She pulled out her cell phone and sent a text to Parrish.
Meet me at the office?
* * *
She fit the office key into the lock of the heavy steel door, but the tumblers didn’t turn. Now she grasped the ugly handle hard with her left hand and with her right, jiggled the key, left, then right, then left again, until finally, the key turned in the lock.
She paused for a moment. At one time, Wendell had talked about having the same kind of security system he’d used at Sand Dollar Lane installed here at the office. Riley couldn’t remember if he’d actually followed through on that plan.
Holding her breath, she opened the door and stepped inside, waiting for the shriek of an alarm or flashing lights. But all was quiet.
* * *
She walked quickly to the front window that looked out on the village green and closed the old-fashioned venetian blinds, then drew the curtains too, before snapping on the light in the office.
The outer office wasn’t a large room, maybe ten by fourteen feet. The walls were painted planks, and the floor was linoleum, although Wendell had installed a thick Berber carpet in an effort to class the place up. Various postcard-worthy color photos of Belle Isle dotted the walls: a scenic shot of the Big Belle lighthouse, views of the harbor, the beach, and some village shops, along with slightly fuzzy old black-and-white enlargements depicting the early days of the island. Her favorite of all the photos was one of her great-grandfather James and his brother, her great-uncle Charles, posing with shovels planted in the sandy soil in front of a large RILEY BROTHERS REALTY sign. Her grandfather’s massive oak desk stood near the center of the room, used now as a receptionist’s desk, although Wendell had actually fired his receptionist more than a year earlier, claiming she was incompetent.
In the interest of being thorough, Riley opened and closed the desk drawers, finding nothing besides forgotten pencils, pens, paper clips, and rubber bands. There was a filing drawer, but the only thing it held was a pair of worn flip-flops and a stained coffee mug.
She went into the inner office, and in the half-light from the outer office found the desk and turned on the lamp. Wendell’s desk was as tidy as Wendell himself. Large, sleek, contemporary, and made of some rare African wood she couldn’t pronounce.
Riley sat down in the ergonomic chair. The desktop was bare, except for a phone and a sterling picture frame that held a studio portrait of Maggy that she’d had taken for Wendell’s Father’s Day gift two years earlier. The picture showed Maggy in profile, in a pensive pose, her hands resting lightly in her lap, her face tilted up toward the light. Riley’s face softened as she touched the photo. Her girl had changed so much in two short years. Hadn’t they all?
She was about to open the top desk drawer when she heard the back door creaking open.
Now there were footsteps, light ones, in the hallway, coming her way.
“Riles? Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Parrish was dressed in black: black yoga pants, black tank top, black-and-pink running shoes. “How’d you get in here?”
“Through pure, dumb luck, I found Mama’s jacket in the back of her golf cart, put it on, and in her jacket pocket magically found her key ring with a key to the office,” Riley said.
“Luck of the Irish,” Parrish said, looking around the room.
She cleared her throat. “As your attorney, and as an officer of the court, I feel obliged to tell you that what you’re doing right now could be considered obstruction of justice. Or maybe tampering with evidence. I warned you I know squat about criminal law, right? But that much I vaguely remember.”
“Okay,” Riley said. She pointed at the three-drawer file cabinet against one wall. “I’ve been warned. Now get busy going through those files while I ransack Wendell’s desk.”
* * *
“Any idea of what we’re looking for?” Parrish pulled out the first file in the first drawer, which was labeled ARCHITECT’S RENDERINGS. It was thick, with lots of folded blueprints.
“Not really,” Riley admitted. “I guess it would be too obvious for Wendell to have a file labeled ‘Shenanigans,’ huh?”
“Or ‘Foreclosure.’ I’ll look though, just in case,” Parrish said.
Riley slowly opened the shallow top desk drawer. It contained all the things you’d expect to find: small stainless mesh baskets, with the contents neatly sorted. Paper clips in one, rubber bands in another, postage stamps, three different sizes of Post-it Notes. There was a stapler and a tape dispenser. She was about to close the drawer when something caught her eye.
