Serendipity

by Fern Michaels

  “It’s getting light out, Ross, I have to leave,” Jory said a long time later.

  “Me too. I have to go back to the house and get fresh clothes. I keep saying I’m going to bring a stack of clean shirts, but I always forget. How does my eye look?”

  “Awful. Do you really know how to make mustard plaster?”

  “Yes. Woo told me how to do it. He made one for me. I swear that’s how I got better last year before . . . before you had the accident. Woo’s in love with you, but then I guess you already know that. I’m jealous. I imagine all kinds of things. It’s none of my business, I know. I had to say it out loud.”

  “Do you feel better now that you said it?” Jory asked quietly.

  “No,” Ross replied, getting up. “I think you’re right, I’m going to limp for a week. Aren’t you going to wash your face?”

  Jory laughed. “With what? There’s no soap in the bathroom. I’ll see you later, Ross. Saturday is good for me, if you want to go with me to get the Christmas tree.”

  “What time?”

  Jory shrugged. “Come for breakfast and we’ll go from there.”

  “All right, ” Ross said, helping her on with her coat. He kissed her lightly on the tip of her nose. “I meant every single thing I said last night. By Saturday I’ll think of a lot more. Should we ask Woo to go with us?”

  “No. Just you and me. ’Bye, Ross. I’m not sorry about the black eye and your shins.”

  “I know, but I forgive you anyway. Drive carefully.”

  “I will.” She didn’t look back.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Gravel spurted upward as the tires of the station wagon crunched to a halt. The moment Jory opened the car door, she could hear the dogs barking by the back door. Guilt rushed through her. She’d take them for a long walk the minute she brushed her teeth and washed her face. She didn’t look to the left or the right or toward the carriage house as she hurried up the back steps to the porch. A moment later she was inside, scrooched down with the dogs, hugging and crooning softly.

  Across the yard in the carriage house Woo watched Jory climb the steps to the back porch. All night he’d watched for her return, wishing for a key to let the dogs out. It wasn’t like Jory to stay away all night. Not that it was any of his business. He wanted to stomp his way over to the house, to demand to know where she was, who she’d spent the night with. Demand to know details.

  He needed to know where she had been. And when he needed to know something, he asked. He was out in the driveway, walking slowly, when Jory emerged from the house, the dogs on their leashes. He was feeling belligerent, and his heart felt sore when she stopped long enough to say “Good morning” in a voice so neutral that he winced.

  “You’re up early,” he said carefully. “Were the dogs upset last night? They kept barking. I suppose there was a cat or maybe a squirrel in the yard.”

  He didn’t think it possible for her voice to sound even more neutral and bland, but it did. “I hope they didn’t keep you awake.”

  “I couldn’t sleep, so it didn’t matter.”

  “Then why did you mention it?”

  “To make conversation. I don’t understand what happened. One minute things were . . . wonderful, and the next minute you acted like . . . it didn’t mean anything. I guess I just wanted to understand. If it was just to pass the time, just to make me feel good about myself, then tell me that. If I did something, if I said something, tell me.”

  “It meant a great deal,” Jory said, bending down to untangle the dogs’ leashes from around her ankles. “I waited for you to come over, to call, to make some kind of move.”

  “When you came in that evening from walking the dogs, you acted like I was there to pay the rent. Sometimes I’m not too astute. I figured you were already regretting making love with me, so I went home. Then when you didn’t come over or call, I figured my theory was right. I know you didn’t come home last night. The house was dark, so that’s not exactly a brilliant deduction on my part. The dogs did bark, though. I thought something happened to you, and then I decided you were with Ross. You were, weren’t you?”

  Jory bent to untangle the leashes again. “Where I was last night is not your concern. I’ll share something with you, Pete. I quit my job yesterday, and in just a bit I have to head for town because the sheriff is going to evict Mrs. Landers. I have to walk these dogs.” She raced off, the dogs yipping and yapping happily.

