A Gala Event

by Sheila Connolly

  “Have you read the file?” Meg demanded.

  “Yeah,” Art admitted. “Didn’t take long.”

  “What did you think?” Meg tried to keep her tone neutral.

  Art sighed. “There’s not much there, Meg. The fire was determined to have been set, so it was not electrical, or a careless cigarette, or a forgotten candle. It started in the basement and spread quickly, because the building was old and drafty and the wood was dry. Your buddy Aaron had himself a little hidey-hole down there where he could carry on his less-than-legal activities out of sight of Mom and Dad. He managed to get himself out of the building, God knows how, but there’s no evidence that he tried to help anybody else get out. That didn’t go over well with the jury. That and he showed no remorse at the trial. Both probably contributed to his long sentence.”

  Meg didn’t like what she was hearing. “Where were the parents found?”

  “In their beds. Probably overcome by smoke. As was the grandmother.”

  “Sad,” Meg said, almost to herself. “So nothing new?”

  “Not really. To be honest, I don’t think Chief Burchard dug very hard, but I can’t see any reason why he should have. I don’t know if I would have, in his place. It looks like the proverbial open-and-shut case. I know that’s not what you want to hear, Meg.”

  “Oh, Art, I don’t know what I want,” Meg protested. “A few days ago I’d never heard of Aaron Eastman or the fire in Granford. A jury convicted Aaron, and even he isn’t sure whether he did it. Look, I really appreciate your digging up the files, and there’s no way I want to throw mud at the Granford police, past or present.”

  “Am I hearing a ‘but’?” Art asked.

  “The Aaron Eastman I see now seems so harmless. Even after twenty-five years in prison. Isn’t that supposed to harden people? He just wants to know what really happened. If everything points to him, he says he’ll accept that. But I still want to see what’s in those financial files—that’s sort of the wild card here. You don’t have to do anything more. Seth and I, and the rest of Seth’s family, I guess, will take it from here.”

  “Good luck with it, Meg. I mean that. Well, I’d better be going,” Art said, as he turned toward the door.

  “Wait.” Meg stopped him. “Can you find out where the brother and sister are now?”

  “Better than you can, with the Internet these days? Maybe. I don’t recall if we interviewed them before the arrest; they were both at school at the time, not in Granford. If we did, it would be in the file.”

  Maybe they said they weren’t in Granford, but both had attended schools that weren’t all that far away. Did they have any reason to burn down their home? But then, did Aaron? “Could you take a quick look for them? Please? I’ll let you know if I come up with any more questions, once I’ve looked at the files. Thanks again, Art. Now go home and enjoy dinner with your wife.”

  “On my way,” Art said, and walked out the door.

  18

  Lydia arrived shortly before six. When she walked in, she said, “Mmm, something smells good!”

  “I hope it tastes good,” Meg said. “I’ve been so busy this year I may have forgotten how to cook. How was work?”

  “Busy. Funny, what goes on at a big construction company is exactly like what Seth is facing: everybody suddenly gets busy when fall comes. It’s like they can see snow looming on the horizon.”

  “How long have you been working there?” Meg asked, tasting her soup. More salt, she thought, and maybe another herb. Or two.

  “Since not long after Seth’s father died. I think I told you’d I’d been keeping the books for the family business, and those skills transferred pretty directly to the position I’ve got now. Of course, the company was a lot smaller when I started, and it wasn’t really a full-time job then, but it worked for all of us. I enjoy it; the people are nice, and the size of the business now is about right. I can’t imagine working for some huge corporation, or even the university. Listen, Meg . . . I’m not sure how much I can contribute when we look at the files tonight. I mean, I may know numbers and accounting, but high finance? Not so much.”

  “Don’t worry. I hope I’ve got that covered, if I haven’t already forgotten everything I used to know from my banking days. But once you get past the size of the accounts, it’s pretty much the same principles. And I appreciate having a second set of eyes looking at things.”

