Tom Hyman (7 page)

Goth frowned. “Well, what do you consider fair?”

The baroness scratched her bare knee as she thought about it.

Stewart watched the lazy movement of her red-painted fingernails along the tanned surface of flesh and felt a warm tingling sensation in his groin.

“Ninety percent,” she said.

Goth’s face turned from its pasty white to a mottled purple.

Stewart chuckled. The baroness was beginning to show a little of the steel under her luxurious exterior.

“I could never agree to anything like that,” Goth protested, when he had found his tongue again. “That’s not profit sharing —that’s exploitation.”

The baroness made no effort to defend her offer. She just shrugged and flicked her fingers in a gesture of dismissal.

The room grew very still. Stewart looked around. No one else had any questions. They all appeared ready to leave.

“I’m amenable to discuss percentages,” Goth said, attempting to resuscitate the discussion. “I’m not interested in personal enrichment. I just want to get on with my work. You must understand that. My work is everything to me. Please think about what I’ve said.

My discoveries are real. Jupiter is real. If any of you wish to pursue this further, you can find me in my lab.”

With a tight-lipped grimace of defeat Goth picked up the catalogue he had shown them earlier and prepared to depart. “If I don’t hear from any of you in a couple of days, I’ll seek help elsewhere.”

Harry Fairfield raised a hand. A mischievous grin lit his ruddy face.

“I have another question, Doctor.”

Goth glared at Fairfield with obvious distaste. “What is it?”

“Can this Jupiter program of yours do anything about cock size?”

Everyone laughed except Harold Goth. He jammed the catalogue under his arm and stormed out of the room, the veins in his forehead pulsing with fury.

Anne Stewart walked unsteadily across the mansion’s dimly lit entrance hall to the enormous winding staircase. She grabbed the banister railing as if it were a lifeline, and hauled herself up the interminably long flight of stairs, consciously placing each foot as she went.

How she hated this house—so large and cold and intimidating.

Nothing in it had anything to do with her. Not one piece of rare antique furniture, not one bit of hand-painted wallpaper or linen drapery. Not one painting or mirror or candlestick holder. Not even the piano. It had all been here when she arrived, and would probably all be here when she left. Most of the rooms never saw anyone for weeks at a time, save an occasional domestic with a vacuum cleaner and a dust rag. It didn’t feel like home at all. It felt like an institution. It reminded her of one of those mansions that had once belonged to some long-dead famous person and were now open for public tours. All it lacked were the brass stands with velvet-covered ropes and a few signs admonishing visitors not to touch anything. How was she ever going to go on living here?

She reached the safe harbor of her bedroom at the end of the second-story hallway. Once inside, she locked the door behind her and collapsed onto the bed.

The damned committee meeting. She had missed it. She considered calling Mrs. Talley to apologize and make some lame excuse, but she didn’t trust her tongue to get the words out.

Instead, she called down to the kitchen and mumbled something to Amelia, the cook, about not feeling well. She intended to retire early, without dinner.

As soon as she lay back against the pillow, the ceiling over her head began revolving slowly. She closed her eyes, and the bed began to roll. She opened her eyes. The ceiling was still spinning.

My God, she thought, five o’clock on a Monday afternoon and she was drunk. Oh, Lexy, why did you do this to me A tide of nausea surged toward her throat. Clutching the bedpost to steady herself, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. Praying that the floor wouldn’t tilt beneath her, she got to her feet and lunged toward the bathroom, hands cupped over her mouth.

She reached the toilet on her knees, groped blindly for the sides, and retched noisily into it.

After a few minutes she felt marginally restored, but she was reluctant to move. The cold porcelain lip of the bowl felt good against her forehead. Without looking, she reached up and tripped the flush mechanism.

She wished that she were back home in Vermont.

Home. Something she had never really known. The closest she had ever come was a rundown three-room rental in a destitute mill town out in a depopulated wilderness called the Northeast Kingdom. And she never really wanted to go back there.