She picked up the container of paper clips and stirred it around with her forefinger, then picked up the object.
Riley slipped the white-gold band onto her thumb. “Oh, God.” She choked back a sob.
“What?” Parrish dropped the file she was holding and rushed over to the desk. “What is it?”
“Wendell’s wedding ring,” Riley whispered, holding up her hand.
“Oh, Riles,” Parrish said with a sigh.
“It was tossed in with a bunch of paper clips. I almost missed it, but then I realized one of these things is not like the other.”
“Did you know he’d stopped wearing it?”
“No. The last few times I saw him, he was in and out of the house in a hurry, or we were bickering. I guess I never even noticed. How’s that for some kind of subliminal message?”
“What do you think it means?”
“Well, he’s known the marriage was over for a while now. Maybe he took it off after our last unpleasant encounter. Or maybe he quit wearing it months ago. Maybe his girlfriend objected to it.”
“I still think this was a bad idea. Maybe we should stop looking,” Parrish said. “This is too hard on you. Who knows what else we’ll find? Let the local cops sort it all out.”
“No.” Riley shook her head vigorously. “If the cops were any good, they would have searched this office already. I can’t count on them for answers. If it makes you feel any better, we’ll put everything back where we found it before we leave tonight.”
Parrish picked up the ring from the desk blotter where Riley had placed it. She held it up and read the inscription aloud. “‘AAFY.’ What’s that mean?”
“Always and forever yours. He used to write me the sweetest notes when we were dating, and he always signed like that. Always and forever yours, Wendell. I wonder if he took it off after he realized always wasn’t going to be forever.”
“What are you going to do with it?” Parrish asked, handing it back.
Riley tucked the ring into the jacket pocket. “Keep it. I’ll give it to Maggy at some point. Probably.”
* * *
“Look at this,” Riley said, holding out a file folder. “I know you were joking about a foreclosure file, but here it is.”
Parrish took the folder and examined the documents. “Wow. It’s the mortgage for Sand Dollar Lane. Which you, apparently, signed.”
“Somebody signed it, but that’s not my signature,” Riley said. “And did you notice the copies of all the foreclosure notices there, too? Whoever signed my name on that mortgage must have also signed that I’d received those notices.”
Parrish set the file aside and picked up the one she’d just put down. “This might be something.”
“What?”
“Articles of incorporation for a company called Sand Dollar Development Corp.” Parrish traced a line down the document. “You’re the chief executive officer.”
“What the hell?” Riley said. “Wonder what it means?”
“Dunno. But the business address is a post office box in Wilmington.”
“I guess that could be something important,” Riley said, going back to her search of the desk. “There’s a copy machine over there. Better make a copy.”
“A copier? That’s so old school,” Parrish chided. She whipped her smartphone from her bra and clicked off a couple of exposures.
“Hey, Riles,” Parrish said a min
ute later. “I found four more articles of incorporation with you listed as chief executive officer.”
She waved a batch of documents in the air. “They’ve all got different names, but their mailing address is that same Wilmington post office box. Let’s see. You’re also CEO of St. Mary’s Holdings, Fiddler’s Creek Enterprises, Oceanview Partners, and Belle Isle Landings Corp. Aren’t those the companies the FBI agent asked about?”
“Yeah,” Riley said. “Come to think of it, he did ask me about those names.”
“Who’s Samuel Gordon?”
“Beats me. Why?”
“He’s listed as the agent of record on all these articles of incorporation.”
“I never heard that name, and I’m pretty sure I never heard Wendell mention him,” Riley said. She took out her own smartphone. “Let’s Google him … what was that name again?”
“Samuel Gordon. Spelled like it sounds.”
Riley typed the name into the search engine and frowned down at the phone.
“He was a lawyer in Wilmington.”
“Was? Did he get disbarred?”
