The Senator’s Daughter Read online

Maddie had fled from poverty and a husband who didn’t appreciate her and ended up in prostitution. Or she’d run off with a man, one who treated her like a queen and hired a maid so her callused hands healed. The one Lyle hated most was the scene in which an enraged James Thomas hit his wife too hard and disposed of her body.

  Because Lyle chose to think his father incapable of such evil and couldn’t believe his mother would have gone without a word, the nightmare receiving the most votes was that some drifter or deviant had murdered her.

  Every time Lyle heard or read of someone disappearing, it all surged back.

  Take Tony Valetti. Last night’s recap by “On the Spot” had Lyle thinking about him again.

  Every day since Tony’s wife had filed a missing persons report, Lyle had expected to hear he had a case. There would be a body, or parts, found and identified. The DA’s office would open a file.

  Truth to tell, Lyle had opened his own two days ago. He wanted this one for several reasons, not the least of which was it could not fail to advance his career. Antone … Tony … Valetti, was one of the newest movers and shakers in the Bay Area developers’ community.

  He’d shown up only a few months ago after spending some years back east and opened a flashy office suite downtown. Rumor had it he played scratch golf, held his liquor, piloted his own helicopter, and was involved in a number of high-powered deals.

  The other reason Lyle was concerned was that he liked Tony. They’d met at a charity auction a couple of weeks ago. The same night he’d decided to ask Sylvia out again.

  When Lyle had walked in to The View Lounge on the thirty-ninth floor of the San Francisco Marriott, there was no mistaking Tony Valetti, the center of a convivial group near the bar. His picture had been in both the business and society pages, and of course the petite brunette who managed to make a short man look tall was his wife, Janine.

  Lyle took his time scoping out the rest of the crowd and making a round along the outer perimeter, looking out through the giant fan-shaped window walls. With the last lavender of sunset fading, lights in tall buildings sparkled all around. Beyond, the towers of the Bay Bridge marked the way to points east.

  Checking out who was with whom, Lyle found himself, as he had at every gathering this summer, keeping an eye out for Sylvia Chatsworth.

  He didn’t see her, but noted her father in a blue pinstripe. The Senator wore his light brown hair a bit long in back, probably to appeal to younger voters. A high energy man, his pale sharp eyes roved over the room.

  What would it be like to be that man’s daughter, to have him attempt to broker her in marriage to the son of another powerful developer?

  The politician fixed on Tony Valetti and moved in.

  Trying to appear nonchalant, Lyle sauntered in their direction. He circled around and came in to the bar behind the two men.

  Tony was speaking to Chatsworth. “… Prime oceanfront …” Lyle had trouble catching it all with the background chatter. “… Going to call it Emerald Cliff.”

  “Fine … just fine …” Chatsworth approved.

  “… Really more interested in the situation up north …”

  The Senator interrupted. “If you asked the Regional Planning Commission to set aside Napa County zoning, I couldn’t help you without creating a conflict of interest.”

  Lyle hadn’t come to eavesdrop. If he couldn’t break in and introduce himself, he’d move along. But first, he took a moment to catch the bartender’s eye.

  “What can I do for you?” The man wiped the polished counter with a rag.

  “A glass of Chardonnay.”

  “Is Villa Valetti okay? It was donated for the evening.”

  “Make that two.” The voice was accented with the distinctive cadence of Italian; accenting every other syllable created a musical effect.

  Lyle turned and looked down into a sun-bronzed face with a spiderweb of lines at the corner of alert black eyes. Up close, one realized how solidly Tony was built, like a bantam wrestler. A glance beyond his tuxedo-clad shoulder revealed the receding back of the Senator. That had been a short conversation.

  Tony picked up on it. “You come over to meet Chatsworth?”

  “No, I …”

  “Look there.” Tony took Lyle’s elbow and turned him. Sylvia had just entered with a couple of other women. All dressed expensively, with stiletto-heeled sandals and skirts that barely covered their backsides. “Perhaps you want to know the Senator because …”

  Though Lyle would have liked to keep checking out how Sylvia’s smooth fall of black hair brushed her shoulders, bare above a strapless crimson cocktail dress, he took the opportunity to ignore the comment by thanking the bartender and taking the first sip of Andre Valetti’s wine.

