Serendipity Read online

“I’d like that,” Ross said quietly.

  “Good. I’ll call you.”

  Justine watched her husband leave the room. She bit down on her lower lip. She’d just been put in her place by a master. Who would have thought such a thing could come out of Jasper’s mouth? Certainly not Ross, whose mouth was hanging open. Her heart was pumping furiously and she knew her face was a mask of shame.

  She pulled herself together before turning to face her son. “Don’t take any of this to heart, Ross,” she said. “Your father has never paid any attention to finances. It’s nice to have unlimited resources,” she added sardonically. “He just clips coupons and cashes checks. That’s your father’s life. Besides playing golf and dining at the club. But this magazine is losing money.”

  Ross stared at his mother. She was dressed to the nines, her heavy makeup garish. His father had to clip at least three coupons to pay for the designer outfit she was wearing. Crocodile shoes were expensive. He should know, he had a pair.

  She wasn’t pretty or even attractive, this woman he called Mother. More than once he’d heard his father call her a mongrel, and at times it showed, like today. Justine was cold, callous, and manipulative, and he didn’t like her at all. However, he did respect her keen business sense. The opposite was true of his father. He liked Jasper, but didn’t respect him.

  “Eight months and eight hundred thousand in the black is pretty stiff, Mother,” he said. “Are you sure you want to go ahead with this?”

  “I’m damn well sure, Ross. Draw up the papers. I’ll make your father eat those words. I have a few little . . . insertions I want you to add.”

  “Just a minute, Mother. What kind of little insertions? This has to be a cut and dried professional contract. I won’t be a party to trying to put something over on Father.”

  “Get off it, Ross. Don’t get sanctimonious on me. You’ll do as I say or you’ll be disinherited. Let’s not forget all those little scrapes I got you out of, all the strings I pulled. To be blunt, son, you’d be in jail if it wasn’t for me. The first rule of business is, you fuck them before they fuck you. Now, I suggest you go to your office and get to work on that contract,” she said coldly.

  Anger, hot and scorching, flared in Ross’s eyes. Standing, he towered over his mother. He wanted to tell her how much he disliked her, how his earlier rebellion was because of her; wanted to tell her she wasn’t and never had been parent material, and yes, she bailed him out of scrapes because he had no role model growing up. He also wanted to tell her to go home and wash the heavy pancake off her face, and to take off the artificial eyelashes that made her small eyes feral-looking. The urge to yank at her upswept hairdo was so strong, he clenched his fists. What the hell would she look like without all the trappings? Like a real mother?

  “Don’t threaten me, Mother,” he said coolly. “I’m a good attorney, I can get a job anywhere. In fact, I was asked last week if I had any interest in going back to work in the prosecutor’s office. What that means is I have other options.”

  “My, we’re uppity today, aren’t we?”

  “Is this where you give me that tired old line about changing my shitty diapers when I was born? Forget it, Mother, and don’t ever dismiss me again.”

  “Ross, you are an ungrateful snot. I will not tolerate such talk from my son. Not now, not ever.”

  Ross threw his hands in the air. “Are you firing me?” Jesus, how hopeful his voice sounded.

  Justine heard it too. “Of course not. One doesn’t fire one’s son. We are merely having a business discussion. Clearing the air, so to speak. I will not apologize for my drive, for my business sense. Remember this, Ross, you do what you have to do. Business comes first.”

  “Well, I can certainly relate to that,” Ross said bitterly. “Firsthand of course.”

  “Why don’t we have dinner this evening?” Justine said.

  Ross’s stomach heaved. Dinner with either one of his parents was, in his opinion, like dining out with vipers, each of the vipers trying to find ways to do the other in, with him always in the middle. “I have other plans, Mother. Didn’t we just have dinner, let’s see, wasn’t it three years, two months, and sixteen days ago?”

  “That will be enough, Ross. Enough!”

  The moment the door closed behind Ross, Justine clapped her hands. She’d won both rounds. So what if Jasper held her down with restrictions? She could keep him in line by simply mentioning Judge Halvorsen and his wife Helen, who was cuckolding the judge with Jasper.

