A Perfect Life: A Novel Read online

  A Perfect Life is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Danielle Steel

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  DELACORTE PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Steel, Danielle.

  A perfect life : a novel / Danielle Steel.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-345-53094-3—978-0-345-53096-7

  I. Title.

  PS3569.T33828P37 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2012017017

  www.bantamdell.com

  Jacket design: Eileen Carey

  Jacket images: © Masterfile (buildings), © Multi-bits/Getty Images (bridge)

  v3.1

  “L’amour n’a pas d’age.”

  Love has no age.

  “True love is like a special language: You either speak it, or you don’t.”

  —LALEH SHAHIDEH

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Crowds of students began congregating outside Royce Hall Auditorium at UCLA two hours before Congressman Patrick Olden was scheduled to speak, an hour before they opened the doors. He had been invited by an enterprising professor, who taught a class on citizenship and public service, open to juniors and seniors. But once the congressman accepted, he had sent out notices to all political science majors, and the auditorium was expected to be full. They were estimating that two thousand students would be there. And judging from the number of people waiting for the doors to open, there might even be more. He was a popular congressman, with a liberal voting record dedicated to the underdog and was known for championing minorities, including women, and sympathetic to the issues of youth and the elderly. And he had four kids of his own. He was married to his childhood sweetheart, and everybody loved him. The students were excited to hear him speak that day.

  The crowd was orderly once the doors were open, on a brilliantly sunny, warm October day. Olden was scheduled to begin addressing them at eleven, with time set aside for questions from the audience after his speech. He was scheduled to have lunch with the chancellor afterward and fly back to Washington that afternoon. Getting him there at all had been a major coup. It wasn’t for a commencement address, or a law school graduation, it was just a class, and all of them were thrilled to have him there. Luckily it had dovetailed with his plans and a meeting with the governor the day before, and a dinner in his honor to receive an award. Pat Olden was a beloved figure with both young and old.

  One of his own kids, his oldest son, was at USC, and he had breakfast with him that morning. Patrick Olden appeared on the stage less than ten minutes late, while they waited backstage for the crowd to settle down. He stood at the podium with his warm smile, his eyes sweeping the crowd. You could hear a pin drop in the room when he began, and students without seats sat cross-legged in the aisles, and stood at the back of the room. They paid rapt attention to everything he said about government today, and what their responsibilities would be if they chose a career in politics. He talked about his own college days and explained what he was trying to do on the various committees he was on, and went into considerable detail. He had already been in office for three years, had done considerable good with the bills he proposed, and this was not an election year for him. He sounded earnest and sincere, and the audience hung on his every word and greeted him with thunderous applause when he was through. He looked pleased. He was the perfect role model for them. The professor who had invited him opened the question and answer period, and a hundred hands shot into the air. The questions were pointed and intelligent and relevant to what he had said. They were twenty minutes into it when a boy in the third row stood up as soon as the congressman pointed at him, and looked him in the eye with a welcoming smile.

  “What’s your position on gun control now?” the young man asked him, which was a topic he hadn’t touched on that day and didn’t want to. He was gentle but firm in his views in favor of gun control, but it was a sensitive issue that had had no place in his talk, advising them about careers in government and it was a subject he had chosen to avoid. The boy who asked the question had neatly combed blond hair, was clean-shaven, and was wearing a blue shirt and an army surplus jacket. He looked orderly and well-groomed, but didn’t smile back when Pat Olden smiled at him, and someone said later that the boy looked unusually pale, as though he hadn’t seen daylight in a long time.

  Pat Olden began answering his question with a serious expression. “I think you all know how I feel about it. Despite the provision in our Constitution that gives us the right to bear arms, I think that terrorism is an important factor today that can’t be ignored. And guns too easily fall into the wrong hands. I feel,” he said, and before he could finish his sentence or reiterate his position, the young man in the blue shirt and army jacket pulled a gun out of his pocket and, barely pausing to take aim, shot him squarely in the chest, and then followed with a shot to his neck. The congressman fell forward across the podium and then slid to the ground gushing blood, as students throughout the room began to scream. Security guards rushed forward, along with two bodyguards who had accompanied him. People began running toward the exits, others crouched on the ground, as the boy with the gun shot the girl sitting next to him in the head, and then shot randomly into the crowd, while guards in uniform rushed toward him and he killed two of them when they approached. The seats on either side of him were empty by then, and he ran swiftly across them shooting at other students trying to run from the room. He shot three in the back and another girl in the head. There were bodies lying everywhere as a crowd on the stage was ministering to the fallen congressman. There was blood all over, as people continued to scream in terror and grief watching their classmates being killed. And knowing exactly what he was doing, the shooter saved the last round for himself. A university guard in uniform was within a foot of him and was about to grab him, as the shooter hesitated for only a fraction of a second, deciding whether or not to kill him, and then shot himself in the head, and ended the carnage he had begun only minutes before. The entire episode had taken exactly seven minutes, and eleven students and two guards lay dead, eight more had been injured, and the congressman was unconscious, covered in blood as paramedics rushed him from the auditorium on a stretcher. There were already a dozen emergency vehicles outside and more on the way, as university police attempted to control the crowd, to no avail. Several of them had been trampled on the way out and were injured too. All you could hear was crying and screaming in the room, as two thousand students had attempted to escape.

