by Judy Duarte
Walter surged to his feet. “Shut your mouth, boy, or I’ll shut it for you. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were stirring up trouble just for the hell of it.”
The silence streamed like a force field throughout the gracious room, binding the five of them in a miasma of anger and resentment and dislike.
“Yeah,” Rowan muttered. “Maybe that’s exactly what I’ve done. After all, I’m the black sheep of the whole bunch, aren’t I?” He glanced at his sisters, then at Cade. “He’s like a spider, wrapping everyone in his web of control. I’d advise all of you to get out while you still can. That’s what I’m going to do.”
“Rowan,” Emily began worriedly.
“Don’t say anything, Em,” their younger brother said bitterly. “Nothing would convince me to stay. I’m outta here, like forever.”
With that he left them, going down the hall and out the back door without a backward glance. In less than a minute, the roar of his motorcycle blasted the house from the driveway, then faded into the night.
“Father,” Jessica said. “I think you’ve gone too far this time.” She rose and set her cup and saucer aside, but gently. “Rowan won’t forgive you, and neither will I.”
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before I ask for forgiveness from my own children,” Walter said coldly.
“Fine. I’m glad we had this little chat.” Smiling rather defiantly she, too, left.
Cade stood. “You ready to go, Em?”
“Yes.” Her lips trembled slightly as she tried to smile. “I’ll say good night to Wheelie.”
“Send Stacy out, will you?”
“Yes.”
When they were alone, Cade turned to his father. “Is the house of Parks in trouble?” he asked, unable to hide the sardonic tone. “As your attorney, I need to know.”
“No,” Walter snapped. “Nothing’s wrong. I’ll explain things to Rowan next time I see him.”
“I think,” Cade murmured, heading for the door when he heard Stacy’s voice in the hall, “that might be a long time. Stacy, come say good night to your grandfather.”
When he and his daughter arrived home, Cade breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t know what the mess was, but he was damned sure his family was in deep.
After putting Stacy to bed, he went out on the back deck. The town house next door was completely dark.
Hell, he wasn’t fit company tonight, anyway.
“I beg your pardon?” Sara said, staring at the principal of the Lakeside School for the Gifted on Monday morning. The woman’s words made no sense.
“We are no longer in need of your services,” her boss said again, her voice a monotone as if she read aloud from a dull script.
“Are you saying I’m fired?” Sara demanded in disbelief. “You can’t fire me without cause. I have a contract.”
The woman hesitated. “There’s a clause in it relating to student enrollment.”
“I have a full class.”
“You’ll receive payment for the semester, of course,” the principal continued as if Sara hadn’t spoken. “The secretary has the check. You may pick it up when you collect your things and sign out.”
Sara started to protest further, but realized from the closed face across the desk that it was useless. Rising, she nodded with what dignity she could muster and went to clear her desk before classes started.
Fortunately she didn’t have much this early in the school year. The supplies fit in one box that she could easily carry the three blocks to her town house.
When she went to the office to collect her check and sign out, Rachel was there, two bright red spots of anger in her cheeks. “I just heard,” she said to Sara. “What is this all about?”
Sara shrugged. The school secretary pretended she couldn’t hear a thing. She handed Sara an envelope and observed while she signed herself out. Under “reason for leaving campus,” Sara put a question mark.
Rachel escorted her from the office to the front sidewalk. “This isn’t right.”
“No, but there’s nothing we can do.” Sara managed a smile. “You’d better go to your class. I don’t want you in trouble because of me.”
Her friend dismissed the thought with a wave. “I thought you and Cade were getting along rather well. Why would he have you fired?”
The question shocked Sara. “He wouldn’t—”
She and Rachel stared at each other.
“Do you think Cade would have done this?” Sara asked after a moment of strained silence.
“Who else? He’s on the board of directors. You know we always need good teachers. The old bat would sign away her soul before letting someone out of a contract, not to mention paying them a whole semester’s salary for nothing.”
Sara touched Rachel’s shoulder, comforted that her friend was angry and indignant on her behalf. “Well, I suppose I’d better go before I get thrown off campus.”
“I’ll see you tonight. Let’s go out to dinner,” Rachel said. “Call your brother and see if he can come. We need to have a strategy meeting.”
“Not tonight. Later this week. I’ll call you,” Sara promised, needing privacy to lick the wounds inflicted by this blow.
When Rachel nodded and retreated to her classroom, Sara started home. Glancing back as she approached the street corner, she saw a stranger standing at her classroom door, smiling and answering questions from the students when they realized Sara wasn’t there.
She would have to return at three o’clock to pick up Stacy. Then…then sometime this evening she would tell Cade Parks exactly what she thought of him and his lying, conniving family. Like Rachel, she was convinced they were the ones who’d arranged this humiliation.
A frigid resolve entered her soul. She’d let herself get distracted by Cade and his charm, had fallen for his daughter and even thought she was falling for him, but she wouldn’t be that foolish again.
Cade smiled at the warm leap of his heart when he pulled into the drive on his side of the duplex at nearly seven o’clock that evening. Home. And his two favorite girls waiting for him. He was eager to see them.