“Worse. He’s dead. I’m looking at his obituary. He died six months ago. At the age of eighty-two. I think you better make copies of all those corporation documents.”
“I’m on it.”
Riley went back to searching the desk drawers. The contents were nothing unusual or very interesting. Until she opened the bottom right file drawer.
A pair of tan-and-white golf shoes sat atop a stack of envelopes. She lifted the shoes out and looked at them. Wendell’s, undoubtedly. His feet were unusually small for a man, a size seven, and wide—he wore a D width, which meant most of his shoes had to be custom ordered. She set the shoes on the desktop.
The entire bottom drawer was filled with unopened mail. Riley scooped up a handful of envelopes. They all had those telltale windows. Bills. Utility bills, credit card bills. And there were official-looking letters from the same source. Coastal Carolina Bank. Dozens of missives from that bank. Dunning letters.
Riley exhaled slowly. “Parrish. I think you better look at this.”
31
Parrish picked up a handful of envelopes and let them drift down onto the desk blotter like oversize pieces of confetti. “Wonder what this is all about?”
“Only one way to find out,” Riley said. She grabbed an envelope and started to rip.
“No!” Parrish snatched the envelope away. “That’s tampering with the U.S. mail. For sure, that’s a federal offense. You can’t open any of these.”
“Watch me,” Riley said. “According to those articles of incorporation you found, I’m CEO of every one of the companies this mail is addressed to. Wendell’s dead. I’m not. It’s as simple as that.”
“I doubt the sheriff is going to see it like that,” Parrish said. “Or that baby-faced FBI agent.”
Riley fixed her with an annoyed glare. “When did you get to be such a rules follower?”
“When I was sworn in to the bar,” Parrish said. “I happen to have an aversion to prison.”
“And I have an aversion to homelessness and poverty,” Riley shot back. She opened the top desk drawer and withdrew a wicked-looking brass letter-opener. “Now. Are you in or are you out?”
Parrish knew she’d been overruled. Again. “God help me. I’m in.”
She picked up a stack of envelopes and began sorting them into piles. “Let’s at least get a system going. Five different companies. Five different piles. We’ll put them in order by date, oldest to newest. Put the bills in one stack, the notices from the bank in another. Got it?”
* * *
It took them an hour to sort all the pieces of mail. “There must be a couple of hundred bills and notices here,” Parrish said. “Some of them are postmarked as long as a year ago.”
“I know,” Riley said. She gathered up the first batch of bills and sat cross-legged on the floor. “I’ll start with St. Mary’s Holdings.”
“And I’ll do Sand Dollar,” Parrish said, taking the desk chair Riley had vacated.
Riley slit open the first envelope and withdrew a single sheet of paper. She furrowed her brow as she read the fine print. “It’s an overdue payment notice. From Coastal Carolina Bank. There’s a loan number, and a balance of three million. Jesus! Do you suppose I’m liable for all this debt?”
“Hopefully not. You didn’t sign any loan documents and, from what I can tell just glancing at what we’ve seen so far, the indebtedness is corporate, not personal. But again, I mostly don’t know what the hell I’m talking about here.” Parrish held up the notice she’d opened. “Mine is an overdue payment notice from the same bank. A loan number, and a balance of one point three million.”
For the next hour the room was quiet except for the sound of envelopes being opened.
At some point, Parrish walked into the reception area and came back with an adding machine. “Good idea,” Riley said. “I suck at math. There’s a calculator in that top desk drawer there. Hand it to me, will you?”
The women began tapping away at their respective keyboards, unconsciously setting up a cadence that made the room sound like a busy corporate office.
Riley yawned loudly and glanced at her watch. “Holy crap. It’s past midnight. I’m gonna make us some coffee.”
“Good idea,” Parrish said. “Otherwise we’ll never get through all this stuff.”
* * *
They worked their way through two pots of coffee, and at 2 a.m., split a slightly stale packet of cheese crackers Riley found in the long-gone-receptionist’s desk drawer.
