by Andrew Hart
“I was trying to keep you out of it,” he said. Suddenly it all seemed so stupid and humiliating. “And there’s more.”
She waited, saying nothing, barely moving.
“The reason I hesitated before telling him no,” he said. “I lost some money.”
“Company money?”
“No,” he said, swallowing. “Our money. The Wells Fargo savings. I made a bad investment.”
“How much?”
“It was a tech stock. Made microprocessors. Looked like they were about to land a huge military deal . . .”
“How much?”
He bit his lip.
“Forty,” he said.
“Thousand?”
“About that.”
She almost smiled at that, a mirthless, stunned smile at her own idiocy. It stopped him in his tracks.
“Closer to fifty,” he said, all pretense abandoned, shrinking in his chair. “I thought that maybe Kurt’s thing would help me replace the money before anyone noticed.”
“Me.”
It was as if he had folded in on himself under the weight of that one syllable, but he held her eyes and nodded.
“Yes. I was trying to . . . I just thought you had so much going on and . . . I know I should have.”
“So you waited. You didn’t get in on the action, but you didn’t report him to Vasquez or anyone while you decided if it was worth the risk.”
“Right.”
“And then he got caught.”
Josh sighed.
“It might have been OK,” he said, “but the Doherty file was being restructured. Their accountants noticed an anomaly. Just a small discrepancy in the accounts. But when they pulled on one thread, the whole thing unraveled. The file history showed that I had looked at the account, that I’d seen what Kurt had done. It would have been worse if I’d tried to delete my access history, but I wasn’t trying to do anything criminal. I was, I guess, evasive. Tried to stay out of it. But the bank forced the issue, said I had to testify against him or face more serious charges myself. I agreed to tell them everything this morning.”
“It might have been OK?”
“What?”
“You said it might have been OK till this Doherty file thing,” said Anna. “How was it going to be OK, Josh? For how long? You think this was going to go unnoticed?”
“I guess not.”
“And this all happened when?”
“I first became aware of it back in May. The company started poking around at the end of August.”
He watched her doing the math in her head—the weeks and months that had gone by before he had told her anything. For a long, painful moment, she was rigidly silent, staring at him.
“Right,” she said at last. She seemed quite calm, exasperated, for sure, but quiet, levelheaded, as if the worst of the matter had passed and she was now focused on solutions. “How much are we talking, Josh? What did Kurt make?”
“A couple hundred K.”
“Jesus.”
“I know. But I got none of it. Like I said, I didn’t even try to hide the fact that I’d seen what he was doing. I mean, I guess I couldn’t deny it, but still. My only real fault was not stepping forward.”
“Your only fault? You blew fifty grand of our savings without discussing it with me, then kept it a secret from me for months, and you think not coming clean on Kurt’s get-rich-quick bullshit was your only fault?”
“It was supposed to be a surprise.”
She laughed at that, a wry, hard laugh frosted with a bitterness he had rarely heard from her.
“Well, I guess I got that, all right,” she said.
He looked at the countertop.
“I’m sorry, Anna.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Not sure. We’ll both be disciplined. Penalized. Kurt more than me.”
“Will you keep your jobs?”
“Don’t know yet. There’s an internal audit first. Then we talk to the companies involved and see what they want to do. If we’re lucky, they’ll be satisfied with remuneration and the promise it won’t happen again.”
“And if they aren’t?”
“Then it goes to the SEC, and we’ll lose our positions for sure. Kurt will never work in finance again. May face jail time. Me? I don’t know, but I’m helping the investigation, so I may be OK.”
“And how are you and Kurt?”
“We were fine until the barbecue, but I had to make a choice, and I made it today. I called Kurt first thing and told him I would be cooperating fully with the inquiry.”
“So you’re not fine now?”
“He understands that I covered for him as long as I could but that it had to happen eventually.”
“And Mary Beth?”
He sighed and shook his head.
“She’s less forgiving,” said Anna, reading his look. “You should have told me. All of it. But God, Josh, fifty grand and you said nothing?”
“I know,” he said. “I thought maybe we could fix it without anyone finding out. I didn’t want to disappoint you or stress you out.”
“You should have told me.”
“You couldn’t have done anything. I couldn’t do anything.”
“Even so.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know. It was just so . . . humiliating. I couldn’t stand to tell you.”
“I would have stood by you,” she said. The sentiment was well-meaning, even tender, but her tone was full of cold fury.
“I know.”
“Apparently not.”
“It was just that the longer it went on, the harder it got. I kept waiting for you to look at the accounts. Almost wished you would. But I told Vasquez about the bad investment, and then Kurt and I were sworn not to discuss the matter while the firm went through its internal investigation to see exactly what laws had been broken and what they wanted to do about it.”
“Did Mary Beth know?”
He nodded, mute. Ashamed.
“Kurt told her as soon as he got caught. She went with us to the company hearing in New York because he had diverted money into her account. That made her complicit.”
“She must have loved that.”
“No kidding. I think they’ll split up when the dust settles.”
This was a new surprise to Anna, greater than the details of the financial mess.
“Seriously?”
