Flash (2 page)

Jasper had few memories of his mother, who had died in a car crash when he was four. But his stepmother, Caroline, had been kind enough in a reserved fashion. Her great talent lay in managing the social side of Harry's life. She was very good at hosting dinner parties at the country club for Harry's business associates.

It had always seemed to Jasper that his father and stepmother lived in two separate universes. Harry lived for his work. Caroline lived for her country club activities. There did not appear to be any great bond of love between them, but both seemed content.

Caroline's only real fault was that she had doted on Fletcher. In her eyes her son could do no wrong. Instead of helping him learn to curtail his tendencies toward reckless irresponsibility and careless arrogance, she had indulged and encouraged them.

Caroline was not the only one who had turned a blind eye to Fletcher's less admirable traits. Six years younger than his new brother and eager for a hero to take the place of a father who was always at work, Jasper had been willing to overlook a lot, also.

Too much, as it turned out.

Fletcher was gone now. He and his wife, Brenda,
had been killed nearly a year ago in a skiing disaster in the Alps.

Caroline had been stunned by the news of her son's death. But she had quickly, tearfully explained to Jasper and everyone else involved that she could not possibly be expected to assume the task of raising Paul and Kirby.

Her age and the social demands of her busy life made it impossible to start all over again as a mother to her grandsons. The boys needed someone younger, she said. Someone who had the patience and energy to handle children.

Jasper had taken Paul and Kirby to live with him. There had been no one else. He had committed himself to the role of substitute father with the same focused, well-organized, highly disciplined determination that he applied to every other aspect of his life.

The past eleven months had not been easy.

The first casualty had been his marriage. The divorce had become final six months ago. He did not blame Andrea for leaving him. After all, the job of playing mother to two young boys who were not even related to her had not been part of the business arrangement that had constituted the foundation of their marriage.

The microwave pinged. Jasper snapped back to the present. He opened the door and took out the mugs.

“Did you have a nightmare, too, Paul?” he asked.

“No.” Paul wandered over to the fire and sat down, tailor-fashion, beside Kirby. “I woke up when I heard you guys talking out here.”

“Uncle Jasper says we can do some more archery
and maybe go fishing tomorrow,” Kirby announced.

“Cool.”

Jasper carried the two cups to where the boys sat in front of the fire. “That's assuming the rain stops.”

“If it doesn't, we can always play Acid Man on the computer,” Kirby said cheerfully.

Jasper winced at the thought of being cooped up in the house all weekend while his nephews entertained themselves with the loud sound effects of the new game.

“I'm pretty sure the rain will stop,” he said, mentally crossing his fingers.

Paul looked at the closed file on the arm of the chair. “How come you're burning those papers?”

Jasper sat down and picked up the folder. “Old business. Just some stuff that's no longer important.”

Paul nodded, satisfied. “Too bad you don't have a shredder here, huh?”

Jasper opened the file and resumed feeding the contents to the eager flames. “The fire works just as well.”

In his opinion, the blaze worked even better than a mechanical shredder. Nothing was as effective as fire when it came to destroying damning evidence.

Five years later
…

Olivia Chantry poured herself a glass of dark red zinfandel wine and carried it down the hall toward the bedroom that had been converted into an office. She still had on the high-necked, long-sleeved black dress she had worn to her husband's funeral that afternoon.

Logan would have been her ex-husband if he had lived. She had been preparing to file for a divorce when he had suddenly jetted off to Pamplona, Spain. There he had gotten very drunk and had run with the bulls. The bulls won. Logan had been trampled to death.

Trust him to go out in a blaze of glory, Olivia thought. And to think she had once believed that a
marriage based on friendship and mutual business interests would have a solid, enduring foundation. Uncle Rollie had been right, she decided. Logan had needed her, but he had not loved her.

Halfway down the hall she paused briefly at the thermostat to adjust the temperature. She had been feeling cold all day. The accusing expressions on the faces of the Dane family, especially the look in the eyes of Logan's younger brother, Sean, had done nothing to warm her. They knew she had seen a lawyer. They blamed her for Logan's spectacular demise.

Her cousin Nina's anguished, tearful eyes had only deepened the chill inside Olivia.

Uncle Rollie, the one member of Olivia's family who understood her best, had leaned close to whisper beneath the cover of the organ music.

“Give 'em time,” Rollie said with the wisdom of eighty years. “They're all hurting now, but they'll get past it eventually.”

Olivia was not so certain of that. In her heart she knew that her relationships with the Danes and with Nina would never be the same again.

When she reached the small, cluttered office, she took a sip of the zinfandel to fortify herself. Then she put down the glass and went to the black metal file cabinet in the corner. She spun the combination lock and pulled open a drawer. A row of folders appeared, most crammed to overflowing with business correspondence, tax forms, and assorted papers. One of these days she really would have to get serious about her filing.

She reached inside the drawer and removed the
journal. For a moment she gazed at the leather-bound volume and considered the damning contents.

After a while she sat down at her cluttered desk, kicked off her black, low-heeled pumps, and switched on the small shredder. The machine whirred and hummed to life, a mechanical shark eager for prey.

