For the Children Page 3

  The caller who’d left the number was Gandoyne’s son, who had no interest in taking over the business, who was worried about his father’s health and who had heard of Kirk’s win-at-all-costs reputation. He’d gone on to say that both companies were family-owned, headed by stereotypical patriarchs intent on doing business in the same way as their fathers and their fathers before them. They refused to sell stock options. Refused to let anyone else have any say in their businesses or give up the least measure of control.

  “Leave them to it,” Kirk told the cup of coffee he’d poured, which had grown cold. He dumped out the offensive liquid, rinsed the mug and put it back in the cupboard.

  “You can’t do that,” Susan used to say. “It wasn’t washed.”

  “My mouth never touched it,” he’d tell her.

  “But the coffee did.”

  “And coffee is just what it’ll have in it the next time I use it.”

  “It’s still wet,” she’d say next.

  There wasn’t a lot Kirk managed to do right around the house. Of course, you couldn’t blame him much on that score. He’d never spent enough time around a house to learn.

  And he’d tell her, “It’ll be dry by tomorrow morning when I need it again.”

  She’d quit arguing, but her eyes would be speaking loud disapproval. And he’d bet his living trust that she’d go back afterward and wash the mug. Probably the whole cupboard of mugs in case any of the others were contaminated by his inadequate sense of what was sanitary—and acceptable.

  Leaning against the counter, staring at the cell phone on the tiled island across from him, Kirk felt satisfied that, at least in this imagined exchange between him and Susan, he’d had the last word.

  Gandoyne and his family were going to lose his empire if he didn’t reinvent his business practices. Aster Sealants would get an offer too good to refuse. Or if they said no, they’d lose out altogether when some young upshot fresh from Podunk College U.S.A. found a way to make the edges of an opened aluminum lid nonsharp and resealable. If Aster could do it, so would someone else.

  And that someone would sell to another someone who made aluminum cans. Those two someones would get filthy rich while two old men went bankrupt.

  The cell phone rang.

  “Chandler.” Some habits died hard.

  “Douglas’s name is on the birth certificate.”

  Alexander Douglas. Susan’s new husband.

  “I expected as much.”

  “In the state of Arizona, that makes him the kid’s father.”

  Kirk lowered the hand holding the phone. Watched the coffee in the pot. Put the phone back to his ear. “The bastard has my wife. I’ll see him in hell before he gets my son, too.”

  “Arizona laws are pretty clear.”

  “File whatever you have to file to get me a paternity test.”

  “You aren’t thinking straight, Kirk.” Kirk knew Troy Winston only dared say the words because he couldn’t see Kirk’s face. That muscle in his jaw started to tic.

  “I’ve never been thinking straighter,” he said softly. “That child is mine, and I will do whatever it takes to be a part of his life. If I have to sue, I’ll sue. Just get me that paternity test.”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  Kirk was pleased as he disconnected the call—in spite of the offended tone he’d heard in the voice of his most trusted associate.

  He was sorry he’d been rough on Troy. Maybe even sorry that this would rock Susan’s world. But he was going to do this.

  He was determined.

  And he was Kirk Chandler.

  Thumb on the keypad of his cell phone, Kirk dialed the direct line to Edgar Gandoyne. It was now almost eight-thirty in Virginia. And Kirk had half an hour to get to work.

  “ALL RISE.”

  Valerie walked through the hall door leading from her office to the courtroom after a five-minute break, taking a deep breath as she went through the change from emotional woman to detached judge.

  “You may be seated.”

  The six other people in the small room sat as she took her seat on the bench. Smiling at Ashley, the court clerk who usually worked with her, Valerie checked the day’s files.

  Mona, the bailiff working this morning’s schedule, announced the first case in the same clear, unemotional voice Valerie had been hearing since her first day on the bench.