  Cold, crisp, with a touch of green apple and a buttery finish. “Cheers,” he told Tony.

  The smaller man laughed and raised his glass.

  The bartender watched him sample and grinned. “Like it, sir?”

  “My brother, he made it.” Tony saluted him and spoke to Lyle. “Come meet my wife.” He turned and tapped the sequined shoulder of a brunette in black velvet. “Janine, this is …”

  “Lyle Thomas,” he supplied.

  Tony slid an arm around his wife and she beamed up at him before looking at Lyle.

  “You play golf?” Tony went on.

  “Every chance I get.”

  “You will play with me. Next weekend at the Marin Club. After, you bring …” He inclined his head at Sylvia. “We will have dinner, the four of us.”

  “I don’t…” He didn’t mention she’d already turned him down.

  Tony fixed him with an almost hypnotic gaze, white showing all around his intense dark eyes. He raised his arms in an expansive gesture as though imparting a blessing.

  If any other man in the room had done it, Lyle thought, including the Senator, it would have come off as ridiculous. “Lyle. The world is full of people who will tell you why you cannot do a thing. It has never been done before, they say. It may offend someone’s sense of order or right.” Tony lowered his arms and voice and leaned in toward Lyle, who had lost all sense that the man was smaller in stature. “You want something bad enough, you make it happen.”

  Though Tony hadn’t even known Lyle, he’d made him feel special and included. For the rest of the evening, Lyle had noted how he worked the room; everyone seemed to find him a hail-fellow-well-met.

  And he had offered to take Lyle under his wing.

  Tony disappeared the day before their golf date.

  Lyle tried to tell himself it didn’t matter; he’d met the man once, but he’d been looking forward to his Old World manners and brash, new age cheerleading.

  It did matter.

  And with the headlines came the old questions. All those he’d asked about his mother, rewritten to fit the developer’s situation. Had Tony slipped out of his office without anyone seeing him? Had he pulled off some criminal act people said couldn’t be done, directed the cash to the Caymans, and arranged to meet Janine in Marrakech?

  Lyle didn’t believe it for a minute.

  Had one of his big money deals, despite being handled with all ethics on Tony’s part, offended an opponent’s sense of “order or right”?

  How was Janine making it through each day … each hour, while every tick of the clock lowered the odds her husband would be found unharmed?

  Those two had been in love, Lyle believed. For the rest of the evening at the charity auction, even when Tony and Janine were talking to different people, they managed to brush shoulders and direct glances each other’s way.

  Love.

  The word gave pause to a fellow raised by a father who failed to express that emotion. Now a man, for Lyle the word love conjured its aftermath … gut-twisting aches and living with a hole in one’s heart.

  Chapter 3

  On Sunday afternoon, Sylvia sat in her family’s glass-walled house overlooking Sausalito. The view of the harbor marina, with the weekend contingent
of sails on blue water, had never before failed to lift her spirits.

  Drifting across the walnut-paneled family room, she hoped their cook had stocked the refrigerator with an adequate supply of iced tea and sliced lime.

  The glass door of the wine compartment next to the Sub-Zero threw back Sylvia’s reflection, her spa tan dark against a white peasant blouse over hip-slung jeans. Without the use of nicotine, alcohol, or other substances, she teetered on a razor edge between collapsing into laughter or tears. As it had been tears Friday night after Lyle left her, she voted for laughter, testing the kitchen acoustics. Dark green Norwegian rock floors and counters threw back the sound nicely and echoed in a way that emphasized she was the only one there.

  Sylvia hadn’t phoned ahead, and when she pulled her red Jaguar convertible into the four-car garage, her mother’s BMW had been absent from its slot beside Lawrence Arthur Chatsworth III’s Maserati … Sylvia thought the chichi sports car looked like a late model Buick.

  Boston bred, her father was filthy rich, and, as former commissioner of the Bay Area Planning Group, he rubbed elbows with plenty of well-heeled people.

