by Nancy Adams
Just a week ago, we were happy together. I was there in Nebraska with her, letting her run the store and gain experience while was with her, but we both knew she didn't really need me looking over her shoulder; it was just our way of keeping things on track, so no one could ever use our relationship to say she'd gotten any special favors. We didn't plan on her continuing to work at the store once we were married, anyway, and although I had not yet formally proposed, we both talked about what things would be like “after we're married,” so it was a foregone conclusion.
Then, I got called back to our main office for some sort of problem, and while I was there, I sensed that there was something wrong between us. At first, it was just that she didn't seem to want to talk to me, and she said she just wasn't feeling well, so I tried not to worry. I even went out and bought the engagement ring I planned to offer to her when I got back a few days later, but then I was called into our legal department, on the very morning I was supposed to fly back to her.
The lawyers informed me that an employee at Katelynn's store was accusing me of sexual harassment and rape, and only the company's stature had prevented my being arrested already. The accuser, a woman we'd caught stealing money from the store, had a photo of me that appeared to suggest I was holding her forcibly, in what might be taken for a suggestive position. I knew very well that no such photo could exist, and so it had to be faked, but it was so well done that we couldn't prove it just by a digital analysis.
I was floored, but not nearly as bad as when they told me that one of her witnesses against me was none other than Katelynn, herself. I wanted to call and ask her what on earth was going on, but I was advised not to have any contact with her until the case was settled.
Settled? I had no intention of settling anything! I told the lawyers they could forget making any kind of settlement, and they went berserk on me. Didn't I know how bad this could be for business? Didn’t I know the damage that could be done if I were convicted, or if there was a civil ruling that I was guilty?
“Since I'm not guilty, I'm not worried about that!” I said, but they wouldn't stop. Jackson Miller, our senior corporate counsel, said, “You'd better be worried about it! Nate, if you had any idea how many innocent people get railroaded in this country every year, you'd be begging us to settle it, and fast!”
“No,” I insisted, “I wouldn't, because I didn’t do it! How do I get that through your thick heads? This woman is lying, and she's got someone to help her by creating this photograph! Why won't you listen?”
“Because it doesn't matter a bit what we believe, Nate! It's about what a team of lawyers can get a judge or jury to believe, and the sympathy of the court and the jury is always with the poor victim and against the rich, corporate scoundrel, namely you! If you go to trial on this, there is a very real chance that you will be convicted and go to prison, or at the very least, ruled culpable and liable for damages in the millions!”
“And if I settle it out of court, the whole world is going to think I'm guilty, even though there's no conviction!” I yelled back into his face. “Jack, there is no way on God's green earth that I could live with myself if that happened! The woman I love has somehow been convinced by this woman that I would do such a thing, and the only chance I've got to prove myself to her is by not backing down! Forget settlement, and tell me how to go about fighting this thing!”
The argument went on for hours, and no matter how many times I said it, the lawyers kept pushing for settlement. Don't get me wrong, I understood their position; all they wanted was to make this unpleasantness go away, and the sooner the better, but they weren't the ones who stood to lose the most. I was the one who would see my life destroyed if it went against me, but all they could care about was the company!
If I went to trial on this, or if I filed a counter suit claiming that I was being framed, there was a chance that I would lose and maybe even be convicted of a crime I did not commit. If that were to happen, the company's stock would plummet, and there was a very real possibility that it could go into bankruptcy and receivership. We and all of our stockholders would lose everything we had with the company.
On the other hand, and this was the hand I was on, if I won, then I at least had a chance of proving to Katelynn that I was innocent, that Donna Bennet had faked the photo and made up her story to try to keep me from prosecuting her for theft, even though I'd already given her a second chance and said I wouldn't.
If we settled, though, there would be no way to ever prove that to anyone. The settlement agreement would require both sides to drop the matter and never bring it up again, so she would have won by default, and Katelynn would never believe me.
That was simply not conceivable to me, but the lawyers were only concerned about the bottom line. Each of them was also a stockholder, so my decision would affect their futures, as well as my own, and the one thing that made it possible for me to even argue about this was that, since my father's retirement a couple of weeks previously, I was the majority stockholder. That meant that no matter what they said, I was the one who had to make the final decision, and I'd already made it. There would be no settlement!
After this exchange went on for several hours, I left the office and went home. I had to force myself not to call Katelynn, but the one thing they'd managed to impress upon me was that I could not do that. She was listed as a witness for Donna, and if I even called her number after being served on this lawsuit, it would be construed as attempted tampering with a witness.
I walked into the house, and knew that Mom and Dad had already been told. They were sitting in the kitchen, waiting for me.
“Hello, Nathanael,” Dad said.
“Who called you?” I asked bitterly. “Was it Jackson?”
He nodded. “And Stan Jacobs, and Martin Stewart, and Kelly Bonaventura and a few others. This is some kind of a mess. I'm not even going to ask you if you’re guilty, because I know you better than that; all I want to know is what is behind it, and what we're going to do about it.”
