Buch lesen: «Nothing to Hide»

1

“I STILL CAN’T believe I was fired. Everyone loved my work. They told me so every day. Well, okay, most days.” Allie McDonald paced from one end of her and Julie’s living room to the other, which took about four and a half steps. You had to love the wide-open spaces of Manhattan apartments. She could pace the kitchen standing still. “Clients loved my ideas, too. I heard a hundred times how their products or services really popped in the pieces I designed. And most of all, it makes no sense that they’d let me go and keep old whatshername, who everyone hated, even though she’s been there forever.”

“Yeah?” Her roommate sedately turned a page of Saveur magazine, her long legs tucked under her on their bright red couch. “Get over it.”

“I know, I know, you’re sick of me.” Allie stopped pacing and shoved her hands through her long hair. Her bangs were getting caught on her eyelashes. At least she could hack those off herself. The rest could just keep growing until she got another job. With luck she wouldn’t look like Rapunzel by then. “I’ve been whining about this for the past week.”

“Have you?” Julie turned another page, examining it with apparent fascination. “Honestly, I stopped listening after the first four or five hundred times.”

Allie cracked up. A native New Yorker through and through, Julie Turner talked tough but she’d walk through lava to help those she loved. They’d been roommates and fast friends at the Rhode Island School of Design—Allie with a full scholarship, Julie with a full tuition check from Mom and Dad—and had found this apartment through one of Julie’s parents’ friends. No matter what you needed or wanted in the city, the Turners knew someone or knew someone who knew someone.

It would be very easy to hate Julie if she wasn’t so wonderful. Beautiful, sophisticated, wealthy and smart, she led a charmed life. Men fell for her in droves. She could eat whatever she wanted and stay thin. Straight out of RISD, she’d landed a job at Vanity Fair...

Come to think of it, Julie was the type of woman Allie’s father had ditched his family for. Only Julie was human.

Allie wasn’t the type men lined up for. She had dull caramel-blond hair and girl-next-door features, scoured secondhand shops, made her own clothes and controlled her weight through relentless exercise and constant sacrifice. It took her nearly a year after graduating to land her job as a graphic artist at Boynton Advertising. Five years later, having been promoted to assistant art director, the company hit hard times and—bang, thanks, bye—here she was, pounding the crowded New York City pavement again, worrying about rent again, though Julie had promised to cover her until Allie got back on her feet. Trust funds must be wonderful things. The closest Allie ever got to a trust fund was the jar in their old Brooklyn apartment into which her mother dropped quarters whenever Allie babysat her five brothers and managed not to kill any of them.

She flopped onto the couch next to Julie and let her head sink back on the cushion. “I feel like a failure.”

“You’re not a failure.”

“I didn’t say I was a failure, I said I felt like one.”

“Stop feeling like a failure.”

Allie clapped her hands. “Hey, that worked. Thanks!”

“Your problem is that you don’t have enough to do.”

“Because I have no job, because I was fired.”

Julie snorted. “You’re doing everything you’re supposed to be doing to find another one. But it’s not enough to fill your day, so you—”

“Get restless and cranky and then I whine at you.”

“Yuh-huh.” Julie put down her magazine. “Hey, you know I don’t mind. Whine away. God knows I would. Losing your job is serious stuff. As I’ve said over and over, if there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. Besides giving you my job.”

“Aw! I was just about to ask for it.” Allie grinned at her. “You are doing more than enough just putting up with me. This is so not where I thought I’d be six years out of school.”

Julie lifted a perfect dark eyebrow. “My point is you need something to do, some project. Like design a line of clothing that will take London, Paris and Milan by storm. You’ll fill your time and your creative well.”

“My creative well.” Allie stared hopelessly at a triangular crack in the ceiling paint. She hadn’t designed anything substantive since she’d started working at Boynton. “Someone threw a plagued rat into it.”

“There’s my little optimist.”

Allie’s cell phone rang from her back pocket. She pulled it out. Maybe a job interview? Maybe London, Paris or Milan?

“It’s Erik.”

“Oooh, your favorite colleague and sexual predator.”

“Ex-colleague. Who finally did stop hitting on me.”

“Because you’re not there anymore.”

“Good point.” Allie answered the call. “Hey, Erik.”

“Alli-i-ie.” He yelled her name so loudly Allie yanked the phone from her ear. Julie rolled her eyes and went back to her magazine.

“Shhh, Erik. Jeez, you just made my head explode.”

“And that’s a problem because...”

