Sweet Revenge

by Fern Michaels

“Wonderful!” Nealy beamed.

  Three days later, on a cold but bright and sunny February afternoon, the ladies of Pinewood sat around the kitchen table eating lunch while they waited for Myra and Charles to get back from their trip.

  “Are you sure it’s the same Nealy Diamond, the one who won the Triple Crown?” Alexis asked.

  Nikki laughed. “The one and the same — and she’s agreed to help us with Isabelle’s mission. Only her name these days is Nealy Littletree. And yes, she rode her horses to the Triple Crown, not once but twice. The first woman to do it, too! The town will turn out the red carpet for her since this is horse country. She’s a great lady. I only met her twice but she sure is a woman you never forget. Being in the horse business and all, I’m hoping she might know or maybe have heard something about the Barringtons.”

  “I don’t understand, what can she possibly do for Isabelle?” Alexis asked.

  “Window dressing. Photo ops for Isabelle. It’s Myra’s PR machine kicking in. To make Rosemary livid in the hopes she does something stupid. It will be obvious to everyone that Isabelle will have the inside track. That will make Rosemary green with envy. She’s going to start poking around, trying to find out how Isabelle got back on her feet and how she got her license reinstated. Since she’s the devil in the woodwork, wouldn’t you be a little nervous as well as angry that the woman you ruined is back on top?” Nikki said. “Myra is hosting a dinner party at the Silver Swan to kick off this huge endeavor, and will invite every notable she can find. Even the governor. Photo opportunities out the kazoo. Rosemary’s invitation will conveniently get lost in the mail only to arrive in her mailbox after the dinner party. How’s that for devious?”

  The women laughed for a long time.

  Three

  The sign outside the building was simple and stark with a single name on it: Rosemary Hershey. Anyone caring enough to wonder who Rosemary Hershey was had to enter the building and ask the skinny receptionist with the see-through hair and fake nails. If Rosemary was within earshot of the person doing the questioning, her reply was always succinct: “K.I.S.S.” Keep It Simple, Stupid. Then she’d blow an airy kiss to the person who had asked the question and walk away.

  Bobby Harcourt didn’t like the sign and had had many heated conversations with his wife about his name not being on it even though he was a full partner. During each one of those conversations, Rosemary would remind her husband that she’d used her settlement money to buy the building and start up her own firm. Bobby had been in the picture at the time of the accident and she’d made him buy into her firm, but by that point the sign had already been commissioned and there was no room for his name on it.

  Bobby had gone along with the whole thing because of the bedroom gymnastics. But, as in most cases, even that side of things had worn thin and he’d later married Rosemary and bought into her firm because it seemed reasonable at the time. Now, though, the whole thing was starting to get under his skin. He was a damn good architect and had made Architect of the Year two years in a row. Rosemary had won the award once. He was the workhorse of the firm and Rosemary was the show horse. Filly, if you will. All three plaques hung in the lobby of their office building.

  Bobby no longer looked at the sign on the door or the plaques on the lobby wall. Today, just as on every other day, he entered the building, the morning paper tucked under his arm, and headed straight for his office with its spectacular view of the Washington Monument.

  He stopped at the receptionist’s desk for his messages, hating how sleazy the young woman looked. He’d spoken to Rosemary about the receptionist’s appearance and all she’d done was cluck her tongue and ask him if he wanted a lawsuit on his hands. It wasn’t just the way the young woman looked, it was her stupid name as well. Sasha. No one named their kid Sasha except maybe a Russian mother. This Sasha was from Mud Creek, Mississippi. White trash, all ninety pounds of her. He rather suspected that Rosemary kept her on because Sasha made her look beautiful, which she was, but she was also a cold, relentless, heartless bitch of a woman. He’d found that out as soon as the honeymoon was over, much to his regret.

  Bobby looked at his watch. Ten-fifteen. Time to ruin his wife’s day. He smiled as he crossed the hall to her suite of offices. He rapped on the door and opened it without waiting for a response.

  “Got a minute, Rosemary?”

  “Yeah, sure. How’d the Rotary breakfast go? Any gossip?”

