Hot Shot (38 page)

Paige hung up. Susannah continued to hold the telephone. She didn't want to replace the receiver. She didn't want to break her last fragile link with someone in her family.
Daddy
, she cried out silently.
Daddy, don't do this to me. I'm your sweetheart, remember? I'll be
good. I promise. I'll never be bad again
.

A monster pressed down on her chest. Her golden prince had gone. There would be no more chances to win back his love. She began to cry—deep, wracking sobs that came from her soul. There was no more time left to receive her father's forgiveness. Her daddy was dead.

Sam heard the sounds when he walked in the door—soft, animal sounds. Fingers of fear shot through him as he ran toward the bedroom. Susannah was huddled in the far corner with her back smeared against the wall and her hands tangled in her nightgown.

"Suzie…"

He rushed toward her, knelt down on the floor and pulled her against him. The expression on her face chilled him. Someone had broken in the apartment and raped her. He drew her closer, rage and fear shaking him. "It's all right, baby. I'm here. I'm here."

"Sam?" Her voice quivered like an old woman's. "Sam? Daddy's dead."

Relief coursed through him. She was all right. Nothing terrible had happened to her.

Hearing the news of Joel's death didn't particularly trouble him, and instead of trying to offer her phony words of comfort about a man he had detested, he stroked her.

It felt strange to have her clinging to him so helplessly and to hear those broken little sobs coming from her. Their position on the floor was awkward. He lifted her and helped her over to the bed. Her body was naked underneath the thin nightgown, and as he lay down with her, he could feel himself starting to get hard. Jeezus, she would never understand that in a million years.

He hated anything that had to do with death. Once, he had heard a priest say that death was what gave life its meaning, but he didn't believe that. Death took away meaning.

Death robbed life of any sense. When he was ten, the inevitability of his own death had struck him for the first time, and he had been consumed with a cold, gripping terror. For months afterward he had been afraid to go to bed at night, until, finally, he had told himself it wouldn't happen. The rules of the universe would change for him. Death was one more barrier to be smashed, one more hurdle to overcome.

He wished she would stop crying. He wished she hadn't brought death into their bedroom. He began stroking her breasts. In the midst of death, there is life. In the midst of death, there is—

"Sam." She pushed his hand away.

"No, Suzie," he whispered. "Let me. I'll make it better. I promise."

She continued to cry as he lifted her nightgown and pushed open her thighs. "I'll make it go away," he promised. "I'll make it all go away."

But he couldn't make it go away, and when he finally shuddered inside her, she felt even more alone.

For the next two days, he treated her tenderly, but when she awakened the morning of the funeral, he was gone. Frantically, she called the office, but neither Mitch nor Yank had seen him. Angela had been away for days and no one answered the phone at her house.

Finally, she realized that he had deliberately disappeared and she would have to go to the funeral alone.

She picked up the keys to the old Volvo they had bought and squeezed them so tightly that the ridges bit into the palm of her hand. She needed Sam, and he wasn't here for her.

A dark maroon Cadillac Seville was pulling into the parking lot as she walked unsteadily from the apartment building. Mitch got out and came toward her. "Get inside," he said quietly. "I'm coming with you."

She nearly slumped against him with relief. He took her elbow and helped her into the car. As they drove toward Atherton, she stared blindly through the windshield. "Sam's afraid of death," she said numbly. "If he weren't afraid, he would have come with me."

Mitch made no response.

Solid, strong, and immovable, he stayed by her side throughout the ceremony. Sometimes it seemed as if only his presence was keeping her from flying apart. Spasms kept wracking her body, but he held tightly to her hand. She refused to cry. Once she started, she would never be able to stop.

Whenever she looked at the sleek black coffin, her teeth chattered. She tried to talk silently to her father.
It's not finished between us, Daddy. Nothing's finished. I love yon. I
still love you
. But no comforting messages came to her from the other side of the grave.

