The Arrangement

by Suzanne Forster

  He knew about Andrew’s grand plan to have Marnie pose as Alison, but to be fair she’d also told him about Bret’s insane maneuvers, including his plan to let his own sister drown and then frame Andrew for her murder. Julia had also had to admit that her son had dressed up in his sister’s clothes and killed LaDonna Jeffries. That had been terribly hard. It had all been terribly hard.

  But it had surprised her that one of the most difficult things to confess was the affair she’d had over twenty years ago. She’d explained that her mother had discovered it, but instead of confronting Julia, Eleanor had gone to her husband. Eleanor and Grant had plotted together to catch her with her lover, and Grant had confronted them. He’d paid the man off right in front of her, forcing him to choose between the money or Julia. The man had taken the money, of course. And Julia had known exactly what she was worth to her lover and her husband.

  She’d never forgiven Grant for that. She hadn’t felt a moment’s sadness when he died. She’d actually thought she might never feel sad again, over anything, anyone. She’d been wrong.

  “How do you feel about Marnie?” the doctor asked. “Let’s go back to your decision to have Josephine Hazelton raise her.”

  “I feel guilt, of course. I’m eaten alive with guilt. Always was. I can’t hear a baby crying without losing it. I see a fire, even in a fireplace, and I think it’s a sign that I’m meant to burn in hell for what I did.”

  She hesitated, aware that these were the memories she’d been trying to block for two decades. “I named her for the Marnie in the Hitchcock movie. I really don’t know why, except that I love the name. I couldn’t tell the world about her for obvious reasons, but I didn’t abandon her because I was ashamed of her. I was ashamed of me, and horrified at what I’d done to her. The sight of her, even the thought of her, sent me to a terrible place.”

  “Do you have a relationship with her now?”

  “No, and I’m sure she wouldn’t want one.”

  “Would you?”

  “I don’t want to sound impossibly corny, but how could I expect her to forgive what I can’t? There’s no defense for what I did. If there’s a competition somewhere for the world’s worst parent, I must be in the running.”

  She tried to adjust her wedding set, but couldn’t make it sit right. Why hadn’t she just taken it off after all these years? Why was she still trying to make it right? “Couldn’t you just hospitalize me?”

  Tears burned like acid, and this time she couldn’t easily stop them. There was no composing herself with a deep breath, no anger to energize her. She bowed her head and cried. The doctor said nothing to comfort her, but she could see compassion in his expression when she finally took a breath. “I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for, certainly not your feelings. Julia, where do you think you got your poor parenting skills?”

  The hanky was soaked and stained with her eye makeup. She would have to throw it away. “Shit, I don’t know. My mother, I suppose.”

  “Your mother, indeed. She wins the worst parent award by a mile.”

  “Really? And I grew up thinking she was perfect, everything I should aspire to be.”

  “What a shame,” he said softly. “You had a mother who had no clue who you were and never bothered to find out. Eleanor’s obsession with doing good was about ego gratification. Her moral standards were a way to measure others and make them less worthy than her, including her daughter. She professed to want to make the world a better place, but she couldn’t take care of one little girl. She was too wrapped up in her own needs.”

  He sat forward, as if to make sure Julia heard every word. “Your mother was a failure as a human being, but she was never able to acknowledge that. She couldn’t look at herself for who she really was. You, Julia, are more woman than she ever was.”

  Julia was shocked at the doctor’s bluntness, but knew it was exactly what she needed to hear. Even the trust fund, Eleanor’s legacy, punished anyone who didn’t meet her standards.

  “My obsession with my looks, even to the point of plucking every little hair?” she asked him.

  “You were trying to meet her standards in the only way you still could. You’d failed all her other tests, so you struggled with physical perfection. I’m speculating, of course. You’ll have to decide if that answer feels right for you.”

  Julia allowed herself a moment to try and digest it all, but it was too much. Some of what he was telling her she’d always known, even if not consciously, but other things he’d said were a revelation. She could never have imagined herself as more woman than her vaunted mother.

  “Shall we set up another time to get together?” the psychiatrist inquired politely.

  Julia took a moment, but finally shook her head. “I don’t think so. Thank you, though, you’ve been a great help. And no offense, but I know what I need to do.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  She managed a smile as she picked up her bag. “You wouldn’t approve.”

  Tony Bogart pulled to the curb, parking down the street from his dad’s heavily fenced stucco house. This wasn’t a police maneuver. Tony was embarrassed at the outright flamboyance of his rental car. His dad would take one look at the sleek red Stingray and ask him how he got to be such a fucking big shot, and it wouldn’t end there. He’d probably go into a tirade.

  Tony figured this was easier. He didn’t want any fights with the old man. He’d tracked him down only to let him know that Butch’s murder had been solved. Not that justice had been done. In Tony’s opinion, it hadn’t. Because she was key to the prosecution’s sting operation, Marnie had gotten off with a slap on the wrist. But at least she’d owned up to what she’d done to Butch. She’d confessed.

