Paradise by Judith McNaught
“It probably is,” she said, fighting to keep her voice level and her thoughts clear. “The minute you can get back inside, start putting together a list of anyone at all who might have a reason to want to put us through this. Have your security manager draw up a list of everyone who was detained for shoplifting, and have your credit manager give us a list of everyone denied credit in the last six months. Mark Braden, who heads our security division, will fly down there tomorrow to work with your people. Now, get out of there—just in case it wasn’t a crank.”
“Right,” he said reluctantly.
“Call me from wherever you decide to go and give me your phone number so we can keep in touch.”
“Got it,” he said. “Meredith,” he added, “I’m really sorry about this. I don’t know why this store is suddenly a target. I assure you we bend over backward for customers, in keeping with company policy, and—”
“Adam,” she interrupted emphatically, “get out of that store!”
“Okay.”
Meredith hung up and punched the button for the line where she’d left Wilder on hold. “Nolan,” she said, “I don’t have time to talk about a board meeting now. The New Orleans store just had another bomb threat.”
“This is going to play hell with Christmas profits,” he predicted furiously. “Keep me posted, Meredith, you know where to reach me.”
Meredith mumbled a distracted promise, and then launched into action. Looking at her secretary, who was hovering anxiously in the doorway, she said, “Have the paging operator give out the emergency code. Hold all my calls unless they’re critical, and if they are, put them through to me in the conference room.”
When her secretary left, Meredith stood up and began to pace, telling herself this was nothing but a false alarm. On the store’s intercom system the emergency code was already beginning to ring—three short bells followed by three long ones—notifying all department heads to assemble immediately in the designated emergency location, which was the conference room adjoining Meredith’s office. The last time that emergency code had to be used was two years before, when a shopper had died of a heart attack in the store. Then, like today, the purpose for assembling everyone was primarily to keep them informed and, therefore, prevent a hysterical outbreak of gossip among the employees, and to plan what information would be given to the press. Like most large corporations, Bancroft & Company had an established set of procedures for dealing with emergencies such as personal injuries, fires . . . and even bomb scares.
The possibility that a bomb might actually explode in New Orleans and injure people was more than Meredith could bear to contemplate. The thought of a bomb going off after the store was cleared was less horrifying but sickening nonetheless. Like all the Bancroft branch stores, the New Orleans store was beautiful, distinctive, and new. In her mind, Meredith saw its splendid white-pillared façade gleaming in the sunshine, then she saw it exploding and collapsing, and she shuddered. There wasn’t a real bomb in it, she told herself, it was another false alarm. A false alarm that would cost the store dearly in lost Christmas profits.
The store’s executives were hurrying past her doorway, assembling in the conference room, but Mark Braden, according to established procedure, came straight into her office. “What’s happening, Meredith?”
Meredith told him, and he swore under his breath, looking at her in angry consternation. When she finished telling him about the instructions she’d given MacIntire, he nodded. “I’ll catch a flight out there in a few hours. We’ve got a good security man in that store. Between us and the police, maybe we can turn up something that will point to a suspect.”
The atmosphere in the crowded conference room was heavy with tension and curiosity. Rather than sitting down at the conference table, Meredith walked to the center of the room, where she could be seen and heard more easily by the men and women who’d assembled there. “We’ve had another bomb scare in New Orleans,” she began. “The bomb squad is on its way there. Since this is the second one we’ve had, we’re going to be hit with a lot of calls from the press. No one . . . no one,” she emphasized, “is to make any statements. Refer all inquiries from the media to public relations.” She glanced at the P.R. director and said, “Ben, you and I can work out a statement after this meeting, and—” She broke off as the phone rang on the conference table. “Excuse me,” she said, and picked it up.
The manager of the Dallas store sounded frantic. “We’ve had a bomb threat, Meredith! The caller told the police that the bomb is set to go off in six hours. The bomb squad is on the way, and we’re clearing the store.” Meredith automatically gave him the same instructions she’d given the manager of the New Orleans store, then she hung up the phone. For a moment she was unable to think, then she slowly looked at the assembly. “We’ve had another bomb threat—at the Dallas store. They’re clearing it now. The call went to the police, just like the one in New Orleans, and the caller said the bomb is set to go off in six hours.”
A flurry of furious exclamations and outraged curses erupted around the room, then died in the shock of the telephone shrilling yet again. The sound made Meredith’s heart stop, but she reached out and picked it up. “Miss Bancroft,” the policeman’s voice said urgently, “this is Captain Mathison over at the First District. We’ve just received an anonymous phone call from a man who said a bomb has been placed in your store and is set to go off in six hours.”
“Hold on,” Meredith said, her dazed eyes leveling on Mark Braden as she stretched the receiver out to him. “Mark,” she said, automatically following procedure for the Chicago store and handing the matter over to him. “It’s Mathison.”
