It was three o’clock by her wristwatch when they landed in Westchester. By then Rod’s expression was sufficient proof of the pain he was in. After he hobbled on crutches from the cabin to his waiting wheelchair, Alison bent over him and whispered, “Thank you for making this trip.”
He managed a smile as he looked up at her.
Mercifully the driver, a ruddy-faced man of about fifty with the build of an ex-boxer, was waiting for them in the terminal. He introduced himself to them. “I’m Josh Damiano, Mr. Powell’s chauffeur. He wanted to be sure you had a comfortable ride from the airport to your hotel.”
“How kind of Mr. Powell.” Alison hoped that the contempt she felt did not show. Now that they were back in New York, a kaleidoscope of memories was flooding her mind. Neither one of them had been in New York in fifteen years. That was when the doctors had told Rod there would be no more operations.
By then their money was gone and Rod’s family was taking out loans to support them, but Alison had managed to take the necessary courses at night for a year and get her license as a pharmacist. They had gratefully seized the opportunity to go to Cleveland and work in his cousin’s pharmacy.
I loved New York, she thought, but I was happy to get away from it. I always thought that the minute people saw me, they wondered whether I’d killed Betsy Bonner Powell. In Cleveland, for the most part, we have lived quietly.
“There are benches near the doors,” Damiano said. “Let me get you settled comfortably and go for the car. I’ll try not to be too long.”
They watched as he collected the luggage from the pilots. He was back for them within five minutes. “The car’s right outside,” he said as he helped Rod with his wheelchair.
A shiny black Bentley was waiting at the curb.
When Damiano helped Rod out of the wheelchair and into the backseat, Alison felt her heart wrench.
He’s in so much pain, she thought, but he never complains, and he never talks about the football career he would have had…
The big car began to move. “The traffic’s light,” Damiano told them. “We should be at the hotel in about twenty minutes.”
They had chosen to stay at the Crowne Plaza in White Plains. The town was near enough to Salem Ridge, but far enough away from the hotels where the other three childhood friends who were on the program were staying. Laurie Moran made sure of that.
“You two okay?” Damiano asked them solicitously.
“I’m very comfortable,” Alison assured him as Rod murmured his assent.
But then Rod leaned over and whispered, “Alie, I was thinking, when you’re on camera, not a word about sleepwalking and possibly being in Betsy’s room that night.”
“Oh, Rod I never would,” Alison said, horrified.
“And don’t volunteer that you’re hoping to go to med school unless they ask. It will remind everyone how disappointed you were when you didn’t get the scholarship to medical school, and how furious you were that Robert Powell got the dean to throw it to Vivian Fields.”
The mention of her heartbreak the day of her graduation from college was enough to make Alison’s face contort with pain and rage. “Betsy Powell was trying to get into the Women’s Club with the top-of-the-line socialites, and Vivian Fields’s mother was the president of it. And of course Powell had leverage-he’d just donated a dormitory to the college! The Fieldses could have afforded to pay Vivian’s tuition one hundred times over. Even the dean looked embarrassed when he called out her name. And then he muttered something about Vivian’s academic brilliance. Right! She dropped out in her second year. I could have scratched Betsy’s eyes out!”
“Which is why if they ask you what you’ll do with the money, just say that we’re planning to take a round-the-world ocean cruise,” Rod counseled.
Glancing into the rearview mirror, Josh Damiano observed Rod whispering something to his wife and watched her shocked reaction and how upset she instantly became. He could not hear what they were saying, but he smiled inwardly.
It doesn’t matter whether I can hear them, he thought. The recorder picks up everything that’s said in this car.
14
Regina Callari’s initial response upon learning that, between Fisher Blake Studios and Robert Powell, she would net three hundred thousand dollars for appearing in the program was one of relief and elation.
The crushing burden of living paycheck to paycheck, which translated to house sale to house sale in a terrible real estate market, had been lifted from her shoulders.
It almost gave her that warm, secure feeling she had felt in early childhood, until the day she found her father’s body hanging in the garage.
Over the years she had had the same dream about her early life. In it, she woke up in her big bedroom, with the pretty white bed that had a spray of delicate pink flowers painted on the headboard, the night table, the dresser, the desk, and the bookcase. In the dream she could always vividly see the pink-and-white bedspread, the matching draperies, and the soft pink rug.
After her father’s suicide, when her mother realized how little money they had, they had moved to a three-room apartment, where they shared a bedroom.
Her mother, who loved fashion, had gotten a job as a personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman, where she had once been a valued customer. Somehow they’d gotten by, and Regina had proudly graduated from college on a financial-aid scholarship.
After Alison’s wedding and all the gossip about Betsy’s death, I moved to Florida to escape, Regina thought as she boarded the plane in St. Augustine. Some escape. Put it aside, she told herself. Don’t keep dwelling or you’ll drive yourself crazy.
A few hours earlier she had seen Zach off on his backpacking trip to Europe. He was meeting his group in Boston, and they were flying to Paris tonight.
Regina settled comfortably in the small private plane and helped herself to a predeparture glass of wine.
She smiled briefly at the memory of the visit she and Zach had just shared.
When he had arrived home from college two weeks earlier, she had put a CLOSED FOR VACATION sign up on the front door of the office and announced to Zach that they were going on a vacation together-a cruise through the Caribbean.
The closeness between them that she was so afraid was lost had been regained-even magnified-on that trip.
Zach purposely said little about his father and stepmother, but once she asked, he told her everything.
“Mom, I knew when Dad made money, lots of money, he should have given you more. I think he would have, except he was afraid of Sonya’s reaction. She has a really bad temper.”
Zach’s father was writing the songs that made him rich when we were married, but the first one didn’t sell until a year after we were divorced. I couldn’t afford a lawyer to prove that he wrote it when he was married to me, Regina had thought bitterly.
“I think he regrets marrying Sonya,” Zach had told her. “When they have an argument, the decibel level goes through the roof.”
“I love it,” Regina remembered telling Zach.
She warmed at the memory of Zach’s compliments about her twenty-pound weight loss. “Mom, you look so cool,” he’d said, more than once.
“I worked out at the gym a lot these past two months,” she told him. “I realized that I’d gotten out of the habit of going there regularly.”
On the cruise he asked her about her parents. “All you ever really told me was that Grandpa committed suicide because he had made some bad investments and was broke, and that Grandma was planning to live in Florida when she retired, but died in her sleep only a year after you moved here,” he said.
“She never got over losing my father.”
Zach looks so much like my father, Regina thought now as the plane took off. Tall, blond, and blue-eyed.