The Parks Empire: Secrets, Lies and Loves

“Substitute,” he automatically corrected. “Sara is Miss Carlton to you,” he reminded the child.

“She said I could call her by her first name since she isn’t going to be my teacher anymore.”

While his daughter gave Sara a disapproving glance for this latter sin, Cade added this information into the mix and still came up with a jumble. “This isn’t making sense.”

“I’m no longer employed at Lakeside,” Sara informed him, her manner casual, her gaze cold.

The icy surety of knowing what was to come hit him like a flash flood in winter. “Why?”

She shrugged. “Apparently the class size wasn’t big enough to sustain an extra teacher. That was the clause invoked to let me go. The good news is they gave me a check for my salary for the rest of this term. Nice, huh?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said, giving his neighbor a pointed perusal to assure her he meant to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Sara nodded, her head bent over the sketch as she went back to shading it with pencil strokes.

Stacy looked from one adult to the other. Cade knew his sharp-minded daughter had picked up on the undertones between him and Sara. It was time for a distraction.

“I’m starved,” he said. “Let’s go out for dinner.”

“Sara and I already ate,” Stacy told him, bridging the tense silence between the other two. “We had ice cream after school, and Sara got to meet Mrs. Ling. When Mrs. Ling held Mrs. Chong up next to Sara, their eyes were almost ’xactly the same. Raymond was there, too. He’s in my class. Then we had Chinese.”

Cade sorted through this information. Raymond was Mrs. Ling’s grandson. Mrs. Chong was her cat, whose eyes indeed were as green as Sara’s. The cat was also as aloof as Sara appeared at the moment.

“We got Chinese take-out,” Sara clarified. “There’s plenty left in the refrigerator for you.” She stood. “I have some work to do. I’ll see you in the morning, Stacy.”

“Okay,” Stacy said.

“Wait a minute.” Cade tried to suppress his frustration while Sara gazed at him as if they were perfect strangers. Aware of his daughter taking every word in, he changed his mind about an interrogation at the moment. “I can drop Stace off on my way to work. There’s no need for you to go to the trouble.”

“As you wish.”

With a nod to each of them, she sailed into her side of the mansion and closed the door.

“Do you think Sara is mad?” Stacy asked.

“I suspect she’s tired. Come on, you can keep me company while I eat. Then it’s bath time for you.”

They went inside. By the time Stacy was in bed and sleeping like the angel children are purported to be, Cade was chomping at the bit to go next door and see what the hell was happening.

Sara thought of staying in her bedroom and not answering the door when she heard Cade’s knock at the back of the house later that night. Reviewing her feelings as she went downstairs, she decided she was fine, all emotion bottled up and locked away.

“Come in,” she said, standing back from the door after opening it at his impatient second knock.

She noticed he had the receiver for the monitor he kept in Stacy’s room hooked to his belt. A thoughtful father, she scoffed. He looked after his own.

She sat in one of the chairs. He took the other.

The space between them, where the coffee table resided, was as wide as a canyon.

“What’s happened?” he asked quietly.

“Nothing.” At his ominous frown, she shrugged. “I was fired this morning. My services are no longer needed was the way it was put to me.”

He regarded her with narrow-eyed scrutiny, then a light dawned in his eyes. “You think I had something to do with it.”

She ignored the disbelief in his voice. “I’m positive of it.” She wrapped her arms tightly across her middle as a shield from the tremors that had invaded her.

“Sara—”

“Was it your idea or your father’s?” she asked, letting the glacier that had formed inside her penetrate her entire being, allowing icicles to coat each word.

Cade observed her without answering.

“It doesn’t matter. I know where we stand now. I was distracted over the weekend,” she admitted, the bitterness of the previous winter entering her soul. “But that won’t happen again.”

He rose. She did, too.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

“The mighty Parks family,” she said scathingly. “You can have me fired, but nothing will stop Tyler and me from finding out the truth. We’re not helpless children anymore, and we have friends in the city. You had better not try the same tactics on my brother.”

The pleasant room filled with raging silence as they studied each other like opponents in a boxing ring. It would be a bare-knuckle battle to the finish, and only one of them would be standing at its end. That survivor would be her.

