Paradise

by Judith McNaught

  “Yes.”

  Meredith heard again the appreciative laughter that filled the library at Matt’s sangfroid, and her eyes sparked with resentment over the ease with which he could win people over.

  “You’ve never married, and I was wondering if you have any plans to marry in the future?”

  “It’s not out of the question.”

  His brief smile emphasized the impertinence of the question, and Meredith gritted her teeth, remembering how that smile had once made her heart hammer. Abruptly, the television cameras switched back to the local newscasters, but Meredith’s moment of relief was squelched by the senator, who turned to her with friendly curiosity. “I imagine all of us here read Sally Mansfield’s column, Meredith. Would you care to satisfy our curiosity and tell us why you don’t like Farrell?”

  Meredith managed to imitate Matt’s lazy smile. “No.”

  They all laughed, but she saw the heightened curiosity in their faces, and she hastily busied herself plumping up the sofa pillows as the senator said to her father, “Stanton Avery has put Farrell’s name up for membership at the country club.”

  Mentally cursing Matt Farrell for coming to Chicago, Meredith shot her father a warning look, but his temper had already overruled his judgment. “I’m quite certain that those of us in this room have enough influence among us to keep him out—even if everyone else who belongs to Glenmoor wants him in, which they won’t.”

  Judge Northrup heard that and broke off his conversation with another guest. “Is that what you want us to do, Philip? Blackball him?”

  “You’re damned right it is.”

  “If you’re convinced he’s an undesirable, that’s good enough for me,” said the judge, looking around at the others. Slowly but emphatically, all her father’s guests nodded their unanimous agreement, and Meredith knew that Matt’s chances of belonging to Glenmoor were now zero.

  “He’s bought a huge tract of land out in Southville,” the judge told her father. “Wants it rezoned so he can build a big high-tech industrial complex on it.”

  “Is that right?” her father said, and Meredith realized from his next words that he planned to squelch that too, if he could. “Who do we know on the Southville zoning commission?”

  “Several people. There’s Paulson and—”

  “For heaven’s sake!” she interrupted with a forced laugh, sending her father a pleading look. “There’s no need to roll out the heavy guns just because I don’t like Matt Farrell.”

  “I’m certain you and your father must have excellent reasons to feel as you do,” Senator Davies said.

  “You’re damned ri—”

  “Not at all!” Meredith said, cutting off her father and trying to stop a vendetta from getting under way. With a bright artificial smile, she told everyone, “The truth is that Matt Farrell made a pass at me years ago, when I was eighteen, and father has never forgiven him for it.”

  “Now I know where I’ve met him!” Mrs. Foster exclaimed, looking at her husband. Turning to Meredith, she said, “It was years ago at Glenmoor! I remember thinking what an extraordinarily attractive young man he was . . . and, Meredith—you were the one who introduced us to him!”

  Whether by accident or design, the senator spared Meredith the need to reply by saying, “Well, I hate to break up my own birthday party, but I have to be on a plane to Washington at midnight. . . .”

  A half hour later the last of the guests departed, and Meredith was bidding them good-bye beside her father when she saw a car turn into the drive. “Who the hell is that?” her father said, scowling at the headlights swooping toward them.

  She peered at the car and identified it as a light blue Mercedes when it passed beneath one of the lamps along the drive. “It’s Parker!”

  “At eleven o’clock at night?”

  Meredith began to tremble with foreboding, and that was before the porch lights illuminated his tense, grim face. “I was hoping the party would have broken up by now. I need to talk to both of you.”

  “Parker,” Meredith began, “don’t forget my father’s been ill—”

  “I won’t distress him unduly,” Parker promised, almost propelling them down the hall with a hand against both their backs, “but he needs to be apprised of the facts so that they can be dealt with properly.”

  “Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” Philip said when they entered the library. “Facts about what? What the hell is going on?”

  Pausing to close the library doors, Parker said, “I think you both ought to sit down.”

