by Cate Holahan
Still, Tom’s demeanor didn’t mean that Ana hadn’t had an affair—just that her husband couldn’t imagine it.
A yawn swallowed Tom’s face. “It’s like I’ve told you and countless other people. She’d been sick all vacation. I left her sleeping on our balcony to go to the pool for a bit and—”
“You swim?” Ryan asked to avoid hearing Tom’s impossible explanation for his wife’s fall for the umpteenth time. Repetition had a way of turning fabrications into facts. He couldn’t risk Tom convincing him of his crazy story.
“What?” Tom looked into his glass. He rotated his wrist, spinning the alcohol inside his tumbler into a cyclone. “No, not really. Ana was the swimmer.”
“Ana didn’t want to swim?”
“Like I said, she was sick all trip. She wanted to lie down after the beach, so she went back to the room and I went on to the pool.”
Ryan caught the inconsistency. “Wait, I thought you went back with her to the room before you went to the pool.”
Tom’s head snapped up from his drink. “What? Yeah.”
“You just said you ‘went on to the pool’ like she went to the room and you went straight to the sun deck.”
He coughed. “No. Look, I’m tired, all right? I went on to the pool, after dropping her in the room. She got settled in the lounge chair on our balcony and then I went up to the ninth deck.” He rubbed his temple with his free hand. “If I’d just stayed . . .”
Ryan felt suddenly guilty for jumping on Tom’s word choice. He was starting to feel bad for judging him so harshly at their first meeting. So what that Tom had remained presentable after his wife’s death? Maybe he was someone who needed to go through the motions in order to manage his grief. Getting a haircut and shaving didn’t mean the guy wasn’t torn up about losing his wife. It didn’t make him a jerk. A cocky guy would have thrown a fit at the suggestion that his wife had boinked her boss, maybe even taken a swing at the man doing the suggesting. Tom had remained calm, almost collegial. Ryan couldn’t picture the man as a callous wife-beater like Ana’s parents claimed.
The thought reminded Ryan of Tom’s earlier statement. “You said Ana took care of her parents?”
Tom took a deep breath. “Sure did. Those two were constantly making withdrawals from the bank of Bacon. Even after I stopped working and we had to cut back on the household, they were asking for money.”
Household cutbacks. The Bacons did have staff, at least at some point. Ryan reminded himself to keep hassling the house cleaners’ voice machine. “You had a nanny and a cleaning service?”
Tom laughed to himself. “I’m sorry. But you’re crazy if you think I’m handing out the name of everyone who ever worked for us so you can spread rumors about my wife.” He swished the liquor in his glass. “I answered the question about the affair.”
“I take it you didn’t like Ana’s folks?”
Tom took another sip of whiskey and shrugged. “I tried to. I think they took advantage of their daughter and me, refusing to work because it was too easy to guilt Ana into sending cash.” He gestured with the glass. “Those people would say anything for money.”
“Ana’s mother suggested that you got physical with your wife before her death . . .”
Anger darkened Tom’s resigned expression. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, and then took a long drink from his glass. When he lowered the tumbler, he again appeared tired and sad. “It’s not surprising. Like I said, they’d say anything for money. They wanted their daughter to support them. Now they want Sophia to do it.”
He threw back the last of his whiskey and set the glass on the counter. A guttural sound resonated in his throat, as if the liquid had seared his esophagus. “Anyway, my point was that Ana wouldn’t have put them through any grief over her.” He smacked his lips together. “So we done here?”
“Just one more question.” Tom raised both eyebrows, a get-on-with-it expression. “Why did Ana quit?”
Tom’s head cocked. “Who told you she quit? Michael?”
“Yes.”
Tom snorted.
“So she didn’t choose to leave Derivative Capital?”
Tom eyed the open Canadian bourbon, as if debating whether to pour himself another. He picked up the bottle and placed it back on the shelf beside several near-empties. “It was complicated.” He walked around the bar and lifted Ryan’s coat off the back of the chair. He held it out to him. “But I can assure you, the reasons she left had nothing to do with her fall. That was just an accident.”
