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
