Innocent Mistress

Bobbi, Jude’s secretary tapped lightly on his door, breaking up his melancholy reflections.

“Manage to get rid of her?” Her hazel eyes were full of wry humour. Bobbi was petite, attractive, power dressed and happily engaged. Since he’d been with the firm she’d proved a real friend and a great legal secretary, loyal, thorough and accurate. He got on well with her sports reporter fiancé, Bryan as well.

“Don’t look so damned happy,” Jude groaned. “It was really, really hard.” He moved back to his desk. “Poppy Gooding has deluded herself into thinking she fancies me.”

“And how!” Bobbi choked on a laugh. “I nearly had cardiac arrest when she shoved past me. She mightn’t look like Leonard—she must get down on her knees every night and thank the Lord for it—but she’s a bulldozer just like him. She only wants you for your body, friend.”

“Why the heck me?” he asked in extreme irritation.

He really means it, Bobbi thought. Jude Conroy, every girl’s dream! A drop-dead gorgeous hunk with those dreamy, dreamy blue eyes! He even had a fan club in the building. If she and Bryan weren’t destined for each other Bobbi thought she’d have thrown her own cap in the ring.

“Want me to put around the rumour you’re gay?” she asked drolly.

He shot her a sharp glance that softened into his white lopsided grin. It made even the faithful Bobbi’s heart execute a little dance. If he wanted to, Jude could star in a toothpaste commercial.

“I doubt that would stop Poppy. She’d think she was the one girl who could turn a man around. What I need right now is a vacation.”

His cell phone rang when he was walking to his car later that afternoon. It was Bobbi on the line, her voice flustered.

“Listen, I just had a guy on the phone, kind of snarly sort of guy I bet kicks his dog, severely put out you weren’t here—name of Ralph Rogan. Says you know him. Wants to speak to you ASAP. Sounded like you were sleeping with his wife. I told him you were due for an important meeting that should break up around four. Number is—your part of the world curiously—got a pen?”

“Give it to me, I’ll remember.”

She laughed. “Jude, you’re a human calculator.”

“Right.” He had a special thing with numbers. Even as a kid he’d been able to add up stacks of them in his head not that kids used those skills anymore. Bobbi gave it to him and from the area code he immediately identified his area of Far Northern Queensland. He didn’t need any introduction to Ralph. Ralph Rogan was the son of the richest man in his home town of Isis and one of the richest men in the tropical north. Jude’s dad had been Lester Rogan’s solicitor and close confidant. Rogan Senior had trusted no one except Jude’s father. Jude and Ralph had gone to school together but they had never been friends. More like adversaries. The hostility was an on-going state of affairs exacerbated by Ralph’s “problems” with his domineering father. Rogan Senior had wanted and expected his son to shine, to come out on top. Ralph never had. Even as a boy he’d been to use Bobbi’s word, “snarly,” a bully who traded on the fact his father practically owned the town and huge tracts of land for development. It had to be something serious for Ralph to get on the phone to Jude. As soon as the meeting was over he’d place a call.

Piercing screams woke him, screams that echoed around the mansion. The minute Ralph Rogan heard his mother’s frenzied cries, he knew something was very wrong. It had to be his father. His father had been diagnosed with atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries. It wasn’t surprising after a lifetime of indulgence, eating, drinking, smoking, womanising. Despite the warnings it never occurred to him to give anything up. With any luck he was dead. Ralph had lost every skerrick of affection for that big bull of a man who was his father. He didn’t consider he closely resembled his father at the same age.

Ralph shot out of bed, pulling on jeans and a shirt in a great hurry. He didn’t bother finding shoes. He rushed into the hallway, covering the not inconsiderable distance to his father’s suite in the west wing in record time. His mother and father hadn’t shared a bedroom in years. In his arrogance and insensitivity—Lester Rogan thought of his wife and children as property—he’d brought in workman to turn several rooms of the family mansion into a self-contained suite for himself. Ralph’s long-suffering mother had no back bone. She was a thin pitiful thing these days and she’d been left out in the cold. His father was like that: a law unto himself. That’s what came of too much money and power.

Inside the massive bedroom with its heavy Victorian furniture inappropriate to the climate Ralph found his mother slumped to the floor beside his father’s bed. She was sobbing bitterly, her thin body convulsing as though shocked and grieved out of her mind.

“I couldn’t sleep. I knew something had happened.” She turned her head, choking on her tears. “He’s gone, Ralph. He’s gone.”