  Woo returned to the carriage house, his shoulders slumped, his face full of misery. He made two phone calls, the first to Arthur to cancel his therapy, the second to his parents. “I’m leaving as soon as I get my things together,” he told them. “I’ll stay till New Year’s. No, Ross won’t be with me this year.”

  The second thing he did was write a note to Jory that he would put in her mailbox on the way out. As he wrote, scratched out, erased, he wondered if it was possible for someone his size to have a broken heart. He decided it was possible when he signed his name to the note.

  Dear Jory,

  I’ve gone to Lancaster to spend the holidays with my family. I turned the thermostat to 65 degrees. If you get a severe cold spell, the pipes won’t freeze. Feel free to use any of the food in my refrigerator if you want.

  If you see Ross, wish him a Merry Christmas for me. I tried calling the office, but his secretary said he was in court.

  Have a wonderful holiday, and I’ll see you after the first of the year.

  Pete

  Now he wasn’t sure what he should do with the gift he’d bought on his excursion to town with Arthur in his new van. It wasn’t much, more a remembrance than anything else. Jory was probably going to think the four little pewter dogs clustered around a Christmas tree was silly and tacky. He’d thought it endearing when he picked it up. “What the hell, so she’ll laugh and I’ll never know about it,” he muttered.

  His suit for Midnight Mass in a garment bag and one carryall of underwear and assorted day clothes was all he was taking with him. On his last trip to the van he carried the small gift-wrapped package and the note. He slid them into the mailbox and raised the red flag.

  “Merry Christmas,” he whispered.

  Justine Landers looked around her room, which had never been called anything but a boudoir. It looked, Jasper had said at one time, like something in an expensive cathouse. Looking at it now, Justine thought it was one of his more astute judgments. “Tacky” was probably a better word. Maybe sleazy or cheap. Whatever the hell it was, it was giving her nightmares, had been giving her nightmares for months now. When she was able to sleep, that is, which wasn’t much of late. Mostly she spent her nights drinking coffee or pacing, or drinking brandy and pacing.

  She was pacing now, a coffee cup in her hand. Twice the coffee slopped down between her breasts. She looked down at the chantilly lace on her peignoir and shuddered. Damn, she even spilled some of the coffee over the feathery tendrils on her mules. She kicked them off as she ripped at her negligee. She sat naked on the small satin bedroom chair, contemplating her past and her future.

  At some point she was going to be literally out in the cold. Evicted. Unwanted. Where was she to go? To the warehouse where Keyhole was printed? Her eviction would probably be in tomorrow’s paper. Already, half the city of Philadelphia was out of business. In the past six months she’d personally ruined so many politicians and bigwigs, she’d lost count. God, how she’d loved it when they came sniveling to her offices begging her, promising her anything not to print their story. Some of them had even given her juicy stories about their colleagues just to get out from under. She’d accepted money. She hated the word “bribe,” but that’s what it was. She’d taken the bribes and the stories, banked the money, and then a month or so later, when the politician was breathing easier, printed the story she’d promised to withhold. Payback time.

  By God, she sold magazines, though.

  One of her few remaining reporters had tipped her yesterday that the sheriff was on his way. The same repo
rter had called her again last night. He’d signed off by saying he expected five hundred dollars more in his paycheck at the end of the week. She’d agreed. What would happen if she wasn’t at the office at nine o’clock? Did she dare call Ross and ask him? The Landers Building was supposed to be hers. Ross had screwed things up and then tried to make her appear stupid by saying, “If you wanted the building, you should have asked for the building. You asked for TIF and you got it. Don’t be greedy.” But she was greedy. She had every right in the world to be greedy. She loved seeing all those zeros in her various bank accounts.

  It occurred to her then, for the first time, that she could buy a building. But she would lose weeks, months, until the deal was finalized. She’d long ago negated the idea that anyone would rent to her, not with every politician in the city gunning for her. When one of her reporters said the fix was in, she didn’t know what it meant until he explained it. No, renting was something she could not do.

  All she had to do was pay the money to Marjory Ryan, as much as it galled her to do so. All she needed was one more month.