Cal sat with Paige, and when the ceremony ended, a crowd gathered around the two of them, offering their condolences. But hardly anyone spoke to her, not even people she had known for years. It was as if—in running away from her wedding and breaking the rules—she had betrayed them all.

As they left the church for the cemetery, she overheard a guest mutter, "Not his real daughter, of course. Adopted." The word was delivered as if it had been sucked from a particularly juicy lemon. Mitch heard it, too, and squeezed her hand.

The gravesite ceremony was mercifully short. As Mitch was leading her away, Cal approached. "Susannah?"

It had been a year since they had spoken. The eyes that had once gazed at her with pride were now full of venom. This was the man she had planned to spend her life with. Now his hatred struck her like a blow.

"I hope you're satisfied," he sneered. "You killed him, you know. He was never the same after you left."

Susannah felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. Mitch stiffened and took a menacing step toward Cal. "Get away from her, Theroux," he said harshly.

A soft touch penetrated Susannah's pain, the brush of a hand on her arm. It settled there only for a moment and then lifted away like a butterfly in flight. She turned numbly toward her sister.

Paige of the tight jeans and saucy walk was conservatively dressed in Kay's old pearls and a subdued black dress. Her rock and roll sister who used to whip her hair to the beat of the Stones looked as proper as an old dowager. Susannah waited for Paige to condemn her, too, but her sister wouldn't even meet her eyes.

"Come along, Paige," Cal said, his lips thin and tight. "There's no need for you to be subjected to her presence."

Mitch drove her home and offered to come inside with her, but she knew she couldn't hold herself together much longer and she refused. Before she got out of the car, she leaned over and pressed her cheek to his jaw. "Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you so much."

The radio was playing softly in the kitchen as she entered the apartment. She expected to see Sam there, but instead she found Angela washing dishes in the kitchen. She set down the dish she had been drying and opened her arms. "Poor baby."

Susannah felt something break apart inside her. She went toward her like a three-year-old running to her mother with a mortal wound. She cried in Angela's arms while Angela stroked her back and said, "I know. I know, baby."

Her nose began to run and tears dripped off her chin onto the shoulder of Angela's blouse.

Her body no longer seemed to belong to her. What had happened to the woman who never cried?

"My father's dead," she said. "I won't ever see him again."

"I know, honey."

"I never—I never got to say good-bye. Now I'll never get the chance to put it right."

"You tried, honey. I know you did."

"I didn't think he would die. Not ever. He always seemed like God."

Angela led her to the living room sofa. She rubbed her arms and held her hands, but Susannah couldn't be comforted. "I loved him. I always loved him. He just didn't love me back."

Angela stroked her hair. "That's not true, honey. He loved you. He told me so."

Several seconds passed as her words penetrated Susannah's deepest misery. She looked up and saw Angela's face wavery through her tears. "He told you?"

Angela brushed Susannah's hair back from her wet cheeks, freeing the strands that were stuck there with the lightest scrape of her fingernail. "We were together at the end. Your father went with me to Graceland for Elvis's funeral."

"Graceland? My father?" Susannah stared at her without comprehension.

"I don't think he meant to come with me. But it just sort of happened."

Gradually, Angela unfolded the story of the trip. Susannah listened, stunned by what she was hearing.

"The day he died, he talked about you," Angela said.

Susannah went cold all over. "What did he say?"

"He didn't hate you, Susannah. I think he hated himself."

The horrid words Cal had assaulted her with kept punching at Susannah's brain. "I think I killed him," she whispered. "I did a terrible thing to him. If I hadn't run away, he would be alive today."

"Don't say that! Don't say that, honey. You weren't responsible." Angela spoke in quick, breathless tones. "Those last few hours, we were sitting on these camp stools across from the music gate, waiting for the hearse to come out. We started talking about both of you

—about you and about Sammy. Just before the hearse came out, he looked me straight in the eye and he said, 'Angela, I've been wrong to cut Susannah out like I've done. She had to get away. I understand that now. I love her, and as soon as I get back to California, I'm going to tell her so.'"

Susannah held herself rigidly. "He told you that? He told you he loved me?"

