For My Daughters

by Barbara Delinsky

  For My Daughters

  BARBARA DELINSKY

  To Karen and Amy for fighting.

  To Steve, Eric, Andrew, and Jeremy for loving.

  To readers everywhere for believing, as I do.

  Contents

  Foreword My last glimpse of him was as forbidden as all…

  One The news wasn’t good. Caroline St. Clair read the verdict…

  Two The last thing Annette St. Clair could ever be accused…

  Three Leah St. Clair lived in fashionable Woodley Park. On any…

  Four Caroline was hoping that engine trouble might force a cancellation…

  Five Leah took a long, deep breath that carried with it…

  Six Leah sat straighter in the lounge chair. “What are you…

  Seven Wendell Coombs shuffled across the porch of the general store…

  Eight Caroline’s body was operating on Chicago time, which meant that…

  Nine Annette was talking on the telephone, covering her free ear,…

  Ten Midnight found Leah sitting out on the bluff, wrapped in…

  Eleven Wendell Coombs ambled across the porch of the general store…

  Twelve Annette was up early, ready to leave the house and…

  Thirteen I’ve never liked goodbyes, not since that summer in Maine…

  Fourteen Caroline wasn’t herself.

  Fifteen Wendell reached the porch of the general store earlier than…

  Sixteen Caroline was sure she had heard wrong. Calmly holding the…

  Seventeen Leah was beyond the point of caring if her sisters…

  Eighteen Will loved this spot. He told me so on the…

  Nineteen Annette held three pieces of paper in her hand. One…

  Twenty “Jean-Paul,” Annette breathed in response to his groggy hello. She…

  Twenty-One Though the funeral was set for midday Monday, the townsfolk…

  Twenty-Two Wendell Coombs was scowling as he lowered himself onto the…

  Afterword Straightening my shoulders, I close my eyes and breathe deeply…

  About the Author

  Praise and Acclaim

  Books by Barbara Delinsky

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  foreword

  MY LAST GLIMPSE OF HIM WAS AS FORBIDDEN as all that had gone before, but no less precious. It was early morning. The coastal air was crisp, made tangy by the sea salt it bore. I felt its moisture on my skin and in my hair, and smelled it with an acuity that was to become an indelible splash on my memory’s canvas. September had barely arrived, yet the early chill left no doubt that summer was ebbing. With it went a glow that I had never seen before nor would ever see again.

  He stood in the door of the gardener’s shed, framed by wood the color of the lichen-covered granite headlands that spilled to the sea beyond the bluff. The shed, like the man, had withstood many a coastal winter wind. It was where he lived, and in our summer of nights together, had proven far more a home than any larger, more elegant and pricey residence of mine.

  He was a compelling figure. A good head taller than me, he was lean, but solidly built, as befit his work. His back was straight, his shoulders level, his skin toasted. Eyes that I had initially found darkly mysterious were somber now with a mix of rebuke and desire as they held mine for the last time. Everything about him spoke of the stoicism that was the callus of life along the rugged Maine coast.

  A passerby might have thought he was angry, and perhaps there was a touch of that. We had agreed that we wouldn’t see each other again, that it would be too difficult after the night. But I couldn’t help myself. I needed a final reference, a daylight reference, a reference to last the rest of my life.

  Angry, perhaps. More likely dying inside, as I was. Torn by the sorrow of knowing that we had found something priceless and were letting it go. Of our own free will.

  Our own free will.

  But was one’s will ever truly free? Were there ever times in any responsible person’s life when choices could be made without a thought to past or future? I was, unfortunately, a responsible person. I could no more have chosen a different course than could Will Cray.

  At the main house, my bags were packed and waiting on the front porch for the battered station wagon that was Downlee’s taxi. At the main house, too, was Dominick St. Clair, my husband of four years, the man I had promised to love, honor, and obey in exchange for his magnanimity—and therein lay my challenge. The summer that was to have been one of recuperation and rediscovery had been so, but in unexpected and shattering ways. My job now was to pick up the pieces of this chosen life of mine and reassemble them in some kind of acceptable manner.

  I took nothing of Will with me, not the pink beach roses that he had nurtured, that I had worn and breathed, then pressed; not the photographs that had caused such a stir in tiny, parochial Downlee; not the thin leather band that he had woven and given to me to wear in the night. Today I wore a solid gold ring and its companion of emerald-cut diamonds and baguettes, symbolic as nothing else could be of the world to which I returned.

  I was twenty-seven that summer, wise to life’s material needs yet naive enough in the ways of the heart to think that I could be whole without him.

  How wrong I was. My heart stayed with Will Cray, with the salty air, the scent of the pines and the wild honeysuckle, the crimson splash of the dahlias he grew. Tears clogged my throat as I looked on him that final time, as I clung to his warmth for a last minute and melted with the memory of it, as everything inside me cried and the parting tore at the finest, most sensitive and giving parts of me.

  Fighting those tears and the doubts that I knew would plague me for years to come, I turned and started down the path. When everything before me blurred, I imagined the fog horn at Houkabee Rocks sounded its mournful warning, and still I pushed on. I stumbled once. I stumbled again, and might have called it fate and run back to him, had not my sense of duty been so strong.

