Hot Shot

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Susannah tried to hide the bedding, but there was too much of it and she was always discovered. When that happened, her grandmother gave her a stinging lecture and then made her wear her soiled nightgown into the closet as punishment. The acrid scent of her own urine mingled with the camphor that permeated the old furs until she couldn't breath. Furry monsters were all around her, ready to eat her up. She could feel their sharp teeth sinking into her flesh and their strong jaws snapping her tender bones. Bruises, like a string of discolored pearls, formed down the length of her spine from being pressed so hard against the closet door.

  At night she struggled against sleep. She read books from her grandmother's library and pinched her legs to keep awake. But she was only five years old, and no matter how hard she tried, she eventually slipped into unconsciousness. That was when the fox-eyed monster crept into her bedroom and dug his sharp teeth into her flesh until her small bladder emptied on the bedclothes.

  Each morning she awakened to fear. Afraid to move. Afraid to inhale, to touch the sheets. On those occasions when she discovered that the bed was dry, she was filled with a sense of joy so sharp it made her queasy. Everything about the day seemed brighter-the view of Park Avenue from the front windows, the shiny red apple she ate with her breakfast, the funny way her solemn little face was reflected in her grandmother's silver coffeepot. When the bed was wet, she wished she were old enough to die.

  And then several days after her sixth birthday, it all changed. She was huddled in the closet with the smell of urine stinging her nostrils and fear clogging her throat. Her wet nightgown clung to her calves, and her feet were tangled in the soiled bedclothes her grandmother had ordered be put into the closet with her. She kept her eyes fixed, staring through the darkness at exactly the spot where she knew the fox head was hanging.

  Her concentration was so intense she didn't hear the noise at first. Only gradually did the piercing sound of her grandmother's voice sink into her consciousness, along with a deeper male voice that was unrecognizable. She knew so few men. The doorman called her "little miss," but the voice didn't sound like it belonged to the doorman. There was a man who fixed the bathroom sink when it leaked, the doctor who had given her a shot last year. She saw men on the street when she took her walks, but she wasn't one of those dimple-cheeked little moppets who attracted the attention of adults, so few of them ever spoke to her.

  Through the thick door she could hear the male voice coming closer. It was loud. Angry. She sprang back in fear and the furs caught her. The mink, the beaver-their dead skins swung against her. She cried out as the grisly fox head struck her cheek.

  The door flew open, but she was sobbing in fear and she didn't notice.

  "Good God!"

  The angry male voice penetrated her consciousness. Panicked, she pushed herself deeper into the suffocating depths of the furs, instinctively seeking a known terror instead of an unknown one.

  "Good God," the voice repeated. "This is barbaric."

  She stared into the malevolent face of the fox and whimpered.

  "Come here, sweetheart," the voice said, speaking more softly this time. "Come here."

  Slowly she turned, blinking against the light. She turned toward that soft, crooning voice, and her eyes drank in their first sight of Joel Faulconer.

  He was big and golden in the light, with powerful shoulders and a large, handsome head. Like a magic prince in one of her books, he smiled at her and held out his hand. "Come here, sweetheart. I'm not going to hurt you. I won't let anyone hurt you."

  She couldn't move. She wanted to, but her feet were tangled in the wet bedcovers, and the fox head was butting against her cheek. He reached for her. She winced instinctively and drew back into the coats. He began crooning to her as he pulled her free of the furs. "It's all right. It's all right, sweetheart."

  He lifted her into his strong arms and held her against his chest. She waited for him to recoil when he felt her damp nightgown and smelled her acrid scent, but he didn't. Instead, he clasped her tightly against his expensive suit coat and carried her into her bedroom, where he helped her to dress. Then he took her away from the Park Avenue penthouse forever.

  "That stupid, stupid bitch," he murmured as he led her from the building.

  Not until much later did she realize that he wasn't talking about her grandmother.

