Just as I was finally drifting back to sleep around daybreak, the computer still open on my lap, the kitchen phone rang. I ran to answer it.
“When can you get up here?” Mackenzie demanded.
“And good morning to you, too,” I said, irritated that he didn’t have the courtesy to apologize for the delay in getting back to me.
“Oh, honestly, Alice,” he said with a laugh. “Lighten up. I’m the client here, remember? I’ll be waiting.”
I was out of sorts from lack of sleep, and I made the mistake of drinking two cups of strong coffee to make up for it. By the time I started up Mackenzie’s winding private driveway my nerves were jangling. But as I got to the top of the mountain and looked down on the hillside I’d now come to know so well, I felt myself relax. Mackenzie was right: I needed to lighten up. I had every reason to be proud of my plans. What I was about to present to Mackenzie was by far the best work of my life.
There were several cars I didn’t recognize parked in front of the garages. I pulled in next to Eleanor’s familiar blue Passat and carried my laptop and presentation case up to the house.
“He’s in the sunroom having breakfast,” Eleanor said after she greeted me at the door. “With his ex and his son.”
“Won’t I be interrupting?” I asked as she started to lead me down the hallway. I’d already picked up from gossip around town that Mackenzie was divorced. I wasn’t surprised. I never felt a sense of family life in the house. It was more like a male bastion. A bachelor’s aerie.
“I have a feeling he’ll welcome that,” she said. “It’s not exactly a love fest this morning.”
I could hear what she meant as we approached.
“. . . dare you speak to your son that way.”
“Because he deserves it. When I was his age—”
“Oh, man, not that again! I’m not you, okay, Dad? I’m never going to be you. I stopped trying to fill your shoes a long time ago.”
“You’re twenty years old, Lachlan. A long time ago for you means kindergarten, for chrissakes! Either you get a job or you go back to school. I’m not going to underwrite any more of your half-assed ideas.”
The sunroom was a spacious octagon with floor-to-ceiling windows that faced southeast over the valley. Mackenzie, his ex-wife, and his son were seated at a round glass table. The former Mrs. Mackenzie was a redhead with a faultless porcelain complexion and suspiciously taut features for the mother of someone Lachlan’s age. She was tall—nearly Mackenzie’s height—with the upright, self-aware posture of a ballerina. She was probably beautiful, but it was hard to tell; anger had pulled her face into an unpleasant rictus.
Lachlan favored his father—the same high forehead and milky blue gaze, but his thick, wavy hair was jet-black. He wore hip dark-framed glasses and stubble across his jawline. Someone far younger and more susceptible to masculine charm than me might have considered him attractive. He seemed to be trying to project a certain go-to-hell brand of sex appeal—but to me he just seemed sullen.
“Ah, here’s my meeting,” Mackenzie said as Eleanor showed me in. He tossed his napkin on his plate and got up from the table.
“We’re not done with this discussion,” his ex said.
“Actually, we are,” he replied as he walked around the table and shook my hand. “I’m sorry that you had to find us in the midst of a squabble,” he went on, relieving me of my presentation case. “This is Chloe, my ex-wife, and my son, Lachlan.”
Chloe glared at Mackenzie, ignoring my presence, but Lachlan looked over and gave me a nod.
“And this is Alice Hyatt,” Mackenzie continued, as if the two of them actually gave a damn. “She’s a landscape designer who’s here to present her plans for the gardens.”
Mackenzie didn’t wait for a reply as he led me out of the room, though he couldn’t help but hear—as clearly as I did—Lachlan’s sotto voce retort: “What a fucking waste of money.”
We walked down the hall to Mackenzie’s home office. It was octagonal, too, a pendant of the sunroom—but darker and wood-paneled, with curved casement windows facing north into the woods. A large desk with two computers dominated the space.
“I apologize for their behavior,” he said, closing the door behind us. “I can’t tolerate outright rudeness, and they both know it. They fly up from Atlanta periodically to see which one of them can rile me up the most.”
“I’m sorry,” I said noncommittally. I wasn’t there for an airing of his family’s dirty laundry, and I found the subject distasteful.
“She’s a bloodsucker,” he went on, walking over to the window with its tranquil prospect of birches and evergreens. “That’s all either of them want from me: money, money, money!”
I didn’t say anything, but I was hoping he was beginning to get the venom out of his system. I didn’t want his ugly mood infecting my presentation.
“They know I’m planning to cut them off entirely as soon as he turns twenty-one. It’s the best thing that could happen to him, as far as I’m concerned. He’s got to learn to stand on his own two feet. She’s just using him to get whatever she can out of me—and then she takes a cut. It’s disgusting . . . ,” he said, turning around as my silence continued. “And you’ve obviously heard enough out of me on the subject.”
“I’ve a lot to show you,” I told him, avoiding a more honest answer. “I can give you a virtual tour on my laptop, and I also have printouts of the plans that we can go over, if you have time.”
“There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing, believe me. But let’s see if we can’t get your presentation up on one of these hi-res screens,” he said, walking over to his desk and sitting down. He pulled another chair next to his and waved me over. “Okay, let’s see what you’ve got.”
