The Signature (A Perfect Forever Novel)

  The Signature

  Susan Ward

  Copyright © 2014 Susan Ward

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1500230715

  ISBN-10: 1500230715

  Dedication

  For LAW

  PROLOGUE

  It was like a firestorm storm in the sky. A thousand blinding lights blinking on and off. It was impossible to see through the flashes, and the world became a blur of shifting patterns and shouting voices.

  “Mrs. Stafford! Mrs. Stafford! Mrs. Stafford!”

  Her nails dug into her lawyer’s arm as she tried to keep herself steady, and she fought to keep her composure. Her body ached from the constant pressure to push forward through the press to the car.

  Wasn’t there one among them who could understand what today’s court ruling meant to her? One who would stop shouting questions at her and taking rapid-fire photos long enough to realize that this was more than a sensational story? That her life had just been unraveled and turning Katherine over to Nick for visitation was like signing her daughter’s death warrant? Or what it meant to her own safety to have Nick Stafford still in her life?

  Hadn’t even one of them understood her frantic pleas? Wasn’t there one among them who could see that she was truly afraid?

  She stared at the reporters straining against the line of security. Thank God, she was almost to the car.

  “Mrs. Stafford!”

  In the tiny space between the curb and the open car door, a man had cut in, blocking her escape. “Mrs. Stafford, why do you think the judge ruled in your husband’s favor? Are the accusations you made in court true, or just a publicity stunt?”

  “A publicity stunt!” She knew that she was screaming, knew that she was playing into their hands, but the people around her were suffocating her, and each question was like a knife struck cruelly into her heart. “Why won’t you people leave me alone?”

  Someone was pulling on her arm, dragging her forward as the cameras went mad. She couldn’t breathe; her whole body was shaking from the inside. She struggled to get air. Would she faint? They were too close. How had it come to this? Why hadn’t the judge protected her daughter? Protected her? Why? Why? Why?

  “Mrs. Stafford! Mrs. Stafford! Mrs. Stafford!”

  “MOMMY!”

  Her heart plummeting against her chest and her entire body drenched with sweat, Krystal Stafford woke with a start to find her daughter Katie perched beside her on her knees.

  She sat up, blinking rapidly as she tried to orient herself. Her nightmare had taken her back two years ago, to Los Angeles, but she was safe in her tiny house by the sea in Coos Bay, Oregon.

  Her eyes took in the familiar confines of her bedroom: the antique brass bed, the old mahogany dresser, and Katie’s sweet round face.

  I’m in Coos Bay and we’re safe, she told herself, dragging Katie into her arms in a fierce hug. It had only been a dream. She had escaped Nick Stafford and they were safe. And those fears in her nightmares, like Krystal Stafford, were a thing of the past. Christine Dillon had other matters to attend to.

  “Mommy, its eight o’clock and I’m late for school!” Katie informed her anxiously.

  “Eight?” Krystal mumbled, running her fingers through her disheveled blond hair as she tried to make her brain function. Eight! “Run and get dressed, Katie. I’ll be out in ten minutes!” she said, trying to shake the numbness her nightmare had left in her body.

  Five minutes later, beneath the hot streams of the shower, she pondered the events which had led to her, at the age of thirty-one, to be preparing for a studio filled with preschoolers in whom she would attempt to instill the love of music during her one-hour tiny tots piano class. At last count, her class was up to twenty. After that, her morning would be spent giving private lessons in “Fritz McCaffery’s Music and Audio Equipment Shack Limited,” until Katie returned home from school. Her afternoon would pass in a steady blur of piano lessons given in her home.

  What would Fritz McCaffery think if he knew that she was not Christine Dillon—that the woman he’d been unknowingly helping to hide for nearly two years was Krystal Stafford, rising star and fugitive ex-wife?

  Shuddering, Krystal pushed the thought from her mind. He would never know. She could never risk Nick finding her and losing Katie to him. If she were found, she’d go to prison and Katie would be helpless in Nick’s hands. What remained in the past was gone. Just as Krystal Stafford was gone.

  As she went through her morning routine, she studied her reflection with a sense of wonderment; the face staring back was so much different than that of the woman she had been two years ago.

  Her transformation had come about slowly, and most days she hardly took note of the change, but after a night spent staring at old magazines after Katie had gone to sleep, she was shockingly aware of how dramatically different she was now. Would anyone from the past even recognize her? Beyond a certain sameness at the surface, she so little resembled the woman she used to be.

  Nice as her features were, after years of being the target of merciless photographers, she had no illusions. It was not her features, but rather the rapidly shifting expressiveness of her face that caught the eye.

  It had taken a score of makeup artists and hairdressers accentuating her features, changing the color of her hair and cutting it into fashionable, cropped waves, to convince her fans that she was very beautiful. Thank God all that pretense was past.

  As for now, her only complaint with her looks were the freckles splattered across her nose from her heightened sun exposure. She was certain they had prompted the grocery clerk to demand her I.D. last week when she was purchasing a bottle of wine with her weekly groceries.

