The Uneven Score Read online

“Yes, it does. If he had gotten rid of me two months ago, the CFSO would have died then and there. But now everything is ready. The orchestra is prepared, the programs are set, the publicity is in place. If I suddenly died or left town, the orchestra could conceivably survive. Someone like Daniel Graham would think it could easily survive.”

  “But where would he find another conductor on such short notice?”

  “It can be done.”

  Whitney had sighed miserably, her doubts slowly being erased by Paddie’s calm, rational explanation. “How could anyone believe you’d ruin the CFSO?”

  “I am the fat, ugly lady who dares to do music. Who would want to come see my orchestra?”

  “Anyone who knows anything about music!”

  “Not everyone agrees with you, Whitney.”

  “But that’s disgusting! What difference does it make what you look like or whether you’re a man or woman?”

  “You know it makes a big difference to far too many people.”

  “Yes,” Whitney said, deflated, “you’re right. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

  Paddie’s eyes had lit up. “I have a plan.”

  Now, as she left Lake Eola Park and crossed the busy street, Whitney wondered if perhaps she had been too credible. Looking up at the gleaming high-rise, she wondered why on earth a man like Daniel Graham would go to the extreme of kidnapping a French horn player and making threatening phone calls just to harass Victoria Paderevsky into giving up her podium. He was the vice president of a national citrus corporation, for heaven’s sake! Whitney had drunk a glass of Graham premium orange juice that very morning!

  It was impossible, she told herself She was just going along with Paddie’s bizarre scheme to pacify her, to calm her frayed nerves. Whatever Harry was up to was perfectly legitimate, if ill-timed, and had simply taken a bit longer than he’d thought. He’d be back. And everything else was just what Paddie had originally thought it was: nasty incidents spawned by jealousy.

  Yet how did Whitney explain Daniel Graham’s visit to Harry’s rooms?

  She couldn’t, not to her satisfaction.

  Besides, there was the chance, however slim, that Paddie was right, and Harry had been kidnapped, wasn’t there? And as long as that chance existed, Whitney would remain cautious and open-minded. She simply couldn’t bear to have anything happen to Harry—or, for that matter, to Paddie.

  The revolving doors at the front of the building were still unlocked. Whitney went through them and smiled at the security guard. He smiled back. She went straight to the elevators, banged the up button, whistled Mozart while waiting, and walked in when the doors opened up. The nonstop rise to the twenty-first floor was smooth but fast, and Whitney’s stomach, already not in the best of shape, flip-flopped several times. She did deep-breathing exercises and, when the doors opened and the bell dinged, walked out onto the gold-carpeted floor with her stomach intact.

  It was after five, and the reception area was empty. Whitney fished out the key Paddie had presented her and walked past two secretarial desks and down a hall to the last door on the left. Glancing up and down the hall, she stuck the key in the lock, held her breath, and turned the key; to her immense surprise and relief, the door opened.

  It was a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows: quiet, cool, and even more elegant than Whitney had expected. The view of Orlando was stunning. A huge antique walnut desk stood in front of the windows, and there were leather chairs and a leather couch, shelves, two nineteenth-century landscape paintings, and an Oriental carpet. There was absolutely no clutter and certainly no indication whatsoever that the man who occupied this office had kidnapped Harry Stagliatti or poured soap into Victoria Paderevsky’s coffee.

  It hardly seemed the man’s style, Whitney thought.

  “I don’t know what you’ll find,” Paddie had said. “I don’t even know what you should look for, but if you can find something... a clue as to his motive, or proof of his intentions, or an idea of where Harry might be…I will be indebted to you, Whitney.”

  At the time, it had seemed a reasonable proposition. As Paddie had explained, Whitney wasn’t really breaking and entering. She had a key, didn’t she? (Paddie had shrugged off questions about where she had procured a key to Daniel Graham’s office; she was a resourceful woman.)

  But now, sensing the power of the man whose office she was about to search, Whitney wondered if she had made a grievous mistake in going along with Paddie. What would happen if she was caught? Guilty or innocent, Daniel Graham wouldn’t be pleased. But Paddie had said Daniel Graham was to be at her four o’clock rehearsal, and she would keep him there at all costs. Whitney was safe.

