The Billionaire Next Door (24 page)

He walked her out into the foyer and ushered her to the front door, but hung back from the great outdoors because he only had boxers on. As she got into the old Toyota, he hated the thing she was driving. He wanted to buy her a new ride with state-of-the-art air bags and a steel crash cage and every amenity available to make her comfortable and safe.

With a wave, she pulled away from the curb and headed off. In her wake, he had to laugh at himself. Before meeting her, he’d refused to give women a dime. Now? He wanted to shower his money all over Lizzie Bond.

Not that she’d let him.

Fine. He was just going to drag his feet on the sale of the house, then. The longer he put it off, the more time Lizzie could be rent free and the less stressed she’d be as she looked for a job.

And maybe he could start working on her about the car thing.

Sean whistled as he went back in her apartment, cleaned up breakfast and started a fresh pot of coffee. He took a steaming mug upstairs with him, and as he opened the door to his father’s place, he braced himself for the usual gut crank.

He was glad he hadn’t eaten breakfast when it hit.

After casing the joint, he decided to start in the kitchen. It was the room with the fewest memories.

It didn’t take long to develop a core competency getting those U-Haul boxes taped into shape. He filled them with dishes and glasses and cheap silverware, all of which would go to the church. He also started a trash pile. A lot of the cooking utensils were rusted from lack of use and he realized, as he threw out wire whisks and paring knives and measuring spoons, that what he was pitching had most likely last been touched by his mother.

Yeah, Eddie never had been much of a cook. Sean and his brothers had pretty much lived on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Well, those and Mrs. O’Neal’s handouts.

Sean had been in full clean-out mode for about an hour when he found a half-empty, dust-covered bottle of booze way in the back of a cupboard.

Ah, yes. The demon.

As he poured the cheap vodka out and watched the stuff funnel down the scratched porcelain sink, he wondered what quitting had been like for his father. As well as the why and the when of it.

It would have been hard, that was for sure. Alcohol and his father had been inseparable, the one relationship Eddie had valued, the one thing the man had connected with. Sean could even remember being jealous of the Popov. When Eddie wasn’t loaded, he might actually talk to you.

At the very least, he didn’t come after you.

A little later, Sean found another bottle in the broom closet. Again, dust-covered. This time when he emptied the booze, he didn’t think of anything at all.

It took him the better part of the morning to finish up the kitchen and then he started in on the living room. As he worked, the number of stacked, marked boxes grew and he went through miles of packing tape.

He broke for eats around noon and then forced himself to hit the bedrooms. As he couldn’t bear to go into his father’s or Mac’s, he whipped through his and Billy’s then took care of the bathrooms. When he was through with them, it was only seven o’clock. Lizzie wasn’t going to be home for another five hours and there was no reason to stop working.

Except all that was left were the two places he didn’t want to go.

As he paused outside the door to Mac’s room, he wished like hell his older brother would check in. He supposed there was always the option of trying to track Mac down through military channels, but he knew his brother wouldn’t appreciate getting red flagged even if it was for a good reason. Besides, given what the guy did, it might not even be possible to find him through regular army contacts.

Sean went inside and worked fast. He needed only four boxes for Mac’s stuff and then he was left with nothing but his father’s domain.

Gearing up, he headed down the hall with an armful of cardboard and a taping wheel. Inside his dad’s room, he flipped on the overhead light and looked around. Pretty much standard-issue, lower-middle-class stuff. The bed was made, but the blankets were old and the pillows thin. On the side table, there was a fake wood alarm clock, a lamp with a yellowed shade and a little thicket of pill bottles.

Sean went over and checked out the labels. He recognized the ones for high blood pressure and cholesterol, but the others didn’t mean anything to him. Whatever. They obviously hadn’t worked all that well.

He taped up a box to use as a trash bin and tossed the orange vials then emptied the drawer underneath of a bunch of old racing forms.

He was about to start stripping the bed when he saw the slippers on the floor.

The pair were right out of the L.L. Bean catalog, made of tan leather and lined in sheep’s wool. They were old and worn, peeling up off the carpet at the toes. The two were lined up right together, facing out as if his father had kicked them off as he’d gotten into the bed for what had turned out to be the last time.

God…Same kind Eddie O’Banyon had worn twenty years ago. Conceivably the very pair.

Sean picked one up. Inside, as if the soles were made of sand, there was a precise impression of his father’s foot registered in relief. The man had clearly spent hours wearing them, shuffling around this apartment, crossing from room to room…until suddenly there were no more trips to be made and the slippers would never be worn again.

Thoroughly creeped out, Sean pushed them under the bed so he didn’t have to see them, then took off the sheets and threw them out.