“You know what they’re like,” said Josh. “Barely able to keep from clawing each other’s eyes out at the best of times. If Kurt is no longer bringing home the bacon . . .”
Anna nodded vaguely, suddenly sad again.
“I’m sorry,” said Josh again. “I should have told you.”
“Among other things.”
He gritted his teeth and looked at the counter, but just said yes again.
“And Oaklynn knew?” said Anna, almost as if it was an afterthought, a memory of a previous conversation inserting itself into the present.
“At least some of it,” said Josh. “I’m not sure how. She suggested she’d overheard something between me and Kurt or Mary Beth. Said she didn’t want to make trouble.”
“Is that right?” said Anna, frosty again.
“I don’t think she meant anything by it.”
“But you have been taking her side, consciously or otherwise, as if you were afraid to upset her.”
“I really didn’t mean . . .”
“Like I said, consciously or otherwise.”
“Right. So now what?”
“With Oaklynn? Nothing, I guess. This isn’t evidence of anything involving her. Neither is anything else, as you all keep reminding me.”
He heard the stung sense of being ridiculed in the remark.
“It wasn’t a conspiracy, you know, Anna. Like the three of us confiding or whatever. Pushing you away.”
“No, I don’t know that, Josh,” said Anna. “It sounds like that’s exactly what it was.”
He opened his mouth to protest but knew it
was fruitless and sagged. The beer bottle, untouched since he had begun his story, sweated, making rivulets on the countertop.
“I’m going to go to bed,” she said.
“I’m really sorry, Anna.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
Chapter Forty-Four
ANNA
I went to see Mary Beth the following day. I hadn’t planned it, and a part of me thought it would be better to let things lie for a while, but I couldn’t get any work done with the knowledge of this thing hanging over me, so I told Oaklynn I was stepping out and headed over to number 16. There was no immediate response to my bell ringing. I had started to turn away when the door was snatched open. Mary Beth stood in the door wearing pale green yoga sweats, her face drawn, her eyes hard.
“Yes?” she snapped.
I recoiled but managed to find the spirit in which I had left the house.
“Josh told me,” I said. “I just wanted to check in. See how you guys were doing . . .”
“Gloat, you mean?” said Mary Beth.
I felt stung at the injustice of the remark but just shook my head.
“I wanted to know if I could help,” I said.
“Too bad you didn’t discuss that with your goody-goody husband a few weeks ago,” she shot back.
“I’m sure Josh didn’t mean . . .”
“Like I care what he meant. We’re going to get screwed, and he’ll get a slap on the wrist.”
“Well, I don’t understand all the details,” I said, “but it doesn’t seem like Josh did anything wrong exactly . . .”
“Oh, so Kurt’s the villain, and Josh is the white knight again, huh?”
“What? No!”
“Yeah, well, that’s about right, actually. Except that Kurt’s more moron than villain, and Josh isn’t so much the knight in shining armor than he is the idiot bystander who doesn’t stick up for his friend.”
“Kurt stole from people, Mary Beth,” I said. This wasn’t going the way I had planned it. “And Josh kept his secret.”
“Well, no surprises that you’d take his side.”
“He’s my husband, and he’s not the one at fault here. In fact, it was his friendship with Kurt that made him risk getting in trouble himself.”
“By not turning his best buddy in to be disciplined and fired, you mean?”
“No! Well, yeah, I guess. Mary Beth, can we talk inside?”
“I should have known people like you wouldn’t understand real loyalty. I bet if we’d been Asian, you’d have covered for us.”
I stared at her, my mouth open, completely dumbfounded.
“What?” she shot back, radiating defiance as if she wanted to swing a clawed fist at me. “That too near the knuckle for you, Miss Nihon Princess?”
I shook my head, tears starting to my eyes.
“That’s so not true,” I managed.
“Yeah? You come down here with your superior New York bullshit and your psycho nanny, looking down your tiny nose at us like we’re fucking Mayberry hicks, and you wonder why regular people don’t trust you?”
“I never thought . . . ,” I stammered.
“Well, you should. Except that you can’t see beyond your precious family, can you? Like it’s some big achievement to squeeze out a couple of kids. You think having a white servant makes you something? I swear, when that psycho bitch you keep chained up in your basement kills you all in your sleep, don’t look to me for sympathy. You’ve made your bed, now you’re going to lie in it.”
And with that, she slammed the door.
I retreated into my study, though I couldn’t do anything productive. Mary Beth’s words, her malignance—for want of a better word—had left me rattled and unsteady. I couldn’t think. I certainly couldn’t work. But I pretended to, hiding myself away and staring unseeing at the computer as my breathing steadied and my tears dried.
Was I surprised? Not entirely, I supposed, but that somehow made it worse, as if I had turned a blind eye to Mary Beth’s meanness, her racism, desperately ignoring it because I had needed a friend who wouldn’t invite me to her church or have me over to help her choose color swatches for her drapes . . .
She hadn’t deceived me. I had done that all by myself. Now I felt alone, cut off from the sparsely populated neighborhood like I was living on a rock in the middle of a lake. Or an ocean. I had even farmed out my family, outsourced it to a stranger I didn’t trust.
As if on cue, there was a knock at the study door.
