Crossroads (24 page)

Stan picked up the child’s book and took it back to the shelf. He’d learned to live with his suspicions about Jeff Henry—mostly because he trusted his wife’s integrity so much. But he had never really settled in and become gung ho about working at JeffSon. He hadn’t joined the company baseball team, and he didn’t go to the morning motivational meetings. He was probably the only person working at the place who had not taken advantage of his stock option plan. The money he’d been paid for his business had been socked away in a money market account. He hadn’t spent any of it, because in spite of everything he still couldn’t forget Cassandra’s warning. For two years he’d been waiting for something dire to happen at JeffSon. At the very least, he worried that he’d be fired and he and Gwen would need his money until he was back on his feet.

But in the last couple of weeks he’d decided he was being ridiculous. JeffSon had just been named one of the top ten companies in the country in
Fortune
magazine for the second year in a row. All around him his colleagues who had invested in the company were making out like bandits and his money was earning peanuts. It was time to accept the fact that he was a member of the damn JeffSon family—no matter how phony that sounded to him—and he wasn’t going anywhere. It was time to stop hoarding his money, and buy JeffSon stock. And it was time to buy a house for Gwen. He’d told her to start looking, and she’d already found a place she liked. In fact, she was going to meet him today for lunch and show him some brochures from the real estate agency that handled the property. He checked his watch; he had two hours before he was supposed to meet her downstairs in the lobby.

On his desk was a preliminary draft for one of the newsletters JeffSon released to keep its shareholders—and potential shareholders—informed about the company. Usually Stan skipped reading these things because he considered them nothing more than puff pieces, but this day he was too restless to deal with the paperwork that cluttered his desk. Besides, if he was planning to buy JeffSon stock, he told himself he probably should read up on the company.

Twenty minutes later, deeply troubled, he put the newsletter down and turned on his computer. There were some numbers he wanted to check.

Chapter Thirty-one

A
s the small jet circled the airport and prepared to land, Jeff looked out the window at the city below him. He’d always considered Wrights town his good luck charm, the place where great things happened to him. So how had everything gone so desperately wrong? He turned his gaze to the interior of his private plane. This was his third, but he could still remember when he’d bought his first. He’d been coveting one . . . no,
lusting
for one . . . but he hadn’t been able to overcome his puritanical background enough to actually make the purchase. Jewel had convinced him to do it. Now he couldn’t imagine flying commercial again. But that day could come. Worse than that could come. He closed his eyes and asked himself, again, how he had gotten to this place. How had his company, his brainchild, stopped being a vibrant, growing business with limitless potential and become one that was hemorrhaging red ink? What had started it all? The water contracts in São Paulo? The energy crisis in California? The new Internet start-up that had been sucking up seed money without a penny of profit to show for it? Whatever it was, it didn’t matter now. JeffSon was millions of dollars in debt. The New York accounting firm had done all it could to hide the losses, but unless a miracle happened, it was only a question of time before the whole thing imploded. So Jeff had begun a risky game. He continued to make speeches touting his dying company while privately unloading his own stock in JeffSon. Mark Scotto and several other top level guys at the company were quietly doing the same. And just in case, Jeff was putting as much of his assets as he could in Jewel’s name.

Jeff rubbed his aching head—he seemed to have a headache all the time now. He’d debated long and hard about turning over so much to Jewel. Fortunately she was too stupid—or disinterested—to understand what he was doing. But for some reason he hadn’t transferred the house to her yet. It wasn’t because he had any attachment to it; he hated the damn place and always had. There was just something about handing her the roof over his head that made him feel vulnerable. But face it, he
was
vulnerable. You couldn’t be more vulnerable than he was.

And he had to do what vulnerable people did, salvage whatever he could. He pulled out his cell phone, called his lawyer, and told him to prepare the paperwork for the transfer.

“I’ll be landing in Wrights town in half an hour,” he said. “Be in my office. I want to get this done.”

If it were done . . . then ’twere well it were done quickly.
That was a quote from somewhere; he couldn’t remember the source. His head was throbbing now. Putting the house in Jewel’s name would tie them together for a far longer time than he’d wanted.

For a while now, he’d known he wanted to leave Jewel. Because of Gwen. He wanted Gwen now as much as he had once wanted his private jet and the Lamborghini. As much as he had once wanted Jewel. He had dreamed of being a free man for Gwen so he could ask her to free herself too. But that dream was over. It belonged to a time when he could still make choices.

