The Golden Chance (2 page)

But, Phila reflected, lately it had been very hard to get interested in a new challenge. Everything seemed increasingly unimportant. She now felt her parents and grandmother had been wrong. One person could not save the world. In fact, one person could only get hurt trying to fix things.

It was tough trying to carry on the family tradition when there was no family left to support it. She had been doing it alone for years and now she seemed to have run out of steam.

Crissie Master's philosophy of life, on the other hand, was finally beginning to make more sense to Phila. It could be summed up in five words:
Look out for number one
.

But now Crissie was dead, too. The big difference was that, while they had died young, her parents had died for a cause in which they had believed and to which they had been committed. Matilda Fox had died at her desk. She had been busily penning yet another article for one of the score of strident left-wing newsletters which printed her work. She had been eighty-two years old.

Crissie Masters, however, had died behind the wheel of a car that had plunged off a Washington coast road and buried itself in a deep ravine. She had been twenty-six years old. Her epitaph could have been,
Am I having fun yet
?

Phila dropped ice into two tall glasses and poured the cold tea. She felt no overpowering need to be courteous to a Lightfoot, especially not to one as big as the specimen out in her living room, but it was awkward to drink tea in front of someone else without at least offering a glass. It was, after all, very hot outside and the Lightfoot looked as if he had been sitting under her apple tree for some time.

She picked up the tray of drinks and headed for the living room. An echo of fear rippled through her as she recalled how close he had gotten to her a few minutes before without her even having been aware of him.
That's how it could happen
, she thought uneasily. No warning, no intuitive sense of danger; just
wham
. Someday she would simply turn around and find herself in trouble.

Phila forced herself to relax as she set the tray down on the glass coffee table. Surreptitiously she studied the intruder. He looked big and dark sitting on her bright red sofa. His eyeglasses did nothing to soften the effect.

He really was a large man, she realized, and that alone made her feel hostile. She did not like large males.

“Thanks for the tea. I've been getting by on warm beer for the past hour.” Nicodemus Lightfoot reached for a frosty glass.

The vibration of his voice sent a distant, whispered warning through Phila's nerve endings. She told herself she was imagining things. Her nerves had been more than a little frayed lately. But she had always relied on her instincts, and now she couldn't ignore the way his voice disturbed her senses.

Everything about this man was too calm, too still and watchful, as if he could spend hours waiting in darkness.

“Nobody asked you to sit out in front of my house for an hour, Nicodemus Lightfoot.” Phila sat down in a yellow canvas director's chair and picked up her own glass of tea.

“Call me Nick.”

She didn't respond immediately. Instead she examined him for a few seconds, noting the gold-and-steel watch, the blue oxford-cloth button-down that he wore open at the throat, and the snug, faded jeans. The jeans looked like standard-issue Levi's, but she guessed that the casual shirt had cost a hundred bucks or more. His type would wear hundred-dollar shirts with old jeans.

“Why on earth should I call you Nick?” She took a swallow of cold tea.

Nick Lightfoot didn't rise to the bait. Instead, he studied her in turn, his eyes thoughtful behind the lenses of his glasses. The window air conditioner hummed in the silence.

“You're going to be difficult, aren't you?” he finally observed.

“It's what I'm good at. I've had a lot of practice.”

His eyes swept over the glass coffee table, spotted the stack of travel brochures. “Going on a trip?”

“Thinking about it.”

“California?” He flipped through a couple of the folders with their scenes of endless beaches and Disneyland.

“Crissie used to say Southern California would be good for me. She always claimed I needed a taste of life in the fast lane.”

Lightfoot said nothing for a few minutes, and Phila watched him out of the corner of her eye. He was a predator, she decided. His light gray eyes reflected little…only perhaps an unending search for prey and a cold intelligence. The thin lips, bold, aggressive nose and the high, blunt cheekbones made her think of a large animal. The heavy pelt of his dark hair was lightly iced with silver. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, she guessed. And he'd done some hunting in his time.

There was an unconscious arrogance in the set of his shoulders and a lean but powerful strength in his body. She knew that his must be a smooth, prowling stride that ate up ground as he moved. He could stalk a victim all day if necessary and still have plenty of energy left for making the kill at the end of the hunt.

“You aren't quite what I expected,” Nick said finally, looking up from the brochures.

“What did you expect?”

“I don't know. You just aren't it.”

“I've had phone calls from someone named Hilary Lightfoot who sounds like she runs around in an English riding habit most of the time. Also, some from a man named Darren Castleton. He sounds like he's running for office. Where do you fit into the scenario, Mr. Lightfoot? Crissie never mentioned you. Frankly, you look like hired muscle.”

“I never met Crissie Masters. I moved from Washington to California three years ago.”

“How did you find me?”

“It wasn't hard. I made a few phone calls. Your ex-boss gave me your address.”

“Thelma told you where I was?” Phila asked sharply.

“Yeah.”

“What did you do to her to make her tell?”

“I didn't do anything to her. I just talked to her.”

“I'll bet. You say that a little too easily for my taste.”

“No accounting for taste.”

“You're accustomed to people answering questions when you ask them, aren't you?”

“Why shouldn't she have been willing to cooperate?” he asked with the mildest possible expression of surprise.

“I asked her not to give out my address.”

“She did say something about you wanting to dodge reporters but when she found out I wasn't interested in doing an interview, she opened up.”

