Looking For Trouble (9 page)

“Openin' up that bank ain't just your dream, baby. Your mama and daddy, me, and all your ancestors been dreamin' right along with you. Trust in God and let him lead you in the right direction. He showed you a sign today. That woman over at the hotel ain't the one for you, baby.” Allene grunted. “But there's somebody out there who is. Somebody who's real, with a pure heart. She's gonna come to you when you least expect it, but when you need it most. You watch and see.”

John looked up into the sky as Allene was doing. “Grandma, you've never told me anything that wasn't true. So, as unlikely as what you said seems, I'll try to be as optimistic as you are.”

“Sounds like you done gave up on love.”

“Well, kind of. I've had a lot of women, but I've never been in love. I don't even know what that feels like.”

“Baby, you just wait. Things are gettin' ready to change.”

John laughed and shrugged as he shook his head.

“One more thing,” Allene said. “Use your book learnin' for startin' that bank, but use the God-given common sense runnin' through your veins for everything else. Every friend ain't good, and every enemy ain't bad.”

“First you tell me I'm going to find true love, and now you're telling me I need to watch my back?”

“That's right. That's exactly what I'm tellin' you.”

“Grandma?”

Allene knew what he was going to ask, so she quickly responded to him. “I just get a feelin' about these things. I can't tell you why or how I know. But when God puts somethin' on your heart, you have to pay attention.”

John smiled. “I woke up this morning with a feeling that something great was going to happen today. Now I know that I wasn't wrong. Your wisdom and love are the greatest gifts I could have. I love you, Grandma.” John leaned over and gave Allene another kiss on her cheek.

“I love you, too, baby.”

Allene and John enjoyed another hour of conversation before he headed back across town to the hotel.

“Lord, thank you for givin' my grandson some smarts,” Allene said aloud as she watched John's car roll away. “Keep that woman away from him, and let him see her for who she really is before it's too late.”

She rocked back and forth in her chair, thinking about what John had told her.
“King,”
she whispered, freeing the word from her mouth. It had curdled like sour milk in the pit of her stomach. A queen and a princess were in John's future, but there was no room for a King.

Allene had done her best to maintain her composure when John had uttered his girlfriend's last name. As soon as she heard the word “king,” she had wanted to drop to her knees and pray. But she knew she couldn't alarm her grandson, so instead she rose from her chair, went into her kitchen, and poured two glasses of lemonade. She said a prayer she had been rehearsing all morning—the one that Susan had branded into her memory over the last eight decades. It was a prayer of protection, meant to form a shield against anything that was rooted in bad intentions. Then she parted her lips and took a small sip from the glass meant for her grandson.

When she returned to the porch, she handed John his lemonade and watched him as his lips drank from the exact same spot where she had sipped. It was the first time in days that she had felt any relief. From her lips to John's, she was wrapping him in the protection that only pure and honest love could provide.

“Nothing bad is gonna happen to my grandson. Not on my watch,” Allene spoke in a determined voice. “Not on my watch.”

Chapter 12

F
urious was a mild emotion to describe how Madeline felt. She was out-of-her-mind mad that John had the nerve to leave her all alone at a podunk hotel that she could barely stomach. She went into the bathroom and flipped on the light switch, surveying John's toiletries, which were neatly arranged on the counter. She twisted her mouth into a frown, picked up his toothbrush, walked over to the commode, dunked it down in the water, and swirled it around the bowl several times. “Bastard!” she snarled. “Chew on this!”

She'd wanted to run out behind John and ask him where he was going before he'd practically slammed the door in her face, but she instinctively knew his destination. No doubt, he was headed to his grandmother's house.

Madeline knew he loved his parents, but his grandmother . . . Well, she was John's heart. Although he didn't talk about his family in great detail, whenever he mentioned Grandma Allene, Madeline noticed how his face would light up with the glee of a little boy. And that was all the more reason why she wanted to meet the woman so bad, especially since her meeting with his parents had been a complete disaster.

“A bumpkin and a belle,” Madeline said with a smirk, thinking about Isaiah and Henrietta Small. “But I can't blame her for marrying that old bama, because at least he's got money, and lots of it. And if John will just act right, I can get my hands on it all.”

Madeline studied her slender face in the mirror and smiled with approval. She knew her beauty was her ace in the hole—that, and the fact that her sexual expertise had reeled John in like a fish on a hook. Since childhood, she'd had a knack for using her beauty and brains to get what she wanted.