Tom paused between every other syllable in the last sentence. Ryan accepted his coat, understanding that his host had said all he would on the matter. He slipped on his outerwear as Tom led the way through the playroom toward the stairs. With luck, he’d glimpse the “family friend” before he left, maybe slip her his card.
Ryan heard a sliding door open before he saw it. There was an exit into the backyard. Tom was letting him out the rear door. The female friend would remain a mystery, at least for now.
Ryan mentally cursed as the lock clicked behind him. Tom had given him nothing and again threatened a legal challenge to any suicide-related denial of benefits. There was no way ISI would win a lawsuit with only a stat showing how extremely unlikely it was for a sober person to fall off a cruise ship. He needed to show beyond a shadow of doubt that Ana had reasons to want to die. As it was, all he had was that Ana had quit her job to stay with her family during a challenging time for her husband and that the Bacons had money issues. But they weren’t destitute. Tom had managed to remain in his multimillion-dollar home. Losing the housekeeper wasn’t justification for becoming shark bait.
His feet sunk into melting snow as he rounded the Bacons’ house to the front yard. What was he missing?
He pulled out his cell and wallet from his pocket. Fernanda’s card was in the front flap. Ana had stopped sending Sophia to daycare after August 18. Maybe she could figure out what had been on Ana and Michael’s agenda that week and what had gone wrong.
14
August 14
A crack ran through the bedroom ceiling. Faint, like a fingernail mark on chalkboard, but definitely there. The new house had settled during the past few years and lines snaked across the drywall. The future owners would need to invest in plenty of plaster and paint.
I listened for Tom’s breathing to smooth out into the sounds of a deep sleep, all the while fighting my eyelids back. It had been a long day. Michael had decided to take a family cruise to the Bahamas, at the insistence of his wife. There’d been islands to research, reservations to secure, pets to board, entertainment options to vet. Michael, of course, had insisted that I plan it all. He couldn’t “trust the wife to keep the schedule straight.”
Gauzy linen crumpled on top of my legs. My husband slept on top of the bedding, too hot from the lack of a blasting air conditioner, and too withdrawn from our recent argument, to join me beneath the sheets.
After an exhausting fifteen minutes, Tom’s breathing settled into a long, nasal whistle. I freed myself from beneath the sheet and slid from the bed. My parents still needed two hundred more dollars to keep the gangs at bay, and I had a dozen ideas of how to use the additional eight hundred from the Ghost Horse.
My first stop was Sophia’s room. I’d figured out a more portable solution to accessing the wine fridge’s top shelf than the stepladder: the wooden stool Sophia used to reach the sink. The extra foot would be enough to grab the neck of the Ghost Horse, and it only weighed a couple pounds or so.
I crept into my daughter’s dark bedroom. My familiarity was better than night vision. Often, I put away her clean clothes after getting her to sleep. I guessed most parents did. Children probably got the idea that monsters lived in the closet from fuzzy glimpses of moms putting away the laundry past midnight.
The stepstool stood against the vanity in Sophia’s adjoining bathroom. I snatched it and slipped back into the hallway. Again, I tried to think like a burglar as I descended the main
staircase to the first floor and then turned toward the basement stairs. Don’t turn on the light until there’s no chance of it spreading to the upper hallway. Step carefully. Move quickly.
A light in the man cave threatened like an intruder. Tom had left it on. Was he trying to run up the electricity bill? How hard was it to flip a switch after leaving a room? I strode to the LED-lit wine storage unit. Blue light encased the bottles. At least LEDs were energy efficient.
I placed the stepstool at the foot of the enclosure and slid back the glass door. The Ghost Horse beckoned on the top shelf. As soon as my palm wrapped around the bottle, I sensed a problem. The bottle was lighter than an empty milk carton. A full wine bottle should have weight to it.
“I drank it.”
I nearly fell off the stool as I whirled around. Tom stood in the opening to the room. His frame filled the exit.
