by Wendy Wax
Miranda could hear her heart beat in the silence. She forced herself to look up into the appraising blue eyes.
“Not that I know of,” Carly said. Then she hesitated. “But he could have dealt directly with the airline.”
“Who do we book through?”
“The Delta ticket office in Claymore.”
“Will you get them on the line for me, Carly? And please tell Helen St. James I want to see the latest financial statements along with all our receivables and pertinent client files immediately.”
Surprise washed over Carly’s face. She opened her mouth then closed it. With a nod, she turned and left the office, closing the door softly behind her.
Two minutes later Miranda was talking to the agent who had booked Tom’s flights.
“I booked him through San Francisco just like I always do,” the woman said.
“Yes, yes, and I know he was very happy with the flight.” Miranda coughed. “Um, did you book just the one ticket?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Was he traveling alone?” Miranda was prepared to describe the woman’s manicure if necessary, but she never got the opportunity.
“Who is this?”
“This is Miranda Smith. His wife.”
What followed was a really dead silence, which Miranda hastened to fill.
“What if you just tell me whether you sold the seat next to him to anyone else.”
The woman did silence better than anyone Miranda had ever encountered. If keeping quiet were an Olympic sport, this woman would be taking home the gold.
“Right, then.” Miranda chose another tack. “Can you tell me if the seat next to him was occupied at all?”
“No.”
“How about telling me whether he actually used his ticket to Hong Kong.”
“Can’t.”
This was getting really annoying.
“Is there anyone at the airline who can?”
“No.”
“How can I get information about the seating arrangements?”
“You can’t.”
“Because . . .” Miranda prompted.
“Because the passenger manifest is not a public document.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Look, Mrs. Smith.” The agent abandoned the monosyllables with a vengeance. “The only person in this universe who can answer these questions for you is your husband. I suggest you ask him.”
Miranda flushed and put down the phone. Then because she was apparently a glutton for punishment, she dialed American Express’s customer service number and gave the answering agent Tom’s credit card number. The woman’s “We’re here to help” tone lasted about five seconds.
“Are you reporting the credit card stolen or not, ma’am?”
Miranda rubbed her forehead. “Well, I don’t actually know that it’s been stolen. I’m just trying to understand why there’s no activity on it.”
There was a silence and then, “Could it be because no one is using it?” The words themselves were inoffensive. The tone was not.
And of course the customer service agent was right. Anyone with half a brain knew that credit cards left their own breadcrumb trail. Tom had watched all the same Rockford Files reruns she had. She was wasting her time trying to find him on her own.
“I don’t suppose you can tell me whether another account has been opened under the name of Thomas J. Smith?”
“No, I certainly cannot.”
Miranda hung up the phone and began to gather her things. She’d been wrong to come here. Wrong to try to keep Tom’s desertion to herself. Stupid to think she could track him down. She couldn’t pay her bills on time or get a simple answer out of a customer service agent. Her own husband didn’t think she was worth hanging around for; what made her think she could keep a leaky old ship from sinking?
Much better to go home, lick her wounds, maybe cry herself another little river. If she left now, she could ask Gran to bring over some soup and be tucked into bed in time for her favorite soaps. And then she’d call her daddy.
Clutching her laptop to her chest, she slung her purse over her shoulder, and stood. There was a commotion at the office door and she looked up to see Carly sprinting toward her with Helen St. James on her heels.
“Mrs. Smith, she won’t—”
The bookkeeper stepped around Carly and squared off in front of Miranda. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but you have no right to—”
Miranda studied the bookkeeper. She watched the French manicure flash before her eyes, thought about the number and tone of the E-mails Helen St. James had sent to Tom, considered the woman’s proprietary attitude. She’d just taken a ton of attitude from two different customer service agents. She was in no mood to take any from a woman who might have been sleeping with her husband and, for all she knew, had a hand in damaging the business.
“I don’t have the right to what?” Miranda asked Helen St. James. “Ask for figures from bookkeeping? Try to determine why Fidelity National is worried about our receivables?”
She heard Carly gasp and turned to Tom’s assistant. “That doesn’t leave this room.”
Carly nodded, her eyes wide.
She’d wasted their last encounter assessing the bookkeeper’s manicure, but she’d come here today to try to figure out what was going on; she was not going to let this woman stand in her way.
“Tom Smith is the president of this company. You are only—” Helen began.
“His wife.” Miranda straightened her shoulders and concentrated on projecting, just as she taught her girls in the Miss Rhododendron Prep class to do when answering those stressful onstage questions during pageants. She spoke slowly and clearly, maintaining eye contact with Helen St. James, intent on communicating absolute certainty, hoping neither Helen nor Carly could hear the knocking of her knees.
“This company belongs to the Ballantyne family. And I am a Ballantyne. Tom,” she paused for a moment, surprised by how strange his name was starting to feel on her lips, “is not here.” She swallowed but didn’t look away. “And he may not be here for a while.”