“What truth are you searching for?” he asked with a deadly calm that might have frightened her had she not been sure of her ground.

“The one involving my father, Jeremy Carlton, and your father, Walter Parks…the honorable Walter Parks,” she mocked softly, “who was a liar, a thief, a seducer of other men’s wives, a diamond smuggler…”

“Don’t leave anything out,” Cade invited when she paused, his voice as expressionless as his face.

She inhaled carefully, sensing his cold fury, then said, “Walter Parks, my father’s partner. And his murderer.”

Chapter Eight

Cade walked unannounced into Walter Parks’s office at nine o’clock the following morning. The secretary followed uneasily behind him. “Mr. Parks is on a conference call,” she repeated. “He isn’t to be disturbed.”

“It’s all right, Connie,” Walter said, placing the receiver on the hook. “I’m through with the call. Please close the door.” It was an order, not a request.

She did so.

“Did I forget an appointment?” Walter asked.

Cade shook his head. “I have one question. Did you have Sara Carlton fired?” He knew the answer by the way his father’s eyes darted away from him. “You did.”

Walter shrugged. “I suggested to one of the directors that her services weren’t needed.”

“What else?” Cade demanded.

“Nothing.”

The older man was lying. Cade knew it in his gut. The blood pounded through his temples at a furious pace. “What else?” he asked again.

“I suggested she might have an unsavory background, which she does,” his father insisted at his snort of fury. “Her mother was an unstable person.”

“Unstable,” Cade repeated. “The way my mother was unstable and had to be sent away?”

“Not like that,” Walter hedged. “Not exactly. Marla was given to depression and hysteria. She, uh, took things more seriously than warranted.”

Cade digested the statement. “Such as the affair you had with her?” he asked softly, icy coldness joining the white-hot anger in his blood as he observed the familiar signs of anger in his father.

“I was not involved with her. Anyone who says so is a liar.” A pulse pounded out of control in Walter’s temple as his face suffused with color. “I suppose you’ve been listening to Marla’s daughter.”

Cade shoved his hands in his pockets and sat on the corner of the desk in a casual manner. “Yeah. We had an interesting conversation last night. She thought I’d gotten her dismissed and wanted to know if it had been my idea or yours.”

Walter frowned. “What did you tell her?”

“Since I knew nothing of it, I didn’t tell her anything.”

“Good. Keep your mouth shut and this will all blow over in a day or two.” He looked pleased.

“The way her father’s death did twenty-five years ago?” Cade asked, keeping his tone neutral, his voice low.

There was a slight jerk to his father’s hand before he waved it in dismissal. “That’s ancient history. The police investigated thoroughly and concluded it was an accident.”

“A convenient one,” Cade murmured.

The flush spread from Walter’s neck to his face. “What the hell are you suggesting?”

“You tell me.”

The older man planted both hands on his desk and viewed Cade with narrow-eyed scrutiny. “Don’t let the fact that you’ve got the hots for the girl get in the way of your thinking,” he warned.

“So you had nothing to do with Jeremy Carlton’s death?”

“No. It was like I told the police. We’d all had too much to drink while celebrating the new enterprise. I went to sleep. When I woke up, adrift on the tide, I barely got the yacht cranked up in time to avoid breaking up on some rocks. Jeremy was a fool to take the boat out on his own. We could have both drowned.”

Cade considered the scenario painted by his father. It jibed with the police reports. But then, those reports used Walter’s story to describe what happened. He shook his head slightly, not liking the way his thoughts were going or the faint shadow of doubt that nibbled at the edges of his mind.

“I can’t believe my own son would ask me such a question,” his father said, his voice rough with pain. “That was a horrible year, first with Jeremy’s death and all the questions about it, then your mother’s illness coming on top of that. With four children to raise, I was at my wit’s end.”

Cade felt a jab of guilt at bringing up old memories. “It was lucky we had Mrs. Wheeler by then,” he said, recalling it had been the motherly widow who’d tucked them into bed at night and listened to their prayers.