“There’s always a lot of water running below the surface of these hills,” I told him. Mackenzie had stopped me with so many questions that it had taken me more than an hour to get through the whole presentation, but we were nearing the end now. “What we discovered here, though, is pretty exciting. You see this double dotted line—east of the limestone outcropping? It represents what is basically an underground creek. I hope to redirect its course and have it come to the surface here”—I pointed to my largest terraced area, the one with the widest view of the valley—“and channel it across the garden in a low trough until it cascades over the edge in a waterfall to the pool we’re going to create below.”
“How far is the drop?” he asked. It was typical of his questions. He wanted facts and figures and seemed impatient if I didn’t have them at my fingertips. Luckily, the ten-day delay had given me time to go over every detail in my mind.
“About forty feet,” I said. “I plan to have steps leading down from over here, but I’m hoping the view will have a feeling of infinity.”
“Yes,” he said, staring at the screen. I’d taken a photo of the vista from approximately where I planned to site the waterfall and superimposed it on the virtual garden of ferns, irises, and hostas I proposed. A weeping Japanese cherry dangled its whips into the channeled stream.
“That’s it for the virtual tour,” I said. “I have printouts of the AutoCAD plans to show you as well as photos of samples from the ironworker and the stonemason I’d like to use.” I hesitated, waiting for him to say something, but he continued to stare at the last photo that I’d left up on the screen. There was the long valley with its patchwork of farms and woodland. The rise of mountains in the distance. The beams of sunlight breaking through the bank of clouds on the far horizon. What was he thinking?
“Alice,” he said at last, turning in his chair toward me. For a moment I thought there were tears in his eyes, but then he threw back his head and laughed. “It’s perfect! Absolutely fucking perfect! I knew you could do it.”
Mackenzie asked just as many questions when we went over my AutoCAD drawings with plant callouts and accompanying ph
otos, Phil Welling’s reports, and the designs for the lighting and in-ground watering systems. He obviously enjoyed drilling down into the details. He questioned some of my choices, but more, it seemed to me, out of curiosity than criticism.
“Why buddleias here? I think I would have gone with hydrangeas.”
“They can take a long time to get established. You want this to be a showplace by the end of June, so I had to make some tough choices. I’ve called for groupings of hydrangeas up here in the sundial garden. They may not flower much this year, but they’ll form a nice mass.”
He glanced over my price estimates, which I’d spent endless hours assembling. I’d attached more than twenty pages of itemized lists, together with samples of Nate’s and Damon’s work and their own cost sheets. The grand total seemed astronomical to me, but Mackenzie didn’t question a single number.
“Did you fold in your own fee for overseeing the contractors? I don’t see it broken out here.”
“I wasn’t sure how you wanted to handle that—if you preferred to pay them directly or not.”
“What—and screw you out of a markup? Alice! I thought you were a better businesswoman than that. You found them. You should get the credit—and the cut.”
“Thanks,” I said, though there was another reason I’d submitted their proposals separately. “But that means I’ll need more of the money up front. I can’t afford to—”
“I understand,” Mackenzie said, reaching over and unlocking a desk drawer. He pulled out a checkbook ledger. “Shall we say half now and half on completion?”
“Fine,” I said as I watched him write out in a bold, almost illegible hand the biggest check I’d ever received in my life.
“And I haven’t forgotten my promise to you about the Mackenzie Project,” he said, standing and stretching while I began to pull my things together. “I’ll make a contribution this week. And I’d appreciate it if you gave some thought to possible recipients.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, smiling. One came to mind more or less immediately. I felt almost light-headed with happiness as he walked me across the entranceway to the front door. He glanced down the hall toward the sunroom.
“I’m sorry if I shocked you before,” he said in a lowered voice, “the way I talked about my family. I guess I just thought you knew a thing or two about unscrupulous spouses.”
I stared up at him. So he knew. Of course he knew. He’d told me himself he’d done a little digging around about me. He’d talked to Sal. He’d no doubt Googled me. How many thousands of news items would he have found there, with my name buried somewhere in the fine print? Everyone in Woodhaven knew, though they never said anything. It was considered such a scandal. Such a shame. But there was something about the casual—almost cavalier—way Mackenzie brought it up that I found oddly comforting. It occurred to me that he operated in the cutthroat, mega-business world where the kind of crime Richard had committed was, if not commonplace, at least not all that unusual.
Not something that would rip a marriage right off its foundations and sweep a lifetime of dreams into oblivion.
6
Richard and I always agreed that you could never really know the truth about anyone else’s marriage. The newlyweds next door, for instance, who seemed so in love—look, they’re still holding hands!—but who ended up filing for divorce within the year. Or the elderly aunt who spent a lifetime grousing about her husband and then died of a broken heart a month after his final stroke. But we knew the truth about our own marriage. After being together for nearly two decades, we were still passionate lovers and best friends.
