Daughter of Darkness (10 page)

    His son Robert continued on in investment banking. Between world wars, Robert began to take great interest in European markets. He put the firm in a good position to take advantage of key European investments following World War II.

    But it was Tom Stafford who brought the firm to true dominance. He took an early interest in computers. His roommate at Harvard, in fact, would become a major player in developing mainframe computers for IBM. This was at a time, the late fifties, when Wall Street and its allies in Chicago and Los Angeles still had doubts about the relevance of computers to their particular kind of work. Could you really trust computers? Tom Stafford believed you could, and this got him an extraordinary jump on his competitors. Stafford Investment Bankers became one of the most important players in contemporary investment banking.

    Socially, Tom Stafford was also a noted figure. He spent his early twenties breaking the hearts of several beautiful debutantes. He also dated a few movie stars. Not many investment bankers found themselves in the pages of both
Esquire
and
GQ
. Stafford watchers were thus surprised when he settled his attention and fondness on a young woman he met working behind the counter of a small jewelry store near the Drake Hotel. Her name was Molly Davis and while her father, who owned the jewelry store, was a successful merchant, he certainly wasn't in the Stafford league. There was another unlikely aspect to the tale as well; though Stafford was handsome, charming, and rich, Molly Davis took no particular interest in him. She thought he was nice, she thought he was amusing, but when he asked her to marry him, she thought he was kidding. She said no. Nobody had ever said no to Tom Stafford. It was, at least to Tom Stafford, unthinkable. He redoubled his efforts. He courted her for nearly a year before she finally gave in. The wedding was one of the most lavish ever staged in Chicago. They day they married, Tom Stafford was thirty-eight (he'd had a long run as an eligible bachelor) and his Molly was twenty seven.

    Seven months to the day of their wedding. Jenny came along. This was 1973. According to press reports, she was just about the perfect child-beautiful, joyful, and hypnotized by her parents, just as they were hypnotized by her. She spent seventh grade in Sweden, trying out a very tony private school. She didn't quite make it through the year. She was lonely for her parents, and they were miserable without her. She stayed in Chicago from then on, attending a private Catholic school and quite seriously studying ballet. The local press loved her as much as they'd loved her father. And she was even more photogenic than he'd been. She was an impossibly lovely seventeen-year-old when her Porsche convertible was back-ended by a truck and knocked down a steep ravine. The bets were she wouldn't make it. The Chicago news establishment held a death watch. The story had everything. People who didn't give a damn about high society-indeed, resented it-stayed fixed to their TV screens. Would the young heiress make it? Could the fates be so cruel as to snatch her life away?

    She lived. But it was not easy. She spent two months in the hospital slowly and painfully learning to walk again. She had blinding headaches. And her memory was shaky. She'd lost long periods of time.

    A year later, everything was fine. Her smashed leg had healed very well, the disk in her back was once again where it belonged, her memory had been fully restored and-if it was possible-she was even more beautiful than she'd been before the accident.

    The press went right on loving her. For another whole year, she was their darling. She didn't want the attention-she was truly a shy person-but what choice did she have?

    At about the time the press found a new life to suck dry-a dazzling young blonde skater who was, it seemed, headed for the Olympics and who had already been offered a modeling contract from the Ford Agency in New York-Jenny began to change.

    All that anybody knew for sure-though it was the subject of much coy speculation in the local gossip columns-was that Jenny had suffered some kind of mental breakdown and was in a psychiatric hospital. One sympathetic gossip columnist noted that breakdowns were often a delayed reaction among people who suffered great physical traumas, such as Jenny had when her sports car had been knocked down a ravine.

    This was where the story ended. There were no more references to Jenny in the books Coffey found. There had also been-for all the talk of her great good looks-no photograph of the young woman.

    Coffey noted the approximate date when Jenny had been rumored to suffer a breakdown and then went over to the microfiche newspaper files.

    Coffey was not a mechanical genius. Indeed, it took him a full ten minutes to string the microfiche roll into the machine properly. He did a fair amount of cursing which earned him a number of hostile glances from the people around him.

    Then he got to work, and it didn't take long before he had his answer.

    He stared at her photograph with an almost drugged expression. Not even the smudgy microfiche image could spoil her looks. He found himself drawn to her in a near-mystical way. He found himself longing to touch her, hold her, as he had last night. The longing was physically painful.

    He had to see her. And soon. He had to find out how she was.

    There was only one logical place to look for her. Her home, the Stafford mansion. But how could he ever approach them? What could he say? He'd sound like some kind of con artist, or a madman. Either way, they wouldn't take him seriously. They would most likely call the police. And what would he tell the police? He certainly couldn't tell them about last night, not without getting Jenny in a lot of trouble.

    Jenny.

    Did she even
know
she was Jenny?

    And maybe she hadn't gone home. Maybe she was still wandering the streets, trying to reconstruct everything that had happened to her.

    He rolled through several more feet of microfiche. He found two more pictures of her. They were as stunning as the first had been.

    The second one was contained in a story about her going berserk in a posh pub on the Gold Coast. The story reported that she had slapped a woman and then proceeded to overturn several tables. She then began hurling glasses at the liquor bottles displayed behind the bar. The damage was estimated to be in the $5,000 range. She had been taken into custody and released two hours later to her attorney and her family. When she appeared in court the following morning, she claimed to have no memory of the entire incident. The judge set a trial date and suggested that Jenny look into Alcoholics Anonymous.

    After this, there were no more stories about Jenny Stafford.

    Coffey sat back in his chair. He knew what he had to do. Now he had to figure out the best way to do it. the best way to help Jenny.

    As he sat there, he thought of several clever ways that he might get into the Stafford mansion. But that's all they were-clever. They wouldn't guarantee that he'd get to see her alone so that they could talk.