  Joel Faulconer wasn't a sentimental man, so nothing in his experience had prepared him for the surge of emotion that had overtaken him when he had seen Susannah huddled like a frightened animal in his mother-in-law's moth-eaten furs. Now, six hours later, he glanced over at her strapped into the airplane seat at his side and his heart turned over. Her enormous gray eyes were set in a small, angular face, and her hair was skinned into braids so tight her skin seemed as if it might split over her fragile bones. She stared straight ahead. She had barely spoken since he had taken her from the closet.

  Joel took a sip of the bourbon he had ordered from the stewardess and tried not to think about what would have happened to Susannah if he hadn't given in to the vague impulse that had taken him to his mother-in-law's doorstep that morning. Kay didn't like her mother, so he had only met the woman a few times in social settings and had never spoken with her long enough to realize that she was mentally ill. But Kay should have known.

  As Joel thought about his wife, he felt the familiar combination of disgust and arousal she always managed to produce in him. She hadn't even disclosed that she had a daughter until several months after their wedding-about the same time he had begun to have second thoughts concerning the wisdom of his marriage. Kay had assured him that the child was better off with her mother, and not being anxious to take on the burden of another man's offspring, Joel hadn't pressed her. She went to see the child whenever she was in New York, and he had assumed that Susannah was well cared for. By the time Kay had given birth to his own child, he had nearly forgotten the existence of the other one.

  He swirled the bourbon in his glass and stared blindly out the window. What kind of woman could conveniently forget she had a child? Only someone like Kay-a woman who was too silly and shallow to see what would be perfectly obvious to anyone else. He should have taken it upon himself to investigate long ago.

  He turned his head to study the little girl at his side. She sat straight in the seat with her hands clasped neatly in her lap. Her head was beginning to wobble a bit, and he suspected the noise of the airplane engines would soon put her to sleep. As he watched, her eyelids, like fragile eggshells, began to drift downward, and then they abruptly snapped back up.

  "You're sleepy," he said.

  She turned to look at him, and he felt another pang of sympathy as he saw that her eyes were huge and stricken, like those of a fawn caught before a hunter's gun. "I-I'm fine," she stammered.

  "It's all right. We won't be in California for hours. Go ahead and take a nap."

  Susannah stared helplessly at the magic, golden prince who had rescued her. It would be unthinkable to disobey him, yet if she slept, the fox-eyed monster was certain to find her. Even in this great silver airplane, he would find her and make her wet herself, and then her prince would know how bad she was.

  Joel caught her hand and gave it a soft squeeze. "Just shut your eyes."

  His voice was so gentle that she could barely control her tears. "I-I am unable," she said.

  He gave her all his attention, as if she were an important adult instead of only a child. "Why is that?"

  "Because it's unwise. Sir." She added the courteous form of address belatedly and hoped he wouldn't notice her extraordinary lapse of manners.

  "I don't know very much about six-year-old little girls. I'm afraid you'll have to explain it to me."

  Those blue eyes speared through her, sympathetic but demanding. He had a dent in the center of his chin, and she wished she could push the tip of her finger into it to see what it felt like. Her mind raced as she tried to find a polite way to explain. Bathroom talk was vulgar and unacceptable. There w
as never an excuse for it. "I rather suspect-" she said. "It's quite possible-"

  He chuckled.

  Alarmed, she looked at him. He gave her hand another squeeze. "What a queer little bird you are."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I don't think you can keep calling me 'sir.'"

  "No, sir. What would you like me to call you?"

  He was thoughtful. "How about 'Dad'?" And then he smiled. "On second thought, let's make it 'Father' for the time being. Somehow I think you'd be more comfortable with that."

  "Father?" Her heart soared. What a wondrous word! Her own father was dead, and she desperately wanted to ask this golden prince if that meant she would now be his little girl. But it was dreadfully impolite to ask personal questions, so she held her tongue.

  "Now that we have that settled, why don't you tell me why you can't fall asleep?"

  She stared ahead miserably. "I'm rather a-afraid that I might-not on purpose, of course-purely by accident… I might commit an unfortunate mishap on the airplane seat."

  "Mishap?"

  She nodded her head miserably. How could she explain something so terrible to this shining man?

  He didn't say anything for a moment. She was afraid to look at him, afraid of the revulsion she would see on his face. She stared at the woven back of the airplane seat ahead of her.

