Hidden Riches

go down to Market Street to raise hell. One night, one of the servants spotted me and reported it to my father. He had the tree cut down the next day. Then he came up here, locked the door and beat the hell out of me. I was fourteen.” He said it without emotion, took out a cigarette, lighted it. “That’s when I started lifting weights.” His eyes flashed through the smoke. “He wasn’t going to beat me again. If he tried, I was damn well going to be strong enough to take him. A couple of years later, I did. And that’s how I earned boarding school.”
    Something sour rose up in her throat. She forced herselfto swallow it. “You expect that to be hard for me to understand,” she said quietly. “Because my father never raised a hand to us. Not even when we deserved it.”
    Jed considered the tip of his cigarette before tapping the ash on the floor. “My father had big hands. He didn’t use them often, but when he did, it was without control.”
    “And your mother?”
    “She preferred throwing things, expensive things. She knocked me unconscious once with a Meissen vase, and then took the two thousand in damages out of my college fund.”
    Dora nodded, continued to stare out the window while she struggled not to be sick. “Your sister?”
    “They vacillated between treating her like a Dresden doll and an inmate. Tea parties one day, locked doors the next.” He shrugged. “They wanted her to be the perfect lady, the virginal debutante who would follow the Skimmerhorn rules and marry well. Whenever she didn’t conform, they put her in solitary.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Locked her in her room, a couple of days, maybe a week. Then they’d bribe her with shopping sprees or parties until she did what they wanted.” To combat the bitterness in his mouth, he took another drag. “You’d have thought sharing the misery would have made us close, but somehow it never did. We didn’t give a damn about each other.”
    Slowly, she turned her head, looked at him over her shoulder. “You don’t need to apologize to me for your feelings.”
    “I’m not apologizing.” He snapped the words out. “I’m explaining them.” And he refused to let her unquestioning compassion soothe him.
    “I got the call to go see Elaine—supposedly from one of her staff, but it was one of Speck’s men. They wanted me on the scene when it happened. They knew she went out every Wednesday at eleven to have her hair done. I didn’t.” His gaze lifted again, latched onto Dora’s. “I knewnothing about her, wanted to know nothing about her. I was minutes away from her house, and royally pissed at being summoned, when the dispatch came through with the bomb threat. You could say Speck had a good sense of timing.”
    He paused a moment, walked over to the small hearth and crushed out the cigarette on the stone. “I was first on the scene, just as Speck planned. I could see her in the car when I was running. The roses were blooming,” he said softly, seeing it all perfectly again, not like a film, not like a dream, but stark reality. “She looked toward me. I could see the surprise on her face—and the irritation. Elaine didn’t like to have her routine interrupted, and I imagine she was ticked off at the idea of the neighbors seeing me run across the lawn with my weapon out. Then she turned the key, and the car went up. The blast knocked me back into the roses.”
    “You tried to save her, Jed.”
    “I didn’t save her,” he said flatly. “That’s for me to live with, and the guilt of it because she meant no more to me than a stranger. Less, because she wasn’t a stranger. We lived in this house together for nearly eighteen years, and we shared nothing.”
    She turned back then, and sat quietly. Jed felt a quick jolt of surprise at how lovely, how perfect she looked there with the sun pouring liquidly around her, her eyes calm and watchful, her mouth solemn. Odd, he thought, there had never been anything in this house he’d considered beautiful. Until now.
    “I understand why you brought me here,” she began. “Why you felt you had to—but you didn’t have to. I’m glad you did, but it wasn’t necessary.” She sighed then and let her hands rest in her lap. “You wanted me to see a cold, empty house where very little is left but the unhappiness that used to live here. And you wanted me to understand that, like the house, you have nothing to offer.”
    He had a need, an almost desperate one, to step