Surface (31 page)

With that bit of housekeeping brought to light, Claire knew there was no simple explanation for Mac Kessler or Janus. Or the country club bill, or Neiman’s. Operation Mikey-Leaks was turning out to be more like Mission Impossible. But there had to be other important details left in there, she thought, something the data transfer actually
was
capturing. Snow had begun to fall from the leaden sky, and she stepped outside and listened to its lonely whisper, convincing herself that there had to be a few more lulus left on the hard drive, because that’s just how things were going in her world. She stretched her arms and shoulders wide, half in anticipation of what new bombshells awaited.

Back inside, Claire checked her own e-mails on her phone. Amid alerts from Barnes & Noble,
The Post,
and Bergdorf, there was a message from Richard. Her posture softened at the sight of his name, while her cheeks heated up. She did not allow her brain to wander back to the spa.

With the impending cache of new reading material, in addition to all of the documents she needed to sort through for Jack, the timing wasn’t ideal. On the other hand, she had no doubt she would be in the advice market again by then.

Sure,
she typed.
Things have gotten a little thorny here. I may need some more of your expert counsel. Call me when you land.

She pushed send, and pulled open the file drawer in the desk. Michael kept both of their brokerage account statements at his office, along with all documents relating to the house and insurance policies. But she thumbed through the files and grabbed those for their joint Amex card, her Visa card, and her own bank account. And after some digging, she also found the old attorney file with their prenup. The rest, Michael would have to provide to the attorneys.

Claire slipped the files into her bag, and as she closed the French doors there was the sound of crunching gravel from the driveway. She prayed it was Ray. But he always parked in the porte cochere, and she couldn’t see his car there from the patio. She raced back to the computer, where the progress indicator showed about four more minutes to completion. And she was not about to acknowledge defeat, not after venturing this far across the line. There would be no second chance. She tidied up the desk, pushed Michael’s chair back into place and slung her bag over her shoulder, prepared to sprint the second the transfer was done. The kitchen door opened with the same noisy bang against the wall from the other night.
The woman has no respect for hand-troweled wall finishes,
Claire thought as she circled the desk impatiently and counted down the time. She couldn’t afford for Berna to find her in the house with Ray and Nicky gone.

“Halloo?” Berna’s yodel echoed in the hallway. Claire was almost certain she could hear her sensible shoes squeaking on the kitchen floor.

After another tidying pass around the desk and two failed attempts at a hair knot, the indicator flashed that the job was complete. Claire popped the flash drive out of the port and into her bag and logged out, before closing the French doors behind her and disappearing into the gathering white.

 

“Oh, hello, Berna,” Claire said, surprising the housekeeper from behind as she was unloading the groceries from her car in the garage.

Berna spun around. “Where did you come from? I saw your Jeep and—”

“I just love walking in the snow, so I did a nice loop around the neighborhood,” Claire said, wiping the dampness from her hair. “Looks like you could use a little help with the bags.” She took the smallest bag from the hatch and marched past Berna and into her kitchen, where she put the kettle on to boil.

A few minutes later, Nick breezed through the mudroom door and threw his parka and hat onto the chair next to where Claire was sipping her tea. “It’s freezing out there and this guy’s . . . making me do the . . . climbing bars at the park.”

“But you did great,
and
you got to drive, didn’t you?”

Nick nodded and took out his glucose monitor.

“I’m proud of you, Nicky,” Claire said, kissing a cold ear.

Nick rubbed his hands together and pricked his finger, placing a small droplet of blood onto the test strip. Claire watched him. Only two months before, he didn’t have the dexterity to manage this on his own.

Berna brought in the last of the groceries and the therapy bands, and announced to Nick that she had a pantry project for him. The cozy group nodded then resumed their business, at which point the visibly miffed housekeeper made herself scarce.

“How ’bout some sugar-free hot chocolate?” Claire asked with a satisfied grin.

“I’m low. I get the real stuff.”