  “Dammit, Parker, nothing upsets me more than being kept in suspense—”

  “Very well. Philip, last night I happened to have a look at Meredith’s divorce decree, and there were several irregularities about it. Do you recall, about eight years ago, reading of a Chicago attorney who was accepting fees from clients, then pocketing the fees without ever filing their cases?”

  “Yes. So what?”

  “And about five years ago there was another batch of stories about an alleged attorney on the South Side named Joseph Grandola who was convicted of fifty-some counts of fraud for misrepresenting himself as an attorney and charging fees to handle cases that never actually went near a courthouse.” He waited for a comment, but short of a sudden rigidity in Philip’s stance, there was no response, and so he went on. “Grandola had a year of law school before they kicked him out. A few years later he opened an office in a neighborhood where most of his ‘clients’ were undereducated. For over a decade he got away with his scam by taking only cases that wouldn’t require a trial and that were unlikely to ever involve an opposing attorney—such as uncontested divorces, wills that needed to be drawn up, and so forth—”

  Meredith sank down onto the sofa, her stomach beginning to churn, her mind already numbly accepting what Parker was going to tell her father, while her heart screamed a denial that it couldn’t be true. Parker’s voice droned on as if from a great distance. “He’d had some law school training, and he knew just enough legal jargon to draw up a fair representation of a legal pleading. When a client came to him wanting a divorce, he first made certain the other spouse was either in full agreement—or nowhere to be found. If that was so, he charged his client whatever he could get them to pay him, then he drew up a petition for divorce. Knowing he’d never be able to pass himself off as an attorney long enough to get a judge to sign the petition, he signed them himself.”

  “Are you trying to tell me,” Philip said, his voice strained almost to the point of unrecognizability, “that this lawyer I hired eleven years ago was not a lawyer?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I don’t believe it!” he said in a low shout, as if he could frighten the possibility away with his own fury.

  “There’s no point in giving yourself another heart attack over it, because it won’t change anything,” Parker pointed out quietly and reasonably, and Meredith felt a mild sense of relief as she saw her father make an effort to calm himself.

  “Go on,” he said after a moment.

  “Today, after I verified that Spyzhalski isn’t a member of the bar association, I sent an investigator over to the courthouse—a very discreet investigator we use for bank matters,” he reassured Philip, who had clutched the back of a chair. “He spent the day and part of the night verifying and reverifying that Meredith’s divorce is nowhere in the court records.”

  “I’ll kill that bastard!”

  “If you mean Spyzhalski, you’ll have to find him first. He’s vanished. If you mean Farrell,” Parker continued in a resigned voice, “I strongly suggest you reconsider your attitude.”

  “Like hell I will! Meredith can solve the whole thing very simply by flying to Reno or somewhere and getting a quiet, quick divorce.”

  “I’ve already thought of that, and it won’t help.” He held up his hand to silence Philip’s angry outburst. “Listen to me, Philip, because I’ve had time tonight to think this thing through. Even if Meredith did as you sugg
est, it wouldn’t unsnarl the legal tangle of their property rights. That would still have to be done through the Illinois courts.”

  “Meredith would never need to tell him that there is a snarl!”

  “Besides being morally and ethically wrong, it’s also completely impractical.” With a frustrated sigh, Parker explained. “The ABA has already had two complaints against Spyzhalski, and they’ve turned the matter over to the authorities. Let’s assume Meredith did as you just suggested, and Spyzhalski is arrested and he confesses. The minute he does, the authorities will notify Farrell that his divorce isn’t legal—assuming he doesn’t read about it in the newspaper first. Do you have any idea of the lawsuit he could slap against you for all this? In good faith, he allowed you and Meredith to assume the responsibility for handling the divorce, and you were negligent; furthermore, you’ve exposed him to bigamy all these years, and—”

  “You seem to have the problems figured out,” Philip snapped. “What do you suggest we do?”

  “Whatever we have to do in order to pacify him and make him agree to a quick, uncomplicated divorce,” Parker replied with calm implacability, then he turned to Meredith. “I’m afraid that job is going to fall to you.”