  She started with the shelves and worked her way around the room. Everything she touched and examined suggested that Daniel Graham was a wealthy and cultured man…and not an especially old one, as Whitney had anticipated. The diploma displayed on one of the shelves, just below the decanters of scotch and bourbon, was only fifteen years old. The man had graduated from the University of Florida the same year Harry had introduced Whitney to the glories of Mozart horn concertos.

  She moved to the desk and began rifling through the in nocuous drawers, despairing of finding anything incriminating. Clearly, Daniel Graham was the type who would cover his tracks—if he had any to cover. But Paddie would want details, and Whitney was determined to give them to her.

  Then, as she was trying to open the bottom right drawer, she heard footsteps out in the hall.

  “Just my luck,” she muttered to herself, and, not wasting a second in self incriminations, grabbed her horn and scuttled off to the closet.

  With her heart pounding in her chest, she leaped into a dark corner of the closet, which she had already searched, and pulled a herringbone jacket down on top of her, curling up under it and tucking her feet under a tennis racket. The wooden coat hanger made a horrible clanging noise and fell on her head. She was about to toss it aside, but seized it instead, clutching it to her side, listening. If worse came to worse, she wondered, would she be able to beat Daniel Graham over the head with a wooden coat hanger?

  The footsteps stopped, and Whitney sat very still, wondering if the oppressive silence was good news or bad news. She was uncomfortable and claustrophobic and furious with Paddie for getting her into this mess and with herself for letting Paddie get her into this mess. It was just a janitor, she told herself; nothing to be worried about.

  Then the daunting silence exploded. “You might as well come out,” a deep, male, and very alert voice said in a distinct drawl. “I assure you, you don’t want me to come after you.”

  Whitney grimaced and held her horn tightly with clammy hands. Breathing the stale, stifling air under the jacket, she acknowledged the dreaded truth: The man beyond the closet door didn’t sound at all like a janitor.

  “I wouldn’t try anything foolish,” he said with an annoying air of self-confidence.

  Too late for that, Whitney thought dispiritedly. She began to picture herself on a chain gang in some bug-infested swamp. Having waited until age twenty-nine to step foot into Florida, she had her preconceived notions. She pursed her lips and sweated.

  “I have a gun,” he announced matter-of-factly.

  Whitney was not surprised. There was an off chance he was just a security guard doing his job, but she doubted it. He sounded more like Paddie’s rendition of Daniel Graham. Probably the gun had been in the locked drawer. And since she had so brilliantly hidden in the closet, Graham had had plenty of time to slip into the drawer and arm himself. From his perspective, she was a possibly dangerous burglar. From her perspective, she was a harmless woman hiding in a closet with a coat hanger and a nickel-plated French horn for protection.

  The closet door creaked open, light filtering through the herringbone jacket. Whitney wondered what kind of idiocy had prompted her to hide in a closet. It was a dead end. She breathed through her nose and tried to remain calm, silent, and still. All she needed now was to hype
rventilate. She hadn’t hyperventilated since high school when she’d played the horn solo in L’Après Midi d’un Faun. Nerves. Harry had thrown a paper bag over her head and whacked her on the back. A horn player needed to know how to breathe properly.

  So, apparently, did a burglar.

  “You will remove the jacket from your face—very slowly.”

  He spoke in a confident, sonorous drawl, but, of course, he could afford to be confident. He was the one with the gun. It occurred to Whitney that the roles were reversed. She was the burglar. He was the innocent bystander.

  “Need I remind you that I have a gun?”

  “You needn’t,” she replied with as much lighthearted and irreproachable good cheer as she could manage.

  Slowly—very slowly—she removed the jacket from her face and wondered what Daniel Graham was making of his dangerous burglar. Once she had agreed to Paddie’s scheme, Whitney had disappeared into the women’s bathroom at the airport and changed into attire she considered more suitable for breaking into a corporate office: gray sweat pants, a Buffalo Sabres hockey shirt, and pink ballet slippers. She had even tied her ash-brown hair back with a length of thirty-pound fishing line that she had tucked in her horn case. Ordinarily she used the line to string up the complicated valves on her instrument, not to string up her bouncy, dangling curls. She considered herself a strong, sturdy sort of woman—a French horn player had to be—and, with her wide blue eyes, straight nose, and good cheekbones, not unattractive.