  Bobby looked at his beautiful wife. Spun sugar candy was what she always reminded him of. No matter what time of the day or night, she always looked like she just stepped out of a bandbox. Perfectly coiffed, expertly made up, exquisitely dressed, subtle perfume that never seemed to fade, and always with her twenty-four-carat smile that was as phony as the caps on her pearly white teeth.

  “Actually, I did hear quite a bit of gossip,” he said, feeling smug, “but you aren’t going to like it. You know, Rosemary, it was your turn to do the Rotary breakfast this month.”

  “Oh, poo, you good old boys didn’t need me there. All you do is tell risqué jokes and pretend to shock me. So, what’s the gossip? And for heaven’s sake, why won’t I like it?”

  Bobby shrugged inside his tweed jacket. “Because, my darling, it has to do with Isabelle Flanders and we both know how much you despise her.”

  If he was expecting a reaction, he wasn’t disappointed. Rosemary stopped what she was doing and just glared at him. Bobby thought for a minute that she looked frozen! But she recovered quickly. “That crazy woman, What did she do now?”

  “Evidently something good. The Queen of England commissioned her to design some kind of memorial. She did get her license reinstated a while back. I saw it in the newsletter, so you must have seen it too, even though we never discussed it. Roscoe Cummings, who heads up the realty board, said Isabelle signed a lease on some very impressive office space. She’s got contractors working round the clock. Roscoe said, and this is a direct quote, ‘Her offices will make yours look like a dump, Bobby.’”

  “Really?”

  Tongue in cheek, Bobby said, “Really. Terry McGovern said he spoke to Isabelle one day last week about some of the furnishings she’s buying — which, by the way, according to Terry, are the high end of high. Lots of plush furniture, paintings, tons of marble and mahogany. He said it’s probably costing her about three hundred grand just to outfit the place. Nine rooms in all, so you can imagine the kind of rent she’ll be paying. Rumor has it she paid for a full year in advance. But it’s just a rumor. Max Turgold said he heard Isabelle enticed two heavy-hitters from New York to join the firm and another guy from California who is hotter than hot. They’re bringing along their own roster of clients. Guess Isabelle hit the mother lode. If all that’s true, this outfit is peanuts compared to what she’s starting out with. Guess we better look to our laurels.”

  Rosemary fingered a set of blueprints but Bobby could see she was upset. “Wait till they find out about her past,” she snarled.

  Bobby wagged one of his fingers. “Now it’s funny you should say that. Roscoe said everyone knows about it; Isabelle didn’t pull any punches. She’s got beaucoup bucks so who cares? And the rumor is that now that she has all those beaucoup bucks, she’s talking about reopening her case. She said she was shafted. I always thought the same thing myself,” he added slyly. “You know why I always thought that, Rosemary?” Not bothering to wait for a response, he continued. “Because Isabelle never drank. She was a one glass of wine kind of person and she never even finished that. Sometimes she’d have a beer and she’d never finish that, either. Yet, they said she was drunk. They said it because you told them that.”

  Rosemary bared her teeth. “The next thing you’ll be telling me is you made a mistake dumping Isabelle and marrying me. She was drunk that day. Go check the police report. They did blood alcohol tests on her.”

  Bobby ignored this. “See ya. Gotta get ready to go to that Pioneer luncheon, unless you want to take my place.”

  “For Go
d’s sake, you just had breakfast. All right, I’ll go, you weasel,” Rosemary snarled.

  Bobby walked across the hall to his office, closed the door and flopped down on his ergonomic chair. He felt lower than a snake’s belly at his sense of satisfaction. He should have walked out of his marriage and this partnership a long time ago. Bobby Harcourt, last one out of the gate. His claim to fame.

  He thought about Isabelle then because he always thought about Isabelle when he was unhappy. They’d had a good thing going back then. Back then. Isabelle with the laughing eyes and ready smile. Workaholic Isabelle. Isabelle who never drank. He’d tried telling that to the police, but they wouldn’t listen to him. He’d testified in court, but no one had believed him. They didn’t believe him when he said Isabelle was a cautious driver and would never have run a stop sign. They didn’t believe him when he said Isabelle would never steal someone else’s work. Of course, he’d testified after Rosemary. Poor, poor Rosemary with her injuries, wearing all those different braces, crying into a lacy handkerchief. With nine men on the jury, Isabelle was dead in the water.

