The Innocents Club

by Taylor Smith

“My father did, but he had dozens of properties. I convinced him to give me that one for my own use. When Ben needed a place, I let him have it. I still own it, actually. I keep meaning to sell it off, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it.” Renata reached down beside her and opened her purse, pulling out some keys, which she set on the table. “If you’d rather have that house, instead—”

  Mariah pulled back and shook her head. “Oh, no. Not that one. Not any house of yours, in fact.” Then she paused, frowning. “My mother stayed on there until she died. She never told me it belonged to you. She just said she stayed because the rent was low and it held my father’s memory.”

  Renata began to fidget with her rings, lining up a massive diamond solitaire that had slipped around her thin finger, aligning the stone to the center of a wide wedding band of sapphires and diamonds. These were gifts that had obviously not come from the impoverished writer who had preceded her husband. “Ben would have wanted me to let her keep the place, and I was always happy to give him anything he wanted. That’s why, when he decided he needed to get away, I took him to Europe.” She took another drink from her glass. “But then he changed his mind. He decided that what he needed was his family, after all.”

  Mariah studied the woman’s liver-spotted hands and the tired lines around her mouth. Up close, she looked every bit her fifty-nine years. “That’s why you dumped him, isn’t it?” she said. “Not because he took up with someone else, as everyone always says. Because he wanted to go back to his wife.”

  Renata studied her glass morosely, obviously uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was taking. She nodded slightly.

  “But he was broke, wasn’t he?” Mariah pressed. “He had no way of getting back to this country on his own. That’s why he was working so hard those final weeks of his life—to try to produce another novel that would pay his way home.”

  “I suppose so, yes,” Renata said. She looked up at Mariah. “But I couldn’t help him, you see. I’m sure you think it was vindictiveness on my part, but it wasn’t. I had no choice.”

  “Of course you had a choice! Would it have been so hard for you to lend him the money?”

  “Yes! Because of my father. He absolutely forbid me to see him anymore. He’d never been happy about me being with Ben. Mind you,” she added, “he never liked anyone I was involved with. I just did what I wanted, and after he finished grumbling, he usually indulged me. But when he heard that Ben was holding a smuggled samizdat novel, that was another story altogether.”

  “You have to understand, Mariah,” Nolan piped up, “my grandfather had extensive financial dealings with the Soviet Union—billions of dollars in investments and trade monopolies. He couldn’t be linked, not even indirectly, to anything that might upset the Kremlin.”

  Renata shifted her attention to Paul, seeking his sympathy if she couldn’t get it from Mariah. “I had never in my life seen Daddy so angry as when he heard about the smuggled Orlov manuscript. He gave me an ultimatum—give up Ben, or give up my trust fund.”

  “So you threw Ben to the wolves,” Mariah said bitterly.

  “He wasn’t interested in my patronage, anyway,” Renata said bitterly. “It seemed an easy enough choice.”

  “You have to remember, Mariah, my mother was very young at the time,” Nolan said.

  “You told everyone Ben was running around with other women behind your back,” Mariah said, ignoring him.

  Renata arched one perfectly tended eyebrow. “Well, one has to save face, doesn’t one? The allegation could hardly hurt him, given his reputation—as you’ve already pointed out.”

  “Not as much as the humiliation you’d suffer when word got around that he’d dumped you for the waitress he’d left behind,” Mariah said.

  Renata lifted her glass in a resigned toast. “And touché yet again. You, my dear, are a very hard woman, you know that?” She took another long drink. “The point is,” she added, setting down the glass, “Ben seems to have decided to take advantage of Orlov’s manuscript to get himself out of the financial pickle he was in. After all, Orlov had been evacuated back to Moscow—ostensibly for medical reasons, although rumor had it he was under house arrest. No one knew about the smuggled book, and Orlov was hardly in a position to stand up and defend his copyright, was he?”