  “You really want to find something that would exonerate Aaron?” Lydia said carefully.

  “‘Exonerate’ might be too strong a word. I don’t want to go into this with any preconceived ideas, and everything attached to the trial may have been done by the book, with the right result. I want to give Aaron peace of mind. Wouldn’t you hate not knowing if you’d done something awful? So if there’s something in these papers that suggests that his father might have been doing something shady that might have led to his death, I want to know.”

  “Maybe it’s a blessing, Meg,” Lydia responded. “Could you live with yourself, with that knowledge?”

  “I can’t begin to guess, but I do know that Aaron asked me to help him find out. That’s all. I know I shouldn’t be giving big chunks of time to this, much less dragging other people into it, but I feel sorry for him. And he didn’t have to come back.”

  “Did he have a choice, Meg?” Lydia asked. “It’s the only place he knows; he was only a kid when he went to jail. He has no resources. Where would you have him go? And what do you see as the best outcome now?”

  Meg shook her head. “Lydia, I really don’t know. If he did start that fire, he isn’t any worse off than he was. If he didn’t do it—if he was framed, or nobody found the right evidence or asked the right questions—that creates a whole new set of problems. But let’s take this one step at a time. Tonight you and I will sift through his father’s papers and see if anything seems ‘off.’ If we find something odd, we can look further. If not, we give the whole batch back to Gail and tell Aaron we tried. Good enough?”

  “Works for me,” Lydia replied. “Hi, Seth,” she said to her son as he walked into the kitchen. “How’re things?”

  “Busy!” he said, giving his mother a quick hug. Then he turned and gave Meg a longer one, which ended only when Lydia said, “Hello? There’s someone else in the room, you know.”

  Bree came in from outside, bringing a blast of cool air with her before she shut the door. “Do I smell dinner? Hi, Lydia.”

  “Yes to dinner,” Meg said. “Get washed up and I’ll serve. You, too, Seth. Lydia and I have a busy night tonight.”

  “First dibs on the bathroom!” Bree said, as she dashed up the stairs. Seth’s mouth twitched as he looked at Meg. “I hope we won’t have to worry about that for much longer.”

  Once they were all settled at the table, with steaming soup, hot rolls, and wine or their beverage of choice, Meg reviewed what she’d done all day. She glanced at Bree before she mentioned the tiny house concept, but Seth seemed intrigued, and that launched a spirited conversation about housing needs around the table. Meg waited until the end to say, “Art dropped off the police files.”

  “And?” Seth asked.

  “I didn’t look at them yet, but in Art’s opinion they don’t hold anything that we didn’t already know. But he went as far as admitting the notes were kind of sparse. I did ask if he could help track down Aaron’s brother and sister.”

  “Why? They weren’t around at the time of the fire,” Seth countered.

  “It’s just another loose end. I guess I’m curious to see how they turned out, and how much they were affected by losing their parents in such an awful way. I wonder if they know that Aaron is free now? Or if they’ve kept in touch with him?”

  “Have you asked Aaron?” Seth said.

  “No. I didn’t want to talk to him until I had something to report. Either we find something or we don’t, and then he deserves
to know, but right now I don’t want my sympathy for the man to color my opinion.” Meg took another spoonful of soup. “I looked at bathroom fittings today, in those catalogs of yours.”

  “And?” Seth asked.

  “I have no idea what I want. You want to pick?”

  “I had another idea today,” he said. “What about authentic pieces? I know a couple of salvage places that carry the old stuff in good condition, at fair prices. Unless you’re committed to shiny new things?”

  “That sounds great to me, considering this place started out with an outhouse and maybe a few chamber pots. Do things like you’re talking about meet current code? I’ve always heard Massachusetts is pretty sticky about details like that.”

  “Don’t worry. I can retrofit them and you won’t even notice. What about tile floors to match? Tile walls, at least half high? Easy to clean.”

  “Great.”

