“You okay if I don’t get up?” she said.
“No problem,” Chloe said, standing at the door.
“Give us a kiss before you go,” she demanded. Chloe bent over to give the woman a peck on the cheek, but got pulled into another hug. “Don’t be a stranger. And don’t forget what I asked you.”
“Sure thing,” Chloe said.
“Walk you to your car,” Todd said.
Once outside, he said to her, “She can be a bit much sometimes. But she’s really happy to meet you. Did she give you a good interview?”
“Yeah.” Chloe paused, wondering whether to get into it. “She’s worried about you.”
“What else is new?”
“She says you’re getting into some bad shit, but she doesn’t exactly know what.”
“She imagines things,” Todd said.
“Why did you have a list of old folks homes on your computer screen?”
“Huh?”
“I saw it. Before you closed your laptop. Why would you be researching those kinds of places?”
“I might have gotten on the page by mistake.”
“Why’d you have two cell phones?”
Todd blinked. “Who says I have two cell phones?”
“They were sitting right there.”
He shrugged. “Just a backup. You know, in case one dies.”
They’d reached Chloe’s Pacer. “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “I go visit my grandfather a lot.”
“Yeah, you said.”
“One time I was there, sitting in the dining hall, and there was this one old lady, in a wheelchair, and she wouldn’t stop crying. Sometimes, you know, you hear them moaning and stuff because they’re old and shit hurts. But she was just crying and crying. I thought maybe someone had died. So I asked my grandfather, did he know what happened with her?”
“Okay.”
“And he says, that day was her son’s birthday. She had this grown-up son, like forty or fifty years old. But anyway, it was his birthday, and he was going to come and visit her, but she had nothing for him. She’d always get one of the staff to go out and pick him up a gift card for Burger King. Her son loved Whoppers, and I think I saw him one time, and I gotta say, I believe it. She’d get him a card with fifty bucks loaded on it. But she didn’t have any money in the bank. She couldn’t do it. She’d lost almost everything. Not a fortune. Around three thousand or something, although if I actually had that much in the bank I’d feel like the richest person on Earth. But anyway, she had all this money but she got scammed out of it.”
“Scammed?”
“Yeah. I don’t know all the exact details but she gets this random call one day, and it’s someone pretending to be a relative or something, and they’re in some kind of trouble and need money right away. Like, for an operation or bail, or something. And she falls for it, and wires all this money to someone. And that was the last she saw of it.”
“Jeez,” he said. Hesitantly, he asked, “What’s the name of this old folks place?”
“Providence Valley.”
Todd nodded slowly. “Oh.”
“Heard of it?”
He shook his head.
“Anyway, it was the saddest crying I ever heard,” Chloe said. “What kind of person would do something like that?”
“I don’t know,” Todd said. “Someone kind of shitty, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “Someone kind of shitty.”
Thirteen
New Haven, CT
“It’s not true,” Caroline Cookson said evenly. “None of it.
I never talked to anyone at Google or Apple or Netflix or anyone about some app.”
“You didn’t say something to one of the Google representatives that could have been interpreted as a request for money, and that you had Miles’s blessing?” Gilbert asked his wife that evening as they got ready for bed.
Caroline laughed. “Wow. That’s just … I don’t know what to say. You think I’d forget saying something like that?”
Gilbert had been cautious with his tone, trying not to sound overly accusatory. More like he was just hoping to clear up a misunderstanding, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there was a simple explanation for what Miles had disclosed to him. Dealing with Caroline could be like walking on proverbial eggshells. You had to be careful because she could become very defensive in a hurry, and when that happened, watch out.
But Caroline, who gave every indication of being shocked by what Miles had told Gilbert, remained relatively calm. To Gilbert’s surprise, her response bordered on sympathetic.
Caroline blinked her blue eyes at him and slowly shook her head. “I just feel so badly for him. What a terrible thing for Miles to go through. And you. You must be devastated. But honestly, what he told you, it simply did not happen.”
“Why would he lie about that?” Gilbert said.
Caroline, pulling her long blond hair back behind her head and securing it with an elastic, just as she did every night before crawling into bed, thought about that. “Maybe he’s not lying,” she said.
“What?”
“Maybe he believes what he’s saying. After you got home, and told me about Miles’s diagnosis, and went upstairs to give Samantha the news, I did some online research. You know that Huntington’s will affect his mental capacity. That dementia is part of what he’s going to go through. Maybe he’s confused, misinterpreting things, misremembering things, believing certain events happened that never did. For some reason he believes I did this awful thing, when the truth is I did not.”
Gilbert thought about that. It didn’t strike him that Miles was anything less than fully engaged. He had to admit Caroline was convincing in her denials, but then again, that was the sort of thing she was good at.
“I mean, okay, I did talk to some of the Google people at that party,” Caroline said. “But nothing along the lines of what Miles suggested. Let me ask you this.”
“What?”
“Did he show you any proof?”