  Naked, Justine padded over to the Victorian desk she’d gotten at an auction. She hated the desk, but it matched the ruffles and frills she adored. Maybe it was time to think about redecorating. Time to think about a lot of things, like all the pending lawsuits she was involved in. She struggled with the i bottom drawer of her desk until it opened. Stacked haphazardly were complaints and summonses. District Court, Civil Court, Federal Court. Nine different lawsuits with nine different lawyers representing her. She wrote a check to one or the other of them every day. Her response to all complaints filed against her, and to the nine different lawyers, had been and still was to threaten, cajole, stress the First Amendment, and if that didn’t bring results, tell all those other lawyers she’d attack with a vengeance and print another story worse than the first one. She knew she was in very hot water, because all nine lawyers said so. She rifled through the stacks of complaints, trying to calculate the vast amount of money she was being sued for. She’d done it once before in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, and the amount had been so staggering she’d gone downstairs and drunk half a bottle of brandy. If even two of the suits went against her, she’d lose everything. The following morning she’d used an adding machine to be sure she hadn’t made a mistake. Two days later she’d been on a plane to the Cayman Islands, where she kept a bank account.

  Justine swore then. What were all these people going to get from her? Nothing but judgments. Jasper had never, in all the years of their marriage, put anything in her name. She personally owned nothing except her car. TIF had no accessible assets, she’d made sure of that. As fast as the money came in, it went back out. Operating funds and lawyers’ fees were all she kept in the business account.

  One of the more bitter, adamant plaintiffs was trying to seize TIF. And, according to the attorney, he might well succeed. So maybe she should vacate the premises at nine o’clock when the sheriff arrived. At best, she could get out three more issues before the ax fell. Three issues would net her, if she went with the stories she planned, at least $800,000. More like $1.1 million. With what she had deposited in foreign accounts, plus the three weeks’ net, she could live in splendor for the rest of her life.

  Could the authorities extradite her? She’d been afraid to ask. First they’d have to find her. She thought of Jasper then. Was there a way to gouge money out of him? Of course there was. He’d do anything to keep the Halvorsens’ name out of print. She’d been saving the judge and his wife for just the right moment How much would Jasper pay? A lot, she decided.

  Justine’s eyes fell on a thick manila envelope with the name Q. T. Investigations stamped in the corner. She’d paid handsomely for the contents of the envelope, because Quentin Thomas, the private detective, said he would have to put all his other cases on hold if she wanted the information in thirty-six hours. Not that she’d acted on the information. Coward that she was, she hadn’t gone to see her parents or any of her brothers and sisters. But she had pictures now. Pictures she looked at almost every day. A good psychiatrist would probably say she was obsessed with the photos. Maybe she was. But then again, maybe she wasn’t. She liked the word “curious” better than the word “obsessed.”

  Justine looked at the onyx clock on her dressing table. She had enough time to look at the photos again and still make the office at nine o’clock. She kept the pictures in order, her mother, her father, and then the oldest to the youngest of her siblings. Then all the nieces and nephews. All told, she had forty photographs. The first two pictures were of her parents and her oldest sister, Mary Ellen. She’d cried in the privacy of her room when she saw Mary Ellen’s picture. The prettiest of all the girls, Mary Ellen was now crippled with arthritis and in a wheelchair. The nieces and nephews of all ages were dressed neatly, but poorly. Candid shots with a zoom lens didn’t show clear features, but she could see the family resemblance in each black and white snapshot. The pictures of her parents were the ones that left her the most fearful. The camera captured them as they were leaving the church, her mother holding on to her father’s arm. They looked so old, dressed in their best, her mother with a kerchief on her head, her father carrying his fedora.

  Justine wiped away the tears to stare at the elaborate furnishings in her bedroom. The cost of the lace spread and fancy flounces on the imported draperies could have supported her parents for at least three years. She looked at her mother’s feet, at the black-laced oxfords with the one-inch heel. She knew they would pinch her feet, give her blisters and corns, but she’d wear them one day a week to church no matter what. At home her mother had always gone barefoot, because she had flat feet and hated shoes. The only time she remembered seeing anything on her mother’s feet was when one woman she ironed for gave her a pair of men’s slippers. She’d worn them till they wore out, and even then she’d put cardboard over the inner soles and kept on wearing them. Justine looked across the room at the feathered mules. One hundred twenty-five dollars, and she was going to throw them in the trash because she’d spilled coffee on them.