  Seth raised a glass. “Here’s to one more item checked off the list!”

  After supper, Seth volunteered to clean up, Bree disappeared upstairs, and Lydia and Meg moved to the dining room. “Where do we start?” Lydia asked.

  “Since we don’t really know what’s in here, I’d say chronologically. Maybe after that we can sort them by type, like bank statements, client reports, and so on.”

  “Works for me,” Lydia said. “So we line them up on the table, earliest at the back, newest at the front?”

  “Fine. Let’s get started.”

  The sorting was both harder and easier than Meg expected. The entire date range, covering less than ten years from the early eighties to the date of the senior Eastman’s death, was represented. But the longer Meg sifted through the documents, the more she had the feeling that these were discards—not the final copy. Some had items scribbled on them, but she planned to wait until the organization was done before taking a closer look at those. But the general condition of many of the pages led Meg to wonder if maybe the grandmother hadn’t been scrabbling through the trash to retrieve them. At least Kenneth Eastman hadn’t shredded them, so they’d survived. But Meg realized she had been wondering how the grandmother had gotten her hands on the pages, and so many, over time. Had there been a copy machine in the Eastman house? And why were these documents at the house at all? Didn’t Eastman have an office to go to? She wondered if this was a cross-section of all the documents in his home space, or whether there had been far more that had been destroyed in the fire.

  After a couple of hours, Meg and Lydia had everything lined up in piles by year and sorted by type within each year. They stood side by side along the table and looked at them. “Well, what have we learned?” Meg asked.

  “There’s a lot more from the later years than from the earlier ones,” Lydia offered.

  “True. The business was growing? And I’m wondering where Aaron’s grandmother got all this—was she riffling through the wastebaskets?”

  “I had the same thought. They look kind of shabby, don’t they?”

  “They do. The other question, of course, is why did she collect these?”

  “I did find what looks like a client list,” Lydia volunteered. “It goes back a ways.” Lydia riffled through a stack and came up with a two-page document, which she handed to Meg. “Notice anything?”

  Meg scanned it quickly. “Mostly Granford names. I’d bet you most of those families appear on the first census.”

  “So if he was working in Boston, he was recruiting his friends and neighbors for his own business?”

  “Lydia, did you see any Boston letterhead?”

  Lydia shook her head. “Now that you mention it, none at all. He had his own—nice-quality stock. Maybe Aaron got it wrong; he was pretty vague about what his father did for a living, mostly because he wasn’t paying attention. Maybe his dad was no more than a small-town financial advisor with pretensions. Although he handled some pretty big sums.”

  “Not exactly a titan of Wall Street?” Meg said, smiling. “I’d say I could ask a friend in Boston to check it out, but it was so long ago, they wouldn’t know about him personally.”

  “Google the man,” Lydia said.

  “You Google, Lydia?” Meg asked, surprised.

  “Of course I do. I’m not ancient. Although I’d bet either of Rachel’s kids could run rings around me, electronically.”

  “I’ll look up the obituary. There must have been a nice one.” Meg booted up her laptop and then searched for Kenneth Eastman, and quickly found a multicolumn obituary with a professional photo. “Here we go. It says he was employed by a company of Boston and New York. I vaguely remember the name: I think it was one of the ones that merged with another or two or three when the investment-banking bubble burst. But the implication in the obituary is that he was still working for them at the time of his death.”

  “Stop and think about who may have written that obit,” Lydia said. “One of the kids? How much did they know about Dad’s activities? Maybe they grabbed an old CV from somewhere. Or maybe it had been written in advance by the paper and nobody updated it. Any way you look at it, he may not have been working for that firm when he died, but we have no way of knowing how much earlier they had parted ways. What’s the earliest date for his own company?”

  “Looks like 1983,” Meg said. “So now we’ve got one more puzzle. Well, leaving that aside, what do the reports tell us?”

