by Janet Dailey
In front of the house, looking distinctly out of place, stood a hopped-up cycle, a black and shiny machine of sleek power. Kneeling on the ground beside it, tinkering with the motor, was Ring Stuart. He straightened slowly to his feet when Hattie drove in and parked her car ten feet from the big Harley cycle.
When she got out of the car, he took a couple steps forward and idly wiped his greasy hands on an equally greasy rag. With a steely calm she looked him over, not at all surprised by what she saw. A pair of faded jeans blatantly hugged his narrow hips, leaving little to the imagination for a knowing eye. A dirty T-shirt clung to every muscled contour of his chest, its short sleeves rolled up to the points of his shoulders, the right one bulging over a pack of cigarettes. Her glance touched briefly on the revolting tattoo of a knife dripping blood from the blade tip that ran down his left biceps. Then she examined his face. The devil had given him his lean, handsome looks and hell-black hair, as well as a pair of lightning blue eyes to go with them.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the duchess herself.” His lip curled in a sneering smile. “I kinda figured you’d be paying me a visit, only I expected you to come yesterday.”
“You did,” she murmured, disliking him even more intensely than she’d expected.
“Yeah.” He sauntered a few steps closer, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, giving a cocky spring to his walk. “I spotted that cowboy you had following Elizabeth right off. You should have seen his eyes bug out of his head when he saw the way she kissed me—and kept kissing me.”
“You’re disgusting.”
His smile widened. “Elizabeth doesn’t think so. As a matter of fact, she’s crazy about me. She likes it when I kiss her…among other things.”
Hattie stiffened at his deliberately suggestive remark. “You know I’m not going to allow this to continue.”
“There’s nothing you can do about it, duchess,” he said, his head tipped arrogantly back. “She’s old enough to know her own mind. She doesn’t need your consent or approval.”
“How much?”
“How much?” he repeated on a note of amusement. “Man, you really are something, duchess. You know I’ve often wondered what it would be like living in that big house with people waiting on you, serving you coffee in dainty china cups and fetching the morning paper for you. It must be real fine living.”
“How much money do you want, Stuart, to leave my sister alone?”
“You really think you can buy me off, don’t you, duchess?”
Pointedly she swept her glance over the weed-choked clearing and the dilapidated house with its front porch askew. “What’s your price, Stuart? Name it.”
“I’ve already got what I want. I’ve got Elizabeth. She’s mine and you can’t take her away from me. If you thought you could, you wouldn’t be here talking to me now.” He paused, his confidence growing. “She was real shy with me at first, but she isn’t shy anymore. It kinda surprised me at first. But after meeting you, I’m convinced that she’s got all the passion in your family. What kind of sister are you, anyway? She loves me and here you are trying to make me give her up.”
“It would never work between you. Never.”
“Why? Because you think I’m not good enough for her?”
“I know you aren’t.”
“She doesn’t agree with you. Y’see, the difference is she believes in me, and that means more to me than all the money you could pay, duchess.”
“I’m warning you—”
“No, I’m warning you—you’d better watch how you talk about your future brother-in-law or I just might take your little sister away from you for good.”
She held his gaze for a long minute, then said, “You’re a fool, Stuart,” and turned on her heel and walked back to the car.
Driving out of the clearing, she could see his reflection in the rearview mirror as he stood in the middle of the track, watching her leave and looking cocksure. At a midway point, the long lane to the shack widened. There, Charlie Rainwater waited in the ranch pickup along with a half-dozen hands from the bunkhouse. Hattie pulled up alongside the truck.
“He wouldn’t listen, Charlie,” was all she said.
“I figured as much, Miss Hattie.” He turned the key in the truck’s ignition, the engine grinding slowly to life. “Reasonin” with a Stuart is a lot like talkin’ to a mule. First, you gotta get their attention.”