“What’s going on? No!” She raised her hand dramatically. “Don’t tell me. Boynton wants me back. They’re begging, in fact.”

“They should be. They’re morons for letting you go.”

Even though Erik tended to say whatever people wanted to hear, she decided this time he was being absolutely sincere. “They certainly are.”

“So how are you doing?”

“Anxious. Frustrated. Bored.”

“Need a little excitement?”

“Uhh...why don’t you tell me what kind of excitement first, then I’ll tell you if I need it.” A lead on a job was the kind of excitement she needed. Erik trying to get into her pants was not.

Getting into female pants was what Erik did. If he could get women to pay him for sex, he’d be twice the billionaire he already was, due to family megabucks. Sometimes she thought the only reason he paid her so much attention was because he still hadn’t succeeded with her. Nor would he ever, which she’d told him in no uncertain terms, but to Erik that was so much blah-blah-blah.

The funny thing was, Allie liked him. Really liked him. She respected that he worked hard at a day job like the rest of the poor rats in the race. And she suspected that underneath all the BS and swagger there was an insecure mess of a guy with a really good heart. She even managed to feel a little sorry for him. Which meant she was nice to him, which, unfortunately, meant he thought he still had a chance. Men were pretty slow about stuff like that.

“This is the chance of a lifetime, Allie.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How’d you like to spend a week in the Adirondacks on Lake George? Or two weeks?”

“Your family’s summer house?” She’d heard about the place and had seen a few pictures—beautiful house, beautiful lake. The temptation was immediate, even as she was formulating her no-thank-you speech. Leave hot, smelly New York in July for a luxury oasis? For a wonderfully cool, breezy, relaxing week...or two? It would be impractical, irresponsible, and serve as needless encouragement for the Great Horned Predator, but who wouldn’t be tempted?

“Yes, our cottage in the woods.”

Allie snorted. If that enormous place was a cottage, she was the queen of planet earth. “So, Erik, we’re talking a week up there, just the two of us?”

Julie shook her head emphatically no.

“Oh. Well... Wait, I haven’t gotten to the best part.”

“I’m listening.” She was a little afraid of the best part.

“My grandmother and great-grandmother were total fashionistas and they never threw anything away. The attic is full of their clothes. In mint condition.”

Allie came to full attention. Antique clothes. Her passion. “Really.”

“Here’s the best part. Mom wants to get rid of them before we sell the house.”

“You’re selling that place?”

“Yeah.” His voice thickened. “Since Mom and Dad moved to Germany they can’t get back here often enough to make it worthwhile. I’ve been after my brother to buy it with me, but so far no good. I’d buy it myself, but it’s too much for one person to keep up. And they’re right, the house deserves to be used and lived in.”

“Erik, that’s terrible.” She knew how much he loved the place.

“It is. But back to the clothes. There are at least four trunks. You’ll get first rights to everything.”

“I’ll— Everything?” Allie stood there, blinking at Julie’s curious stare. Erik’s grandmother and great-grandmother would mean clothes from the 1920s and ’40s. This could be an amazing collection. It could be fashion nirvana. “Wow. That sounds incredible. But, Erik...it’ll just be you and me up there?”

Julie waggled her finger urgently, no, no, no.

“Allie, Allie, Allie. You still don’t trust me?”

“Nuh-uh,” she said pleasantly, her heart still pounding at the thought of all those clothes. Would she sell her body for this chance?

Umm...not quite.

“I’m not going to try anything. I swear.” He was trying very hard to sound sincere. Or maybe he was sincere. It was frustratingly hard to tell with Erik. “I figured you’d want first shot at the clothes. Plus, you being in a tough spot and all, I thought the break would be nice, too.”

“I don’t know...”

Julie drew her finger across her neck. Cut!

“Yeah, so, anyway.” Erik cleared his throat. “It won’t be just me there.”

Allie narrowed her eyes. “Now you’re telling me this?”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

She waited. Nothing. “So...who else will be there?”

Julie frowned skeptically.

“My brother, Jonas. And his girlfriend.”

Hmm. Allie narrowed her eyes, ignoring the jump in her pulse at the mention of his brother, the hottest man in the Northeast if not the universe. “Are you making this up?”

“No, I’m not making this up. What makes you think I’m making this up?”

“The way you never hesitate to make things up.”

“I’ll prove it to you. I’ll have Jonas email you saying he’s going. That okay?”

“I’m not even sure I’m going.”

“How could you not go? A whole attic full of clothes, Allie, yours for the taking. Gowns and hats and shoes and I don’t know, they probably even kept underwear. How can you pass this up?”

