Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance

by Sonora Seldon

  He looked past me at a blank spot in the wall while I ran a hand over his hair, and then sank my fingers into it. What was I looking for? I had no idea, but I went at it anyway, sorting through the thick black mane that hadn’t felt a barber’s scissors in weeks.

  “I don’t know, boss; you’re going all hippie on me here with this mop you’re growing on your head, so I might not be able to find whatever you’re talking –”

  Then I found it. As I probed through to his scalp, my fingertips slid into … a dent. Over his ear and just below the crown of his head, there was an egg-shaped depression in his skull. It was solid beneath my touch, like a rocky little valley hiding in the forest of hair – or like a secret hiding below the surface of a story. Firm and not the least bit sensitive to being touched – judging by Devon’s lack of reaction to my prodding – this was plainly old news.

  But news of what? Why was he sporting a crater in his head? What had happened to him?

  What had been done to him?

  “Devon, please tell me how that thing got there, and tell me now.”

  He asked me a question instead.

  “Ashley, who has not yet been mentioned in this account of my father’s end?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Gee, I don’t know – Amelia Earhart? Ivan the Terrible? Tom Bombadil, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Humphrey Bogart? Devon, why the hell do you have a dent in your skull?”

  I glanced around, snatched up one of the extra chairs, and pulled it up next to him. I planted myself in that chair, and I waited for an answer.

  Devon brought his head level again, ran a hand over the patch of hair I’d mussed up, and then reached forward to retrieve his glass of orange juice. He drained the last dregs, sat back again, and he spoke like a man making an idle observation about a mildly interesting film he hadn’t seen in years.

  “The Killanes were rather cross when they found out I’d killed my father.”

  His voice flowed on, mild and routine and relaxed. “They didn’t come to the scene of his death. That stable area was filled with a storm of people in the minutes and hours after it happened, but I never saw a single Killane.

  “An ambulance arrived within a few minutes, but the paramedics who jumped out of it slowed and stopped and stared as they saw that my father was beyond their help.

  “Police came, taking statements and photographs. Men in suits fussed and questioned and hurried about – they might have been track management or detectives, I’m not certain – while the trainer spoke to the police, argued with various track officials, steered his people here and there, made an endless series of phone calls, and likely cursed the day he met Kevin Killane.

  “A veterinarian came and gawked at the dead horse for some useless reason or other; after a few minutes he left, ashen and shaking. The grooms I’d befriended in the hours before my world exploded came to check on me, talking to me and reassuring me and saying a thousand kind, well-meaning things that did no good at all.

  “Horses neighed from the backs of their stalls, confused and scared. Cats hissed, goats hustled passersby for treats and attention, and I remember one of the dogs wandering up and thrusting its head against me, quivering its tail as it tried to comfort me in its own way.

  “I thank every force in the universe that Maria stayed with me through it all, holding me safe from the madness that swirled all around us – if she hadn’t been there, I think I might have bolted, or screamed my throat raw, or lost my mind entirely. Of course, if she hadn’t been there and I had run away in the confusion, who knows where I might be now?”

  He sighed. “I did have one useful thought during all that insanity – Uncle Sheridan would know what to do.

  “He would come and get me, he’d hide me at his home, and I’d be safe there while he fixed everything somehow. So I grabbed at the trainer as he rushed past, pleading with him to call my Uncle Sheridan – but the man shrugged me off and hurried away, intent on something or other he was doing to cope with the situation.

  “Off he went, and he took my one hope of escape with him. If only this had happened a few years later, Maria could have pulled a cell phone from her pocket and my future might have gone in another direction altogether, but all phones were landlines back in those days.

  “I asked her to take me to the nearest phone so I could make the call myself, but a police officer blocked our path and ordered us to stay put because we were material witnesses who had not been authorized to leave the scene, or some such nonsense. I begged the police officer to call my uncle, he said one of my uncles was already sending someone to pick me up, and that was that.

  “I knew in my sinking heart that Uncle Sheridan wasn’t the uncle they’d called.

  “I clung to Maria like the pathetic little animal I was, I cried, and she held me like a lioness defending her cub. She stroked my hair and asked if I had a mother I could go to – I howled that I didn’t know where Mama was, that they wouldn’t let me see her, that I loved Mama, and then I ran out of words and cried until I couldn’t breathe.”

  I pushed my chair right up against Devon’s, I leaned over and wrapped my arms around him, and it was years too late, but I hugged him close. I hugged him, and I buried my face in his shoulder before I could start crying.

  He kissed the top of my head, rested there for a moment, and then he sat up and soldiered on to what happened next.

  “The coroner sent a black van. It was one of those bland, unmarked, anonymous vehicles that arrive when something nasty needs to disappear, and the men who climbed out of it did their best, I imagine – Maria wouldn’t let me watch their efforts.

  “I suppose a body bag or a bucket, a number of spatulas, and stomachs of cast iron were their chosen tools, but regardless, they separated what was left of my father from the remains of the horse, somehow. The bits of him scattered over the trunk and leaves, on the grass, and in the dirt were cleaned away, and do you know what I saw the one time I squirmed around in Maria’s arms to steal a glance at what they were doing?”