“And good riddance.” Ralph Rogan let a lifetime of bitterness and resentment rip out. For moments he stood staring at his father’s body, his heavy, handsome face dark with brooding, a thick blue vein throbbing in his temple. Eventually he moved to check if his father was indeed dead. A huge man in life, in death Lester Rogan looked surprisingly lighter, shorter, his mouth thrown open and his jaw slack. His eyes were still open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Ralph reached down to shut them, but abruptly drew back as if the corpse would rise up and bite him. He didn’t want to touch the man who had treated him so badly, who had never shown an ounce of pleasure or pride in him. All he’d received were insults and humiliations, comparisons with that clever bastard, Jude Conroy, the Golden Boy.

“He’s dead all right!” Coldly he informed his weeping mother, throwing the sheet over his father’s face with something approaching violence. “I’ll get Atwell over. He’ll have to sign the death certificate.” Ralph cast another disgusted look at his mother, before drawing her to her feet. “What the hell are you crying about, Ma?” he demanded in genuine amazement. “He treated you like dirt. He never had a kind word for you. He kicked you out of his bed. He had other women.”

“I loved him,” his mother said, disengaging herself from her son’s hard grasp and collapsing into one of the huge maroon leather armchairs custom built for her husband. It dwarfed her. “We were happy once.”

Ralph’s laugh was near wild. “What a load of drivel! It must have been a lifetime ago. There’s never been any happiness in this house. You’ll have to pull yourself together while I phone Atwell. Where’s Jinx?”

“Please don’t call your sister that, Ralph,” his mother pleaded. “Sometimes you’re so cruel.”

He rounded on her, tall and burly, deep-set dark eyes, large straight nose, square jaw, already at twenty-eight carrying too much weight. “I didn’t give her the nickname, remember? It was Dad. Okay, where’s Mel?”

“Here, Ralph.” A light soprano voice spoke from the door. “He can’t be dead.” Melinda Rogan cast one horrified glance at the sheeted figure on the bed, then advanced fearfully into the room.

“He is, darling.” Myra Rogan answered, holding out her hand to her dressing gowned daughter. Melinda was two years younger than her brother, a pretty young woman with her mother’s small neat features, soft brown hair and grey eyes.

“Well I’ll be damned!” Ralph mocked. “He never did a thing the doc told him.”

“It’s such a shock, Ralph.” Melinda swallowed on the hard lump in her throat. Bravely she went to tend to her mother, putting her arms around Myra’s thin shoulders. “Don’t weep for him, Mum,” she said gently, her own eyes bright with unshed tears. Death was death after all. “He never showed you any kindness.”

“He did once,” Myra insisted, rocking herself back and forth.

“Oh, yeah, when?” Ralph busy pushing buttons on the phone looked towards them to bark.

Myra tried to think when her husband had been kind to her. “Before you were born, a few years after that,” she said vaguely. Lester Rogan had taken little notice of his daughter.

“So he never cared for me from day one,” Ralph snarled.

“That’s not true. He loved you. He had great plans for you.” The fact that these plans never worked out was not always Lester’s fault.

Abruptly Ralph held up a staying hand, speaking into the phone to his father’s doctor.

“Here, Mum,” Melinda found a box of tissues. Copious tears were streaming down her mother’s face, dampening the front of her nightgown. Once her mother had been pretty, but for years now she had been neglecting herself, horribly aware her husband had no use for her.

“Atwell will be here in twenty minutes,” Ralph informed them. “Could you please stop all that hypocritical blubbing, Mum, and get yourself dressed. That man in the bed there—” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder “—has done us a huge favour. At long last we’re free of him and his cruel tongue.”

“Surely you mean at long last you can get your hands on the money,” Melinda challenged, suddenly looking at her brother as though he were the enemy. “You’re head of the family now. I tell you what, Ralph, I’ll take a bet you’ll turn out no better than Dad.”

It was hours before Ralph Rogan was able to make his phone call to his old sparring partner, Jude Conroy. Good old Jude, the big success story. The hotshot lawyer. There was no love lost between them. Once when they were kids, around thirteen, Conroy had whipped him good and proper for bullying some new kid, a snivelling little runt, small as a girl, who’d been admitted to their excellent boys’ school on scholarship. Ralph had never forgotten lying on the ground, wiping the blood from his nose and his mouth—a loose tooth. It was easy to beat up other kids. It was humiliating to be beaten up yourself. One day he swore he’d get even with Jude Conroy, school hero, champion of the underdog, young lion. Even Ralph’s mother had said he’d probably deserved his beating, taking Conroy’s side.

His father and Conroy’s father had been real close. Matthew Conroy had been his dad’s solicitor. Conroy knew all the secrets and he’d taken them down to the deep with him. Now Ralph was going to need a solicitor and loathe as he was to contact Jude, he knew he had to. Matthew Conroy had drawn up his father’s will but in the event of his death Lester Rogan had appointed Jude executor.