She didn’t think she could. Not only would the break do her good, but somewhere in this treasure trove of history, there might be the seeds of a new business or career. All her life she’d been obsessed with clothes of the past, watched old movies obsessively, worshipped Edith Head, who’d costumed the greatest stars from the golden age of cinema—the 1920s to the 1960s. When Allie was a little girl, she’d designed outfits for her dolls on her mom’s old sewing machine, and started designing her own clothes in high school.

Reality hit her when she graduated from college. She needed a stable, well-paying career, because unlike Erik, she couldn’t count on her family for support or inheritance. Three of her five brothers had gone to community colleges to learn trades, but Allie had wanted more from the minute she was old enough to understand the difference between the haves and have-nots. Which, not coincidentally, was when her father had met La Richesse Bitchesse and left them to live on the Upper East Side. He’d moved into a fabulous full-floor condo with his new wife and her two snotty kids, while his real family had moved to Kensington in Brooklyn. All seven of them had crammed into a three-bedroom apartment located in a borderline neighborhood at best. Mom had started drinking in earnest then.

A few times a year they visited their father in his luxury digs, and were sneered at by his new children and ignored by his wife, Betsy. Allie had vowed that someday she’d live well enough to get back at him for what he’d done to them. And that she’d never make the same mistake her mother had, and depend on a man for her livelihood. Nor would she make the same mistake her father had, and go crawling after money she hadn’t earned.

“I’ll pick you up on Friday after work.”

“Erik...”

“Jonas will be emailing you as soon as I can get in touch with him.”

“Erik.”

Julie threw up her hands.

“We’ll have fun. More than fun. We’ll have a blast. And you’ll come back with a truckload of the most fabulous clothes you’ve ever seen.”

“I haven’t decided yet.” Except she sort of had.

“C’mon, say you’ll go.” Mr. Account Executive, trying to close the sale.

“Give me an hour to think about it.”

“Allie, Allie, you want to go, you know you want to go. You can keep up with job openings online, you have your cell in case anyone calls, you’re mere hours away if you need to get back. You won’t miss anything. Unless you stay here.”

He was right. Her panic stemmed from feeling as if she could control her life better from here, where the solutions lay. But really, she could stay on top of the job hunt up in paradise, too. If any of the résumés she’d sent out caught someone’s eye, Allie could rush home in a blink.

In the meantime, there were those clothes. And that lake. And the elegant house. Julie’s life. Her father’s life. Maybe hers someday. Lives that fascinated as much as they repelled her. Just for a week. Or two. Then back to reality and more important things.

“You absolutely promise your brother will be there with his girlfriend, and that this is not some elaborate seduction ploy?”

“I absolutely promise.” He spoke firmly, without hesitation.

Allie turned away from Julie’s warning look. “Okay, Erik. I’ll go.”

* * *

JONAS SAT IN the conference room at Boston Consulting, tapping his capped pen on his thigh. Same old meeting, same old client, same old problems. Same old management consulting team suggesting the same old solutions. Give the employees a suggestion box. Combine a few positions into one. Develop more efficient means of bringing the product to market by reorganizing the physical space and eliminating redundant steps.

Yeah. That would help slow down, possibly reverse, the slide the company was in right now. For today, tomorrow, next year, the year after that. It would be good enough, stop the worst of the bleeding. But to become one of the future leaders of the industry, they’d have to do more. Make harder choices, shake up corporate culture to a degree that would panic everyone, at least for a while. When the changes took hold, when employees could walk into the building not just with an absence of bitterness and dread, but with a real sense of team spirit and enthusiasm, then BC would have really done its job.

But Boston Consulting execs didn’t think that way. Jonas knew that, because once he rose through the ranks of consultants to a level where he had the power to make recommendations, he’d made several, all of which he’d been excited about, all of which would have meant real progress for the companies they served, real progress for them. But he’d been shot down every time.

Too expensive. Jonas, the client is looking for us to save money, not spend more.

Too radical. It will never fly.

Jonas was thinking more and more that he didn’t belong there.

Yeah, okay, he’d been thinking that for the past year, and he still hadn’t done anything about it. The first six months, he’d been a basket case after breaking up with Missy. The next six months...he had no excuse but his own passivity.

The meeting droned on. Jonas’s pen tapped harder. He maintained his expression of interest, automatically turning toward whoever was speaking, but took in only enough that if his opinion were asked, he’d be able to contribute coherently. Automatic pilot. Robo-employee.

