The Bewildered Wife. Vivian Leiber
glanced out his sixty-fourth-floor office window to the black sky. Clouds hung low, so low it seemed he could grab their swollen mounds. There was a crack of lightning in the distance.
It all came back to him—even now the memory was as sickening as it had been two years ago.
Nicole’s body, her car at the bottom of the ravine where the Radcliffe property line met the street, the car radio still playing the heavy-metal music she loved so much, her blond hair thrown forward across her still, frozen face.
“Henry, get Susan on the phone,” he ordered his son, more curtly perhaps as he struggled to squelch his own emotions.
“That’s the problem,” Henry said. “Susan’s outside.”
Unbidden, the scent of sugar and vanilla came to him. He batted it away with a surge of anger. She was clearly negligent, leaving the frightened children to fend for themselves. He’d have to talk to her.
“What’s she doing outside?”
He stood up, his tall frame making the office look as if it had been furnished with treasures from a dollhouse. He raked a callused hand through his hair. Savvy executives knew he was fighting off a headache—they had seen that gesture many times during tense negotiations. And nothing in recent years had been more tension filled than the attempted purchase of the Eastman Bear Company.
Indistinct sobs crackled from the speaker phone.
“Henry!” Dean yelled.
Someone else came on the line.
“Daddy, it’s Chelsea. Please come home.”
“If Susan’s outside, get me…” He thought for a minute, and then remembered the terrible truth. There wasn’t a housekeeper who would stay in the isolated and gloomy Radcliffe house. There wasn’t a maid who had lasted longer than a day. And he had fired the groundskeeper two days after Nicole’s death; as he remembered that man, his jaws clenched in suppressed rage.
The problem was there was no one to care for his children except Susan.
Dependable, responsible, nearly invisible Susan.
If she wasn’t there…
“There’s no one here, Daddy,” Chelsea said quietly. “Susan went outside to save Wiley.”
Dean scribbled a note to Mrs. Whitherspoon and passed it across the table to her. “Call 911, send them to the house,” it said.
“Are you hurt?” he demanded.
“No,” Chelsea said in a very small voice.
“Are Henry and Edward all right?”
“Yes, but we’re very scared.”
Dean took a deep breath, and his emerald eyes skittered across the conference room at the two dozen executives who had been working through profit-loss statements, annual reports, spreadsheets and payroll estimations for the purchase of the Eastman Bear Company.
“Daddy, it’s just like Mommy,” Chelsea said.
He closed his eyes, wishing very much that she wouldn’t say that. He had worked so hard to get on with his life.
“You’re just saying that because it’s a storm, just like on…that night.”
“No, Daddy,” Chelsea said. “I’m saying that because…because she’s dead.”
Dean dropped the phone and leapt across the table, making the receptionist’s desk in the lobby in four seconds.
“Fire department will be out there in ten minutes,” Mrs. Witherspoon cried out to his shadow.
“Not soon enough,” he muttered.
He punched the elevator button with his fist, then decided to take the stairs. He hit the parking lot in less than a minute, leapt into his midnight-colored Porsche and skidded out onto the street.
Chelsea was so right, he thought, as he sped down the rain-soaked streets of Chicago. It was just like that long-ago night of violent tempers and recriminations. He remembered driving home, angered at…Well, those memories were too painful to go over.
He reached the house before the fire trucks—although, to their credit, he could hear the sirens from a distance.
He screeched to a halt at the point where the circular drive met the front colonnade. His three children cowered just inside the door.
“Are you all right?” he demanded, taking the steps three at a time and yanking open the beveled glass door.
“We’re all right.” Chelsea gulped. “It’s…it’s Susan.”
Though he wanted to pick up a howling Edward, to smooth Henry’s trembling lip, to brush away Chelsea’s tears, he knew he’d better go first to the body of his children’s nanny.
Besides, for the past two years, he had found himself totally unable to handle any of his children’s emotions.
“Now this, now this,” he muttered as he swept through the entrance hall, the living room, the library and out onto the breakfast room porch. Rain lashed against the French doors, and gurgling waters from overflowing gutters swept through the cobblestone courtyard.
He opened the back door and then he saw her. The inert body. Susan? He tried to remember any detail of the woman who had cared for his children for the past year.
But to him, she was the only nanny who had lasted, and there had been fourteen others who had left before her—some lasting no more than a day. He was hard on people, he knew that, and regret welled up in him as he realized that if he were only easier to work for, he might have had a full-time housekeeper, or maid—someone else besides the woman who came twice-a-week—to bring the dog in.
He took the steps two at a time and crouched down at her rain-soaked body.
He opened the palm of her hand, and nearly broke down in uncharacteristic tears as he saw she still held the metal clasp of Wiley’s chain.
He looked heavenward, wondering at a world in which there could be such random and senseless horror.
She had given her life for his children’s dog.
He rolled her over carefully, put his hand underneath her head and pulled her up into his arms.
Gently, so very gently. She deserved the deepest respect in death even if she had never, to his knowledge, had much respect accorded to her in life.
Hadn’t the agency said something about her not having had much of a family?
Well, maybe that’s the only thing that would make a nanny willing to put up with him.
He looked at the closed eyes, the pale skin with drops of rain like dewdrops on rose petals. He touched the budlike lips. He stroked away the wet, thick tendrils of golden hair. He knew it wasn’t right, but his eyes drifted to the swell of her breasts revealed by the rain-drenched T-shirt. She had been beautiful, in her own fresh and innocent kind of way.
He had never noticed. Never noticed at all.
He thought of the life that had been taken away from her, of all the opportunities that a sweet, gentle girl like her had lost. The future—the possibility of finding someone, of having children, of having a life.
All for Wiley, a twelve-year-old German shepherd.
All because of his own stupidity and hard-heartedness—there should have been someone else here to worry about the dog, someone else to help out around the house.
Hadn’t she just had a birthday? He searched his memory and realized that he hadn’t even been able to offer her a day off. Hadn’t even managed to get home in time for a shared dinner. Had delegated the purchase of her birthday present to Mrs. Witherspoon. He noticed the twinkling of the three-charm bracelet.
He shook his head sadly.
And