She waited in a paralysis of fury and pain while Mark snapped questions at the captain, whom he knew well. After Braden hung up, he turned to the silent group in the conference room. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his voice tight with anger, “we’ve had a bomb threat against this store. We’ll use the same procedure you’re familiar with for fire. You all know what to do and say to your people. Let’s get at it and get everyone out of here. If you’re feeling panicky, Gordon,” he snapped, looking straight at Meredith’s problem vice president who’d started to mumble frantically, “keep it to yourself until your staff has cleared out!” He threw a quick glance at the other faces in the room. They looked tense but composed, and he nodded curtly, already turning to leave and instruct his own staff to supervise the evacuation procedures. “In case you don’t normally use them,” he called behind him, “don’t forget to take your pagers with you when you leave.”
Within ten minutes Meredith was the only one present on the executive floor. Standing at her window, she listened to the sirens wailing and watched as more fire trucks and squad cars jammed into Michigan Avenue to reinforce those that were already there. From her vantage point fourteen stories above street level, she watched the police cordoning off the store and shoppers pouring out of it in droves, while the knot in her chest grew and twisted until she could hardly drag air through her lungs. Although she’d ordered the heads of the other two stores to evacuate, she herself had no intention of leaving this one until she absolutely had to. This store lived and breathed for her; it was her heritage and her future; she refused to desert it or be driven out until the bomb squad needed it completely cleared. Not for a moment did she believe there was a bomb in any of her stores, but even if the threats were just that, the damage they were going to do to the company’s profits would be great. Like many other department stores, Bancroft’s depended on the Christmas season for over forty percent of its annual gross sales.
“It’s going to be all right,” she told herself aloud. She turned away from the window, her attention caught by the twin computer screens on her credenza. They were flashing now because the computers were updating sales figures from the Phoenix and Palm Beach stores. Reaching out, Meredith pressed the combination of keys that showed the Phoenix store’s sales figures for this same day last year, and then those from the Palm Beach st
Matt wasn’t concerned when she told him what was happening, he was frantic. “Get out of that store, Meredith,” he ordered. “I mean it, darling, hang up the phone and get the hell out of there!”
“Nope,” she said softly, smiling at his autocratic command and alarmed tone. He loved her, and she loved hearing his voice whether he was calling her darling or issuing orders. “It’s a hoax, Matt, just like the one a few weeks ago.”
“If you don’t leave that building,” he warned, “I’m coming over there and hauling you out of there myself.”
“I can’t,” she said firmly. “I’m like the captain on a ship. I don’t leave until I know everyone else is safely out of here.” She paused while he expressed his opinion of that with a long and eloquent curse. “Don’t give me orders you wouldn’t follow yourself,” she said with a smile in her voice. “In less than a half hour we should be cleared out. I’ll leave then.”
Matt expelled his breath in a harsh sigh, but he stopped trying to persuade her to leave because he knew it was useless—and because he knew he couldn’t get to her before thirty minutes and drag her out of there. “All right,” he said, standing up and glowering worriedly at his office, “but call me when you’re out, because I’m going to be going crazy until I know you are.”
“I will,” she promised. Teasingly, she added, “My father left his cellular phone in his desk. Do you want the number so you can reach me—in case the suspense gets too great?”
“You’re damned right I want the number.”
Meredith opened the desk, took out the phone, and gave him the number.
When she hung up, Matt began to pace, too agitated to sit and wait without knowing what was happening to her. Raking his hand through his hair, he walked over to the window, trying unsuccessfully to see the roof of her building through the maze of skyscrapers. She was so cautious by nature that he could hardly believe she was insisting on staying in that damned store. He hadn’t expected that. It hit him then that if he had a radio, he might be able to keep abreast of what was happening twelve blocks away as well as at Meredith’s other stores. He didn’t have one in his office, but he thought Tom Anderson did.
Turning away from the windows, he headed toward his secretary’s office. “I’ll be with Tom Anderson,” he said, “extension 4114. If Meredith Bancroft calls me, I want that call put through to me there. Is that clear? It’s an emergency,” he warned her, wishing to God that Eleanor Stern were there.
“Perfectly clear, sir,” she said, but Matt didn’t notice the hostility in her tone. He was too worried about Meredith to notice a secretary; he was too worried to remember to take his keys out of his desk.
Joanna waited until the elevator doors closed behind him, then she turned and looked at his desk. His gold key ring was still in the center drawer. The third key she tried unlocked the file cabinets; the file on Meredith Bancroft was neatly labeled with her name and filed in its appropriate place, under B. Her palms perspiring with nervous excitement, Joanna removed the file and opened it. In it were some shorthand notes not yet transcribed, and which she didn’t dare take the time to try to decipher—and a two-page typewritten agreement signed by Meredith Bancroft. The terms of that agreement made Joanna’s eyes widen and her mouth slowly curve into a smile of malicious glee. The same man who Cosmopolitan magazine named as one of the country’s ten most eligible bachelors—the man who dated movie stars and famous models and who women drooled over—that same man was having to pay his own wife five million dollars just to see him four nights a week for eleven weeks. He was also having to sell her some land in Houston she evidently wanted. . . .
