In Self Defense (5 page)

“I know,” Clare said.  “But you really shouldn’t have called the police, you know.”

“Why not?” Nina responded with a shrug.  “You weren’t going to do it, and someone had to.”

“You’re a good friend, you really are,” Clare said sincerely.  “But by making my private life public, you’ve exposed my family to what is probably going to be a lot of unpleasant gossip.”

“That was certainly not my intention,” Nina assured her.

“I know it wasn’t,” Clare allowed.  “And I know you didn’t mean to cause me any embarrassment.  But you acted without thinking things through, and now I’m stuck with having to go home and deal with the consequences.”

“If I’ve caused you any embarrassment, or if I’ve made things awkward between you and Richard in any way, I’m certainly sorry,” Nina said.  “You’re right, I wasn’t thinking about that.  Frankly, I was thinking about your safety.”

“I know you were,” Clare acknowledged with a little smile.  “And that’s why we’re going to go right on being good friends.”

“In that case,” Nina said, “you should have told them.”

“Who?  What?”

“Those two detectives.”

“I should have told them what?”

“About the water.”

“The water?”  Clare looked at her friend with a puzzled frown.  “Why should I have told them about the water?  That was last spring.  How could it possibly have anything to do with what’s going on now.”

“How do you know it doesn’t?” Nina countered.

“Well, I guess I don’t know for sure,” Clare had to admit.  “But I don’t see how it could.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Nina told her.  “You should tell the police everything.  Isn’t that what Detective Hall said?  You should tell them everything, and then it’s their job to figure out what has to do with what, and what doesn’t.”

***

“Clare, where’s my blue pinstripe?” Richard called over the intercom from the master bedroom of their spacious home, a little after nine o’clock that evening.

Clare was in Peter’s room, at the other end of the second floor, reading to the ten-year-old.  The children had long since outgrown bedtime stories, but the ritual had hung on, Rumpelstiltskin having given way to the likes of Harry Potter, and the half hour she spent with each of them at the end of the day had become a pleasant little interlude that all three of them looked forward to.

“It went to the cleaner’s last week, but it should be back by now,” she responded to her husband, pressing the little button on the wall-mounted gadget he had insisted on installing in every room of the house.  “Have you looked in the closet?”

“Of course I looked in the closet, and it isn’t there,” he replied.  “That’s why I’m asking you.”

Clare gave Peter a quick hug.  “You remember where we were, and I’ll be right back,” she told him.

She stood up, set the book on the nightstand, and padded down the carpeted hallway of the fifteen-room Laurelhurst dwelling that had been her home for the past ten years.

North of downtown and east of the University district, the lakeside part of Laurelhurst was a quiet and relatively crime-free enclave of elegance.  It may not have been The Highlands, but it nevertheless offered rolling hills and winding roads and well-tended gardens and estate-sized lakefront homes, occupied by families who didn’t mind parting with some of their wealth if it brought them peace of mind, a good investment, and the neighbors of their choice.

The Durant home was no exception.  The timbered stucco and stone structure sat graciously amidst two-plus acres of velvet lawns, dotted with flowering gardens, sculptured hedges, and splendid conifers, that rose ever so slightly from the road, and then sloped gently down to the lake.  The house was reached by means of a long circular driveway, and featured a three-car garage and a swimming pool.

It was not Clare’s style to live like this, in such lavish surroundings, separated from neighbors by high privacy hedges, and privy to the awe-inspiring backdrop of Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains beyond.  She had been raised in a modest area of Ballard, by parents who taught her the value of saving money rather than spending it.  But it was Richard’s style.  Or rather, it was the style to which he had long aspired and then rapidly become accustomed.

Entering the mauve and gray bedroom suite, she turned right and walked into the room-sized closet, reached to her left, and pulled a plastic-covered suit off the rack.

“Is this the one you’re looking for?” she asked.

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t see it,” Richard said, a little sheepishly, as he searched through the drawers of his dresser.  “Set it aside for me, will you?  I want to wear it tomorrow.”

Clare hung the suit back on the rack in the closet and retraced her steps down the hall to Peter’s room, picking up the book and settling herself once again on the bed beside her son.

“How come Daddy couldn’t find his own suit?” the ten-year-old wanted to know.

“Sometimes, grown-ups have a hard time seeing what’s right in front of them,” his mother replied, smiling gently and tapping the tip of his nose with her index finger.  And then she began to read again from the place where they had stopped.

***

“How was your day?” Clare asked an hour later, as husband and wife sat in the dining room, at opposite ends of the banquet-sized mahogany dinner table, finishing their after-dinner coffee.  It was a beautiful room, large and airy, as were all the rooms in the house, this particular one boasting rich mahogany wainscoting and velvet-flocked wallpaper.  It was used mostly for special occasions, or when Richard was home for meals.

Clare had spent her first two years in Laurelhurst remodeling and redecorating the house under her husband’s watchful eye.  There was nothing wrong with the way the place looked when they moved in, but Richard didn’t want to live in the former owner’s shadow.  He wanted his own stamp put on everything.

“About the same as always,” Richard replied to her question.  “Busy, frustrating, productive.”

“That’s good,” she said brightly.  “Well, the productive part, anyway.”

“Thompson’s still giving us problems in manufacturing.  I’ve told him he either straightens it out or we move the whole damn thing to Taiwan.”

