“I went to early Mass,” she said, fingering her pearls. “I knocked to see if you wanted to come but you were out.”
“I went for a walk.” He made himself sit and took coffee from the maid. “Why didn’t you sleep in and go to a later service? I figured you’d want to take it easy on your first gala-free day. Rest on your laurels. You did a great job.”
“It did come off well, didn’t it? Our biggest yet, the ticket committee told me.”
“Everyone looked like they were having a good time.”
“Except you.” At his guilty start, the corners of her mouth curved slightly. “You did a good job of pretending, but I could tell you were miserable most of the time. And I could also tell when you weren’t.” She paused. “I saw you dancing with Keely Stafford.”
Lex let out a long, slow breath. “I danced with a lot of people. I danced with you.”
“And you danced with her.”
“Why shouldn’t I? We’re all kind of in this together, aren’t we? I like her.” And he was very afraid that like had turned into something more, something that was going to be dangerous if he didn’t watch it.
“Just don’t get too caught up in her. She was your brother’s fiancée, don’t forget.”
Lex felt his jaw tighten. “I’m aware of that. I also don’t think that matters much, given the present situation.”
“I wasn’t the only one who noticed, you know. And commented.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “Alicia Smythe.”
“Joyce Barron, actually.”
Equally as loathsome, as far as he was concerned. “She can mind her own business. Not that it matters what she thinks.”
“It matters to me,” Olivia said tartly. “Keely Stafford was involved with your brother, got him to propose to her and then all this trouble broke out. I won’t have you paying that kind of attention to her. It makes us all look ridiculous.”
Lex stared at her. “Ridiculous? Do you hear yourself? Are you completely forgetting the fact that Bradley was the one who got you both into this mess? Keely’s doing everything she possibly can to get you off the hook. I’d focus more on that and stop listening to trash-talking witches.”
“Those ‘trash-talking witches,’ as you call them, happen to be my friends.”
“Are you so sure about that? I’d say your friend is the person I’m working with to clear your name.”
Olivia’s gaze cooled. “Are you doing anything else with her?”
Yes, he was—but what, exactly? “I spend ninety-five percent of my time in places like the Sudan and Lebanon,” he said shortly. “You want to tell me how I’m supposed to get involved with anyone?”
“That’s not an answer to my question.”
“It’s the only one you’re going to get.” Courtesy, he believed in. Pointless accountability, he didn’t. “Mom, I turned thirty last summer. A medical miracle, I realize, since you’re only twenty-nine yourself, but still…”
“I don’t want you involved with her.” She folded her arms.
He looked at her, staring at him defiantly like some Victorian matron. Whatever world she thought gave her that kind of authority, he didn’t belong in it. He met her eyes with a look equally as resolved. A humming silence stretched out between them.
Olivia cracked first. “I don’t want to fight with you,” she said.
“That’s good. I don’t want to fight with you, either.”
“There’s just a lot going on. Bill Hartley is pressuring me. We have to make a decision on the new director this week.”
“So what’s holding you up?”
“They want my recommendations.”
“The answer,” he said, “is still no.”
“You don’t know the question yet.”
The hell he didn’t. “Did you forget what I just said about ninety-five percent of my time? That’s where I belong. Not here, not on the board. For the last time, find someone else.” The room suddenly felt stifling. Lex rose. “I’m going to get out of here and check e-mail.”
He headed out to the hall, Olivia hot on his heels. “But we can’t have someone else. We need you.”
“No, you don’t.”
He entered Pierce’s office and headed for the desk. Olivia slipped past him and stood in his way. “Aubrey Pierce Alexander, you stop right there and listen to me.” Despite himself, Lex stopped short. “That company is our family legacy. It’s only right that control stays in our hands, in the person of a family member who can carry on the Alexander line of succession. And that means you.”
It was as if he could hear the shackles clamped around his ankles. “No, Mom. No. It doesn’t mean me.”
“Then who else do you suggest?” she snapped. “I need someone who’s looking out for this family’s interests. This is your legacy, Trey, whether you want it to be or not. It’s in your blood. It’s your future.”
“No,” he blazed. “It’s not my future. Why the hell do you think I left? Why do you think I’ve stayed away all these years?”
“You left because you were angry at your father,” she retorted. “Let it go. He’s gone. He had flaws but he’s gone, and all staying angry with him is going to do is hurt you, the family and the family’s future.”
