Truth and Consequences, page 11
She felt weepy, so she said no more. She couldn’t afford to puff up her eyes again. She wasn’t living in the real world right now. She was living in Model World, the world of the most clever illusions.
She heard Roddy’s voice. “Nymph, I command thee back to thy bed of ferns. Obey your master!”
“I forgot how much I hate this job,” she muttered, but she went back to be attended by the malicious little forest sprite. How wonderful macho brothers seemed in contrast to Roddy. And how extremely, extraordinarily wonderful Craig seemed.
CRAIG COULDN’T FORCE HIMSELF to call Penny back. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Not yet.
Too much hell was breaking loose. He talked to some member or other of his family at least once every two hours during waking hours. The doctors now thought that Big Gary’s concussion was more serious than they’d first thought. The vision in his right eye was blurred and he kept dozing off.
Lilly, her face and hand heavily bandaged, was back with the family, but in the lowest spirits. The twins were both traumatized, and Rita, Gary’s wife and Lilly’s mother, was beside herself with worry. Dena, Craig’s sister, tried to comfort her, but couldn’t.
They were one of the families hardest hit in the county. One of the most painful things for Craig was that Lilly was so depressed that she didn’t want to talk to him. Another was that Little Gary and April and Angie kept asking for him—and Penny. He didn’t want Penny in Vermillion. He somehow knew she’d come if he asked, but he couldn’t ask. It would kill her, and it might just about kill him, as well.
Craig had gotten sympathetic calls from Bart and Will, who offered to do anything they could to help. Decent guys. Decent to the core. He thanked them and told them the Branch family had enough problems of its own. All he asked of them was to help Penny take care of Maeve.
Maeve, he thought cheerlessly. Poor Maeve. And Penny. And her brothers. The detective he’d hired for Maeve, Bretscher, had phoned him this afternoon and asked him to meet at a sports bar. And there he told Craig the latest news about Hilton. News that might break Maeve completely.
Bretscher warned Craig he thought the story would hit the tabloids next Monday and the Internet even sooner. Somebody needed to prepare Maeve. That somebody would probably have to be Craig. And that was one more reason not to call Penny—then he would have to tell her, too.
CEDRIC HAD A SMALL BUT ELEGANT apartment in the Village. He hugged Penny in greeting and then poured two flutes of excellent champagne.
“To you,” he said as a toast. “You’re not going to be a Texas girl anymore? You’re coming back to us?”
“If they’ll have me,” Penny said pensively. “My assignment for Roddy was faux nude—my body was tastefully hidden by ferns and cascading tresses. I’ve never done that sort of stuff before. And he was as snotty as he could be. Yuck!”
Cedric groaned. “That just means he still has the hots for you. Forget him. He’s losing it. Tell me about yourself. You said you had another assignment. What?”
She grimaced. “A couple of layouts for Marcella Lingerie. I didn’t want to take it, but I was afraid to turn it down. My stock’s slipping. Well, I’m getting older. Late this afternoon Roddy pointed out I was getting crow’s feet and should think of having a nip and a tuck.”
“Ignore him,” Cedric said, “You’ll be back on top in no time. You’re one of the special ones. You could last another two decades, at least.”
“Me?” she said in disbelief. “Two decades?”
“Modern women take good care of themselves. You can see grandmothers who are drop-dead lovely. They buy fashions. They buy cosmetics. They buy hair products. Do they want a model who looks sixteen? Of course not.
“Good grief,” he said, “Diane Keaton was hired to be the face of L’Oreal when she was sixty. Julie Christie still stunned at sixty-five. Don’t let people like Roddy get to you. You could still be going on when he’s ancient history.”
He finished his champagne. “To le salade,” he said, and led her to an old-fashioned ice cream table and matching chairs. “I made lobster salad. You always liked that, didn’t you?”
“I adore it,” she said. He pulled out the chair for her to sit and lit a single candle in a silver holder. He set out their dinner, which was beautiful, and poured them both a glass of sparkling water.