He closed his burning eyes. He hadn’t wanted to make Gwen his mistress, but there was no other way. He had to have her, even if he couldn’t free himself for her. She was the one bright spot in the world. And with everything he was going through he deserved something bright and hopeful in his life.

As the jet was landing, there was a call on his cell phone. His lawyer needed a copy of the deed to the house.

*                           *                           *

Jewel had spent the morning working out in her home gym. When she was finished, she headed for the bedroom to shower and change. The master suite was in the opposite wing of the house and as she walked down the halls they echoed with her footsteps. Except for the servants, the place always seemed to be empty now. It was meant to be a party house, crammed with admiring guests and the sounds of drinks being poured and laughter. When it was silent, there was something chilling about it. At night, when Jeff was gone—and that was most of the time these days—Jewel would lie in her bed listening to the silence, and think about her home when she was growing up. And in her memory now it wasn’t as ugly as she’d thought it was back then, and all the noise and confusion didn’t seem as bad to her as it once had. At least it had been alive. And there had been times when they had laughed—even Pop. Jewel would turn over on her down pillow and she’d realize that the five-hundred-thread-count pillowcase was wet—and she’d feel the tears on her cheeks.

There were times when she thought she’d die of loneliness. She’d even gotten so desperate that she’d gone back to Times Past—ostensibly to shop, but really to sit in the un-air-conditioned, unheated back room with Patsy Allen and talk.

Jewel picked up her pace; sometimes it seemed as if it took forever to get from one part of her home to the other. Once she had loved that, but now she had changed. So much had changed since she’d built this house.

Jeff was coming home from a business trip this morning and there had been a time when she would have rushed out to the airport to meet him. He would have been so eager to see her that he wouldn’t have been able to keep his hands off her. There had been a couple of times in the early days when he hadn’t, and only the tinted glass partition prevented the limo driver from having a great show.

But Jeff had been tired of her for a long time now. He thought she was so thick she didn’t realize it, but of course she did. She’d known for years that he had girls, and there had always been the danger that he’d fall in love with one of them.

Now she was afraid that it had happened. She knew how Jeff acted when he was in love—she’d been around the last time it had happened—and the signs were all there. And Jeff being Jeff, if he really was infatuated with some woman, he’d want to throw over everything like one of the heroes in those stupid operas he loved so much. He would want a divorce.

Jewel had finally reached the bedroom. She stripped off her workout clothes and headed for the bathroom.

She didn’t want a divorce. And she would fight against one with everything she had. But if she was honest about it, being Mrs. Jeff Henry hadn’t been all that great. Her husband’s money hadn’t bought her a place among the blue-blood women who ran the charitable events for the museum, the hospital, and the symphony. They’d take her donations, and they’d even ask her to sit on the board, but she couldn’t keep up with their talk about books and politics and art and music. And Cassandra Wright was on many of those boards, letting everyone see her animosity toward Jewel. So Jewel never was invited to the homes of the women she wanted to cultivate; she never went to the intimate dinner parties or the casual cookouts where they and their families bonded.

Jewel and Jeff belonged to the most exclusive country club in town, but she didn’t play tennis or bridge and Jeff only used the place for JeffSon entertaining, so she’d never made any friends there, either. The wives of the men who worked in the upper echelons of JeffSon were polite to Jewel, but they kept their distance—and she could understand why. Being a friend of the boss’s wife was too tricky. What if you had a falling-out with her?

The women Jewel enjoyed the most were those JeffSon employees who would be thought of as “girls” well into their fifties—women’s lib be damned—the secretaries and receptionists. Jeff ’s faithful “office wife”/secretary, Rosetta, and Barbara who answered the phone at the front desk, were Jewel’s kind of people. She knew either of them would be thrilled to be invited for a long poolside lunch featuring margaritas and gossip, but she couldn’t ask them. She was Mrs. Henry and she couldn’t fraternize with secretaries and receptionists.

Jewel went into the shower stall—four thousand dollars for the steam system alone—and let the hot water soothe her muscles that were aching from her recent workout. She wished the hot water could take away the aches that went deeper.

Because it hurt to know that your husband didn’t want you anymore—even if you had never been deeply in love with him.

And it really hurt to know that he didn’t care enough about you to try to pretend otherwise. But she had made her bed and it was a cushy one and she wanted to go on lying in it. She’d be damned if she’d let anyone kick her out of it.

