In-Laws and Outlaws (22 page)

“How much?”

A pause. “I don't recall the exact amount. Elinor would remember.”

“You have three houses, Oscar. One in Georgetown, one in Dover, and one here. Only three million more.”

He stared at me. “You haven't heard a word I've said.”

The conversation was clearly at an end. In the uncomfortable silence I got up and left the kitchen without thanking Oscar for the omelet or even saying goodbye; such amenities seemed pointless.

I sat down at the bottom of the stairway leading to the second floor and tried to still the butterflies in my stomach. It had been an unpleasant scene; neither one of us had really reached the other. Oscar was undoubtedly right about the futility of paying off kidnappers and terrorists. But when it's a member of your own family whose life is at stake, how can you take the chance? I didn't know what the answer was.

Nor did I know what to do next. I stood up and glanced up at the top of the stairway, as if the answer would somehow appear there. Elinor was still ill; and as much as I thought I ought to talk to her, I couldn't bring myself to go badger a sick woman. It didn't really matter anyway; she'd just tell me the same things Oscar had told me. Nor did it matter the exact amount the Fergusons had contributed to Theo's ransom. Whatever it was, it wasn't enough.

A door opened and Nancy Younger came out into the hall. “Hello, Gillian,” she whispered. “You're up early.”

“I wanted to see Oscar before I went sailing. Do you know how Elinor is?”

“I looked in on her before I came down. She's pretty miserable. All she wants to do is sleep.”

“Has a doctor seen her?”

A flush appeared on her cheek. “Tom. Yesterday afternoon. He prescribed some antibiotics. I suppose he'll be back today?”

Asking
me
. I told her I supposed so and started to leave … when an unbidden thought popped into my head that made me freeze. I'd been going on the assumption that the family was collaborating on a Big Lie—the Matthew Zeitz story, made up out of whole cloth, to accommodate Connie and to stop me from poking my nose into something they wanted to keep hidden. But I'd made that assumption on the basis of
one phone call
—to the Boston police, right after Rob had brought the “good news.”

But Rob had said the arrest had been made only an hour earlier. What if the record of the arrest simply hadn't had time to make its way to the desk sergeant's blotter or whatever he called it?
What if I had called too soon?

“Gillian? Is something the matter?”

“I need to make a private phone call. Immediately.”

My tone startled her. “Uh … there's no one in the study right now.” She pointed to the room she'd just come out of.

I went into the study and closed the door behind me. I couldn't remember the rigamarole you go through to get long-distance directory assistance, so I had to look it up in the book. My hands were shaking and I had trouble finding the right page. What if I was wrong? What if I'd been mentally accusing the family of all these dreadful things when in fact they were totally guiltless? And Joel … Joel! Joel was exactly the innocent kid he appeared to be. I'd been in too big a hurry, I'd jumped to the wrong conclusion. Finally I got through to the Boston police …

… who neatly deflated my newly born hopes before they had time to grow any larger. I got the same answers as before, absolutely the same ones. No arrest of Raymond Decker's murderer. No Matthew Zeitz. No investigating officer named McCarthy. No way, lady. Our records are up to date.

Nothing had changed. Nothing had goddamned fucking bloody well changed. I was right back where I was a few minutes ago, stuck in the middle of a family that would go to any extreme to protect its only chance for perpetuating the bloodline. Joel Kurland, the Deckers' grand and glorious hope for the future! Survivor! Psychopath! Killer!

Hurrah. Hurrah.

15

We lost the
Ghosts
sketch.

When I got back, Connie was taking a call from Leonard and handed the phone to me with relief; Leonard sometimes affected people that way. Yale had got the sketch, he told me, to no one's real surprise. Leonard had bid “vigorously” but “slyly”—his words—but I had, after all, put a ceiling on the amount he could bid and there was only so much he could do. That sounded rehearsed; he'd probably already used the speech once before, on the museum's board of trustees. I was the villain for not allowing him to bid all the museum's assets on this one item; he was the stalwart hero struggling against unreasonable odds to achieve the impossible. Leonard told me Mr. Atkins wanted me to call him.