They dined and chatted about the latest news in the modeling world. When they’d finished their lobster salad, he served the most beautiful strawberry salad she’d ever seen.
He kept the conversation light until she was finished. “Sweetheart, I hate to bring this up, but it’s like there’s an elephant in the room. Any word about your father?”
She told him there wasn’t. And he coaxed from her the basic outline of Maeve’s financial problems, and, more especially, her emotional ones. He listened about the twins’ struggles to find new primary sponsors and about Sawyer’s gambling debts.
And then he asked Penny about the upheavals in her own life, particularly her shattered marriage. She tried to hedge. “We just weren’t compatible.”
He put his elbow on the table and cupped his chin in his hand. “Does your ‘incompatibility’ have anything to do with what happened in the Caribbean?”
The taste of strawberries disappeared, and she felt as if she had ashes on her tongue. “Oh, Cedric,” she murmured. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t ask that.”
“Well, I did. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to,” she said in resignation. “But, yes, it has to do with that. He wants children. Very much. And I kept denying that the moment to start one would ever really come. I was always vague. I mean, after all, he has so many responsibilities to his own family. His mother’s a widow, his sister has—”
“Stay on the subject,” Cedric said, his tone gentle. “The subject is you. You don’t want children? I understand why. But did you tell him?”
“I can’t tell him.” Her hands had started to tremble again. “I can’t. I promise myself I will, but I can’t. Even here, talking to you, I’m starting to fall apart. It was the worse thing that ever happened to me. I guess it’s not as bad as what’s happened to my mother. She—”
“Stay on subject, Penn,” Cedric said, putting his hand over hers, steadying it so it couldn’t shake. “You mean you’re afraid to tell him.”
“Afraid and ashamed. Everything that happened, I brought on myself. I was stupid. I was arrogant. I thought I knew it all. And it still makes me feel filthy and—and like I’m damaged goods. Damaged forever. I’m the freak.”
He tightened his grasp and leaned nearer. “Penny, first you’re a good person. Everybody worth his or her salt loved working with you. You had more than looks. You had a quality—it was almost luminous.”
He paused and looked into her eyes. “You weren’t a diva. You weren’t interested in clawing your way to the top, but you got to the top—on your own terms.
“You missed all the major pitfalls, the anorexia, the drugs, the promiscuity, the drinking, the wild spending. All of it.”
“Except,” she began bitterly.
He held a finger to his lips, telling her to be silent and listen. “What happened in Milan wasn’t your fault. And even if it were, you were barely eighteen. You made a mistake, a misjudgment. Who in the world hasn’t?”
“But what happened in the Caribbean—” she said, but he cut her off again.
“You didn’t have a scrap of power over it. It was a long time ago. You should learn to accept it and forgive yourself. For your sake. And your husband’s.”
Her heart beat so hard that she was afraid that Cedric could see it jarring her knit top. “He won’t be my husband much longer.”
“And you,” warned Cedric, “will regret that as long as you live. Because you love this man. He’s the love of your life. I can tell. And if he has any sense, he loves you back.”
“If I tell him the truth, he won’t love me,” Penny countered.
“What are you saying?” Cedric asked in exaggerated dismay. “You’re hiding the truth, so he’ll still love you even if you divorce him? Does that pass for reasoning in Texas?”
Penny blinked hard, because what he was saying was damning—and very near the truth.
Cedric put his hand on his forehead in frustration. “Let’s see. It’s better that he suffers and still loves you. And that you suffer, so he’ll still love you. But if you love him, is it fair to make him suffer? If you’re really so awful, shouldn’t you tell him the truth and set him free? Or don’t you really love him enough to do that?”
Penny put her face in hands. “Please. You’re confusing me.”
“Then let me be clear. If you love him, tell him. Then if he doesn’t want to see you anymore, he really didn’t love you, he loved an illusion. Is that clear enough?”