    And that's what they badly needed to do. Talk. Alone. See if she'd had any luck puzzling through her loss of memory.

    He checked his watch. Nearing noon now. He'd wait till dinnertime. It was more likely the family would be home then.

    In the meantime, he'd buy the morning papers and see if there was any more information on the unidentified man they'd found dead in the motel room.

    He rewound the microfiche, put it neatly back in its box, and left the library.

    

    

    Jenny was on her way to Ted Hannigan's loft near the River North Gallery District when the news came on the radio. At first, she was tempted to change to another station. Unlike her parents, she had no interest in local politics, and with a city election coming up in six weeks, most of the local news concerned tracking polls and statements from candidates.

    Then she heard, "The man found stabbed to death in the Econo-Nite Motel has now been identified as Earl Benedict of Skokie."

    Her headache was instant and lacerating. She was afraid she might pass out. She gripped the steering wheel, not wanting to smash into the cars on either side of her. She was on the JFK Expressway, and it was extremely busy at the moment. There was no way she could drive in this condition.

    The announcer went on: "A police spokesman said that Benedict was a salesman for a local radio station."

    

    

    At the end of the exit ramp, Jenny shot across the street, pulling into the parking lot of an Arby's. The lunch crowd had descended on the place like a jungle predator on a carcass. Rock and roll and rap music boomed from two dozen cars with the windows rolled down.

    Jenny sat in her car, trembling, and pressing delicate fingers to her temples. She felt suddenly dehydrated as well. She began licking her lips frantically.

    Why would she respond to a news story this way? She didn't have anything to do with a dead man at some cheap motel, did she?

    But she
was
missing eight days…

    She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. There was something in her mind… something slowly working its way to her consciousness… some ghostly image that she knew she didn't want to see… something that would perhaps explain the eight days she couldn't make register in her mind…

    And the story about the dead man in the motel had seemed to trigger it. But why?

    Then she thought,
Maybe it's a coincidence
.
Maybe I just happened to react at the same time the story came on
.
Maybe any story would have triggered it
.

    She sat in her car for several long minutes. She felt as if somebody had violently assaulted her. She felt isolated, the way she had in the psychiatric hospital.

    It made no sense, responding to a news story like that. It
had
to be a coincidence…

    She walked unsteadily into Arby's and got herself a small Diet Pepsi. The smell of the meat made her sick. The psychiatric hospital at which she'd stayed had sat next to a farm. She'd frequently walked along the perimeter fence watching the cows go about their cowy business. And suddenly one day, it came to her that it was ridiculous-not to mention inhumane-to raise a breed of living beings for food.

    The human faces about her looked grotesque suddenly. She remembered an old
Twilight Zone
episode about a party of upscale people drinking their martinis… and suddenly the hero sees them for what they are… pig-faced aliens.

    
Steady
, she thought. This was the kind of mental self-indulgence she'd had to fight against after coming out of the hospital, these little excursions into phantasmagoria. She didn't tell anybody about them, of course. She didn't want to go back to the hospital…

    Then the people in Arby's were no longer monsters. They were just ordinary people-construction workers, salespeople, college students, mothers and their children-nice people for the most part, she was sure. People who wished her no harm, people who would help her if she asked…

    The spell, or whatever it had been, was starting to pass.

    She sat in her car sipping at her soda. Her trembling had stopped. The worst of the headache had receded as well. It had been like a seizure, a great dark god holding her slender white body in his hand, and squeezing her until her life was almost snuffed out-

    The sun had moved out from behind the clouds now. She rolled down her window. Even the air smelled fresh, and beautifully redolent of autumn-

    She felt better. Even the dread associated with her eight missing days was gone.

    She wanted to go see Ted. He always made her laugh, and she felt so secure in his strapping and powerful presence.

    She started her car engine and headed back for the expressway.

    

    

    Ted Hannigan's loft was located in the River North Gallery District, a section of the city Jenny loved. On a sunny day, it was great fun to stroll up and down the streets that were lined with art galleries. It was a little world unto itself, people here focused on art of every description. Sure, there were snobs and poseurs-a place like River North was bound to attract them-but most of the people were in equal parts enthusiastic, intelligent, and unpretentious.

    Ted's loft was on the third floor of what had once been a warehouse. He often joked that this was the only place a man with three ex-wives could afford. Ted's interest in women was far more passionate than his interest in art. Ted had never kidded himself. He had adopted a Monet-like style of illustration and taken as his subjects the wealthy and arty set of Chicago. They loved his work, even if most of the major local artisans found it little more than clever commercial illustration and not in any way serious art. Ted had a Rolls Royce, a modest country estate, and spent at least two months of every year living well in Paris. He had made his peace with his own artistic limitations years ago.

    While most of his art was for sale at the Harcourt Gallery right down the street, Ted did private portraits in his loft. Much as he hated such concessions, his portrait work required him to put a small business office in the front part of his loft. This meant a desk, a three-line phone system, two filing cabinets, a copying machine, a fax, and a leather couch and chair for his clients to sit in while they awaited the master. Ted always joked that the next thing you knew, he'd be joining the Chamber of Commerce and voting Republican. Oh, and one more thing came with the office-whatever stunning young thing Ted happened to be sleeping with at the moment. Ted's age range these days had gotten slightly older. The fetching short-haired blonde behind the desk this morning appeared to be at least in her late twenties-which was an improvement on the last one, who'd been a sophomore dropout from Northwestern. This one even dressed somewhat conservatively, in a nicely cut four-button jacket with casual white blouse and pleated blue slacks. Jenny could have lived without the nose ring and the butterfly tattoo on the top of the right hand, but then Jenny had never been much for fads or trends.