Marcus stepped through the door with an absent nod to his butler Parkinson, barely even noticing as the man helped him out of his coat. "Dinner will be ready at six, sir," the classic English gentleman's gentleman informed him. As Marcus strode off to the study with a grunt that barely acknowledged he'd been spoken to, Parkinson allowed a slight sign of worry to cross his brow. To those who knew him, this was as troubling as a shout of dismay from a less composed individual. Turning to Arabella, he added, "It's the Master's favorite, Miss Arabella. Please see if you can get him to eat at least a little of the roast. I'm concerned; he hasn't been eating much since the accident." For Parkinson to actually voice his troubled thoughts out loud was as dismaying as alarm klaxons going off. "And you too need to keep your strength up, Miss. The cook has made your favorite dessert tonight."
Parkinson had reason to worry. He'd had to refill the decanter of scotch in Marcus' study every night for the past week and his plates that were removed from the table between courses at dinner for that same week had obviously had their food moved around, but there wasn't much evidence of any of it having been consumed. Marcus had gone straight for his study, and once there straight for the scotch. At least I haven't sunk so low that I'm drinking it straight out of the bottle, he thought. I've really made a mess of things. They'd had such plans; almost none of them fulfilled. Elaine had loved children as much as he did, and when they decided to get married she'd made him promise that she could have as many as she wanted. Perhaps it's better, he mused as he finished his first tumbler of scotch and poured another, that we never had any more, that we couldn't have any more.
After she'd almost lost Arabella, and nearly died in the process, the doctors had been quite firm--another pregnancy would almost certainly kill her. Once she had recovered physically and emotionally from the trauma of birth, she'd had to go back to the hospital for the operation that guaranteed their lovely little daughter would be the only child they ever had together. He'd held her and consoled her as she grieved for all the little babies that operation killed in her mind, the mass murder she felt she was helping the doctors commit. But it was the needs and joys of caring for Arabella that saved her sanity. He watched as she took all the love and devotion she had planned on giving to a whole gang of children and lavished it on their one precious offspring. Arabella was their pride, their joy, and their affirmation of their eternal love. Elaine wouldn't even consider adopting. "Just look at her, darling," she'd said. "She's you, and she's me, and she's the living symbol of our life together. What adopted child could possibly compete with that? How could it be fair to make one try? Let those poor women out there who can't have even one child of their own have the babies who are available. I have mine; you and she are all I'll ever need."
"If we'd had any more," he murmured, "that would just be more children I could have been a lousy father to." Taking his tumbler and the decanter with him, he walked over to his desk and sat down. He hadn't even been in the car, but still he felt the accident was his fault. No, the accident was my fault because I wasn't in the car. He was supposed to pick Arabella up, but as usual, he'd allowed one thing after another to delay him at the office. What the hell had been so important that I couldn't leave?! He'd called his wife up and asked in a distracted voice, "I'm running a bit late here, could you have Jenkins pick Bella up on his way to get me?" Elaine had informed him in her gently exasperated way that Jenkins had been waiting in his office parking garage for the last hour. She'd just gotten off the car phone with him to verify that he was still there and was already on her way to pick up Arabella in the minivan.
Marcus had always hated that minivan, and not for some status conscious "We're better than that" sort of reason like Elaine seemed to think. Those vans were dangerously top heavy and had a documented tendency to roll. He didn't want Elaine or Arabella in one of them ever, but Elaine had wanted to be just another Mom picking up her daughter and taking her and her friends somewhere, so he'd researched them thoroughly and gotten her the absolutely safest model available, status symbols be damned. But no matter how safe the vehicle itself was, it wasn't much help as Elaine, making her way down the switch back from their estate in the wealthy district atop the bluffs overlooking the city, fighting her way through the pouring rain that Marcus would have known was coming down if he ever took a moment to look outside and enjoy the gorgeous view available from his office perched at the top of the office building his company owned, found herself driving over a jagged rock that had fallen off the exposed cliff face of the level above her.
As the tire blew out, she panicked and slammed on her brakes, attempting to stop the van. All this succeeded in doing was putting her into a hydroplaning spin that slammed right through the guard rail and dropped her over the cliff. She probably would have survived the crash if hadn't happened at one of the corners of the switchback, so that rather than merely falling to the level below, the van traveled outside of the area where the road was and tumbled all the way to the bottom of the bluff to finally crash upside-down into the stream that flowed along its base. The official cause of death had been drowning, his only consolation the fact that the coroner informed him that she was almost certainly unconscious before she ever hit the water, so she didn't suffer.
Pouring his fourth tumbler of scotch, he snarled, "Like hell she didn't suffer! How did he think she got unconscious. It was all those damn airbags I made sure the van had." If the van hadn't been so "safe" maybe she'd have been hurt, but able to unhook her seat belt and keep her head above the three feet of water she'd drowned in until help had arrived. Instead, OnStar hadn't even been able to get her to respond. "I killed her as surely as if I'd put my gun to her head and pulled the trigger." Suddenly, saying that, he reached into his desk and took out the case that held his officer's .45 from his days as a tank commander during Desert Storm.
Between his grief, his guilt, and half a bottle of scotch on an empty stomach, his thoughts at this point were not very coherent, but they centered on the feeling that he was a horrible father and Arabella would be better off without him. His life insurance would be void, but Elaine's multimillion dollar policy would still pay out. And even if she didn't have that money, there was plenty in the bank, and an extensive money market account and investment portfolio with his broker. And even though it wouldn't be as profitable, the company would still make money even if he wasn't there. You couldn't think of that before your thoughtless devotion to your work killed your wife? He quietly slide the loaded magazine into the pistol and chambered a round. Looking at his nearly full tumbler of scotch, he thought, Shame to waste good scotch, so he sat there sipping the remaining scotch, each sip more sands through the hourglass of the remaining minutes of his life.
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