In a strangled voice, she said, “Painfully clear, thank you.”
“Then let me clarify something else,” Cedric offered. “What if he learns the truth and still loves you? What if he does, and all that stands between you two is your pride?”
“And my humiliation,” she said, her face still covered.
“And your fear.”
“That, too,” she mumbled.
“Penny,” he said sternly. “This secret’s kept you on the run for years. It’s colored everything in your life. Especially how you think about yourself. Make it let go of you.”
She couldn’t say anything because she didn’t want to cry.
“Do you love him?”
“Yes,” she managed to say. She loved him with all her heart. She loved the way he looked, the way he moved, the way he talked, the way he thought. His honesty, his kindness, his sense of responsibility.
She loved him on so many levels that she couldn’t count them. He was the man she admired beyond all others.
She uncovered her face and looked at her friend. “You’re right. I should tell him. But I think I should wait until our lives are a little less chaotic. I told you about the tornado—”
“Yes. But you can’t wait too long, Penny. Life’s never simple. Not for any of us.”
She nodded in agreement.
“Want another glass of champagne?” Cedric asked. “It might help. Then I’ll put you in a cab and get you back to your hotel room.”
She was about to agree when the ring of her phone startled her. She looked at the caller ID. It was Craig. At last.
CHAPTER TEN
“CRAIG?” WHISPERED CEDRIC. Penny, feeling light-headed, nodded.
“I’m leaving so you can talk in private,” Cedric declared and headed for another room.
Penny pressed the button. “Hello? Craig? How are Big Gary and Lilly?”
A long pause. At last he said, “They’re hanging in there. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Thank God!” Penny said, limp with relief.
“Yes. Exactly.” For once, his strong voice sounded tired, and she could imagine his face—handsome but drawn, his brow furrowed, his mouth unsmiling, his eyes deeply serious.
“And the farm?” she asked.
“There’s no estimate yet on the damage. For now, I just want everybody well again.”
“How’s your mother taking this?” Penny asked.
“She’s pretty much unbreakable.”
Unbreakable. She passed that on to you, Penny thought. In her heart she blessed Shirley for being able to face whatever fate threw in her path.
“But,” said Craig, “this call isn’t about my family. It’s about yours.”
Her body went taut again. “What do you mean?”
“Remember the detective I recommended for Maeve? Bretscher?”
Penny remembered. “Yes? He found out something?”
Another pause. “He did. And, I’m sorry, Penny, the news isn’t good.”
He paused again, and she was in no mood for his hesitation, even if he was trying to spare her. “Tell me,” she demanded. “Don’t hold back.”
“Okay. I don’t think there’s any way I can soften this. Bretscher said Hilton has—or had—a mistress. For the last twenty years. He bought her a fancy condo in a gated community in Fort Worth, a new car every other year—in short, he kept her in style.”
Penny said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
She meant it. She didn’t feel as if she had butterflies in her stomach. It felt as if it were full of drunken fruit bats.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s why I put off calling. You don’t need this news, I know.”
Penny’s jaw started to quiver, but she set it, determined not to cry, at least while talking to Craig. He would want to comfort her. In the old days, the good days, he always ended up taking her in his arms, holding her against his lean, powerful body, making her feel that there was no force potent enough to weaken the protection of his embrace.
Keeping her voice as steady as she could, she said, “Who is this…mistress?”
“Her name’s Alyssa Ritchie. He met her in Las Vegas and brought her to Texas. She was supposedly twenty years old then. And Bretscher says he’s got proof that Hilton took her on a lot of his overseas ‘business trips.’”
While my mother was home handling four children. And never suspecting a thing. Penny gritted her teeth. “My mother can’t know about this. It would destroy her. It would flat-out kill her.”
“Penn, she has to know. There’s no way to keep it from her. It’s going to hit the tabloids next Monday. The National Star and Enquirer Weekly News. And Bretscher knows who broke the story—Alyssa herself.”