  Justine sat back in her swivel chair, long legs stretched out in front of her. She had nice legs. Nice high breasts too. All in all, she was perfectly proportioned. Back then—meaning back when she’d married Jasper thirty years ago—she’d been good in bed. Jasper had said so.

  Orange plastic chairs. She winced. She would have ordered them too. For the reception area. Her thoughts whirled as she tried to come up with suitable justification. Mongrels versus pedigrees. She wasn’t actually going to sit on them herself. They were for other people to sit on. She would never, under any circumstance, sit on any kind of plastic chair. Never.

  Jasper Landers settled his pudgy body in one of the three club chairs in his office. It was his office by right of succession. His leg twitched and then his entire body started to tremble. He hated confrontations of any kind. In the past he would go out of his way, lie, evade, disappear, anything to avoid a face-to-face meeting with his wife. He didn’t know how it was possible for Justine to intimidate him, but she did.

  A drink. A stiff shot of Irish whiskey would help get his emotions under control. Somewhere in this office there was a liquor cabinet complete with liquor, unless Justine had tossed it out. He looked around, his eyes vague and slightly disoriented. How could Justine do this to him? Why did he allow her to reduce him to this . . . old fart? And he wasn’t an old fart. He was a decent, caring human being, who loved Helen Halvorsen.

  He hadn’t meant it to happen. In fact he’d had months of sleepless nights over his attraction for Helen. And he probably would never have acted on that attraction if Ross hadn’t been rushed to the hospital with a ruptured appendix. He’d been only four at the time. Helen had been a volunteer in the pediatric ward that day; Justine hadn’t been around. Helen had held Ross’s hand, smoothed back his dark curls, crooned soft words of comfort to his son, and then to him. She’d stayed on after her shift was over, to sit with him, and when the doctor assured them both that Ross would sleep through the night, they left to have coffee in an all-night diner. God, he could still taste that wonderful coffee and smell the sticky Danish neither of them had eaten. He could still smell Helen’s perfume, a scent she still used.

  Once, they’d had a long discussion about Justine and the judge, and Helen told him that Matthew married her for her position and background. He refused to have children, saying they would clutter up their lives.

  Today, their affair was in its twenty-seventh year.

  What they were doing wasn’t right, but Helen was a Catholic, and said divorce was out of the question. Jasper didn’t understand how adultery could be better than divorce. His own reasons for not divorcing Justine were far less noble. The stipulations of his father’s will, as they applied to him—though, oddly, not to his descendants—forbade divorce. For him, divorce would mean giving up everything, which he wasn’t prepared to do, his love for Helen notwithstanding.

  Jasper gulped at the fiery liquid in his glass. That wasn’t quite true. He would have given it up if a guardian could have been appointed to monitor the Landers holdings, but his attorneys had said Justine, as the boy’s mother, would control everything.

  Life wasn’t all that bad for Jasper. Helen made it all bearable. Right now he wanted to call her, to run to her, to wrap her in his arms and tell her what had just transpired. It was late now, though, and he couldn’t call her house because Matthew would be home. Matthew answered the phone after four o’clock. Unless . . . unless he called and invited both Helen and the judge to dinner at
the club. No, tomorrow would be soon enough.

  Jasper sighed wearily. All he wanted was to be happy, and for Ross to be happy. He wished he was stronger, more forceful. He gazed then at the pictures of his ancestors lining the walls of his office. Once they’d hung in the reception room, but Justine had moved them in here. He should have paid more attention, demanded they be returned to the entry walls.

  His father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather were tall men, imposing figures; hale and hearty, whereas he was short, pudgy, and simple-looking, with his horn-rimmed glasses. He didn’t have their strength, their business acumen. “I can, however, cut straight lines when I clip coupons, and I sign my name legibly when I cash my checks,” he muttered. It was a hell of a thing to be good at nothing. “I love, I’m human, I care. I care about everything and everyone. I love my son as much as I love Helen,” he whispered to the pictures on the wall.