Lester Rogan’s funeral was underway before a young woman slipped into the back pew of the church. She knelt for a moment, then sat back quietly. A navy silk scarf was wound around her hair in such a way not a tendril escaped. She wore a simple navy shift dress. A few people at the back of the church turned to glance at her. Most were caught up in the eulogies, as first Ralph Rogan, then various towns-people walked to the podium to endeavour to say a few words for the late Lester Rogan, whose real estate kingdom included half the town and stretched for miles.

Though everyone tried—some better than others—there was no real feeling, not even from his son who stood with his hand over his heart, face beaded with sweat in the heat, rambling on about what a giant among men his father had been; how his father had taught him everything he knew. This had caused a little sardonic ripple to pass through the congregation that was quickly brought under control. Lester Rogan had not been loved and admired. Over the years he had become as mean as they come. Collective wisdom suggested Ralph was shaping up to be a chip off the old block.

The family sat up the front, son and daughter with their faces blank, Myra Rogan inexplicably weeping uncontrollably as though her husband had been the finest man ever to walk the earth.

Tears of joy, a lot of the congregation thought waspishly. She’d get over it. Probably take a grand tour overseas. There never had been any evidence Lester Rogan had physically abused his wife or children, but he’d kept tight control on them, allowing his wife and daughter little real freedom. At the same time they had benefited from his money. They lived in a sprawling two-storey mansion atop a hill with the most breath-taking view of the ocean. The womenfolk were able to buy anything they wanted—clothes, cars, things to keep them entertained—though Myra Rogan wasn’t anywhere near as attractive as she used to be. The expensive black suit she wore with a black and white printed blouse was much too big for her. The stylish, wide-brimmed hat with a fetching spray of dark grey and white feathers, spoiled by her haggard unmade up face.

Jude, who had arrived a scant ten minutes before the service began sat rows back on the family’s side of the aisle. How different this was to the memorial service that had been held for his father. Then the old timber church had been packed with mourners spilling four deep into the grounds. Today it was half filled.

People had wept as they spoke about Matthew Conroy’s innumerable kindnesses and the generosity which he’d wanted kept private, but the grateful had let their stories out. It was well known and perhaps traded on, in hard times Matthew Conroy never took a fee. He was always on hand with free advice. He listened to people’s problems when they came to him, tried to come up with solutions and most often did. Matthew Conroy had spent his life giving service to the community. All agreed he had been a wonderful father to his son. The proof was Jude himself.

No one seems to doubt I’m a winner, Jude thought. They don’t know about the scars. The young woman Jude had seen slip into the church late—his hearing was so acute he could near hear a pin drop—was barely visible at the back. It was as though she had deliberately withdrawn into the shadows. Only her skin bloomed. It made him think of the creamy magnolias that grew in the front yard of his dad’s house that now belonged to him. Whoever she was, he didn’t recognise her. Intrigued, he turned his head slightly to take another look. Immediately she bent forward, her face downcast as if in prayer, or she’d realised her presence had drawn his interest and didn’t welcome it.

By the time the service was over, she had disappeared. He even knew the moment she’d left. He thought he knew just about everyone in the town. Obviously she’d arrived fairly recently, or she was from out of town. He really couldn’t understand why he was so curious. He certainly wasn’t keeping watch on anyone else, not even poor little Mel, who had always wrung his heart.

Jude joined the slow, orderly, motorcade in the hire car Bobbi had organised to be waiting for him at the air terminal, some twenty kilometres from the town. It felt a little strange to be back to the snail’s pace of his hometown. No traffic. No nightmare rush hour. No freeways, no one-ways. You could go wherever you wanted with no hassle at all. There was limitless peace and quiet, limitless golden sunlight to soak in, tropical heat and colour, white sand, and the glorious blue of the ocean at your door. The rain forest and the Great Barrier Reef were a jump away. Isis had been a wonderful place to grow up.

The family and the mourners—not everyone who had attended the service came—spread out around the gravesite, all slightly stunned Lester Rogan was actually dead and being lowered into the ground. He’d always seemed larger than life, a big, burly, commanding man with a voice like the rumble of thunder.

The interment took little time. The widow was a pitiable sight. Who knows what she was thinking. Ralph, sweating profusely, shovelled the first spadeful of dirt onto his father’s ornate, gleaming casket with too much gusto. As Jude walked over to pay his respects to Myra and the family, he saw, not entirely to his surprise, the same young woman who had attracted his attention at the church. She was standing well away from the crowd, taking refuge and he suspected a degree of cover under the giant shade trees dotted all over the cemetery’s well-tended grounds. There had to be a reason she was there. He could see she was taller than average, very slender. She wore a simple dark dress that managed to look amazingly chic, no hat, but a matching head scarf tied artfully. It completely covered her hair.