Glen Franklin leaned back in his leather desk chair and lifted his feet up on the desk. His loafers needed polishing. Or maybe he should just buy a new pair? Business was good. He could afford the expense of four-hundred-dollar shoes, and looking good was essential to continued good business. If one wanted to be a successful attorney, one had to look the part of a successful attorney.
Sandy Parker’s inquiry had been laughable. Of course he remembered the Bennett family! He had had an affair with Jane years ago, and it was only because of that he’d gotten her mother’s business when her old lawyer passed away. They were no longer exactly on good terms, though. Apparently, she’d expected him to cheat on his wife with only her, but had never conveyed that to him. Discovering him with another woman had brought about a rapid end to the passionate interludes that had delighted him for several years.
He wasn’t particularly eager to rekindle a romance with Jane. He had younger and more attractive women at his disposal. Yet Jane Bennett had been a valuable asset to him during their time together—outside of the bedroom as well as between the sheets. Both members of the Valley Country Club, she always seemed to have the scoop on everyone. She was active with various charities and organizations, and her list of contacts was endless. Information is power, and Jane was a high-voltage transformer.
He would be foolish to not take advantage of this opportunity to reconnect with her.
It was the grandson, Bobby Percavage, who had acted as the executor for Helen’s estate. Bobby had been a college student at King’s when his grandmother passed away and had done an admirable job in sorting things through. The old lady had chosen well.
He should have dialed Bobby’s number with this request from Sandy Parker. As executor, he was the contact person for the Bennett family. Glen didn’t dial Bobby’s number, though. Pressing a number on his speed dial, he called Jane Bennett.
Apparently his contact information was stored in the memory bank of her phone as well, for her greeting was very suggestive. “How may I help you, Counselor?” she asked. Apparently time had healed her wounds, he thought with a smirk.
He wasn’t s
ure why, but he suspected her mood would be different after he revealed the reason for his call. And although she didn’t say anything specific, just thanked him for passing along the message and promised to keep in touch, Glen could tell that the message wasn’t welcome.
Remembering the awful day when she read Nellie Parker’s obituary, Jane decided it was too early in the day for a cocktail. On that occasion, she’d spent the rest of the day in a stupor, stumbling through the house before finally passing out on her couch. Instead of a drink, she popped open the lid on her Xanax bottle and washed a tablet down with water. Zero calories and no hangover. Sixty was looming just ahead, so her metabolism was on the sluggish side and she couldn’t afford to put on weight. Obesity was unattractive, and with the remarkable job her aesthetic surgeon had done on her face, she was looking quite good. She wanted to stay that way.
She opened the door to the storage closet adjacent to her kitchen, reached into the dark depths, and retrieved a pack of cigarettes and the disposable lighter she had hidden there.
She didn’t light up until she was seated on her deck. No longer a smoker, Jane only chose to enjoy a cigarette under circumstances of extreme duress, and this certainly qualified. She inhaled and felt the supreme pleasure of smoke filling her lungs, the nicotine instantly reaching equally dark depths of her brain and calming her. Her eyes closed, for a moment she felt just fine.
Opening her eyes, staring into the expanse of forest that bordered her property, she barely registered the natural beauty that surrounded her. It was a luxurious townhouse, if a townhouse was the type of home you were interested in. If, however, you’d spent most of your life in the grandeur of magnificent estates, spreading your many things around five thousand square feet of marble and hardwood, staring out from your courtyard to a manicured garden, with no neighbors in sight—well then, this was hardly a residence to brag about.
How had her life gone so far astray? She couldn’t unravel the mystery no matter how often she thought it through. She’d become a nurse. She’d married the doctor. She’d borne him a son. Not wanting to be left alone at home, she’d enjoyed her career—not the actual hands-on patient care, but the administrative position she’d held until her hospital merged and she was let go. She’d been the wife who volunteered and chaired committees, the PTA mom who knew her son’s friends and their parents. She was active at the country club and in the church. She thought she was happy. She was happy. Her husband wasn’t.
Having come from a modest background, he’d worked his way through college and worked his tail off in the early days of his medical career to repay the school loans and the mortgage on the house and the country-club membership he never used. A workaholic, he missed the evenings at home and the weekends with his family. He missed much of his son’s childhood. In truth, he never felt he was missing much because he’d so loved doing surgery and delivering babies and making rounds in the hospital.
But medicine changed from those early days of his career, when doctors were kings and they were given free rein over hospitals and patients, and rewarded handsomely for their efforts. Paperwork and regulations, quality assurance, sexual-harassment seminars, and malpractice premiums had wrung all the fun out of medicine. Upon his only child’s graduation from college, and with no plans for graduate school, the last obstacle to his freedom was cleared.
He left Jane with two hundred thousand dollars of debt on the home they’d shared. He left her with a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-month car payment and a five-hundred-dollar-a-month country-club fee. He left her with no job.
The landscaping and the security system and the electricity and the household expenses all added up to more money than her investments brought in. She’d exhausted unemployment and wouldn’t even consider a bank loan. The bankers would laugh her out the door, and then she’d have to face them at the club with the shame of her poverty known to one and all.
