But I can’t afford to let my brain stay shut down. This isn’t just about me anymore. I have responsibilities to my other employees and the company’s shareholders. If Liv is acting up again, she is a scary-good actress who could do real damage from inside Wakefield.
Bottom line: I need an objective assessment about how much risk Liv poses. When I know that, I’ll confess and turn everything over to Yolanda, preferably from the safe distance of several thousand miles.
Not that my eardrums will be spared her wrath.
The traffic is finally moving but I estimate we have another fifteen minutes before we reach the airport. Time enough to get things underway.
I have the driver turn down his music. A short while later, I’ve been put through to Darcy Whitier, whose firm handles background checks for Wakefield employees, among other things.
“I need you to dig up a file that your predecessor opened for me,” I say, when we’ve dispensed with the niceties.
“Bert? Aye-aye, cap’n,” he says with his perennial cheerfulness. “Under what name?”
“Olivia Prosser.”
“Hang on.” There’s a clattering of keys and Darcy grunts. “I just double-checked to be sure, but we changed computer systems after he retired. I don’t have anything going back that far. Mind telling me what this is about?”
I close my eyes. “Please tell me you didn’t toss the paperwork.” Because I have. When I moved houses a couple of years ago, in a symbolic effort to finally break with the past, I forced myself to shred my copy.
“Bert probably kept it. I can’t speak to whether he stored it properly, but I’ll try to dig it up if it’s important.”
“It’s important,” I say. Right now I could use a tangible reminder of Liv’s capabilities, not only for Wakefield, but for my own peace of mind.
“Okay. Can you tell me what this is about?”
I suppress a sigh and begin. “A decade ago, I ended up in a hamlet near Cleveland, living with a woman named Ada Prosser.”
I’d been disoriented and tired when we met, fresh from a dispute with my father about my future, and his assumption that I’d finish my business degree and move seamlessly into his company. The argument was a regular occurrence; the blow to my face during it hadn’t been. As far as I was concerned, violence wasn’t about to become my new normal.
I had taken off, nursing a heart full of self-righteous anger, determined to give myself the summer, at least, to figure out what I wanted to do. I’d “go dark,” get off-grid. I’d get my head on straight and, in the process, have the great pleasure of alarming the old man.
Then I discovered how little time it took to run through cash on the road, and how hard it was to make good decisions on an empty belly, with little sleep.
After a bout of hitchhiking, I had been stumbling along a country road, looking for cheap lodgings for the night, when up pulled a battered Chevette. The middle-aged driver had wild hair and kind eyes and she asked for help corralling a stray Pekingese. By the time we had the dog sequestered in Ada’s kennel, I was stupid with fatigue, to the point that the state of her home hadn’t fazed me. I gratefully accepted her offer of shelter.
“I fell in love with Ada’s daughter,” I say. “Olivia.”
After a few hours sleep, I awoke to the scrutiny of a weary brunette with skeptical eyes. Somehow, my stupid, self-pitying brain took one look at her and knew: This is the one. She wasn’t like the girls of my acquaintance, who could be won over by glib comments, nice clothes, the flash of money. She would be careful with her emotions, cautious, slow to trust. But once you earned that trust, she’d reward you with a lifetime of acceptance and love.
After the house I grew up in, it was the sexiest thing I had ever seen.
I clear my throat. “We spent the summer together, living in Ada’s house.”
I had three weeks to woo Liv on my own before Tucker came back from college. Then another three months with Tucker on the scene, functioning as a skeevy older competitor who delighted in pointing out my many deficiencies. He wasn’t wrong, either. I started off soft, entitled, hopelessly impractical. But I learned, I worked hard at the jobs I could get, and by the end of the summer, I was a better man. And Liv and I were in love and beginning to dream of a future.
“Then my father’s people came with the news he had cancer, and that the company was in trouble,” I say.
