“No problem, I’ll text it to you as soon as we’re done. I don’t know much about divorce court, but if you need anyone to testify, Cynthia and I’ll be happy to tell the judge what a bitch she is.”
“Oh,” Morgan said, dreading what he might be about to learn. “She’s caused you problems too?”
“Oh yeah. A couple of years ago she made a pass at me. When I said no, she told Cynthia that I’d seduced her into an affair. I thought my whole world was going to go up in smoke. But then Cynthia asked her when we’d slept together and she claimed some nights that Cynthia knew she’d been with me.”
“I’m sorry man. She and I haven’t been getting along for years, but I thought it was just my problem. I guess she’s been causing problems for other people and I was just oblivious.”
“Yeah, she’s crazy. Way crazy. I thought about telling you some of the stuff she’s done, but… I figured you must know. Told myself it was none of my business… Actually, I guess I was just too chickenshit to sit down and have a man-to-man with you. Sorry.”
Morgan gave a rueful laugh, “I know where you’re coming from. I have a hard time talking to people about that kind of stuff myself.”
“Yeah, but I should’ve done better for my best friend. I’ll hang up now so you can call Vic and then you can check your emails.”
“Wait, sorry. I’ve got more problems. Arlette cleaned out all our accounts and shut down my credit cards. I hate to ask, but I’m gonna need some cash somehow. Would you be able to lend me some?”
“Oh, hell yeah. How much are you thinking?”
“If you can spare it, $10,000. I’m afraid this’s going to take quite a while and I’m going to have to live in a hotel and—”
“You don’t have to explain. It’s not a problem. I’ll write you a check, unless you know a better way for me to get you the cash?”
“No, that’d be great. Right now though, I’m on my way to Asheville. I’ll call you when I’m back and can pick up the check.
Dubiously, Roger said, “You’re going on vacation?”
“No, um, my brother was just killed. He lived up there and I’m going to make arr—”
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. Your whole life’s just gone to hell hasn’t it?”
“Yeah… it sure feels that way,” Morgan croaked, his throat closing so he couldn’t say any more.
“Anything I, or Cynthia, can do, you just let me know. You need me to go up to Asheville with you?”
“No, Adam’s with me. He’s…” Morgan’s voice broke again, “He’s been awesome.” He took a deep breath and swallowed. “I’m going to be reading those emails on my phone during the drive. Any of them that need something done, I might just forward to you. Would that be okay?”
“You bet buddy. Do you have enough cash for this trip to Asheville?”
“I think so. We’re using Adam’s debit card, spending his earnings from his job last summer.”
“He’s a good kid. I hope you know how lucky you are there.”
“Yes, I do…”
Once they’d signed off, Morgan sat for a couple of minutes to get his emotions back in control. Adam reached over to pat his shoulder and he thought to himself just how true Roger’s final words had been.
Taking a deep breath, he called Vic Naylor and told him about the situation with Arlette. Vic explained that he and Arlette would need to be separated for a year before a divorce could be final in North Carolina. He also said that the documented proof of Arlette’s affair would mean that Morgan didn’t have to pay alimony, but that he might still be responsible for “post-separation support.” Most importantly, Morgan and Arlette would equally divide their marital property as of the date of their separation. “I suspect she transferred your joint accounts into her own account in hopes she could say that today’s the date of your separation. She’ll claim that on that date the money was in her account and therefore was hers alone, rather than belonging to both of you.”
“Oh. Does that mean she’s no longer entitled to my future paychecks or income from my job?”
“Well, she’s almost certainly going to be awarded some “post-separation support,” out of those paychecks, but she wouldn’t be entitled to half your future income like she’ll get half of your current property. She’s only entitled to half of what you have as of the date of separation. You should print out statements regarding the current value of any investments you have.”
