Bleeding Heart (16 page)

“Of course not,” I said.

“He made me laugh. Which is just about the most wonderful thing one person can do for another. Don’t you think?”

Even by the time she left, I still wasn’t sure whether it was Mackenzie’s death or the possible loss of his funding that had forced Gwen to expose her more vulnerable side to me that morning. She tends not to get emotional, though I’ve always suspected her tough-girl persona to be something of an act. But she’s definitely not the kind of person who gives her heart easily. As far as I knew—and I knew pretty much everything about Gwen—she’d yet to give it fully to anyone. So I could understand her shock if, having finally fallen in love, death suddenly robbed her of that hard-found happiness. If that’s what had actually happened.

Gwen often revealed things to me obliquely or after the fact. In truth, our friendship had never been the particularly gushing, tell-all kind. I suspected that Gwen, like me after my marriage collapsed, didn’t always trust her feelings. But though we tended not to confide every little thing to each other, we never held back for very long about the truly big things. I knew that eventually I’d learn what was behind Gwen’s tears that morning. It seemed to me that there was more than just frustration in her voice when she said,
I’ve
got to get Mackenzie’s money for Bridgewater House!
There was also fear.

“H
i, Brook, it’s Alice.”

“Who?”

“Alice Hyatt from Green Acres.”

“Oh, my goodness! How
are
you? I heard the news about Graham Mackenzie. I was hoping to get to your Open Day, but I had an event in Williamstown and I didn’t get back down here until late afternoon. I’m so sorry—it must have been just horrible for you!”

“Yes,” I said. I was on my fourth client call of the morning, and they’d all started out more or less this way. “It was pretty shocking. A heart attack, apparently. He was under a lot of stress.”

“So I heard,” Brook Bostock said. “Did you see the article in the
Wall Street Journal
this morning? Michael pointed it out to me at breakfast. Apparently they had to stop trading Mackenzie’s stock yesterday because it dropped below some per share price limit. The poor man. I met him a few times at parties and fund-raisers up here, and he was always so charming! But I’m sure you got to know him a lot better than me. It must have been exciting
working with him on that garden. I’ve been hearing from everyone what an absolutely stunning . . .”

I loved Brook, but she could talk your ear off. I let her ramble on, only half listening, while I ran my eye down the list of clients that Mara had drawn up for me. These were the ones who had either called repeatedly for me and/or complained during the last month or so when I was so wrapped up at Mackenzie’s. This round of phone calls was an attempt on my part to make nice and, hopefully, drum up some additional work. But in every case so far, my efforts only seemed to prompt a lot of questions about my late client.

“I’ve heard so many things, Alice. What was he really like?”

“I understand he sank millions into that house. Was it amazing on the inside?”

“Is it true the Fed is launching an investigation into his business dealings?”

“What’s going to happen to the gardens now, do you think? It would be a shame not to have them cared for, after all your hard work.”

This last one was from Brook, and it was typical of her thoughtfulness. Brook and Michael Bostock were among my first customers. She’d hired me originally to enlarge their fenced-in kitchen garden, but had been so pleased with the results that she’d given me carte blanche to reimagine all the landscaping around their beautiful Arts and Crafts home on Willard Mountain. We became friendly, if not quite friends. I’d convinced myself that it was better for professional reasons not to get too close to my clients; though, in truth, I was also determined to keep the emotional complications in my life to a minimum. However, if I had to choose one person on my roster to confide in, it would probably be Brook Bostock. I knew she’d been through some tough times herself, and I
appreciated her confidence in me. She’d sent a number of important referrals my way over the years.

“I really don’t know what’s going to happen to it now,” I told her. “Mr. Mackenzie’s death has left a lot of things hanging, I’m afraid.”

“But you’re okay, right?” Brook asked, perhaps picking up something in my tone I hadn’t meant for her to hear. “He didn’t leave
you
hanging, did he?”

I was tempted to tell her. For a moment I hesitated, torn between my sense of professional propriety and my aching need for sympathy.

“I’ll be fine,” I said at last. “I was actually calling because I know you tried to reach me a couple of times recently. Did you and Michael decide to move ahead with the patio landscaping we talked about earlier in the year?”

“I’d forgotten all about that, actually,” Brook said. “No, I was calling to let you know that I’d put a little bug in Vera Yoland’s ear about featuring Mackenzie’s garden in the Open Days program. But obviously, you got the word.”

“I had no idea I had you to thank for that! How generous of you, Brook.”

“Oh, please, you know how I feel about Green Acres. And I’m glad you reminded me about the patio. Sure, let’s get going on that. It would be great to have it ready by the end of the summer. We’re planning a big party for my sister-in-law’s fiftieth over Labor Day weekend.”

Though I was grateful to Brook, the additional work at the Bostocks’—as well as a couple of other projects I was able to scrounge up—couldn’t begin to dig me out of the financial hole I now found myself in. Only the money Mackenzie owed me could
do that. And I didn’t feel right about pursuing payment until after his funeral.

“Eleanor told me the ex-wife and the son are planning a service in Atlanta,” Mara reported to me the Monday after Mackenzie’s death. “But the body still has to be released by the coroner.”

“What’s the holdup?”

“I don’t know. The ex isn’t telling Eleanor anything. Though Eleanor’s totally convinced she plans to sell the house and get rid of the help. Apparently the ex and the son both hate the place.”

“Well, the Mackenzies are divorced, and unless he named Chloe as executrix—which I sincerely doubt—she won’t have much of a say in what happens to his estate. The whole thing will probably be tied up in probate for months.”

