Liar's Market

by Taylor Smith

  “Lots of men wear golf shirts and sunglasses, Ms. Overturf, especially in boats.”

  Tracy’s shoulders assumed a stubborn square. “Jonah wouldn’t say there was someone there if there wasn’t.”

  “But you didn’t see this boat yourself?” Andrews asked. “And you didn’t, either, Mrs. MacNeil?”

  They both shook their heads, but Tracy wasn’t backing down. “I think it’s time Carrie move somewhere safer and more comfortable. The situation here sucks, to put it bluntly. It’s not secure, and it certainly isn’t a happy or stable environment for a six-year-old, especially with Cruella De Vil up there on a rampage the way she is. As her lawyer, I’ve advised Carrie she’s under no legal obligation to stay in this house. As her friend, I insist you people back off. Let her do what’s best for her little boy. Whatever Drum has or hasn’t been up to, you’ve got no grounds to be casting suspicion on his family and making their lives miserable like this.”

  Tucker stepped forward, a deep frown bisecting the high dome of his forehead. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “Mrs. MacNeil, did you not tell Agent Andrews the other day that the reason you weren’t going to ask for alimony if you divorced your husband is that you had resources of your own to fall back on?”

  “That’s right,” Carrie said.

  “An investment account, I believe you said. Was that being managed by the Stanley-May brokerage house?”

  “That’s right. My father used them for years. Why?”

  “And you said the account was in your name alone, I believe. That your husband had no interest in it.”

  “No, no interest at all, legally or otherwise. When tech stocks started to tank a few years back, I asked Drum where he thought I should move my money. Stocks and bonds weren’t exactly my forte, either, even though I’d done a business minor as an undergrad. I always ducked the courses on financial markets. It was the art markets I cared about. And Drum was even less inclined to deal with that stuff than I was. I could have been asking him what brand of panty hose to buy, for all the interest he showed. Finance made his eyes glaze over. He told me to call the brokers, tell them I wanted to park the money in some conservative shelter and ride out the storm. That’s more or less what I did.”

  “So you parked the money and you haven’t touched it since?”

  “That’s right.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Andrews said. He withdrew a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “You’ve been in the process as we speak of quietly cashing out and moving your money offshore.”

  “What? No way!” Carrie said indignantly. “I told you, I haven’t touched that money since I got married.”

  “That’s not what this letter from your broker says.”

  “What letter?” Carrie took the letter from his hand and read it, then sank onto one of the bar stools.

  “Carrie? What is it?” Tracy asked, coming around the island.

  Carrie handed her the letter. “It’s not true, Tracy. I didn’t order this. Where did you find this letter?” she asked Andrews.

  “Among your husband’s things. The annex is missing, though. How convenient. Won’t do you any good, though. We’ll find out where the accounts are.”

  “But these transactions are still underway,” Tracy said, re-reading the letter. She looked up angrily. “It’s obvious what’s happened. Drum forged her signature and set out to steal her money. But it’s not too late to stop it, Carrie. You need to call the brokerage right now and terminate these transfers. With luck, you can even get the ones that have already gone through reversed.”

  Carrie took a step toward the phone mounted on the kitchen’s brick wall, but Andrews held up a hand.

  “Don’t bother, Mrs. MacNeil. I’ve already got my people working on a warrant to freeze your accounts and seize your broker’s files. The rest of your money’s not going to be leaving the country any time soon, and neither are you. If you want to move your son over to Georgetown, we might consider that. But Georgetown is as far as I’m prepared to see you go until we get to the bottom of this.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The next few days were the most uncomfortable of Carrie’s life, with the exception of the period immediately following the death of her parents and sister. With Tracy’s cautious agreement, she agreed to submit to a polygraph examination in which she was grilled on everything from her financial dealings to her sex life—both pretty much nonexistent, she was able to say and apparently pass electronic muster. Her personal correspondence was examined and retained for analysis, both content and handwriting. Her closets and drawers and jewelry box were pulled apart for evidence of recent purchases or other evidence of plans to skip the country.