She saw the bookkeeper blanch and heard Carly gasp again and imagined their reaction if she just went ahead and blurted out the truth. She’d undoubtedly feel better for a good five seconds or so, right up until the moment when they realized she was all that was standing between them and joblessness and the panic began to spread.
“I just had an, um, E-mail from Tom a few minutes ago. He’s leaving for,” she wracked her brain for the name of the town she’d looked up at dawn, the one about five hours farther inland, “Guandong, and he’s asked me to keep an eye on things until he gets back.”
“But I e-mailed him and heard nothing. I . . .”
Miranda raised an eyebrow at the bookkeeper just as she had learned to do at committee meetings when someone questioned her opinion. Or with beauty pageant contestants who weren’t paying attention to their coach.
“Tom has always spoken very highly of you, Helen.” She used the woman’s first name intentionally. “And we would not like to lose you. But I need to see our latest financial statements and a breakdown of the payables and receivables, as well as our cash balances, immediately. If you don’t have them on this desk in the next thirty minutes, I’ll have to hire someone who will.”
Then she and her laptop swept past the two dumbfounded women, rounded a corner, and marched straight into the ladies’ room. Where they spent the next thirty minutes gathering up the courage to go back to work.
chapter 5
L eaving the toilet was tough. Facing the files Helen St. James had left on the desk was even tougher. But as she worked through the financial statements, Miranda began to feel a faint glimmer of hope. After years of shrinking profits, these statements showed steady growth over the last six months, most of it due to an unprecedented number of new accounts.
Here, on paper, things looked very good. When all those new receivables came due over the next weeks, Ballan
tyne Bras would be in its best cash position in years. They’d be solvent, liquid, fluid, all those wonderful water-based terms that meant they could focus on growing the business instead of struggling to tread water.
So why, she asked herself, had Tom bailed out? Why, right before Ballantyne was about to reap the rewards of his efforts, had he grabbed a life preserver and jumped ship? If it was only her he’d wanted to leave, he could have asked for a divorce. The key had to be in these receivables.
Staring out the window, Miranda thought about the shreds of the letter she’d found the night Tom disappeared, and the bank’s concern about the number of new receivables. There were a lot of them, and they’d all been opened by Tom. Then she thought about the terms they’d been given.
Most customers got thirty to sixty days to pay for their goods, but Tom had given the new customers a hundred and twenty days. Four months.
The hair on the back of Miranda’s neck prickled.
“Carly,” she said into the intercom, “will you bring me a copy of the orders and contact phone numbers on all the receivables due over the next two weeks, please?”
Miranda had to remind herself to breathe as she waited for the information she’d requested. With shaking fingers she dialed the phone number of the first company. Her mouth was dry and she wasn’t sure how she was going to talk around the lump of fear in her throat.
On the fourth ring the phone was answered. Miranda was just letting out a sigh of relief when she heard, “Joey’s Pizza. The special today is . . .”
Miranda hung up, waited a full sixty seconds, and then hit the redial button.
“Joey’s Piz—”
Miranda slammed down the phone. She looked up at Carly, who was standing expectantly in the doorway. “Did you need anything else?” she asked the assistant.
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Miranda lied. “Um, that’ll be all.”
Carly put a hand on the doorknob.
“And will you close the door behind you?”
She waited until Carly left the office, waited a few more seconds for the door to click shut, then waited another mind-numbing thirty seconds for the assistant to move away from the door.
Miranda wanted to go home, put on her flannel pajamas, and get back in bed. A really stiff drink would be good, too.
She picked up the phone and dialed the second company on the list.
“Thank you for calling the Asheville Biltmore. How may I direct your call?”
Miranda put the phone down quietly. She then dialed a Laundromat in Winston-Salem, a bowling alley in Macon, and a state prison in north Florida.
Of the ten new accounts, all of which had allegedly placed and presumably been shipped orders over the last six months, not one was real.
These nonexistent customers owed Ballantyne more than three million dollars—money the company needed to pay suppliers, create new inventory, and pay down their line of credit at Fidelity National.
Miranda’s head was throbbing full force now, and she sincerely wished she and her laptop had never come out of the bathroom.
Where had the goods gone? Had Tom intentionally created the fictitious customers so that he could sell the ordered goods to finance his new life? Or had he just been trying to make Ballantyne look better on paper and then fled when faced with an audit that would reveal the truth?
She dug in her purse for a Tylenol as she considered both possibilities. As his wife, the distinction was important. As the person left holding the bag, Tom’s motivations couldn’t have mattered less.
Not having the money or the goods was bad enough. Creating fictitious accounts and receivables was worse.
Not to mention completely illegal.
That afternoon Miranda tried to outswim her panic and fear in the country club swimming pool. It was mercifully empty and she swam full-out, kicking with all her strength, reaching with her arms, pulling with her cupped hands. She tried to make her mind as empty as the pool itself, tried to ditch the worst-case scenarios that kept playing out in her head, but she wasn’t having a whole lot of success.
Normally the embryonic silence of the water buoyed and comforted her; swimming smoothed out her thoughts and produced a sense of well-being she found in no other place. But today her mind churned even faster than her feet and arms. Messages she didn’t want to hear echoed in her brain, crashing through the quiet and demanding her attention.
