“She’s not coming back? Ever?”
“That’s my understanding.”
Diana had counted on Hester for a quick review on the way she operated, and to go over any quirks about the people she dealt with. “Did she leave anything for me?”
He gave her a puzzled look. “Like?”
“A list of passwords?”
“I assume you mean for places like the bank?”
“And any other accounts that require them.”
Thomas reached around her and opened an unlocked desk drawer. He took out a yellowed piece of laminated paper and handed it to her. “As far as I know, they’re all right here.”
Alarms loud enough to send an entire city scrambling to take cover in basements went off in Diana. Only this had nothing to do with a tornado. She glanced at her watch. With forced casualness, she said, “Since I’m here, and it’s only a couple of days until I’m official, I might as well get started.” Realizing she might be putting Thomas in an awkward position, she added, “Is that okay?”
He hesitated and then shrugged. “I don’t know why not. As I said, Hester doesn’t work here anymore, so she’s not going to care. And it’s not as if we haven’t been expecting you.” The doorbell chimed. “Michael will be glad there’s someone he can count on. I’m sure you know, this has been a bad year for Hester.” He moved toward the door. “I’ll be right outside if you need anything or have any other questions.”
Diana eased into the chair behind the desk. It fit her as if it had been made for her. Good thing. She had a sick feeling she was going to be spending a lot of time sitting in front of the ancient Apple computer. Somewhere in there was the key to finding out what the hell had put a successful business into a nosedive in less than a year.
She didn’t like the obvious answer, especially with the way Peter and Michael felt about Hester.
Chapter Fourteen
MICHAEL STAYED WITH Hester the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, listening as she relived her fight to save David. She insisted he know what she’d done out of desperation, and how she’d done it. Michael let her talk without telling her that Peter should have been there to hear her confession, not him. Peter was the only one who could give her the forgiveness she so desperately needed.
When Michael finally left, he felt as exhausted as Hester looked. Having his and Peter’s suspicions confirmed didn’t make what would come next any easier. But first he had to deal with Diana. From that moment on, his primary goal would be to get her as far away from the fallout as possible, even if she wound up going back to Kansas, and Peter had to find another bookkeeper. Just considering that possibility was like a punch to the gut. He no more wanted Diana to leave than he wanted to see Hester in jail.
DIANA WAS DEEP into following the money trail that had thrown the Santa Cruz gallery into near financial ruin, and didn’t hear the bell signaling someone had entered the showroom. She’d skipped lunch and then dinner, declining Thomas’s offer to bring her a sandwich, and then later, sushi. She had, however, accepted coffee. Too much coffee. Now, either hunger or caffeine had her feeling light-headed.
A simple comparison between the previous year’s balance sheets and the current year’s was all Diana had needed to figure out that Hester was the reason the Santa Cruz gallery was in trouble. She was a thief. And not a very clever one. On top of that, she wasn’t a very good bookkeeper.
Diana and Peter were going to have a long talk when he got back. Trust was something you put in your wife or your friends, not your bookkeeper. It was a disservice on both ends. From then on, Diana would insist an outside accountant went over the books on a quarterly basis.
Hester’s clumsy embezzlement would have been caught by a first-year accounting student. If Peter had just gone over the books occasionally he would have noticed the anomaly. There were new vendors, paid in even amounts, and haphazardly, without filed receipts to match the billings. Finally, Diana went online and opened the bank statements, studying the scanned copies of the checks. Her heart sunk when her suspicions were confirmed. While the checkbook listed a list of fictional vendors, all of the checks had been made out to, and signed by, Hester.
A feeling came over her that she was no longer alone. She glanced up, expecting Thomas with more coffee. Instead she saw Michael standing in the doorway, his arms crossed, leaning heavily against the oak frame. He looked awful, a somber combination of exhaustion, anger, and sorrow. She tossed her pencil on the desk, and leaned back in the chair. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“I suspected.”
“For how long?”
“I started putting things together a couple of weeks after I got here.”
“And Peter?”
“What he knows about bookkeeping you could write on a postcard and still have room for a return address.”
“Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you do something?”
“I did. I told Peter that I didn’t believe Hester was leaving because she had this sudden urge to move to Oregon to be with her sister. Something else was going on. He said he would take care of it when he got back.
“But then he gave you the wrong starting date, and you showed up early and we had to figure out how to keep you out of what was going on. The most important thing shifted from protecting Hester to protecting you.”
She pushed away her chair from the desk and stood. “I don’t understand why you thought I’d need to be protected.”