Evidence of my intended theft stuck to my hand. I began stuttering. “T—Tom. I thought you were asleep.”
His hips rolled as he walked toward me, a cat stalking a mouse. “Drank it ages ago. You did too. Remember? We were celebrating my promotion to managing director. I kept the bottle because it looked good on the shelf.” He shook his head, disappointed or disgusted. “I didn’t drink the Pingus though. And I’d been saving that Gaja for a something special.”
“I needed to sell them.”
“To whom?” He scowled. “Vincent?”
He stopped inches from my perch. His bottom lip pulled above his top teeth. “Do you even know how much those bottles were worth?”
“Vincent gave me eight hundred.” A cold sweat broke out on my body like a fever rash. I blamed guilt. I did not fear my husband. “We needed the money.”
“To pay what?” The words shot from his mouth and ricocheted off of the high ceiling. “What bill could you possibly pay off with eight hundred bucks? The twelve thousand monthly mortgage, on a house that the bank will take by the end of the year? The last four months of car payments? The maxed-out credit cards with the ten-K limits?”
Thanks to the stepstool, we were eye to eye. His pupils loomed large, reflecting the fridge’s blue light, a lightning strike in a dark sky. My lower lids grew heavy with restrained tears.
“Gangs are threatening my parents’ lives. They nearly put my father in the hosp—”
“Your parents? Again?” Tom threw up his hands. They landed on his hair and curled into fists. He raked his fingers down his face. “We can’t keep a roof over our heads, and you’re still sending cash to your parents?”
“They’d been paying off these men, and when I stopped sending money—”
“I don’t care about your parents’ situation.” Tom’s hands clasped into a hammer of locked fingers. He beat the air with each point. “Let me explain our situation. We are worse than poor. We don’t just have no money, we have negative money.” His hands broke apart. A finger hit the center of his forehead, right between his brows. “The debt is up to our fucking eyeballs.”
“They were going to kill my dad.”
Tom threw his hands into the air. “Ana, I’m not heartless. But there’s always some tragedy with those two, and they always make it seem bigger than it is so you will keep them on the gravy train. And that train has long left the station. I can’t support them anymore. Babe, I can’t even support us. Don’t you understand? We are reeling from the biggest financial crisis in a lifetime. Thousands of traders lost their jobs. New jobs are not out there. And even if they were there, they’re not open for me. All that risk I took, which was wonderful when the billions rolled in, now, it’s this black mark. We are losing our house, our cars—”
“You didn’t see the bruises. They had bats.”
His hands pulled down his cheeks. A red line followed his fingernails. He’d cut himself. “I am drowning and you keep dragging me further under.”
Pity for my husband stabbed at my insides. I cauterized the cuts with anger. This argument wasn’t about his struggle to find work. It was about exchanging a bottle of wine for my parents’ safety. He was upset because he hadn’t drunk it. “So I’m supposed to let you pour thousands of dollars’ worth of wine down your throat while my parents suffer?” I shouted. “They’re in real danger. We can do without wine.”
“It’s not just—” Tom wiped his hand over his mouth. He shoulders sagged. “We can do without everything, right, Ana? Maybe you can even do without me? It’s not like you need my permission.”
This time, my sympathy pains stayed sharp. The job loss had been emasculating. And rather than treat him as a spouse worthy of respect, I’d gone behind his back to sell his stuff, as though he didn’t matter at all.
I stepped down from the ladder. Once on the ground, he towered over me. But my actions, not my height, made me feel small. I’d betrayed my husband. And why? The alcohol was not the only way to get money for my folks. I worked for a multibillion-dollar hedge fund. Surely I could ask Michael for a salary advance. Selling Tom’s liquor had never been my only option.
“I’m sorry.” I extended the empty bottle out to him. “I panicked.”
He took the Ghost Horse and stepped around me to slide the bottle back into its holster. Without my anger and fear, all I had left was grief: for my parents, for my husband, for me. A sob burned in my throat. I swallowed it with another apology. “I should have talked to you.”
