Severe Clear Read Free Page A

question.”
    “Oh, dear.”
    “Well, yes. Took me a while to get over that.”
    “And by that time, Arrington was pregnant?”
    Stone froze; she had boxed him in, and this was a question he did not want to address. “It happens to married people.”
    “It also happens to unmarried people,” Kelli said, “and to people who have not yet decided to marry.”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “And it happened to you and Arrington.” It wasn’t a question.
    “We had been living together.”
    “So how did she know whose son she was carrying?”
    “She didn’t,” Stone replied. “I think it was many years later that it became clear to her, when the child was growing up.”
    “No paternity test?”
    “Not until much later, and that was nearly by accident.”
    “And when did she tell you?”
    “After Vance’s death. She felt she owed it to him to maintain the status quo while he was alive, and she did.”
    “So why didn’t you marry immediately after his death?”
    “By this time we had very different lives, on opposite coasts, and they seemed incompatible. Then she decided to take Peter back to Virginia, her home state, and build a house there. I invited them both to come to New York for Christmas, and after that, things developed very quickly. Peter and I got along immediately, and he quickly guessed that I was his father. There’s a photograph of my father in my study, and Peter resembles him closely. When he saw it—that was all he needed. I had promised Arrington I wouldn’t tell him without her approval, and I didn’t. But Peter is a very bright young man.”
    “I saw that in him when we met in Virginia,” Kelli said. She had come down for the housewarming of Arrington’s new house with her boyfriend, James Rutledge, who was photographing the place for Architectural Digest.
    Joan came into the room. “Lunch is served in the kitchen,” she said.
    Stone led Kelli from his office through the exercise room to the kitchen, where his housekeeper, Helene, had laid the table for two, and he seated his guest.
    Stone poured them glasses of Chardonnay, and they dug into a seafood risotto.
    “May we talk about money for a minute?” she asked.
    Stone sighed. “Must we?”
    “I don’t want details, just an overview. Vance Calder was very rich, wasn’t he?”
    “Vance, who was much older than Arrington but looked wonderful, had had a fifty-year career in Hollywood, and he was, financially, very astute. From his first film he waived salary in favor of a percentage of the gross receipts of his films, and he invested in Centurion stock. Sometimes, when the studio was having cash flow problems, he took stock in lieu of his percentage. Over the years, he became the largest single stockholder in Centurion Studios, and he also invested in California real estate, which brought him handsome returns.”
    “I’ve heard that his estate was worth something in the region of two billion dollars?”
    “You said you didn’t want details.”
    “Sorry. It was during those years that Vance acquired the land in Bel-Air where the new hotel is being built?”
    “Yes. First, he bought an old house there and redid it, then, as his neighbors aged or just moved, he acquired adjoining properties.”
    “So Arrington inherited Vance’s estate, and you inherited Arrington’s estate? Thus avoiding inheritance taxes in both cases?”
    “I made it clear to Arrington that I was uninterested in her money,” Stone said. “In fact, I declined to participate in any of her decisions about her bequests. She worked with another attorney to draw up her will, and I was given a sealed copy, which was not opened until after her death. She left the great bulk of her estate to Peter, in trust, and a lesser share to me. Arrington died in a year during which, due to some congressional anomaly, estate taxes were suspended. I have made it a rule not to spend any of her money on myself, and I have willed my estate to Peter in its entirety, except for a