  He’d tried to visit Isabelle in the hospital but he hadn’t been permitted to see her because he wasn’t family. He didn’t know until much later that she’d almost died with pneumonia. After the trial, Isabelle went off somewhere to lick her wounds. He’d tried everything he could to find her but she seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. Little did he know at the time that she had just moved across town.

  Wounded to the quick over Isabelle’s rejection, he’d allowed himself to wallow in Rosemary’s attention. Before he knew what was happening, he was having a torrid affair with her that was more about lust than anything else.

  Bobby looked at his day planner. Meetings out the kazoo. Screw the new clients. They now had so many they couldn’t handle them all. He called through to the secretary he shared with Rosemary.

  “Cancel all my appointments. I’ll be back by three o’clock. If Rosemary wants to know where I am, tell her something came up. If she needs me for anything, tell her to call my cell phone.” Bobby reached for his overcoat and left the office. Brad Olsen was an old friend. He’d see him even if he had to cancel someone else to fit him in. It was time to find out where he stood legally, both business-wise and marriage-wise. His gut told him it was time to bail out. Something was going on and he sure as hell didn’t want to be around when it all went down.

  Rosemary tugged at her short powder-blue skirt before she opened the door to the meeting room at the Holiday Inn. If there was one thing she hated it was these civic meetings where everyone had to make nice to each other and then, when the meeting was over, the little cliques tore each other to pieces. The meeting was nothing more than a gossip session under the guise of what’s-new-in-our-field.

  The Pioneer Club dated back to the 1930s when Cyrus Canfield, the town’s leading architect, formed it after being forced into retirement at the age of seventy-three. It was a way for Cyrus to keep his hand in the business and to stay as up-to-date as he could with the young whippersnappers who were fighting tooth and nail for their share of the building boom. When the club first met, it boasted seven members. Today there were a good three hundred — not that they all showed up at these little monthly luncheons, where everyone had to pay for their own lunch and drinks. It was still a gossip session and most of today’s members were young in comparison to Cyrus Canfield and his original band of retired architects.

  These days the Pioneers allowed women, but only because Sadie Longberry had filed a discrimination suit against them. Sadie had said in her lawsuit that even on her worst day she could outthink, outrun, outwork and outdrink any member of the Pioneers and that just because she was a woman they had no right to exclude her. Judge Cornelia Easter had heard the case. She had agreed with Sadie and had ordered each member of the club to pay Sadie two hundred dollars. Sadie walked away with a little over twenty-four grand. Then she did what any red-blooded fifty-year-old woman would do. She got a facelift and perky breast implants and managed to find a toy boy hot enough to melt her brand-new acrylic nails, and all within three weeks. Then she took the rest of the money and ran full-page ads in the local paper denouncing the Pioneer Club until the money ran out. And she never once set foot in a Pioneer Club meeting. Sadie then proceeded to form her own organization that boasted four hundred active members. Isabelle Flanders had been president four years running. Bobby was the treasurer. Rosemary had never joined.

  Rosemary gave her mini skirt another tug and plastered a smile on her face before she entered the room. She was aware instantly of two things. One, the tension was high. Two, Maggie Spritzer from the Post was sitting at the table munching on a chunk of cheese right next to the Post’s star reporter, Ted Robinson. Because the meetings were always as boring as the lunch itself, the reporters usually opted to call the president after the meeting to find out if anything new or noteworthy had gone on. She looked a little farther down the long table and was stunned to see the Chronicle’s leading reporter, Zack Elderman. Her belly did a flip-flop.

  Her smile intact, her expensive perfume wafting about, Rosemary greeted everyone at the table as she took her seat. This was not going to be an ordinary meeting of the Pioneer Club.