I had to leave, but I remember how torn I felt at the time. Ada couldn’t be left alone—I understood that—and while Liv wasn’t a complainer, she was filled with dread, convinced I would forget her once I was back in my old life. So I had promised—vowed—to return as soon as I could.
“I went back to Jacksonville, took care of business, buried my dad. All that stuff.”
If I told this story to Yolanda, this is where she would tell me that the mistakes I made going forward weren’t all my fault. That the environment shaped my default behaviors. That I was pummeled by complicated grief, overwhelmed with the responsibility of managing thousands of employees in a company unexpectedly in decline. And this would all be true.
But I also let myself believe my own press. I fell for the idea that I’d become an important man, and that if Liv and I were to be together, she should come to me.
I blamed her for how hard it was for us to communicate. She didn’t have a landline at home, and cell coverage didn’t reach the bungalow. The brief conversations we managed during her shifts at the diner were wholly unsatisfactory. And when I tried to send her money for airfare, or just to make her life simpler, the messenger had treated Ada poorly and Liv sent them away.
Meanwhile, I was lonely, and hurting.
“A few months after I left,” I say, “Liv showed up in Jacksonville without any warning. There was…an unpleasant scene at a jewelers. After that, she kind of lost it.”
“What do you mean?” Darcy says.
“It’s in the report, but basically, she committed a lot of vandalism.”
He grunts.
“I hired Bert to document it all. I planned to press charges, but I never got that far. And then she stopped.” It had taken her almost a year. And the sick thing was, when I realized it was finally over—that three months had gone by without a Liv-induced mess of some sort—I had been more upset than when my father died. How bent is that?
“Anyway,” I say, “she just recently became an employee.”
He whistles and I hear the sound of rustling paper. “You think she’s stalking you?”
“No.” That was some comfort at least. “Not in that sense. She was working for a firm we scooped up. She was probably as shocked as me to discover our reconnection. But now that we are, it’s possible she’s starting up again.”
I briefly explain what’s been happening in Jamaica, and that I’m not convinced events were planned, never mind connected to Liv.
“Any cameras on the villa?”
“No. There are locked gates and the villa is alarmed. No one came inside except the staff, so it’s possible my shorts blew over the railing and into the sea.” Possible, but not probable.
On the other hand, there is a certain kind of person who gets off on accessing the villa’s private beach. I once returned from a meeting and discovered nude kayakers sunning their junk on my chairs. Could be one of them used an oar to hook my shorts and pull them down from the railing.
Darcy grunts. “If she’s working through the staff, good luck trying to prove it.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. It’s all circumstantial, anyway.”
“What about Stateside?” he says. “Any monkey business there?”
I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. My house and car had borne the brunt of Liv’s attention before. “Not as far as I know. But I haven’t been home in—” I check my watch and calculate “—nearly two weeks.”
“I can take a run by your house, have a look-see.”
“I’d appreciate it.” The security service would have called with anything major, but better to be c
areful.
“Okay, other than that, what do you need me to do?”
I ask him to conduct general background checks on both Liv and Tucker, because why not? “And dig out those old records. I want us prepared if things go south.” Nobody would use ten-year-old material to press charges, but if Liv steps out of line, Yolanda can establish a pattern and bolster a case for dismissal.
“Hmmm,” he says. “You said this was ten years ago?”
“Ten this coming September.”
“What kind of evidence did you have on her?”
“What do you mean?”
“Fingerprints, surveillance reports, CCTV footage, stills?”
“Security footage for sure.” Plus the evidence of my own eyes… I have to shake off an image of Liv at the jewelry store to concentrate on what Darcy is saying.
“—poke around, but stuff that old tends to decay in quality, especially if it isn’t stored properly. It’s possible I’ll find the tapes but we’ll be looking at static.”
“Well, do what you can. And, Darcy, I need it like yesterday.”
When I hang up, the van is pulling up to the airport loading zone. I jump out and am paying the driver when I acknowledge what I’ve known since seeing Liv out. I’m staying until I’ve got a satisfactory handle on this Liv business.