“Okay…” Morgan said, feeling surprised that Arlette’d essentially started the separation by throwing him out of the house before he got his severance bonus. Even if she didn’t understand that he and Roger intended to contest the new contract, she should have wanted half of that $1.4 million. To Vic he said, “Can you record this as the date of our separation for me?”
“Sure, but be sure to remember that if you guys get together again, the separation starts all over after that date. If you might get a settlement of any kind for Matilda, be wary of her asking to make up, or even just wanting to fool around. Anything that might be construed as an interruption to your separation.”
“Oh!” Morgan said, thinking that sounded like just the kind of thing Arlette would do. He didn’t necessarily want to cut her out of all the income that might come from Matilda, he still thought fondly of the early years of their relationship. But, he wanted to be in control. And, he was really tired of her trying to screw everyone over, especially him.
Once Morgan finished talking to Vic, he asked Adam how he was doing. “You need a break from driving?”
“No, I’m doing fine. You just keep handling what you can.”
Morgan decided his next agenda item should be to go through his emails. He didn’t like reading substantial documents on his phone, so he plugged the phone in to charge on one of the car’s USB ports. Then he set it up to be a hotspot for his laptop.
With some trepidation, he logged into his TD Ameritrade account, hoping he could sell some stock instead of borrowing from Roger. Its balance was zero.
What?! he thought. It takes days to sell a stock so even if she’d initiated a sale as soon as she threw Morgan out of the house, the money should still be there. He looked for the dates on the sales. Early April. Resignedly, he thought, I guess I shouldn’t have made such a big deal of how I only check our stock accounts at the end of each quarter.
He read his emails on the laptop. Many of them were angry and the amount of vitriol they spewed made him a little uncomfortable. The stories they told about how they’d come to sign the new contract had a certain uniformity though. Almost always someone from the legal office had stopped by their office asking them to quickly sign a “slightly modified” contract that was “needed so the sale of Matilda could go through.” They weren’t sent a copy of the contract to review ahead of time, nor given a copy of what they’d signed. If they asked for a copy, they were promised that one would be emailed to them. In fact, however, no one had received such a copy to date. Morgan suddenly realized that this put all of them in the unenviable position of contesting a contract, when they didn’t actually know what it said. Most of the employees had just signed the papers where they’d been told to. Some people had skimmed over the contract, but it was pages long and no one had noticed any phrases that they’d interpreted as subverting their right to a share of the company.
He was about to think that all they’d have to support their claim that the signatures had been “secured by deception or fraud” would be the relative uniformity of their stories. Then he came to an email from Bill Lake. A blowhard and a conspiracy theorist, Bill was someone that most people in the company avoided when possible because of his tendency to bend their ears till they broke. When Morgan first opened the email and saw that it went on for pages, he rolled his eyes in dismay.
Morgan thought he was in for a real slog through another of Bill’s tirades, but then he read the first line of his “reply all” message. “I didn’t sign that damned thing and I tried to tell you idiots you shouldn’t ha
ve signed it either!”
Bill went on to describe how he’d immediately been suspicious when they came in with the document but didn’t seem to want to give him time to read it. It didn’t come as a surprise to Morgan that Bill had set up his office desktop so it’d record audio and video through its integrated camera and microphone upon a keystroke command. Nor that Bill had executed those keystrokes when he decided the “legal drone” was trying to bully him into signing. He’d demanded a copy to read and insisted they come back to get him to sign it in a few hours. After badgering him unsuccessfully, the guy apparently left, promising to email the contract. But he’d never sent it and never returned for a signature.
Morgan glanced at the header for the email to see if the AV file had been attached but it hadn’t. Even though he didn’t know how it could be done without the attachment being signified in the header, he scrolled to the bottom to see if the file had been embedded somehow. It wasn’t there either. He resumed reading, forcing himself not to skim over paragraph after paragraph of, “I told you so” and, “if only you’d listened” and, “I’m the only one…”
Finally, he came to a section that bemoaned the fact that the video had been stored on a Matilda server, known at the company as the “K-drive.” Bill could no longer reach the K-drive since he couldn’t get back in the building.