Her parents, Samuel and Gloria King, had adopted Madeline when she was six months old. They'd had one son, and had always wanted to round out their small family with a sweet little girl. But their hopes were dashed when the doctor told Gloria she couldn't have any more children. After their son graduated from high school, their empty nest intensified Gloria's desire to have a daughter. Given that Samuel wanted to make her happy, they decided to adopt. They didn't have the money or the patience for the red tape and length of time it would take to go through a New York adoption agency, so they decided to look into orphanages down south, which were much more lenient and overflowing with babies, who all needed a home.

When Samuel and Gloria walked into the Children's Home of Beltsville, Kentucky, they thought Madeline was the most beautiful little brown baby either of them had ever seen. The way she cooed and smiled at them with precious dimples on each side of her chubby cheeks had made them fall instantly in love. It only took a little over a month for the paperwork to be approved before Madeline became their little girl. Samuel and Gloria had been thrilled. They pampered little Madeline with whatever she wanted, spoiling a child who, unbeknownst to them, was already naturally rotten to the core. Her smiles, even as a child, hid the real mischief behind her motives.

After Gloria and Samuel were killed in a tragic house fire, when Madeline was eight years old, she was shipped from their modest two-family flat, where they'd lived in Queens, to a two-room apartment with her aunt Betty, on her mother's side, in Harlem.

Betty was a grocery store clerk from nine to five, and a taxi dispatcher in the evenings. During what little time she could scrounge after working around the clock, she took in laundry in order to piece together a living for her and her only sister's child. She worked tirelessly in her effort to provide a life for her niece—a life that she knew would make Gloria proud.

But despite Betty's hard work and sacrifices, Madeline had no use for the woman. Betty was a strict, Bible-toting disciplinarian whom Madeline couldn't stand. She resented the fact that Betty wouldn't let her listen to the popular tunes on the radio that everyone danced to, or hang on the stoop outside their building after school, like the other kids in the neighborhood. She saw life outside their cramped four walls as much more interesting than the Gospel-laced existence her aunt provided.

But even though she detested her unfortunate lot in life, Madeline quickly learned how to pretend to enjoy going to church, reciting Bible verses, and volunteering with the elderly. These were all things her Aunt Betty required her to do. As long as her aunt was willing to work three jobs to send her to the private school where she was bused—and where she pretended to be just as well-to-do as the privileged kids around her—and buy her all the clothes, shoes, and treats she wanted, she figured faking it was a small price to pay.

As Madeline grew older, she found that not only could she get what she wanted from her aunt and a select few friends she'd made at the ritzy school she attended, she could do the same with men. By the time she was in high school, she'd perfected the art of seduction, and had studied the
Kama Sutra
from cover to cover. She wrapped men in her web, commanding them to do whatever she wanted.

Once she graduated from college and reached adulthood, she had corralled a string of men who gladly followed behind her like puppy dogs, obeying her command. But there was one troubling problem. The great majority of them lacked the ambition, drive, and, most important, the level of financial means she desired. She didn't simply want someone who had money; she wanted someone who was wealthy beyond ordinary standards. She wanted a mogul, and that was why she'd set her sights on John Small and his family's wealth.

Madeline knew she'd done a superb job of making up an entire life from whole cloth that John had fully believed, right down to the wayward con artist she'd paid to pretend he was her brother so she could show proof of family who would back up all her lies. But the masterful job she'd pulled off today paled in comparison to any of her past stunts. She let out a hearty laugh when she thought about how surprised she'd managed to act when she saw John's parents' home, as if she didn't already know they lived in a mini-mansion, secluded from the common folks in town.

“I could've won an award for that performance.” Madeline chuckled loudly. She wanted to pat herself on the back for the way she'd fooled them all into thinking she had no idea how Isaiah had acquired his wealth. “Those country bumpkins didn't have a clue.”

She smiled, carefully inspecting her sparkling eyes in the mirror as she applied another layer of frosted shadow to her lids, which the humidity had swept away. “I didn't scrape and claw my way out of a two-room apartment to settle for just anything,” she said as she looked at herself, thinking about how she'd stripped to earn money for college so she could have the opportunity to rub elbows with people of means, who could lead her to riches. “I've gone through a lot to get to this point, and there's no turning back now.”

A month after she'd met John, Madeline had spent hours and hours researching him, his family, and his background. She even knew about the town he was from, having read articles about the local goings-on, compliments of the Manhattan downtown library and their microfiche files. She'd grown up poor, but she knew from a very early age that she was destined for a different station in life. She loved money and power, pure and simple, and she spent day and night dreaming about how to get both.