We’re broke, we’re doomed, breathe. We’re broke, we’re doomed, breathe.
She did a racing turn, pushed off the wall, and sliced through the water, and the message changed to: It’s fraud, it’s over, breathe. It’s fraud, it’s over, breathe.
You’re all they’ve got, gasp.
Up and down and back and forth she swam until her arms began to tire and her brain finally began to numb. The messages continued, but they didn’t echo quite so loudly. Her strokes slowed and her kick became a more steady flutter. She hadn’t found peace or any kind of answer, but she thought she might be able to pry herself out of the pool soon before all of her body parts were completely and irreversibly shriveled.
Edith and Lois Turley delivered lunch to the police chief’s office. Blake had brought a small Caesar salad and half a rare roast beef sandwich from home, but when the elderly sisters showed up on the stroke of noon with a picnic basket stuffed with fried chicken, biscuits, and potato salad, he’d had no choice but to let them spread the feast out on the desk in front of him.
It took him twenty minutes to put away enough food to satisfy the sharp-eyed duo, and another ten to ease them—and the apple pie they seemed to think he had room for—out the door. Then he put on his coat and hat and went looking for Miranda Smith.
He tracked her down at the Truro Country Club, where Nancy Bell, the alarmingly perky receptionist, informed him Mrs. Smith was swimming laps. He followed the signs through the tastefully decorated lobby to the soaring glass wall of windows that enclosed the indoor pool. Entering through the men’s locker room, he walked toward the pool in his winter-weight uniform and hard-soled shoes.
Wet heat, all the steamier after the frigid air outside, assaulted him. The floor was slick with water, the room echoed with sound, and the damp, overheated air carried the scent of expensive eau de chlorine. Within seconds, his clothes were limp and perspiration was trickling down his back.
Trying not to breathe in the heat or the chlorine, he scanned the Olympic pool for Miranda Smith.
She swam in the last lane, her slim arms flashing in and out of the water in a practiced crawl, her breathing synched to her stroke, the flutter of her feet steady and sure. She was the lone occupant of the pool.
At the deep end wall, she made a smooth underwater flip turn, and as she resurfaced he got a brief flash of dark hair and goggles before she resumed her stroke. He hunkered down in front of her lane and waited for her to reach him, not quite sure how he was going to play the whole thing.
Her right hand landed on the wall first, and her other came to join it. For a brief moment he thought she meant to keep on swimming, but then she stopped and stood, removing her goggles and running a hand over the top of her head in an automatic smoothing gesture.
The water eddied around her waist, hiding what lay beneath, but the black one-piece was molded to her body like a second skin, and droplets of water clung to her chest and arms.
He brought his gaze up and had to bite back a smile at the raccoonlike imprint the goggles had left around her green eyes.
“Hello, Miranda.”
“Chief.”
They regarded each other for a moment, neither speaking. She didn’t make a move to get out of the pool, but just stood there looking up at him, waiting for him to say something. They’d known each other since birth, though that knowledge had been tempered by the social divide between them. He’d been the son of a real estate agent who died before Floridians discovered Truro’s quaint charm, and a dissatisfied Miss Rhododendron who’d deserted
her husband and eight-year-old son when her life didn’t live up to her expectations.
Miranda Smith had been a Miss Rhododendron, too, plus a whole lot of Miss Something-or-Others he hadn’t bothered to keep track of. From what he could tell, she’d lived the life his mother had aspired to.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Fine.” She flashed the beauty pageant smile a fraction of a second late. “And you?”
“Good, good.” He made a point of staring her right in the eye, despite the natural inclination to drop his gaze lower. As he studied her he realized that her individual features were not particularly beautiful, but the sum of those parts was hard to look away from. “And Tom? How’s Tom?” he asked.
If he hadn’t been watching so closely he might have missed the hesitation. She swallowed and cocked her head in his direction. Then she pulled out her beauty contestant smile again.
“Why, he’s fine, Chief. Thank you for asking.” She finished her Scarlett O’Hara impression with another flash of white teeth. Any minute she was going to bat her eyelashes at him.
“I haven’t seen him around for a while,” Blake replied.
“No?”
“Nope.”
She fidgeted slightly. Nothing major, just enough to tell him she was uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken.
“That’s because he’s out of town.”
“Oh? Where is he?”
She didn’t look away, but he could have sworn he could feel her mind racing.
“He’s out of the country right now. In China.”
“China, huh? Business or pleasure?”
She blushed, which he found interesting. And then she batted her eyelashes.
“Business, of course. He’s attempting to develop new suppliers.”
“And when are you expecting him back?”
She laughed, a hollow sound that sent his law enforcement antennae quivering.
“Why, I do believe you’re interrogating me, Chief Summers. And here I thought you were just passing by.” She aimed her gaze at the uniform shirt now clinging to his chest.
Her tone intimated this was nothing more than a casual chat, but he sensed the tension in her body. And she kept making eye contact with him, which felt distinctly odd.