  She held the photos of her parents against her bare chest. “I’m sorry, Mama. Maybe it’s better I didn’t go to see you and the others. You would be so ashamed of me. You’d go to church and pray for me, saying prayers better said for someone else.” The photos went back into the brown envelope. A moment later she opened the middle drawer of the desk and withdrew Ross’s law school graduation picture. She slipped it into the envelope. Her family. She slammed the drawer shut with the palm of her hand so hard, one of her nails broke against the brass pull.

  A packet of photos, millions of dollars in foreign banks, and a heart full of misery. That was all she had.

  Things could be worse, she thought on her way to the ornate marble bathroom. I could be poor. She turned on the gold faucet, remembering the tin tub her mother used to bathe her in. She and Mary Ellen in the same tub. In the same water, the same washcloth, the same towel. The soap had been hard and brown and smelled like disinfectant. Justine sprinkled fragrant bath crystals under the gushing water. The soap was perfumed, the same scent as the bath crystals. Imported. The thick, extra large towels were a far cry from the threadbare towels that hung on the back of the door in the shack she’d grown up in.

  “You have no right to be ashamed of me,” she said aloud. “None of you had any gumption, any wish to better yourselves. I did. You were all content to make excuses, to simply exist and to depend on public welfare to take care of you. You have no damn right being ashamed of me. None at all. Damn you. Damn the whole bunch of you.”

  Her bath was a quick one, little more than a dunking. She dressed quickly and carefully in a navy blue suit with a flared skirt that swished about her knees. Her blouse was high-necked and silk, perfect for the single strand of pearls she slipped over her head. She added pearl studs to her ears and powder to her nose, instead of the pancake makeup she usually wore. She peered at herself in the mirror, her
breath catching in her throat. She swore she was looking at a younger version of her mother. The thought didn’t exactly displease her, but it did bother her.

  If ever anyone was prepared to be evicted, she was that person.

  At exactly two minutes to nine Justine Landers walked through the front doors of the Landers Building. She didn’t bother with the elevator, preferring the steps. She wasn’t in the least surprised to see the sheriff and Jory sitting in the reception room, each of them reading the latest issue of TIF. She allowed a small smile to play around the corners of her month.

  “Sheriff, and you must be Marjory,” Justine said coolly as she held out her hand to receive the eviction notice. “My staff and I will be out of here by four o’clock. Will that be satisfactory?”

  The sheriff looked at Jory. Jory nodded.

  “Mrs. Landers, would you like to discuss this?” Jory asked. “Perhaps we can come to terms, make a new agreement. If the rent is too high, I can lower it. I didn’t set the terms. You need to know I never asked for or wanted this building. Jasper . . . Jasper just did it. I believe it’s part of some kind of trust or something. I don’t want to evict you. Truly I don’t. I’d like us to sit down and talk about it.”

  “You turned into a very pretty young woman, Marjory,” Justine replied. “My instincts tell me Ross was a fool for divorcing you. He’s incredibly handsome, don’t you think?” she asked dryly.

  “Yes, he is, and thank you for the compliment. It was a compliment, wasn’t it?” Jory said, puzzled.

  “Yes, it was, dear. I don’t think what Jasper did was right. And because of that I couldn’t pay you the rent. It no longer matters what his reasons were or still are. I am a Landers by right of marriage, and by that right, even though Jasper has filed for a legal separation, I am not paying any rent. You may have this building. It’s more than kind of you to want to discuss or negotiate new terms. If you think about it, I believe you’ll understand my position. If you don’t, let me repeat it. It is unfair and I refuse to pay one dime. My secretary probably has coffee on by now, would either you or the sheriff like a cup?”