“How low? Let me get you some juice before—”

Ray inserted himself between Claire and the refrigerator. “What do
you
need to do, bro?” he asked Nick.

Nick got a bottle of orange juice and was able to unscrew the top, pour himself a glass, and drink it down before the shakes set in. “I’m good,” he said after a second glassful.

And Claire felt even more grateful for Ray and all that he, as a nonparent, could push Nick to do without the usual pushback. She mouthed a silent thank-you to him as she spread Nick’s sketches out on the breakfast table. “So, I love these sketches, Nicky. The detail work is fantastic.”

“They’re cool, I guess.”

“What do you think about your new art class?”

He didn’t look her in the eye or answer, and instead ran his fingers over the drawings, back and forth, tracing the figures. It was hard to gauge his emotions, so Claire just waited. One of the building’s columns smudged under his finger, and when Nick noticed what he’d done, he abruptly swept all of the sketches onto the floor with the back of his hand. His face reddened and he kicked the leg of the table. “Damn it,” he shouted, kicking twice more. “I’m retarded. Everything was fine before, but now . . . I’m retarded.” His body shook as he repeated the phrase, seemingly powerless against the siren song of what had been. “I don’t know . . . why this happened,” he cried, tearing the drawings with the heels of his boot, “but I can’t . . . do anything now.”

Ray helped restrain Nick’s thrashing arms and got him into one of the chairs while Claire reminded him that the smudge was a simple mistake, and that he could do some more sketches with pencil, if he preferred, and that he was doing beautiful work. And that there was nothing retarded about him. The teakettle started to boil again, its piercing whistle heightening, and then ultimately diffusing, Nick’s outburst. When he was done, he sat breathing heavily, clasping and unclasping his fingers.

“Sometimes it’s hard when things don’t go exactly the way we expect them,” Ray said, kneeling in front of Nick. “But we learn to roll with that, right, man?”

Nicholas lowered his eyes.

“Do you want me to grab your art supplies?” Claire asked in a soothing voice. A strip of sunlight reflected off the snow through the picture window behind the breakfast table. “You could work on some more sketches in here.”

“Whatever,” he muttered.

“That’s a great idea, Nick. How about getting your sketchpad from your room? You can do that, can’t you?”

Nicholas grudgingly picked up the torn drawings from the floor and threw them into the trash, and sulked down the hall to his room.

“Is it ever not going to be like this?” Claire asked.

“Maybe,” Ray answered. “But he’s feeling disconnected right now. He’s not living with people who struggle with the same things he does anymore, and my guess is that as much as he wants to be on his own and be out of the hospital setting, he misses that comfort zone and camaraderie.”

“There’s just no winning, is there? What do we do?”

“Exactly what we’re doing. We keep promoting his independence through classes and activities outside of class. We provide him with opportunities to be successful. And we don’t let him sink into depression or the lure of the past, if we can help it.”

“Piece of cake,” she said, tossing that challenge in with all of the other hurdles on the horizon, and wondering how shatterproof she and Nick really were.

Ray handed her a piece of paper. “Here’s Andrea’s info. The tutor I mentioned.”

Claire forced a smile and took the note. “I’ll set up a meeting. And maybe you could casually float the idea to Michael? He’s more receptive to suggestions when they come from professionals.” She had no desire to debate Michael on the merits of a tutor over a college counselor. She could barely stomach the thought of sitting in the same room with him. She rubbed her hands along her jeans, recalling a painfully accurate comment about ex-husbands and cellulite being forever. Michael would be part of their future no matter how much she spent on lawyers and vanishing creams. And she would need to keep her composure through it all, for Nicky’s sake.

Ray nodded and leaned in over the table and asked her in a low voice how everything had gone while he and Nick were at the park.

“It was one step forward,” Claire said, just as Nicholas padded up the hall with his sketchpad. “How about a study of the Aspen trees in the yard?” she asked, while Nick set out his pencils on the breakfast table.

