Lookaway, Lookaway (17 page)

Moments later, Jerene was met at the door. Mrs. MacArthur was in her early forties, lovely, an oval face with large brown eyes and a small mouth that played successfully at a smile even in repose. Still dressed from church, perhaps. Custom designer, a small shop in town …

“I take it this is not a happy call,” Belinda MacArthur said graciously, the right note of concern in her voice.

“Do you already know what this is about?” Jerene asked.

Belinda paused. “No,” she said simply. “I’ll get some coffee.”

She does too know, thought Jerene. The woman has given away the game already. Their little darling has been in trouble with girls before. Jerene entered the foyer, seeing a golf bag and clubs leaned against a dark wood table; perhaps Mr. MacArthur was bound for the golf course … Louis Vuitton bags with a pouch for a mobile phone, Jerene noted, and a bouquet of gleaming silver-headed Nike clubs within.

“Welcome, welcome,” boomed Lucas J. MacArthur Sr., a bearish man, much older than his wife, dressed in high-end leisure wear. Sixty-something. Belinda must be the second wife; a first wife is probably eating him alive with alimony. Good. Perhaps daddy can’t keep it in his pants any more than sonny can, in which case he is practiced in the art of paying to make trouble go away. “What can we do for you?” Mr. MacArthur purred, directing Jerene into the living room.

“I’m afraid it is a most unpleasant business,” she said, meeting his gaze without a flinch.

“We should wait until Belinda brings in the coffee. She’d like to hear.”

Jerene faintly smiled. All right, who was the power in this family, who had the name to protect? Who was more scared of scandal? Jerene assessed the living room. Acceptable taste but nothing very fine. The glass-fronted cabinets were Thomasville, not antique, all newish. A Persian rug of no great antiquity or distinction, maybe not even Middle Eastern, baubles, odds and ends, small statuary (possibly from Pier 1), oil reproductions of the English countryside, a fox-and-hounds lithograph over the fireplace, not a trace of originality. The first wife is probably in the good home, Jerene figured; this one had to be moved into quickly and filled hurriedly, so as not to look empty. There was the sound of a coffeemaker whirring from the kitchen. Sailing magazines—they must have a boat. The door slowly opened, revealing a three-second glimpse of the kitchen: French copper cookware hanging from hooks, a pasta maker, granite countertops, Illy, Le Creuset, Miele … Belinda’s domain, so he has spared no expense in pleasing her. Belinda approached with the tray and coffee things. China cups and saucers, not just any old mugs from the kitchen, no instant coffee blasted in a microwave. Belinda wanted her to see they were refined people, too.

Belinda poured well, placing the cup on the saucer and not spilling a drop as she poured with her left hand; the saucer and cup were extended with balletic grace. Jerene upped her assessment: he married the college-era sorority girl for Wife Number One, then he married society for Wife Number Two, once he made partner. He didn’t just marry his secretary. Position and reputation are important to him.

“I suppose, then, we might as well have it all,” said Lucas, leaning forward.

“My daughter—and there is no easy way to put this—tells me that she was assaulted by your son. It happened in a bedroom, in the Zeta Pi house. There had been a wild party—‘Hell Week’ they call it—with the boys violently intoxicated beforehand. My daughter had lain down in a bed, not feeling well, when Luke…” Jerene paused for effect, terrifying her listeners that she might cry or break down. “She had her clothes on, when he … I know you can’t possibly want to hear this about your son.”

Belinda was all empathy: “We’re so sorry that…” But she trailed off as Lucas shot her a look. Ah, the woman must never play cards for money, thought Jerene.

“Honeybun,” Lucas said to his wife, “will it be all right if Mrs. Johnston and I have a little talk, privately.”

She nodded, relieved, and left the room, pulling the double doors closed behind her.

Lucas folded his hands on his belly and leaned back in his chair sagely. “She’s not Luke’s real mother—his stepmother.”

Jerene accepted this with a slight nod.

“I don’t think, Mrs. Johnston, my son is capable of … of assaulting your daughter. It’s not in his nature—”

“My Jerilyn has not showered. Or washed her torn clothes. She has not gone to the police yet, or the doctor’s.”

He was utterly attentive.