Fury boiled up in him. “I’m hurting the family’s future? I am? You’ve got one Alexander who couldn’t tell his home life from his business life and the other who’s in hiding because he flushed some criminal’s money through the corporate accounts. That’s the family legacy I’m supposed to uphold?” He leaned down toward her, his face only inches from hers. “I want my own life, not version three of the Aubrey Pierce Alexander corporate dynasty. I am not Pierce—thank God—and I sure as hell am not Bradley. You want someone in the family to be on the board, then dammit, do it yourself.”
Anger seethed in the room like some kind of a living thing. Each click of the clock sounded like a mallet being struck.
“I see.” Olivia’s voice was as brittle as glass. “Well. Excuse me. I won’t take up any more of your time.”
A nice quiet, diplomatic conversation. Perfect.
“Mom, wait,” Lex said, but she’d already gone.
He stared at the photographs on the walls: Pierce, his parents together. Bradley and Pierce side by side on the family sailboat, the one Bradley had inherited, destined now to be confiscated and auctioned off to the highest bidder.
On the day captured in the photo, though, that was all off in the unimaginable future. Bradley and Pierce leaned shoulder to shoulder, holding a race trophy they’d just won, putting on toothy smiles for the camera. The day Bradley had inherited the All In had no doubt been his proudest moment.
People usually use the name of someone or something important. Lex stiffened. The boat, he thought. It had to be the boat.
And he rose.
Keely and her parents walked out of the church, squinting in the late-morning sunlight. The bells of the carillon sounded in the background.
“Lovely sermon, Reverend,” Jeannie said warmly, shaking his hand.
“Glad you enjoyed it. And it’s been a pleasure to have you back.” He smiled at Keely with eyes so twinkly she wondered if he knew just how long it had been since she’d been to services.
A snatch of My Chemical Romance shattered the silence. Blushing furiously, Keely dug out her phone.
“Excuse me,” Keely muttered, and hurried down the steps. “Hello?”
“Keely? Lex,” he said briefly. “Where are you? Can you get loose?”
“I’m just coming out of church. What’s up?”
“I just figured out something that might be our answer.”
“To what?”
“The password. What church are you at?”
“St. Stephen’s, over on Hollis.”
“Great. I’ll be by in ten minutes.”
It was closer to five when his Jeep swung up.
“I’ve got to go,” Keely told Jeannie, and kissed her goodbye.
She couldn’t help not
icing the stares as she walked to the vehicle. So much for staying under the radar, she thought in resignation.
“You found the password?” she asked as she shut the door and snapped on her seatbelt.
“Not exactly. But I think I have a good guess. If I’m right, this might all be over.”
The snow they’d had since the last time they were up at the house had done the road no good. The Jeep bounced over the ruts with a tooth-rattling vigor that made it impossible to talk.
Little else had changed since their last visit, she saw when they arrived. The new snow lay in a pristine white layer over the yard and the steps, broken only by the small tracks of some little rodent.
“So are you ever going to tell me about this flash of inspiration you had?” Keely asked as Lex swung open the door.
“The boat. Bradley’s boat.”
“The All In?”
“Exactly.” He strode ahead of her through the living room and down the hall. She did her best to ignore the door at the end that led to the master bedroom. Lex didn’t seem to notice.
“People use things that are important to them for passwords, right? Bradley was crazy for sailing from the time he was a kid. There was the picture of you guys on the boat and there’s a picture of him and my father on it hanging in Pierce’s office.” He pulled out the laptop case. “So I figured the best thing to do was get over here and try it. If I’m right, all our problems are solved.”
All their problems were solved?
Not even close, she thought.
Keely opened the laptop and hit the power button. The machine came on with a hum. “It was nice dancing with you at the gala last night,” she said, wondering if he’d even noticed that they hadn’t kissed hello or touched once since he’d picked her up. There was a weird sort of frenetic energy to him. After all the times she’d felt so connected, she suddenly felt like there was no communication there at all.
The log-in screen came up. Lex leaned over her, bracing his hands on the desk beside her. Their faces were very nearly side by side as she tabbed down to the password line and keyed in all in.
“Come on, baby,” he murmured to the computer, his fingers pressing into the desktop.
Keely pressed Enter.
And the log-in screen disappeared.
“Yes!” Lex crowed, arms up.
The background screen appeared, a photograph of a tropical beach, complete with pale blue water and palm trees.
“Looks nice on a thirty degree day, doesn’t it?” Keely sighed.
“You find the files we need on this computer and I’ll send you there,” Lex said, oblivious to the quick glance she shot him.
With a few clicks of the keys, she brought up the file tree. “Better yet, we could go together,” she said, keeping her tone as light as his. “A reward for hard work. Bradley and I were going to Barbados for our honeymoon. I still have the tickets for the package.”