Morgan used one of his back doors into Matilda and opened the K-drive. He found Bill’s subfolder, which had its own AV subfolder. As Morgan should have expected, there were a lot of video files stored there, but he was able to eliminate a lot of them by date since he knew approximately when he’d been asked to sign the revised contract himself. He was still left with three possible files, but when he started watching the first one, it proved to be the correct one. He didn’t try to watch or download the whole thing over his cell phone link, he just scrolled to a couple of spots, both of which looked pretty damning. He sent the whole thing to Google Drive and gave Roger access to it.
Then it was back to reviewing more emails. He didn’t find anything else particularly important.
Morgan called Roger and gave him a brief recap of what he’d learned as well as making sure he recognized the importance of his access to the Google Drive video file. He encouraged Roger to copy the file to several different secure storage medias and get a copy to Treyvn and Associates.
“How are you holding up?” Roger asked, concern in his voice.
“Okay I guess. Having stuff to do’s been taking my mind off my brother. Vic was a lot of help, thanks.”
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
Once he’d hung up, Adam said, “Was all that about whatever happened with the sale of Matilda?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened there? I mean, if it’s okay to tell me?”
Morgan decided it was. Explaining what’d happened seemed to clarify some of the issues in his own mind. Besides, he thought it might serve as a cautionary tale. Having heard this tale of woe might someday keep Adam from making a similar mistake himself.
When he finished, Adam said, “Wow, you’re really getting screwed by a lot of people you trusted, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Morgan said, feeling himself tense up as he thought about it.
“But,” Adam said, “it sounds like there’s some chance you can get this contract revision thrown out?”
Morgan sighed, “Maybe? I sure hope so.”
“So, I’ve heard Mom go on and on about how Matilda essentially consists of your idea and your programming. She says everyone else in the company’s just riding your coattails, helping you sell it. She thinks their shares of the sale should be tiny.”
“Yeah,” Morgan said with a bitter laugh. “That’s her theory all right. But they worked hard to build the company, sell the product, manage the people…” After a pause, he said, “And they were my friends. She wanted to demand a bigger share for us, but I didn’t think that was right.”
“Sounds like some of them probably aren’t your friends any more, huh?” Adam said softly.
“True dat,” Morgan said, trying to be flip. It fell flat.
They rode in silence for several minutes, then Adam said, “What happened between you and your brother?”
The silence stretched onward as Morgan wondered how to tell the story. Finally, he said, “We were inseparable as little kids. He was two years younger and had a smart mouth that got him in trouble a lot. It seemed like I was always protecting him. From kids he’d pissed off and… from ordinary playground bullies too.
“But one time,” Morgan found himself misting up again, “a bully in my own grade picked on me. He had my head locked under one arm and was giving me a Dutch rub. Suddenly, he let go. I leapt away, of course, but when I turned around to see why, I found Daryn latched on to the back of his leg, biting his thigh. The bully was screaming bloody murder and trying to hit him. I had to drag Daryn off. We all got in trouble, but Daryn wasn’t the least bit repentant.” Morgan wiped at his eyes again as he thought about how he’d felt, learning the lengths that his little brother would go to—for him.
Morgan sat reminiscing to himself until Adam prompted him again, “So, what happened?”
Morgan shook his head, “He wasn’t just a smart ass, he was really, really bright. He decided he wanted to be in the same grade as me and started doing everything he could to skip ahead. He lobbied his teachers, he lobbied Mom and, of course, he did great in his classes. He even found out that kids who are unchallenged and bored in class tend to act out. He’d already been acting out, but he got even worse and started telling everyone it was cause of how bored he was.