  “Do I want to know? Scratch that, of course I don’t want to know, but you’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”

  “Of course. It was another one of those curious and irrelevant details that won’t release its hold on your memory, despite being such a trivial thing … when I looked around, they’d already loaded everything they could scrape together of him into the van, when one of the men performing that thankless job noticed one of my father’s shoes leaning against an exposed tree root.

  “I followed his gaze, and I stared at that shoe. I was quite struck by how perfect and untouched it was by all that had happened – the imported Italian leather gleamed in the sunlight, the laces were still tied, and there wasn’t so much as a single spot of blood on it. It sat there just as it would have in my father’s closet that morning, empty and flawless, waiting.

  “The man who’d spotted the shoe snatched it up and tossed it into the van. I watched that shoe spin end over end, I distinctly heard it thunk onto the floor of the van, and then Maria turned me back towards her again.

  “That was the last I ever saw of my father.”

  “But didn’t you go to the funeral?”

  “No, I did not. A family spokesman informed the press that Kevin Killane’s heartbroken son was grieving and ‘in seclusion’ at an undisclosed location, but the truth of the matter was rather different – I spent the funeral locked in a Long Island hotel room with a guard stationed outside the door, as my uncles were under the odd impression that I might try to escape their justice. I was not, therefore, ‘in seclusion’ so much as I was a prisoner.”

  “Devon, I doubt that the Killanes even have the word ‘justice’ in their dictionaries – it’s probably blacked out with a Sharpie, along with words like ‘sympathy,’ ‘humanity,’ and ‘decency.’ Besides, why the hell would they feel the need to impose their version of justice on you, anyway? You were a spectator at that particular train wreck, not the drunk engineer – how could they get away
with locking you up for it?”

  “They locked me up not as just punishment for my sins, but so that I could not run away from their just punishment, which came later.”

  Before I could get started on how unjust the entire situation had been, Devon headed me off at the pass. “In time, my Ashley, all will be revealed – until then, I ask your patience.”

  He ended his narration of that awful day in the same calm professor’s voice he’d used from the beginning. “Not long after the coroner’s van trundled away, a skip loader arrived to remove the horse’s carcass. A ring of grooms and exercise riders stood around the scene, watching as the unlovely remains of that lovely animal were scooped up to the accompaniment of groaning gears and creaking metal, and when it was done, they all drifted back to their endless work, never meeting each other’s eyes.

  “Brave Maria stayed with me to the end. She promised she would not leave me until my family came for me, and so she did not. Others offered to sit with me, but she refused them all. The trainer happened by at one point, stood a cautious distance away, and suggested that perhaps she might get back to work; when she answered him with a fierce shake of her head and an icy stare, he had the good sense to move on.

  “In time, the Killanes came for me. They always do.

  “A deathly black limousine nosed around the corner of a barn and rolled toward me, thirty minutes or so after they took the horse away. It bumped over the dirt and lurched to a stop six feet away.

  “I never saw the driver – he stayed in his seat, behind a tinted window, and kept the engine running. As he waited, two men stepped out of the back of the limousine – one was a stranger in an aggressively expensive suit, a stranger who I later learned was a lawyer in the pay of my uncles. The other man wore a reserved, inconspicuous suit that did little to hide the bulge of a holstered gun; I recognized him as a bodyguard who worked for my youngest uncle, Kinsale Killane.

  “Maria glared at them both – she was the bravest little thing I’d ever seen, they were twice her size or more – and then she asked me if I was quite sure I wanted to go with these men. Hopeless thing that I was, I told her they came from my uncles and that I had to go with them. She hugged me one last time, told me I was welcome to come see her whenever I could get away, and together we’d feed the horses their portions of grain.

  “Of course, I never saw Maria again.”

  He said this with a frightening sort of calm – after all, didn’t terrified little kids lose their last hope of kindness and safety every day?

  “I did try to locate her about ten years ago, after I’d spent an entire night walking off the remnants of another panic attack and was in desperate need of even the memory of comfort.

  “My representatives discovered that some three years after my father died, she apparently ran afoul of one of this country’s mystifying immigration laws, and was deported back to El Salvador like so much unwanted baggage. I then sent several of my people down there to look for her, but it turns out that ‘Maria Hernández’ is as common and forgettable a name in El Salvador as ‘Mary Smith’ is here, and the trail ran cold.

  “In any case, Kinsale Killane was the first of my uncles to arrive on Long Island and investigate whatever awful thing it was I’d done to their brother, and I spent the next week locked in his hotel room.

  “The family spent that time sweeping the whole ugly business under the rug, hiding as many details as they could from the press and cremating my father as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, I tried to use the suite’s phone to call Uncle Sheridan, but I found the line was disconnected. I begged the bodyguards who always hovered nearby to call Uncle for me; but they were newly hired, did not know me, and were intent on keeping their jobs, so they refused.”

  “Devon, there’s one thing I’m not tracking you on – well, a lot of things, but one of them seriously puzzles me: why did you immediately assume your family would blame you for what happened to your dad? I mean, every one of the eyewitnesses would have testified that it was in no conceivable way your fault, right?”