Mom poured me a cup of hot tea, and I sat down with them at the big table.
“What's behind it is what I'm not too sure of. Donna Bennet is the woman that Mike Davenport and I determined was stealing a little money from the North Platte store, trying to make it look like Katelynn was doing it. When I got back to Nebraska last week, I went to see her quietly and told her that I could prove she was doing it, and that if it happened again she'd be prosecuted, but if it stopped, I wouldn't say anything and she could keep her job. She promised me she'd straighten out, gave me some reasonable explanations for why she'd needed the money, and I even gave her some money of my own to help with a crisis. That was the entire extent of our conversation, and I left. Never so much as shook hands with her, let alone tried to touch her in any other way!”
Dad sighed. “Then she's afraid you'll come after her anyway, and this is her way of making it look like you're faking records to get back at her for reporting you. May be a bit of revenge involved, too, some people get really angry when they're caught doing something wrong, as if it's their right to steal, and you shouldn't have interfered.”
Mom piped in. “What about jealousy? Nate was in love with Katelynn, maybe this girl wanted her for himself and is mad that he didn't notice her?”
“Mom,” I said, “Donna is a lot older than me, and not a bit attractive. I don't think jealousy plays a big role in this.”
“You'd be surprised,” she shot back. “You're a wealthy and handsome young man; she may have had some fantasies of her own about you, and seeing her boss getting all your attention could set off a scheme to get it for herself. You said she was trying to frame Katelynn for theft, right? If she'd gotten her fired, she might have thought you'd give her the manager's job, and she'd get a chance to spend a lot of time with you, show you all her charms, the way she imagines Katelynn did.”
“Your mother's making sense, Son,” Dad said. “Jealousy is one of the prime motivators of humanity.”
; I sighed. “Does it really matter what prompted this? I've got Jack and the entire legal department insisting I settle it out of court; but if I do, then Katelynn will never believe it was all a set up, and I'll lose any hope of getting her back. Somehow, I've got to prove I didn't do this, prove it so completely that there can be no doubt in anyone's mind that I'm being framed.”
Dad nodded his head. “Any ideas how to do that?”
“Not just yet, no. This has just happened, and I've spent the whole day being blasted about not taking the company's position into account.”
Mom reached across the table and put her hand on mine. “You know that we're behind you, Son.”
I looked up at both of them. “Are you? Even if it means there's a real chance we could lose everything?”
Dad added his hand to Mom's, and I felt tears start to well up in my eyes. “Even if it means the company goes under. Son, the one thing a man must have, more than money, more than power, more than anything else, is his own self-worth. If you settle, and lose Katelynn forever because of it, you'll be destroyed. True, you'd eventually get over it and move on, but there would be a part of you that would always feel that you failed yourself, and it would never be the same. You do what you believe is the right thing to do, and we're with you no matter what.”
I sat back and wiped at my eyes. “You don't know how much that means to me. I know that your own wealth is on the line, here, as well as mine and everyone else's, so having you in my corner makes all the difference in the world.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, a habit I'd gotten from Dad, then looked at them again. “I can't settle. I have to fight. Now, all I have to do is figure out how to win!”
Dad smiled. “You will. You're a Simmons, and we're winners! If you knew how many times this company had been on the brink of bankruptcy, it would shock you, but we've never given up, and we've never lost a fight that mattered. This one matters!”
I let myself smile for the first time that day. “Thank you, and I mean that—but this is also probably the worst fight we've ever been in.”
Mom and Dad looked at each other, and something passed between them. Mom said, “Tell him, Norman.”
I looked at my father, and he gave me a sheepish grin. “I don't think this is the worst one, not from the company's perspective. Son, back in the mid-nineties, we had a situation that was similar to this one. A girl who worked in one of our earliest stores accused me of raping her, one night when we were working alone together. There was no one to say I didn't do it except me, and I was actually arrested; you were still pretty small, and we kept it from you at the time. Anyway, what finally cleared me was that the girl bragged to someone about how she was going to get rich from a big settlement she was getting from us, and she let it slip that she hadn’t really been raped at all, that she'd made up the story after seeing a TV movie about a woman who had been raped by her boss and gotten a lot of money for it. Like you, I refused to settle, but if that person hadn’t gone to the cops and told them the truth, I probably would have been convicted; it was just her word against mine, and she was quite an actress, even had your mother believing her!”
“We got lucky,” Mom said. “The person who came forward was that girl's mother, and it tore her up to do it, but she said she couldn't let your father's life be ruined over her daughter's greed. The charges were dismissed, and that girl was charged with fraud and went to jail for several months.”
“The point is that I understand your position. That's why we're behind you, one hundred percent.”
I shook my head. “If only this one would turn out that easy!”
Nathanael
Chapter Two
Preparing For Battle
* * * * *
The next morning, I went to the office and had the legal team come in to see me. They didn't like being ordered to the CEO's office, but they didn't have a choice but to show up, so I had five irritable lawyers sitting at my conference table at nine AM.