  During the entire discussion, Meredith had been sitting, reeling from it all, but that remark served to stir her out of her blank stupor. “Just exactly why does he have to be pacified by me or by anyone else?”

  “Because there are enormous financial implications here. Like it or not, Farrell is your legal husband of eleven years standing. You are a wealthy young woman, Meredith, and Farrell, as your legal husband, could conceivably demand a share of what you have—”

  “Stop calling him that!”

  “It’s true,” Parker said, but gently this time, “Farrell could refuse to cooperate in getting a divorce. He could also sue you for negligence—”

  “Dear God!” she cried, standing up and beginning to pace. “I can’t believe this! No, wait—we’re overreacting,” she said after a moment. Forcing herself to start thinking logically, as if she were dealing with a problem at work, she paused and then said, “If what I’ve read is true, Matt is far wealthier than we are—”

  “Far wealthier,” Parker confirmed, smiling approvingly at her for the calm logic she was exercising. “In which case, he would have a hell of a lot more to lose in a fight over property than you do.”

  “So there’s nothing to worry about,” she concluded, “because he’ll want to get this thing over with just as badly as I do, and he’ll be relieved that I don’t want anything from him. In fact, we have the upper hand—”

  “That’s not quite true,” Parker denied. “As I just explained, your father and you assumed the responsibility for obtaining the divorce, and since you failed to do it, Farrell’s attorneys could probably convince the courts that the fault is yours. In which case, the judge might even grant him punitive damages. You, on the other hand, would have a hard time getting any money out of Farrell, because you were supposed to handle the divorce from here, and I suspect his attorneys could convince the court that you deliberately failed to do that out of some premeditated belief that you might later be able to squeeze him for money.”

  “He can rot in hell before he gets one more cent out of us,” Philip snapped. “I already paid the bastard ten thousand dollars to get out of our lives and forgo any money of Meredith’s or mine.”

  “How did you pay it to him?”

  “I—” Philip’s face fell. “I did what Spyzhalski told me to do which wasn’t extraordinary—I wrote a check made jointly payable to Farrell and him.”

  “Spyzhalski,” Parker pointed out sarcastically, “is a swindler. Do you honestly think he’d have scruples against forging Farrell’s endorsement and cashing it himself?”

  “I should have killed Farrell the day Meredith brought him back here!”

  “Stop it!” Meredith cried. “Don’t give yourself another coronary over this. We’ll simply have an attorney contact his attorney—”

  “I hardly think so,” Parker interrupted. “If you want the man to cooperate and keep this mess quiet—which, I think, is a primary goal for all of us—then you’d better start by smoothing things over with him.”

  “What things?” Meredith demanded hotly.

  “I would suggest you begin,” Parker stated, “with a personal apology for that remark of yours that appeared in Sally Mansfield’s column—”

  The recollection of the benefit ball hit her then, and Meredith sank onto the chair in front of the fire, staring into the flames. “I can’t believe this,” she whispered, but her father’s voice was a near shout as he glared at Parker.

  “I’m starting to wonder about you, Parker. What sort of man are you to suggest she apologize to that bastard! I’ll deal with him.”

  “I’m a practical, civilized man, that’s what I am,” he replied, walking over and laying a consoling hand on Meredith’s shoulder. “And you’re a volatile man, which is why you’re the last person in the world who ought to try to deal with him. Furthermore, I have faith in Meredith. Look, Meredith has told me the whole story about what happened between Farrell and her. He married her because she was pregnant. What he did when she lost the baby was cruel, but it was also practical and possibly kinder than dragging out a marriage that was doomed from the start—”

  “Kind!” Philip spat out. “He was a twenty-six-year-old fortune hunter who seduced an eighteen-year-old heiress, got her pregnant, and then ‘kindly’ condescended to marry her—”

  “Stop it!” Meredith said again with more force. “Parker is right. And you know perfectly well he didn’t ‘seduce’ me. I told you what happened and why.” With an effort, she got herself under control. “This is all beside the point. I’ll deal with Matt once I decide how best to do it.”