  He raised a single eyebrow. “Ashley, these were Killanes – as you so often observe, they are assholes of the worst stripe. Is it so strange that they would blame the child they hated for their brother’s death?

  “As for witnesses, the vast majority of them were people like Maria, and it will not surprise you to learn that in the eyes of the Killanes, testimony given by brown-skinned people speaking Spanish can be safely dismissed out of hand. That left them free to see the situation in whatever light they cared to, and that light did not favor me.”

  Devon picked at his cold bacon, and then pushed his plate to one side.

  “The funeral and the interment of my father’s ashes took place at home in Chicago, but I was left behind in that Long Island hotel suite until it was all over. Then, once they’d successfully hushed everything up and the press had moved on to new amusements, my uncles sent for me.

  “I spent another endless week shut away in the main Chicago residence of Kennan Killane, the oldest of my uncles and the one most prone to blind fits of temper at the slightest thing that displeased him.

  “I rarely saw him, but I often heard him shouting in some distant part of the house, as he and my other uncles and their families conferred on what was to be done with me.

  “I remember quite a lot of shouting from that time, from all of my relations – and all of it was about me, the troublesome, hated, and thoroughly unwanted nuisance Kevin Killane had left behind to plague them.

  “Uncle Sheridan told me much later he had no idea of my circumstances at the time, and I had no way to contact him – I was of course not allowed access to a telephone because my family knew perfectly well I’d call him at the first opportunity, and I did not ask the servants to call because I knew well enough what would be done to any of them who were caught helping me. And so, I remained a silent prisoner in my uncle’s home.

  “Everything was riding on my father’s will. No one in the family knew what it contained, not exactly, and waiting for the day it would be read was like standing by waiting for an apocalypse to rip the world apart. Tempers were short, nerves were raw, and I hid in my room, avoiding everyone but the servants.

  “The day the will was to be read arrived, and I waited in my room through that bleak morning and a darker afternoon. The meeting where the executor would read out the document was scheduled for three o’clock, and that hour came and passed.

  “I heard the front door open and crash shut again when Kennan Killane came home afterward, but he did not shout. He did not speak. A maid told me later that he walked straight into his office and closed the door behind him without a word. The silence was terrifying.

  “He sent for me at nine that night.”

  I knew from my talk with Uncle Sheridan just what the will had said, and waiting to hear that vicious bastard Kennan Killane’s reaction to Devon inheriting every last penny of his father’s money and a majority share of Killane Industries was like waiting to hear about a soccer riot that killed hundreds of people over nothing.

  I didn’t know the half of it.

  Devon stared at the memory playing inside his head. His voice when he told me about that terrible night was faint, colorless, and … disconnected somehow, as if he were recounting events that had happened to someone else entirely, many wandering years in the past.

  “The housekeeper led me to him, down one corridor after another, around endless corners and past rooms I’d never been allowed to enter. She marched ahead of me like a soldier on parade – back straight, eyes front, one hand extended behind her to hold mine, and she never once looked at me. Guilt trembled in her fingers as they curled around mine, though, just the tiniest of tremors.

  “We arrived at my uncle’s office, and I stared at the mahogany door as the housekeeper rapped her knuckles against it. I remember the fingernails of my free hand biting into my palm, as I drew in a deep breath and readied myself for what I assumed would be another beating.
That was the worst I could imagine, a beating like many another I’d experienced at the hands of various relatives – perhaps this one would be more severe than most, but once the blows were absorbed, the end result would be much the same and life would go on.

  “I didn’t know my world would end in that room.”

  Devon paused, and then turned to look right into my eyes as I sat at his side.

  “Everything ended, and it happened before he ever laid a finger on me.”

  He turned away. He stared at the table and talked to his plate as I leaned into him, trying to keep him close and protect him somehow from the past.

  “The housekeeper’s knock was answered by an indistinct grunt; she then opened the door, released my hand, and thrust me inside. She didn’t set one foot in that office herself – once I was inside, she pulled the door closed behind me, and I heard her footsteps hurrying off down the hall.”

  “Bitch couldn’t get out of the line of fire fast enough, huh?”

  “It seemed that way at the time, though she still had a crucial role to play, at the end of the business done that night – but I’m running ahead of events. In any case, she made off, and I bit my lip as I looked around the darkened office.

  “The overhead light was off, and so too was the shaded lamp on my uncle’s desk. Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw the leather chair behind his desk was empty. I backed toward the door. Then movement lurched at me from the corner of one eye and the overhead bulbs snapped on, flooding the room with light.

  “Uncle Kennan loomed over my left shoulder. Seconds ago he‘d been nowhere, and now he stood than six inches away, staring at me. His right hand dropped away from the light switch, his left held an empty glass that stank of whiskey, and he stared down at me.

  “The man was six feet tall, weighed well over two hundred pounds, and to my scrawny ten-year-old self, he looked like a giant. His face bloomed red with rage and alcohol, his breath sawed in and out like the rumblings of a waking dragon, his massive body trembled, and I saw his empty right hand clenching into a white-knuckled fist.