Jerene decided to wade in a little deeper. “Jerilyn, though she was upset, put a brave face on it and went down to breakfast with the other Sigma girls and brought up his name. It would seem Luke already has a reputation of sorts.”

Lucas stared at Jerene and Jerene, chin high, stared back, expertly holding her saucer and sipping from her coffee cup without breaking his stare. “Perhaps you should call your son and ask about his side of the story.”

“I will do just that.” Yet he didn’t move.

“We have a name in Charlotte, Mr. MacArthur. My husband was a Republican city councilman; despite the commonness of the Johnston last name, we are prominent and…” Another tactical pause. “… and I assure you, I would no more make something like this up, or bring this sort of attention to my child and family, than I would shoot the president.”

She sensed him sizing her up, the clothes, the hair, the bearing. Lucas MacArthur reached for the remote phone on a nearby end table. He speed-dialed his son. His son was still asleep. “Get him up,” Lucas growled to a roommate. Finally, his son came on and his father asked if he knew Jerilyn Johnston from Sigma Kappa Nu.

“Uh-huh,” mumbled Mr. MacArthur. “Never heard of her?”

He looked at Jerene, whose expression was stone.

“Son, this is important. Were you with her last night?” He listened. “Who were you with?” A pause. “What was her name?” Lucas closed his eyes for a full two seconds. “So you do know her.”

But Jerene was not prepared for what happened next: Lucas mumbled a few yesses, an “Oh really?” then hung up on his son, in the middle of what seemed a long explanation, and flung the phone into the bricks above the fireplace, smashing it. Jerene jumped in her chair, wondering what this moment of rage would lead to … but that gesture was the whole of the storm. Jerene sensed he had been here before, another mother in his living room, another girl with a court case, another incident. Jerene returned to granite ineluctability. In another half hour, forty minutes maybe, she would be in her Mercedes on her way to see if the caterers had obeyed her about the narrow-stem cocktail glasses, all of this over.

“What do you intend to do?” he asked.

“We’re both parents,” she said, softening. “I want a trial no more than you want a trial. You will hire someone to destroy my Jerilyn and my husband will most assuredly call in the A-team from his former law firm to destroy your son. The question is what are you prepared to do?”

Lucas seemed to have shrunk in size. “What am I prepared…” he repeated timidly.

“What are you prepared to do to make this right?”

“You mean, you need money—”

“We hardly
need
money. However, if my daughter is pregnant, it will be most unfortunate. I will not have her reputation ruined, her chances for a good marriage obliterated. Her brother is a prominent minister in Charlotte,” she said piously. “We do not believe in abortion. We are active in family values politics.” Jerene briefly flashed on her telling both daughters that she would go through the kitchen drawers and find sufficient implements to perform a five-minute abortion at home if her daughters dared get knocked up in high school. Moving along. “… we would have to construct an elaborate scenario by which my daughter studied overseas and was out of sight for the term of her pregnancy. We would have to delay her debut. She would be showing by this winter, so it would mean a semester out of school.”

Lucas shifted in his chair; his eyes showed something akin to relief. A price was going to be named, after all. Jerene could see the weight lift off him as she spoke. Money, he was thinking—she will go away and sweep it under the carpet for a check—a check he could write easily!

She sipped her coffee, to make him wait a little longer. “Switzerland for foreign language study, Paris for art history—none of that is cheap. I do not intend to have her sleeping with backpackers in train stations. Good hotels, hostels for young women run by the Josephine Sisters.” Jerene had just seen a PBS special on the Josephine order two nights before.

Lucas nodded eagerly. “That could well be ten thousand—”

“Twenty thousand, so far, I should think. Sorority dues, tuition, all of her studies interrupted, while she’s in hiding, like a fugitive. She’s not bright enough for this sort of disruption; I envision having to hire a tutor. Doctors, obstetricians, of course she should have the finest health care. And I do not need to tell you about the counseling ahead, her sense of guilt and shame, the pain of giving up a child.” She drew a difficult breath and this time it was not playacted.

“But we don’t know,” he said gingerly, “if she
is
pregnant.”

Jerene stared at him icily. She set the saucer down and stood. “If you would like to take a wait-and-see approach, I will drive back to Chapel Hill and accompany my daughter to the police, like I should have done when I first heard—”

“Oh please wait.”