  In hindsight, I see that I was driven by something far less noble than duty, and for that my punishment was harsh. The tears I fought that morning as I left him behind froze in my throat, growing hard as stone, a barrier past which softness rarely crept, for in leaving Will I had sentenced myself to a life devoid of emotion.

  That was what I now sought to correct.

  one

  THE NEWS WASN’T GOOD. CAROLINE ST. CLAIR read the verdict on the jurors’ faces well before it was passed to the judge. None of the twelve could look at her. Her client had been found guilty.

  The rational part of her knew it was for the best. The man had kidnapped his ex-wife, held her hostage for three days, and repeatedly raped her. A respected state legislator with an otherwise spotless record, he would serve his term in the relative comfort of a federal prison, receive the psychiatric help he needed, and be paroled while he was still young enough to start again. In some regards an acquittal, which would have tossed him to the media and others bent on exploitation at a time when he was as bruised as his ex-wife, would have been more cruel.

  But for Caroline each win was crucial. Wins generated renown, renown generated new cases, and new cases fattened the bottom line that was the obsession of the predominantly male partnership of Holten, Wills, and Duluth. Like so many of its kind, it had spent the better part of two decades in overextension, but while other firms folded, Holten, Wills, and Duluth clung to solvency. The cost was a fixation on cutting dead weight, limiting perks, and streamlining operations—and a preoccupation with accounts receivable.

  Caroline was one of the newer and, even at forty, younger partners. The future of the firm rested on her shoulders, lectured her older colleagues in the same breath that they grilled her on her billabl
e hours. They didn’t like sharing the wealth. Worse, they didn’t like women. Caroline had to work twice as hard and be twice as good for the same recognition. She had to be more clever in the manipulation of legal theory, more aggressive negotiating with prosecutors, more effective with juries.

  She had badly, badly needed this win.

  “Tough break,” said one of her fellow junior partners from the door of her office. “The press opportunities would have been good, what with your man’s political connections. Now you get exposure for a loss.”

  Caroline shot him a look that might have been more stern had he been anyone else. But she and Doug had joined the firm at the same time, both lateral appointees, and though he had been named partner two years before her, she hadn’t held it against him. She couldn’t afford to. He was her strongest ally in the firm.

  “Thanks,” she drawled. “I needed that.”

  “Sorry. But it is true.”

  “And you think that that thought didn’t keep me awake for more than a minute or two last night?” she asked, tapping the desktop with her forefinger, then her pinkie. “I knew the potential for this case when I took it. I thought we had a shot at winning.”

  “Proving insanity is tough.”

  “But aside from this one aberration John Baretta has lived an exemplary life,” she argued, as she had more eloquently and in greater depth to the jury. “I thought that would count for something.”

  “Then you do believe he was temporarily insane?”

  Caroline had had to believe it. That was the only way she could present an effective defense. With the trial behind her now, though, what would have been, “Definitely!” became, “Arguably.” Her fingers kept up their alternating beat. “The man was crazy about his wife. He couldn’t accept it when she left him. But he has no history of violence. He’s ashamed and apologetic. He isn’t a danger to society. He needs therapy. That’s all.”

  “And you need a cigarette.”

  She stilled her hand. “You bet, but I won’t have one. I’m not going through withdrawal again, and I’m not doing anything that’ll make me sick. Just think of what the firm would do to me then.” She sputtered out a breath. “My friends don’t understand. They think that making partner guarantees something, like if I were to become pregnant tomorrow the firm would throw me a shower. They’d throw me out, is what they’d do. They’d find a way to get around the issue of discrimination and toss me out on my tail.” She sighed, feeling suddenly tired. “It’s so fragile, this thing we call a partnership, this thing we call a career. Is it worth it in the end?”

  “Beats me. But what else can we do?”

  “I don’t know. But something’s wrong, Doug. I’m feeling worse for myself for losing a case than I do for my client, and he’s the one who’ll be doing the time. My values have gotten messed up. All of ours have.”

  The words had barely left her mouth when a second face appeared at the door. This one belonged to one of the senior partners. “You allowed too many women on the jury,” was his assessment. “They sided with the victim.”

  Doug slipped away just as Caroline said, “Gender isn’t grounds for exclusion.”

  “You should have found a way to get them off,” he answered and continued on down the hall.

  She had barely begun to think up a response when another partner appeared. “You shouldn’t have let him take the stand. He was looking piteous up to that point. Once he started talking, he sounded slick.”

  “I thought he sounded sincere.”

  “The jury didn’t,” came the chiding reply.

  “We can all be brilliant tacticians after the fact,” Caroline reasoned, “but the truth is that none of us knows why the jury reached the decision it did.”

  She was brooding about that moments later when yet another partner stopped by with as much encouragement as she would get. “Put this behind you, Caroline. You need a victory. Take a look at your caseload, pick a good one, and clobber the sucker.”

