The Billionaire Next Door

Sean forced himself to stand up like a man and pushed a hand through his hair to try and clear his brain. Yeah…freedom had come with that phone call.

Hadn’t it?

Tilting his head back, he measured the lack of stars in the sky and thought about the inflection in the nurse’s words, the sadness and the regret.

How appropriate that the person mourning his father was a stranger.

God knew, his sons would never be able to.

***

Chapter Two

Lizzie hung up her cell phone and stared at the thing. Through the din of what sounded like a party, Mr. O’Banyon’s son had been totally detached, his voice giving away no emotion at all. Then again, she was a stranger and the news had not been good or expected. He was no doubt in shock.

She’d wanted to find out when and where the funeral would be held, but that hadn’t seemed like an appropriate thing to bring up. Worst came to worst she could always call him later.

An ambulance went by her, its lights flashing red and white, its siren letting out a single squawk as it left the Mass General complex and headed out onto Cambridge Avenue. The sight of it got her moving and she started for the parking garage. Part of her wanted to stay here and wait for the son to arrive, but it would take him hours to get into town. Plus it appeared that he was the type who’d rather deal with things on his own.

Besides, it was time to go to her second job.

Lizzie jogged across the road and took two flights of concrete stairs up to the second story of the garage. When she found her old Toyota Camry in the lines of cars, she unlocked it with a key as the remote no longer worked, and put Mr. O’Banyon’s things on the backseat. Getting behind the wheel, she figured she’d leave the bag by the upstairs apartment’s door for the son along with a note that if there was anything she could do to help she was always available.

The drive from Beacon Hill to Chinatown took her on a straight shot up Charles Street, then a jog around the Commons, followed by a scoot past Emerson College. Down farther, opposite one of the Big Dig’s gaping mouths, was Boston Medical Center. Affiliated with Boston University, BMC was a busy urban hospital and its emergency department saw a lot of action. Particularly, and tragically, of the gunshot and stabbing variety.

She’d been moonlighting in the ED three nights a week for the past year because, though she worked days at the health clinic in Roxbury, she needed the extra income. Her mother lived in an artist’s world of color and texture and not much reality, so Lizzie helped her out a lot, covering her expenses, paying bills, making sure she had enough money. To Alma Bond, the world was a place of beauty and magic; practical matters rarely permeated her fog of inspiration.

The extra income was also for Lizzie, however. Earlier in the year, she’d applied and been accepted into a master’s program for public health. Though she couldn’t afford to start this fall, her plan was to save up over the next few months and matriculate in the winter session.

Except now she wondered whether she needed to find a new place to live. Would Mr. O’Banyon’s son hold on to the duplex? If he sold it, would her new landlord ask for more in rent? How would she find something equally inexpensive?

After driving through BMC’s parking garage, Lizzie squeezed the Toyota in between two mountain-size SUVs and took a last look at Mr. O’Banyon’s things. Then she got out, locked the car and strode toward the bank of elevators.

As she waited for the metal doors to slide open, Sean O’Banyon’s hard tone and emotionless words came back to her.

Maybe that hadn’t been shock. Maybe that had been genuine disregard.

God, what could cause a father and son to lose touch to such a degree?

***

It was 3:16 in the morning when Sean stopped his rental car in front of the Southie row house where he and his brothers had grown up.

The duplex looked exactly the same: two stories of nothing special sided in an ugly pale blue. Front porch was a shallow lip of a thing, more a landing than a place to sit outside. Upstairs was all dark. Downstairs had what looked like a single lamp on in the living room.

He wondered who was staying in the bottom unit now. They’d always rented it out and clearly that was still the practice.

With a twist of his wrist, Sean turned the engine off, took the key out of the ignition then eased back in the seat.

On the flight from Teterboro to Logan, he’d made two phone calls, both of which had dumped into voice mail. The first had been to his younger brother, Billy, who was traveling around to preseason games with the rest of the New England Patriots football team. The second was to an international exchange that was the only way he had to get in touch with Mac. The oldest O’Banyon boy was a special forces soldier in the U.S. Army so God only knew where he was at any given time.

Sean had told them both to call him back as soon as they got the message.

He looked up to the second story of the house and felt his skin tighten around his bones and muscles. Man, Pavlov had been right about trained responses to stimuli. Even though Sean was a grown man, as he stared at the windows of his childhood apartment, he felt his ten-year-old self’s terror.

Dropping his head, he rubbed his eyes. The damn things felt as if they had sawdust in them and his temples were pounding.

But then stress’ll do that to you.

He so didn’t want to go into that house. Probably should have stayed at the Four Seasons, which was what he usually did when he was in town. Except on some molecular level, he needed to see the old place even though he hated it. Needed to go inside.

It was like peeling back a Band-Aid and checking out a cut.

With a curse, he grabbed his leather duffel as well as the two bags of groceries he’d bought at a twenty-four-hour Star Market, then opened the car door and stood up.

Boston smelled different than New York. Always had. Tonight, the brine of the ocean was especially heavy in the air, buffered by the sweet sweat of summer’s humidity. As his nose ate up the scent, his brain registered it as home.

He followed the short concrete walkway up to the house then long-legged the five steps to the shallow front porch. He didn’t have a key, but as always, there was one tucked behind the flimsy metal mailbox that was tacked onto the aluminum siding.

The door opened with the exact same squeak he remembered, and, hearing the hinge complain, his blood turned into icy slush.

That squeak had always been the warning, the call to listen hard for what came next. If it was a door closing underneath them, he and his brothers would take a deep breath because it was just the tenants coming home. But if it was footsteps on the stairs? That meant pure panic and running for cover.

As he stepped inside the foyer, Sean’s heart started to jackrabbit in his chest and sweat broke out on his forehead.

Except, damn it, he was thirty-six years old and the man was dead. Nothing could hurt him here anymore. Nothing.

Uh-huh, right. Too bad his body didn’t know this. As he went up the staircase, his knees were weak and his gut was a lead balloon. And God, the sound of the wood creaking under his soles was awful in his ears. The dirge of his approach was the same as when his father had come home, and hearing his own footsteps now, he remembered the fear he had felt as a boy as the thundering noise grew louder and louder.

At the top of the landing he put his hand on the doorknob and the key in the lock. Before he went in, he told himself this was only a door and he wasn’t stepping back into his past. The space-time continuum just didn’t work that way. Thank God.

But he was still in a cold sweat as he opened up and walked in.

When he turned on the lights, he was amazed. Everything was exactly the same: the tattered Barcalounger with the TV tray right next to it; the rumpled couch with its faded flower print; the 1970s lamps that were as big as oil drums and just as ugly; the crucifix on the wall, the yellowed, exhausted lace drapery.

The air was stuffy in spite of the air conditioner that was humming, so he cracked open a window. The place smelled of cigarette smoke, but it was the kind of thing left over after a four-pack-a-day addict stops. The stench lingered, embedded in the room’s paint and flooring and fabrics, but wasn’t in the air itself.

As the breeze came in, he walked over to the TV tray and picked up theBoston Globe crossword puzzle that was mostly done. The date in the upper right-hand corner was from the previous Sunday, the last time his father had sat in the chair with a pencil in hand filling in little boxes with wobbly, capitalized letters.