  “But we don’t know for a fact that’s what happened,” Paul was quick to point out. “There could have been any number of reasons why Ben put his name on the cover sheet. Maybe just to protect the true identity of the author until he could get back to the States and get the manuscript to a publisher. I think we should try to put a positive spin on this,” he said to Mariah. “If the publisher is alerted in time, damage control will be a relatively simple matter. In fact, it’ll make for a great story. There’s no reason why anyone need suffer embarrassment.” He laid a comforting hand over Mariah’s, frowning when she snatched hers away.

  “This doesn’t change the fact that your father was still one of the great American novelists of the twentieth century, Mariah,” Nolan argued. “What does it matter if this book is published or not? Benjamin Bolt doesn’t need it to ensure his place in literary history.”

  “Ah, yes, that’s true,” Renata said, “but public opinion is a fickle thing. If the notion gets around that he was a plagiarist, Mariah, I think you’ll soon find that he’s about as popular on a college syllabus as O.J. Simpson at Pebble Beach. And the residual royalties on his book sales, my dear, will dry up even faster than his reputation. I understand you keep the bulk of those proceeds in trust for your daughter?”

  “Is that something else your private investigator uncovered?”

  “I do hire the best,” Renata said. “In any case, you see what I mean about this affecting your daughter.”

  “My daughter will survive,” Mariah said firmly. “She’s a tough kid. But whether Man in the Middle is a Bolt novel or an Orlov novel, there’s another aspect of this you haven’t touched on.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The allegation that my father was murdered.”

  “Oh, God.” Renata groaned softly, resting her head in her hands. “Louis Urquhart’s gotten to you, hasn’t he?”

  “So you know him?” Mariah asked.

  “Who’s Louis Urquhart?” Paul inquired. “Why does that name ring a bell?”

  “He’s a professor at UCLA,” Renata said impatiently. “He won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Jack Kerouac, and now the idiot thinks he’s infallible. He came to me about this, too. Damn that man!” she exclaimed, glancing over at her son, “I can’t believe he’s persisting with this nonsense!”

  “Mother, don’t get yourself upset about him. He isn’t worth it.”

  “Mark my words,” Renata said, turning back to Mariah and Paul, “Urquhart’s just looking to line his pockets on the profits he’ll make if he stirs up a scandal like this. I had him thrown out on his ear when he came to me,” she added, waving an arm airily. Mariah sensed she was a little drunk.

  “Urquhart’s working on a biography of my father,” Mariah told Paul. “He wrote to Chap Korman saying he’d uncovered evidence not only of this so-called stolen manuscript, but also that Ben was murdered. I just found out about it yesterday. Frank’s looking into it for me.”

  Paul’s face shifted into something not at all attractive. “So that’s the research he was doing for you. And what the message from him at the hotel was about. You went to him for help. Why? Why couldn’t you have come to me?”

  “Chap had couriered a copy of Urquhart’s letter to my house and I needed Frank to pick it up.”

  “And because you trust him in a way you’ve never trusted me,” Paul said.

  Mariah considered denying it, but as she thought about it, she realized he was absolutely right. “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact,” she said, adding, “With good reason, as it turns out.”

  Paul looked severely vexed. Not even the curious stares of other diners were enough to force him to maintain
a good front at this point.

  Mariah turned back to the other woman. “You don’t credit Urquhart’s theory that Ben was murdered?”

  “No, of course not,” Renata said impatiently. “When Ben died, I made the funeral arrangements myself, my father be damned. I discussed them with your mother, as a matter of fact.”

  “You actually spoke to her?”

  “Yes. I phoned her from Paris. She was his next of kin, after all.”

  Watching her drain her glass again, then nod as the waiter appeared with a refill, Mariah recalled the day she’d come home to find her mother on the sofa, crying after learning of Ben’s death. It must have been Renata, she realized, who’d called while she was at school.

  “Hepatitis is a contagious disease,” Renata went on, lecturing as if to the simple-minded. “Neither the American nor the French public-health authorities were going to allow the body to be transported. Cremation was the only option. I explained to your mother about Père Lachaise Cemetery—how many other famous writers were buried there, and how I would ensure that a suitable monument was erected to his memory. She agreed with me that it would be a better to have his ashes interred there rather than dragging them back to the States. The point is,” she added, “there was an autopsy when Ben’s body was found. The French authorities were very clear that he died of hepatitis.”