“I need a radio,” Matt said without preamble as he stalked into Anderson’s office. He saw it on the windowsill and turned it on. “The bomb squad is swarming all over Bancroft’s. They’ve evacuated all three stores,” he said disjointedly. He’d had dinner with Tom last Tuesday after his tumultuous meeting with Meredith, and Matt had told Tom all that led up to it. Now he glanced distractedly at his friend and added, “Meredith won’t leave the damned store!”
Tom lurched forward in his chair. “My God! Why not?”
Meredith’s call to tell Matt that she was out of the building was put through to him in Tom’s office. Matt was still talking to her when the newscaster on the radio announced that a bomb had just been found in the New Orleans branch of Bancroft & Company and that the bomb squad was attempting to disarm it. It was Matt who had to tell her the news. Within the next hour another bomb was discovered in the Dallas store, and a third one was found in the toy department of the Chicago store.
50
With his hand on the iron gate, Philip stood looking at the picturesque little villa Caroline Edwards Bancroft had lived in for nearly thirty years. Perched high on a rocky hill, it overlooked the sparkling harbor far below, where his ship had put into port early that morning. Flowers bloomed riotously in neatly tended beds and pots, basking in the late afternoon sunlight. An aura of beauty and tranquillity pervaded the place, and he found it nearly impossible to imagine his frivolous film-star ex-wife living happily in such relative seclusion as this.
The house had been given to her by Dominic Arturo, the Italian she’d had an affair with before they were married, he knew, and now he assumed she must have gone through every cent of her divorce settlement, or she wouldn’t be living there. The large block of stock she owned in Bancroft & Company paid dividends, but she was legally prohibited from selling or transferring it to anyone other than himself. Beyond that, all she could do with her stock was exercise her right to vote her shares, and she always voted in accordance with whatever the board of directors recommended. That much Philip knew, because he’d made it a point over the years to watch how she voted. Now, as he stood looking at the house, he assumed she must have been trying to live on the dividends alone, because nothing short of poverty could have induced his party-loving wife to live like this.
He took his hand away from the black iron gate. He hadn’t intended to go there, until that foolish woman at the captain’s table had asked if he planned to visit his ex-wife. Once she’d put the idea into his head, he’d found it hard to ignore. He was older now, and he didn’t know how long he had to live. Suddenly it had seemed like a good idea to make peace with the woman he’d once loved. She’d been an adulteress and he’d retaliated by keeping her away from her own daughter and forcing her to agree never to come near Meredith or him again. At the time it had seemed like justice. Now that he was facing death without warning, it seemed a little . . . harsh. Perhaps.
However, having seen the way Caroline had been living made him decide against entering the courtyard and knocking on the front door. Curiously, his reason for that was one of pity: He knew how vain she was, and he knew that her ego would take a terrible blow if he saw her living like this. On those occasions when he’d thought of Caroline during the last three decades, he’d always imagined her living in high style, looking as beautiful as ever, and participating in the same social whirl she’d adored before they were married. The woman who lived here must surely have turned into a hag and a hermit, with nothing to do but wile away the years watching ships put into port or shopping in the tiny nearby village.
His shoulders drooping with a strange kind of despair for long-forgotten dreams and shattered lives, Philip turned toward the little path that wound around the side of the hill toward the port below. “You’ve come a long way, just to turn back, Philip,” an unforgettable voice said.
His head jerked around, and he saw her then, standing perfectly still beneath a tree on the hillside to his far left, a basket of flowers over her arm.
She started toward him, her ga
He stared at her, feeling his unreliable heart beating a little faster than normal, and he couldn’t think of what to say, which made him feel gauche, which in turn made him angry with himself. “You look older,” he announced bluntly.
She replied with a soft laugh and no rancor at all, “How nice of you to say so.”
“I just happened to be in the neighborhood—” He nodded toward his ship in the harbor, realized how inane his words sounded, and scowled at her because she appeared to be laughing at his discomfiture.
“What takes you away from the store?” she said, putting her hand on the gate but not opening it.
“I’ve taken a leave of absence. Bad heart.”
“I know you’ve been ill. I still read the Chicago newspapers.”
“May I come in?” Philip said without meaning to, and then he remembered that there were always men around her. “Or are you expecting company?” he added with unhidden sarcasm.
“It’s good to know that while everything and everyone else in the world seems to change,” she remarked dryly, “you and you alone remain the same—as jealous and suspicious as ever.” She opened the gate, and he followed her up the path, already regretting that he’d come.
The floors of the villa were stone, covered with bright patches of carpet and huge urns of flowers from her garden. She nodded to a chair in the small room that doubled as living room and parlor. “Would you like a drink?” He nodded, but instead of sitting down, he walked over to the big window, looking out at the harbor. He stayed there until he was forced to turn and accept the glass of wine she held out to him. “Are you doing—all right?” he asked lamely.