  Police had rapidly surrounded the lifeless form of the shooter, and a policeman checked his pockets for ID. Moments later param
edics took him away. His brain was smeared across the seats around him.

  It took hours to get injured students to hospitals by ambulance, remove the dead, clear the area, and begin to calm everyone down. Two of the victims died on the way to the hospital, which brought the student death toll to thirteen. It was a scene of carnage and grief, which, sadly, was not entirely unfamiliar in the world of campus violence today. It was an event that had happened before. All network programming was interrupted, with on-the-scene reports of the shooting at UCLA. Congressman Olden was listed as in critical condition, hovering between life and death from the wounds in his chest and neck, and he was in surgery at last report, while surgeons fought for his life.

  Within an hour, the identity of the shooter was on the air. He was a pre-law student who had dropped out the year before, and had a history of mental instability. He had evidenced signs of mental illness for a year before he left school. He had refused treatment while at UCLA and had previously been admitted to a psychiatric hospital while in high school. He had been reported in college for threatening an ex-girlfriend with a gun when she dated someone else, but he had never injured anyone before. He was nineteen, currently living in an apartment by himself, and working at a pawnshop, where he had bought the gun he had used that day. And his parents weren’t reached for comment until later that afternoon. His mother was incoherent with grief as police led her from her home for questioning, and his father was reported to be away on a fishing trip. Neighbors, when asked to comment, said he was a nice boy, always polite, although a little strange. He was obsessed with computers, rarely left his place except for work, and seemed to have no friends. He had been a loner all his life. And the portrait of him painted by those who knew him, teachers, co-workers at the pawnshop, neighbors, all presented a classic image of a mentally disturbed boy who had somehow slipped through the cracks of treatment and run amok, killing sixteen people that day, including himself, and injuring seven others including the congressman. It was a wanton waste of life, and police believed that he had gone there to kill Pat Olden, for his stance on gun control, since he had been armed and taken a seat in the third row.

  The campus was closed immediately, classes stopped as news got around, and crying students congregated everywhere, with their arms around each other, mourning lost friends.

  Pat Olden’s wife, already on a flight to Washington that morning, after the awards ceremony the night before, was told what had happened to her husband. She was on a chartered plane, which landed in Denver. Pat Olden was still in surgery but was not expected to survive, and his wife called their four children while on the ground before they headed back to L.A. Their oldest son, at USC, was already at the hospital, waiting outside surgery. He had been in class when he heard, and a friend at UCLA sent him a text even before it hit the news.

  Everyone was in shock, and by late that afternoon, another of the victims had died from his wounds, a member of the university police. It was one of the worst shootings of its kind, compared to others in recent years, and events like it were precisely why Pat Olden was opposed to guns, readily available, and too often in the wrong hands in today’s world. The boy in the blue shirt had proven him right, yet again.

  Blaise McCarthy sat in her office at the network in New York, watching the images of crying, hysterical students, and the reruns of what had happened, from a video taken on someone’s phone, which was a crazy jumble of visuals captured while the person who had recorded them hid under a seat at the back of the room. All you could really see was people running, and hear horrible screams and gunshots as the shooter took his victims down.

  She was serious as she watched, when her assistant, Mark Spencer, walked into the room, with a stack of reports on the stories she was covering the next day. Blaise had been an anchor on morning news for years, but had moved on and had her own segment on the show now, to cover the most important aspects of the news. She did editorial pieces, and in-depth interviews of important famous people that were legendary. It was a long way from where she’d started, as a weather girl in Seattle, fresh out of college at twenty-two. Twenty-five years later, she had become the most famous woman ever to cover the news, and an icon in the business. And Mark had worked for her for ten years. He was a quiet, somewhat nervous man, who tried to anticipate her every thought and need, and had deep respect and affection for her. He was a perfectionist, who took pride in doing his job well. He loved her values, as well as her talent.