  Federal agents delved into every aspect of her life, and no matter how much Carrie argued that there was no evidence to be found, she got the distinct impression she was guilty until proven innocent—of what, she wasn’t sure. As for the letter of instruction to her financial broker, Carrie could get nothing out of Agent Andrews, who seemed to have warned Tucker and Huxley, too, against telling her what they’d decided about that business. The broker, when she quietly telephoned, wouldn’t take her call. Obviously, he, too, had been warned about colluding with shifty redheads.

  Finally, though, Andrews agreed to let her take Jonah and move across the river into Tracy’s parents’ house in Georgetown. She could only hope that meant they’d decided she wasn’t lying about not having instructed the broker to send her money overseas.

  Drum, meantime, made no return appearances—if it had indeed been him Jonah had seen at the dock that morning. Jonah was bitterly disappointed, but as he and Carrie made plans to move yet again, he seemed to sense the pressure she was under and the fear she was feeling, and he never mentioned his father’s name again.

  With Althea not speaking to her in earnest now—not merely grumbling, as she had since Drum’s disappearance, but responding with icy silence to all approaches—Carrie was down to Jonah and Tracy as her last remaining allies in her battle to hang on to her good name and her sanity. And, she conceded, maybe Huxley, who was kind to Jonah and reasonably polite to her—although he was probably just playing good cop to Andrews’s and Tucker’s bad. Since he was the only bright point in poor Jonah’s long days, though, Carrie was willing to give the Brit the benefit of the doubt. She might as well. She needed all the foul-weather friends she could get.

  The feds seemed to have backed off a little for the moment, but it was small enough comfort, given that she was effectively broke, abandoned, and still under suspicion of God only knew what.

  “But it’s a bit like being repeatedly poked in the eye with a stick,” she told Tracy the day she and Jonah were finally given the go-ahead to relocate across the Potomac to Georgetown. “It feels so good when it finally stops that you almost forget you’re bleeding, blind, and a butt ugly pariah to the rest of the world.”

  Washington, D.C. (Georgetown)

  October 27, 2002—9:25 a.m.

  Sunday morning, and a cool breeze wafted through the tall windows that Carrie had flung wide open that morning, setting the creamy shears in the Overturfs’ front rooms to dancing like drunken wraiths. Somewhere nearby, somebody had a fireplace lit—or was burning leaves, maybe. Were people allowed to do that anymore? Whatever it was, the air carried that smoky autumn undertone that always made Carrie’s heart skip a beat.

  For the first time in weeks, she found herself humming under her breath as she moved from room to room, tidying the clutter that seemed unavoidable when you lived with a six-year-old. She pulled a rag from the back hip pocket of her jeans and dusted surfaces in each room she passed through, liberating them temporarily from the perpetual film that seemed to accompany the renovation work being carried out in Tracy’s parents’ absence.

  Other people, when asked to name their favorite season, might choose spring with its green promise of re-birth or maybe “those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.” For her part, Carrie thought, give her a crisp fal
l day any time to spark hopes for new beginnings and better days to come. This warm fuzzy feeling was probably rooted in her happy childhood, she decided, when her mother would take her and Izzie shopping for matching back-to-school outfits as Labor Day approached. Then it was lunch at Anderson’s Pea Soup, with its full-size, turning windmill, and on to their father’s drug store, where each twin would be allowed to wheel her own shopping cart through the school supply aisles, picking out shiny lunch boxes and pencil cases and all their other goodies for the coming school year. Best of all were the new crayons, one big box for each girl because their dad owned the store, so no need to settle for smaller packages of twelve or twenty-four. For the Morgan twins, only sixty-four brilliant colors with a built-in sharpener in the bottom of the box would do.

  After Jonah’s first day at Elmwood Elementary, Carrie took Jonah shopping for supplies on the list his new teacher had sent home. As they walked through the aisles at the Georgetown branch of Staples, Jonah paused and gave her a very strange look when he caught her sniffing Crayolas. “What are you smelling the crayons for?”

