Twist of Fate

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “I think I can make it to the bathroom on my own,” she advised Mrs. Broadcourt.

  “Fine. I’ll get a walker.”

  Hannah wondered how frequently Mrs. Broadcourt used George as a means of encouraging female patients to get on their feet.

  Nick appeared in the doorway half an hour later, clearly on his way to work. He looked very up-and-coming in the gray suit and dark tie—ready to take his place among the movers and the shakers in the Silicon Valley North that was developing around Bellevue, Washington. Hannah took heart.

  “Does that outfit mean you’ve still got a company to run?” she asked.

  “Barely. God knows for how long.” He came over to the bed. “Feeling better?”

  “Thanks to George.”

  “George?” Nick cast a puzzled look at the flowers. “Is he the guy who sent the roses?”

  “Not exactly. George is into bedpans, not flowers. The roses are from Gideon Cage.” She gave her brother a level glance, waiting for an explanation.

  Nick’s mouth tightened. “Hannah, what happened down there in Vegas?”

  “I tried a little salvation work. I haven’t been able to figure out yet whether it was effective.” Hannah struggled to a more elevated position on the pillows, wincing as the throbbing increased in her left knee. “Tell me what happened, Nick. I can’t stand the suspense. Cage called off the takeover attempt, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes, he called it off.”

  “Then why all the cryptic comments? Why did I get that message on the card?”

  “What message?” Nick leaned across the bed and glanced at the card that was still attached to the roses. He read it quickly and shook his head sardonically. “I think, sister dear, that you can forget about giving Gideon Cage any guidance counseling. He’s way ahead of you. Way ahead of both of us.” He straightened.

  “Tell me what happened, damn it!”

  “To put it simply, Cage never intended to take over Accelerated Design. He just wanted us to think he did. He bought a big chunk of stock and then made all the right moves to simulate a takeover bid. The activity in the stock market got everyone excited and drove the price of the stock sky-high. I and everyone else were properly terrorized. Yesterday he let it be known that he was willing to consider selling his stock back to us and bow out of the picture.”

  A distinctly uneasy chill went down Hannah’s spine. Perhaps it was just caused by incipient bed sores. Warily she eyed her brother. “I think I’m beginning to get the drift. By the time he offered to let you buy back his shares they were worth four times what he’d paid for them a few months ago.”

  Nick sighed, running a hand through his neatly styled hair. “You’ve got it. Yesterday afternoon while you were sleeping off the anesthesia, I scrounged money from every source I could find. We had to liquidate a lot of assets, Hannah. Accelerated Design is now ass-high in debt. I cleaned out my own personal account and borrowed heavily on my line of credit at the bank.”

  “Oh, my God.” Hannah felt sick but it wasn’t from the ache in her leg.

  “Gideon Cage made a tidy bundle on the deal and then washed his hands of the whole thing. I’m stuck with a firm that will have trouble paying its light bill next month. But at least I’ve still got the company. It was a near miss, Hannah. We were lucky to survive. I think I’m going to have to pay a hell of a lot more attention to the management end of things. It may be time to leave the technical development to others. I should never have let Accelerated Design become so vulnerable.”

  “He never intended to take over the firm and run it. He only wanted to make a quick kill.” She touched the nearest of the yellow roses.

  “He let us assume he intended a corporate raid and that’s exactly what we did assume,” Nick said quietly.

  “He warned me about assumptions,” Hannah murmured. Her fingers closed around the rose.

  “Did you really go down there and talk to him about changing his career path?” Nick still couldn’t believe it. There hadn’t been time to argue about the trip after Hannah got back to Seattle. She’d been too busy checking into the hospital.

  “You know me. A guidance counselor to the core. I really thought I knew what I was doing, Nick. I thought I had guessed what made him tick. Parts of him I could see quite clearly. But there are other elements in him that I couldn’t quite grasp.”