  She couldn’t make out the features of the dark-haired figure in the light of the doorway, but she did see his gun. “I’m not armed,” she said in a clear voice. “I know this must look odd, but—”

  “Stand up—slowly. We’ll talk in a minute.”

  Whitney was not encouraged. She didn’t want to talk. She couldn’t talk. She had promised Paddie. Not, she thought, that Paddie had kept her end of the bargain. She had vowed to keep Daniel Graham at her four o’clock rehearsal, and unless Whitney was very much mistaken, Daniel Graham wasn’t at the Orlando Community College auditorium. He was in his office ordering her about with a gun. Brilliant conductor though she might be, Victoria Paderevsky was not a reliable cohort.

  “I can’t stand up slowly,” Whitney said. “I mean, if I do I’ll hit my head on the closet pole and mess up your suits and—”

  ‘‘Up.”

  She shook off the jacket, tucked her horn under one arm, and leaned forward, at the same time pulling her feet under her so she could get up slowly, without losing her balance. She had a mad urge to catapult herself out of the corner, but stifled it. The individual giving orders looked very much as though he would shoot her given sufficient provocation. Or insufficient provocation.

  “What in hell’s name have you got—”

  He broke off with a growl and grabbed Whitney by the wrist. She screamed something about lunatics and all this being a mistake as she and her horn went flying out of the closet. They landed in a heap on the fringe of an Oriental carpet. Her horn ended up on the bottom.

  “You idiot!” Whitney yelled, prudence gone where her horn was concerned. “You made me bend my bell!”

  But Graham wasn’t listening. He pounced on her, pinning her to the floor, and yanked the horn out from under her. There was a flash of muscled thighs straining against creased gray linen, and then she was free.

  “You maniac!” she groaned into the carpet and rolled over, sitting up. No wonder Paddie thought him capable of kidnapping poor Harry!

  She shut up at once, regretting her rash comments as she took in exactly what kind of man she was dealing with. Clearly he was not an idiot or a maniac. He stood before her, flourishing her horn in one hand, holding his gun steadily in the other; tall, intrepid, and solid, just the sort of aggressive and physical man Whitney had expected from her search of his office. There was nothing kindly or gentlemanly about the way he was glaring at her, nothing restrained and businesslike about his dark, wild hair, nothing that indicated he was a corporate vice president. His features were angular, striking, but not pampered, and their ruggedness suggested he didn’t spend all his time behind a desk. Instead of a suit, he wore casual pants and a gray gabardine safari shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, revealing tanned and finely muscled forearms. And yet there wasn’t a single doubt in Whitney’s mind that this was the man whose office she had invaded. This was Daniel Graham.

  “What’s this?” he demanded, raising her black-encased instrument.

  Elbows straightened, palms flat on the wool carpet behind her, Whitney stared up at him. His gun was leveled calmly at her. This isn’t happening to me, she thought; it really isn’t. If she told him he was brandishing a French horn, he would assume she was connected somehow with the Central Florida Symphony Orchestra, which she was. But he wasn’t supposed to know that. If she didn’t tell him it was a French horn, he would assume the worst. Once, on a New York subway, a dangerous-looking man had tried to buy her “machine gun” for an ungodly sum. She had finally had to take out her horn and belt out a hunting call before he’d believe it really wasn’t a weapon.

  “It’s nothing,” she said lamely. “Just a— No! Don’t throw it! Please. I think you’ve already bent my bell. I mean— Oh, blast it all.”

  The gun didn’t move a fraction of an inch; neither did his eyes. They were, Whitney observed in spite of herself, an engaging shade of sea green. She wished his expression was engaging, too, but it wasn’t. It was grim and suspicious and not at all reassuring. Paddie had said he was “terribly handsome,” hadn’t she? Handsome and chivalrous. Only Whitney had yet to see any indication of chivalry.