Georges and MarieClaire Beauregard. French Catholic and poor. And both dead now. She had loved them, she supposed, even though they weren’t her real parents.

She didn’t know her real parents. The state’s Department of Social Welfare had taken her from them when she was three years old. Barely more than children themselves, they had neglected Anne so completely that the welfare officials feared she might starve to death. Or so Mama Marie had told her when she was growing up.

Nothing about her natural parents remained in Anne’s conscious memory.

Even their names were absent. Anne’s life did not really begin until the age of seven, when Georges and MarieClaire rescued her from a series of foster homes. A childless middle-aged couple from the province of Quebec, they adopted her, and she became Anne Marie Beauregard.

They did the best they could, but Anne’s life was bleak. Georges died when Anne was eleven, and MarieClaire, fragile and superstitious even when Georges was alive, simply couldn’t cope with his death. She stopped cooking, stopped cleaning, stopped getting dressed. She waited out the rest of her life in bed, in front of a TV set. Anne, not yet a teenager, was forced to take over the household herself. She did the shopping and the cleaning and the cooking. Georges had left no money.

They lived on welfare and a minuscule retirement pension from Georges’s years with the Canadian National Railways.

Anne rarely thought of those years—not because the memories were so painful but because there was so little worth remembering. They were a blur of fatigue and drudgery, a bleak gray existence in a world in which there was neither time nor money for dates or parties or even decent clothes.

Keeping house, taking care of MarieClaire, and going to school consumed her days. She came to hate that small TV set at the foot of Mama Marie’s bed. It stayed on around the clock, blotting out real life with an endless drone of soap operas, sitcoms, cop and detective dramas, quiz shows, talk shows, and commercials.

It still disturbed Anne to be in a room with a TV set turned on.

She found her escape in books. If it had not been for the town library, inadequately stocked as it was, her life would have been impossibly grim.

In June 1989, five months before her seventeenth birthday, Anne graduated from high school. Anne had gone to the ceremonies by herself, feeling miserable and alone amidst her happy classmates and their families. When she got home, she found MarieClaire propped against her pillows, her eyes staring vacantly at the TV screen.

Nearly an hour passed before Anne realized she was dead.

Anne pulled down the toilet seat and struggled to her feet. She washed out her mouth at the big marble sink and brushed her teeth. She still felt drunk, but at least the nausea had subsided and the floor was holding steady.

MarieClaire’s death freed Anne. She took a job in a local health clinic, and when she had saved a little money, she enrolled at a nearby two-year community college. She did so well there that she was able to transfer to the University of Vermont on a scholarship. At the university she blossomed. She chose biology as her major, and she excelled at it, much to the surprise of the male-chauvinist head of the department. Even with the scholarship, she still had to work part-time as a receptionist at a medical center to support herself, but for the first time she began having a social life. Her astonishing good looks, hidden from the world during her high school years, were hidden no longer. Male students followed her around like a permanent band of courtiers, constantly vying with each other for her attention.

She lost her virginity to her piano teacher, a handsome, charming professor in the school’s music department. He threatened to kill himself if she didn’t consent to marry him. She agreed reluctantly, but was able to back out at the last minute when he confessed that he ad been married twice before and had five children.

She graduated from the university with honors and went to work at a biological supply house in her hometown, Burlington, Vermont. After two years there she had made up her mind to go back to college for an advanced degree. She had decided to pursue a career in biology, probably as a teacher.

But that decision got canceled.

One day Dalton Stewart walked into her lab, flanked by his chauffeur-bodyguard and a couple of assistants. He was looking for the head of the accounting department. It seemed that he had just bought the company, and he wanted to see the firm’s financial records.

He was tall and charming in a worldly way that impressed Anne enormously. He was also very rich—the ultimate eligible bachelor.

People magazine had recently run a story on him, detailing his high-powered business and social life. He had dated many celebrities, and there were always rumors flying in the gossip columns about whom he might marry next.