He shifted the pickup into gear and the vehicle lurched forward onto the rough trail. Hattie sat in the car and waited, listening to the lonely sigh of the wind in the trees. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? She wasn’t sure how much time passed before she heard the rumble of the pickup making the return trip.
Charlie drove up beside her, a cut on his lip and a bruise swelling his cheek, but there was a smile on his face that went ear to ear. “He wasn’t able t’do much talkin’ when we left him, Miss Hattie, but I can guarantee that he got the message.”
When Hattie returned to Morgan’s Walk that day, she said nothing to Elizabeth and went about her work as usual. Late in the afternoon, Elizabeth received a phone call from one of her girlfriends. Unbeknown to Hattie, Ring Stuart had called Sally Evans and persuaded her to phone Elizabeth with a message. Sometime after midnight, Elizabeth slipped out of the house and met Ring Stuart. Hattie didn’t discover she was missing until morning. She looked for her, but she found no sign of either of them. The next day, Elizabeth called to say that she and Stuart were married, and asked if they could come home to Morgan’s Walk.
“You can come home any time, Elizabeth, but not with him. I won’t have a Stuart sleeping under this roof.”
“Then neither one of us can come, because I’m a Stuart now, too.”
Two months went by, two miserable and bitterly lonely months for Hattie with memories of Elizabeth haunting every room. She made no attempt to contact her, certain that in time she would come to her senses and see what a terrible mistake she had made. Then came the phone call from Ring Stuart informing Hattie that Elizabeth was ill.
Piles of dirty dishes with food caked on them covered the kitchen counters. Empty beer bottles spilled over the sides of the wastebasket and sat next to every chair and butt-filled ashtray in the filthy shack. The thought of her Elizabeth living in this germ-and dirt-infested dwelling sickened Hattie as she followed Ring Stuart down a dingy hall to one of the back bedrooms.
In the bedroom, Hattie stepped around the dirty clothes strewn on the floor. Bedsprings squealed noisy protest under Ring Stuart’s weight as he sat down on the edge of it and took Elizabeth’s hand.
“Honey, Hattie’s here.”
She stopped two feet short of the bed and fought back the bitter tears that stung her eyes when she saw Elizabeth, her wan face as pale as the pillow slip beneath her head. “This place is a pig sty. How can you live in this filth?”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s a mess.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “I haven’t been feeling too well lately, and—”
“—and he’s too lazy.” Hattie hurled the contemptuous accusation at Stuart.
“Hattie, it isn’t man’s work,” Elizabeth chided gently.
“I never thought he was a man, and now that I’ve seen the way he takes care of you, I know he isn’t.” She moved to the bed and laid the back of her hand against Elizabeth’s cheeks, feeling for a temperature, and completely ignoring the glare from Stuart.
“That isn’t fair, Hattie,” Elizabeth protested. “Ring has tried, he really has. But he can’t keep a job and look after me, too.”
“He’s certainly done a fine job of looking after you, hasn’t he?” she murmured caustically, unable to suppress the rage she felt at her Elizabeth being forced to live in these wretched surroundings. “Have you called the doctor, yet?”
“I saw him yesterday.” Elizabeth caught at her hand, a frailness in their attempt to clutch at Hattie’s fingers. A smile fairly beamed from her face. “Hattie, we’re going to have a baby. So you see, I’m not real
ly sick. I’m pregnant.”
For several long seconds, Hattie stared at the girl she’d raised since birth, inwardly revolted by the prospect of her sister having a child sired by a Stuart. She wanted to scream at her and demand to know if she realized what she had done—the terrible consequences of this.
Instead, she swung on Stuart. “I want to speak to you. Now!” She turned on her heel and marched from the room. The instant she reached the living room, she whirled to confront him, “I’m taking her out of this pig hole you call a house, today.”
“She won’t go without me, duchess,” he said confidently. Hattie lifted her head slightly, eyeing him coldly. “Looks like my daddy was right all along, doesn’t it? A Stuart will have Morgan’s Walk.”