  Caroline glanced at the stack of folders on her desk. To each were clipped the telephone messages and memos that had gathered while she had been on trial. She was thinking that she ought to address them but that she wasn’t in the mood, when another partner called from the door, “Just try not to mention the name of the firm when you talk with the press, okay?”

  Seconds later she found herself staring at the empty doorway feeling something akin to despair when, suddenly, messed up values seemed the least of it. There was selfishness, greed, and partisanship. Not to mention pomposity. And vanity. And condescension.

  While she was at it, she threw in ruthlessness, and in that moment couldn’t for the life of her understand why she wanted to be associated with these people.

  Not caring that she risked the ire of the senior partners by leaving the office while the sun was still up, she filled her briefcase with the files from her desk that would be perfect reading during the wee hours when she couldn’t sleep, instructed her secretary on the appointments she wanted made for the next day, and headed home.

  Chicago was typically April-cold, but the wind on her face was a relief after too many tense courtroom days and stuffy office nights. Rather than take a cab, as she had in the rush of the weeks past, she buttoned her overcoat, wound her scarf around her neck, and set off on foot.

  Fifteen minutes of brisk walking later, she was able to produce a smile for the doorman, who greeted her by name, held the door, then summoned the elevator while she got her mail.

  Her condo was on the eighteenth floor with a view of the lake. From the vantage point of the living room sofa, she could freeze the scene at an angle that cropped out all signs of the city and left a portrait of sails in the wind. On a clear day, it was the stuff of which dreams were made.

  This day was overcast. She dropped her things on the chair by the door and flipped through the mail. There was nothing of note but one piece, a thick envelope whose Philadelphia postmark was as telltale as the script on its front.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised. It figured that a message from her mother would arrive on a day like this. Ginny hadn’t wanted her to be a lawyer, had thought it a fatal occupation for a woman. Losing a case, as Caroline had just done, would be proof of that, as would the fact that there were neither a husband nor children to greet Caroline at her door.

  Caroline and Ginny St. Clair had never seen eye to eye on women’s rights. They had never seen eye to eye on much of anything. Ginny didn’t like the ultrashort clip of Caroline’s dark hair or the no-nonsense cut of her clothes. She didn’t like the fact that Caroline’s nails weren’t manicured, or that she didn’t wear perfume. She didn’t understand why Caroline didn’t have the maternal instinct of her sister Annette or the social flair of her sister Leah.

  The one thing upon which they did agree was that to argue about any or all of this would be futile. So they settled into a relationship of prescribed roles and surface pleasantries. They saw each other on family occasions and chatted sometimes on the phone, and this worked well for Caroline. She had long since stopped looking to Ginny for either warmth or understanding.

  With a moment’s sigh for what might have been, she dropped the thick letter, along with the rest of the mail, went down the hall to her bedroom, and took off the plum-colored tailored suit that hadn’t impressed the jury either. Then, barefoot, wearing jeans and an old shirt rolled to the elbows, she returned to the living room and sank onto the sofa.

  The world beyond her window was cloudy and gray, even depressing, and the sleekness of her apartment, with its preponderance of chrome and glass, didn’t help. She felt cold, failed, thwarted—none of which made sense on a rational level. She was a successful lawyer, partner in a prestigious firm. She had won enough cases to make today’s loss an aberration, and would win plenty more down the road. There was no cause for discouragement. No cause at all. Still, she felt it.

  The telephone rang. She counted the rings. With her jaw resting on her palm, she waited through her own
voice for the caller to speak.

  “This is Mark Spence, Sun-Times, wanting a quote for the morning edition. Call me at—”

  She let the machine take his number, though she doubted she would use it. She had given quotes to the press outside the courtroom after the verdict had been returned, had made the obligatory mention of faith in her client, the system of justice, and the process of appeal. She had nothing to add.

  The answering machine clicked off. Her front buzzer rang. She closed her eyes and willed away whoever was downstairs, but the buzzing went on. Muttering choice things about privacy and the press, she stalked to the intercom and barked, “Yes.”

  “Hey, pretty lady.”

  After a moment’s pause, she smiled, put her forehead to the wall, and released the angry breath she’d been holding.

  It was Ben. Her Ben. As predictably there when she needed him as her mother was not.

  “Hey, Ben.”

  “Need a lift?”

  “Don’t you know it.”

  “Buzz me up.”

  She did, then sank back against the front door with a fluidity in her limbs that she hadn’t felt in days. Ben Hammer, with his slow smile and easy-going way, was everything she wasn’t, and while she could never take a steady diet of him, in moments of strain he was like a smooth, sweet wine.

  She had the door open when he stepped from the elevator looking as loose-limbed, laid-back, and—wearing leather, with his sandy hair mussed from the motorcycle helmet he carried—disreputable as ever.

  “Dangerous thing,” he chided as he sauntered down the hall, “to open your door before you peek through the hole.”

  “No one could possibly imitate your voice,” she said. It was one of the few simple truths in life. “How are you, Ben?”

  He produced a bunch of daisies from behind his back. “Better’n you, I’d wager. I heard the news. Tough break.”

  She took the flowers, ushered his wind-chilled self inside, and closed the door. “Thanks. These are sweet. A consolation prize.”