“It was,” Walter agreed. “With the business tangle to sort out after Jeremy’s death, I had all I could do to keep the company solvent. Some of the diamonds we’d purchased were missing. We never found them.”

“Sara and her brother think you kept the ones their father had bought.”

Walter shrugged. “They would only see things from Marla’s point of view. She even accused me of smuggling gems. Why would I do that when I had a perfectly legitimate business in diamond trading? The woman was crazy.”

Cade mulled over the odds of there being two crazy women involved in the same scandal.

His father came around the desk and threw an arm around his shoulders. “I don’t know what Marla’s kids think they hope to prove by stirring up the past, but I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. I can assure you of that. You got time for lunch today?”

“Uh, not today,” Cade said. “I’m swamped.”

“Catch you another time, then,” Walter said, jovial now that he considered their problem resolved.

Cade left the building and headed for his law office, aware of the cloud that sat over his head, its presence not quite letting him totally rely on his father’s vow of innocence.

But why would he lie? What did he have to gain?

More importantly, what did he have to lose?

Three hours later, Cade replaced the phone, noted the time used for the conference call on the charge sheet for that client, then stared out the window at the Golden Gate Bridge.

He had a corner office in the TransAmerica building in downtown San Francisco, so the view was impressive. As well as the bridge, he could see Alcatraz Island and the ferries plying the bay, carrying tourists to the prison so they could see where America’s most notorious criminals were once housed. The Birdman of Alcatraz had been nothing like the movie version depicting him.

Neither, apparently, was Walter Parks.

An uneasiness rippled through Cade as he replayed that morning’s visit with his father. A man was supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty. He certainly had no proof to the contrary on his father.

The conversation, argument, whatever, with Sara last night sloshed around in his brain like bile, bitter and burning in its intensity. The revelation of her true reason for moving to the city had haunted his sleep…which had been in moments, not hours, after he’d left her place and returned to his own town house.

His eyes felt like sand pits this morning, and his spirits weren’t much better. Live and learn.

Sara wasn’t the first woman who’d fooled him into thinking they had something special. His wife had done the same. He should have gained something from that first experience of betrayal.

He exhaled heavily, still not wanting to believe that the woman next door, the woman who had shared the sweetest moments in his arms, had done so only because she wanted information…and revenge on his father.

Sara had been sad at times. She’d seemed vulnerable and fragile, but there had been a core of honesty and openness about her. Stacy had trusted her at once, and he had trusted his daughter’s instincts.

There had also been the connection between him and Sara as children—the shared kindergarten class, the disruption of their lives through no fault of their own by her father’s mysterious death and his mother’s equally mysterious departure. Those experiences had been life-altering for both of them and represented the same thing to the children they were at the time—abandonment by those they loved.

Over the weekend, they had shared more than childhood memories. Certainly she hadn’t faked her response to their lovemaking. Or had she?

Hell, he couldn’t tell truth from fiction anymore. He rubbed a hand over his face as if to shut out the pictures that rampaged through his mind. Sara smiling. Sara holding the saddle horn for dear life. Sara coming to him, meeting him eagerly as a lover—

“Hey, Cade, how about lunch?” a friendly male voice interrupted just as his thoughts were becoming uncomfortably steamy and his blood hot.

A distraction, that’s what he needed to escape the morass his mind had fallen into. He nodded to Steve Knoles, fellow attorney and good friend at the law firm.

Like him, Steve had started with Clauson, Mason, Barnett and Raines, the senior partners of the company, right out of law school five years ago. Being the newest members of the prestigious group had bonded them from their first day. Their friendship had held fast from then on.

The two men walked to a nearby restaurant. Once they were seated and had gotten water and iced tea, Steve leaned close. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked.

Cade smiled wearily and crossed his heart. “To the grave.”

Steve grinned, reminding Cade of Rowan when his younger brother was in a devilish mood. Both men had blue eyes and dimples that melted the females of the species when they smiled. Steve wasn’t quite as hotheaded, though.

“Something tells me this means trouble,” Cade muttered to his friend.

“Nah.” Steve waved aside the statement with feigned nonchalance. “I’m going out on my own. Want to be a partner in a new law firm?”