  “That’s my girl,” Parker said. He glanced at Philip, ignoring his thunderous expression. “All Meredith has to do is meet with him in a civilized way, explain the problem, and suggest that they obtain a divorce with no financial claims against one another.” With a wry smile he studied her pale, drawn face. “You’ve handled tougher adversaries and tougher assignments than that, haven’t you, honey?”

  Meredith saw the encouragement and pride in his face, and she looked at him in helpless consternation. “No.”

  “Of course you have!” he argued. “You can put most of this behind you by tomorrow night if you can get him to agree to see you tomorrow—”

  “See me!” she burst out. “Why can’t I just talk to him on the phone?”

  “Is that how you’d handle it if it were a messy business situation of vital importance to you?”

  “No, of course not,” she sighed.

  For several minutes after Parker left, Meredith and her father remained in the library, both of them staring into space in a kind of angry stupor. “I suppose you blame me for this,” her father stated finally.

  Rousing herself from her self-pity, Meredith turned her head and looked at him. He looked defeated and pale. “Of course not,” she said quietly. “You only tried to protect me by hiring a lawyer who didn’t know us.”

  “I’ll call Farrell myself in the morning!”

  “No, you can’t,” she said quietly. “Parker was right about that. You become irrationally angry and defensive at the mention of Matt’s name. If you tried to talk to him, you’d lose your temper in ten seconds and end up giving yourself another heart attack in the process. Why don’t you go to bed now and get some sleep,” she added, standing up. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow. This will all seem less—well—threatening in the morning. Besides,” she added, somehow managing to give him a reassuring smile as they walked toward the front door, “I’m not an eighteen-year-old girl anymore, and I’m not afraid of confronting Matthew Farrell. Actually,” she lied, “I’m rather looking forward to outwitting him!” He looked as if he was desperately trying to think of an alternative, and he was growing paler because he couldn’t.

  With
a cheery wave she left and hurried down the front steps. Her car was parked in the driveway, and she opened the front door, slid into its freezing interior, and closed her door. Then she put her forehead on the steering wheel and closed her eyes. “Oh, my God!” she whispered, terrified at the prospect of confronting the dark-haired demon from her past.

  25

  Good morning,” Phyllis said brightly, following Meredith into her office.

  “I might call this morning a lot of things,” Meredith replied as she walked over to the closet to hang up her coat, “but good isn’t one of them.” Trying to delay calling Matt, she said, “Do I have any phone messages?”

  Phyllis nodded. “Mr. Sanborn in personnel phoned because you haven’t returned your updated insurance application form. He says he needs it right away.” She handed it to Meredith and stood waiting.

  Sighing, Meredith sat down at her desk, picked up her pen, and filled out her name and address, then she stared in revolted confusion at the next question: “Marital Status” it said. “Circle one: Single Married Widowed.” A hysterical laugh welled up within her as she looked at the middle choice. She was married. For eleven years she had been married to Matt Farrell.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Phyllis asked anxiously when Meredith put her forehead in her hand and gazed at the form, paralyzed.

  Lifting her eyes to Phyllis, she said, “What can they do to you for lying on an insurance form?”

  “I guess they could refuse to pay off your legal heir if you die.”

  “Fair enough,” Meredith replied with bitter humor, and with an angry flourish, she circled Single. Oblivious to Phyllis’s worried frown, she handed her the completed form and said, “Will you close my door when you leave, and hold my calls for a few minutes?”

  When Phyllis left, Meredith removed the phone book from the credenza behind her, looked up Haskell Electronics’ phone number, and jotted it down. Then she put away the phone book and sat there, staring at the telephone as if it had fangs, knowing the moment she’d dreaded all night had arrived. Closing her eyes for a moment, she tried to put herself in the right frame of mind by rehearsing her plan again: If Matt was angry about what she’d said at the opera—which he would surely be—she would apologize with simple dignity. An apology, with no excuses, followed by a polite, impersonal request to meet with him about an urgent matter. That was her plan. In slow motion she lifted her shaking hand and reached for the telephone. . . .