“Proof?”
“Any documents? Any emails? Recordings of me talking to someone at Google? Anything at all like that?”
“No.”
Caroline nodded with satisfaction. “Well, there you go. Don’t you think, if he’d had any evidence, he would have shown it to you?”
“I … don’t know. Maybe.”
“What Miles is alleging, why, that’s just criminal. Why didn’t Miles call the police?”
“Well, for one, you’re his sister-in-law.”
“Oh, please. You really think that would have stopped him? You know he’s never cared much for me. But seriously, how would I think I could get away with something like that?”
But there was something going on there, behind those eyes. Gilbert could tell.
The thing was, Caroline had plenty of insight into people who got on the wrong side of the law. She worked in the court system, as a court reporter, or stenographer, as the job was also called. Sitting through trials and depositions, listening to thousands of hours of testimony, getting it all down for future reference.
She never failed to come home with a story. People who’d committed murder, tax fraud, kidnapping. A favorite was the story of the hit man on trial for killing some guy’s wife, but he got off when the star witness failed to show up. And not just for his court appearance. He failed to show up anywhere, ever again.
The accused, he actually looked over at me and winked, Caroline had said. Like he was putting the moves on me right in the middle of the trial. When she told that story, she’d actually shiver, although Gilbert could never quite tell whether it was with fear or excitement.
But most of Caroline’s stories were about people who did not get away with it. You know why so many criminals get caught? she would ask. Because they’re stupid.
She would often cite some of her favorite examples. The guy who bragged on Facebook about the goods he’d stolen. The man who’d fatally stabbed his girlfriend, the
n used a dry paper towel to get the blood off the knife, missing much of it, and not bothering to wipe his fingerprints off the handle. The bank robber who went on a spending spree. The woman who said she couldn’t have killed her husband because she was visiting an aunt in Cleveland, but turned out not to have an aunt in Cleveland.
Gilbert sometimes thought his wife was a classic example of someone who could see in others the faults she could not see in herself. Case in point: that time she backed her car into another at JCPenney, left the scene, and denied ever having been there. She even persuaded Samantha to back her story, to say the two of them had been together at a different mall on the other side of town. When the other car owner managed to obtain, from mall security cameras, video that showed crystal clear images of Caroline causing the damage, she had still continued to deny it.
Which was why Gilbert didn’t believe her denials about the Google encounter for a second.
But he had raised it with her for a reason. It might help her better appreciate Miles’s decision about his estate and his decision to start divvying up his fortune among his biological children, once he had been in touch with them.
The discussions surrounding that had happened earlier, after Gilbert had come home behind the wheel of the Porsche.
Once he’d filled her in on why he had the car, as well as the news about the nine children who had come into the world because Miles had visited a fertility clinic more than two decades ago—he had shown her the picture of the list of names he had taken with his phone—she had not responded well.
“This car is supposed to make things right? You could buy a thousand of these with what he should be leaving to you when he’s gone. After all you’ve done for him?”
Gilbert was conflicted. On some level, he agreed with his wife. But at the same time, he wanted to defend his brother, which led him to relate the Google story. There was a look on Caroline’s face, if only for a second, that persuaded him Miles had not lied. That glimmer of I’ve been caught in her eyes, but she had recovered quickly.
The thing was, he’d found Miles’s story convincing, and Caroline’s denials much less so, because it fit a pattern. How many times over the years had Caroline lamented her husband’s lack of success, at least when compared to his brother? Oh sure, he had a good job in the accounting division and was paid well enough, but it wasn’t like he owned the company. It wasn’t like he was in charge. Gilbert could imagine a scenario in which Caroline might try to dip into her brother-in-law’s pocket, a way of evening the score, if only a little.
It was a case of the old you-reap-what-you-sow, Gilbert figured. You tried to cash in on my brother’s reputation, and now it’s bitten you in the ass.
Maybe this would be a lesson to her. Gilbert was hopeful that her subdued response to all these developments was evidence of some introspection.
Not that he was foolish enough to get his hopes up too high.
There were times when Gilbert thought about finding a way out of this marriage. He knew, in his heart, that while he could pretend to be, he was not a happy man. He tried to love this woman, even though he was not at all certain she loved him. And besides, there was Samantha to think about. True, she was closing in on the end of her teen years. It wouldn’t be like splitting up when she was still in diapers.
But Gilbert didn’t believe he could face the trauma of a divorce. The acrimony, the ugly scenes. Selling the house, finding a new place to live. And he knew Caroline would find a way to persuade Samantha it was his fault. She’d drive a wedge between them. Samantha, desperate for her mother’s respect, was always looking for ways to please her, and if that meant shutting her father out of her life, she might just do it.
Maybe this was what marriage was, Gilbert mused. Unrelenting unhappiness, but at least you had someone to talk to.
He was thinking all these things as he and Caroline got into bed and turned out the light. She reached under the covers and gave his hand a squeeze and whispered, “I’m sorry about your brother. I truly am.”