“Come in,” I said, wiping my eyes and turning.
“Do you mind if we go into the backyard?” said Oaklynn. “Vronny is bouncing off the walls. I know it’s cold, but . . .”
“Sure,” I said, not turning around so she wouldn’t see my face.
“Gracie is asleep, and I don’t want to wake her.”
“It’s fine,” I said, managing not to yell. “I can keep an ear open for the monitor. Veronica could use some undivided attention for once.”
“Are you sure? We won’t be out more than a half hour or so. Vronny really wants to go on the swing.”
“It’s fine,” I said again. “Go ahead.”
I managed not to make it sound like I was telling her to leave me alone. Or I thought so, at least.
When she went downstairs, I listened to their preparations for going into the garden, the fussing with shoes and coats and gloves. When I heard them head down to the basement and the back door into the yard, I moved silently into Grace’s room, where I could watch them unseen from the window. Grace was sleeping soundly, her little chest rising and falling with each breath. She had shown no signs of fever or vomiting since that second hospital visit. I sat beside the crib, listening to the distant, muted sound of girlish laughter in the yard. Veronica. I glanced down as she got onto the swing and then, as Oaklynn began to push her, glanced back to Grace, thinking about money and Josh and Mary Beth’s unspeakable and unexpected malice. I was still trembling slightly. Outside, Veronica’s scream of delight turned into something else. It was a high, shrill sound, almost a wail.
It went on a second too long.
And suddenly, I knew it wasn’t laughter at all. It was a keening cry of pain that sent me spilling out of my chair and back to the window. The soft yellow curtains were still half-closed, but I yanked them apart, seizing the sash of the window and forcing it up.
Oaklynn was standing over Veronica, who was lying awkwardly on the ground beneath the swing set, her bandaged right hand clamped to her left forearm just below the elbow. One of the chains of the swing seemed longer than usual. Then I realized it looked that way because the seat was hanging straight down, disconnected from the chain hanging from the frame above.
I thrust my head out of the open window.
“What happened?” I shouted, though I already guessed.
“The chain broke,” Oaklynn called back. She looked anguished, her face pink and shocked. Veronica had stopped screaming and had started to moan and rock back and forth, clutching her arm. “She landed on her elbow. There was nothing I could . . . The chain just snapped, and . . . I think her arm is broken.”
It was. I went out into the yard and told Oaklynn to get Grace and a few things for Veronica. Once she was in the house, I examined the break in the chain, kneeling beside my injured daughter, who was now sitting up and keeping very still, cradling her broken arm against her chest. There was no rust on the chain where it should have hooked to the swing’s seat. The broken end of the link was smooth—cut almost all the way through cleanly—and beside the cut, there was the rough burring made by what I took to be a hacksaw blade that hadn’t yet found its groove.
I said nothing to Veronica, but I wasn’t about to leave Grace alone with Oaklynn while I went to the hospital. We would all go to the hospital together. I think Oaklynn saw the pale fury in my face as we drove, but she said nothing, as if sensing something coming beyond the trauma of dealing with Veronica’s injury. After we had checked in to the ER, I insisted on tak
ing both girls back with me, despite the suggestions of the nurse that I should leave Grace with Oaklynn who—tellingly, guiltily—did not attempt to make a case for herself. I sat with them both until the X-rays were done and the arm—with its hairline fibula fracture—was braced and set.
My anger felt like the burning charcoal at Mary Beth’s idiot cookout: undramatic but searing hot. I needed no further evidence. I didn’t care what Josh or Mary Beth or anyone else thought. I was sure, and that was almost a relief.
I returned to the waiting room to find Oaklynn teary and being hugged by the blonde nurse we had met before. The sight of her being comforted for what she had done to my child relit the furnace of the rage that had been smoldering within me. I marched over to her, seeing nothing else in the place, barely conscious of the way the staff stared at me with something like horror as they read my face.
“You’re fired,” I said. I managed to keep my voice down, though my hands were trembling. “I want you out of the house today. You can collect your belongings later. You should expect to hear from the police as well.”
“I didn’t do it!” she protested, tears pouring down her face. “I wouldn’t. I love Veronica!”
“You’re done, Oaklynn. We’re done.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Officer Paul Randall parked cruiser number 177 on the street, checking the GPS against his notes and peering at the numbers on the scattered houses. There were more vacant lots on Settle Road than there were houses, and though Randall had been patrolling these neighborhoods for three years now, he didn’t think he had ever been down here before. Didn’t know, in fact, that it even existed. It was tucked away between Brandon Circle and the creek—Sugar Creek, he thought, maybe Briar—a weird little wooded pocket only about three miles from the center of uptown. He got out of the car looking north for the skyscrapers—a new one going up every year, or so it seemed—that dotted the area around Trade and Tryon and made Charlotte feel like a real honest-to-God city, but there was nothing. Just trees.
He took the tablet computer from its stand in the vehicle and approached the front door of the house, moving between a Camry and a tree with silvery bark that he thought was probably a cherry. It was bare now, though some of the other deciduous trees in the Kleins’ yard still held their leaves, mostly shades of brown, but with a couple of small maples that were red and glossy.