He wanted out of there.

As if God had heard his prayer, his cell phone started vibrating. Erik. Immediately he got up, waving his phone apologetically at the stony faces in the room, and bolted. Very important call. Have to go. So sorry. If it wasn’t urgent...

“Hey, Erik, what’s up?”

“I need you to come to Lake George this weekend. And all of next week. And maybe the week after that.”

Jonas gave a brief laugh. His brother shouldn’t be able to surprise him anymore, but he still managed. “Yeah? What for?”

“Allie McDonald.”

“What about her?” He’d met Allie last December. He’d joined her and Erik for dinner when he’d been in New York on business. She’d been different from the artificial blondes Erik usually went after—Allie had seemed more genuine. She had the same sophistication, intelligence and beauty of Erik’s girlfriends, but it hadn’t seemed as if she’d been trying to impress anyone. Jonas remembered that night as a landmark: it was when he’d really begun to believe that he’d survive Missy’s betrayal. “You’re still dating her?”

“Still trying to.”

“Still trying over six months later? Is this a record?” It was beyond him how his brother scored with as many women as he did. Jonas’s theory was that he wore them down by being so persistently charming that they eventually gave in, hoping he’d leave them alone. But this was a new level of chase.

“Allie’s different.”

“Uh-huh.” Behind him, the meeting door opened. Jonas strode down the hall toward his office so his team wouldn’t realize his important call had to do with whether or not his brother could get laid. “Different because she’s turned you down longer than anyone else?”

“This trip to Lake George is my best chance yet. I think she’s weakening.”

“Really.” Jonas pushed open the door of his office. Ten years with the company and he finally had a door, which at times he was very happy to be able to close. “Then why do you want me there?”

“I promised you’d be around. To chaperone.”

“That’s your best chance? With a woman who doesn’t want to be alone with you?”

“She agreed to spend the week with me, didn’t she?”

“Uh, yeah.” Jonas pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. He was developing a headache named Erik. His brother’s life was a restless and relentless quest for a type of fulfillment Jonas was convinced Erik hadn’t yet identified, which obviously didn’t stop him from trying to achieve it. Erik changed styles, cars, apartments, jobs and women as if nothing held his attention for longer than a season. He drove their steady, regimented German father completely up a wall. Sometimes Jonas thought Mom and Dad had moved to Munich not only to care for Dad’s parents, but so they wouldn’t have to watch their younger son play hummingbird through his life.

“I’m doing us both a favor. She got laid off.”

“Tough break.” He went to his window—with a view of the building next door—and pictured Allie sitting across from him at the restaurant, cheeks pink from the wine, hazel eyes bright under girlish wheat-colored bangs, talking about her design-career hopes and ambitions with every ounce of the passion he no longer had for his. Being laid off would have hit her hard. That depth of excitement had been one of the sexiest things about her.

What he hadn’t seen in Allie was even the slightest trace of sexual interest in his brother. Unless Jonas’s radar had misfired, he’d say he had more chemistry with her than Erik did, though a lot could’ve changed in seven months. Was she really “weakening”—Erik’s typically charming choice of words? It was disappointing to think she might fall like the rest of them.

“She’s incredibly talented. You should see the costume designs she did in school. I told her about Grandma Bridget and Great-Grandma Josephine’s clothes and how Mom wants to get rid of them. She was practically drooling.”

Aha. So Allie could be more interested in the clothes than his brother. Jonas relaxed his shoulders, unaware of how tightly he’d been holding them.

“So you’ll come?”

“Erik, I can’t just take a week off work.”

“Sure you can. You just don’t think you should.”

Jonas suppressed a jolt of irritation and tapped a pencil on his desk. His brother always made him out to be a somber slave to duty like their father. Maybe compared with Erik’s hedonistic lifestyle he was the more responsible one, but nothing extreme, and typical for an oldest child.

He could go up for the weekend. It had been a while since he’d been to Lake George. Two years, since the last time the family got together there before his parents’ move.

“A long weekend, then,” Erik said.

“Quite a drive for a weekend.”

“C’mon, help me out, brother.”

Jonas rolled his eyes. He usually did give in to his brother, sometimes against his own instinct. But Erik was family, and that seemed to win out. Jonas rarely asked for anything in return—but there was one thing he did want from his brother now. “Tell you what. I’ll go up for a long weekend if you drop your objections to selling the house.”

There was a long silence. Jonas had expected an immediate refusal. Either Erik had been considering changing his mind anyway, or he wanted this time with Allie more than Jonas thought. “For that, you’d owe me a whole week.”