“Because once you figured out what was going on, you’d know that a crime had been committed. Peter was prepared to do whatever it took to keep Hester from being arrested. That left you in the middle.”
Diana’s frown turned into a slow smile as she filled in the blanks. They thought that if she knew, she’d become an accessory. “How were you planning to keep me away from the books?”
“Bribery.”
She nodded. “And how were you planning to bribe me without my knowing what was going on?”
“By offering you the apartment at the gallery. Peter figured you wouldn’t mind waiting to start work if you had something to keep you busy, like getting the apartment ready to move into as soon as Cheryl and Andrew came home. I was supposed to tell you that Hester had requested another week to tie up some loose ends before Peter came back.”
“And I ruined it all by showing up today.”
“I told Peter it was a stupid idea, but he insisted you wouldn’t mind when you found out later. As long as we did what we could to keep you out of it.” Michael shrugged, forsaking his attempt to make their idiotic plan sound better than it was.
The corner of her mouth twitched with an unformed smile. “What if I told you that none of this was necessary? Would that take the offer of the apartment off the table?”
Michael ran his hand across his face and then through his hair. “What am I missing?”
“Embezzlement happens all the time. It’s a crime of need and opportunity that’s rarely practiced by hardened criminals. Few prosecutors want anything to do with it.”
“You mean—”
“You and Peter, and probably Hester, have wasted a lot of sleepless nights worrying about this. If Peter doesn’t want to pursue it, then it’s over. My recommendation would be to let Hester set up some kind of payment schedule to return what she stole as quickly as she can. It will go a long way to help both of them make the best of a sad situation. They’ve been together a long time. My guess is that neither of them wants it to end this way.”
Michael pulled out an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. “They won’t need to set up anything. It’s all there. She only took the money because they’d used all their savings and David refused to let her sell the house to pay for more cancer treatments. She managed to convince him that the clinic was going to complete his treatments free of charge because he hadn’t responded as quickly as th
ey’d promised.”
“Oh my God,” Diana said. “That’s so sad.”
“The saddest part is that Hester couldn’t see that David knew he was dying and wanted the treatments stopped. His one wish was to go home to be with her for whatever time he had left. ”
“Peter’s right. She’s suffered enough.”
Michael came into the room and sat on the corner of the desk. “You’re sure about the prosecution thing?”
“Positive. But just to be sure California operates the same way Kansas does, I called around this afternoon to double-check. And even if you decided to pursue it, there isn’t a prosecutor anywhere who’d want to take that on.”
He gave her a smile that was the best thank you she’d ever received.
“I could kiss you,” he said.
Diana looked deep into his eyes, and was lost in the way he looked back. Her heart on her sleeve that he would say he was only joking, she whispered, “Okay.”
This time the smile he gave her curled her toes. He reached for her hand and brought her around the desk to stand in front of him. Without saying anything more, he cupped her face with his hands, and with slow deliberate intent, brought her forward until his lips brushed hers.
She snaked her arms through his and wrapped them around his neck.
He kissed her again, this time with his lips parted. On the third kiss, their tongues touched.
Diana sighed and fleetingly wondered what he would say if she asked him if he’d ever made love on a desk. Instead, she said, “What about Thomas?”
“I sent him home.”
She kissed him, long and hard. A soft groan rumbled in the back of his throat. All of the baggage she’d brought with her from all of the men who had disappointed her exploded like a balloon filled with brightly colored confetti. Mentally standing in the middle of the downpour, she closed her eyes, swept away by a wondrous sense of promise.
IN THE COVE, a three-year-old boy rode his father’s shoulders up the steps from the beach, talking nonstop as he had for the past half hour. He’d fought going home the way he fought eating orange and yellow vegetables. It was their last night at the cove, his last chance to hear a mermaid sing. Tomorrow his father would take him back to his mother in Sacramento, and then disappear for another month. Or more. His dad traveled with his job, and the boy never knew when he would look out the window and see him coming. The boy spent a lot of time looking out the window.
The moon was as high as it could go in the star-filled sky. They only had to wait until the seagulls were lined up just outside the wave’s foam barrier, waiting, too. And then the mermaid would sing. The boy knew this because it was written in the book his grandmother read to him every night before he went to bed.
He couldn’t leave now, not when he was so close to hearing the music that would grant him a wish. It would be his fault if his mother moved away and his father couldn’t find him.
A tear escaped the little boy’s eye and rolled down his cheek. He reached up to wipe it away with the back of his hand, then turned for one last look at the ocean. But it wasn’t the ocean that made him sit up straight and grab his father’s chin to turn his head toward the house at the top of the stairs, it was a soft blue light the exact color of the mermaid’s tail.