  As Ben White’s name was announced, Valerie glanced up, looking at the four people sitting on the dais eight feet in front of her and six feet below. Behind them was a hard wooden bench that could seat maybe four visitors. And an upholstered, sound-buffered wall.

  An intimate setting for their little party.

  The visitor’s bench was empty.

  Ben was looking down. She waited.

  A couple of seconds later the twelve-year-old boy gave a surreptitious and very hesitant glance in her direction.

  She smiled at him. And forced herself to ignore the catch in her lungs. Ben might be the same size as Blake and Brian, but his life was not theirs.

  He was the most important person in that room and she wanted him to know it.

  Those eyes were trained in her direction for only a second, but she read the fear there.

  She called for those present to introduce themselves.

  Debbie Malcolm, state prosecutor on the White case, went first.

  “Gordon White, father to the juvenile.” Ben’s father had been in her courtroom before.

  “Leslie White, mother.” As had she.

  Ben was next. He stated his name, looking at her briefly, and then lowering his eyes.

  Ben’s attorney, Tyson Hunter, a public defender Valerie saw often, was next. During the difficult first minutes of this proceeding, everyone in the room, with the exception of Ben, was occupied with whatever papers were in front of them.

  There wasn’t a lot of eye contact in Valerie’s working life.

  With a crease in his forehead that had grown more pronounced over the months Valerie had been seeing Ben, the boy was peering at the papers in his lawyer’s hands. His papers.

  The file was thick.

  Valerie had a version of the same file in front of her.

  Without looking at the boy again, she began with the legal protocol, turning Ben from a twelve-year-old child to a case number. For the record she asked if Ben’s biographical information was correct. His attorney stated in the affirmative, both of them going through their notes during the exchange.

  Detachment was critical to her. She was about to make a decision that was going to change, one way or another, the rest of this all-American-looking boy’s life.

  Debbie Malcolm, for the state, recommended, in light of the evidence before them, that Ben be detained.

  Valerie had known coming into the room that this would be the recommendation.

  Ben’s attorney spoke next, trying to explain away repeated truancies as no danger to the community. In great and passionate detail, he told the court about the boy’s scholastic abilities, his remarkable IQ that was blamed for a boredom that drove him from classrooms. The misdemeanors the lawyer dismissed in much the same way, managing to assert more than once that detention was for those who were a danger to the community. He believed that there were other, more beneficial ways to handle the case before them and asked for a lesser sentence.

  Six months ago, Valerie would have been swayed by the arguments. They were solid. Sound. As good as anything she’d ever done during her life on the other side of the bench.

  Looking at the boy’s parents, she asked, “How’s he doing at home?”

  Ben’s father said fine.

  His mother wiped away the tears that were sliding slowly down her face.

  Valerie glanced at Ben. His face was impassive, which sent alarms to her nerve endings. At twelve years of age, the boy was unmoved by his mother’s anguish. Anguish that he had caused.

  His mother’s statement was rife with confusion, helplessness, an engulfing desire to do what
was best for her son and the honesty to admit she had no more ideas.

  “Do you have anything to say?” she asked Ben, pinning him now with her most serious stare. Unless something happened in the next thirty seconds to convince her otherwise, Ben White had just sealed his fate.

  “No, Your Honor.”

  “Okay.” Valerie scanned the pages in front of her once more, making absolutely certain she’d seen everything—every note, date, justification, charge, recommendation and previous disposition. She was warm in her robe. Warmer than normal. She was aware of the heavy circular metal plaque on the wall behind her, almost as though it were radiating heat. Its words were emblazoned on her mind. Great Seal of the State of Arizona. 1912.

  The state of Arizona had entrusted her with this decision.

  “Ben, based on the number of times I’ve seen you in this court, and based on the fact that you’ve violated the terms of your intensive probation, I am going to have you detained, here at Juvenile Detention for a period of ninety days.” In spite of the sharp intake of breath she heard from the dais, Valerie continued, explaining legalities, conditions. “Do you understand what that means?”

