Table Of ContentNo Kids or Dogs Allowed
Jane Gentry
To all the Airedales we have loved:
witty Snooker and goofy Daniel, darling Maggie I and clever Patrick, charming
Dillinger the Thief and our rescued Maggie II, the best and sweetest of them all.
Almost all breeds have rescue committees for purebred dogs who need new
homes. Call the American Kennel Club headquarters in New York City and ask
for adoption and rescue information.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Chapter One
E
lizabeth Fairchild gave her daughter an exasperated look and tried to remain
calm.
“It is too damned hot for this,” she said.
It was the first of October, and Philadelphia sweltered in unaccustomed heat.
Elizabeth twisted her heavy black hair into a bun and skewered it with a pencil.
Damp tendrils escaped and tickled her nape. City traffic rumbled outside, and
her daughter, Cara, rumbled inside, and that was the trouble with being a CPA
with an office at home: there were no secretarial buffers to shield you from the
intrusions of the real world.
She bent her head over her papers, hoping to discourage Cara’s attention. “I
am trying to work, Cara. Go away.”
“You always have a reason not to discuss it,” said Cara, who was thirteen
and knew everything. “Why won’t you admit it? You need a man.”
“I do not need...” began Elizabeth, and heard her voice scaling up toward the
E above high C. Then she stopped and regrouped and said in a more normal
tone, “I will not discuss this, because it is absolutely none of your business.
Don’t you have homework?”
“You don’t even date,” said Cara, perching on the edge of Elizabeth’s desk.
“It’s not normal.”
“Go away, Cara.”
“Well, you need sex,” said Cara. “Everybody does.”
Oh, God! thought Elizabeth frantically. How would she know about that?
Then she stifled her panic. Cara attended the Harkness School for Girls in
Philadelphia. The only boys she saw were in strictly supervised environments,
unseductively clad in flannel slacks and school ties and sedate, blue wool
blazers. There was no cause for hysteria. Yet.
Cara continued relentlessly. “Vonnie Chrysler’s mother said so.”
“Vonnie Chrysler’s mother has been married five times,” said Elizabeth,
“which I think indicates a nearly fatal capacity for self-delusion.” She tried to
close the subject by turning back to her work.
Cara thought about this. “You talk funny sometimes.” Then she begged,
“Won’t you even look at him?” She was pleading on behalf of her history
teacher, over whom her entire class was swooning.
“Certainly not,” said Elizabeth. “Really, Cara. Look at him? You make poor
Mr. Salvini sound as if he’s in a shop window, up for sale.” She recalled last
year’s history teacher. Cara had been enamored of him, too. She was too young
to realize that interesting men were very rare. Last year’s teacher had hair like
James Dean—Elizabeth remembered wondering if it had been artfully arranged
not to look artfully arranged. No real human male had hair like that.
“You have to at least talk to him,” Cara said. “I told him we had swords and
letters and stuff from the Civil War, and we could show them in class. Is that
okay?”
Surely Cara’s attention was diverted by this new topic. Elizabeth relaxed a
little. “Sure,” she said, determined to keep the wind blowing in this direction.
“We’ll get them out after dinner.”
“And after you just talk to him, you could maybe go out,” said Cara
earnestly. “Dad wouldn’t care if you just dated somebody. I mean he does
sometimes.”
“What I do, except with respect to you, is none of your father’s business
anymore,” said Elizabeth. “Just as what he does isn’t any of my concern. We’ve
been divorced a long time, Cara.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Cara earnestly. “I mean, even if you and Dad did
decide to get back together, he wouldn’t care if you went out with Mr. Salvini.”
“We are not ever getting back together, darling. What gave you that idea?”
“I know you’re not. You told me. That’s why I want you to just talk to Mr.
Salvini. Okay?”
Cara continued her impassioned appeal until the phone rang. Elizabeth
sighed and lifted the receiver to her ear.
The caller was Miss Edwarda Westcott, headmistress of the Harkness
School.
Cara quietly and rapidly disappeared.
A few minutes later Elizabeth, much annoyed, concluded her conversation
with Miss Westcott. Miss Westcott had done all the talking and had requested, in
a voice which brooked no refusal, a conference at 8:00 a.m.
Elizabeth went to the head of the stairs to summon the transgressor.
“Cara!”
No answer.
“Cara!”
Still no answer.
She went downstairs and out into the yard. Cara was industriously weeding a
flower bed.