  Toby Wiseman brought the meeting to order. He whittled away at the dry, boring business on his agenda before he finally said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, there’s a new game in town with a whole new bunch of players. We’re all going to have to watch our p’s and q’s from here on in.”

  “What are you talking about, Toby?” Rosemary asked, as if she didn’t know the identity of this new player in town.

  “I’m talking about Isabelle Flanders. Surely you heard. It’s all over town. My God, woman, the Queen herself has commissioned Isabelle to do some sort of memorial for Buckingham Palace. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

  Rosemary feigned indifference. “Oh, that,” she drawled. “I’m not impressed. I wonder whose work she’ll steal this time to pass off as her own. I’d like someone to tell me how she got her license back.”

  “Oh, I can tell you that, Miss Hershey,” Maggie Spritzer chirped. “The board only suspended her license for five years and gave her a two-hundred-thousand-dollar fine. The board said they wouldn’t give back the license until she paid the fine. Miss Flanders paid the fine, and then donated another fifty thousand dollars to the board to disperse to ailing and retired architects housed in the nursing home you all had built years ago. The board lifted the suspension five months ahead of schedule and Miss Flanders is back in business. I’m surprised you didn’t know that. It was in the paper last week.”

  Ted Robinson flipped open a dog-eared notebook and said, with relish, “Miss Flanders issued a statement through her office manager. While I don’t want to quote her verbatim, what she said in essence is this: ‘I’m back and I remember all the people, my colleagues, who turned away from me when the case against me was circumstantial at best. I’m reopening my old case because the statute of limitations has not run out.’ In the meantime, she plans to aggressively seek new business for her new firm. She also said that all those people who testified against her had better hire some damn fine attorneys because she’s going to war.”

  The smile on Rosemary’s face finally slipped away. “Why are you all looking at me like that? If Isabelle wants to go after everyone involved in that ugly mess, let her. I certainly have nothing to hide. A jury found her guilty and saw fit to award me compensation for my injuries. The board revoked her license, not me. The woman is just another architect like the rest of us. She’s no Frank Lloyd Wright, for God’s sake.”

  Ted Robinson looked down at his notebook. “According to Miss Flanders’s spokesperson, Miss Flanders used the word ‘perjury’ quite a few times when preparing her statement. However, she didn’t name names. Is there anyone here who would like to make a comment?”

  “Don’t insult me,” Rosemary said. She looked around the table, mentally counting all the
men she’d slept with over the past five years. She noticed they had a hard time meeting her gaze.

  Tamara Wheatley, a mousy woman with thin hair and oversized glasses, leaned toward the two reporters. “Do either of you know if it’s true that Myra Rutledge bought the Barrington farm and is going to turn it into something like that famous racing farm in Kentucky? I think it’s called Blue Diamond. Owned by the woman who won the Triple Crown. I heard that she’s a personal friend of Mrs. Rutledge and she’s called on her for help. Supposedly she’s going to be asking for bids from all of us. If what I’ve heard is true, that’s a hundred-million-dollar project. Possibly more. That’s going to be fodder for the newspapers for months to come.”

  Rosemary felt sick to her stomach. She reached for a piece of cheese she didn’t want. She could feel the heat of the moment start to creep up her neck into her face.

  “It’s true,” Maggie Spritzer said. “Mrs. Rutledge is going to close on the Barrington property sometime this week. I called her myself yesterday and she confirmed it. She said she’s going to host a dinner party at the Silver Swan and will be inviting all the dignitaries, the governor, and all you architects so she can tell you what she wants in person. She said Nealy Diamond Clay will be in attendance to further elaborate on what is needed.” Maggie looked around at the shocked and awed expressions on everyone’s face. “I’m surprised none of you knew this. Would anyone care to give me a quote, make a comment?”

  Rosemary nibbled on the cheese in her hand. She wondered what her voice would sound like if she made a comment. She decided silence was her best friend.

  Carla Peabody said, “Aside from the dinner at the Silver Swan with some dignitaries, what makes this deal so spectacular? Of course, my firm will submit a bid, but why this huge interest? Myra Rutledge is a wealthy woman and does stuff like this all the time. A racing stable is not new to the state of Virginia.”