Jonas peered at his BlackBerry, checking the next week’s schedule. He could move his Monday trip to Wednesday afternoon and take Monday and Tuesday off.

“Half a week. I’d have to leave Wednesday morning.”

“Deal.”

Jonas lowered his brows suspiciously. His brother had been persistently vocal in his objections to selling Morningside. “Just like that?”

“Look, you, Mom and Dad all want to sell. I’m outnumbered, I get that. This is sooner than I’d planned to cave, but I’ll do it for Allie.”

“Okay.” The victory left Jonas less triumphant than he’d expected. With their parents abroad, the house had been sitting empty except for Erik’s brief, infrequent visits. Upkeep was expensive. With money from the sale of the house, Jonas would rather buy a retreat of his own, closer to Boston, maybe in Cape Cod. A place he could use year-round.

“Bring Sandra.”

“Jeez, Erik.”

“I told Allie—”

“Well, un-tell her. I’m not involving Sandra in your schemes.”

“This isn’t a scheme. I think Allie could be the one.”

Jonas turned from the window. He’d never heard Erik talk like that. Size of boobs, lushness of ass, depth of sexual depravity, sure, but marriage? “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding. I’m crazy about her. She’s everything I want.”

“Since when do you want to get married?”

“I’m almost thirty. It’s time. And I want kids.”

Jonas took the phone and stared at it before replacing it to his ear. “Who are you, and what have you done with my brother?”

“Just call Sandra.”

“She’ll have shows this weekend.”

“So have her come next week.”

Jonas scowled, tempted in spite of himself. Sandra was a long-ago lover and good friend. She’d been a rock during the ugly breakup with Missy. “You’re a piece of work.”

“I owe you one, bro.”

Jonas hung up the phone, shaking his head. He could stand up to the highest-level executives in the company. But around his brother he became as indulgent as their grandfather, who used to bring cookies and candy from Germany when he visited, as if Jonas and Erik were still kids. Really good cookies and candy. They didn’t object.

Taking consolation from the knowledge that if he didn’t want to make the trip to Lake George, wild horses couldn’t make him, he dialed Sandra, whom he’d known for ten years, since the night he’d gone to one of her shows on a musician friend’s suggestion. She’d spotted him in the audience and had come over to his table. They spent the intermission together, then time after the show, then made a long, hot night of it—that night and several others. For two years, if they weren’t seeing other people, they’d hook up for a night, once a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. He’d liked the uncomplicated nature of their sexual relationship and was disappointed when she ended it and broke off contact. Happily, they met again by chance a few years later, and had started a platonic friendship. Who knew, maybe they would end up together forever. They joked about it now and then.

Sandra picked up. “Hey, hottie, what’s happening?”

“Want to come with me to Lake George for a long weekend?”

She gasped theatrically. “Oh, you are so speaking my language.”

“Seriously? You don’t have a show?”

“I’m between them, and can’t stand myself anymore. You called just as I was about to become a heroin and shopping-channel addict. I don’t know which one’s worse.”

“Yeah?” He chuckled. She had a fairly edgy sense of humor, to put it mildly. Came from a rough childhood in South Boston. “Put down the needle and the remote and pack your bags.”

“When do we leave?”

“Considering the week I’m having, not soon enough. Saturday morning? I have a dinner meeting Friday.”

She clucked her tongue. “Only you would have a business meeting on a Friday night.”

“He’s a client in town for a conference.”

“I’m telling you, they own your very fine Jon-ass.”

“Ha.” He bristled at the dig. “Maybe not for long.”

“Yeah?” She dropped the sensual lounge singer act she did so well, her voice rising to its normal sweet pitch. “No offense, but I’ve been hearing that for a while.”

Jonas sighed wearily. “I know. But I’m getting closer. We can talk.”

“Good deal. Saturday suits me fine. What brought this on, by the way? I thought you were going to get rid of the place.”

“We’ve been summoned to chaperone young Erik and his latest target.”

“Erik needs a chaperone? What’s wrong with that boy? Or more to the point, what’s wrong with the woman? Frigid? Closet gay? From a past century?”

“I was just asking him the same thing. Between you and me, I think it’s a case of ‘she’s just not that into him.’”

“Ah. I suppose even a master can fail sometimes. Well, after all the stories you’ve told me, I look forward to watching him in action.”

“That makes one of us.” His voice came out more brusquely than he intended. “I’m sure he can’t teach you a thing.”