  Nick shook his head. “He’s hardly a liberal arts student floundering around looking for a career.”

  “I knew that.” She made an impatient gesture with her hand. “But I thought I could make him see that he wouldn’t be happy for long if he continues in his current direction.”

  “If you ask me, he’s perfectly content with his current direction! It’s made him rich. For Christ’s sake, Hannah, whatever made you think you could offer guidance counseling to a man who thinks like a chess player?”

  The rose started to come apart in Hannah’s palm as she made a fist. “Just a feeling I had.” She opened her hand and let the disintegrated flower fall into the wastebasket beside the bed. “The toughest part about being a counselor, Nick, is finding out that a lot of people won’t take good advice. Not everyone wants to be put on the right path.”

  For the first time since Nick had entered the room, genuine amusement flared in his green eyes. “Well, at least I know for sure that you didn’t sleep with him in an attempt to get him to stop his takeover bid.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “This is the mood you get into whenever one of your counseled students fails to go in the direction you wanted him to go. You start fretting and worrying about his future. That’s not quite the same way a woman scorned would act.”

  “How would you know? Scorning a lot of women these days?”

  Nick started for the door. “Haven’t got time for it. I’m too busy trying to save Accelerated Design. I’m barely making time for my workouts at the club. See you later, Hannah.” He halted for a second, his hand on the door jamb. “Oh, by the way, Drake Armitage called me last night. He and his wife wanted to find out how you were getting along. I also got a call from the Andersons and the Barretts and a few others. You’ve got a lot of friends. Told them you’d probably be up to taking phone calls today and visitors tomorrow. That okay?”

  “That’s fine, Nick. Thanks.”

  “Armitage and his wife have joined my athletic club. They work out regularly. That Vicky sure does something for a leotard. If they’d made anthro instructors like that when I was in college I might have changed my major.”

  “Forget it,” Hannah said with grave authority. “Most of the really fascinating anthropological sites are not conveniently located near fitness clubs or Alfa Romeo mechanics.”

  “You’d never guess Dr. Victoria Armitage didn’t have access to a good fitness club all year long. Great pecs on that woman. See you later, Hannah.” Nick disappeared into the hall.

  He was right, Hannah thought briefly. Drake and Victoria Armitage, both visiting professors of anthropology who were scheduled to teach in the fall at the college where Hannah worked, were living testimonials to the value of physical fitness. They had introduced themselves to Hannah shortly after the local papers had carried an obituary on her aunt. The articles had mentioned that some of Elizabeth Nord’s relatives lived in the Seattle area. Since they were on the faculty of the same college for which Hannah worked, it had been easy for the Armitages to locate her. She’d had coffee with them on a couple of occasions and had introduced them to Nick one evening when he’d accompanied her to a campus concert. Nick and the Armitages had found a common ground in their mutual interest in fitness.

  Drake and Vicky were a pleasant enough couple if you liked the trendy, academic type, but Hannah wasn’t all that comfortable in their company. She had decided it was partly because their chief topic of conversation around her was Elizabeth Nord’s work. Their enthusiasm for it was overpowering at times, especially Victoria’s.

  But there was another reason why she preferred
not to spend a great deal of time around Professor Victoria Armitage, Hannah admitted to herself as she gazed out the hospital room window. In some ways, Victoria and her respected work in cultural anthropology represented an alternate universe, one Hannah could have inhabited if she’d stuck to the path she’d originally chosen in college.

  It had all seemed so clear-cut in the beginning: a straight shot from college freshman to Ph.D., then on to the faculty of some small but reputable college. At the start she hadn’t really worried about which field to focus her energies on. It had seemed as though there was plenty of time. For the first three years she’d bounced cheerfully from the convolutions of history to the updated witchcraft of psychology. She’d experimented with philosophy and then with English literature. In between she had sampled a little radical politics, done a special studies paper on modern religious communes, and helped out in a local crisis clinic.