  He did have one bit of spunk though. He’d put his foot down and insisted this office remain the way it was the day his father died. It had the same old furniture, dusty now, the same carpet, which was even dustier, the same lamps, the same drapes. The only thing different was the recent addition of Justine’s picture on the wall. As publisher, she was entitled to be here with the three past publishers of TIF.

  God, how he hated Justine. She was going to wreak havoc on TIF, and they both knew he was powerless to stop her. Maybe Ross could keep her in line. “I’m sorry,” he apologized to his ancestors, “but I can’t let her destroy Matthew and Helen.”

  It was the easy way out. Don’t fight it. Accept the situation and move on.

  “Die, Justine, just goddamn die already,” Jasper said. “I’ll dance at your funeral. I swear to God I’ll strip naked and dance on your coffin.”

  He whimpered then, the way Helen did when things got out of control.

  When Jasper left the office a long time later, he was carrying the empty liquor bottle in one hand and Justine’s portrait in the other. He tossed both in the Dumpster in the parking lot.

  He stood for a moment looking at the Landers Building. He would never come back here, because he’d failed. He had no one to blame but himself. Hopefully, Ross would do what he hadn’t been able to do all these years—take control. He realized what a stupid thought it was. No one controlled Justine.

  “Just die, Justine.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was early, not yet dawn, but Justine Landers was made-up, dressed, and ready for breakfast. Her own private motto was, early to rise, be ready for a prize. The prize was almost in her grasp. Being publisher, turning the Landers magazine TIF around, was only half the prize. Ownership was the prize. Ross would handle the details.

  Justine rang the breakfast bell. Rosa the cook appeared at her elbow with a huge silver coffeepot. “Two eggs, three slices of bacon, toast, strawberry jelly, orange juice, and five small pancakes,” Justine said as she poured cream from a cut-glass pitcher into her cup. “Remember what I told you, Rosa, don’t turn your back to me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Rosa said respectfully. “How would you like your eggs this morning, Mrs. Landers?”

  “Three and three-quarter minutes, not a second longer.”

  “Three and three-quarter minutes, not a second longer. Will there be anything else, ma’am?”

  “As a matter of fact there is something else. Why is my food bill two dollars higher this week? Have you been feeding that fool gardener again?”

  “Mr. Landers asked for fresh melon. He was leaving the house on Thursday morning when the produce man arrived. He picked out the melon himself, ma’am.”

  “From now on serve Mr. Landers canned peaches. You do not buy anything that is not on my list. If Mr. Landers wants something that is not on my list, have him give you money.”

  The moment the dining room door closed, Justine withdrew the last issue of Confidential from her briefcase. Her greedy eyes devoured the sleazy headlines, the cheap paper, the large print. She could do this and do it better. She could hardly wait to find out which starlet cavorted in which pool with which star in his skivvies.

  Justine closed the magazine and sipped at her coffee. For the past year she’d read every single sleazy published tabloid. In her room, in her cedar chest, she had every copy of Confidential , with notes on how to publish it better than Robert Harrison did. If anyone could give him a run for his money, Justine thought, she could. With the new, young, and greedy reporters she was hiring, she would pull it off. She knew it. Her only regret was that she hadn’t done it earlier.

  Today was a bright new day. The sun would shine just for her. Even if it rained, it wouldn’t dampen her spirits. She finally had what she wanted. Today was going to be the best day of her life, the day when she fired everyone in the office and started new. The day the payback started.

  Today people would start to take her seriously; she would begin her reign as publisher of the new TIF. After today, she wouldn’t be Jasper Landers’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks wife who had never been really accepted by the old Main Line Philadelphia families. One by one the old pompous farts would come to her when she started to dig into the skeletons in their closets. They’d beg her not to print their sordid little secrets, and she would damn well turn a deaf ear. All the slights, all the slurs, all the raised eyebrows, would be a thing of the past.

  Power was the name of the game.