“Jack,” I began. In meetings like this, you only address the senior counsel, not the whole group. “I've made a decision to refuse settlement. You can force it to a board vote if you wish, but we all know how that will turn out, so thee really isn't a point. The only thing I want to hear from you is what our defensive strategy is going to be.”
Jackson smiled ruefully. “Since I know you're as stubborn as your old man, I naturally assumed that would be your decision. I had Lawton begin preparing a civil defense last night, and we went outside for criminal defense; I got you Harrison Wheeler, the guy who defended that movie star accused of killing his mistress. He's the best there is for down and dirty criminal defense, and that's what we’ll need if you’re indicted.” He turned to one of the other lawyers present. “Lawton?”
Lawton Orloff was another of our lawyers, a brilliant man who'd graduated top of his Harvard Law class. He generally handled our lawsuits, and I can't say I was unhappy to have him working on this case. Almost all of the cases he took on were dismissed without going to trial, and without a settlement!
“Nathanael,” he said, “our position has to be that this woman is merely a money-grubber, trying to make a patently false claim of wrong-doing by you in order to line her own pockets. We're going to use the evidence of theft, but she'll counter that she never heard anything about it before. Since you and Davenport kept it private between yourselves, there isn't any documentation, so proving it will come down to your testimony and his. That’s a tenuous position, at best, because the court will expect you to have a whole team of people to back up what you say, while the poor little victim is all alone. That means the sympathy of the court will be with her, so unless we can break her testimony somehow, we're not in the strongest position.”
I nodded. “I see that. What else we got?”
“Donna Bennet has a very minor record involving alcohol, but everything we can find on her says she isn't drinking today. That will also look good for her, as in, she's been working hard to straighten out her life, so why would she stoop to something like this? If she had any kind of actual criminal record, particularly involving theft or blackmail or fraud, we'd have a much better chance of discrediting her, but she’s actually pretty clean. Any chance you know anything we can use against her?”
I shook my head. “No. She's a good worker, other than taking some money she needed for medical expenses. Her daughter had some condition that needed chronic care, and she was taking small amounts to pay for it until her insurance kicked in. I gave her the moneys he needed, in cash, and she promised not to steal any more. I thought that was the end of it.”
He nodded, making notes. “I'll call in a private investigator this morning, get them digging into her as deeply as possible. Everyone has a skeleton or three in the closet, and we'll find hers. Meanwhile, you need to write out everything about your interactions with this woman, every detail. Go over it and over it until you’re sure it's as accurate as it can be, then get it to me. Sometimes there's a little detail that seems insignificant, but turns out to be the key to breaking the case.”
I nodded agreement. “I'll do that this morning,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Not at the moment, but I'm sure I'll be calling you off and on. These things can move very slowly, or they can seem like a whirlwind, so we'll take it a step at a time.”
The lawyers filed out, and I tried to concentrate on normal business issues, but my mind was in North Platte. I missed Katelynn, and it was driving me nuts that I couldn't even call her. I understood why, but it still hurt.
The worst part of this, for me, was not understanding what could have made Katelynn give up everything we had together to believe Donna. It made no sense to me, none at all. I was fairly certain that there was nothing on earth that could ever have made me doubt her, not even a photograph that seemed to show her in a compromising position.
Speaking of photographs, I had yet to see the one being used as evidence against me. Jackson said that a copy of the actual lawsuit, including that pho
to, would be arriving by Fed Ex that day, and I had the feeling that I'd see something there that would give me a clue about how to handle this.
I made it through the morning by writing the report on Donna and my interactions with her, then started digging into lots of my Dad's old records, looking at how he'd handled various situations. I was hoping to get some insights into how to cope with this one, but there was nothing even close. I stopped for lunch, even though I wasn't very hungry, and was just heading out to our cafeteria when Mom walked into my office.
“Hi, Mom,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “Join me for lunch?”
She agreed, and we went down the elevator to the first floor, where the cafeteria was located, and got into the line. I took the roast beef sandwich and chips, and Mom got a salad. She always ate a lot of salads, which was probably why she stayed so thin, I figured.
We sat down at a table away from others, and Mom said grace, then we began eating. We made small talk while we ate, but when we got finished, she turned serious.”
“Nathanael,” she said, “I wish there were something I could do to help you through this. I know you're hurting, as much from the accusations as from the loss of your relationship, but you can't give up.”
“Mom, I have no intention of giving up! Katelynn is the most wonderful woman in the world, present company excluded, of course, and I'm not going to lose her forever! No matter what it takes, I'm going to prove that this woman is lying and get Katelynn to take me back!”
She smiled at me. “That's my boy,” she said, patting my hand. “We'll get through this, Nathanael, I promise you. I wish there was more I could do to help, though.”
“Mom, just having your support, yours and Dad's, is more than I could ask. It means so much to me.”
I went back to my office and started working on some of the corporate reports that needed my signature. I'd been at that for about twenty minutes when my secretary told me I had a call. I took it without asking who it was.