  Caught off-guard and feeling cautious about showing her forged identification, she’d claimed she hadn’t brought it with her and was forced to return the bottle to the wine rack like a busted youth! She crinkled her tiny nose and pulled her delicate features into an exaggerated grimace. How Nick would have taunted her about that!

  Nick. She wondered how many people would have believed that hidden behind his handsome face and lively brown eyes was a heart capable of such cruelty that she had left her life, her family, and her past behind. If the term don’t judge a book by its cover had been invented for anyone, surely it had been invented for Nick Stafford.

  For as far back as she could remember, Nick had hovered on the fringes of her existence. Her first vivid memory of him was at a party hosted by her father on their Newport Beach estate in the midst of her sixteenth year. What a horror that day had been. The media had shown up in its full overwhelming and intrusive force, and she had never felt more alone than while she struggled, forgotten, in a crowd of a thousand people fighting just to keep sight of her father’s dazzling figure.

  Her expectations that day had been so high. After all, how often did her father bring her home from school? She had not counted on half of the world standing between them.

  Wandering among the guests, angry, confused, heartbroken in a way only a sixteen year old girl could be, it was Nick who had come to her side and stared at her with kind, dark eyes. He understood. Or at least, he looked as if he understood. She’d been too young to realize that what she had seen mingled with the compassion had been a touch of pity.

  Six years had elapsed while she watched Nick, studied him, and fed a secret adolescent infatuation before, by some unquestioned miracle, they’d crossed paths after her college graduation and he returned her interest. Nick. Beautiful. Enigmatic. Unattainable Nick. The object of every young girl’s fantasy was in love with her. How could she have known that her dream would become a nightmare?

  Nothing in her
sheltered upbringing could have prepared her for the storm of intense episodes which came with loving Nick Stafford.

  Volatile. In hindsight it seemed a paltry word to describe the life she had known as Nick Stafford’s wife. The warning signs had been there before their marriage: his jealousy; his “control issues,” as she had come to call them; his dark moods followed by bouts of violence she could not understand, explosions that were cruel and brutal, and more often than not, a torture to endure.

  Another woman, a woman wise with age, perhaps would have seen the warning signs and run. But Krystal had been young and in love and more than a little fascinated by Nick Stafford’s dark and curious presence. Swept by the tide of a relationship she was not emotionally mature enough to understand, she had married him.

  No one was more surprised than Jonathan Palmer when Krystal announced that, at the age of twenty-one, she had eloped with a thirty-seven-year-old musician whose talent was only surpassed by his ability to undermine his career. Until his daughter had delivered that bombshell, the only thing Jonathan had held against Nick was his almost neurotic desperation to avoid success by repeated bouts of self-destruction.

  It was Jonathan Palmer, himself, who had discovered Nick and signed him to a recording contract with the label. Full of youthful promise, no one was more disappointed than Jonathan when Nick’s promise had never panned out.

  Nick’s creative and personal ups and downs looked like the intense waves of a seismologist’s graph.

  And this was the man his whimsical and romantic daughter had chosen to marry—a man who possessed a wealth of talent and a knack for self-destruction that was too often indulged.

  The outcome of Krystal’s marriage to Nick had been preordained by the nature of their personalities, though everyone but Krystal had been able to see the telltale signs. Her father’s world had been part of her life from the cradle, but the darker, harsher parts had never touched her.

  Her marriage to Nick had propelled her into the burning center of the strange inner-society of the recording world. Her only exposure to the perks and baggage that came with the music industry were the monthly checks sent to her without failure. She had been ill-equipped to understand the pressures surrounding her.

  Nick, however, was in his element. He thrived on the edge of that strange energy which enveloped their lives, the temptations she recoiled from, disdained. It claimed him, the strange, nocturnal existence of smoke and booze, music and parties, an opium which dragged him along its treacherous track.

  Life on the road was a dark labyrinth of strange beds, sleepless nights, fawning fans and long hours spent alone in stark, bare-walled dressing rooms clogged with excited, chattering people who had no interest in Krystal. She had no standing of her own in this insider’s society. She was Nick’s wife. Jonathan’s daughter. Krystal Stafford, herself, was nothing to them.

  Her own success had come about by accident. She often wondered which Nick had resented the most: the ease of her rise or her complete lack of fascination with it.

  Backstage proved a valuable vantage point, and the natural gifts she had been born with took life within her in those long hours spent alone, while Nick’s band, the opening act for a major headliner, sweated and played onstage. A well-trained musical ear and four years of college music had cultivated the natural talent her father had fostered all her life; her misery stirred it for release. By the end of their first year on the road, she had a collection of songs ready to take to a studio and turn over to the knowing hands of a producer.

  She thought Nick would support her request to listen to some of the songs she’d written, perhaps even record them with his own band, but she’d been wrong. Nick had laughed at her. She may very well have been the daughter of one of music’s genius icons, but the fickle tastes of the masses were no challenge for a rank amateur. And that was what Krystal was in Nick’s eyes—a woman who had studied four years of music theory rather than create, whose greatest ambition the prior year had been to accept a position teaching music in a public school in South Central Los Angeles. She knew nothing about the art of making music or the sacrifices of the road. She should have known better than to even venture the subject with Nick.

