“Three!” he roared. “Three bombs? What are you talking about?”
“What were you talking about?” she asked, but too late.
“I was talking about the fake scare in New Orleans,” he said, and she could feel him striving for control. “There were three bombs found? When? Where?”
“Today. In New Orleans, Dallas, and here.”
“What’s happened to our sales?”
“The inevitable happened,” she said, trying to sound both matter-of-fact and encouraging. “We had to close down for the day, but we’ll make it up later. I’m already working on some sort of special sale—Advertising wants to call it a bomb sale in lieu of a fire sale,” she tried to joke.
“What happened to our stock?”
“It was down three points at closing today.”
“And Farrell?” he demanded with renewed fury. “What’s happening with him? You stay the hell away from him. No more press conferences—nothing!”
He was talking so loud that Matt could hear him, and Meredith looked at him in helpless consternation, but instead of giving her an encouraging smile, or any form of moral support, Matt waited for her to refuse her father’s orders, and when she didn’t do it immediately, he turned on his heel and walked over to the windows, standing with his back to her.
“Now, listen to me,” Meredith pleaded with her father in a shaky, calming voice, “there is no point in working yourself up and having another attack over any of this.”
“Don’t speak to me like an idiot invalid!” he warned, but his voice was straining and she was certain she heard him pause to swallow a pill. “I’m waiting for an answer about Farrell.”
“I don’t think we should discuss this on the phone.”
“Stop stalling, dammit!” he raged, and Meredith realized that it was probably better to deal with the issue now instead of trying to delay it, since he seemed to be getting more worked up over her evasiveness.
“All right, fine,” she said quietly, “we’ll deal with it now, if that’s what you want.” She paused, thinking madly for the best way to go about it. It seemed wisest to first try to relieve him of the anxiety he’d undoubtedly have over whether or not she’d discovered his duplicity eleven years before, so she started there. “I realize you love me and you did what you believed was best eleven years ago . . .” Taut silence followed that, so she cautiously added, “I’m talking about the telegram you sent Matt telling him I’d had an abortion. I know about it—”
“Where the hell are you right now?” he demanded suspiciously.
“I’m at Matt’s apartment.”
His voice shook with rage and something that sounded to Meredith like fear. Panic. “I’m coming home. My plane leaves in three hours. Stay away from him! Don’t trust him. You don’t know that man, I tell you!” Reverting to blazing sarcasm, he added, “See if you can manage to keep us out of bankruptcy until I get there.”
He slammed the phone down, and Meredith slowly hung up, then she looked at Matt, whose back was still turned on her, as if accusing her of not taking a stronger stand. “This has been quite a day,” she said bitterly. “I suppose you’re angry because I didn’t come right out and tell him more about us.”
Without turning, Matt lifted his hand and wearily rubbed the tense muscles at the base of his neck. “I’m not angry, Meredith,” he said in a flat, emotionless voice. “I’m trying to convince myself you won’t back down when he gets here, that you won’t start doubting me and yourself, or, worse—start weighing what you have to gain by staying with me against what you have to lose if you do.”
“What are you talking about?” she said, walking over to him.
He gave her a grim sideways look. “For days I’ve been trying to second-guess what he’ll do when he gets back here and finds out you want to stay with me. I’ve just figured it out.”
“I repeat,” she said softly. “What are you talking about?”
“Your father’s going to play his trump card. He’s going to make you choose: him or me; Bancroft and Company, along with the president’s office—or nothing if you choose me. And I’m not sure,” he added on a ragged sigh, “which way you’ll go.”
Meredith was too worn out, too spent, to take on a problem she didn’t have yet. “It won’t come to that,” she said, because she honestly believed she could, with time, persuade her father to accept Matt. “I’m all he has, and he loves me in his own way,” she said, her eyes pleading with him not to make things harder on her now than they already were. “And because he does, he’ll rant and rave, and he may threaten me with that, but he’ll relent. I’ve thought a lot about what he did to us. Matt, please, just put yourself in his place,” she urged. “Suppose you had an eighteen-year-old daughter whom you’d sheltered from every reality and ugly thing in life. And suppose she met a much older man who you honestly believed was a—a gold digger. And that man took her virginity and got her pregnant. How would you feel about him?”
After a moment of silence Matt said tersely, “I’d hate his guts,” and just when Meredith thought she’d scored her point, he added, “but I’d find some way to accept him for her sake. And I sure as hell wouldn’t crush her by making her think he’d walked out on her. Nor would I try to bribe him into doing exactly that,” he added.
Meredith swallowed. “Did he try to do that?”
“Yes. The day I took you home to him.”
“What did you say?”
Matt gazed into her wide, troubled blue eyes, smiled reassuringly, and put his arm around her. “I told him,” he whispered as his mouth came down on hers for a long, drugging kiss, “that I didn’t think he ought to interfere in our lives. But,” he murmured thickly, kissing her ear as she melted against him, “not quite in those words.”
It was midnight when he walked her down to her car. Exhausted from the trials of the day and deliciously limp from his lovemaking, Meredith sank into the driver’s seat of the Jaguar. “Are you certain you’re awake enough to drive?” he asked, his hand on the open door.