  Having expected him to be home—he had stayed on the West Coast after the August recess—Sylvia now noticed the note on the counter.

  Laura, I’ve taken the ferry to San Francisco for a political meeting.

  Probably planning strategy to help his party’s House members gain reelection in November.

  How typical that Sylvia’s parents were not together on a weekend afternoon. Her throat tightened at the games men and women played. Look at the way her folks had leapt at the chance to announce her engagement to Rory Campbell, whose father seemed cut from the same ambitious cloth as Lawrence Chatsworth. Too bad Rory hadn’t actually asked her.

  For a while, she’d been into him. But he’d held apart some essential essence of himself she later realized was reserved for his childhood sweetheart. Thankfully, that hesitation on his part had made it possible for her not to be deeply wounded by the end of their relationship. Yet, it had made her aware how much she detested the dating game.

  What would it be like to have a man who was not?

  only an athlete between the sheets but who loved her, somebody to watch sunsets with and snuggle against when dawn grayed the sky? If Lawrence and Laura had felt that way once, that made it even more depressing. Most of Sylvia’s circle had parents who’d divorced, some more than once. And though she wasn’t even thirty, she knew plenty of people who’d been through the divorce mill. Everybody agreed the worst was when a kid was involved.

  She had some thoughts on whether it was worse for people to tear the family apart or stay together.

  The sound of the automatic garage door preceded the tapping of heels toward the laundry room entry.

  Laura, the perfect politician’s wife in public, made an entrance. One of the Cabots, rooted in New England, whose great-grandfather went South, Laura’s Sweet Briar education had prepared her for a life of hostessing and fund-raising in the best tradition.

  Dark eyes inherited from a passionate Greek maternal grandmother matched her daughter’s, flashing as she tossed her twelve-hundred-dollar Carolina Herrera purse onto the counter. “What are you doin’ here?” The liquid music of the South still accompanied her every word.

  “I used to live here, Mother. In case you forgot.” Sylvia tried to ignore the hurt. “Where have you been?”

  She gave Sylvia an impatient look. “Ah told you about the luncheon today for the tax-exempt fund to build a new battered women’s shelter. You were invited.”

  With a pang of guilt, Sylvia replied, “I’m afraid I forgot.” If she hadn’t been moping about losing a chance at Lyle, she would have remembered. She’d planned to get involved in helping women make the break with their abusers.

  “Too caught up in yourself to look beyond your own nose.” Laura checked out her brown hair accented with golden highlights in the wine compartment’s glass.

  Sylvia attacked. “Kenneth has cut your hair too short. Again.”

  Laura turned away from her reflection as though she did not like what she saw, either. It took only a moment for her to muster her own parry. “Don’t you dare try to subvert the real issue. Your father and I were mortified near to death when we saw you and that common lawyer puttin’ on a spectacle.”

  “Common lawyer?” Sylvia’s cheeks warmed. “Lyle Thomas is one of the brightest stars in the prosecutor’s—”

  “Ah am serious!” Laura insisted. “It’s widely known that Lyle, though educated, came from the worst kind of poverty, while your father has a respected and prominent place at the nation’s highest level.”

  Prestige, always prestige for the family. Nobody allowed to call her father Larry without permission. Nothing for Laura without a designer label. Finishing school for Sylvia so she’d be a good museum docent.

  “Mother, have you forgotten Lawrence Chatsworth’s much-publicized roots were that of a family who owned a dry-goods store?” When the press following his campaign had caught up with it, the dry-goods store had taken on all the rustic, romantic aspect of Lincoln’s log cabin.

  Laura ignored the thrust. Despite her husband’s and her ancestors’ Boston connection, her roots sprang from the soil of old Virginia where Civil War battlefields and talk of Lee and Stonewall were young history compared to Cornwallis at Yorktown and Pocahontas at Jamestown. “When ah think how hard ah’ve worked to establish my daughter—”

  “Mother, darling.” Sylvia’s voice rang with sarcasm at the pretended endearment. “You turned me over to a nanny the day I was born. You couldn’t stand the idea of having any more kids. Neither you nor my father has ever cared in the slightest what I wanted.”