  It took Tony only a couple minutes to get to his dad’s place. Once he’d jimmied the lock on the chain-link fence and let himself in, he saw the run-down condition of the small, one-story house. His dad had sold cars for as long as Tony could remember, but he could be retired by now and living in reduced circumstances. Not that the Bogart family had ever had a lavish lifestyle.

  Tony knocked on the front door and heard someone inside bellow, “Stop making that fucking noise!”

  “Dad? It’s me, Tony. I need to talk to you.” He tested the knob and the door opened.

  “Get the hell inside and shut the door,” his father snapped.

  Tony entered the bare-bones living room, feeling as awkward as a kid when he met the old man’s questioning glare. His father was sitting in an upright recliner, watching something on an old nineteen-inch television set with rabbit ears on the top. On the table next to him was an empty long-neck beer bottle, a rotary dial telephone and the remote. There was not another stick of furniture in the room.

  “Are you okay?” Tony asked. “It’s been awhile.” He didn’t add that his father had never bothered to give him his new address when he moved away from Mirage Bay.

  The old man lifted a shoulder, as if to say it wasn’t important.

  Already Tony could feel his blood rising. It didn’t take much. He really did hate his father’s cold indifference. Hated it.

  “Butch’s killer confessed to the crime,” Tony said, wondering why he’d bothered to come. “It’s a local woman named Marnie Hazelton.”

  “I know,” his father said.

  “You know she confessed?”

  “I know it was Marnie Hazelton.”

  Tony nodded. “Yeah, it’s probably been on the news. Sounds like they’re going to let her off with a slap on the wrist, when they should be throwing away the key. Christ, she stabbed him seventeen times. That’s not self-defense. That’s something else.”

  “It’s rage,” the old man said. “It’s hatred. She didn’t have that kind of hate in her.”

  Tony felt something go soft and slimy in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t a good feeling. He focused in on his father. “Did you know her?”

  The old man looked up, his face as hard and er
oded as the rock reefs in the bay. “Well enough to know she didn’t stab him seventeen times. I did that.”

  Tony stepped back, bracing himself against the wall. There was nowhere to sit, and his legs wouldn’t hold him. “You don’t mean that, Dad. Butch was your boy. You loved Butch.”

  His father sat forward, crossing his arms over his legs as he stared down at the floor. “I never said I didn’t love him.”

  Tony’s throat felt like it was lined with rust and corrosion. Somehow he managed to ask his dad to tell him what had happened.

  “I got a call one day from one of Butch’s friends,” his father said. “The kid was worried that Butch was headed for trouble, said he was obsessed with some girl, but in a bad way, harassing her, stalking her.”

  “Marnie?”

  The old man nodded. “When the kid told me the girl’s name, I didn’t believe him. I knew who Marnie Hazelton was, everybody did. She was deformed. I laughed and told the kid that Butch would never be interested in a freak like that. I told him somebody should put the ugly slut out of her misery, and if it was Butch, more power to him.”

  He exhaled heavily. “Butch heard me say it, and we had a good laugh. We were kidding each other. It was a joke, that’s all. People don’t really do things like that.”

  “Like what, Dad?”

  “Like kill a girl because she’s ugly.”

  Tony slid down the wall to the floor and sat there in stunned silence. He didn’t know what to say. It sounded as if his father had unknowingly provoked Butch into the attack on Marnie.

  The sound of the telephone being dialed brought Tony back. “What are you doing?” he asked his father.

  “Calling the police. Butch was alive when I found him in the pool. Just barely, and he was a raving maniac, but he was alive. The girl was unconscious on the ground, and he was trying to get to her with the pitchfork, trying to get enough leverage to kill her. When I heard the filth coming out of his mouth—about the girl, even about his own mother—I picked up the pitchfork and clubbed him over the head with it.”

  His voice was giving out, and he seemed to sag forward with every word. “Even that didn’t stop him, nothing could. I had to kill him to shut him up.”

  “You killed him to shut him up? What was he saying?”

  “He was saying I told him to kill the ugly slut and put her out of her misery. He was saying I told him to do it. I had to shut him up. I had to stop him.”

  Tony could hardly grasp it, a father stabbing his beloved son repeatedly. Where did that kind of blind rage come from? But his father had already said it. From hatred, the kind that sprang from ignorance and fear.

  “What happened to Marnie?” Tony asked.

  “At some point I realized she was gone. She must have come to and made a run for it. I had a hunch she’d gone to the cliffs, and that’s where I found her.”

  “You followed her?” Had his father killed Marnie, too?

  The old man closed his eyes. “I was too late.”

  “She’d already jumped?”

  “She didn’t jump. The rocks gave out from under her. There was nothing I could do.”

  Tony sat there in silence and let his father call the police. He knew the howling ache inside him would never go away. He also knew that he came from a family where insanity reigned, and he couldn’t possibly be fit to serve in the FBI or any other organization that protected people. He was insane, too. All the signs were there—the guns, the firing range, the obsession with Alison, the intermittent explosive disorder. He was sick. It was a virus he’d caught from the man crumpled in the chair across from him, and it had infected Butch, too.