  Justine attacked her breakfast the way she did everything: with force. She ate every single thing and could have eaten more. She debated asking for another stack of pancakes, but negated the idea almost immediately. Women ate daintily at the club and usually left half their meals on their plates. She did too, when she dined out, but when she was home she ate like a stevedore.

  Living on the wrong side of the tracks, with a drunken father and a mother who took in wash, didn’t allow for a lot of food on the table. Growing up, she’d always been hungry. The oldest of seven children, she’d had to give up her portions to the little ones more times than she could remember. The day she walked out of the mean little shanty, she’d vowed she would never go back and never be hungry again.

  She was seventeen years old when she left to work in the dime store. She’d lived in a boardinghouse until she met Jasper Landers. Her first thought when she met him: meal ticket. And all Jasper wanted in return was sex. But then she found herself falling in love with him. So she decided to marry him.

  She talked to the girls at the dime store, who gladly shared their bedroom secrets, before she gave in to his desires. She, in turn, embroidered and improvised, until Jasper howled at the moon, at which point she cut him off completely, demanding marriage. He hadn’t balked at all. In fact he’d slipped the ring on her finger so fast he made her head spin. She’d looked him straight in the eye and, meaning every word, said, “I will be Mrs. Jasper Landers for the rest of my life.”

  At that point she didn’t know much about the old family and how worried they were about scandal. Nor did she know about the stipulation in Jasper’s father’s will, that his son, if married, could not divorce and still retain the family fortune. She knew now, of course, and relished the position in which it placed her.

  She hadn’t known a thing about Main Line living. She made all the classical mistakes, dressed wrong, said the wrong things, wore too much makeup, used the wrong fork, messed up the food on her plate, and of course her speech was all wrong. Jasper hadn’t helped her either, preferring to spend his time on the golf course, when he wasn’t fucking her brains out three times a day. She’d tried to teach herself, and often the results were totally disastrous. Eventually she’d conquered most of her more outrageous social faults, but it had taken her fifteen years. She constantly read the dictionary, not that it did her any good. It made her feel better, though.

  Once, after Jasper officially made her the publisher of TIF, she’d been in one of the bathroom stalls at the club and overheard several women talking about her. What they said was so cruel, so hateful, she’d stayed in the sta
ll for an hour, her face burning with shame. When she finally got up the nerve to leave, she’d had to slink from the club like a beaten, weary alley cat. She cried to Jasper afterward and tried to explain how she felt. His response was to tell her it was her imagination, to take long walks and drink plenty of water.

  “And all good things come to those who wait,” Justine murmured as she patted her lips.

  It was a lovely room, a far cry from the three-room shanty she’d grown up in. Here everything was old and real. Not necessarily beautiful. She’d learned the hard way that expensive didn’t mean beautiful. During the second year of her marriage, she insisted on redecorating the entire first floor. All the antiques, all the rare carpets, were put in storage. When she thought of the results, she cringed, for in the end all the rooms looked like Sears Roebuck pictures. Jasper had gasped and then turned purple. For the first time in her life she experienced fear. She’d run upstairs and cried for hours. When she came downstairs for dinner, all the furniture was gone. It took a week before the Landerses’ furniture could be taken out of storage and the rooms restored to their former appearance. That story had gotten around the club too.

  She blamed Jasper for everything, and he accepted the blame, which only convinced Justine she was right.

  Everyone knew about Jasper and Helen except Matthew Halvorsen. But then, Matthew was stupid and didn’t know night from day. She’d been tempted to send him an anonymous letter informing him of his wife’s infidelity, but was deathly afraid it would be traced back to her somehow. She did hate to be shamed, and of late it was getting harder for her to hold her head up in public. All that was going to change now. Now her head would be higher and the others would slink around. “And you all deserve it,” she muttered.

  “Rosa!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Replace this tablecloth for dinner. Order fresh flowers, and is that dust I see on the sideboard? If it is, it better be gone when I get home this evening. And this coffeepot needs to be polished.”