"As God is my witness. He told me he was going to call you that very day."

Susannah pressed her eyes shut and tears slithered from beneath her lids. "Oh, Angela."

Angela took her in her arms once again. She was much smaller than Susannah, but she sheltered her. "I—I couldn't bear the idea that he went to his grave hating me."

"He loved you, honey. He went on and on about how much you meant to him."

Susannah pulled away, her forehead crumpling. "You're not making this up so I'll feel better, are you, Angela? Please. I have to know the truth."

Angela squeezed her hands tightly. "It's true. I'm Catholic, Susannah. If I didn't tell the truth about somebody's last moments on earth, it would be a mortal sin. He loved you so much. He told me again and again."

Angela's eyes were wide and earnest, and Susannah wanted desperately to believe her.

But although grief had dulled some of her senses, it had sharpened others. As she gazed at her mother-in-law, she knew with absolute certainty that Angela was lying from the bottom of her loving, generous heart.

Sam came home that evening with an expensive hand-woven shawl she had admired in a boutique a few weeks earlier. He made no mention of his disappearance, and she was too drained to ask him about it. As she tucked the shawl away in a bottom dresser drawer, she told herself that no one was perfect and she had to learn to accept Sam's faults. But a fissure had been ripped in the fabric of their marriage.

Several weeks passed before she learned that she had been cut from her father's will and that he had left everything to Paige. Millions of dollars were involved as well as a huge block of FBT stock. But it wasn't the financial loss that devastated her. It was the additional evidence of her father's lack of forgiveness.

Sam argued with her for weeks because she refused to challenge the will. Even in death he hated for Joel to get the best of her. But she didn't want money. She wanted her father alive. She wanted another chance.

Sometimes Susannah thought it was only the overwhelming work load that kept her going through the next few months. She had little time to wallow in either grief or guilt, no time at all to try to decide how she would live the rest of her life, knowing that she could never be reconciled with her father. All of the hours that would have been devoted to introspection were occupied with keeping their small company alive; ironically, success was proving to be even more dangerous to SysVal than failure.

"Will you relax, for chrissake," Sam said, glaring at her as he paced the carpeted reception area of Hoffman Enterprises, one of San Francisco's most prestigious venture capital firms. "If they see how nervous you are, you're going to blow this whole deal. I mean it, Susannah, you could personally screw us up—"

Mitch slapped down the magazine he had been pretend-ing to read. "Leave her alone!

Susannah, why do you put up with his nonsense? If I were you, Sam, I'd worry about what I was going to say instead of giving her a hard time."

"Why don't you go fuck yourself?"

"Why don't you—"

Susannah whirled around. "Stop it, both of you! We're all nervous. Let's not take it out on each other." Mitch and Sam had always argued, but in the four months since her father's death, it had grown worse. While their relationship had deteriorated, her own relationship with Mitch had grown closer. She would never forget the way he had stood beside her when she had most needed it.

These past months had been unusually difficult. Not only had she been faced with a searing personal crisis, but SysVal was in deep trouble. Despite the fact that stacks of new orders were coming in every week for the Blaze, the company had run out of money.

Sam glared at her and resumed his pacing. Mitch continued to brood. She wandered over to the windows, where she stared at the view of the ocean, the Golden Gate, and the distant hazy outline of Marin beyond. The chill December rain that splashed against the skyscraper's windows matched her mood.

It bothered her that Sam always seemed to be at his worst when she most needed his support. Today, for example. This meeting meant everything to them. If they couldn't get the financing they needed, they simply wouldn't be able to survive. As orders poured in for the Blaze, they had been feverishly adding new staff, expanding their facilities, and searching out additional subcontractors to assemble the machines—all within the space of a few months. Now they simply couldn't pay their bills. The money was there on paper in future orders, but it wasn't in hand where they needed it.

They had known from the beginning that they were dangerously undercapitalized, but now she and Mitch estimated that their precarious financial balancing act was within thirty days of collapsing. They could no longer put off going after venture capital.