“Frankly, Pam, I haven’t a clue. I know he lost a few good clients, but I thought he still had some. I must admit that I was a little surprised at the state of his finances.”
“It all went into the business? He took almost half a million out of the house last year. Everything’s gone?” Pam slumped in her chair. “I’m in shock.”
Mark reached across the desk and took Pam’s hand. She sensed there was something going on beneath his calm exterior. “I can imagine.” He lowered his voice and seemed almost conspiratorial. “Pam, I don’t know whether I should say anything to you, and I don’t mean to imply anything illegal or immoral, but maybe there are accounts I don’t know about. Secret ones.”
“You mean that Vin might have been moving money to the Cayman Islands or something?”
He looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know what I mean. I’m pretty sure Vin was an honest man.” She watched him make a decision. He gazed directly into her eyes. “I’ve known you and Vin for many years, and it’s just that there’s not as much money as I thought there should be, either, and I can’t imagine where it might have gone. I suspect that he’s been either hoarding cash or spending it on something besides the business. I hadn’t wanted to bother you, but frankly I’m stumped and you deserve to know what was going on.”
“Something beside the business? Like what? Other women? Gambling?”
Mark sat up straight and looked miserable. “Let’s not jump to any conclusions. Please.” He clasped his hands on the desk. “Let’s do this. You take some time and then go through the papers in his desk at home. See whether you can find anything—records, bank statements, credit card bills, anything like that, anything that might give a hint of where some of this money might have gone. I’ll give you a complete list of everything I know about and you can compare what you find with that. Maybe there are bank accounts I don’t know about. Let’s hope so, anyway.”
“Why don’t you come out to the house and look for yourself?”
“I’d rather you did it. If there turn out to be tax implications I’d rather find out all at once.” He didn’t say, or not at all.
“What if we find something illegal? Should we go to the police or the IRS?”
“Let’s consider that if, and it’s a very big if, the time comes. Take your time and call me when you’ve had a chance to look over his things. Don’t hurry. Take a few weeks if you want to.”
Chapter
4
It was almost three months before Pam finally got up the courage to look through Vin’s office for any of the information Mark had alluded to. Oren Stevens had called frequently, keeping her abreast of the developments at the agency, and several times he’d asked her to come into the city to sign papers. However, it was all just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s necessary to close the business down. He’d asked her whether she wanted to go through Vin’s office but she declined, so he’d packed up several large boxes and had them delivered to the house.
Mark had also called from time to time but he kept saying that she could let any investigating slide, so she kept putting it off. What if she found that he’d been doing something illegal? What if he’d been being blackmailed or something? What if any of the things she signed in ignorance would get her into some kind of trouble? She was sure that whatever she found wouldn’t make her happy and so she delayed, and delayed, and delayed.
It was now almost four months since Vin’s death and she was surprised at how little she’d mourned. She was sad, and confused, and lonely, but she kept waiting for the deep pit of grief that she thought she ought to be feeling. Day after day she examined her soul, but that misery just wasn’t there. She wasn’t happy, but she wasn’t devastated, either. The membership at the country club had another six months to run and the people had been supportive and urged her to get back into the swing of things, so she’d slowly begun doing some of the things she’d done before.
She spent her days playing bridge, which bored her a little, and had quickly gotten back to her work with her favorite charities. In the beginning she’d joined because Vin insisted that mingling with the rich and dedicated would be good for his image, but from the beginning she’d enjoyed the work: keeping up with mailing lists, designing Web sites, and particularly planning fund-raising functions for anywhere from a dozen to several hundred people, a skill she honed with the frequent gatherings she organized for Vin. She became a prominent hostess, someone a group could come to. Occasionally she donated the use of her home and she quickly discovered that she was good at that kind of enterprise and earned a lot of praise from those around her. No one questioned the fact that since Vin’s death, although she donated her time, she no longer wrote large checks to the various organizations.
At first the women she worked with were solicitous and careful not to mention Vin, but eventually they began to treat her easily. None of the women were friends, exactly, but they were familiar. The women she’d been close to earlier when they lived in White Plains all had children and they had less and less in common, so they eventually drifted apart. Real friends, people she could talk to about serious things like feelings and fears, didn’t exist.
Now that she had a little distance from her husband she found she was able to organize her thoughts and think more clearly about her marriage. Who was this man she had been married to for all those years? Did she know him? As she thought about it she realized that, over the past few years, they’d led separate lives, intertwined yet distant, twin circles with only tiny overlaps.
Vin had his business and it had taken inordinate amounts of his time. He was seldom home before ten or eleven, attending business dinners, taking prospective clients to sporting events and Broadway shows, working on campaigns until all hours. Of course they often entertained together and she had learned to love Broadway, although sports still left her cold so Vin went on forays to Yankees or Knicks games without her.
Did she love him? How did that question get into my brain? she asked herself as she finished her shower one morning. However it got there, it was a valid question, one she could now think about with some objectivity. Love? She wasn’t sure she knew what the word meant. Didn’t love include trust? She’d been worried for months that he’d been doing something illegal and so she’d put off looking through his things for fear she’d find out something she didn’t want to know. But wouldn’t she jump to his defense if she loved him? Wouldn’t she immediately and vigorously deny that he could have been doing anything illegal?
It was time to find out everything, no matter the risk. She’d been putting off digging into her own finances, too, and had let Mark handle it all. Strange. She could do a creditable job with the computer programs that took care of the finances at two of the larger charities she was involved in, but she knew next to nothing about her own. That had to stop, too.
The morning was bright and unusually warm for late winter, and as she walked through her bedroom she realized that work would have to begin on the landscaping of the house. It made no sense to let things go. She’d have a good look at the budget Mark had made up for her and see whether she could afford to continue the kind of outdoor work that had been done for the past few years.
She glanced at Vin’s wide closet and realized that she’d also have to do something about donating Vin’s clothes to any one of several charities. She wondered which one could make good use of his thousand-dollar suits, hundred-dollar silk ties, and the shirts that weren’t monogrammed.
Trying again to put off her trip to the den, she wandered through the four guest bedrooms, now smelling just a little musty. As she opened the windows in each to let the rooms air out, she looked around. Mark had told her she needed money. That might be less of a problem than he realized. The furniture in these rooms had cost the earth and she could easily sell the expensive stuff and replace it with good, classic contemporary pieces. She’d have to see whether Carlys, the decorator who had bought most