  Eventually Tony got himself up off the floor and stood by the window, waiting for the police to get there. His father had collapsed like a rag doll. He was mumbling something about Butch’s mother, how she shouldn’t have done it, and even though he needed comfort, Tony knew his old man would never accept it from him.

  Tony could predict his father’s future, and it was endlessly bleak. He had no clue about his own. If he didn’t stay with the FBI, what would he do? End up in a recliner, sobbing his heart out over the lives he’d wrecked, the children he’d ruined? End up alone? In jail?

  As the patrol cars rolled up and he watched the officers get out, Tony realized that something had happened here this morning, something besides the hopelessness of his father’s situation. Tony had learned how easy it was to fuck up a kid. Even hatred masquerading as humor could do it. Butch had been eager to please his father. All kids were at some point, and that was when it could all go wrong.

  Tony drew a breath and felt the aching in his chest flare into his throat. He was never going to be a preacher or a counselor or even a nice guy, but he had learned something, and maybe there was a way to put it to use. At least when he dealt with kids who were hell-bent on death and destruction, he would understand where things might have gone wrong for them, where their eagerness to please might have been twisted into something else, something sick.

  “Maybe all is not lost, Bogart,” he heard himself saying as the deputies pounded on his father’s door. “Maybe you could make a halfway decent G-man someday.”

  Julia knew she looked hot in her peony-pink slip dress, and she was tremendously pleased with herself. She had a rendezvous with Jack Furlinghetti, and he was meeting her right here in her own home. She clutched the prescription bottle hidden in her hand, excited at the prospect. What could be more delicious than that?

  Her breathing tight, she waited for the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. She’d left the gate and the front door unlocked, and told him to meet her in her suite of rooms. She could hardly wait.

  Just as she was giving her head a little shake to wake up her hairdo, she heard a telltale creak. “Jack!” She gushed his name as he entered the room, wearing a trench coat that nearly touched the floor. She knew exactly what was under it.

  He raked her body with a hungry gaze. “You look beautiful, Julia.”

  “So do you, Jack. Nice coat.”

  “I’m going to fuck your brains out, Julia.”

  “You’re such a charmer, Jack. Could it wait until I take control of the trust away from you?”

  Jack’s grin evaporated. His eyes got dark and shiny. “I don’t think so, Julia.”

  She produced the pills, waggling them above her head. “I do, Jack.”

  When he realized what they were—his illegal prescription drugs—he began to laugh. “Are you blackmailing me? Me?”

  “No, I wouldn’t dream of it. This is just insurance. I want my mother’s trust fund money, Jack, and I’m going to have to insist that you fork it over.”

  “You can’t have it. Take me to court. You’ll lose.”

  “Yes, perhaps I would lose a court battle, but Marnie wouldn’t. She’s my daughter, Jack. My blood daughter. She’s my one surviving child, and a female. She’s next in the line of succession, all nice and legal.”

  Jack began to sweat. “But she killed someone, didn’t she? The morals clause—”

  “Actually, she didn’t. Butch died at the hands of his own father. Tragic story. I just read about it in the paper this morning.”

  Julia jiggled the bottle again, making sure the contents made lots of noise. “These little red pills are my insurance that Marnie’s slate will remain clean. She’s clean as a whistle, do you understand? And if that doesn’t convince you, I have some interesting pictures of you and your hairy derriere on my cell phone. I’m sure the partners at your law firm will love your black leather jumpsuit.”

  His smarmy smile had vanished. He was starting to look like a man who had envisioned his financial fall from grace, and Julia had never seen a more beautiful sight. As trustee he would have continued to control the fund, pay his own exorbitant fees from it and eventually drain it dry.

  She glanced at his trench coat and gave him a bawdy wink. “You should have worn your shirt, Jack. The one you’re about to lose.”

  Epilogue


  Three months later

  On one side of the continent, a group of marine biology students, diving off the shoals of the Channel Islands, discovered the skeletal remains of a woman’s body and called 911. That same week technicians from the county coroner’s office in San Diego identified the remains, based on dental records. Alison Fairmont-Villard was no longer a missing person. Her fate: death by drowning.

  That same week, on the other side of the continent, in the Long Island home that Marnie and Andrew shared, the wheel of fortune had turned in the opposite direction. A home pregnancy test confirmed that Marnie’s queasiness wasn’t the flu. She and Andrew were bringing a new life into the world. A Christmas wedding was planned. Julia Fairmont had already RSVP’d her regrets, saying that she didn’t want to cast a shadow over the happy event, but that her wedding gift—the Driscoll trust—would give full ownership and control to Marnie. And Marnie would not be without family. Josephine Hazelton, the only mother she’d ever known, would give her away.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-0074-0

  THE ARRANGEMENT

  Copyright © 2007 by Suzanne Forster.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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