On his way out of the building, he returned to the lab and Jupiter’s laugter ù 55 handed Anne a note that sent her pulse hammering: “You’re an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Will you have dinner with me tonight? I’m staying at the Ethan Allen Hotel. Please call me there.”

Anne didn’t call him. She had a date with her boyfriend, Matty, and she had no intention of breaking it, even for Dalton Stewart.

The idea of going out with him terrified her, anyway. He was divorced, nearly twice her age, and impossibly glamorous. And she was put off by the implicit assumption in his note: that she’d come running just because he was who he was.

To her astonishment, he reappeared in the lab the next day and asked her to dinner again. She blushed and stuttered, but turned him down.

This time she lied and told him she already had plans for the evening.

He persisted, and finally got her to agree to see him the following Friday. He was supposed to be at a business conference in Barcelona, but he said he’d change his plans just to see her.

Her friends in the lab, meanwhile, were going quietly berserk.

They couldn’t believe that she had had the nerve to give him such a hard time. She should jump at the chance to go out with him, they insisted. Anne wasn’t so sure. She couldn’t understand why someone like Stewart should show any interest in her in the first place. They couldn’t possibly have anything in common. The day before their Friday date, she called his office in New York and canceled.

Anne removed her dress and her underclothes and stepped into the shower. She turned the water on as cold as she could stand it, let it run for a few minutes, then mixed in the hot until the spray felt warm and soothing. She stood under it for a long time, until she was aware of nothing but the pleasant sensation of the water beating down on her shoulders and back.

Dalton Stewart had refused to give up. The more she resisted him, it seemed, the harder he tried. Finally, in the mistaken belief that the only way to discourage him was to go out with him and get it over with, she agreed to a date.

And some date it turned out to be.

Stewart suggested they start early and do a little sightseeing.

At five P.M. his chauffeur drove them to the Burlington airport.

They boarded his private jet and circled over Lake Champlain.

Anne was delighted. She pointed out some of the landmarks of the city of Burlington below.

“Have you ever seen the Eiffel Tower?” Stewart asked.

Anne laughed. “In Paris? No. Someday, though.”

“How about right now?”

“Right now? What?”

“Let’s go see the Eiffel Tower.”

The twin-engine Lear altered course to the east, climbed to thirty thousand feet, and flew to France. They talked through the evening and had dinner on the plane. After seven hours, just as dawn was breaking across Paris, Anne looked down and saw Sacre-Coeur, Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, and, of course, the Eiffel Tower. The magic of the moment moved her to tears.

Through some friend in the French foreign ministry Stewart arranged for customs at Orly Airport to admit Anne into the country without a passport, and they had breakfast at a lively cafe on the Left Bank.

After that they spent the day shopping and touring the city in a limousine. He had rented a double suite for them at the Hotel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli. Their windows looked out over the Tuileries and the Louvre.

Anne had dreamed for a long time of seeing Paris. Now there it was, right outside her window. She felt giddy, euphoric. In her entire life she had never been any further from Burlington, Vermont, than Boston, Massachusetts.

They had dinner at L’Hotel with a famous French actress and her producer husband. Anne charmed them with her provincial Canadian French, and the producer offered her a part in his next movie.

Everyone drank a lot of wine, and the mood was festive.

At one point Dalton leaned close and whispered in her ear.

“Can I ask you an important question?”

Anne shook her head playfully. “No. Only silly questions are allowed today.”

“Okay. A silly question then. Will you marry me?”

Anne felt her heart flip. “That is a silly question,” she replied.

Later, at the Brasserie Lipp, they sat at a crowded table with

!

more famous people—many of them acquaintances of Dalton’s —and drank more wine. There was a well-known American TV journalist and his writer wife, and so many others who came and went during the evening that she lost track. During the quieter moments, Dalton continued to press his case for marriage, painting a stirring picture of what a wonderful life they would have together. She protested. They barely knew one another, after all.