Lex was back to leaning over her shoulder. “I thought the guy bought those.”
She shrugged. “Bradley wasn’t big on organizing. I was sort of the one who took care of it all so everything’s in my name. Fully paid for and transferable.” She hesitated. “Maybe we could take a getaway when this is all over.”
She held her breath for his response but all he said was, “Let’s hope that’s soon,” and stared at the screen.
Files were there, that much was certain. The problem was, they only documented the operation. They didn’t do anything to clear her or Olivia. Not that she and Lex didn’t look and look hard. Keely opened spreadsheets, she opened PDFs. She opened text document after text document, even image files. She discovered the full world of Bradley’s secret universe, even a fake identity.
But she didn’t find the one piece of information she sought.
“We’re missing something,” Lex said, pacing around the room. “He’s got all kinds of documentation but nothing to really incriminate Skele. Why go to all this trouble and not keep leverage?”
“Maybe it’s in his e-mail.” Keely opened the e-mail application. “I can’t really imagine anyone putting anything incriminating in e-mail but we might get lucky.”
The software finished loading and the launch page appeared.
Bradley was scrupulously neat when it came to his e-mail. He didn’t have the usual tangle of messages in his Inbox or Sent Items. He’d structured a slew of folders, each empty, each with a cryptic name.
Save for one.
“Interesting,” Keely murmured.
“What?” Lex asked, watching her closely.
“He’s got a VoIP line.”
“Voype?” Lex echoed.
She smiled. “V-O-I-P. It stands for voice over Internet protocol.”
“Pretend I’m someone who spends the bulk of his time in Third World countries and war zones,” Lex said.
Keely felt the pang. She didn’t have to pretend. She swallowed. “VoIP is telephone service over the Internet. You can skip phone lines altogether, most of the time—the Internet carries the calls. The service can be spotty but it’s incredibly cheap. I have it at my apartment.” She switched to the web browser. “As long as you’ve got a telephone and their little widget, you can make and receive phone calls from anywhere you can hook up your computer.”
“Without changing the number?”
She nodded. “You could call me at my 212 Manhattan number and I could actually be in Tuscaloosa. And I could call you from there and you would still see me as calling from the 212 area code.”
Lex flicked her a quick glance. “He couldn’t be traced.”
“Not easily, especially if he was using cable modem to get the VoIP service. The account’s under his false identity, so it’s not traceable to him, or even to this house.”
“Sweet.”
“There’s another nice little aspect to it all. You can check your voice mail online, as well as by phone.”
“By text or by sound?”
“It plays it on your computer. If we can get into his account at the VoIP Web site, we can not only see a detailed log of every incoming and outgoing call, we can get audio files of every message.”
She was grasping at straws, she knew, but she was damned if she was going to give up. When the VoIP site loaded, she crossed her fingers and clicked on the fill button on the browser to see if it would complete the username and password for her.
The lines stayed resolutely blank. Unsurprised, she entered Bradley’s e-mail address and all in for the password.
Username or password incorrect, the screen said.
At least this time around they didn’t have to run in circles to get the password. She clicked on the “Forgot your password?” link. Confidently, she entered the first initial and last name of Bradley’s false identity, along with the e-mail address and clicked Submit.
Error: Username or e-mail address incorrect.
This, she hadn’t expected. The password was supposed to be the hard part. “Trust Bradley to make it difficult,” she said, typing first name, last initial.
Error: Username or e-mail address incorrect. Over the next fifteen minutes, she tried his real name, his parents’ names, the boat, the company, every combination and permutation she could think of. Always with the same result.
Error: Username or e-mail address incorrect.
If she saw it one more time, she was going to scream.
“Dammit.” Lex slapped his hand on the desktop and began to pace again, practically vibrating with frustration. “I thought we were home free. We’d get you and Mom off the hook, we could get the laptop to Stockton so he can nail his case and we could all finally get back to our lives.”
We could all finally get back to our lives.
And there it was, out in the open.
“Is that what happens?” Keely asked quietly. “We stay out of jail and you fly away?”
Lex turned to her. “When I get another assignment.”
She knew it, she knew that was the unspoken agreement an
d yet something in her had to try. Something in her couldn’t give up.
Lex let out a slow breath. “Keely, look, you know I came here to clear my mother’s name.”
“And I guess I was just entertainment along the way.” Her voice sounded far away to her own ears.
“No.” He looked at her steadily. “You weren’t. You’re not. But…I can’t stay here. I just can’t. And I don’t know where I’m going to end up next—or how long I’ll be there.”
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