The phone began to ring. There was an extension in the bathroom. As she was drying off, she picked it up. It was Jeff.

“I need you to bring a copy of the deed to the house to my office this afternoon,” he said tersely. “Go into my study. Open the left-hand bottom drawer of my desk, and—”

“Why do you want that?” Jewel blurted out. She felt herself go cold in spite of her steamy shower. What the hell was he up to? Was this the phone call she’d been dreading? Was there really another woman as she’d suspected?

“I need it, Jewel. Now, you’ll find it . . .”

“What do you want with the deed?” Panic made her shrill.

“Oh, for God’s sake, I’m planning to put the house in your name! I’ll explain when you get here. Now will you listen while I tell you where the deed is?”

She listened. And she was happier than she had been in months. Because if the house was going in her name, that meant things between them couldn’t be as bad as she’d thought they were. If Jeff was giving her the house, then he wasn’t going anywhere.

*                           *                           *

Gwen tried to concentrate on the cranberry bread she was supposed to be making, but it was a lost cause. She simply couldn’t focus on measuring baking soda and sugar when she wanted to dance around the apartment from sheer happiness. In three days she’d be giving her first reading of her book. The event was to take place in a library in Langham, a town that was about forty-five minutes north of Wrightstown. Her publicist wanted her to have this experience as a way of getting her feet wet before her actual book tour, which began at the end of the month. Stan was planning to drive up with her so he could cheer her on, and then they would spend the night in a charming old inn in the town—just to add a little romance to her triumph, he said. He was so excited for her. In fact, Stan and her mother seemed to have started competing for the title of Loved One Who Is Most Proud of Gwen. When Stan had turned to Cassie for help, that had softened her mother toward him. “He’s got a good heart,” she now told Gwen. “And he does care about you.” She hadn’t said he was smart or competent—but still, it had been high praise coming from Cassandra Wright.

And then just when it seemed that things couldn’t get any better, Stan had decided it was time to buy a house. Gwen had been thrilled, but she felt she had to make something clear.

“I’d love to move, you know that,” she told Stan. “But you should also know that I’ve changed. I know I can be happy anywhere as long as I’m with the right person.”

“Got anyone special in mind?” he’d asked.

“There’s this guy . . . he’s a little stubborn and he always needs a haircut and he never has learned to put his socks in the laundry, but I’m kind of partial to him. . . .”

“How partial?” he’d whispered.

She’d nodded toward the bedroom. “I’ll be glad to show you any old time. . . .”

Then of course all thoughts of houses and home ownership were forgotten. But the next day Stan had asked her to make an appointment with a real estate agent and she’d started looking.

Gwen picked up the flyer on the house she’d seen that she wanted to show Stan. Every time she thought about it, she was pleased with herself all over again. Because she hadn’t chosen an ancient farmhouse in the middle of nowhere—as she knew Stan would expect her to. Instead she had found a place in a well-established, though decidedly unfashionable, suburb called Brookside. It was far enough out of the city for her to see trees and birds, but it was close enough for Stan to have a little hustle and bustle if that was what he wanted. Brookside was perfect.And so was her life.

*                           *                           *

“This is Stan Girard again, and I really need to speak to Mark Scotto,” Stan said to the assistant who had answered Scotto’s phone. “This is the second time I’ve called.”

“I’m well aware of that, Mr. Girard,” came the supercilious reply. “But as I said, he’s been on the phone all afternoon with Tokyo and I can’t disturb him.”

“Okay, when he takes a break, give him this message. I think I’ve discovered something that could be very serious. There’s an error in the figures in the JeffSon newsletter we’re sending out this month. We’re reporting profits on two of our electrical plants that can’t be true. I work with both plants and I know that for a fact. I’m not sure where the faulty figures are coming from; I’ve been trying to track down the source, and quite frankly I’m not getting anywhere.”

“I’ll relay your message to Mr. Scotto”—the voice on the phone sounded a little rattled now—“and I’m sure he’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

It seemed that Mark Scotto’s important business with Tokyo could be interrupted after all, because five minutes later Stan’s phone rang.

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Stan,” said Scotto after Stan had explained the problem again. “I’ll follow up on it personally and I’ll be in touch to let you know what I’ve found out.” The man’s tone was smooth and reassuring. Maybe a little too reassuring. Stan would remember that later.