A ruling passion : a novel (86 page)

"You're sure it was her voice, Nick? I thought so, but..."

"I've heard her scream a few times," he said dryly. "And she had a reason to try to stop Bob from seeing us. I should have thought of that." He stirred restlessly, and stood up. "I'm going to call her again."

At the pay telephone in a corner of the room, he dialed Sybille's number and listened to it ring. "No answer." He sat beside Valerie and took her hand again. "Still driving back from a shooting spree in Falls Church."

They sat quiedy, absorbed in their thoughts. "I wonder what will happen to LUy," Valerie said. "She'll have to find a way to live on her own. I don't think ^he ever has."

Nick nodded. "She has more growing up to do than Chad."

Valerie thought about it. "I'm not sure. Lily knows a lot more then she lets on. Or she doesn't even know how much she knows. Sophie said once that Lily sounded like someone in a trance. I think she's lived that way. And now she has to wake up. Can you imagine what she'll be then? She has such power to move people; I wonder how she'll use it."

"You'll probably be a part of it, whatever it is. She adores you; do you really think she won't come to you for help? My poor darling, you'll have Chad and Lily to think about before we ever have children of our own."

Valerie smiled. "We'll figure that out."

'"We'd better do it soon. I don't want to wait; do you?"

"No, how can we? I'm thirty-four, and I've been wanting children for a long time."

"Once you weren't sure."

"Once I was very young, and didn't know what a family with you would mean to me."

They kissed gently; passion was out of place there. And then the police arrived.

They had one question: who had a reason to shoot Bob Targus and Reverend Grace? From what Valerie and Nick had told them, the sniper had gone after Targus first; he was alone when he was hit. But as soon as Reverend Grace was there, she was shot, too. So, who had it in for both of them?

"We got some eyewimesses," said one of the policemen. "There was a scream in the park, some teenage kids heard it. You probably did, too. Sounded like 'Lee,' they said; close enough to 'Lily' to make no difference. They looked over there, and they saw a woman carrying

what could have been a rifle get into a car. A Testarossa. Italian. There probably aren't a half dozen of them in the D.C. area, but you can bet every teenage boy knov^s what they look like. So we oughta be able to track that down, no trouble. You know anybody who drives a Testarossa?"

"Yes." Nick felt Valerie grip his hand more tighdy, "Her name is Sybille Enderby."

"Enderby. You hear her scream?"

"Yes. We recognized her voice."

"Who is she?"

Nick felt a wave of helplessness wash over him. Who is she? A television producer. A former wife. A mother of sorts. Possibly the power behind Graceville. A woman whose ruling passion was envy. An angry woman. "She produces The Hour of Grace' for television. Bob Targus was the pilot for the Hour of Grace corporate plane, until the plane was sold a few weeks ago. He was coming to Mrs. Sterling's house to talk about Sybille's—Mrs. Enderby's—possible involvement in a plane crash a year and a half ago."

The policeman frowned deeply. "I don't get the connection. Reverend Grace and a plane crash?"

'We're still figuring it out," Nick said. "There's a lot we don't know yet. We can't tell you anything about Sybille Enderby we're not sure of"

"Why not? Everybody else does. Give us guesses."

"No. Ask her."

"We will, don't worry about that. You know where she lives?"

"At Morgen Farms, in Middleburg."

When they left, Valerie and Nick sat close together while Rosemary skimmed magazines and murmured about Sybille, remembering when she employed Sybille's mother as her dressmaker. Sybille, just a child, always sat nearby, silent and watchfiil, playing with scraps of fabric and listening to everything that was said, intent, observant and unsmiling, as if storing everything in her memory. When Rosemary gave her clothes Valerie was tired of, she took them without a word of thanks, just a look from those strange pale eyes, until her mother reminded her, and then she would say her thanks in a short, breathless kind of way. "She gave me the shivers," Rosemary murmured. "Or am I only thinking that because of what I know about her now?"

After three hours, the doctor came. Lily had been taken to the recovery room. Her vital signs were good; she had come through the operation well. She was young and strong. And lucky. "You should go

home," the doctor said. "There's nothing more I can tell you, and you can't see her now. Tomorrow, maybe. Give us a call in the morning."