  “That his clients were doing really, really well,” Lydia said. “In a very unstable market. I remember thinking back then that I was glad we didn’t have any money invested, with three kids and a small business supporting us all, because we probably would have lost it.”

  “Interesting point, Lydia,” Meg answered. “Are you saying that the numbers look too good to be believable?”

  Lydia looked Meg in the eye. “I’m saying that’s a strong possibility.”

  Is that the smoking gun? Meg wondered. “Lydia, how much longer do you want to spend on this tonight?”

  “Hey, we’re just getting to the fun stuff.” Lydia grinned. “How about this: we pick one client and follow him or her from start to finish? See how their account performed? How many trades? Ups and downs?”

  “Lydia, you do know something about finance,” Meg said.

  “I know enough to know that when something looks too good to be true, it usually is. Especially when money is involved.”

  Meg pulled a client statement at random from the 1983 pile, and she and Lydia went searching through the other stacks of paper. At the end, they had a tidy handful of copies. “Looks like a nice, steady rise in the balance, but not many payouts. Which is not unusual—Eastman may have persuaded his clients to reinvest the income. If they didn’t have an immediate need for the money, it makes some sense, especially if the funds were doing so well.”

  “Hold on,” Lydia interrupted her. “We’ve got a couple of duplicates in the stack . . . and those doubles don’t show the same figures.” She handed several pieces of paper to Meg.

  Meg scanned them quickly. “Funny, the changed pages all seem to show an increase over the original calculations. Of course, this is only a couple of statements out of who knows how many. But he made sure the returns looked really good.”

  “Did this guy have a secretary?” Lydia asked. “Or an accountant working for him? Most bigwig banker types don’t bother themselves with basic math and sending out reports.”

  “I haven’t seen any evidence of that,” Meg said, “but this isn’t everything. Or maybe his lovely socialite wife was doing the books, the way you used to for your husband.”

  “Goodness, Meg, do I detect a hint of sarcasm? I can’t imagine Mrs. Eastman doing anything so mundane. Not that we ran in the same circles or anything; she didn’t mingle with the Granford masses.”

  “But maybe her husband didn’t want to let anyone else in on what he was doing,” Meg said, “so he kept it all in the family.”


  “Maybe,” Lydia said, unconvinced. “I wish we had some bank statements. At least then we’d know where the money actually was.”

  “Trying to get those would be a royal pain, Lydia,” Meg told her. “Even if we could locate the bank, or even banks, there’s no guarantee that we could get hold of the records. We don’t necessarily know what name he used for the account. And I’m pretty sure it would take legal action for us to get copies. I doubt we can convince anybody to help us on that.”

  “But there could be an inventory when the estate was settled, right?” Lydia said with a gleam in her eye. “And wills and probate are a matter of public record.”

  Meg stared at her, impressed. “Lydia, you are brilliant.”

  “Where do you think Seth got his brains?”

  19

  Lydia left not long after that, pleading eye fatigue and the need to get up early for work. Meg tidied the piles of papers, fed Lolly, and walked Max one last time, then trudged up the stairs to her bedroom, where Seth was propped up in bed reading. “Mom gone already? I would’ve come down to say good-bye, but I didn’t want to disturb you two—you looked pretty wrapped up in what you were doing.”

  “She just left. Are you disappointed she didn’t kiss you nighty-night before she left?”

  “I think she’s passed that torch to you. Did you find anything useful?”

  “I think so,” Meg said cautiously. “Do you want to hear about it now, or wait until tomorrow?”

  “Give me the condensed version now; I can wait for the details.” Seth put down his papers and rolled over to look at her.

  She settled next to him. “Okay. From what we saw tonight, Lydia and I both think that Kenneth Eastman was running his own investment business and cooking the books. He was altering clients’ reports to make them look better, but he wasn’t paying out much. Which suggests to me that his mother-in-law was onto him and was stashing documents that could prove it, possibly to protect her daughter. That’s what was in the boxes.”