His day had been spent in a wrangle over a property settlement that had gone to civil court. Two brothers had started a business together. Now they’d had a falling-out. Such was the wisdom of doing business with family members.
As soon as the garage door was open, he pulled inside, parked and leaped up the steps leading to the kitchen.
“Hey, anybody home?” he called.
“We’re here,” Stacy responded. “We’re drawing.”
He tossed his suit coat and tie aside, then rolled up the sleeves of his shirt on the way to the deck. One glance at Sara chilled the warm glow inside him.
Although she was smiling, her eyes were as opaque as the cheap jade sold in tourist shops.
After going through the greeting ritual with his daughter, he turned to their neighbor. She held an artist’s sketch book in her lap. On it was a pencil drawing of Stacy sitting on the deck railing, the city behind her and the Golden Gate Bridge beyond that.
“That’s very good,” he said, pausing beside her. “I didn’t know you were an artist.”
“I dabble,” she said. “I’m not anywhere as good as your sister. I saw some of her work at a gallery today.”
He tried to put all these pieces together and come up with a coherent picture. “Did you take your class on a field trip?”
She shook her head.
“We had a sub’tute,” Stacy told him. “I didn’t like her as much as Sara. None of us did.”
“Substitute,” he automatically corrected. “Sara is Miss Carlton to you,” he reminded the child.
“She said I could call her by her first name since she isn’t going to be my teacher anymore.”
While his daughter gave Sara a disapproving glance for this latter sin, Cade added this information into the mix and still came up with a jumble. “This isn’t making sense.”
“I’m no longer employed at Lakeside,” Sara in
formed him, her manner casual, her gaze cold.
The icy surety of knowing what was to come hit him like a flash flood in winter. “Why?”
She shrugged. “Apparently the class size wasn’t big enough to sustain an extra teacher. That was the clause invoked to let me go. The good news is they gave me a check for my salary for the rest of this term. Nice, huh?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said, giving his neighbor a pointed perusal to assure her he meant to get to the bottom of this mystery.
Sara nodded, her head bent over the sketch as she went back to shading it with pencil strokes.
Stacy looked from one adult to the other. Cade knew his sharp-minded daughter had picked up on the undertones between him and Sara. It was time for a distraction.
“I’m starved,” he said. “Let’s go out for dinner.”
“Sara and I already ate,” Stacy told him, bridging the tense silence between the other two. “We had ice cream after school, and Sara got to meet Mrs. Ling. When Mrs. Ling held Mrs. Chong up next to Sara, their eyes were almost ’xactly the same. Raymond was there, too. He’s in my class. Then we had Chinese.”
Cade sorted through this information. Raymond was Mrs. Ling’s grandson. Mrs. Chong was her cat, whose eyes indeed were as green as Sara’s. The cat was also as aloof as Sara appeared at the moment.
“We got Chinese take-out,” Sara clarified. “There’s plenty left in the refrigerator for you.” She stood. “I have some work to do. I’ll see you in the morning, Stacy.”
“Okay,” Stacy said.
“Wait a minute.” Cade tried to suppress his frustration while Sara gazed at him as if they were perfect strangers. Aware of his daughter taking every word in, he changed his mind about an interrogation at the moment. “I can drop Stace off on my way to work. There’s no need for you to go to the trouble.”
“As you wish.”
With a nod to each of them, she sailed into her side of the mansion and closed the door.
“Do you think Sara is mad?” Stacy asked.
“I suspect she’s tired. Come on, you can keep me company while I eat. Then it’s bath time for you.”
They went inside. By the time Stacy was in bed and sleeping like the angel children are purported to be, Cade was chomping at the bit to go next door and see what the hell was happening.
Sara thought of staying in her bedroom and not answering the door when she heard Cade’s knock at the back of the house later that night. Reviewing her feelings as she went downstairs, she decided she was fine, all emotion bottled up and locked away.
“Come in,” she said, standing back from the door after opening it at his impatient second knock.
She noticed he had the receiver for the monitor he kept in Stacy’s room hooked to his belt. A thoughtful father, she scoffed. He looked after his own.
She sat in one of the chairs. He took the other.
The space between them, where the coffee table resided, was as wide as a canyon.
“What’s happened?” he asked quietly.
“Nothing.” At his ominous frown, she shrugged. “I was fired this morning. My services are no longer needed was the way it was put to me.”
He regarded her with narrow-eyed scrutiny, then a light dawned in his eyes. “You think I had something to do with it.”
She ignored the disbelief in his voice. “I’m positive of it.” She wrapped her arms tightly across her middle as a shield from the tremors that had invaded her.
“Sara—”
“Was it your idea or your father’s?” she asked, letting the glacier that had formed inside her penetrate her entire being, allowing icicles to coat each word.
Cade observed her without answering.
“It doesn’t matter. I know where we stand now. I was distracted over the weekend,” she admitted, the bitterness of the previous winter entering her soul. “But that won’t happen again.”