And so Nick drove through the pale, ghosdy streets of Georgetown. Home, Valerie thought.

The whole night seemed clearer to Nick now, sitting in bed while Valerie showered, than it had in the hospital. Then he had been too overwhelmed by events to think about details. Her car, he mused. A Testerossa. She had always reveled in visible signs of wealth. It probably never occurred to her that it was like carrying a red flag.

"Dad? You awake?" Chad's voice, charged with early-morning energy, came through the closed door.

"Just about." Nick pulled on a robe and opened the door.

Chad looked past him at the tumbled bed, and Valerie's slacks and striped shirt on the chair. He looked at Nick. "I didn't hear you come in."

"We were very late. Something happened last night; we want to talk to you about it. We'll be down for breakfast in fifteen minutes. I'd like you to wait for us."

"Sure. It sounds like it's something bad."

"We'll talk about it in a few minutes."

"It's not about you and Valerie, is it? I mean, you're okay?"

'We're fine. We're wonderfiil. We'll tell you about that too."

Chad shot another glance at the bed. "I guess I already know." He grinned. "That's pretty great. See you downstairs."

Nick watched him leap down the stairs, so hill of life and anticipation of a new day stretching before him that even the prospect of something bad could not slow him down. Nick's heart sank. What am I going to tell him?

"You can help," he said to Valerie when she came from the shower, a towel twisted into a turban around her head. "My God, you are so beautiful; how can I think of anything but you?"

"You're thinking of your son," she said smiling. "Keeping your priorities straight. I can help with what?"

"Talking to Chad." He watched her take clothes from her suitcase. "Fd like us to do it together."

Valerie paused. Slowly she shook her head. "I don't think you mean that. I think you'd like to talk to him alone. There's nothing I can do to help, Nick; I can't tell Chad how to feel about his mother, and I can't tell you how to talk to him about her. Anything I say would be irrelevant."

"You're never irrelevant. But you're right; this has to be between us.

You're a wise lady." He held her briefly, her cool body against his warm one, her slender strength molding itself to him. Then he let her go. "I'll take a quick shower and get down there. Do you want to wait here.>"

"I'll go upstairs and see how Mother is. We'll be down later."

So Nick was alone when he walked into the kitchen ten minutes later. Chad's face fell. "Where's Valerie?"

"She'll be here soon. Good morning, Elena," Nick said as Elena finished squeezing oranges and handed him a glass of juice. He sat beside Chad on a cushioned banquette at the maple table in the breakfast room. "Her mother stayed here last night, on the third floor, and Valerie wanted to spend some time with her and bring her down to breakfast so she wouldn't feel strange."

"Her mother? Whafs she here for?"

"Something happened at their house last night. I was with them." He watched absendy as Elena put a plate of pancakes and a thermos of coffee in front of him, and refilled Chad's plate.

"I'll be in the pantry," she said. "Call me if you want me."

"So what's this all about?" Chad demanded through a mouthful of pancakes.

"It's about Graceville," Nick began slowly. He saw Chad stiffen, pause in his eating, then go on, chewing steadily. But Nick knew he was listening. 'Tou've been watching all the news reports about television ministries; you know what's going on. There's evidence that the Foundation that runs Graceville may be guilty of the same kind of fraud, and maybe a few other kinds as well. We don't know—"

"So is this about Mother too?"

'We don't know for sure. We think it is."

"She doesn't do things like Tammy Bakker does, like they showed on tv... you know, she had this air-conditioned doghouse and her closet was as big as my bedroom, bigger maybe, and it had this huge chandefier thing... Mother doesn't have any stuff like that."

"I'm sure she doesn't. I don't know how she spends her money, Chad, but there does seem to be evidence that she and some others are involved in a scheme to take money from Graceville, and the Foundation that runs it, for their own use. Thafs all anybody knows right now. But a lot of people are going to be investigating it, and the more they learn, the more attention television and the newspapers will give it. You know how that works. Nobody can hide when that happens. Sybille can't, and you can't. You have to figure it's going to be a tough time."