Atkins was one of the trustees; I called him as soon as Leonard was off the line. Mr. Atkins courteously inquired whether I would like to apply for an extended leave of absence; my assistant was qualified to take over if necessary. I told him I didn't anticipate being away much longer; there'd been several deaths in my family and certain problems had arisen. He said he understood and wished me luck in resolving said problems before too much more time had elapsed.

The message was clear. My job was in danger. I'd have to worry about that later; the museum seemed very far away just then. “Where's Tom?”

“At the hospital in Oak Bluffs,” Connie said. “An East Chop man's heart attacked him, and they called Tom. Complications of some sort and they wanted a specialist. Call Michelle, will you, Gillian? I've got to run—Mrs. Vernon will be waiting.” And she was off to her full-time antihamburger job.

Michelle wanted to take the sailboat out right then, so I went over to her house. It seemed that only the twins and I would be aboard. Joel was going to a birthday party a little later in the day (thank god) and Rob had to attend to some business in Boston; he'd be back by nightfall.

“
One
of you had to go to Boston,” Annette laughed.

Michelle smiled. “It was a fair toss.”

Annette was wearing red shorts and a red tank top; she even had on red deck shoes. Michelle was wearing approximately the same outfit, but in white. I wondered how Annette happened to pick red as
her
summer wardrobe color; I'd have thought that was a winter color. But I appreciated the color-coding; it wasn't always possible to tell the twins apart without a little external help. “Have you two ever swapped places? Stood in for each other?”

The twins exchanged a glance and laughed. “A few times,” Annette admitted. “But only in emergencies. The last was—oh, two years ago. I had a meeting in Boston I couldn't miss on the same day I was scheduled to play in a tennis tournament here. So Michelle played in my place.”

“How'd you do?” I asked her twin.

“I won,” Michelle said with a rueful smile. “But then I lost my own match later that same day because I was exhausted from the first one.”

“I still owe you one for that,” Annette said.

We had to drive to Edgartown where the boat was moored in a slip at the yacht club; it was too large for the boathouse behind the Kurlands' place. Still, Michelle told me it was just as well there were only the three of us, because with more than three or four on a thirty-six-footer it tended to get a mite crowded.

The boat was a sleek-looking Swan 36 with a Volvo engine. The twins put me to work finding a place to stow the ice buckets of wine and fitting food into the undersized refrigerator in the tiny galley; there wasn't one inch of waste space. Michelle powered up and steered us out of the harbor; only when we were several minutes out did she cut the motor and the business of unfurling the sails began. Mostly I stayed out of the way.

I tried to put my customary initial uneasiness at being on a sailboat out of my mind because I needed to concentrate. But Michelle was so busy showing her sister all the features of the new boat that I couldn't find a way to bring the subject up. The twins had always shared everything; they both probably considered the boat as much Annette's as Michelle's. At one point Michelle had me take the wheel to show me what a finger-light helm felt like. It was true; I could turn the wheel with one finger—no friction, no play. The queasiness in my stomach wasn't too bad, but I was glad we were staying in sight of the shore instead of heading out into open waters. We were sailing in the direction of Chappaquiddick.

Michelle had promised me a long talk during this sail, but by the time we passed the lighthouse on Cape Pogue it was clear
she
wasn't going to introduce the matter. I waited until they'd done what was necessary to get the boat to sail south instead of east and then said, “All right, let's talk.”

They both looked at me brightly, waiting.

Bull by the horns. “Why didn't you give Raymond the rest of the money he needed to ransom Theo?”

“But Gillian, we did give Raymond what we had in our personal accounts,” Michelle said with a show of patience. “Everything else was tied up in the business.”

“All right, then, what about the business? Why didn't you just take the money from there?”