“It’s her,” the little boy insisted. “We have to save her.”
The father laughed. His son’s imagination was only one of the hundreds of things he loved about him. Already he felt an intense sorrow that as his boy grew older, their magical journeys would end. The father would be like Puff, the Magic Dragon, left behind by Jackie Paper.
“How do you know it’s her?” the father asked.
“The color. It’s special.” He wiggled to get down. “The book says so.”
The father stopped and stared. He didn’t believe in mermaids or magic, but he believed in his little boy.
“Maybe we—” The words stuck in his throat as the light flashed and abruptly disappeared. “It’s gone,” he said, more disappointed than he could comprehend.
The boy squealed and clapped his hands. “She escaped!”
The man’s knees grew weak. He reached up, grabbed the boy under his arms, and swung him to the ground. The practical analytical side of his brain refused to believe what they’d seen was anything more than a blue night-light.
But the side of his brain that rode with his son on a boat with billowed sail knew without question that they had witnessed something too special for words. Instinctively, he knew that this time the magic had been for someone else. One day, the magic would be for them.
You’re invited to revisit the beach house, as Georgia Bockoven’s Beach House series continues.
Coming soon from William Morrow. . .
Read on for a sneak peek at the story!
And don’t miss the other Beach House books!
The Beach House
The beach house is a peaceful haven, a place to escape everyday problems. Here, three families find their feelings intensified, and their lives transformed each summer.
Another Summer
The moving and powerful story of four families, the conflicts that tear them apart . . . and the house that brings them together.
Return to the Beach House
Over the course of one year, in a charming cottage by the sea, eight people will discover love and remembrance, reconciliation and reunion, and beginnings and endings in this unforgettable novel.
In the next Beach House novel . . .
AFTER YOU’VE GIVEN your baby to strangers, how do you answer when someone asks if you have children?
The beach house that has harbored and healed troubled hearts for decades opens its door once again for a powerful emotional story that spans an entire summer. The first lost soul who arrives is an achingly lonely woman who sees herself as little more than a placeholder in a life as empty as a champagne bottle at a wedding reception.
Fourteen years ago, Melinda Campbell was fifteen and a half, pregnant, and terrified the baby’s father and grandfather would find out. Melinda’s father, critically ill with black lung disease, sends his daughter to stay with her aunt until the baby is born. Torn between trying to take care of her baby or her father, Melinda chooses adoption.
Now, thirteen years later, she is living the life her father struggled to give her, college educated and moving up the corporate ladder in a state a thousand miles from West Virginia. Her cupboards are filled with food that didn’t come from a food bank, her closet has shoes that equal her father’s yearly income. So what if her smiles are empty or if she sees the world through haunted eyes—or if when she goes home at night her only company is a silver and white shelter cat?
Jeremy Richmond knows the beach house the way a painter knows his canvas, intimately and focused on detail. He is a strong-willed passionate man whose life revolves around his adopted daughter, Shiloh. She owned his heart the moment his wife, Tess, put her into his arms. For three years they were the picture-perfect family, the one advertisers use to sell everything from cars to cameras. Then Shiloh was diagnosed with pediatric lupus and Tess walked away, saying she wanted no part of taking care of a critically ill child.
Jeremy’s life becomes narrowly focused between his contracting business and Shiloh. He convinces himself it is enough for both of them when Shiloh opens a door to a world Jeremy had no idea she inhabited.
With heartbreaking calm and devastating acceptance, Shiloh tells Jeremy she’s tired of fighting her illness and wants to meet her biological mother before it’s too late. Desperate to give Shiloh something to live for, Jeremy agrees to do what he can to find someone he has no desire to meet.
Bestselling author Georgia Bockoven is at her powerful and emotional peak telling the story of three deeply wounded souls who come together at the beach house. Distrust and anger keep them apart; only understanding and
love can heal them . . .
About the Author
GEORGIA BOCKOVEN is an award-winning author who began writing fiction after a successful career as a freelance journalist and photographer. Her books have sold more than three million copies worldwide. The mother of two, she resides in northern California with her husband, John.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Books by Georgia Bockoven
The Cottage Next Door
Return to the Beach House
Carly’s Gift
Things Remembered
The Year Everything Changed
Another Summer
Disguised Blessing
The Beach House
An Unspoken Promise
Far From Home
Alone in a Crowd
Moments
A Marriage of Convenience
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE COTTAGE NEXT DOOR. Copyright © 2015 by Georgia Bockoven. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780062389879
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062431639
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