As she inhaled deeply, she could hear her mother’s mocking voice telling her she had to cut back her spending. Her mother had never been critical of Jane’s lifestyle, and for as long as Jane could afford to live that life, her mother didn’t voice any objections. But Helen was from another era and was inherently different from her daughter. She was frugal. She was cautious. She was conservative. She just didn’t understand what it was like to be Jane, who had friends to keep up with and men to impress!
Although she had the means to bail her daughter out, she chose not to. Helen Bennett could see no utility in Jane keeping a house she couldn’t afford, or a country-club membership either. She gladly offered her daughter food, but not the money to go out for dinner.
Most reasonably, the house was the first thing that had to go. And miraculously, a buyer had turned up as soon as it was listed, a wealthy New Yorker anxious to escape the city after September 11. After fees and taxes, satisfying the mortgage and splitting the proceeds, she had been able to afford the townhouse she now called home and still had close to two hundred thousand dollars in her accounts. Bad financial markets and bad spending habits had eroded that nest egg, and now Jane was nearly broke. Even the money her mother had left her couldn’t cover her expenses. A crisis was looming, unless something happened soon to change her cash flow.
And, as luck would have it, a solution was on the horizon. It was imminent. In just another couple of weeks, all of her problems would be solved. She wouldn’t have to give up the club and the car and the lifestyle. Unless something, or someone like Sandy Parker, came back into her life and fucked everything up.
Taking another long drag on her cigarette, Jane cursed her luck. The old lady had lived for nearly a century; why couldn’t she just hold out for another few weeks? Then this would all be over and Jane wouldn’t give a shit about Sandy reappearing in her life. She had shown up, though, and seemed to be working quickly to disrupt Jane’s very existence. Her grandmother had been dead only a few weeks, and already she was beating a path to Jane’s door. Robbie Burns might not have given Sandy Jane’s name, but still Sandy had discovered where she was and was one step away from ruining everything.
Jane had too much to lose to let Sandy Parker interfere with her plans. Snuffing out her cigarette, she released a deep breath and vowed to be strong. She could do this. She could hold it all together. She’d been strong before—when her father was killed, for example. She had driven her mother to the hospital and held her hand through the entire ordeal while Jeannie was there fighting for her life. And after, she’d helped to settle the affairs in West Nanticoke and even picked out her mother’s new house in Mountaintop. This crisis was gaining momentum and was almost as bad as that had been, and she’d done so well back then, hadn’t she? She would have to act quickly to divert an absolute disaster, but with what was at stake, she could pull herself together and do what she had to. And at this point, she’d do just about anything to keep Sandy quiet.
*
Not so very far away, a man unknown to Jane Bennett sat pondering the same questions about Sandy Parker. Why the hell had she had to come back? Nosing around at the lumberyard, plying his young son for information—what was she up to?
Daniel Parker VI didn’t feel it was too early in the day for a cocktail. The one he sipped was, in fact, his second of this young day. He would probably be topping it off with yet a third.
If a biographer were describing him, the word powerful would have been at the top of the list of adjectives. Controlling would have been equally accurate. He wielded power and control over his brothers, his children, everyone in his family. His employees feared him. Competitors feared him. Politicians feared him.
Only two realms of his kingdom were out of his control: the Parker trust fund and his uncle David’s family.
His personal attorney had told him the trust was unbreakable. Harvard lawyers had reviewed the terms and found no way to bust it. Over ten million dollars sat in that fund and he, the head of the family, received an annual dividend of fifty thousand. It was the same amount all the heirs of Dale Parker re
ceived, and with the birth of each new child, the number dropped yet again. His ancestor had probably thought he was protecting his family in setting up the trust, but as he saw it, the trust did nothing but generate revenue for the stockbrokers and the lawyers. Yet he couldn’t change a thing. And just as he couldn’t control the trust, he had no influence over his second cousin.
The reappearance of Sandy Parker in town was indeed troubling. He’d been monitoring her and her grandmother over the years, tracking their movements and finances. He was happy for them to stay where they were, out of his graying hair, far away from the Parker Companies. The more geographical distance between them, the less likely they were to learn something that could be damaging to him. He couldn’t control these two women, but he could keep them on his radar, and he had. It infuriated him to know that Sandy’s last check from the Parker trust totaled nearly half a million dollars. It infuriated him that the commission for managing the trust gave her another hundred grand.
He hadn’t opposed his father’s decision all those years ago. On the contrary, he’d fully supported Dale. The covert move they made had proved to be quite profitable to the family, but like most ventures, it wasn’t without risk. For years he’d avoided discovery, and now he wondered what the cost of exposure would be? He feared his cousin Sandy could bankrupt the Parker Companies or, even worse, walk away with control of all of them.
Without the handsome salary he pulled as CEO of the Parker Companies, living only on the pittance from his trust, Dan would be virtually destitute. The inheritance his father had left to him and his brothers wasn’t growing enough to keep up with inflation. The money he could throw around had always been a powerful weapon. Like the mines that had spawned the Parker fortune, though, that money was drying up. With it would go his lifestyle, his power, his identity.