The small bedroom-cum-office with its narrow windows was oppressive, she thought as she opened the journal. In fact, she hated the place where she and Logan had lived since their marriage six months ago.

She promised herself that first thing in the morning she would start looking for a bigger apartment. Her business was starting to take off. She could afford to buy herself a condo. A place with lots of windows.

One by one, Olivia ripped the pages from the journal and fed them into the steel jaws. She would have preferred to burn the incriminating evidence, but she did not have a fireplace.

The zinfandel was gone by the time the last entry in the journal had been rendered into tiny scraps. Olivia sealed the plastic shredder bag and carried it downstairs to the basement of the apartment building. There she dumped the contents into the large bin marked
Clean Paper Only
.

When the blizzard of shredded journal pages finally ceased, Olivia closed the lid of the bin. In the morning a large truck would come to haul away the contents. The discarded paper, including the shredded pages of the journal, would soon be transformed into something useful. Newsprint, maybe. Or toilet tissue.

Like almost everyone else who lived in Seattle, Olivia was a great believer in recycling.

The present
…

Jasper knew that he was in trouble because he had reached the point where he was giving serious consideration to the idea of getting married again.

His attention was deflected from the dangerous subject less than a moment later when he realized that someone was trying very hard to kill him.

At least, he
thought
someone was attempting to murder him.

Either way, as a distraction, the prospect was dazzlingly effective. Jasper immediately stopped thinking about finding a wife.

It was the blinding glare of hot, tropical sunlight on
metal reflected in the rearview mirror that got Jasper's attention. He glanced up. The battered green Ford that had followed him from the tiny village on the island's north shore was suddenly much closer. In another few seconds the vehicle would be right on top of the Jeep's bumper.

The Ford shot out of the last narrow curve and bore down on the Jeep. The car's heavily tinted windows, common enough here in the South Pacific, made it impossible to see the face of the person at the wheel. Whoever he was, he was either very drunk or very high.

A tourist, Jasper thought. The Ford looked like one of the rusty rentals he had seen at the small agency in the village where he had selected the Jeep.

There was little room to maneuver on the tiny, two-lane road that encircled tiny Pelapili Island. Steep cliffs shot straight up on the left. On Jasper's right the terrain fell sharply away to the turquoise sea.

He had never wanted to take this vacation in paradise, Jasper thought. He should have listened to his own instincts instead of the urgings of his nephews and his friend, Al.

This was what came of allowing other people to push you into doing what they thought was best for you.

Jasper assessed the slim shoulder on the side of the pavement. There was almost no margin for driving error on this stretch of the road. One wrong move and a driver could expect to end up forty feet below on the lava-and-boulder-encrusted beach.

He should have had his midlife crisis in the peace
and comfort of his own home on Bainbridge Island. At least he could have been more certain of surviving it there.

But he'd made the extremely rare mistake of allowing others to talk him into doing something he really did not want to do.

“You've got to get away, Uncle Jasper,” Kirby had declared with the shining confidence of a college freshman who has just finished his first course in psychology. “If you won't talk to a therapist, the least you can do is give yourself a complete change of scene.”

“I hate to say it, but I think Kirby's right,” Paul said. “You haven't been yourself lately. All this talk about selling Sloan & Associates, it's not like you, Uncle Jasper. Take a vacation. Get wild and crazy. Do something off-the-wall.”

Jasper had eyed his nephews from the other side of his broad desk. Paul and Kirby were both enrolled for the summer quarter at the University of Washington. In addition, both had part-time jobs this year. They had their own apartment near the campus now, and they led very active lives. He did not believe for one moment that both just happened, by purest coincidence, to find themselves downtown this afternoon.

He did not believe both had been struck simultaneously by a whim to drop by his office, either. Jasper was fairly certain that he was the target of a planned ambush.

“I appreciate your concern,” he said. “But I do not need or want a vacation. As far as selling the firm is concerned, trust me, I know what I'm doing.”

“But Uncle Jasper,” Paul protested. “You and Dad
built this company from scratch. It's a part of you. It's in your blood.”

“Let's not go overboard with the dramatics,” Jasper said. “Hell, even my fiercest competitors will tell you that my timing is damn near perfect when it comes to business. I'm telling you that it's time for me to do something else.”

Kirby frowned, his dark blue eyes grave with concern. “How is your sleep pattern, Uncle Jasper?”

“What's my sleep pattern got to do with anything?”

“We're studying clinical depression in my Psych class. Sleep disturbance is a major warning sign.”

“My sleep habits have been just fine.”

Jasper decided not to mention the fact that for the past month he had been waking up frequently at four in the morning. Unable to get back to sleep, he had gotten into the habit of going into the office very early to spend a couple of hours with the contents of his business files.

His excuse was that he wanted to go over every detail of the extensive operations of Sloan & Associates before he sold the firm to Al. But he knew the truth. He had a passion for order and routine. He found it soothing to sort through his elegantly arranged files. He knew few other people who could instantly retrieve decade-old corporate income tax records or an insurance policy that had been canceled five years earlier.