The closet was next. After opening the doors, he stared at what hung from the wooden dowel. It was the same stuff his father had always worn. Low-price button-downs—cotton for spring and summer, flannel for fall and winter—and khakis. Off to one side, there was an old work shirt from the phone company with a patch that read Eddie O’Banyon as well as a suit with a fine layer of dust on the shoulders. Probably the last time that had been worn had been at Sean’s mother’s funeral.

Looking at the clothes, thinking about the slippers, Sean could picture his father so clearly, it was as if the man’s ghost had wandered into the room, all simmering and pissed off at being called from the grave.

To get rid of the Stephen Kings, Sean put his hand into the closet and grabbed the first thing he hit. Going on autopilot, he stripped the hangers bare then picked up the shoes from the floor and cleaned off the top shelf. He hit the dresser after that, whipping through the drawers, throwing out the underwear and socks, putting the sweaters into a box.

Final salvo in the room was the rolltop desk in the corner.

The thing was a rank, ugly, worn piece of crap that had nothing but function to offer the world. Battened down tight, with the top in place, it gave off the illusion of having something precious inside.

But only out of desperation.

As Sean slid up the cover, papers spilled out as if he’d opened some kind of wound and the POS was bleeding white.

What a mess.

Copping a seat in the hard-backed chair, he pulled over the box he was using as a waste bin and started sifting through Medicare notices and doctors’ bills and insurance-company correspondence and bank statements. Most of the envelopes were unopened and he felt as if he were on an archaeological dig. The farther he went back, the older things got.

After having turfed the balance of it into some loose organizational piles, he was able to get to the shallow drawers in the back of the desk. He found nothing much important in them, just a couple of old Ticonderoga pencils, some paper clips, a thicket of rubber bands, a bottle of Elmer’s glue that had turned into a solid. Everything smelled like the musky wood of the desk and the dry, dusty scent of time’s passing.

He moved on to the big drawers underneath…and wasn’t prepared for what he found.

He was going through what was just crap, mindlessly pitching copies ofMotor Trend from the eighties into the trash box, when he ran into the photograph.

He sat up slowly, holding the thing with care.

Black-and-white. Three by five. Torn at the corner.

He and Billy and Mac were all under the age of twelve and standing at rigid attention in ill-fitting suits. They were smiling awkwardly, the pained expressions worn with the same graceless forbearance as their Sunday clothes.

His mother had taken the picture and her handwriting, her beautiful cursive handwriting, was on the back: the date, the place and his and his brothers’ names.

Staring at the old ink, it dawned on him that in all the packing he’d done he hadn’t found any photographs of her. In fact, there was nothing of hers in the apartment at all. Sure, his father hadn’t been sentimental in the slightest, but wouldn’t something have survived?

He turned the picture back over and tried to remember what his mother had looked like on the other side of the camera.

When he couldn’t call an image to mind, he thought of Lizzie.

He wanted pictures of her. Lots of them. He wanted one at his penthouse by his bed. And one on his desk at his office. And one in his briefcase. And one stored digitally in his BlackBerry.

As if having all that would ensure she didn’t disappear when she wasn’t with him.

Sean put the shot of him and his brothers facedown on the top of the desk and vowed to go out and buy a camera. Like, tomorrow.

The piles of envelopes got his attention and he figured it was time to find out what kind of mess his father’s estate was in. God, he hoped the man’s will was in this morass somewhere, but chances were good Eddie had died intestate.

Sean started with the bank statements and got no further.

The first one he went through was from June and there were a number of checks…most of which were written to Lizzie Bond.

In her own hand.

Sean’s skin shrank around his skeleton, just tightened up on his body as if he’d been put under a heat lamp and was drying out. As his breath froze in his lungs, he let the hand holding the pale green slips of paper fall to his thigh.

When he could stand it, he looked at the checks again. His father’s signature was on the bottom of each one, a messy scrawl that just about screamed feeble and old and coercible.

Except maybe she’d just been writing them out at his request.

Sean quickly ripped open the other statement envelopes. Checks she’d filled out went all the way back for a year and the amounts varied from a hundred to five hundred dollars. There were four that were over a thousand.

When he was finished adding it all up, the total amount was well into the tens of thousands.

With a curse, he tossed a handful of checks onto the desk. As they scattered all around, he reached over to keep them from hitting the floor and caught sight of an envelope postmarked six weeks ago. In the left-hand corner, there was the return address of a local law firm.

As he slipped his finger under the flap, he got a paper cut that bled and he sucked off the sting while unfolding what turned out to be his father’s last will and testament.

That left everything to one Miss Elizabeth Bond.

Well…well…well.

What do you know.

Turned out he and his father had something in common after all. Because like Eddie, Sean had been suckered into supporting Lizzie, too.

Man, she was smooth. He hadn’t seen this coming.

Sean refolded the will and put it back in the envelope. Rage tickled the edge of his consciousness, making his head buzz, but he wasn’t mad at her. He was mad at himself.