  “Because they smell hopeful,” Carrie told him, closing her eyes and inhaling the innocent, waxy smell of indigo, cerulean and apple-green.

  “Hopeful?”

  “Uh-huh. Like a promise that anything’s possible. That the future belongs to you, if you believe in it and commit yourself to it with all your heart.” She held up a notebook and riffled the pages under his nose. “Newsprint, too. The smell of it, and all those nice, clean blue lines. A big, fat promise that it’s a new day and ours to make the most of.”

  “Mom?”

  “What?”

  “You’re really weird, you know that?” He moved ahead of her in the aisle, distancing himself, curly head shaking as he passed Tengwall, who’d accompanied them that morning while Huxley hung back at the house. If the FBI was keeping its distance, it didn’t mean that Carrie had been completely abandoned by the watchdogs.

  Tengwall laughed at the dramatic roll of his big gray-green eyes. “Oops. What was that about?”

  “It’s happened,” Carrie said ruefully, as she pulled her cart alongside the young woman. “I’ve made the transition from ‘she who can do no wrong’ to ‘she who suffers from terminal dorkiness.’”

  “Bound to happen, I guess. Past a certain point, parents are uncool by definition.”

  “Tell me about it. We’re into the ‘my teacher knows everything’ phase now. As if I didn’t already feel like a complete idiot, after totally screwing up my life to date, now I get a daily reminder from a six-year-old.”

  “You think it’s bad now. Wait till he gets to be a teenager.”

  “Oh, joy,” Carrie had said ruefully.

  But that Sunday morning, it was impossible not to feel cheerful. The air felt especially cool and refreshing after a long, oppressively muggy summer that she’d feared would never end.

  Objectively speaking, she had little enough reason for optimism. Drum was still AWOL, a third of her savings had vanished into offshore accounts, the rest was in legal limbo, and she and Jonah were only temporarily settled in digs that sometimes felt more like a construction site than a home. Yet, despite the uncertainty of her situation, Carrie had been finding herself more and more often irrationally upbeat—for brief stretches, at least, until reality crashed in on her once again and she remembered that she was effectively broke, adrift, abandoned, and under suspicion of God only knew what. She was working on developing Zenlike patience, though. She might as well, since at this point, the situation was largely out of her control. All she could do was take care of her son and try to come up with a workable plan for managing on her own while she waited to see what developed on the legal front.

  She moved into the dining room, gathering up Jonah’s crayons and paper. Already reading, thanks to the advanced kindergarten experience he’d had at the International School in London, he’d been honing his skills on the daily comics in the Washington Post. The night before, he’d decided that his ambition was to draw the Peanuts strip. His first efforts at Snoopy and Company were still scattered across the long oak trestle table. Carrie smiled as she stacked them on the side buffet, picking out a couple to stick to the kitchen refrigerator, then pulling out her dust rag to wipe down the table. Tracy’s mom, who taught nineteenth-century lit in Georgetown’s English Department, was an avid collector of antiques, and the two-hundred-year-old trestle table had once seen service in the dining room of the Jesuit fathers who’d founded the university on the hill. The stories this table could tell, Carrie thought, smiling as she ran a dust rag over its deep, golden grain.

  As much as she’d hesitated to uproot Jonah once again, she should have known the move to Georgetown would work. This house had always been lucky for her. It felt like a special trust, caring for it while Tracy’s parents were away on sabbatical. From the time she’d first arrived at Georgetown University and discovered that her assigned roommate was the daughter of two popular professors, she’d always felt welcome in the big old place on O Street. That fall of her freshman year, despite battling homesickness and missing her left-behind twin, she’d fallen happily into the routine of Sunday night dinner with the shifting crowd of students, professors, neighbors and relatives who always seemed to show up for Tracy’s dad’s hearty concoctions.