“We can’t wait months to get that check reissued.”

“I know, but we have to at least wait until Mackenzie’s in the ground. It’s indecent to go after the money until then.”

“The man fucked us over.
That
’
s
indecent.”

We went around the question a few more times, but I was adamant. I was also convinced that I wouldn’t have to put off demanding what I was owed much longer. But I was wrong. On Wednesday there was still no news about the burial. There was, however, a major investigative piece on the front page of the
New York Times
business section, under the headline
THE
DOWNFALL
AND
DEATH
OF
A
FRACKING
KINGPIN
.

It prompted the two calls I was most dreading.

Both of my daughters inherited their father’s head for numbers. By the time they were acing their algebra quizzes in junior high school, they’d already left me far behind in the mathematical dust. I could balance a checkbook, of course. But until Richard’s disappearance, I’d felt no need to get involved in the financial side of our life together. My husband was a professional number cruncher, after all. So when
it fell to me to try to make sense of the endless bills, policies, checking accounts, and investment statements he’d left behind, I found myself struggling to interpret what seemed to me a foreign language.

“What’s a SEP IRA? Why do they have to use all these ridiculous acronyms?” I remember complaining to my younger daughter, Franny, sometime during those first, nightmarish months after Richard left. At that point I was moving papers randomly around the dining room table at night, making different piles, hoping that everything would somehow just fall into place if I hit upon the right arrangement.

“It’s a kind of retirement account, Mom,” Franny said, looking up from her homework. “Everybody knows that. What are you doing? Do you need some help?”

“No, I’m okay,” I lied. “I’ll work this out somehow. But it all seems like such a jumble!”

“Here, let me take a look,” she said, pulling her chair closer to mine, and within half an hour, she’d reorganized the stacks of paper in a way that clearly made sense to her. Though she must have realized it was all still pretty much a mystery to me.

“It’s good Daddy put everything in your name, too,” she told me. “And that he paid the mortgage off. Things could be a lot worse, I guess. But I think that maybe I should work out a little budget for you—and a list of what bills need to be paid when. This is all stuff you really should know anyway. It’s no big deal.”

It was Olivia who came right out and said what Franny had probably been thinking. My elder daughter was home from college for the summer, and by then it had become clear to us that we were going to have to sell the house to stay afloat.

“How can you
not
know what the place is worth? Or which bank held the mortgage? God, Mom, it’s like you were living in a fog all those years! No wonder you had no idea what was going on
behind your back. You didn’t even know what was happening right in front of your nose!”

Her criticisms hurt—all the more so because I knew they were true. I vowed then to take charge of my financial situation. Learn what I needed to know to keep on a sound footing money-wise and start making smart decisions. I took a few seminars and read some books. My eyes continued to glaze over a lot of the time, but I managed to pick up the basics. Though I had to admit, none of it really interested me. Not the way it did Olivia and Franny, who both began to follow in their father’s footsteps professionally, Olivia as an analyst at Morgan Stanley and Franny handling the accounting for a boutique advertising agency in SoHo.

I think they were both concerned when I announced that I was starting my own small business. In the early days of Green Acres, they checked in with me frequently, quizzing me about how I’d set up the books, what software system I was using, whether I had all the tax consequences under control. When they came to visit, they spent more time poring over my ledgers than they ever did admiring the growing portfolio of gardens I was creating and maintaining around the area. For them, Green Acres was all about the numbers. And gradually they began to relax and believe that somehow or other their clueless mother was managing to make a success of things. I didn’t talk to them about it very often. I knew they wouldn’t much care that Sal Lombardi had hired me to design his pool garden. Or that Brook Bostock loved what I’d done with her front border. But when Mackenzie gave me the commission to design the most significant new garden in the Berkshires in years, I couldn’t help myself. I had to crow a little.

“It’s a fabulous piece of property,” I remember telling Olivia when I first got the job. “About twenty or so acres on the top of Powell Mountain. And the sky’s the limit in terms of budget.”

“Who is this person again? Graham Mackenzie? That name rings a bell for some reason.”

“He’s the third-largest natural gas producer in the country.”

“Oh, my God! He’s that fracking guy! I’ve read about him, Mom. He’s supposed to be a real wheeler-dealer. Super-successful, but leveraged to the hilt. I read somewhere that he has more questionable subsidiaries than Enron.”

“He didn’t hire me to do his books,” I told Olivia, upset that she was acting like such a wet blanket. Why couldn’t she just congratulate me—and let me enjoy my good news? Unfortunately, though, that was Olivia’s way. My older daughter’s glass was always half empty. The reaction I got from Franny—usually so optimistic and encouraging—surprised me much more.

“Be careful,” she said when I told her about the size of the project. “My agency took on a major new client this winter and it’s almost capsized us. The billings are so much bigger than we’re used to, we’ve been forced to cut some commission deals with the media. Thank God we have all sorts of guarantees written into the contract. Make sure you get that, too, Mom. You can never be too cautious.”

I’d originally hoped that Olivia and Franny would be able to attend the Open Day celebration. For me, it represented the pinnacle of my success. The ultimate proof that the financially incompetent housewife whom my husband had discarded, whom my daughters had worried about and pitied, had been able to redeem herself. But their busy lives had kept them in the city—and away from the resulting disaster. Thank God. I kept meaning to call them in the days following Mackenzie’s death, but I continued to find reasons why I should put it off. What was the point in talking to them until I knew something definite about the funeral? Or until I had some word about my money situation? Or until . . .