  She gazed at the boy. Not at his parents. His mother’s tears were not going to help Valerie do her job.

  The boy was stone-faced, as usual. Until he opened his mouth to speak.

  “No! Your Honor, no! Please don’t send me there! I’ll do everything just like you say, I promise.” With tears streaming down his face, he looked frantically over to his parents. “Please, don’t let them take me away from you….”

  Basketball tryouts. Today Blake and Brian had basketball tryouts.

  “Please!”

  She read him the rest of the disposition.

  Detention was this boy’s only hope.

  She believed that.

  The thought carried her from the room and down the hall to her office, but it didn’t erase the sight of that terrified face from her mind’s eye. Or stop her from imagining the next hour and the way the boy’s life was going to be drastically changed.

  Ben had reason to be terrified. Juvenile detention stripped a kid not just of his freedom, but of any false pride he might retain. Her hope was that reducing Ben White to the most basic aspects of existence, he’d be able to begin again, to rebuild his life, to find a positive direction.

  Her other hope was that neither of her sons ever had reason to look like that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LEAH LOOKED UP from her desk outside Valerie’s office when Valerie entered their suite. “Did you detain him?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t stop to chat.

  In her office, hanging up her robe, Valerie concentrated on detaching herself from the image of Ben White. She couldn’t do her job if she didn’t. Nor could she be a good mother outside the job….

  “What’s the little smile for?” Leah asked, walking into Valerie’s office a couple of minutes later.

  She told her J.A. about the boys’ basketball tryouts that afternoon. And how their enthusiasm had completely consumed them. They just had to make that team.

  “Do you know who the coach is?”

  “Yeah, he’s that crossing guard I told you about.”

  “The one who looks far too sexy to be a crossing guard?”

  “I never said that!”

  “Not in words, maybe!” Leah grinned, dropping into the chair in front of Valerie’s desk.

  “What I’ve said is that it’s hard to believe someone who moves with his confidence is content standing on a street corner with a stop sign.”

  “Do you have any idea how many times you’ve said it, though?”

  Was she really talking about the man that much? She made a mental note to stop.

  “It’s just that something about him strikes me, you know?” she said now, thoughts of the smile he’d given her that morning starting to replace the memory of the look in Ben’s eyes.

  “Yeah, I know,” Leah said, her grin growing wider.

  “Not like that.” Valerie picked up a pen, drew some lines on the top of a small pad of sticky notes. “He represents everything I haven’t known in a man,” she continued slowly. She and Leah had never spoken about anything like this before. “He sees the incredible value in children. He gives his time to them.”

  “Isn’t that what Hal and the other male judges and probation officers and C.P.S. workers and attorneys do every day?”

  “Of course.” Valerie glanced up. She couldn’t explain what made the guard different. He just was.

  “So you think the boys will make the team?”

  “I pray that they do.” She’d been offering up little prayers for days. “Neither of them is particularly tall or talented at handling the ball, but Brian’s a great shooter.” She chuckled. “I can vouch for that. We spent more time on the driveway this weekend than we did in the house.

  “Besides, it’s just a junior-high team. At that age they let everyone who tries out have a place on the team, don’t they?”

  Leah didn’t know.

  Valerie didn’t, either. She just hoped to God the boys were chosen. Basketball was going to be Brian’s lifeline.

  “You had a call from someone named Susan Douglas.” Leah passed a note she’d been holding across the desk. “Said she’s a friend of yours and needs to speak with you today. She was hoping before your morning calendar.”

  Susan Douglas. It was turning out to be a day for difficult situations. She reached for the note. “I’ll call now.”

  Leah stood. “I’ve never heard you mention her before.”

  “I told you my husband died two years ago, in a car accident….”

  “Yeah.” Her eyes filled with compassion, Leah sat down again.

  “The accident was his fault.”

  “I’d heard that.”

  “Did you also hear that he was drunk?”