  "I see," he finally replied. "It's an interesting problem. How do you think we could solve it?"

  She didn't move her eyes from the back of the seat ahead of her. He seemed to expect her to say something, so she made a tentative offering. "You could pinch my arm, perhaps, if I began to fall asleep."

  "Uhm. Yes, I suppose I could do that. Except I might fall asleep, too, and then I wouldn't notice. I think I have a better idea."

  She cautiously turned her head to look at him. His fingertips were pressed together and his forehead knitted in concentration.

  "What if…" he said. "What if we both just shut our eyes and took a small nap. Then, if you woke up and found out you'd had an unfortunate, uh, mishap, you could nudge me in the arm. I'd ask the stewardess for a glass of water, and when she gave it to me, I'd accidentally spill it over your skirt and onto the seat."

  It took Susannah's quick mind only a few seconds to absorb the staggering brilliance of his plan. "Oh, yes," she whispered on a rush of expelled breath. "Oh, yes, please."

  She slept for hours. When she awoke, she was dry, rested, and happier than she could ever remember.

  Her happiness carried her through those first few California days in the place called Falcon Hill. The house was as big as a castle and full of sunshine. She had a pretty, pink three-year-old baby sister named Paige who let Susannah play with her, and she saw her beautiful mother every day, not just for tea at the Plaza. Every night her new father came into her bedroom and left a glass of water for her so she could spill it on the sheets if she had a mishap. Susannah loved him so fiercely it hurt.

  From the time he was fifteen, Joel Faulconer had fed on the lore of Tom Watson, the founder of IBM. He had watched avidly as Watson had molded his company into one of the most successful corporations in the world. He wanted the same to happen with Falcon Typewriter, the company his father Ben and his uncle Lewis had founded in 1913. Being good wasn't enough for Joel Faulconer. He had to be the best.

  Returning from World War II with big dreams, Joel presented his father and his uncle with audacious strategies for expanding the company. Selling typewriters was smalltime, he told them. They needed to attack IBM in its own territory by expanding their product line to include accounting machinery. They should be going after government contracts and upgrading their sales force.

  His uncle, Lewis Faulconer, with his flashy suits, Havana cigars, and two-toned shoes, dismissed all of his nephew's suggestions. "Your father and me made ourselves millionaires a couple of times over, buddy boy. What do we need more money for?"

  "To be the best," Joel replied, tight-lipped and seething with frustration. "To give Watson and IBM a run for their money."

  Lewis's gaze slithered from Joel's well-cut hair to his Stanford class ring. "Shit, boy. You're not even wet behind the ears and you're trying to tell your daddy and me how to run the company we founded."

  Ben Faulconer, who had gained more social polish over the years than his brother, was intrigued by Joel's ideas, but still cautious about making the sweeping changes his son insisted the postwar economy mandated. Still, Joel was certain he could manage his father, if only he could get rid of his uncle Lewis.

  In a move that was to prove prophetic, Joel snatched up patents from the infant computer industry. At the same time, he began a systematic courtship of the high-ranking officers of the company, and with very little effort maneuvered his uncle into an escalating series of blunders. It took two years, but he finally succeeded in uprooting Lewis Faulconer.

  On Lewis's last day with the company he had helped found, he confronted his brother in Ben's comfortable, paneled office. "You let a fox in the hen house, Benny," he warned, his words slurred because he no longer had any reason to wait until noon to take his first drink of the day. "Watch your ass, boy, because he'll be after you next."

  Nonsense, Ben had thought to himself, secretly proud of Joel's cunning in ridding the company of a man who had become an embarrassment. The very idea of worrying about the security of his own position seemed ridiculous to Ben. He was chairman of the corporation-an untouchable. Besides, Joel was his son.

  One year later, at the age of thirty, Joel Faulconer had forced his father into early retirement and taken over the helm of the newly renamed Falcon Business Technologies-or FBT, as it was being called. The company immediately began to prosper beyond anyone's imagination.