“Cara,” said Elizabeth. “Who is Melody Riker, and why is Miss Westcott
calling me about her?”
“She’s this stupid girl at school,” said Cara sullenly. “I hate her.”
“I understand she’s new this year. It’s only October. How could you learn to
hate her in four short weeks?”
“She’s a total dweeb,” said Cara. She leaned on the trowel and looked glum.
“Why’s she a dweeb?” asked Elizabeth patiently.
“She feels like she’s just going to die if she doesn’t answer every single
question in class, all day,” Cara said, insulted by the mere idea. “It’s so gross.
All the teachers just lo-o-ve her. She thinks she’s so cool, and she’s not.”
“What are you doing that would make Miss Westcott want me to have a
conference with her parents?”
“Nothing.” Cara saw the look on Elizabeth’s face and said it again,
earnestly. “Nothing. Honest, Mom. I don’t even talk to her.”
Cara, unsettled by her mother’s suspicious scrutiny, scooted on her bottom
until she was hidden by some shrubs and began to chop at a new set of weeds.
Elizabeth returned to her desk and reached for the school directory. Riker.
Riker. The name sounded familiar. Maybe they’d been introduced at the first
PTO meeting. She shook her head. She couldn’t put any faces to the name.
Well, they were new, after all, and she could hardly be expected to
remember everybody. She thumbed through the pages to the Rs and found the
Riker entry. Melody’s father had a local address. Her mother had a different
name and lived in New York.
Elizabeth slapped the book onto the desk and stared at it thoughtfully for a
few seconds. She’d only have to deal with the father; at least she wouldn’t be
outnumbered. She leaned back in her desk chair and gazed out her open window
at the maples in the front yard. They were beautifully red and gold—except for
the two sturdy saplings that had sprung up of their own accord a few years ago.
Those were still green. Obviously adolescent, thought Elizabeth, since they were
deliberately stubborn and out of step. How in the world, she wondered, could
Cara possibly be...
*
...How in the world could Melody possibly be in trouble for fighting? Steve
wondered, astonished by Miss Westcott’s call. Not that he hadn’t done enough
fighting in his own youth, at that Dickensian boarding school he’d attended
while his parents were living it up at the embassy in Riyadh. But Melody, who
got teary-eyed at the idea of a mousetrap and thought Disney’s Peter Pan was
violent?
She wasn’t available for interrogation. She was across the street at her friend
Caroline’s, squealing about whatever it is thirteen-year-old girls squeal about.
Which, he considered, picking up a stack of unread mail, was everything.
Another day in the life of a single father. Melody was turning him gray. It
wouldn’t be long until there wasn’t a single strand of blond left in his thick hair,
if all of her adolescence was as stressful as the beginning.
He propped his feet on his kitchen table and shuffled through the mail. There
was the daily letter to Melody from her mother, which augmented the daily
phone call at bedtime. Marian might be a long-distance mother, but she made
every effort to be involved in Melody’s life. Steve wondered what Marian knew
about Cara Fairchild—Melody told Marian nearly everything. He tucked the
envelope behind the others.
Next up, A Chance to Win Ten Million Dollars! He’d had about one a week
of those in the last year, thanks to magazines he’d bought from Melody’s Scout
troop. Hadn’t won ten million yet. A package from his publisher, containing fan
mail; letter from his agent, asking if he wanted to be the keynote speaker at a
science fiction convention; a letter from the IRS. Damn it, they kept sending the
same letter over and over and over and he was tired of responding to it.
He tossed it into the trash, along with the chance to win ten million, and
went to his office to work on the book he was writing, last of a series of five.
The book was due in three weeks, and he was behind schedule. And thanks to
Melody, tomorrow morning would be lost to labor, since he had to spend a long
unpleasant stretch of time consulting with the Fairchild kid’s parents.
In addition to his more important concerns, in two hours he had to come up
with something for dinner. Melody was tired of pizza, Chinese, Tex-Mex and
fast-food hamburgers. And to tell the truth, so was he; they’d been ordering out
nearly every night for a month. For a man who’d lived alone for much of his life,
he was unreasonably inept in the kitchen. Maybe he’d buy a cookbook and a
couple of decent pots and pans. He’d never much liked to cook, but he liked to
eat. And so did Melody. Definitely time to learn something about that alien
technology looming menacingly from the wall labeled Oven.