“Gawd,” Riley moaned, sprawling backward onto the carpet. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’ve opened past-due bills from grading contractors, architects, civil engineers, surveyors, landscape designers. And that doesn’t even include the credit card charges. It looks to me like when Wendell got one card maxed out, he’d just get himself issued another card to another corporation. By my count he had six different Visa cards, two MasterCards, three Discover cards, and two Amexes.” She consulted the legal pad she’d used to keep tally. “Over eighty thousand in credit card debt.”
“Did you get a total for the bank loans for the three corporations you checked?” Parrish asked.
“Oh, yes. It’s at six million.”
“I’ve only got three point two million for the two I looked at,” Parrish reported.
Parrish tapped a pen on the desktop. “I think all these companies Wendell set up were dummy corporations. He probably knew he couldn’t get a bank as small as Coastal Carolina to underwrite all these loans to one individual.”
“So he created five different companies to spread out the risk, and listed me as CEO, but why did he need all that money?”
“For this,” Parrish said, holding up the file folder. “It looks like he went on a spending spree, buying land here on Belle Isle. What did he want with more land?”
“Beats me,” Riley said.
“I gotta take a potty break,” Parrish said. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“That doorway in the outer office,” Riley said, pointing. “The light’s on the wall, just to the right of the sink.”
A minute later, Parrish opened the bathroom door an inch. “Hey, there’s no toilet paper or paper towels in here.”
“That’s Wendell,” Riley groused, standing up. “He always assumed toilet paper just magically appeared in a bathroom. Hang on, I’ll get some from the supply closet.”
The closet was located in the back entrance hall. As a child, Riley and Billy had loved accompanying their father to the office on Saturdays and raiding it for pens, paper, staplers, and supplies they used to play “work” in the kneehole beneath the receptionist’s desk.
She swung the door open and groped around in the dark for the pull chain to turn on the light.
The wooden shelves inside were stocked as they’d been when Riley had “shopped” there decades ago. Reams of copy paper, ink cartridges, boxes of comp
any stationery. Sitting on the bottom shelf were a pair of long-outdated IBM Selectric typewriters, and beside them were stacks of toilet paper and paper towels. She grabbed a roll of each and was about to close the door when she saw a large framed object pushed to the back of the closet.
Riley tucked the rolls under her arm and pulled the frame from its resting place, then delivered the supplies to Parrish, who was still in the bathroom.
* * *
“Look what I found in the storeroom,” she said, when Parrish walked back into the office.
“‘Belle Isle Master Plan Phase II,’” Parrish said, standing back to look at the frame. It was a large document, five feet by three feet. “I take it you’ve never seen this before?”
“It was shoved way in the back of the supply closet. I’ve never laid eyes on it before,” Riley said. She dragged the plan over to a bare space on the outer office wall and, with effort, managed to hang it from a nail protruding from the wallboard.
“Looks like you found its former home,” Parrish said. She perched on the edge of the desk and gazed at the plan.
It showed Belle Isle’s developed south end, with areas designated as home sites, the marina, village, golf course, and shopping area. But the most detailed and ambitious portions showed the island’s now largely undeveloped north end.
“Look at this,” Riley said, gesturing at the picture. “Hotels. A second marina. An eighteen-hole golf course. Two huge retail ‘villages,’ condos, apartments. An airstrip, for God’s sake! It looks like a mini Hilton Head Island.”
“Apartments?” Parrish stood closer to the plan, her finger tracing the color-coded designations. “We’ve never had apartments on the island before.”
“Or hotels. Or parking decks, or any of this crap,” Riley said, her voice dripping disgust.
“I take it Wendell never discussed any of this with you?”
“Never! We had a knock-down, drag-out fight about the fancy boutique hotel deal he’d lined up. He knew exactly how I felt about any kind of high-density development on the north end. And cars on the island! My grandfather deeded all that land into a nature conservancy for a wildlife preserve. After the last blowup Wendell and I had over it, I thought the idea was dead.”
The Weekenders Page 21