She gathered up her purse. “I thought we could come to an understanding, being people of a certain station with much to lose from this type of awfulness—”

“If twenty thousand is acceptable—”

“Thirty thousand, Mr. MacArthur.”

He was wiping his brow with his sleeve, beginning to breathe more shallowly. “And the extra ten thousand, Mrs. Johnston, is for what?”

“Because your son raped my daughter last night.”

They proceeded—Jerene reflected that it could fairly be said that Lucas MacArthur staggered—to his dark-paneled study. Medical books, encyclopediae, fine leather volumes of literature probably never once opened. Certificates from the University of Alabama medical school in Birmingham. More magazines, a wall of plaques: Duke Cardiology, Duke Clinical Research Institute, some award from the Frederick R. Cobb non-invasive something or other she couldn’t read fast enough. He was a heart surgeon. She should have asked for a hundred thousand dollars. With one quadruple bypass, he will get this money back, Jerene thought. Thanks be to God he wasn’t a lawyer, or he might have fought her.

“I could wire-transfer the money—”

“Three checks for ten thousand dollars each. One made out to my husband, Joseph B. Johnston; one to me, Jerene J. Johnston; one to Jerilyn Johnston. That will be her money for Europe. No federal curiosity on checks below ten thousand; that should keep us all out of tax trouble with the IRS.”

The checks were written (Dr. MacArthur had excellent penmanship, a lovely signature). They were slid into a cream stationery envelope and Jerene placed it without looking into her purse, as if it were nothing.

“I do not know what else to say, Mrs. Johnston.”

“Not the first time with Luke Jr., I take it.”

Lucas looked at his desk, shaking his head no.

“One day, Lucas, it will not be a woman of good standing who comes to visit. It will be someone from down east or the milltowns, some father and a shotgun with a pickup truck in your driveway and they will not be satisfied with what is fair. They will be after everything you own and will care nothing for the importance of appearances.”

“I can’t tell you,” he said, finding his breath, “how glad I am, given the horror of it all, that it was you, Mrs. Johnston, and not someone who might have…”

“Taken advantage.”

“Yes.”

Her brother Gaston was right about N.C. Highway 49. He had told her how he had been homesick for this backdoor Triangle-to-Charlotte route when he was isolated in Paris. With only four hours to spare before her Mint by Gaslight, she indulgently decided against the crowded interstate, and saw that she remembered, somehow, the cut-through down N.C. 87 out of Chapel Hill to U.S. 64 and the two-lane wilderness N.C. 49, a route that the Jarvis family always insisted was a shortcut, true or not.

As a student, she had always taken the bus to Chapel Hill; how refreshing it had been that once to be in Gaston’s old junk heap of a car, windows down, North Carolina still underpopulated and defiantly verdant. How charmingly pompous Gaston had been, narrating the drive, preparing her for rapturous visions: a collapsing old house worthy of a Faulkner novel, a tasteless compound of brightly painted trailers, a rich landowner’s folly complete with moat around a modest castellated home, county-seat towns like Pittsboro with old court buildings in central squares of old white cement, patched with tar, little awninged and alcoved shops ringing the courthouse square, unchanged since 1930. And then the Uwharrie Mountains, which were, she supposed, hills since nothing a mere fifteen-hundred-, sixteen-hundred-feet were technically mountains.

Yes, Gaston had narrated the journey, never suspecting that she had been down this road one fateful time before, in 1966. She could not then tell Gaston, nor did she ever tell him that she and their sister, Dillard, had made a heartbreaking commute along this road to Halliford House, a home for unwed mothers run by Miss Grace, an elderly black woman, and her sisters, far from the notice of Charlotte society, unlikely to attract the least bit of white interest.

Her cell phone vibrated. The caterer. She smiled with relief. A few unpleasant hours, a little concerted effort and determination to will life back into proper shape, and now we can all go back to what we were supposed to be doing. In Asheboro, in Chapel Hill, in Charlotte, she had always unfailingly done what had to be done, while so many among her family and friends never did.

“Hello, Lynne,” she said to the chief caterer. “Antoine has arrived? Good, good. And the long-stemmed glasses … Marvelous. You’re one of the few people…” Suddenly she felt a sob well up, unable to stop it. “… one of the few people I can really count on.”

BOOK 2

Scandal Regained