He rose. She did, too.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“The mighty Parks family,” she said scathingly. “You can have me fired, but nothing will stop Tyler and me from finding out the truth. We’re not helpless children anymore, and we have friends in the city. You had better not try the same tactics on my brother.”
The pleasant room filled with raging silence as they studied each other like opponents in a boxing ring. It would be a bare-knuckle battle to the finish, and only one of them would be standing at its end. That survivor would be her.
“What truth are you searching for?” he asked with a deadly calm that might have frightened her had she not been sure of her ground.
“The one involving my father, Jeremy Carlton, and your father, Walter Parks…the honorable Walter Parks,” she mocked softly, “who was a liar, a thief, a seducer of other men’s wives, a diamond smuggler…”
“Don’t leave anything out,” Cade invited when she paused, his voice as expressionless as his face.
She inhaled carefully, sensing his cold fury, then said, “Walter Parks, my father’s partner. And his murderer.”
Chapter Eight
Cade walked unannounced into Walter Parks’s office at nine o’clock the following morning. The secretary followed uneasily behind him. “Mr. Parks is on a conference call,” she repeated. “He isn’t to be disturbed.”
“It’s all right, Connie,” Walter said, placing the receiver on the hook. “I’m through with the call. Please close the door.” It was an order, not a request.
She did so.
“Did I forget an appointment?” Walter asked.
Cade shook his head. “I have one question. Did you have Sara Carlton fired?” He knew the answer by the way his father’s eyes darted away from him. “You did.”
Walter shrugged. “I suggested to one of the directors that her services weren’t needed.”
“What else?” Cade demanded.
“Nothing.”
The older man was lying. Cade knew it in his gut. The blood pounded through his temples at a furious pace. “What else?” he asked again.
“I suggested she might have an unsavory background, which she does,” his father insisted at his snort of fury. “Her mother was an unstable person.”
“Unstable,” Cade repeated. “The way my mother was unstable and had to be sent away?”
“Not like that,” Walter hedged. “Not exactly. Marla was given to depression and hysteria. She, uh, took things more seriously than warranted.”
Cade digested the statement. “Such as the affair you had with her?” he asked softly, icy coldness joining the white-hot anger in his blood as he observed the familiar signs of anger in his father.
“I was not involved with her. Anyone who says so is a liar.” A pulse pounded out of control in Walter’s temple as his face suffused with color. “I suppose you’ve been listening to Marla’s daughter.”
Cade shoved his hands in his pockets and sat on the corner of the desk in a casual manner. “Yeah. We had an interesting conversation last night. She thought I’d gotten her dismissed and wanted to know if it had been my idea or yours.”
Walter frowned. “What did you tell her?”
“Since I knew nothing of it, I didn’t tell her anything.”
“Good. Keep your mouth shut and this will all blow over in a day or two.” He looked pleased.
“The way her father’s death did twenty-five years ago?” Cade asked, keeping his tone neutral, his voice low.
There was a slight jerk to his father’s hand before he waved it in dismissal. “That’s ancient history. The police investigated thoroughly and concluded it was an accident.”
“A convenient one,” Cade murmured.
The flush spread from Walter’s neck to his face. “What the hell are you suggesting?”
“You tell me.”
The older man planted both hands on his desk and viewed Cade with narrow-eyed scrutiny. “Don’t let the fact that you’ve got the hots for the girl get in the way of your thinking,” he warned
.
“So you had nothing to do with Jeremy Carlton’s death?”
“No. It was like I told the police. We’d all had too much to drink while celebrating the new enterprise. I went to sleep. When I woke up, adrift on the tide, I barely got the yacht cranked up in time to avoid breaking up on some rocks. Jeremy was a fool to take the boat out on his own. We could have both drowned.”
Cade considered the scenario painted by his father. It jibed with the police reports. But then, those reports used Walter’s story to describe what happened. He shook his head slightly, not liking the way his thoughts were going or the faint shadow of doubt that nibbled at the edges of his mind.
“I can’t believe my own son would ask me such a question,” his father said, his voice rough with pain. “That was a horrible year, first with Jeremy’s death and all the questions about it, then your mother’s illness coming on top of that. With four children to raise, I was at my wit’s end.”
Cade felt a jab of guilt at bringing up old memories. “It was lucky we had Mrs. Wheeler by then,” he said, recalling it had been the motherly widow who’d tucked them into bed at night and listened to their prayers.
“It was,” Walter agreed. “With the business tangle to sort out after Jeremy’s death, I had all I could do to keep the company solvent. Some of the diamonds we’d purchased were missing. We never found them.”
“Sara and her brother think you kept the ones their father had bought.”
Walter shrugged. “They would only see things from Marla’s point of view. She even accused me of smuggling gems. Why would I do that when I had a perfectly legitimate business in diamond trading? The woman was crazy.”
Cade mulled over the odds of there being two crazy women involved in the same scandal.
His father came around the desk and threw an arm around his shoulders. “I don’t know what Marla’s kids think they hope to prove by stirring up the past, but I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. I can assure you of that. You got time for lunch today?”
“Uh, not today,” Cade said. “I’m swamped.”
