IN ROOM 33 (22 page)

"The miracle is that these men don't see that. They all love you. Stephen did. Dad did, and God knows how many others there have been. And now, of course, David Grange."

David. Did David love her? She squashed her moment of doubt. Of hope. Refused it. "What can I say, I'm a goddess." She opted for sarcasm, intended it to sideline the direction of this conversation.

"Yes. A goddess." Joy's smile was wry. "That's what Dad always called you."

"You remember that?"

"I remember everything." She wrapped her arms around herself. "I just don't understand." She leveled an empty gaze on Lana. "Like why you walked out on Dad when he was dying. Why you never told me he was sick. Never let me see him again."

"I thought it was best." Lana turned away from her daughter's fervid scrutiny, went back to relax on her lounge chair.

"Best," she echoed. "Best for you. And that's what counts. That's what always counts. I would have stayed with Dad. I wanted to, but you lied to me, took me away."

"You were a kid. You needed to be with your mother." Lana couldn't believe that pap had come from her own mouth.

Joy's eyes widened, and for a moment it looked as though she might laugh. "You're serious. That's how you saw it? You and I needing each other? I don't think so, Mother. I needed my dad. I needed to be there for him." Joy's expression was one of bottomless regret, sickening distaste. "Hell, you didn't even take me back for his funeral."

Lana tried another shrug, pulled herself into the now. "You don't know..." she said, still trying to hold back, go to that silent place deep inside her where anything not good for Lana was shuttered out.

But like thick, black tar under intense pressure, those years of hell bubbled up, worked to force out words Lana never wanted to say.

Chapter 11

Joy watched her mother in amazement, the rapid play of emotions on her normally sanguine features. She looked angry, frustrated, pained, and terrified. All of it at odds with her languid posture on the chaise lounge.

"Then tell me, Mother, tell me what I don't know," she pleaded softly.

Lana's glance shifted sideways. "You're not going to let it go, are you?"

"No."

A long silence fell between them.

"I watched my mother die," Lana said, and Joy could see her muscles tense, the lines in her face straighten. It was as if she were staring barefaced into a winter wind. "It took her three years." Her gaze was opaque, her tone board flat. "Do you know how many bedpans that is? How much vomit and bile? How many changes of sheets? Bed sores?" She closed her eyes. "How many screams of pain."

Joy's eyes widened. "You never told me."

"My father didn't believe in doctors and my mother only believed in my father—the original iron hand. Minus the velvet glove, of course. I'm like him in more ways than I care to admit. As are you, I think. When Mother got sick, he told her to go to bed. When she got sicker, he told her to stay there. I was told to 'see to her.'" Lana breathed slowly, as if to regain her equilibrium. "There was no one else, so I did." She stopped and her gaze turned cool and distant. "I quit school to watch my mother die, daughter dear. And it's a graduation I wouldn't recommend."

"How old were you? When you quit school?"

"Thirteen. I was sixteen when she died. My father said it was too late for school, so he got me a job cleaning house for a woman—a woman who became his new wife within a month of my mother's death. When they married, I walked to the nearest highway, I-5, I think, and put out my thumb." She looked at Joy, her expression defiant. "Your father picked me up. I guess you didn't know that, either. He was decent enough, so I stayed. From then on, I never looked back."

Lana glanced around, and her eyes, more expressive than Joy had ever seen them, lingered on the stately home, the swimming pool, the blur of brilliant red geraniums bordering her fence. "And I'm not going to ever again." She lay back in her luxurious lounge, settled in as comfortably as a freshly fed cat, as if she hadn't spoken of such terrible things. Closing her eyes, she looked calm, comfortable in her silky, pampered skin, the daring bikini most twenty-year-olds would shy away from.

"Did you love her? Your mother?" Joy had to ask, drawn to peer deeper into the fissure Lana had opened.

Silence.

After a deep breath, Lana opened her beautiful eyes. Her voice was distant, achingly soft, when she said, "I adored her. She was long-suffering, patient, giving, uncomplaining, and utterly unselfish. She accepted her death, her long, painful good-bye to this life—under my father's orders—totally alone and with the dewy-eyed innocence of a saint. She was a fool, ten times over, and I loved her with all my childish heart."

She seemed to consciously still her mind, and her gaze steeled when it met Joy's. "She was the
last
person I loved. The last person I will ever love. Do you understand that?"

The mother now stretched out before her was the one Joy had always known, focused inward, untouchable, and eerily serene. "Including me."

Lana didn't lift her head. "You were a mistake. I never intended to have a child. But your father was determined, so I went along with it. I was barely eighteen. I figured it was as good a way as any of hanging on to a man." She curled her lips. "I've since learned a much more effective method. I had two abortions before I finally and permanently ended my childbearing days. Thank God for the miracle of the knife."

"So when Dad got sick, you left—"

"Got it in one. I'd already had enough bedpans to last me the rest of my life. I wasn't looking for more."

"But I begged to stay with him, and you took me with you anyway. Why?"

"A good question. And the only one I've never been able to answer. You were a burden then, and you still are." Lana closed her eyes again, but Joy saw the tension, the deliberate flexing of her hands, as if they'd tightened uncomfortably. "Now that we've had this marvelous sharing experience, can we get down to business? Talk about the hotel."