He was nearly asleep when three words suddenly came to him.
Excel Point Enterprises.
Those invoices from a firm he wasn’t familiar with.
No, he thought. She wouldn’t.
And very quickly dismissed the thought, and drifted off.
When Caroline heard his breathing deepen and she was sure he was asleep, she quietly got up, went to his side of the bed, and picked up the phone that was charging on his nightstand.
She knew his four-digit password, and within seconds was into his photo app. She pulled up the shot of the list of names, emailed it to herself, put the phone back down, and exited the bedroom.
Caroline went down to the kitchen, where they kept a desktop and a printer on a small desk off to one side. She sat down, opened up her mail program, and printed off the picture, confident that the grinding noise of the printer would not wake her husband upstairs.
But Samantha did happen to stroll into the kitchen. She was more of a night owl, often going to bed two or more hours after her parents. She opened the refrigerator and took out a can of diet cola, and spotted her mother.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Samantha asked.
Caroline said, “Come sit.”
Fourteen
New Haven, CT
Sure, I may be dying, Miles thought, but I still have a company to run.
But his next thought was often, Yeah, but for how long?
While the progression of his disease would not disable him overnight, he needed to think about the future of Cookson Tech. There were times, since his diagnosis, when he wondered if he even wanted to run it anymore. He’d made his millions, made his mark in the tech world. Apps designed by Cookson Tech were on as many as a billion phones. What was left to prove?
If word got out that he was interested in selling, he’d have every tech company in the world, at least those with deep pockets, beating down his door in minutes.
It wasn’t something he had to make his mind up about right now, but it was worth thinking about. Maybe it was time for a change. Write a book. Get involved in the movement to find a cure for Huntington’s. Give them a whack of money, and set out to raise more.
Or, maybe, go to Hawaii and get stoned.
So many choices. And who was to say he couldn’t do all of them?
But while he considered his options, Cookson Tech had to continue to move forward, develop new and innovative products in a highly competitive market. If he didn’t sell out, there needed to be a succession plan. Who would run the joint when he handed over the reins?
In his heart, he would have liked to hand it all over to Gilbert. But as long as Caroline was in the picture, that was off the table.
At some point soon, Miles would have to assemble the board of directors and inform them of his diagnosis. His occasional uncontrolled movements were going to become more pronounced over time. People would suspect something was wrong. A whispering campaign would begin. Miles would have to bring the public relations department into the loop so they could start formulating a strategy for when his condition became public. They might recommend getting ahead of it, maybe call a news conference, arrange a 60 Minutes interview, do a spot on one of the morning shows. Tell his tale to Gayle King or Wolf Blitzer. He’d met both of them over the years.
But it was probably best to put all those things on hold until he had connected with his biological children, the Nine, as he had come to think of them. He was still trying to figure out the best way to approach them. A few days earlier he had called Dorian into his office.
“With Heather’s help, you’re going to need to pull together—”
“Profiles on the Nine, yeah. She’s already on it.”
“Okay, good,” Miles said. “But we’re going to need more than just basic information on these individuals. We’ll need—”
“Family and educational background.”
“Yes,” Miles said. “But the important thing is, these inquiries
need to be—”
“Discreet. Under the radar. Figured that.”
Miles sat back in his chair and grinned. “Where would I be without you?”
“Nowhere,” Dorian said.
He nodded with bemused resignation. “Okay, well, when this information starts to actually come in—”
“We have it,” Dorian said.
Miles threw his hands in the air. “I’m gonna shut up now. Just hit me with it.”
Dorian, who had walked in carrying an iPad, raised it in her hands and started tapping and scrolling on the screen.
“Okay, so, not surprisingly, they’re scattered all over the place. One’s up in Massachusetts, we’ve got one going to college in Maine, another on an extended vacation in Paris. One’s in Fort Wayne, another in Scottsdale. Closest one is in Providence.”
Miles felt a kind of excitement surging through him.
“What … do they do?” He’d been thinking, if there was anything to inherited talent, maybe one of them was a software developer or something else in the tech world.
“We’ve got an art gallery employee, a waitress who’s an aspiring documentarian—she’s the one in Providence—a guy who works part-time in a computer store.”
Miles said, “Hmm.”
“That’s just three. I can send this to you. It’s reasonably comprehensive. It’s not all that hard to find out things about people. Like I need to tell you that. So many people putting their lives out there on social media. And Heather’s got a hundred tricks up her sleeve to go beyond the easy stuff. Oh, and this is cool. Every one of them has one or more Cookson apps on their phones.”
That prompted a chuckle from Miles, but his expression quickly turned anxious.
“Now it’s all about the approach.”
Dorian, deadpan, said, “Maybe one of those emails that says they’ve got a few million dollars coming their way and all they have to do is provide their bank details so that the transfer can be made.”
Miles smiled. “I’d have to get a fake email address.”
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