  Laura pointed her finger like a dagger. “If your father were here, he’d tell you the same thing ah am. If we see you on TV again, disgracing the family, we’d as soon you disappeared like Tony Valetti.”

  Sylvia mouth worked; she went hot all over. For God’s sake, the man might be kidnapped, tortured, or dead. She stared at Laura as though she’d never seen her before.

  “Be careful what you wish for, Mother.”

  Sylvia snatched her keys from the stone countertop and headed for the garage. She got into her Jaguar, started it with trembling hands, and backed out of the steep driveway.

  While she’d been sparring with her mother, overcast had rolled in, turning the day damp and gray. Out on Richardson Bay, it was difficult to tell sky from water.

  Attacking the accelerator, Sylvia negotiated the steep turns leading from Sausalito’s high hills onto Highway 101. Why had she bothered going home?

  Questing for her old self, before she’d become a tabloid target? Searching for the room she’d decorated with rock band posters, concert tickets, and mountains of both dirty and clean clothes. The one Laura had redecorated in burgundy flame stitch and polished dark woods.

  Sometimes Sylvia wished she’d been born into a different family. At other times she just wished her parents would approve of something she did.

  At the 101 intersection, Sylvia almost turned north. Away from the City where roving camera crews sought her blood—to just drive away and say to hell with them all. How satisfying that would be.

  But she had nothing packed and no plan.

  When she drove onto the Golden Gate Bridge, a thick layer of fog obscured the burnt orange towers. She imagined the white-whipped tops of the waves working back and forth at haphazard angles below.

  Like the crazy way Lyle had made her feel when she kissed him. How dare her mother call him a common lawyer?

  Van Ness Avenue, once the widest in San Francisco, had heavy traffic, as usual. At the turn of the twentieth century, the area had been a quiet, prestigious neighborhood. But in 1906, most of the graceful mansions had been dynamited as a firebreak in the great disaster. Later the strip where people purchased every kind of car from Chevrolets to Mercedes, had more recently settled into a mix of lodging, shopping, and restaurants.


  Sylvia parked and set out on foot. Ducking into a Mediterranean import shop, she pawed disinterestedly through a pile of embroidered blouses and finally bought a pair of silver filigree earrings she didn’t care about.

  Back on the street, she noted a fat man in a striped shirt fall in step behind her. Whether he was just a jerk, or doing something undercover for some lurid rag, she saw his video camera and her antennae went up.

  She drifted over onto Polk Street. At the next corner, opposite a marquee offering Oriental massage and adult videos, a juggler in emerald satin trousers attempted to gather a crowd. Despite the smattering of tourists, the clientele of Polk Street largely weren’t the balloon and juggler type. A bystander in a San Francisco 49ers ball cap called out, “Try Fisherman’s Wharf, fella.”

  The fat videographer drew closer and aimed his camera at Sylvia, just as a pair of thirty-something biker-jacketed men with head scarves exited a sandwich shop. Turning abruptly, she startled the bikers by slinging an arm around each of their shoulders and calling, “Say cheese.”

  Sure enough, she caught sight of Julio Castillo bearing down on her, microphone in hand. “There she is folks, Sylvia Chatsworth, on a Sunday afternoon.”

  Her middle finger itched to salute the reporter. He’d hurt so many people with his stories, trying to turn “On the Spot” into something as sensational as the tabloids in LA or London. The ones that followed celebrities to the supermarket in hopes of a shot of them looking slovenly while purchasing premium ice cream … or, worse, shadowed them to their analysts or rehab clinics.

  But flipping off Castillo would do no good. To the people who watched the show, she’d appear to be giving the finger to the whole world.

  Instead, she ducked behind the bikers and ran for her car. Halfway there, the rain began.

  Fifteen minutes later, Sylvia slammed into her North Beach town house from the private garage.

  Her hands shook. What a fool she’d been to strike a pose with those bikers, but on the other hand, what difference did it make?