"I'd still like to know—"

Lana glared at her. "For God's sake, drop it, Joy. The psychotherapy session is over. Let it go."

Joy, her senses numbed by the first real conversation she'd ever had with her mother, knew when she was beaten. Lana wouldn't say any more. Her head thick with confusion and revelations, she could only mumble, "I brought a file but I left it in the kitchen. I'll be right back." She stood on weakened legs and made her way off the patio.

In the monstrously unappealing kitchen, she located her file, but suddenly rubbery in the legs, sat down when she realized she'd lost something else—her old perception of her mother.

Lana was self-absorbed, manipulative, and cold—every one of those things in spades, but she
had not
singled Joy out for rejection. She'd rejected loving—anything or anyone—long ago. In a twisted way, knowing this lightened her mood, hinted at possibilities.

Or maybe she was picking at emotional crumbs.

Nothing had changed, yet everything had changed.

There was even the chance, if Joy could make her plans and dreams for the Phil understood, perhaps be more conciliatory and less combative, that her mother would go along with them—that something remotely close to a mother-daughter relationship could come out of this mess. She smiled. Exactly what Stephen had intended by his bizarre will.

With the barest flicker of fresh hope, she picked up the file and headed back to the pool area.

David had arrived, having let himself in by the side gate, and the kiss he and her mother were sharing definitely wasn't meant for an audience. Joy stepped back out of sight until it was over. Which was pointless, because she suspected neither of them knew what embarrassment was.

When David saw her, he got up from where he'd been sitting on the side of Lana's lounge chair. "Joy. Your mother told me you were here. Nice to see you again." Dressed casually in tailored shorts and a labeled golf shirt, he was photo-shoot ready. Again she wondered exactly who David Grange was out for, himself or her mother, or both.

"David." She acknowledged him with a brief nod. "I'm glad you're here," she lied. She actually wished he were a thousand miles away so she could talk to her mother alone. But the way Lana gripped his hand told her there was no chance of that. "I have an idea for the Philip," she went on. "I was going to go over the numbers on it with Mother, but she'll want your opinion anyway, so your being here will save us all time." She handed her mother a recap of Wade's projections and budgets.

"Numbers." Lana barely glanced at them before handing them to David. "Your strength, darling, not mine." She got up from the lounge. "Drinks?"

David was already scanning the papers, didn't raise his head when he said, "A gin and tonic, if you have it. Thanks."

"Done. I'll throw some clothes on and be right back."

When she was gone, David lifted weary eyes to meet Joy's. "You have no idea what you're doing, do you?" He rubbed the center of his forehead as if he didn't expect an answer. "You had help with these. This isn't something you could have worked up yourself so quickly."

"Wade Emerson helped."

"Shit!"

"I don't think so." She took her seat at the table she'd been at earlier, sipped her now-tepid tea. "I think he knows what he's talking about, and he knows the history of that property better than anyone."

"He's an ex-convict, for God's sake. Fraud, obstruction of justice. What the hell are you thinking?"

She ignored his outburst, didn't bother to tell him she'd done her own checking on Wade's criminal record. "I'm thinking of making the Hotel Philip a viable operation so I can provide my mother with the income she needs to live—long term. Makes sense to me." She didn't mention her feelings about the Phil, her strange and growing sense of belonging—the pride of ownership that grew day upon day. She doubted David would understand, or care, when his own vision was of an implosion and a blur of roaring bulldozers.

"It makes no goddamn sense at all. With this"—he gave a wild wave of the file—"you're more likely to put her in the poorhouse. It's insane."

It was Joy's turn to get mad. "Insane or not, I can do whatever I damn well please with the Philip, David, and you have no say in it."

David took a moment, apparently to calm himself. "Okay... let's assume for a moment these numbers make sense—which I don't believe they do—we're talking a few million here. Where do you plan to get the money?"

Lana came back, a welcome interruption, wearing cotton slacks, a silk tank top, and carrying David's gin and tonic.

"Did you hear this?" David asked, waving the file, again.

Lana handed him the drink. "I heard enough." Lana stared at Joy, her gaze as flat as the water in her pool. "And David asked a very good question. Where will you get the money? From sleeping with Wade Emerson?"

Joy felt her jaw drop, and when she glanced from her mother's face to David's, she saw his had done the same.

He spoke first. "Lana, what are you saying?"

"Nothing." She took a chair at the umbrella-shaded table and crossed her long legs. "I'm not saying anything. I'm
suggesting
that Wade Emerson is behind this plan of Joy's, that he's not above seduction to get control of what he sees as his birthright. So... I'm asking." She turned goading, speculative eyes to Joy.

Joy hadn't found her tongue, was afraid she'd swallowed the damn thing. The leap from Lana's earlier revelations, to David's brash interference, to her sex life was like trying to digest a tough cut of beef dipped in chocolate. She grabbed the file from David's hand, her own hand shaking. "My mother has sex on the brain, David, having discovered long ago that the way to man's heart—and wallet—is through his erect penis." So much for being less combative, more conciliatory.

Lana laughed.

David swore.

Joy grabbed her tote bag, stuffed the file in it.

"Don't do this." David said. "It's a mistake. And if you're counting on Emerson for the money, forget it. He doesn't have any. I've checked."

Joy spun, zeroed in on the two of them. "I am not sleeping with Wade Emerson to get his money—" She stopped.