  But somewhere along the line time began to run out. She’d reached the end of her junior year without having settled down to a particular field of study. Panic had set in. Then, in May of that year, Elizabeth Nord had made one of her rare visits to her sister’s family and had casually inquired about Hannah’s interest in cultural anthropology.

  Embarrassed about the obviously undirected focus of her life, Hannah had immediately decided that cultural anthropology was as good a major as anything else. Fortunately she’d taken enough undergraduate courses in the subject to enable her to graduate with an anthropology major.

  Telling herself that now she really had to settle down, she’d applied to graduate school and, thanks to a good, if somewhat eclectic academic record, had been accepted. The letter of recommendation from Elizabeth Nord probably hadn’t hurt, either.

  Determinedly Hannah had started out in the direction of a doctorate. She was pleased and somewhat surprised to discover that she had a genuine inclination for the subject matter of anthropology. She was fascinated by it. But she was also frustrated because so many of the people in the field seemed to become bogged down with the details of kinship theory and systems of religious behavior in various and assorted small tribes. Few of them took a step back to assess the long-range implications of their studies or the studies of others.

  But Hannah had persisted for a while, even writing one or two well-received papers on the philosophical implications of anthropological work. More than one of her instructors told her she had a flair for writing about the subject matter of her field. All she needed was experience. She vowed to finish the Ph.D. program, do a little of the fieldwork so necessary to establish one’s credentials in anthropology, and then settle down to a career teaching the subject. Since the name of the game was publish or perish, she figured she ought to be able to survive in the academic world because she could write.

  It wasn’t long, however, before she had once again found herself drifting, pulled in several different directions. One of the sidelines she found herself pursuing was counseling undergraduate students on what classes they should be taking to complete their majors. She proved to be astonishingly adept at it.

  In the end she had simply run out of steam and surrendered. At the end of her first year in graduate school she had forced herself to acknowledge the fact that she wasn’t ever going to finish. It had been a traumatic decision. There is nothing quite as pathetic in the academic world as the Ph.D. candidate who never makes it to the dissertation.

  A different choice would have resulted in Hannah’s having a Ph.D. and a career that would have put her at the heart of the academic environment instead of on the fringes where librarians, guidance counselors, coaches, and other assorted, nonacademic types were consigned. The papers she now wrote for the professional guidance counseling journals didn’t count, at least not in the eyes of genuine academics.

  Aunt Elizabeth hadn’t seemed concerned by Hannah’s decision. She had simply sent Hannah a brief note that said:

  Follow your instincts, Hannah. You won’t go wrong. Women have such good instincts. It’s a pity they don’t act on them with greater intelligence.

  There had been other occasional words of feminine wisdom from Elizabeth Nord down through the years but the comment about following her instincts was the bit Hannah had liked best. She did it on a regular basis when she was trying to guide others. When people had the sense to take Hannah’s advice, they usually found themselves quite grateful to her.

  She’d seen very little of her aloof, brilliant relative and knew that the rest of the family found her cold and distant. But Hannah had realized intuitively that Elizabeth Nord simply hadn’t needed anyone else. She was complete within herself. A rare development in a human being. Sometimes Hannah wondered if Anna Warrick, the mathematician, had been like that. The family had only limited information on her. Her immediate relatives had found her something of an embarrassment. A woman who clearly did not know how to accept gracefully her proper role in the universe. About the lady artist who had scandalized the family at the turn of the century by running off to live in a Paris garret, even less was known. Her relatives had virtually disowned her. The fact that her paintings now brought vast sums would have been even more shocking to her parents.

  From what little Hannah had learned, neither the artist, Cecily Sanders, nor the mathematician, Anna Warrick, had worried about what their contemporaries thought. Elizabeth Nord had been just as blithely unconcerned.