Tom looked at me with his oceanic eyes, made bluer by the light of the bar. “When did you stop trusting me?”
“I trust you.” The lie echoed in the silence. Obviously, if I still trusted my husband, I would have talked to him about my concerns, not broken into his wine cabinet. I hadn’t because I believed losing his job had made him depressed and irresponsible. I hadn’t thought he’d make the right decision.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
Tom walked over to a wall. He flipped a switch, shutting off the fridge light. Without it, the room became pitch black. His voice pierced through the darkness. “I don’t feel like watching anything anymore. You coming to bed?”
“You still want me to?”
Tom brushed my hand as he passed me out the door. “Ana, we can’t afford anything—least of all a grudge.”
15
November 25
Ryan stood at the base of the Palace Hotel’s twin staircase, waiting for a stranger. Robert Bowen, Esq., would be a thin man with silvered hair and an aquiline nose, according to Fernanda. “He looks like a banker,” she’d said, voice hissing through his phone receiver, as though she’d called 9-1-1 from inside a closet.
The stage whisper might have been overkill, given that Michael was still out of the office for an extended Thanksgiving vacation. But Fernanda clearly wasn’t taking chances. She’d refused to e-mail him Michael’s schedule for the week of August 18, insisting that the firm’s IT department would track her actions. Instead, she’d phoned him back from her personal number and read off the relevant week’s meetings from Michael’s archived calendar.
The only engagement that had stood out was a Tuesday evening dinner with the Illinois Police and Fire Retirement Fund. There’d been a note on that entry: “AB attending.” Ana Bacon’s initials.
Tracking down the fund’s investment team had taken a simple web search. Catching the two-man team was more of a challenge. Bowen and his partner were based in Chicago, according to the fund’s administrative assistant. Fortunately for Ryan, Bowen was in the city for the next few days interviewing investment managers. After appealing to Bowen’s secretary’s desire to help expedite an insurance resolution for a motherless child—as if that were his goal—the woman had squeezed in a meeting before her boss’s dinner engagement.
Ryan regretted not asking the secretary for a better description or providing one for himself. Bowen would be looking for a guy in a black pea coat with brownish hair. In November, that description fit more than half the male population of Manhattan.
He caught a wave out of the corner of his eye. A man with silver streaks and a
long nose with a prominent bump on the bridge sat in the neighboring lobby, gesturing for him to approach. He wore a black suit and orange tie, fitting for the upcoming holiday. A navy top coat dangled over his forearm. He was dressed for dinner—and he did look like a banker.
Ryan limped into the lobby, hand extended. “Thanks for meeting, Robert.”
“Of course. Call me Bob.” The man gave a firm handshake before settling into one of two velvet chairs positioned cater-cornered to the hotel’s reception desk. He draped his coat over the chair’s fat arm. “Horrible what happened to that young woman. She seemed very sweet.”
Ryan settled into the neighboring seat. The velvet sucked in his bottom, urging him to lie back and stay awhile. Good furniture had a way of forcing relaxation. He made himself perch on the edge of the chair. “I understand that you met Ana during a dinner with Michael Smith.”
“Yes.” Bob pulled his right leg over his bent left knee and wagged the foot. “A final due diligence meeting.”
“What was Ana’s role?”
Bowen gave a coy smile. “Guess you’d have to ask Michael. She chimed in with some of the marketing numbers, occasionally.”
“Did Michael seem to need that?”
“Well, we’d had all that stuff from prior meetings. We were mostly there to get a sense of Michael in a social setting, have one last conversation before closing the deal.” He turned up his palms in a guilty manner. “It didn’t hurt having her there. She was attractive and pleasant, you know? Maybe Michael thought she’d make dinner a bit more enjoyable for all of us. Three guys talking shop can get tiring pretty quickly.”
“So she was eye candy?”
Bob’s nose crinkled like a pug. “I wouldn’t put it that way. I think she was there to grease the wheels, kind of. She was quite charming.” He smiled as if remembering how nice she’d been. “Shame, really.”