The Milwaukee investors wouldn’t have the best of me, anyway. Liv shook me back there. Rattled me to my bones.
Once Darcy reconfirms everything I know to be true, I’ll turn it over to Yolanda and put this behind me. This time, maybe it won’t even take me a decade.
CHAPTER 6
LIV
I am unsettled by my conversation with Finn and have a few burning questions to put to Tucker—chief among them, did Tucker antagonize Finn during their brief conversation about me?
But events conspire to keep us apart. We are in different small groups for the rest of the day. Then tonight, Tucker is going out for dinner with the rest of the engineers while I have a hot date with some plant drawings.
I go looking for Tucker during the afternoon break and finally find him at the end of a promontory. He stands in the shade of a gazebo, leaning over the balustrade as he watches a scuttling crab. He has his suit jacket off and his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows. There’s a beer in one hand and a lit cigar in the other.
I jerk my chin in the direction of the beer and can’t keep the tartness from my voice. “This is a work function.”
“No kidding. At an all-inclusive resort.”
“Yeah, well, you might want to reconsider your choices. I need you sharp-minded.”
He drains his beer and puffs on the cigar before leisurely turning. He leans his back on the railing. He tips his head and while squinting at me, blows smoke at a bee in one of the hanging flower pots. The bee wobbles and flies away.
“You’re all hot under the collar,” he says. “What’s the matter? Didn’t go well with our Finn?”
The sea breeze keeps blowing a strand of hair into my mouth so I pull out my sunglasses and use them as a headband. “It went fine. He mostly wanted to make sure I know my place.”
Though I yearn to take Tucker into my confidence and get another perspective on Finn’s contradictory messages, the bigger risk is Tucker overreacting and pushing back. Tucker once took offense to how Finn buttered a muffin. If it came to protecting me, he would be even more aggressive.
“How did he look? Notice anything amiss?” A secretive smile dances briefly across Tucker’s face.
I knew it. I frigging knew it. No wonder Finn had been so intense. “Are you responsible for his bruise?”
He makes a sound of disgust. “Of course not.”
I hold his gaze for a while, but I see no sign of deception there, so I relax. “What did you do?”
He grins and turns to stub out his cigar on the railing. “A little harmless frat boy stuff. Nothing for you to concern yourself with.”
“Here?” I demand. “In Jamaica?”
He shrugs. “Where else?”
“Oh, I dunno,” I say, putting a hand to my forehead. “Here’s a bizarre thought—maybe the office.”
He looks insulted. “Please. That would be downright stupid. I wouldn’t foul the nest.”
I glare at him.
“More than I have.”
“What happened to being Jamaican wallpaper?” I say.
“It got boring.”
“We’ve barely been here a day.”
He grins and lifts a shoulder.
“What if you were caught? What about Marnie and Daniel, then?” I say, because like my mama, Tucker’s mother and stepbrother rely on the money he sends them. And what about me, since my fate is yoked so intimately to his?
“I wasn’t stupid enough to do it myself,” he says patiently. “There’s no way Finn’ll trace it back to me.”
I fold my arms over my chest and say nothing.
“I slipped a few dollars to the staff, okay? There are always a few disgruntled ones who are happy to stick it to The Man and make it look like an accident.”
Sometimes I can’t believe his selfishness. “What if you got them fired?”
“Babe,” he says, exasperated at my naiveté. “It’s not like I twist their arms. You’ve got to stop trying to save everyone. Besides—” he says as I feed him a glare “—I’ll admit it might have been a mistake to rouse the beast. But I’ve had my fun, and Finn’s leaving.”
“You sure about that?” Because I’m not. Not after those moments at the gate.
Now it’s Tucker’s turn to swing and scrutinize my expression. “Finn is staying? He said as much?”
“Not exactly, but call it a hunch. I think he smelled a rat.”