  “So Louis Urquhart is chasing a conspiracy that never happened,” Paul said. “I think you’re right, Renata. The guy’s a hatchet man.” He turned to Mariah. “He’ll try to milk this for all it’s worth, you’ll see.”

  “Maybe,” she replied, “but that doesn’t mean I won’t listen to what he has to say.” She gathered up her purse.

  “Where are you going?” Nolan asked.

  “Her five minutes are long since up. I’ve heard all I need to.”

  “I know this is upsetting, Mariah,” Nolan said. “but surely you can see that there’s nothing to be served by dredging all this up again now. Those papers you found will only bring grief to you, to your daughter, and damage your father’s reputation. Meantime, you’re going to drag my family through the muck, too. You have to let this drop.”

  Renata nodded. “If I made mistakes, it was only because I was young and in love. Everything I did, I did for Ben. I don’t want or deserve to be made an object of public speculation. It isn’t right. I have always acted with the best of intentions.”

  “And so the road to hell is paved, they say,” Mariah noted.

  “That’s not fair,” Paul said. “You need to—”

  “I need to go,” she said, pushing back her chair. “And as for what’s not fair, Paul—manipulating people for your own interest, that’s what’s not fair. It’s arrogant and presumptuous, and I won’t have either of you manipulating my life or my daughter’s.”

  “I’m trying to help,” he protested. “We’re both just trying to save you from public embarrassment.”

  “Public embarrassment?” She laughed scornfully. “You know, Paul, that’s your great bugaboo, not mine. And it’s really what’s got you worried here, isn’t it? The idea that the great Paul Chaney might be publicly associated with a scandal and end up looking foolish. Tsk, tsk! Poor choice of company you’re keeping, Mr. Chaney. Doesn’t reflect well on you at all. I suppose that’s the problem with living your life on a pedestal—you’re in constant fear of falling off, aren’t you? Well, not me. So you can keep your help, thank you very much. And you, Mrs. Carr, you can keep your beach house. I’ll get the keys back to you somehow. Nolan, I’m sorry you’ve gotten caught up in this. I understand why you feel you have to take your mother’s side, but I’m afraid you’re backing the wrong horse here. Don’t bother to get up, any of you. I’ll find my own way out.”

  Thursday, July 4

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Time zones mean nothing to a teenager. Two days after her own arrival in L.A., Mariah’s internal clock was still running three hours ahead of Pacific time, and she was waking up long before the first garnet rays of dawn spilled over the San Gabriel Mountains. But Lindsay’s biorhythms were another story. Mariah watched the slow rise and fall of the blankets on the other side of the massive bed, where her daughter lay turned away from her, curled on her side in a tiny ball and snuggled down into the pillows. With only a bit of her clipped russet head peeping above the fuzzy tan blanket, she looked like a fledgling bird in a lint-lined nest. A night owl hatchling, whose greatest pleasure was to wander around half the night and sleep away half the day.

  This morning, Lindsay had every reason to want to sleep in. Her plane had arrived at LAX nearly forty minutes late, and tension had reared its ugly head the moment she walked down the jet way. Mariah thought she’d steeled herself for the change in Lindsay’s appearance, but her shock must have been obvious. Or maybe it was just Lindsay’s own regret over her impulsive action.

  Mariah hugged her and kissed her, then passed a hand over the short curls. “It’s only hair,” she’d blurted, laughing nervously. “It’ll grow back.”

  A very stupid thing to say. Lindsay had stiffened under her embrace and pulled away. Why couldn’t she have pointed out how beautiful her daughter was? Mariah berated herself. Lindsay could be bald and dressed in hop-sacking, and she’d still look wonderful by anyone’s standards. Why couldn’t she applaud Lindsay’s independence of spirit? Because, her heart replied, it was so hard to let go. Every self-reliant step felt like the beginnings of flight. But though terrified of losing her child, she seemed to be doing everything in her power to drive her away. She could see herself doing it. She just didn’t know how to stop.