  So it could not be said that Nick was pleased when Morgan Katz, the lead singer of the band Nick opened for, quite by accident had heard Krystal playing and had shown an interest. Her talent was raw, but the stuff she had created was very good, and Morgan knew enough to recognize that, even if Nick refused.

  The fight that had followed the night Morgan tossed lightly on the table his offer to have Krystal do a demo of one of her songs with his band, had instantly propelled their marriage into a raging tailspin.

  The argument had been so brutal, Nick’s reaction so violent, that any idea of agreement had died a sudden death. If Nick felt that strongly about the whole affair, what was the point in pursuing it? She knew enough about him after a year of marriage to know that no peace would be found if he didn’t get his way. She was on desperately precarious ground as it was; what was the point in aggravating the situation further?

  Morgan did not care at all if Nick was against his suggestion. The issue may have been dead in Krystal’s mind, but it was alive and well in Morgan’s. It was years later before Krystal understood that Morgan had given a helping hand, partly out of resentment for Nick’s treatment of her, and partly out of fear for what he’d heard in her lyrics. She was a woman crying out for help. She was a woman desperately searching for a place in this crazy rat race they called home.

  The lifeline Morgan Katz threw her was fame.

  Morgan chose for his moment of crisis intervention, as he would term it in later years, a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden. Krystal never truly understood what had compelled her that night to watch Morgan onstage from the open passage at the side. She had never watched him before, but Morgan’s kindness, his interest in her music, the undercurrent of tension between Nick and her newfound friend had sparked her fascination for the man.

  Morgan and an audience: they were an electrifying team. Every turn of his body natural and sensuous, Krystal had watched in rapt fascination as Morgan had woven his spell around the screaming, cheering crowd. She could hardly focus her thoughts about him when the band broke, when he had come to her offstage and dragged her by the hands across the equipment cluttered floor to its center.

  Her own voice had been one of panic. “Morgan! What are you doing? Let me go!”

  “I want you to sing with me,” he had said simply, as if it were the easiest thing on earth to stand onstage before twenty thousand screaming fans and perform. “If Nick has his way, you’ll never have a chance, Krystal. No chance at all.”

  Before she knew it, he was pulling the leather jacket off her back and his adroit fingers had slipped the tie from its customary place on her long, blond hair. Giving her hair a playful shake before reaching for the microphone, there had been no chance to run off before the electrician at the control console directed a flood of light upon them.

  They had played together for fun backstage, but this?

  When he bent to pick up his own guitar, the auditorium had exploded. With expectations and enthusiasm running so high, Krystal often wondered how she had had the courage to continue. The stage had rumbled from the force of the crowd. From the corner of her eye, she’d spotted Nick standing on the top step, at the very opening where she’d watched Morgan. Nick. Good god, what would become of her when this was through?

  It was ironic that center stage offered the safest place for her at that moment. Nick was seething. The only thing she had known for sure was that he wanted her to fail, fully expected her to fall flat on her face, and if she ran now she would prove him right. And there would be no coming back from that.

  She had barely recognized her own music rising up around her, the skillful fingers of Morgan and his band bringing it to life. Within minutes of her singing, it became apparent that this whole episode was much more than some joke the audience h
ad been forced to endure by another ego-blown idol. Krystal on stage was spectacular.

  One song had turned into four, and in the end it was a picture of Krystal collapsed against Morgan’s chest, her tear stained face turned toward the screaming throng, that made headlines coast to coast and signified the launching of her career. The media frenzy and scandal that surrounded them had been both premature and unexpected.

  It was Morgan’s own record label that had signed Krystal two weeks later. It was Morgan’s guitar playing lead. It was Morgan who held Krystal together during those early days of success after the release of her first album, which marked her a star on the rise, while drugs and booze and women had become a full blown obsession for Nick. Her success and collaboration with Morgan had fueled Nick’s final downfall.

  Too much had been written about those days as her star climbed and Nick’s descended for her to ever feel completely unscathed again. The breakup of Nick’s band had come first. Nick, obsessed with his resentment of Krystal and her emerging independence, had lost touch with his own identity. His drug use had run rampant. The women he had flaunted. Their fights, violent and abusive, were the only aspect of her disastrous marriage not to become common knowledge. And always there was the suspicious pen, trying to work out Morgan’s role in this stormy, crumbling union.

  Her affair with Morgan had been inevitable. It’s end predictable. The outcome tragic. Divorce was ugly enough when two people owned the privacy of their lives; it was unbearable when it made headlines daily. And then there was Katherine. The child Nick had never wanted who became nothing more to him than a weapon of war to use against Kristal.

  That Katherine would become Nick’s last strike became apparent quickly during their divorce. He had sought and won joint custody.

  Kristal may have succeeded in freeing herself from Nick in marriage, but in divorce the tie continued. Through Katherine and the courts, he had been given the means to continue his strange, abusive obsession with Krystal.