“Not you. It will never be you,” she vowed.
“But my son will.”
“God willing, the child will never live to cry its first breath. But you’d better pray that when Elizabeth loses it, she doesn’t lose her life as well.”
“Damn you, I love her!”
“Do you? Or is it merely convenient to love her?”
“I love her,” he insisted angrily.
“But not enough to give her up—not enough to do what’s best for her. You deliberately got her with child. You knew how fragile her health is yet you risked her life by impregnating her.”
“Everything will be all right. You’ll see.”
“It had better be, Stuart. Otherwise, you’ll answer to me.”
Although bedridden through most of her pregnancy, Elizabeth carried the baby to term and gave birth to a remarkably strong and healthy boy. Yet the ordeal seemed to have taken its toll on her own health. As the months went by, she grew weaker. Anemia was the initial diagnosis, but when she failed to respond to treatment, she was admitted to the hospital for tests.
Returning from a consultation with the doctor, Hattie found Ring in the library, his feet propped on the desk and blue smoke curling from the cigar in his mouth. “Are you wondering what it’s like to run Morgan’s Walk? If you are, you’re wasting your time. You’ll never find out,” she declared, jerking off her gloves.
He didn’t move from his relaxed position as he smiled at her through the smoke. “You can’t be sure of that, duchess. After all, you aren’t going to live forever.”
“I swear I will see you in hell before I let the day come when a Stuart has the right to sit behind that desk. Now get out of my chair.
He pulled his feet off the desk top and bowed his head in exaggerated respect as he slowly stood up. “I return your throne to you.”
“It probably doesn’t interest you at all, but the results from the tests came back.”
Reluctantly she observed the leap of concern in his eyes. “How’s Elizabeth?”
Coldly, with no more emotion left, Hattie replied. “Your wife has leukemia.” Before her eyes, Stuart crumbled in shock.
“My poor darling Elizabeth,” she whispered to the girl in the silver-framed photograph, then slowly drew her hand away and pushed out of the chair. The loneliness of the old house seemed to press in on her, its weight combining with the tiredness of battling for so long. This time she leaned heavily on the cane as she crossed to the portrait above the fireplace.
“I regret but one thing in my life—that I told them to stop after they had given him a good beating. I should have had him killed.” She bowed her head. “The fault was mine. It was never Elizabeth’s. She didn’t know what she was doing, but I did. I should have put an end to it then.”
13
The morning sun peered through the smoked glass windows of the Stuart Building’s top floor, spreading its refracted rays over the small group gathered around the circular burl conference table in the executive office. A slight man with cherubic features and soft spaniel eyes held the floor, his usual reticence forgotten as he spoke about the one field in which he was an acknowledged expert; he was considered by many to be one of the best, if not the best, civil engineer in the country.
“When I passed these preliminary drawings for the dam by Zorinsky at the Corps, he saw a problem in only one area.” Fred Garver riffled through the pages of blueprints on the tall easel until he found the one he wanted, then flipped back the ones in front of it to reveal a cross section of the proposed dam. “He felt the concrete keys should be another three feet deep to eliminate any possible undermining of the dam itself. If we do that, we’re probably talking about the additional cost of another half million dollars—depending.” He paused to shoot both Chance and Sam Weber a quick look. “Without test borings of the site, I can’t be sure what we’ll run into once we start excavating. I don’t know if we’ll hit rock, sand, clay, or what. All the construction figures I’ve given you are just rough estimates. And I mean rough.”
Sam expected Chance to acknowledge that comment. When he didn’t, Sam darted a quick glance in his direction and frowned slightly at Chance’s obvious absorption with the scribblings he was making on the notepad resting on his knee. He had been preoccupied through much of the meeting—a meeting he had called to get an update on Garver’s progress. Yet he hadn’t asked one question or shown any interest in the engineer’s drawings. That wasn’t like him. That wasn’t like him at all.