“I hope everyone has as much fun as we do,” he used to say to me as we lay together, happily spent after making love. And that’s what it always felt like to us—an act of love rather than one of mere sex. Something that only got better with time and experience. Along with this—or maybe because of it—we were blessed with two pretty, kind, and intelligent daughters. And Richard’s fortunes were rising at a company he loved: Lerner, Reese, and Hamilton, one of the world’s leading international accounting firms. He had made senior vice president of LRH’s Assurance Services Group by the time he was forty-three, specializing in something called business risk assessment, with the possibility of even greater glory to come.
“They’re sending me to Hong Kong for the global conference in two weeks,” he told me about a month before our twentieth wedding anniversary. “John says he wants to introduce me personally to the managing partners. I think you should come with me, Alice. We’ll stop off in Paris on our way home and really celebrate.”
But my daughters needed me just then. Olivia, a freshman at the University of Virginia, was in the throes of her first serious breakup, and I’d planned a tour of colleges with Franny. So we decided he should go alone, concentrate on networking and making the best possible impression, and we’d do something wonderful together when he got back. Of course, I’ve wondered almost every day since what would have happened if I’d thrown my parental responsibilities to the wind and gone with him. Or was his invitation some kind of ruse, along with everything else? Surely it was already too late by then? The kind of complicated financial shenanigans he was up to would have taken months, maybe even years, to organize and implement. That’s certainly what the investigators thought when they questioned me—over and over again—about the days leading up to Richard’s disappearance.
“How many suitcases did he leave with? What did he pack? Did he have any cash lying around the house that he might have taken with him?”
I really didn’t know. I honestly couldn’t say. Though I’d spent each waking hour—and so many sleepless ones—raking over every last ember of memory. But all I could come up with was that he seemed mildly upset that I’d forgotten to pick up his dark blue suit from the cleaners the day before he left.
“Why do you think that was?” the investigator from the DA’s office asked me, leaning forward with his mini-recorder.
“Because it was his favorite?” I replied.
“This isn’t anything to joke about, Mrs. Hyatt,” the FBI agent told me. “This is an extremely serious act of criminal fraud that took a hell of a lot of thought and planning. We have good reason to believe he had help. And we are looking into every aspect of your and your husband’s life and finances. So if you want to save yourself a lot of heartache down the pike, you might as well tell us everything you know right now.”
But even if I did know something about what Richard had done, there was nothing anyone could do about saving me from heartache. The whole thing unfolded in the confusing, slow-motion way of so many disasters. First, he didn’t call me when he landed in Hong Kong. Then his assistant at LRH phoned to ask what had happened in London.
“What do you mean? I thought Richard was going to Hong Kong.”
“He was, but he never made his connection in London. We thought maybe he’d taken ill? John Burbank’s e-mailed me three times this morning. Richard’s already missed the first session.”
He was going to end up missing all of them. And a lot more than that. Our anniversary. His daughters’ graduations. Their engagements. Marriages. He simply walked away from everything. He disappeared into thin air. But not without siphoning off—in an apparently brilliant and brazen series of money transfers—nearly two hundred million dollars from LRH’s three largest clients. Richard’s firm tried hard to keep a lid on what had happened, but that ended up only making matters worse. When the press learned about the “cover-up,” they tore into the story with a vengeance. They smeared Richard’s reputation and LRH’s shocking lack of oversight and transparency all over the business pages and Internet. It was horrible.
And then it got worse.
The article made the front page of the Wall Street Journal a week after Richard went missing:
LRH FRAUDSTER HAD FEMALE ACCOMPLICE
Her name was Ilsa Nilsson. She was an accou
nt executive working with Richard in Assurance Services, and several named sources within the company offered the opinion that they were having an affair.
“She was always in his office.”
“They used to sneak out to lunch together.”
“You could just tell by the way he looked at her.”
According to the Journal, she disappeared the same weekend that Richard had; a brother claimed she was “planning to hook up with a friend in London.” A photo of the two of them sitting together at some LRH function from a year before soon surfaced on the Internet. There was Ilsa with her high Nordic cheekbones and swan neck, gazing adoringly at my husband. And Richard, a bottle of beer in his hand, facing the camera with an embarrassed grin.
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,” Plato purportedly said. Those words resonated with me when I first happened upon them a year or two after Richard vanished. At least, I thought, I wasn’t alone.
Well-meaning people told me it was time to move on. As though I could simply walk away—just as Richard had.
By then I was getting ready to sell the house in Westchester to pay off legal fees, and both of the girls had had to apply for scholarships and student loans. By then I’d finally come to realize that what had happened wasn’t some kind of gigantic misunderstanding. I’d stopped waiting for the phone to ring. Or the front door to open. I no longer heard footsteps on the stairs at night. Richard wasn’t coming back. I sometimes wondered if he was even still alive. I imagined him dead—with her, of course, it had to be with her—in a car crash, drowned, a suicide pact. Not that I really wanted him to be dead. No, in fact, I actually preferred that he still be alive—so that I could kill him myself. With my own bare hands.
Bleeding Heart Page 5