Cade blinked in surprise. “Run that by me again.”

“I’m never going to make partner,” Steve told him. “Old man Raines has hated me from day one. I’ve found a suite of offices in a good location. With the dot-com bust, rents are affordable, if I have a partner to share expenses. You, naturally, are my first choice.”

“Hell’s bells,” Cade murmured. “Warn a guy before you hit him with something like this.”

“Sorry. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but the cost was too high.” He shot Cade a serious glance over the edge of his iced tea glass. “You’ll make partner in a year or two, so it would be a greater risk for you to go out on your own than for me. That said, I hope you’ll consider it seriously.”

“Do I have time to think about it, or is this a do-or-die deal that has to be decided today?”

“Take all the time you need,” Steve said airily, “but remember this—we would be our own bosses, determine our own hours, choose our own cases. Ah, the list is endless.”

“Freedom,” Cade said.

The word filled his head, luring him with a force stronger than any siren’s call. In going out on his own, he would be free of his father’s influence, his subtle threats and the demand for family loyalty.

Cade surveyed the proposal from every angle. His friend had certainly provided the distraction he’d needed from his own gloomy thoughts. Freedom. The temptation of it.

He admitted it had daunted his ego when the old man had made it clear Cade’s position came through the Parks name rather than his own record of achievement.

Which was excellent, he grimly reminded himself. He’d been an honor student and had graduated third in his class. At the law office, he’d done well and earned a reputation as an able attorney. Bringing the Parks account to the firm had been a plus for him, but he’d never considered it worth more than his own merit—

“Earth to Cade,” his friend intoned. “Are you envisioning us on our own, arguing cases like Perry Mason and supplying the damning evidence at the last moment?”

“Right,” he said dryly. “Who’s going to be Paul and Della to our combined Perry?”

“I know a private detective,” Steve said. “He did some work for a client of mine last year. Mark Banning. You ever hear of him?”

Cade shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

“If he came in with us, we could move to a bigger place. I’m thinking of specializing in insurance and medical fraud. A detective in-house would be just the thing.”

Cade studied the other attorney. “Why do I get the impression you’ve thought this through, and all the detective and I need to do is sign the lease papers?”

Steve flashed a supremely satisfied smile. “You’re really going to consider it?” he asked. At Cade’s nod, he muttered, “Hot damn!”

“I’m not signing on the dotted line yet, but yes, it’s something to think about. In fact, I may have use for your friend’s services.”

The waiter stopped by to take their order. After he left, Steve gave Cade a quizzical glance.

“I want information on something that happened a long time ago. Twenty-five years, in fact.” He leveled a serious stare at his friend. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked.

Steve nodded. “To the grave,” he vowed, repeating Cade’s earlier promise.

“Things seem to be getting serious,” Tyler muttered to Sara while dipping sushi in hot wasabi sauce.

She nodded in agreement. He’d called last night and asked her to meet him for lunch today after she’d told him about her dismissal and her accusation toward Cade and/or his father for it.

“Have you decided when you’re going to confront Walter Parks about yours and Conrad’s paternity?”

“Not yet. I want to find out more on his dealings with Jeremy. Ah, there’s Robert.”

Sara followed her brother’s line of sight and saw a man in a conservative suit speak to the hostess, then head their way. “Who is he?” she asked.

“Robert Jackson, from the D.A.’s office. He prosecuted the murder case I investigated back during the spring. I thought we should ask his advice and invited him to lunch if he had time.”

Before she could voice any opinion about this, the man arrived at their table. Tyler made the introductions and invited the attorney to be seated.

“Glad you could join us,” Tyler said. “Anything new on the Shrimpton case?”

The assistant D.A. shook his head. “The trial has been delayed for the third time while the defense is searching for a witness. They’ve hired Mark Banning to help. I think you know him, don’t you?”

“Sure, he’s my partner’s brother.”

While the men talked, Sara estimated the new-comer’s age to be in the mid-to-late thirties. He had a permanent crease across his forehead and a few strands of gray in his black hair. His manner was intensely serious. She found that reassuring, as if he meant business and would let nothing stand in his way while getting at the truth of a situation.