Chad speared the last piece of pancake with his fork and carefully swirled it around his plate, making a pattern in the syrup. "That's what happened last night? You heard about all this stuff)"

"No. That was something else."

"Are you going to eat your pancakes?"

Nick smiled, and slid his plate to Chad. "I'm not too hungry. It's better if they help fill your bottomless pit. Chad, this story goes back a long way. There was a time, about a year and a half ago, when Sybille wanted to stop somebody from being at a meeting in Washington. He was going to fly there, and she had someone put water in the fuel tanks of his plane, not to hurt him, just to delay him. He'd have to have a mechanic look at the plane, to find out if something serious was wrong with it, and then drain and refill the tanks. All that would take a while. The tragic thing was, he didn't do a proper check of his plane before he took off", so he didn't find the water. A little while after he was airborne, his plane crashed, and he was killed."

Chad was shoveling pancakes into his mouth. "Yeh," he said.

Nick watched his son as he resolutely kept eating. He watched Chad and felt the pain beneath that singleminded eating, and fought back tears. "The man who was killed was Valerie's husband, Carlton Sterling. Just yesterday. Bob Targus, the man who put the water in the tanks, finally decided to tell people what he'd done, and he was on his way to Valerie's house, to tell her. Sybille found out about it. And she wanted to stop him, just as she'd wanted to stop Carlton."

Chad had finished his pancakes. He sat still, his head down, staring at his empty plate. "Yeh," he said.

"This is terrible to talk about, Chad, but you have to hear it. If I don't tell you, some stranger will, and that would be the worst thing of all. I'd like to make you understand it all, but a lot of it I don't understand myself. We're going to have to work at that together. Are you following me?"

Chad's head was down. "Yeh."

"Something happened to Sybille in the past year. She was never a particularly gende person, you know that, but she had good control of herself and could get along in all kind of situations, with all kinds of people. But in the past year she seemed to change, as if she was going on a downward path, as if she had an illness that she couldn't control. Before, when she wanted to stop Carlton, she only tried to delay him. When she wanted to stop Bob Targus, she tried to kill him with a rifle."

"She did not!" Chad glared at his father. "She wouldn't... she

wouldn't try to.. .she wouldn^t! And you know it, too! I bet she didn't do any of that stuff! People tell lies about her; she told me that. She said people are jealous of her and they tell lies; she told me all about it."

"I didn't want to believe it, either," Nick said. "And I'd rather have kept it from you. But nothing that's happened with Sybille is the kind of news that can be kept quiet. She always wanted to make big stories, and now she's created a story that stretches so far, and touches so many people, I'm afraid ifs going to be broadcast everywhere. I can't stop that. All I can do is help you deal with it."

Chad shook his head stubbornly. "I don't have to. Ifs all lies, anyway."

"No. Chad, listen to me." Nick put his arm around him, but Chad angrily shrugged it off. "Look, this is going to be hard enough for us to get through, without pretending. Sybille has spent a lifetime pretending, and we're not going to do that; it never works. She tried to live as if the world was a big painting she kept changing as she went along, covering up some things, adding others, moving people and scenes from one place to another, and then painting over everything to make it look as if it was always that way. That's not how we're going to live. Ifs the way children Hve, and adults who never grow up, and it leads to anger, and sometimes tragedy, because the time always comes when you can't paint over something and make your life look the way you want it to look, and when that happens you try to find someone to blame, and you want to punish and hurt that person because you're not happy and somebody has to pay for it. You and I are going to live in the world as we find it, Chad. Some things we can change and some we can ignore, but most things we have to live with, in the best way we know how. Sybille never seemed to learn that."

'Well, if she's so terrible why did you marry her in the first place?" Chad yelled.

Nick hesitated. He and Chad had talked about this before. But he knew that children forget stories if they hear them when they are too young to absorb them and incorporate them into their experience. Each time they went over this, Chad would remember more, until one day he would remember the whole of it, and perhaps be satisfied.

"I was young, and she was different then," he said at last, and wondered how many millions of men and women said those same weary words, trying to explain a bad marriage. "She had a fierce drive to succeed, to get past the poverty she'd known and to make herself famous and influential. I admired that because I was pretty much the