  “You going out there?” he asked her, fully expecting that she would, but she surprised him and shook her head. Blaise had a mane of red hair, finely chiseled features, huge green eyes, and a famously cleft chin, all of which had been caricatured for years. She had a distinctive face, a great figure, and she looked easily ten years younger than her forty-seven years.

  “There isn’t enough for me to cover yet,” she said succinctly, with an unhappy look. Like Pat Olden, she was in favor of gun control, although she knew it would never happen. The lobby against gun control was one of the most powerful in the country, despite incidents like this. Blaise knew Pat Olden and liked him and his wife, and she was sorry to hear what had happened to him, and she knew he had young kids. And worse, Blaise always felt sickened by tragic incidents like this one, where so many innocent people got killed. It was so senseless. She hated the stories about mentally ill students who slipped through the cracks and then went on rampages. And afterward everyone cried about what they should have seen and should have done. But they didn’t, and no one woke up until it was too late.

  “It’s all in the hands of local reporters,” she explained to Mark, “and they’re doing a good job. The kind of piece I’ll do on it won’t make sense until the dust settles a little, maybe in a few days. Besides, I have to go to London tomorrow night,” she reminded him, which Mark knew well, since he had organized the trip for her, meticulously, as he always did. She was going to be interviewing the new British prime minister in two days, and an oil magnate in Dubai the day after. Blaise never stayed in one place for long. She had interviewed every head of state and royal on the planet, every major movie star, noteworthy criminals, politicians, and everyone worth knowing about all over the world, both in and out of the news. Her specials were remarkable and unique, and her editorial comments on her segment of the show every morning cut to the bone. Blaise McCarthy was beautiful, in an interesting way, and more than that, she was smart. She had character and guts, she had been to war zones and palaces, attended coronations and state funerals. Blaise McCarthy was simply one of a kind, and Mark knew that when she did the piece on the UCLA shooting, it would be more than just about a congressman and a number of students who’d been shot. It would be an important statement on the world today. Her coverage of 9/11 from Ground Zero had reduced everyone to tears each time it ran. She had won countless prizes and awards over the years. There was no subject she hadn’t touched. The audiences loved her, and the ratings reflected that. Blaise McCarthy was the gold standard in her business, and thus far was untouched. No one dared argue with success, and although they sent up trial balloons from time to time, trying out a new face on the news, grooming them for her spot, they didn’t even come close. But she was always aware that they might try to fill her shoes one day. She didn’t like to think about it, but it happened in her business. And it could to her one day too, and she knew it.

  She had no illusions about network news. It was a cutthroat world. And she knew that no matter how good she was, one day she’d be gone. But for now, for today, she was safe. It was a battle to stay on top that she fought every day. She was never afraid of hard work. She thrived on it. Part of her success was that she worked harder than anyone else. She always had, right from the beginning. Blaise had been in love with her work and her career, from the very first day. Aside from her early days right out of college at the local station as weather girl in Seattle, which had seemed frivolous and embarrassing to her, from then on, once she got to reporting news, first in Seattle when she got her fir
st promotion, then when she moved to the affiliate in San Francisco two years later, and four years after that when she got her first really big break at network news in New York at twenty-eight, every step of the way had been exciting for her. Not a moment of it had been boring. And she had been willing to sacrifice anything and everything to keep her career moving forward, and to protect it once she got to the top. Blaise never took her eye off the ball. She was a genius at what she did, and what she chose to cover, the angles she saw, the subjects she interviewed. The choices she had made had made her who she was. Being as famous as she was had never been her goal, but excellence in everything she did was. Blaise had never slipped, not for a minute. The ratings had never stopped loving her, and even when changes at the network rocked the boat at times, Blaise had stayed solid. Unmovable, indefatigable. She had more energy than ten people half her age all put together. And at forty-seven, she looked great. In a business where youth and beauty were prized, people had long since stopped caring about her age, and lucky for her, she didn’t look it. She took decent care of herself, but most of the time, all she thought about was work. She was tireless, and a great part of the year, she was on the road, interviewing important, famous, powerful, fascinating people, and doing what she did best.

  Blaise glanced at the television behind where Mark was standing as he heard the announcer say that two more of the shooter’s victims had just died. But Congressman Olden was still alive and remained in critical condition, still in surgery at Cedars Sinai L.A. while his family waited at the hospital. His other three children had come to L.A. that afternoon. And his wife, Rosemary Olden, and their four children were standing by in a private room the hospital had set aside for them.

  The anchorman said that the bullet had gone through his neck and exited on the other side, fracturing several vertebrae. There was some speculation about whether he’d be paralyzed if he survived, but no one seemed to know. The bullet the shooter had shot into his chest had cost him a lung, but miraculously hadn’t touched his heart. There was a slim chance he might survive.