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By Root 1213 0

almost at once things started to go wrong between them. He was working—she wasn’t. He left the house at five-thirty every morning and got home at eight o’clock at night. All he wanted to do was have a bite to eat, go over his lines for the next day, and be asleep by nine. Jenny was lonely—it wasn’t his fault. She knew only too well what that sort of schedule was like, and by God, it was what she had worked with him to achieve. But having gotten it, it began to turn sour on her. There were rows. He tried to appease her.” Bill lit another cigarette from the butt of the first. “Listen, girls, Rory was basically a nice kid. Sure he took what she offered, why not? But he wasn’t like Fields—he wasn’t an exploiter.” Bill shrugged. “The rows became a nightly occurrence, the strain began to tell on his work, and when the TV series was picked up by the network Rory knew he had to do something about it—after all, he had his career to consider now. They split up six months ago.”

Paris chose her words carefully. “Are you telling me that there might have been a good reason for Jenny to take her life? Is that it? Was she so upset that he’d left her?”

“Don’t you believe it! Jenny was a fighter—I never knew any man to get the better of her. Jenny didn’t kill herself for Rory Grant!”

“Is that an opinion,” asked Paris bitterly, “or do you have proof?”

“No one has any proof,” replied Stan. “Jenny was still a lovely woman. There could have been other men, even marriage if she’d wanted it.”

“She never did.” India leaned her head against the cushions wearily. “She told me that the only man she would ever have married was my father. I think she still loved him.”

“Look, girls.” Stan checked his gold Rolex impatiently; time was getting on and he had a golf game at the club at eleven-thirty. “There’s no point in going over the whole thing again. Personally, I believe it was an accident and I don’t suppose going for a drive at four in the morning was that unusual for someone like Jenny—she turned night into day when she wanted to.”

He glanced apprehensively at Venetia, who was staring silently out of the window at the sun shining on the ocean. She wasn’t planning anything crazy, was she? “You know how unpredictable Jenny was….” He cleared his throat again nervously, taking a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. “We’ve got to talk business now, though to be honest there’s not much to talk about. I’m sorry to tell you that in the past few years your mother and her new ‘business advisers’ managed to dissipate a considerable fortune. We believe Fields steered a great deal of it into his own pockets, although we have no concrete evidence of that—by which I mean none that would stand up in court. However, the bulk was lost in bad investments and property deals. How anyone could lose money on property deals in this town amazes me, but Jenny seems to have accomplished it. She paid top dollar for land she was led to believe would increase enormously in value once new highways and developments went in. Somebody misinformed her. Wherever she bought was the wrong direction for the new developments: Silicon Valley, for instance—she owns land fifty miles too far away.

“She picked up expensive ‘bargains’ in prime lakeside residential property at Mammoth Lake. She must have been the only one who hadn’t heard that they’d been having a series of quakes there and that her land was on a major fault line—you can’t give away property there. It’s the same story, time after time. She speculated on the commodities market, and even experienced men can lose their shirts in a couple of months doing that. Your mother gambled on making big profits and she lost.”

Stan lifted his head from the papers. “What can I tell you, girls?” He shrugged. “It’s all here for you to look at.”

Three pairs of stunned eyes met his and he dropped his gaze hastily back to the documents in his hands.

“It’s not true! It can’t be true!” wailed Paris. She couldn’t bear it, she just couldn’t bear it … she didn’t want to hear what she knew he was going to say next.

It was Venetia who said it.