  “No!”

  Valerie nodded, fighting other mental visions she’d spend a lifetime trying to erase. “I’m friends with a couple of reporters who wanted to protect me and the boys, so the accident didn’t get much press coverage. Also, it happened shortly after 9/11….” She paused. “He hit a little girl….”

  She stopped abruptly. The morning she’d had, the life she was having, had briefly gotten the better of her. She would not cry.

  Tears didn’t help. She’d already shed so many and they never eased the pain.

  They couldn’t change the past. They couldn’t bring that little girl back.

  Leah was staring at her, an odd mixture of horror, shock and compassion on her face.

  “Was she badly hurt?” she asked hoarsely.

  Valerie nodded. Scrambled frantically for the detachment that would see her through. “She lived for almost a week, but there was never really any hope….”

  “Oh, God, Val, I heard there was some kind of tragedy involved, but I never guessed… I’m sorry— I had no idea… I’m so sorry.”

  And this was one reason Valerie didn’t talk about that part of her life. People had no idea what to do or say. After the accident, even though the tragedy had been kept out of the papers, Valerie had found that the friends she and Thomas had shared slowly stopped calling. And she understood why. No one knew what to say.

  Because there was nothing to say.

  A year later, she’d received her appointment to the bench. She’d started a new job, a new life and was trying desperately to let go of the most painful parts of the old one.

  “Susan is the little girl’s mother.”

  “You know her?”

  “I got in touch with her after…I’d seen Alicia’s obituary. It listed her mother’s name, said she was survived by a loving family and friends, and that was all. But there’d been this picture….”

  She drew some more lines. Evenly spaced, even in length and thickness. Parallel in every way. Perfectly balanced.

  “I knew there was nothing I could do, but I had to try to help.”

  “Why am I not surpri
sed?” Leah’s smile was sad. And full of love.

  “She was so kind,” Valerie told her assistant. “Even in the face of her own grief, she was concerned about me and my widowhood. As we talked, we found we had something else in common—our poor choice in husbands. Apparently, the little girl’s father was out of the same mold as my husband. Except that Susan and her husband had already been divorced when Alicia was killed.”

  “Oh my gosh! That poor woman!”

  “Yeah. She had it pretty rough for a while there. She’ll never completely recover from her daughter’s death, but…” Valerie paused, feeling again that horrible stab of guilt about all the things she hadn’t done that might have prevented the senseless tragedy. “She remarried shortly after the accident and although I haven’t spoken with her, I heard not too long ago that she’s had a new baby. I sent a little outfit.”

  “Maybe that’s why she’s calling, then,” Leah said, standing again. “To thank you.”

  Valerie hoped so, thinking of the nearly broken woman she’d known. God, she hoped so.

  SUSAN DOUGLAS COULDN’T think straight. Alex had been so good to her. The only good thing in her life at a time when she’d thought she’d never be capable of feeling good again. He’d saved her life. Literally.

  And then spent many, many months slowly putting that life back together. Handing her the pieces as she was ready to receive them.

  And never once, during all of that, had he made her feel as though she couldn’t do it without him. He’d never diminished her. He’d nurtured her.

  She owed him everything.

  She’d chewed the nails of both hands by midmorning that last Tuesday in October. She’d left the message for Valerie at eight, hoping the judge would call before her morning session started. And now it was ten-thirty.

  The baby had been up, eaten, had his bath, occupying her for several hours. But now he was asleep again, leaving her alone with her thoughts. Far too alone…

  The phone rang and she jumped, knocking it off its cradle. With a glance at herself in the mirror, she grabbed the mobile receiver from the floor.

  She looked fine. Her shoulder-length dark hair was perfectly styled, her makeup exquisite, her slacks and sweater the epitome of fashion on a body that was model-slim just a month after her baby’s birth. If one overlooked the bleeding cuticle on her right index finger, she could easily pass for the rich socialite she’d always wanted to be.