  Two weeks after Susannah's arrival in California, FBT was marking the eighth anniversary of Joel's ascendancy to the chairmanship with the dedication of their new corporate headquarters near Palo Alto. Officially named the FBT Center of Corporate Activities, it had already become known simply as the Castle. Joel was secretly pleased with the nickname. After all, what better place for a king to live than a castle?

  Not that he actually thought of himself as a king. But in the kingdom of Falcon Business Technologies, he certainly had unlimited power. Even the President of the United States was answerable to the people, but Joel was only answerable to himself and a handpicked Board of Directors. He was proud to have accomplished so much at such a young age. At thirty-eight, he was one of the most influential men in American industry. If only he had as much control over his own household.

  As he shot a pair of onyx cuff links into the sleeves of his dress shirt, he glanced impatiently at his wife. She was sitting at her dressing table and applying lipstick to the full mouth that had ministered so effectively to his body such a short time before. At thirty-three, she was just entering the prime of her beauty. Her breasts strained seductively against the bodice of her slip whenever she leaned toward the mirror. She worked with utter concentration, as if the simple act of applying lipstick took every ounce of her intelligence-which wasn't far from the mark, he thought.

  "You're going to be late again, Kay," he snapped. "You know how important tonight's affair is. You promised me you'd be on time."

  "Did I?" she said vaguely. She screwed the lipstick down into its tube and then began looking about for the jeweled cap. Wisps of light brown hair from her short Italian cut feathered her cheekbones, softening features that were already pleasantly blurred. Her mouth was too full for fashion, but he had always liked it. Too much, perhaps. It was more a trollop's mouth than the sort of mouth that belonged on the wife of a powerful man.

  "Don't be angry, darling," she said. "Ever since you got back from New York, you've been so angry with me."

  "Do you blame me? I knew you were stupid, but I never imagined that even you could have been this stupid."

  Kay reached for a cigarette and smoothed the thin arch of her eyebrow with her little finger. "Don't start shouting at me again, Joel. I've explaine
d that it wasn't my fault. Whenever I went to see Susannah, she was well-dressed. How was I to know anything was wrong?"

  Joel bit back a retort, knowing that he would only end up making his feather-headed wife later than she already was. What a terrible marriage he had saddled himself with. Still, he refused to dwell too critically on the sensual side of his nature that drew him to women like Kay-seductive high-born kittens who were marvels in bed but inept at the business of daily living. After all, powerful men were allowed a few weaknesses of the flesh. He had toyed with the idea of divorcing her, but that sort of scandal was dangerous for someone in his position. Instead, he blamed her for not becoming the efficient sort of wife a man of his stature needed.

  "Have you seen my earrings, darling? The sapphires?" She poked ineffectively at the clutter on her dressing table in hopes her expensive jewels might be lurking among the Max Factor bottles and cubes of Ayds diet candy.

  "God, Kay, if you've misplaced those sapphires again, I'm going to take them away from you. Do you have any idea how much they cost?"

  She absentmindedly picked up her lipstick tube again. "A fortune, I'm sure. I remember now. I took them off in the living room and tucked them in a drawer of the secretary so I wouldn't lose them. Be a darling and get them for me."

  He stalked from their bedroom and went downstairs. As he walked into the living room, he didn't see Susannah sitting like a quiet little mouse in the corner chair, her legs drawn up under the skirt of her new calico nightgown, her eyes bright with adoration as she caught sight of him.

  "Damn!" The drawers of the walnut secretary held the usual clutter of Kay's possessions, but no earrings. He banged them shut one by one. "Dammit to hell. Where could she have put them?"

  "Can I help you, Father?" Susannah slipped from the chair and walked toward him, her voice quietly deferential. Joel had forbidden anyone to braid her hair, so it hung loose and bone-straight. As she stood before him, she looked so anxious that his heart turned over in his chest. Because he was so powerful himself, he felt her absolute helplessness and total dependence on him even more acutely. She was so solemn, so quiet, so overly polite with her old woman's vocabulary and desperate obsequiousness. He could not ever remember feeling so protective of another human being-not even his own daughter. Baby Paige had an army of caretakers to watch out for her well-being. This ancient little girl had no one but himself.