When the Tide Comes Back In

Chapter 4 The Office on Delancey

Whit called me at seven the next morning, before I'd decided what to do.

"Don't confront her yet," he said.

"I haven't."

"You will."

"I'm aware." I was standing at my kitchen window, looking at the parking lot below. "Whit, did you know about Harborlight?"

Silence. Long enough that I knew.

"How much did you know?" I asked.

"I knew there was a company. I didn't know what it was for. I handled the foundation's filings for two years before Marcus died, and I asked about Harborlight once. Marcus told me it was a donor-advised fund vehicle. I believed him."

"You should have asked twice."

"I know." His voice was flat. "Celia, I've spent the last two years knowing I should have asked twice. It doesn't change the ledger."

"No. It doesn't."

"What are you going to do?"

I looked at the folder on my table. Then at the coffee cup beside it, then at the window, where the sky over the harbor was the color of a bruise. "I'm going to see the office. Today. Are you coming?"

"Should I?"

"It's your family too."

He was quiet. Then: "Pick me up at nine."

Delancey Street was on the wrong side of downtown, in a strip of offices that had been a furniture showroom in the eighties and had never quite been converted into anything better. Harborlight Consulting was on the second floor, above a tax preparer and below a bail bondsman.

The door was locked. We stood in the hallway for a minute. Then a woman came up the stairs behind us with a coffee and a messenger bag, and when she saw us she stopped, and something in her face closed like a hand.

"Can I help you?"

"Diana Ashford?" I said.

She was older than I remembered, but I remembered her well enough. That was the thing about Diana. She met you in a doorway and made you feel like you'd interrupted something important.

"Celia." She didn't smile. "Whit. What a coincidence."

"Not a coincidence." I held up the folder. "Harborlight Consulting. The company you registered. The one that took two hundred and forty thousand dollars out of Marcus's foundation in the last year of his life."

She looked at the folder. Then at me. Then at the door of her office, like she was deciding whether to run or let us in. She chose the door.

"Sit," she said. "I'll put the coffee down."

Inside, the office was smaller than the hallway suggested: one room, two desks, a filing cabinet, a window that looked at a parking garage. On the wall, a framed photograph of a sailboat. On the desk, a stack of manila envelopes.

Diana set her coffee down and sat behind the desk. She didn't offer us anything.

"So," she said. "You found it."

"Where's the money, Diana."

"The company was Marcus's idea." She folded her hands. "Not mine. He wanted something outside the family trust, something the board couldn't see. I registered it because he asked me to. That's all."

"That's not all. The transfers stopped three weeks before he died. Then they stopped. Where did it go?"

Diana looked at Whit, then back at me. "You have no legal standing to ask me that. The company's a separate entity. You're not a shareholder."

"I'm the executor of his estate. The transfers were made with estate-adjacent funds. I can subpoena the account records before lunch."

"You won't."

"Try me."

She sat back. She had the same expression she'd had at the club that night, the one that said we're all adults here, let's not be dramatic. But under it, for the first time, I saw something else. She was tired. She'd been carrying something for a long time, and nobody had ever asked her to put it down.

"Fine," she said. "The last fifty thousand went to Marcus. Not to a mistress. Not to a drug habit. To him. He asked for it in cash and I brought it to him. Three weeks before he died. That's the last I saw of him."

"Why?"

"Because he was being blackmailed."

Whit made a sound. I didn't.

"By whom?"

"A man named Foster. I don't know his first name. Marcus owed him for something that happened before you two were married — a bad business deal, he said. The details don't matter. Foster had proof of something Marcus did in his twenties, and he wanted to be paid, and Marcus paid him for years. When the estate was in probate, Foster got nervous and asked for a lump sum. Fifty thousand. Marcus agreed. He was going to meet him, and then he died."

The room was very quiet. The parking garage across the street was full of cars going up in circles, one by one, like a slow clock.

"Did he meet him?" I asked.

"I don't know. I never saw him again." Diana's voice didn't break, but it thinned. "You can think whatever you want about me, Celia. I lied to you. I helped my son lie to you. But I did not kill him, and I did not take that money."

I looked at her. For the first time in six years, I actually looked, instead of looking away. She was sixty-four years old, and she'd been married to a man who died when Marcus was a teenager, and she'd spent the last two years sitting in an office above a bail bondsman, protecting a dead man's secrets from a living woman she'd decided not to like.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I said. "After he died. Why didn't you just tell me."

She looked at the window, at the garage, at the cars going up. "Because I didn't know how to do it without losing him," she said. "I know how that sounds."

"Yes," I said. "I know exactly how it sounds."

I stood up. Whit stayed in his chair for a second, then followed.

"I'm still closing the foundation," I said. "Nothing about this changes that. The trust for Daniel stays. The rest goes into a charitable trust, and I'm going to want a full accounting from you, in writing, with documentation. Every transfer since the day the foundation was created."

"That's a year of work."

"I'll give you until May." I picked up the folder. "And Diana — the blackmailer. If you know his name, I want it. If you help me find him, I'll leave this office out of the filings. If you don't, I'll subpoena everything, and the auditors will find it anyway, and it won't be a private conversation anymore."

Diana looked at me for a long time. Then she opened her desk drawer and took out a business card.

"His name is Edward Foster," she said. "He lives in Pelham Bay. He's a boat broker. That's how Marcus knew him. From the marina."

I took the card. It had a phone number written in Marcus's handwriting on the back.

"Did he know about Daniel?" I asked.

"Foster?"

"Marcus."

Diana's face did something complicated. "Yes," she said. "He knew. That was part of what Foster had on him. He knew about the boy, and he knew about the payments, and he knew about you."

"How."

"He had someone inside the foundation. A bookkeeper. Somebody who saw the paperwork." She looked at her desk, at her hands, at the manila envelopes. "It wasn't me. I only ever gave Marcus what he asked for. But somebody else was watching, and they sold it to Foster, and Foster sold silence."

I put the card in my coat pocket. "Thank you," I said.

"Celia." She stopped me at the door. When I looked back, her face had come apart a little. "He loved you. He was a coward about everything else, but he loved you. That part was true."

I thought about the letter. You were the only good thing. I thought about the mornings I'd made him coffee and the years I'd been afraid, quietly, that the emptiness at the center of our marriage was something I was doing wrong.

"I know," I said. "I'm going to be all right anyway."