  Lindsay had retaliated last night by launching into snide references to Paul as they waited at the baggage carousel, remarks obviously designed to deflect attention from herself. She was bright enough to know that the best defense was always a kick-ass offense.

  Mariah had been hard-pressed to defend him after the ambush at Spago, but the mention of his name had inevitably led to the subject of the beach house, and despite her best intentions to leave that can of worms unopened until the morning, she’d found herself admitting that she’d refused the place. The disappointment on Lindsay’s face had been shattering to see.

  It was one-thirty in the morning by the time they arrived back at the hotel—4:30 a.m. back in Virginia—not the hour to launch into a long explanation of why it was impossible to accept favors from Renata Hunter Carr, a nonperson whose name Mariah had never even uttered in her daughter’s presence. She’d tried to reassure Lindsay that they would come up with an alternate California holiday plan in place of the three weeks in Newport—maybe drive up the coast to Santa Barbara and San Simeon. But, noncommunicative and clearly exhausted, Lindsay had been interested only in bed. Clinging to the far edge of the king-size mattress, as far away from her mother as she could possibly get without actually moving blankets and pillows onto the floor, she’d fallen asleep in minutes.

  Mariah had slept restlessly, sick at heart, and she’d been awake for over an hour now, reluctant to disturb sleeping adolescent dragons by stumbling around a room darkened by the drawn, heavy drapes. Instead, she watched over this beautiful, tempestuous child who, in sleep at least, radiated warmth and vulnerability. Resisting with difficulty the impulse to reach out and stroke those baby-soft, spun-copper curls.

  This was the infant girl she’d cradled in her arms. The tiny soul whose very existence had inspired a fierce, protective love deeper than anything she could have imagined before Lindsay had come into the world. The toddler whose fat fingers had gripped hers with absolute trust during her first wobbly steps. The mischievous second-grader whose tumbling red hair, gap-toothed grin and sparkling dark eyes had had every little boy on the playground scrambling to be her next victim, a tiny snow queen repelling all challengers from the slippery white hillock left by a rare Virginia blizzard.

  There wasn’t a moment of her daughter’s life that didn’t bring a smile to her lips or a sweet ache to her heart, Mariah reflected. She�
��d already lost the man with whom she’d counted on spending the rest of her life. The prospect of losing this child, too, was more painful than she could bear.

  She rolled back with a quiet sigh and glanced at the digital bedside clock. Six thirty-two. Lindsay was sure to sleep for hours yet, but Mariah’s own anxiety would drive her crazy if she didn’t do something to wear it off.

  She moved lightly to her feet, scooping the hotel notepad and pen from the bedside table on her way to the bathroom, withdrawing a sleeveless dress as she passed the open closet. The bathroom door closed behind her with a soft shush and a click, and she turned on the light. Slipping out of her nightgown and hooking it onto the back of the door, she pulled down her Speedo from the shower rod and shimmied into it, then brushed her teeth, washed her face and dropped the navy linen shift over her head and arms. Perched on the edge of the tub, she wrote a note:

  Lins:

  Gone down to swim laps, then have breakfast and read the paper. If you’re up before I get back, come join me. I’ve left the extra room key card on the bureau. Or, if you’d rather order from room service, go ahead and do that. Either way, I’ll hang around downstairs for a couple of hours so you can sleep in. When you get up, we’ll decide what we want to do today.

  I love you very much.

  Mom

  Switching off the bathroom light, Mariah padded back out into the room, toes sinking into the soft carpet. After a moment of calculation, she wedged the note into the corner of the dressing table mirror, wryly recalling the first time she’d cut off her own hair. She’d been Lindsay’s age, come to think of it, swimming on her high-school varsity team and sick of the daily struggle with long hair. If Lindsay was anything like her, it would be weeks before she felt at ease with her own reflection. After the way things had gone last night, Mariah thought ruefully, she’d just as soon be out of the room to miss Lindsay’s initial angst when she woke up and checked herself out.