Nicolaidis Industries was a conglomerate of half a dozen or so companies, sitting on the cutting edge of the medical technology field and running the gamut from equipment to pharmaceuticals, and from research and development to production.  In 1987, the Nicolaidis Building had added its black glass profile to the Seattle skyline.  And since 1992, the Nicolaidis Foundation had been responsible for donating millions of dollars to benefit those less fortunate around the world.

It was all the vision of Clare’s father, a Greek by birth, who had immigrated to America at the age of seventeen without a penny in his pocket.  Gus Nicolaidis began the business with a five-thousand-dollar loan, and proceeded to build and nurture it into a corporate success story.  And then, ten years ago, two years before succumbing to lung cancer, Gus handed the reins, if not the horse, over to his assistant, the husband of his only child.  Richard promptly took the company public, and was now close to tripling its profits.

“Move it out of Alabama?” Clare asked.  One of the things her father always prided himself on was the fact that the business was one hundred percent American -- conceived in America, operated in America, produced in America -- his tribute to the country that had taken him in and allowed him to live free and prosper.

“Why not?” her husband responded.  “Every corporation with any smarts is moving production out of the country these days -- and very profitably, too, I might add.  Your father’s keep-it-in-America idea has been out of touch with reality for decades.  And it’s been killing our bottom line for years.”

“Well, I guess you know best,” she murmured.  “But maybe we could talk about it a little before you make a final decision.”

“Yes, I think it’s fair to say that I do know best,” he assured her, doing everything he could to hide his irritation, because he didn’t need her on his back about this, at least, certainly not right now, when the plans were so far along.  “But of course we can talk about it, if you like.  I’ll have Henry put some numbers together for you.”

Henry Hartstone was the corporation’s chief financial officer.  Before Richard, he had worked for her father for many years, and Clare both liked and trusted him.

“You haven’t mentioned the trial runs lately,” she said.  “How are they going?”

Richard brightened at that.  “So far, the results look terrific,” he told her.  “I’ll know better in a couple of weeks when I get out to the plant and see firsthand.  But we’ve got so much riding on this that I can’t conceive of anything going wrong.”

“Well then, nothing will,” she assured him.

Richard smiled.  He had full lips, white teeth that were only slightly crooked, and a devastating smile that, even after twenty years, still made Clare’s heart thump a little faster.

“From your mouth to the industry’s ears,” he said.

They fell silent then, and for a few moments all that could be heard was the clink of china cups against china saucers.

“You aren’t going to believe this,” she said, after a while, “but I do believe I had my first real compliment in years from Glenn Thornburgh this afternoon.”               

“Oh, before I forget,” Richard announced, as though she hadn’t spoken, “I won’t be home until late tomorrow night.”

Clare looked at him in surprise.  “What?”

“Mason’s coming into town, and Doug and I have to take a dinner meeting with him.”

George Mason was one of Richard’s up and coming research wizards out of the California plant.  Douglas Potter was Nicolaidis’ vice president in charge of research and development.

“Richard, tomorrow night is the Children’s Hospital benefit,” she reminded him.

He slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand.  “I forgot,” he said.  “I’m sorry, but I can’t put this meeting off.  I’ve been trying to get Mason up here for over a month, and I finally just flat out told him to make it happen.  Look,” he added, as though it were a novel idea, “why don’t I get James to fill in?  He ought to fit into my tux if he doesn’t have his own.”

It would hardly be the first time in the three years he had worked for her husband that James Lilly would be pressed into service at the last minute to accompany Clare to some event or other.  Filling in was almost becoming part of the assistant’s job description.

Clare didn’t bother to object.  The Harvard MBA was bright and quite presentable, and he could carry on a conversation almost as well as Richard.  And, whether her husband knew it or not, it just so happened that he owned his own tuxedo.

“As long as you know it won’t be the same without you,” she said lightly.

“I know,” Richard responded with a grin.  “And I
am
sorry.  But it’s the best I can do.”

“Well, if it’s your best,” she said, her warm brown eyes showing both reproach and forgiveness, “that doesn’t leave me with much of an argument, now does it?”

“That was the whole idea,” he agreed.  “Oh, yes, and will you have Doreen iron me a blue shirt for the morning? I couldn’t find one.”

“Of course,” she said, which meant that she would be ironing the shirt herself, because the housekeeper, who got up at dawn to make Richard his breakfast, was already in bed.

When Richard came home too late to have dinner with the family, which in recent months had been as often as three to four times a week, the two women had an arrangement.  Doreen would cook, and Clare would clean up the kitchen afterwards.  And take care of any extras that happened to pop up.  Like ironing a blue shirt, when an already ironed white or gray one would do just as nicely.

After fourteen years of marriage, she had learned that Richard had his peculiarities.  But then, everyone has peculiarities, she knew, and since she also knew that he carried the enormous responsibility of running Nicolaidis Industries on his shoulders, she had always tried her best to accommodate him.

Except that she had hoped to get to sleep early tonight.  She had an important meeting of her own, first thing in the morning, and she quite naturally wanted to be at her best.  Clare sighed.  Life used to be a whole lot easier.  They used to use a laundry service over by the university that did excellent work, until Richard complained one day that they put too much starch in his collars.

“And be sure to tell her not to put too much starch in the collar,” he added, as he downed his last gulp of coffee, got up from the table, and headed for a little room at the end of the house that he used as his office away from his office.