Spaghetti. He could cook spaghetti with reasonable Oscar Madison-like
facility. After he looked up the Fairchild entry in the school directory, he’d to go
facility. After he looked up the Fairchild entry in the school directory, he’d to go
to the store. He stuffed the mail he hadn’t thrown away into one of his many
junk drawers and made a list: spaghetti, sauce, hamburger. And as an
afterthought: wine, ice cream and get a check cashed so Melody would have
lunch money. He hoped, with a niggling feeling of guilt, that the Harkness
kitchen cooked better than he did.
Oh, well. She seemed to be growing nicely on what he’d been feeding her.
Unless her present unpleasant change of personality was due to some kind of
malnutrition.
*
Miss Westcott had been headmistress of the Harkness School for twenty-five
years. She looked deceptively pliable, with her matronly figure and her curly
gray hair, because she had the self-confidence of a neurosurgeon and the
command presence of Julius Caesar. Her laser glare had been known to reduce
senators, combat generals and captains of industry to mumbling incoherence in
twenty seconds flat.
Elizabeth had passed under the stern Westcott jurisdiction, herself.
Consequently, she hesitated outside the closed office door for a few seconds,
stifling a feeling of schoolgirl panic.
No conversation came from behind the old oak door. Great. Melody’s father
hadn’t yet answered the summons, and Elizabeth would have to face the dragon
alone.
She tapped on a dark wood panel, opened the door and stepped inside.
A tall man stood as she entered. Steel gray eyes met her green ones and
locked there for a short, electric second. Then his lids narrowed and his thick
blond brows lifted slightly to acknowledge an instant, undeniable and mutual
attraction.
Now there, she thought, is an interesting man. He had a long, straight
Yankee nose and a long, straight flexible mouth and a long, lean tan face which
made his hair seem even blonder than it really was. His hair did not look artfully
arranged. It looked as if he had toweled it dry, combed it into place and
commanded it to stay put.
Her back was turned for an instant as she moved past him to an empty chair.
She felt a delicious prickling at the back of her neck: he was indulging in the
kind of frank male inspection which had indicated aroused interest since Adam
had first caught sight of Eve.
Elizabeth tossed her head like a flirtatious girl and sent a froth of black curls
Elizabeth tossed her head like a flirtatious girl and sent a froth of black curls
skimming across her shoulders. It was an automatic reaction to his attention, as
unplanned as blinking. She was astonished at herself. With an effort she
collected her wits, sat down in one of the burgundy leather wing chairs that
faced Miss Westcott’s desk and turned to speak to him.
“You must be Steve Riker,” she said.
“And you’re Elizabeth.” He smiled and stepped forward and took her hand.
Afterward Steve could hardly recall the ritual politeness or the smile. But he
remembered, with uncanny clarity, the sight of her, the sound of her husky
voice, the small soft hand which was so warm in his own. The slight enchanting
apricot flush, which heated her cheeks as he touched her, freed an essence of
autumn air and sweet, late-summer flowers. She wore a dress the color of a
Southern sea, which reflected luminously in her dark-lashed green eyes.
And no wedding ring.
God bless Melody, he thought, for being an intractable adolescent twit. He
returned the hand to its bemused owner and said, “I understand we have a
problem.”
“I am sorry about that,” said Elizabeth, looking into the penetrating gray
eyes and liking what she saw. Liked the entire package, basically. Liked the eyes
and lean brown face and the long legs. Liked the tweed jacket and the broad
shoulders in it and—yum—liked the unseductive, straightforward, no-nonsense
smell of the after-shave which she caught as he leaned forward to take her hand.
Well, she mustn’t act hypnotized.
“I gather that Melody has given your daughter quite a bit of trouble,” said
Steve.
“Miss Westcott told me it was the other way around,” Elizabeth said. “As a
matter of fact, I got the idea that their little feud was upsetting the entire school.”
The door behind them swung open and Miss Westcott came in, breathing
fire.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “it is. And something has to be done about it.
They have somehow managed between them to force every child in the Lower
School into one faction or the other. I had two eight-year-olds fistfighting on the
lacrosse field yesterday. Fistfighting. At my school.”
Elizabeth took a deep breath and moved nervously in the big, uncomfortable
chair. “But Cara told me that she and Melody don’t even speak to each other.”
“They don’t,” said Miss Westcott grimly. “But everybody else does, with
insults and catcalls too various to relate. I have assigned so many detentions that
the Lower School is beginning to resemble a juvenile incarceration facility.”