  Hannah had opted to do as her aunt had suggested and had followed her intuition. She had decided that guidance counseling offered her the greatest opportunity for using her odd ability to direct others down suitable paths. It wasn’t a talent that was in great demand anywhere except on college campuses, and even there it wasn’t the sort of skill that paid very well. But Hannah liked the work. The part-time counseling job evolved into a full-time career. A lot of people egotistically thought they could give advice to others. Hannah knew for certain that she was brilliant at it. She was also fairly good at persuading others to act on her advice.

  Knowing she was good at what she did, she was doubly dismayed when someone ignored her guidance. She glanced over the side of her bed and studied the crushed yellow rose in the wastebasket. One could live with the fact that one had failed. It was much harder to come to terms with having been made a fool.

  She wondered how hard Gideon Cage was laughing.

  GIDEON CAGE was not laughing. It occurred to him that he hadn’t taken that kind of pleasure in a victory for a long time. There was usually, however, a certain sense of satisfaction that he had achieved the goal of his maneuvering. Even that seemed to be lacking this time around.

  Gideon surfaced, drew a deep breath and shot back toward the far end of the pool underwater. It was the woman’s fault, of course. Teaching her a lesson should have added an extra fillip to the final result of this particular siege, but it hadn’t. He’d done her a favor, he told himself. He wondered how she’d taken the “good deed.” And then he thought about how he would have reacted to her visit if he had really been planning on taking over Accelerated Design.

  He reached the far end of the pool and hauled himself onto the edge, reaching for a towel. The morning sun was already threatening to turn hot even though it was only eight. There were no showgirls lounging by the pool at this time of day in Vegas. No one else at all, for that matter, except the waiter assigned to the poolside bar. Gideon heard the bar phone ring as he toweled dry and knew even before the waiter signalled that the summons was for him. He realized that there were times when he hated phones. Reluctantly he headed toward the bar. Without a word the receiver was handed to him.

  “What is it, Steve?” Only Decker would be calling on this number at this hour.

  “More news on Ballantine. The man’s got some real money behind him this time, Gideon. He’s done some wheeling and dealing with a few very high rollers, including the managers of a couple of pension funds. He’s going to have the cash to put up a fight for Surbrook.”

  “Don’t sound so astonished, Steve. He’s Cy
rus Ballantine’s son, remember? Stands to reason he’d have inherited some of his father’s ability. There’s nothing to get excited about. We’ll take care of him when the time comes. Did you give the message about the flowers to Mary Ann?”

  Steve Decker hesitated, clearly not wanting to be distracted from his course. The problem with people such as Decker, Gideon decided, was that they had trouble adjusting to directional shifts. Sometimes you had to nudge them.

  “I gave her the message. She had them wired yesterday. They should have been in the hospital this morning.” Decker paused, as if just realizing something. “The cane was for real, then?”

  “It was for real. The lady was trying to walk a thin line between painkillers and alcohol the whole time she was here.”

  “Well, at least she was different. She seemed sort of nice. I liked her. Now about Ballantine. What do you say I see if I can’t dig up a pipeline into his office? There must be someone around who owes us a favor and who has inside information on that new investment group Ballantine’s put together. Right now I’m having to work with a lot of second-hand information.”

  “Go ahead, Steve. See what you can find out.” But it won’t be much, Gideon added silently. “I’m coming back tomorrow, by the way.”

  Gideon nodded to the bartender as he hung up the phone. Ballantine’s objectives were quite obvious. Gideon remembered a time when his own actions had been equally obvious. At least he’d developed some degree of finesse over the years.

  Picking up the towel he walked back toward the lobby. That afternoon when he took his second swim of the day he’d try getting the bartender to make another margarita the way he’d made them for Hannah. A change of pace from Scotch. He almost always drank Scotch. A creature of habit. He hoped Hannah Jessett’s words weren’t going to haunt him much longer. The more he thought about them, the more he found them annoying. It was all very well to tolerantly accuse Steve Decker of having difficulties adjusting to directional shifts. Somehow it wasn’t the same when it came to himself.