Annette undertook to explain. “It doesn't work that way, Gillian. Do you know anything about ventures at all? Well, every year we look at hundreds of business plans, searching for those with just the right mix of personnel and product and market need. When we find one, we supply seed money, the first-round financing necessary for hiring staff, leasing space, developing prototypes, all the things you need to do when you're just getting started. But rarely is the seed money enough to carry a business all the way to the point where it starts turning a profit.”

“Make that ‘never,'” Michelle sighed.

“Right,
never
. So the business has to go through additional rounds of finding financing—how many depends on the business. Sometimes we'll put in further cash ourselves, if we think we have a hot company. But the most crucial moment of a new company's life is the day of the initial public stock offering. That's the moment all the nickel shares and two-cent options we got for our investment suddenly take on real value.”

Michelle said, “Even if our agreement forbids us to sell our shares right away, we do get a confirmation of the value of our investment. Or not, as sometimes happens. But that's the day we find out whether we picked a winner or a loser.”

I was wishing the boat would stand still. “But why would you want to sell your shares?” I asked.

They both laughed, not unkindly. “Oh, Gillian, that's the whole point!” Annette said. “We don't want to remain owners forever. We cash out as soon as we meet the profit goal we fixed for ourselves at the outset—when our million or two investment has turned into anything from twenty million to a hundred. The whole idea is to get out after five or six years so we can start over again.”

“Start over?”

“New startup investments. New companies needing seed money.”

“New profits,” Michelle added.

I thought about it for a minute. “Okay, I think I see how it works. But how did that keep you from coming up with Theo's ransom money?”

“Timing,” Annette said with a shudder. “The most incredibly bad timing imaginable. Three-fourths of our investment money was then spread out among four new businesses, all four of which were going public within two weeks of one another. That was bad timing in itself.
And
—this is important, Gillian—our agreements with all four companies prohibited our selling any Decker and Kurland shares for a specified length of time after going public.” She looked a question at her twin. “A year?”

“Eighteen months in one case,” Michelle said.

“And that's where we stood when Raymond's call for help came. If we could have sold off our shares right then, there'd have been no problem. But any sale we made would have been illegal.”

The motion of the boat was beginning to get to me. “Then why not make an illegal sale? By the time it came to light, you'd have already transferred the funds to Raymond in Norway.”

“Gillian,” Michelle said forcefully, “they put people in
jail
for that.” She shook her head. “There was just nothing we could do.”

You could have gone to jail
.

“Oscar said from the beginning that they were going to kill Theo,” Annette added almost absently. “He was right, unfortunately.” She gave herself a little shake and said, “What a depressing subject. It's over and done with now—there's nothing to be gained from raking it all up again. Let's have some lunch, talk about something else.”

“I'll get it,” Michelle said. “You take the wheel. Gillian, I'll need your help.”

The subject was evidently closed. I made my way awkwardly to the galley entrance so Michelle could hand things out to me. I heard a soft
Oh!
from inside and looked in to see her sucking a finger.

“Cut myself,” she said. “Now where is that first-aid kit?” She found it and put a Band-Aid on her finger.

One bright red drop of blood had fallen on her white shorts. “Better get that before it stains,” I said.

Michelle hadn't noticed. She wet a sponge and went to work. “They say blood is one of the easiest things to remove if you get it right away. I've never found that to be true.” She scrubbed away.

Eventually lunch was ready. The boat's constant motion combined with the briny smell of the water didn't do much for my appetite; I tasted the white wine and picked at the crab salad. The twins talked of this and that; Annette was saying she wanted to sell the house in Brookline and move to Dover. The sun was hot on my skin, and rivulets of sweat ran down my back. I was feeling a little woozy.

Think
. I interrupted Annette's talk of houses. “You said three-fourths of your funds were invested in four companies due to go public. What about the other fourth? Why couldn't you use that?”

They both looked at me in exasperation. “Seed money for other companies,” Michelle said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “Operating expenses. Insurance.”