“Just barely,” she said with a languorous smile, turning the key in the ignition. The heater and radio came on as the engine throbbed to life.
“I’m giving a party for the cast of Phantom of the Opera on Friday night,” he said. “A lot of people you know are coming to it. My sister will be here too, and I thought I’d invite your lawyer. I think the two of them would hit it off.”
When he hesitated, as if afraid to voice the question, Meredith said teasingly, “If that was an invitation, my answer is yes.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to come as a guest.”
Embarrassed and confused, Meredith glanced at the steering wheel. “Oh.”
“I’d like you to act as my hostess, Meredith.”
She realized then the reason for his hesitation. He was asking her for what constituted a semi-public declaration that they were a couple. She looked into those compelling gray eyes of his and smiled helplessly. “Is it black tie?”
“Yes, why?”
“Because,” she said with a jaunty glance, “it’s very important for a hostess to be dressed just right.”
With a half-laugh, half-groan, Matt pulled her out of the car and into his arms, seizing her lips in a long kiss of gratitude and relief.
He was still kissing her when the newsman on the radio announced that the body of Stanislaus Spyzhalski, who’d been arrested for falsely representing himself as an attorney to clients including Matthew Farrell and Meredith Bancroft, had been found in a ditch on a county road outside of Belleville, Illinois.
Meredith jerked back and she stared at Matt in shock. “Did you hear that?”
“I heard it earlier today.”
His complete indifference and his failure to mention it to her struck Meredith as a little odd, but exhaustion had rendered her incapable of rational thought, and Matt’s mouth was already opening on hers again.
52
Inquest, the investigative agency owned by Intercorp, was
headquartered in Philadelphia and headed by a former CIA man, Richard Olsen. Olsen was waiting in the reception area when Matt got off the elevator at 8:30 the next morning. “It’s good to see you, Matt,” he said as they shook hands.
“I’ll be with you in five minutes,” Matt promised. “Before we get started, I need to make a phone call.”
Closing his office door behind him, Matt sat down at his desk and called a private number that rang on the desk of the president of a large Chicago bank. It was answered on the first ring by the president of that bank. “It’s Matt,” he said without preamble. “Reynolds Mercantile is pulling out on the Bancroft loan, just as we thought they would. So did the other lender they’d lined up for B and C.”
“The economy’s shaky and lenders are nervous,” the banker remarked. “Also, Reynolds Merc had two megaloans go bad on them this quarter, so they’ll be looking for money for a while.”
“I know all that,” Matt replied impatiently. “What I don’t know is whether the bomb scares are enough to make them decide B and C is becoming risky, and to start selling off some of the loans they’re holding on them.”
“Shall we give it a try?”
“Do it today,” Matt ordered.
“The same approach we talked about before?” the banker reconfirmed. “We buy up the B and C loans on behalf of the Collier Trust and you arrange to take them off our hands within sixty days.”
“Right.”
“Is it all right to mention the name Collier to Reynolds? He won’t connect it with you?”
“It was my mother’s maiden name,” Matt said, “no one will connect it to me.”
“If this bomb-scare business comes to an end without doing serious damage to B and C’s overall worth,” the banker added, “we might be interested in retaining the loans ourselves—once they’re stabilized.”
“In that case, we’ll discuss terms then,” Matt agreed, but his main concern was more immediate. “Once you’ve offered to take the loans off Reynolds’s hands, make certain you tell him the Trust wants to finance the Houston project for Bancroft as well. Get him to call Meredith Bancroft right away and tell her that. I want her to know she’s got the funds available to her.”
“We’ll handle it.”
After hanging up the phone, Matt asked Eleanor to bring Richard Olsen into his office. He waited with strained patience as Olsen surrendered his coat, but before the man had settled into a chair across from him, Matt asked the question that was uppermost on his mind: “What do the police know about the bombings?”
“They don’t know a great deal,” Olsen said, unlocking his briefcase and removing a file which he opened on his lap. “They’ve drawn some interesting conclusions however, and so have I.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“For starters, the police think the bombs were meant to be discovered before they went off—a theory which is borne out by the fact that warnings were phoned to the police in plenty of time, and the bombs were placed where they’d be easy to find. The bombs themselves were the work of a pro. My gut feeling is that we aren’t dealing with a demented crank here who’s retaliating for some imagined offense or indignity he suffered at a Bancroft store. If the police are right—and I think they are—then whoever planted those bombs obviously didn’t intend to cause harm to the stores themselves or anyone in them. If that’s true, the only remaining logical motive is to cause harm to the store’s profits by scaring away shoppers. I understand B and C’s sales plummeted all over the country yesterday and the value of their stock has already dropped significantly. Now, the question is, who would want to cause that to happen and why?”
“I don’t know,” Matt said, striving to keep the frustration out of his voice. “I told you on the phone yesterday that there’s a rumor that some entity—other than myself—has been planning to try to take them over. Whoever that is has been quietly buying up their shares. When I got into the game and started buying too, I drove the price of Bancroft’s shares up. Presumably, there’s a predator company out there, other than mine, who decided to either scare me off with the uproar over bombings and the risk to Bancroft’s earnings, or they’re simply trying to drive down the price of the shares so they could grab them cheaper.”