  “All right, all right,” she said. “If you must know, it’s a bomb. It’s set to go off in ten minutes, but you’ve probably tripped the timer. Why don’t we make our exit? You take the stairs; I’ll take the elevator.”

  He gave her an incredulous look, the sea-green eyes narrowing, and turned the case over. On the other side were frayed Tanglewood and Saratoga Performing Arts Center stickers—dead giveaways. “You’re a musician,” he said. “All right, what’s going on? What is this—a horn?”

  “Oboe.”

  “I’ve seen an oboe case before. This is a French horn.”

  “Is it?” Whitney shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. It’s not mine.”

  “You did say I’d bent your bell, didn’t you?” His voice was curiously mild, almost as if he were enjoying himself.

  “I don’t know, did I? I was in hysterics. Look, I’m unarmed, so would you mind putting your gun away? It’s making me nervous.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  Nevertheless, he laid the gun and her horn on the edge of his desk and folded his arms across his broad chest. With a growing sense of doom, she realized he looked every bit as threatening without his gun as with.

  “Well, what are you doing here?” he demanded,

  “Visiting. My sister works two floors down. I got lost.” She tried not to wince at her own lie. But who would visit her sister in downtown Orlando dressed in sweat pants and pink ballet slippers? Maybe she should have kept on her raw silk suit.

  “I see. And you just happen to play French horn and I just happen to be chairman of the CFSO.”

  Whitney blinked. “Of the what?”

  He heaved a sigh and rolled his tongue along the inside of his cheek. If he meant to indicate a certain impatience, he had succeeded, she thought. She could just see him dragging Harry off. “The Central Florida Symphony Orchestra. I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve never heard of it.”

  “No, of course I’ve heard of it. But I had no idea you were the—what?”

  “Chairman of the board of directors.”

  “Are you really? My, what a coincidence.” Paddie’s going to kill me, Whitney thought, unless I kill her first or unless Daniel Graham gets us both. “Look, Mr.—um—”

  “Graham,” he said, indulging her, but not patiently or with any amusement “Daniel Graham.”

  “Oh, well, I
guess that stands to reason, this being the offices of Graham Citrus and all.” She smiled and went on in her most convincing tone, despite the gnawing uneasiness in the pit of her stomach. “My sister said I could use the ladies’ room up here. I guess I lost my way. I’m sorry if I caused you any alarm.”

  Graham, however, did not appear to be convinced.

  “Anyway, Mr. Graham, suppose I just take my horn and go and don’t come back?”

  He leaned against his desk. “You’re not a particularly convincing liar,” he said.

  I’m not a particularly convincing burglar, either, she thought. “You have a suspicious mind, Mr. Graham.”

  “Only when I find strange women in my closet. What’s your name?”

  “Jones. Sara Jones.”

  “I see. With an h?”

  “No.”

  He smiled. “You’re improving.”

  “But you still don’t believe me.”

  “Hardly. How did you get in?”

  “Into your closet?” She shrugged, purposely obtuse. She knew what he meant. “I just crawled in. I was mindful of the tennis rackets, don’t worry.”

  The muscles in his forearms tightened impressively. “Into my office—how did you get into my office?”

  She tried to look both innocuous and reasonable, an elusive combination at best, but, under Graham’s intense scrutiny, nearly impossible. “I came through the door,” she said. “I thought—I made a wrong turn, Mr. Graham. This is all just a silly mistake.”

  “Your sister on the nineteenth floor?”

  The understated incredulity, the small, wry-smile, and the quiet sarcasm did not bolster Whitney’s courage, but they were playing on her nerves. Obviously she couldn’t tell him the truth, but now she didn’t want to. He was enjoying himself far too much. And if he was the kind of man who accosted harmless burglars with a gun, why wouldn’t he be the kind of man to kidnap Harry? What if Paddie had been right all along!

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” she said coolly. “I stumbled into your office while hunting up the ladies’ room, and when I heard you coming, I panicked and ducked into the closet. It’s as simple as that. Honestly. Just a case of countering one mistake with another. Remember Watergate? Now, if it’s all right with you, I’ll just apologize and be on my way.”