“Huh. Maybe our boy has managed to acquire some street smarts over the years. Who would’ve thunk it? Well—” He slaps the railing and straightens. “If he gets too suspicious, you’ll just have to distract him. You were always good at that when we were younger.”
“That wasn’t distraction. That was love.”
“Uh-huh. That’s why it took next to nothing for him to get cold feet and walk.”
Tucker isn’t saying anything I haven’t thought a thousand times before. But for a second, with every fiber of my being, I want to take a running leap at him, push him over the railing, and while he lies there dazed, watch the tiny crab dance on his head.
I settle for saying, “You’re a cold-hearted bastard, Tucker.”
“Yes, but I’m the bastard who always looks out for you. And in return, I expect—”
“A little loyalty, ergo protect the fruit of the poison tree, blah blah blah.” I turn on my heel and start back for the conference center.
“Remember what’s at stake, Liv,” he calls after me.
As if I don’t every day of my life. Besides, I’m not the one baiting our boss, or diving into a beer bottle during the break.
I take off my shoes and carefully step up onto the sea wall. On the pretext of putting my arms out for balance, I flip Tucker the bird in stereo. But the person I really wish I could flip off is my younger self—the foolish girl who didn’t take a stand on the day it counted.
Ten years on, it’s probably time to give up on the hope she’ll ever have a do-over.
CHAPTER 7
FINN
Darcy calls at noon the next day when I’m heading to the beach to watch Yolanda whip the newbies into shape.
“So this chick was going pretty hardcore before she stopped,” he says as his opening gambit.
I’m perversely relieved. Overnight, I continued to second-guess myself on everything Liv-related, including whether I had been unreasonably hurt by her actions during that challenging year. To hear Darcy describe it in such terms makes me think I’m not a total wuss.
“Does that mean you talked to Bert?” I ask.
“Unfortunately, no. Did you know he had a stroke?”
“Too bad.” Bert had been a straight-shooter and as dependable as the sunrise. He’d only had
a couple years of retirement, too.
“Yup. I guess Bev managed as long as she could before she had to ship him to a nursing home. I’ll spare ya the details or you’re gonna need another shave before I’m done, but I was able to get my hands on his records. Daughter had them stored in a shed.”
“And?”
“And the plot thickens.”
There’s a bench ahead on the path. I sink down onto it.
“So like I expected, we’ve got an issue with evidence preservation. The tapes were in a cardboard box, which got wet. Were so bad I couldn’t put them in my machine unless I wanted to gum it up permanently. But here’s the good news: his notes were in a plastic banker’s box. And inside that there was a Ziploc with all the stills.”
“Photos,” I say. “Scan them and send them to me.” That’s what I need—some hard evidence to snap me out of my sentimental mood.
“Sure. So I’m not sure how much you recall, but as a brief recap, Bert looked at eleven incidents for you.”
“Eleven!” I remember it feeling like a lot at the time, but I’m not sure I’d heard the tally.
“Yup. So first step: I eliminated all the events that were suspicious, but that Bert didn’t feel he could definitively connect to Ms. Prosser. Just took ’em right out.”
“Like what?”
“Like when your car got keyed outside the dry-cleaner’s but they had no security footage. That kind of thing.”
“Makes sense.”
“Also, when you originally opened the file, you mentioned a few suspicious incidents that were too far gone in the past to pursue. Say, what’s that sound?”
I blink, confused by the change of subject. “Excuse me?”
“There was a weird cawing sound on your end.”
“Oh.” I look around and spot a multi-colored bird strutting on the lawn. “There are peacocks roaming the resort. They also have a few pet parrots, though you won’t hear them. I’m too far away from their cage.”
“Neat. Back to Ms. Prosser.” There’s the sound of shuffling paper. “So dating from December tenth until July fourteenth of the next year, we’re left with seven incidents that Bert tied conclusively to Ms. Prosser.”
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