  And then, there was the sheer comfort of being back in Georgetown again, with its quaint brick and stone houses, arching trees and funky shops. Although the area’s fortunes had risen, fallen, then risen again in the past three centuries, physically it was little changed from its earliest days as a tobacco port town. Take away the cars from the narrow streets and the bright signage of the trendy coffeehouses and fashionable eateries, and Thomas Jefferson would probably still recognize Georgetown—named not for the first President, as many people believed, but for the mad English king who’d lost America for his heirs.

  The Overturfs’ three-story house was federal-style, tall, narrow and deep, constructed of red-brown bricks that had been formed, like most of those in Georgetown, from the very soil on which the house had been built. Built in 1801 by a tobacco trader, the single family home had been converted to apartments in the late 1800s, and was a rundown tenement when Tracy’s parents had bought it nearly thirty years earlier. Now, after years of renters and renovations, they were almost done converting it back to its original residential elegance.

  Carrie moved out of the dining room and across the hall into the library. After her parents and sister had died, the Overturfs had practically adopted her. She’d even lived with them that first summer after the fire, when going back to California had seemed terrifying and unthinkable in so many ways. Now, this big old house on O Street had become a safe haven once again as she tried to put her shattered life back together.

  She picked up a glass Jonah had left next to the computer on the library desk, pausing to turn off the machine. He’d been playing a Star Wars game when she’d come downstairs a short while earlier to make his breakfast. The computer belonged to Tracy’s parents, and the game was one Tracy had bought as a welcome gift when Carrie and Jonah had moved in at the end of August. Their own computer and Jonah’s games were still impounded by the FBI as they searched for hard evidence of Drum’s treachery—being none too quick about it, Carrie thought, reminding herself to ask Agent Andrews when they planned to return her machine.

  Coming out of the library to return Jonah’s glass to the kitchen, she nearly collided with Huxley, who’d appeared out of nowhere. “Yikes!” she cried. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  She’d accepted by now that they were under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance, even when she couldn’t spot the agents tailing them, but Huxley’s comings and goings seemed to follow no particular schedule, as if he thought the element of surprise might somehow encourage Drum to appear out of thin air. As it was, barring the unexplained incident at the Elcott Road dock, there’d been no confirmed sightings of her husband since the morning he’d given Huxl
ey the slip at Tyson’s Corner. As for missing him, Drum had been around so little even before his disappearing act that neither Carrie nor Jonah really noticed he was gone. If it hadn’t been for worrying he might still show up to claim Jonah, Carrie might almost have been able to relax and accept that Drum was out of their lives for good. It was grim but revealing evidence of how hollow the marriage had become, Carrie thought, that its ending cast so little shadow over her heart.

  Huxley stepped aside awkwardly in the doorway, weighed down by a heavy canvas sheet, rags, brushes and what appeared to be a can of paint. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “No, you go ahead,” she countered, pulling back into the room. “You’re more loaded down than I am.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks,” he grunted, coming through the doorway.

  He set the supplies down and proceeded to spread the drop cloth over the hardwood in front of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that ran along one entire wall. The shelves were empty, stripped and sanded down to the original oak in readiness for staining and varnishing.

  “I didn’t know you were planning to be here this morning,” Carrie said. “It’s Sunday. Don’t you ever get a day off?”

  For a few moments there, she’d almost allowed herself to forget he and Tucker and Tengwall were still underfoot, much less what their presence signified—Drum, betrayal, suspicion, her life in disarray. In England during World War II, she’d read, there had been a period between the declaration of war in the fall of 1939 and the beginning of the Blitz in the summer of 1940 when the idea of battle had seemed a little unreal, as if the newspapers had made up the whole thing in a bid to boost circulation. The Phony War, people called it—until the bombs started to fall and it became gruesomely real.

  She was living in her own personal Phony War these days, a deceptive lull between Drum’s defection and the legal firestorm that was bound to erupt when he was eventually tracked down, as he surely would be sooner or later. Meantime, the ongoing presence of Huxley and the two CIA watchers, as well as the periodic reappearance of FBI Agent Andrews with more questions to which she had no answers only served to remind Carrie that the battle lines drawn by Drum’s defection had yet to be crossed.