Hidden Past – Chapter 1

Chapter 1 - Hidden Past

Angela Morris was beautiful and seemed especially soft and alluring in the evening of the Naples Philharmonic fund-raiser. She was calm, more relaxed than usual, and had no clue that a voice from her past would torpedo her comfort tonight and threaten her now perfect existence in the future.

“You are absolutely stunning!” Angela’s tall, tanned, impeccably dressed husband Austin told her as the chauffer eased the limo away from the circular drive. Austin Morris could not have been any more proud of his wife. He was totally comfortable with his wife of three years, but he knew she was not always comfortable with herself.

“You and your friends are the upper crust,” she sometimes remarked. “I’m just a middle-class girl, barely, from Southern Ohio.”

“You’re wonderful. You’re beautiful—I don’t care where you’re from!” Austin would always try to reassure his naturally glamorous, poised, yet inexplicably insecure wife.

Everyone who was the least bit interested in the up-and-coming symphony in Southwest Florida’s crown-jewel community was in attendance, at least those with some measure of interest and a better measure of money.

People in Naples who were wealthy, many of them transplants, were there, seeing and being seen, though not wanting to be obvious about either. The affluent had achieved a level of success that brought with it some degree of projected indifference, busy people, many of them overscheduled, who chose the fund-raiser over one or two other invitations or commitments. Many had planned to arrive late and leave early.

“I’m sorry, dear. We have another engagement tonight, and we really must put in an appearance. I do hope we can see each other again soon. Please call me your first chance—” or some version of this was heard occasionally within the polite crowd.

This was the typical tone of patrons that night; some warm, some pretentious, but the conveyance of importance was consistent; important lives, important thinking, and important places to go.

Except for Austin and Angela Morris, they were the darlings of the throng, the unpretentious, obviously in-love-with-each-other couple. Neither was aloof, indifferent, nor distractible when talking with their fellow Naples residents and part-time residents. Austin and Angela listened when others talked, and they asked questions that reflected their interest and empathy.

“But, Joan, what are you and Fredrik going to do if Fredrik sells his company?” Angela was asking Joan Werner almost at the same time Austin was asking a similar question to Fredrik on the other side of the ballroom.

“Are you going to start something new—like a new company or a new career?” Austin had asked.

But before Fredrik could answer, he was interrupted by his wife Joan, saying, “Honey, here’s someone you simply must meet.”

Joan was excited about her new friend Angela whom she had met at the Bay Colony Golf Club, standing in line for a grilled chopped sirloin burger, some six weeks earlier.

Joan and Fredrik had recently purchased a home in the Bay Colony section of Pelican Marsh, and it was Joan’s intent to meet as many of the neighbors as possible, although many of them were at home very sporadically. Like she and Fredrik, most of Bay Colony’s residents had at least one home elsewhere that vied for their time and attention. And all Bay Colony’s elite traveled extensively.

“Are you new here?” Joan had asked the beautiful, dark-haired golfer in front of her. She was very pleased and very surprised when the slender, perfect-bodied lady who looked considerably younger than she turned and, with a broad, warm smile, responded, “No, but I felt like it on the back nine today. Hi, I’m Angela Morris.”

“And I’m Joan Werner. We live over on Dormie Drive. And you?”

“My husband Austin and I and our baby daughter Samantha live north of here in Mediterra, off Livingston.”

The two had clicked immediately. Joan was basically a down-to-earth Midwesterner as was Angela. Joan had met Fredrik in college at Ohio University, she a young girl from the town of Athens, Ohio, and he an out-of-state student from the Pittsburgh area. Even back then, Joan was the secretly shy but outgoing “social butterfly,” introducing herself and making friends wherever she went.

She said very little about her husband to sorority sisters or, later on, to social friends. She knew he was stiff, something of a social bore, but he was always adoring and supportive of her. He was logical, structured, and somewhat cold like his German immigrant parents. His father had been a chemical engineer at U.S. Steel and his mother a high school math teacher, whose English, which all the kids had complained, was extremely difficult to understand.

Joan and Angela had arranged to play golf soon after they met and had a wonderful time together. Each had felt very relaxed and able to be herself. It had been a perfect day.

So Joan was delighted to have the opportunity to introduce her new friend, perhaps with the potential of becoming her best friend, to her husband.

She had told Fredrik about her sleek and athletic friend Angela. “When you meet her, I’m going to have to watch you so you don’t use your smooth Germanic charm to hit on her,” she had kidded, always trying to “loosen him up.”

“Not to worry, darling,” the generally unsmiling, always proper Fredrik had reassured, not recognizing the jocular nature of her comment. “No woman could ever cause my eye to roam from you!”

Joan mostly loved her husband, although there were times when she wished other people could see his big heart, his humanism as she did. Perhaps because of the way he was raised and the way he had worked so hard to build a business that was now being wooed by acquisition-hungry suitors, Fredrik Werner never seemed to let down his guard with anyone but Joan.

Joan and Angela approached the two men at the punch bowl, one facing them and one with his back to them, waiting for his cup to be filled by the server in the stiffly starched jacket.

The confident, relaxed man facing them with the brilliantly white smile must be Angela’s husband, Joan thought. Clearly, the bulky, wide-shouldered gentleman with the crew cut about to turn around was Fredrik. He had heard Joan alerting him that she had yet another person for him to meet just as he was starting to respond to Austin Morris’s question and exerting care not to spill the cup handed to him by the starched jacket.

As Fredrik wheeled around, his eyes met Angela’s before they connected with Joan’s. Never illogical and rarely spontaneous, the multimillionaire blurted out with an accent traceable back to his parents’ province of Heidenheim, “Marie, is that you?”