“Why?” Penny cried. “Why? Why on earth would she admit such a thing?”
“For money. Her sugar daddy is gone. The free ride is over. But she wants to keep living in style. What’s she got that she can cash in on? Her story. And she’s got an agent and is shopping a tell-all book.”
“What?” Penny repeated, even more incredulous than before. “What do you mean, tell-all?”
“A lot of peeks behind the bedroom door. ‘Hot, steaming, forbidden sex,’ is how her agent’s touting it. Dozens of ‘naughty ways’ to please a lover. Be prepared for unpleasant revelations. I’m sorry, Penn. Deeply sorry.”
Sick rage flooded Penny. “An unfaithful thought never crossed my mother’s mind.”
“I know,” he said.
“She loved him completely. She lived to make him happy and proud.”
“I know.”
“And this is how she’s repaid? He’s not only a thief, but an adulterer? And now this floozy’s going to broadcast it to the world? In gruesome detail?”
“Maybe we can get some kind of restraining order against the book. I doubt it, but we can try. We can threaten to sue the tabloids, but I don’t think that’ll work, either.”
Penny knew he was right. Anyone in the public eye was fair game for the tabloids, the scandal sheets, the gossipmongers, the rumor blogs.
She could sit no longer. She rose and began to pace Cedric’s small apartment. “Craig, have you talked to the twins yet? To Sawyer?”
“No. I thought you should know first. You’re the eldest. And in a lot of ways, the closest to Maeve. Do you want to tell them? Or should I?”
“I can do it,” she said, but a wobble in her voice betrayed her.
He said, “No. Let me do it. It won’t be as hard on me.”
She wanted to sink down on her knees and thank him. But she was trying to think straight. “The twins need to have a statement prepared.”
“So will you,” Craig said.
Yes, yes, of course. Me, too. “I can handle myself,” she said, forcing her voice back to steadiness. “But my mother’s going to need a statement, too.”
“All she needs to say is ‘No comment.’ Or ‘Call my representative—my attorney,’ whatever. You’ll be home soon. You can help run interference for her. Luckily you’re in a gated community.”
“She’ll be hounded,” Penny moaned.
“I’ll unplug her phones. And you? Only answer your cell when you know the caller. And be prepared to kick reporters off Maeve’s porch because they will get past the guard at the front gate.”
“She was just starting to get better,” Penny said in despair. “This is so unfair. How do I tell her?”
There was a stretch of silence. “I’m going over there tomorrow night. Maybe I could—”
“No, no,” she said. “She needs family there. Maybe one of the twins can come home—No, it’s Easter. They have a ton of commitments. Sawyer? I just can’t see him wanting to be part of this. Maybe I should just cancel the lingerie shoot and come home.”
“That’s the last thing you should do,” he said firmly. “Don’t let them make you run. You’re a pro. You’re making your comeback. Your father’s screwed up your life enough already. Don’t let him screw up this, too. You’re doing it for Maeve, remember?”
“I remember,” she said softly. Then she added, “Craig, I…I don’t think I can talk any longer. I’m just too shocked. I’m going to have to think really hard about all this.”
“I understand,” he said. “Do you want me to call you after I’ve talked to your brothers?”
“Please,” she whispered. “Please. Or have them call me.”
“Yes,” he said. “That would be better. Didn’t mean to barge into it. But Penn…”
“What?”
“What if somebody, a reporter or someone like that, gets in touch with Maeve before any of us can talk to her? What then?”
“I won’t think about that,” she said. “I absolutely refuse to. Please talk to Mom’s lawyer tomorrow and see if they can get a…a gag order or something. Tell them to pull out all their guns. Threaten everybody involved with lawsuits unending, fire and brimstone and eternal damnation. It may not work, but it’s worth trying.”
“Atta girl,” said Craig. “Hang on to that fighting spirit.”
“I will,” she promised.
But as soon as he hung up, she gave in and let the tears come.
