Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,91

women have the luck to look so good, so artlessly. Nick detected a new dimension to her hazel eyes, reflecting the clarity of mind and serenity of spirit that often follow the purifying fires of illness. She was certainly grieving for her mother, but had the innate grace to keep her grief as private as she could.

“Thanks,” Nick said. “Weren’t you going to say goodbye?”

“No. I thought this would be better. After the way I treated you. After I refused to believe that Mother was…not what she seemed to be. I’m ashamed of her, ashamed of myself for not realizing how out-of-control she was. She did terrible things, Nick. The police have finally run out of questions. But I haven’t. I know there’s more that needs to be exposed.”

Nick shrugged. No point in making her suffer for her mother’s wrongs, those she suspected, those she didn’t. As far as she and anyone else knew, her mother’s crimes were the desperate attempts of an unbalanced mind, first to hide the family’s Jewish ancestry, and then to defuse the Balzars’ suit.

Maybe, Nick thought, the ancient harvest of sour grapes has ended for this family; there would be no more teeth on edge.

“You were good to me, Nick,” she said. “You tried to protect me from the pain of the truth as long as you could, but not from the truth itself. When you offered to show me, I ran away. I was a coward.”

There’s more pain out there for you yet, Zola. You’re on your own now–no revolving office in the sky, no more lackeys cringing in your footsteps, no more cocktail parties with disingenuous corporate do-gooders with their hands in your bank account, no more Mother-in-shining-armor.

They had walked over to the large living room, where two shrouded wing chairs faced a cold fireplace. They sat down.

“I’m leaving New Orleans,” she said, looking around the barren room as if she missed it already. “I don’t know when–or if I’ll ever come back. Nick, I just keep seeing the image of Mother, all alone out there in that beautiful setting, physically sick, obsessed with protecting the family name, in her disturbed way. If she’d only confided in me.”

“Yes. A terrible thing,” Nick said. Armiger deserved everything she got; but of course he couldn’t tell Zola that.

“If only I’d known how devastated she was by the difficulties–and that’s what they were, really. Just difficulties. None of this needed to happen. Our more sophisticated clients didn’t give a damn about that suit, or the story behind it; they also happened to be our most important ones. And the $10 million figure I finally agreed on with the Balzars was better than I’d hoped for. The media had exaggerated the scope of the whole affair. In fact, I’ve sold the company for just a bit less than it was valued before all of this. We’ve always had buyers waiting in the wings. Maybe you read about it.”

Nick had. He’d been pleased to learn that the division over which she’d exercised direct control was untainted by fraud. He could tell she was proud of her deal-making abilities; but sadness returned to displace her momentary swagger.

“I just don’t have the heart right now to run that kind of organization.”

Zola was quiet for a few moments.

“She kept so much inside, so many secrets,” she said. “How can a mother and her daughter be so close and know so little about each other?”

“Some people are like that,” Nick replied, trying to be sympathetic and opaque at the same time.

“I loved her; you know I did,” Zola said. “But now I realize what a frightened woman she was. Frightened of the past. I don’t want to be like that…oh, damn it!” Her eyes squinched shut and tears seeped out; she found some tissues in a shirt pocket. “I didn’t want you to see me doing this.”

Nick unclenched her hand from the chair arm. “Here’s my final lecture for this semester,” he said. “You have the power not to be frightened of your past; it can’t hurt you unless you think it can.”

“Like those monsters under my bed when I was a child,” Zola said.

Nick wiped away a rolling tear she’d missed. “Lots of people stop me in family history research when I uncover the first scoundrel. They think a bad apple in the ancestor barrel is a curse, condemning them to misfortune. I don’t believe in curses–not that kind, anyway. It’s all chance and necessity: some things we can change, some