As an accountant by profession, she'd been trained to evaluate numbers, gather information, and investigate for outcomes. As a cunning woman on a mission, she used those same skills to find out what she needed to know in order to squeeze her way into John's world, and ultimately into his wallet. He was the big fish and she wasn't going to let him slip through her fingers.

Her careful due diligence was one of the reasons she knew that Isaiah hadn't told her the complete story about the extent of his wealth. He owned practically every track of land in Nedine, even in some parts of town where the white folks lived. That, combined with his farms—one that grew produce and raised beef, and the other tobacco, supplying grocery stores and cigarette companies up and down the Southeast—yielded millions in net profits each year. Isaiah was sitting on an empire. “I guess he's not as dumb as his poor diction makes him sound,” Madeline said, scoffing.

She looked at herself one last time in the mirror, dried John's wet toothbrush with a Kleenex, set it back down, and then walked back out to the bedroom area. “He should be back soon,” she said, running her hands across the small beads of sweat that had formed on her forehead. “I have to accomplish my mission so I can get out of this town as soon as possible.”

Madeline was thirty years old and she knew her time was running out. Even though she looked like a woman in her twenties, she was all too aware that the aging process would start in a few short years. Soon the elasticity of her smooth skin wouldn't be as resilient. The high rise of her perky breasts would begin to droop. The firm, round behind, which she strutted from side to side, would flatten. After all that, the wrinkles she feared would eventually take up residence at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She had to hook John while she was still young and appealing to his senses. But she also knew that she needed more than good looks and great sex to land him, she needed an air-tight insurance policy that would guarantee a ring on her left hand. She needed to get pregnant, and fast!

She'd hoped that John would forgo his usual insistence on using a condom last night, but he hadn't.

“John, I'm on the pill,” she'd told him a month after they started dating. “So there's no need to use protection. We're covered.”

“Yeah, from pregnancy. But not from anything else,” he'd said.

“Now, hold on a minute. What's that supposed to mean?”

John looked her in the eyes. “VD, syphilis, and gonorrhea are all out there. I want to be responsible and I want to protect myself.”

“I'm clean and you're the only person I'm sleeping with” had been Madeline's comeback.

“Good, let's keep it that way while we use protection.”

Madeline had been pissed to high heaven. Not because she'd wanted to get pregnant by him at the time, especially given that she didn't know if he had any real money or not. The thing that angered her was the fact that she couldn't get John to do what she wanted. She knew any other man would've turned cartwheels on one leg to have sex with her, period, let alone perform the act without a latex barrier.
What the hell is wrong with him?
had been her thought.

Even though he wouldn't give in to her, she still managed to seduce him and had gotten him to buy her just about anything she wanted. They went to the best restaurants, drank the most expensive wines, and shopped in the finest stores. She laughed at the fact that John had no idea who he was really dealing with. But neither did any of the other men who had crossed her greedy path.

But at the same time, Madeline knew that John wasn't the average guy, not just because of his rousing intellect, sophistication, and gentlemanly manners, but because of what he had the potential to be. He was ambitious beyond what even she strived for, and she knew that hitching her horse to his wagon was going to move her forward on her way to living in supreme luxury.

Neither her adoptive parents nor her aunt Betty had ever managed to scrape together enough money so they didn't have to live paycheck to paycheck. That was another reason why she'd been so in awe of what Isaiah had managed to accomplish, especially after meeting him and seeing how terribly country and uneducated he was.

She knew she had to rein John in; and up to this point, she'd done a pretty good job of it. She'd managed to convince him that her aloofness was just a case of fierce independence, and that her hard heart was really careful pragmatism. She led him to believe that her reluctance to show compassion was guided by the fact that she had to present a tough exterior in order to be taken seriously in corporate America; and she made it appear that her unwillingness to get involved in social causes was due to the fact that her plate was full trying to deal with a demanding job, which required so much of her time and concentration.

Madeline sank into the chair where John had sat just an hour ago and let out a frustrated sigh. “After all the work I've put in, and for an entire year at that, I'll be damned if I'm going to let it all go down the drain now. I'm so close.”

She'd been pleased with herself when she finally persuaded John to bring her home to meet his family, and she'd hoped she could charm John's parents, which would cement her even closer to the Smalls' fortune. But to her chagrin, that didn't work out as she'd thought it would.

She knew right away by the look in Henrietta's eyes that the woman didn't care for her, and that was one reason why she didn't attempt to go out of her way to be cordial. “Bitch,” Madeline hissed as she sucked her teeth, thinking about John's mother. Madeline's one saving grace, as she saw it, was that although Isaiah hadn't been overly welcoming, he didn't seem to dislike her the way his wife did.