“Yes, we understand that, Fred,” Sam inserted to fill the void.
“As long as you do.” The engineer shrugged his acceptance and turned his attention back to the cross section. “Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary to increase the depth of the keys. Although if we do incorporate Zorinsky’s recommendation, then we would probably be assuring ourselves of a quick approval from the Corps. The way I see it we have two choices: we can either make this change now or wait until we get to do some test borings to know what we’re dealing with. How soon will you be taking title to the property so we can get on it and do our preliminary site work?”
Sam looked again at Chance, wishing he would field that question, but there was no indication that he’d even heard it. “We can’t give you a date yet.” He didn’t think it was his place to admit that Chance might not get title to it at all, not the way things were going.
“Do you want us to just sit tight for a while or go ahead with the change?”
Damn, but he wished Chance would speak up. This wasn’t the kind of decision he normally made when a project was in its preliminary stage. Looking at Molly, her chair positioned at an unobtrusive distance from the table, Sam wondered what he should do. She grimaced faintly and shrugged her shoulders, unable to offer any suggestion to him. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and nervously cleared his throat. The sound seemed to rouse Chance, his attention lifting somewhat abstractedly from the notepad before him.
Still, Sam doubted that Chance knew the question. “Why don’t you give us a couple of days to think it over, Fred, and we’ll get back to you with our decision?” he suggested, trying to cover for Chance’s inattention to the entire discussion.
“That won’t be necessary.” Chance contradicted him. “Make the changes in the design. When the time comes, I’ll want to move on this project fast. I don’t want anything holding us up.” He shoved his notepad onto the table and rolled to his feet. “Leave a set of the drawings so I can study them later, and send us a copy of any changes. We’ll stay in touch.”
As if pushed by some inner restlessness, he left the conference table and walked to the window. His back remained to them, abruptly but effectively bringing a quick end to the meeting.
Sam exchanged another troubled look with Molly, then helped Fred Garver and his young associate gather their materials together, and made certain a full set of the preliminary drawings remained behind. With Fred reverting to his reticent ways, there was little conversation as Sam walked him to the door. No mention had been made of Chance’s inattention during much of the meeting, but Sam felt obligated to offer some sort of explanation in his defense.
“Don’t mind Chance,” he said at the door. “He’s had a lot on his mind lately.”
“I guessed as much.” Fred nodded, throwing a brief glance over his shoulder in Chance’s direction, his mouth curving into a smile of understanding when he looked back at Sam.
After they’d left, Sam hesitated a moment at the door, then turned and walked back to the conference table. Chance was still at the window, staring out, his hands idly shoved in the side pockets of his trousers. Molly quietly gathered up the dirty coffee cups and set them on the serving tray.
Sam picked up the rolled set of blueprints and turned it in his hands. “Do you want me to leave these here for you or put them on the drafting table in my office with the others?” But his question drew only more silence, and his concern and bewilderment at Chance’s behavior gave way to exasperation. “Dammit, Chance, you haven’t heard one word anybody’s said in the last hour, have you?”
“No, he hasn’t,” Molly stated quite emphatically as Chance half-turned to give them both a blank, preoccupied look. “He’s been doodling on that pad of his. Whenever he starts doing that, you can be sure he isn’t listening to anyone.”
“Sorry.” Chance frowned. “I guess my mind is elsewhere.”
“My God, that’s an understatement,” Sam muttered shaking his head. “Your mind has been elsewhere ever since you got back from San Francisco. Exactly what happened out there?”
“It’s that Bennett woman, isn’t it?” Molly guessed, eyeing him with wondering interest. “The one you sent all those orchids to.”
Chance held her gaze for several seconds, his look distantly thoughtful and his silence seeming to confirm her statement. Then he turned back to the window. “It just may be that you’re going to get your wish after all, Molly.”
For a stunned instant, she couldn’t say anything, then she asked, somewhat tentatively, “Are you saying that you’re thinking about marrying her?”