“You mean you applied pressure and she caved in.” Phila sighed. “So you
are
the muscle for your families. Poor Thelma. She tries, but she isn't very good at resisting pressure. She's been a bureaucrat too long.”

“You, I take it, are better at it?” Nick's brows rose skeptically.

“I'm a pro. And I'll save you a lot of time by telling you now that there's nothing you can say that will convince me to change my mind. I'm not about to sell back the shares in Castleton & Lightfoot that Crissie left to me. Not for a while, at any rate. I have some serious thinking to do about those shares. I may have some questions I want answered.”

He nodded, looking neither annoyed nor startled. He just looked disturbingly patient.

“What questions do you have, Phila?”

She hesitated. The truth was, she did not really have any questions. Not yet. She hadn't been able to think clearly enough to come up with any. She was still trying to adjust to the trauma she had been through lately.

First there had been the trial, which had dragged on for weeks, and then had come the shock of Crissie's death. Phila thought she would have been able to handle the trial if that had been all there was to deal with at the time. But the news about Crissie had been more than she could handle.

Beautiful, bold, flashy Crissie with her California looks and her vow to get what was coming to her. The night of the vow came back to Phila now, a clear, strong image in her mind. It had been the first time she had tried more than a sip of alcohol.

Crissie, looking a worldly twenty-one at the age of fifteen, had talked the clerk of an all-night convenience store into selling the teenage girls the cheap wine. Crissie could talk any man into anything. It was one of her survival skills.

She and Phila had gone to the small town park near the river and drunk their illicit booze out behind the women's rest rooms. Then Crissie had outlined her plans for the future.

There are people out there who owe me, Phila. I'm going to find them, and I'm going to make them give me what's mine. Don't worry. When I do, I'll cut you in for a piece of the action. You and me, we're like sisters, aren't we? We're family and family sticks together
.

Crissie had learned the truth of her own words the hard way. She had found the people she felt owed her and when she had tried to make them accept her, she had discovered the real meaning of a family sticking together. They had formed a solid wall against her and her claims of kinship.

“I don't know if I'm ready to ask my questions yet,” Phila told Nick. “I think I'll wait and ask them at the annual C&L stockholder's meeting in August.”

“The stockholders of Castleton & Lightfoot are all family.”

“Not anymore.” Phila smiled, really smiled, for the first time in weeks.

Nick Lightfoot appeared amused. “Planning to make trouble?”

“I don't know yet. Possibly. Crissie deserves that much, at least. Don't you think? She loved to stir up trouble. It was her way of taking revenge on the world. Making a little trouble on her behalf would be a fitting memorial.”

“Why was Crissie Masters important to you?” Nick asked. “Were you related?”

“Not by blood or marriage, and that's probably the only kind of relationship you would understand.”

“I understand friendship. Was Crissie your friend?”

“She was much more than a friend. She was the closest thing to a sister I ever had.”

He looked politely quizzical. “I never met the woman, but I've heard a lot about her. From what I've heard, the two of you don't appear to have had much in common.”

“Which only goes to show how little you know about either Crissie or myself.”

“I'm willing to learn.”

Phila thought about that, and she did not like the direction her mind was taking. “You're different from the other two who called me.”

“How am I different?”

“Smarter. More dangerous. You think before you choose your tactics.” She spoke carefully, giving him the truth. She was accustomed to relying on her instincts when it came to judging people, and she was rarely wrong. She had developed survival skills, too, just as Crissie had. But she had not been born with Crissie's looks, so those skills had taken a different twist.

“Are you complimenting me?” Nick asked curiously.

“No. Just stating obvious facts. Tell me, who will the Castletons and Lightfoots send if you screw up your assignment to browbeat me out of the shares?”

“I will try very hard not to screw up.”

“How's your track record in that department?” she taunted, although she suspected it was excellent.

“Not perfect. I've been known to screw up very badly on occasion.”

“When was the last time?”

“Three years ago.”

The apparently honest answer surprised her, and thereby threw her off guard. “What happened?” she asked, with somewhat too obvious curiosity.

He gave her a slow, remote smile. “We both know that what happened to me three years ago doesn't matter a damn right now. Let's stick with the issue at hand.”

She shrugged. “You can stick with it if you like. I've got better things to do.”

He studied the brochures on the table again. “Are you sure you want to go to California?”

“I think so. I feel the need to get away, and it would be a sort of memorial trip in honor of Crissie. She loved Southern California. We were both born and raised in Washington, but she always said California was her spiritual home. She went down there to work as a model after she graduated from high school. It seems fitting somehow to spend some time there. She would have wanted me to have some fun.”

“Alone?”

Phila smiled, showing her teeth. “Yes. Alone.”

Nick appeared to consider that for a moment, and then he switched back to the only topic that really mattered to him. “Are you going to fight the Castletons and Lightfoots every inch of the way, or is the word
cooperation
a part of your vocabulary?”

“The word is there, but I use it only when it suits me.”

“And right now it doesn't suit you to cooperate by selling those shares back to the families?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Not even for a great deal of money?”

“I'm not interested in money right now.”

He nodded, as if she had verified a personal conclusion he had already reached. “Yeah, well, that settles that.”

Phila was instantly wary. “What does it settle?”

“My job is done. I was asked to approach you about the shares. I've done that, and I'm convinced you aren't about to cooperate with the families. I'll report my failure, and that will be the end of it.”