“Do you have any idea who that company could be?”
“None whatsoever. Whoever it is wants B and C so badly that they aren’t thinking straight. The corporation’s in debt and B and C is a bad buy for the short-term gain.”
“Obviously you don’t care about that.”
“I’m not in it for profit,” Matt replied.
With characteristic bluntness Olsen said, “Why are you buying up their shares, then?” When his question was answered with a quelling stare and total silence, Olsen lifted his hands. “I’m looking for motives other than profit, Matt. If I know yours, maybe I can find someone else with a similar motive or motives and that will give me some leads.”
“My original motive was revenge against Philip Bancroft,” Matt said when his desire for privacy lost out to his greater desire to get this solved.
“Is there anyone else—with a great deal of money—who might also want revenge against him?”
“How the hell should I know?” Matt said, getting up and beginning to pace. “He’s an arrogant son of a bitch. I can’t be his only enemy.”
“Okay. We’ll start there—we’ll look for enemies he might have made who now see a long-term shot at revenge and profit, and who can afford to go after it by taking over B and C.”
“That sounds absolutely ridiculous.”
“Not nearly as much when you consider the fact that no legitimate corporation with motives of pure profit would resort to bomb threats as a means of weakening their prey.”
“It’s still ridiculous,” Matt argued. “Sooner or later they’re going to have to make their intentions known, and the minute they do, they’re going to be suspect in the bomb threats.”
“Being suspect doesn’t mean anything unless there’s proof,” Olsen said flatly.
53
By midafternoon, business had not picked up at any of the stores, and Meredith was trying not to hover at the computers in her office. Mark Braden was due back from New Orleans at any moment, and she’d been expecting her father to descend on her since early morning. Phyllis’s announcement that Parker was on the phone was a welcome diversion from her present worries. He’d called her once already to cheer her up, and she assumed this was another such friendly call. It dawned on her, not for the first time as she reached for the phone, that her feelings for Parker couldn’t have been nearly as deep as she’d thought they were if she could shift from being his fiancée to his friend so easily. And the fact that Parker seemed to be adapting to that switch as easily as she made her wonder why on earth they’d ever considered getting married in the first place. Lisa’s repeated jibes that Parker and Meredith’s relationship lacked fire were obviously founded in fact. But Meredith now had good reason to wonder if Lisa’s objections to their engagement hadn’t been selfishly motivated. That possibility hurt a little, and if Meredith weren’t so deluged with problems, she’d have called Lisa and tried to talk to her. On the other hand, it seemed to her that Lisa was the one who should initiate that talk, and she should have done so before now. Dismissing that problem for the time being, Meredith picked up her phone.
“Hi, beautiful,” Parker said with a smile in his voice. “Could you stand a little good news for a change?”
“I’m not certain I’ll know how to handle it, but give me a try,” Meredith replied, and she was smiling too.
“I have lenders who’ll make the loan to buy the Houston land, and who’ll finance the whole building project for you when you’re ready to go on it. They walked into my office like angels from heaven this morning, looking for loans to take off our hands.”
“That’s wonderful news,” Meredith replied, but her enthusiasm was dampened by worry about how they were going to make payments on all three existing exp
ansion loans six months from now if business were to stay bad.
“You don’t sound very elated.”
“I’m worried about poor sales in all our stores,” she admitted. “I shouldn’t be telling Bancroft and Company’s banker that, but he’s my friend too.”
“As of tomorrow morning,” Parker said a little hesitantly, “I’ll be your friend—period.”
Meredith stiffened in her chair. “What does that mean?”
“We need cash, he said with a reluctant sigh, “so we’re selling your loans off to the same investors who are going to lend you the money for the Houston project. You’ll be making your payments to the Collier Trust from now on.”
Meredith wrinkled her nose, lost in thought. “Who?”
“A partnership called the Collier Trust. They use Criterion Bank right around the corner from you, and Criterion vouched for them. In fact, Criterion’s people approached me on their behalf. The Collier Trust is a private partnership with plenty of capital to lend, and they’ve been looking for good loans to buy up. Just to be on the safe side, I checked them out with my own sources. They’re solid and completely aboveboard.”
Meredith felt vaguely uneasy. A few months before, everything seemed so stable and predictable—like Reynolds Mercantile’s relationship with Bancroft & Company, and her personal life. Now all of it was in a state of sudden and complete flux. She thanked Parker for getting her the Houston financing, but when she hung up, something about the Collier Trust continued to bother her. She’d never heard it before, and yet it seemed almost familiar.
A minute later Mark Braden walked into her office, grim and unshaven, and she prepared to deal with the more urgent problem of the bombings. “I came here straight from the airport, just as you wanted me to do,” he explained by way of apology for his appearance. He was shrugging out of his coat and tossing it over a chair, when there was a flurry of surprised greetings outside her office as secretaries exclaimed, “Welcome back, Mr. Bancroft!” and “Good afternoon, Mr. Bancroft!” Meredith stood up, bracing herself for the confrontation with her father that she’d been dreading.
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