“What’s happening with you?” Robert asked after snagging the waiter and placing his order.

“We need your advice,” Tyler admitted, lowering his voice. “It’s about a paternity case, for one thing, and about murder, for another.”

“An interesting combination,” the assistant D.A. murmured. “Murder I can help you with. Paternity is a civil suit ordinarily. Unless it’s directly involved in the murder.”

While the trio ate, Sara and Tyler put forth all the information they had gleaned from their mother and added in the details of their research since moving to San Francisco.

“Mark and Nick Banning are helping us find this long-lost uncle,” Sara told the assistant D.A.

“Derek Ross, or Moss or whatever he calls himself, witnessed the crime,” Tyler finished the tale.

“You have to locate him, or else there’s no case,” Robert said, echoing their conclusions. “You need some kind of evidence to show a motive. Usually greed is a good one. What would Walter have gained by eliminating Jeremy?”

“The rare diamonds Jeremy had already invested most of his assets in?” Tyler suggested. “They were never recovered that we know of.”

“You have any kind of proof that these diamonds actually existed and that your father bought them?”

“No. We think Walter kept them and used them to start his jewelry stores,” Sara told the attorney. “That was why Jeremy’s business was in serious debt and went under when he died. Everything had to be sold to pay for merchandise that apparently never existed or was never found, at any rate.”

“A bum deal,” Robert said sympathetically.

“That’s what we think, too,” Tyler said, his expression grim and much older than his years.

Sara forced back the anger that threatened to erupt as she gazed at her brother. It had been a long time since she’d seen him carefree and happy as a young man his age should be. He should be thinking of falling in love and getting married and having a family, but because of Walter Parks, that life had been denied all of them.

She and Tyler had established themselves in San Francisco while riding high on a wave of righteous indignation, but life was so much more complex than one emotion, she’d discovered. She suspected her brother had found out the same thing.

While he’d had a rather serious relationship with one woman, they had broken up because of his vow never to marry and have children. Their mother’s unhappiness had touched all the Carlton children in various ways, none of them leading to a trusting relationship with another human.

She sighed quietly and gazed out the window while Tyler and the attorney discussed how to handle a paternity suit and whether to go ahead with it before finishing the murder investigation. Suddenly, down the street, she recognized a tall, lithe masculine form.

Cade and his companion were deep in serious discussion as they hurried along the sun-filled avenue.

Her heart lurched so hard, she put a hand to her chest to hold back the pain. Not for the first time, she was sorry she’d ever moved to this city. And sorry that she’d met Cade Parks and discovered the man of her dreams.

Yes. She regretted that most of all.

Later that afternoon, Sara sat at a computer in the local library. Noting the date that came up on the screen, she realized that tomorrow she would have been in San Francisco for three weeks.

Three weeks. So short, yet she felt she’d compressed a lifetime into those twenty-one days.

Forcing her attention to the job at hand, she typed in the names she wanted to review. The computer searched the archives of the local newspaper and came up with a surprisingly large list of selections.

She read of Walter Parks’s marriage to Anna Lindsay, daughter of a gem-mining, trade and exploration tycoon. Walter had been thirty, the bride, beautiful and glowing with happiness, only twenty.

Staring at the picture of Walter in his wedding tux, Sara’s heart tightened into a painful ball. Cade looked very much like his father.

That didn’t mean he was like his father in personality, some part of her argued.

She shut out the quarreling halves of her heart and concentrated on the articles. Arthur Lindsay had died two years after the marriage. By then the twins, Cade and Emily, had been born. Next had come Rowan, then Jessica, in quick succession. After the final birth announcement and a few charity functions, Anna Lindsay Parks apparently disappeared from the face of the earth.

Sara closed her eyes and replayed her mother’s dying accusations and agitated murmuring. Yes, Anna had been at the celebration party Walter had thrown aboard his yacht. Walter, Anna, Marla and Jeremy were present, along with Marla’s younger brother, Derek Ross, and a few other staff people involved in the diamond-trading business with Walter and Jeremy. Before the joint enterprise, Carlton’s company had been the biggest rival of Parks Mining and Exploration.