“Daryn read ahead on the books for the grade he was in and asked to take all the tests for the whole year, all in one day. They pointed out that he’d still be behind the other kids if he skipped ahead in the middle of the year. He stole some books from kids in the class a year ahead of him, read them, and then asked to take all the tests for that year too. Eventually, just to get him to shut up, they gave him the tests for the year he was in. He aced them. Then they let him take the tests for the next year, up to the point the class in front of him was at.”
Morgan snorted softly as he remembered it, “So, they let him skip that year. About that time I started to think about how embarrassed I’d be to have my little brother skip up into the same year I was in. I told him to cut it out and asked my mom to make him stop, but he’d already finished the books for that year so he started the books for the year I was in. They skipped him into my year over the summer. I got really worried then; I thought he’d keep doing it until he was several years ahead of me. That’d have been really embarrassing. He didn’t though, he just wanted to be with me.
“I’d always been one of, if not the smartest kid in my class.
“Not after that.
“No one had any doubt that Daryn was the smartest kid in the class. Hell, he was probably the smartest kid in the state, maybe the country. Now I found him annoying.
“He never rubbed my nose in just how smart he was. In fact, he was pretty supportive. But, if I had any trouble in a class he’d offer to help. Which was… pretty humiliating in its own right.
“When we graduated high school, he got accepted by all kinds of elite schools, essentially with full ride scholarships to any of them. However, we both went to the best school I got into. I wanted to be rid of him so I told him he should go ahead and go to MIT. He said it wasn’t the school, but what you learned that mattered in the long run.
“And then he stayed with me.”
Morgan turned to look at Adam and said plaintively, “He loved me. Probably more than anyone else in my life… except maybe you. I don’t know why he did; I treated him like shit. When we were college sophomores he founded a company that programmed games that ran on ordinary desktop PCs. I was already into programming and he asked me to join him. I told him I didn’t have time for that crap, thinking he couldn’t succeed without me. I was wrong, his company made a lot o
f money. And I hated him for it. After college we virtually never saw each other. When our parents were killed in a car wreck a couple of years later, we got in a big fight after the funeral.
“I never saw him again after that day.”
Adam said, “Wow, that doesn’t sound like you.”
“Yeah, well, as the years went by I started to realize what a jerk I’d been. I hated myself for driving away my brother and best friend. I worked hard to calm my temper.” Morgan shrugged, “Maybe I calmed it too much. Your mother says I’m emotionless… A robot.”
“I like the way nothing gets you flustered,” Adam said. After a brief pause, Adam continued, “And I hate the way she turns a cricket into a crisis.”
The road rolled by for a while. Morgan said, “And now I’ll never get to tell him how sorry I am.”
Adam said, “You can show his kids. Doing right by them should go a long way toward making up for whatever parts of the fight belonged to you.”
“Almost all of them,” Morgan said sadly, “almost all of them.”
Chapter Two
They got to the police station after eight. Morgan wondered if anyone had fed Lindl and Kiri. There was a brief delay while he produced ID to confirm he actually was the kids’ uncle; then he and Adam were taken to the room where they’d been held.
The policewoman knocked on the door, opening it without waiting to be asked in. The first thing Morgan saw was a pizza box from the Mellow Mushroom with only two slices remaining. They’ve eaten, he thought with relief, then turned his eyes to the two occupants of the room.
Lindl, the boy, got to his feet. He was tall and rangy with shoulder length dirty blonde hair and wary gray eyes that looked immeasurably sad. He wore jeans and a faded T-shirt with a picture of Schwarzenegger in a powdered wig. Below the picture were the words “I’ll be Bach.” He said, “Hi. You’re dad’s brother Morgan?”
Morgan nodded, wondering whether to reach out for a handshake or presume that a hug was in order. Uncertain, he glanced at the girl. She hadn’t gotten up. Instead she still sprawled on a folding chair, staring skeptically at him. Skinny and pale, she had red-rimmed, shockingly-blue eyes and thick, jet-black hair cropped an inch long. She wore a black T-shirt, black pants, and a neon pink belt.
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