He sat down and stared out the window at the trees. After a few moments he began to draw. He wore an expression of intensity as he sketched, but there was a lightness, too, in the rhythm his hand took on. Claire watched him, her sometimes broken boy, transforming the blank pad with purpose and passion. He took his time with his rendering of proportion and detail, which were good by any standard. And when he stopped to assess his progress, Claire could see his satisfaction. It was as if in creating images, Nick was connecting to who he was, when nothing else was making sense in his world. The drawing was a likeness of Ray’s car in front of the porte cochere, the naked branches of the tree bowing to the hood. “I’m liking this,” he said softly, as he shaded the driveway.

Claire watched as he finished the sketch in silence, wishing she could save him the trouble of rose-tinting his memories of life before. Overcoming distorted perspectives was no easy task. That much she knew.

She dialed Andrea’s office as she pulled out of the driveway, and left a message about Nick and her hope that they could meet.

C
HAPTER
39

W
ith the flash drive still warm and burning a proverbial hole, Claire got to work as soon as she returned to the apartment. She promised herself not to get sidetracked by Taylor—at least not after checking for any further correspondence from Michael to Nicholas about her. And when she couldn’t find any, it came as a relief. He had been smart enough not to actually e-mail anything so incendiary. A piling-on of excuses and apologies from London about his mistress would only have made Nicky more miserable. Then again, she thought sadly, Nick had already been miserable enough to try and obliterate the memory of both of his parents’ bad behavior with the cocaine. She sighed and redirected her search for any messages between her husband and his mystery woman. But Michael’s meticulousness in covering up his duplicity only served to blunt Claire’s pain, and kindle her indignation. Jackie was right. It would not be so difficult to put the past aside and put up the good fight. Lies crush love. Deceit eclipses nostalgia. Betrayal cuts deep. Rock, paper, scissors.

With Michael’s e-mail trash emptied of Mac Kessler and Janus messages, Claire decided on a macro approach of looking through anything that didn’t seem familiar, even if it took all night. She scanned messages about investment deals. There were requests for capital calls, questions from investors, valuations and numerous spreadsheets. The meaningless names and numbers bled together like an unfathomable abstract canvas—right up to the moment she found herself in messages from the previous July, and staring at an e-mail to Andrew Bricker. Seeing Andrew’s name backlit and in bold was like a visual bucket of ice over her head. Claire took a second to catch her breath before opening it. It was a forwarded message that Michael had originally sent to a Jeff Sidon.

 

 

She looked in Michael’s inbox for a response. There was just one.

 

 

Claire stared at the screen and wondered if Andrew had felt helpless that morning, seeing his future snatched out from under him with the push of a send button. She knew he’d be un-hirable anywhere on the East Coast with a Montgomery blackball on his name. And she almost admired the tidiness of Michael’s retribution, were it not for its inherent hypocrisy. He was hardly in a position to cast stones at anyone’s character. But still, the thought that Andrew had been made to pay in some small way left Claire with a sense of satisfaction, bittersweet and petty though it was. In this horrible zero-sum game, was this the karma she had been looking for?

Closing her eyes and taking several moments to slow her hummingbird pulse, Claire returned to Michael’s business files. Most of the LLC and partnership folders were names she recognized, though still nothing appeared for Janus. She skimmed financial statements and operating results. And while she couldn’t make sense of
all
the numbers, what became increasingly clear was that nearly all of his real estate and green-tech venture deals had booked stunning losses in the last year. She went back to the e-mails associated with the biggest underperformers. One deal in particular, a condo development outside of San Diego, had inspired a large amount of angry investor communication over the last four months. Claire sat back in her chair reading through the messages and attempting to digest the big picture. Which, by her own inexperienced calculations, left Michael on the line for millions to salvage this one investment alone. And given the dreary state of the financials she’d scanned before, there were likely other deals in similarly bleak straits.

This wouldn’t have been overly worrisome under normal circumstances. There would be enough cash somewhere to plug the dam until things turned around. But with the recession, it had been a rough year for even the most seasoned financiers, and Michael’s investors looked to be especially hard hit by negative returns. Was there enough for Michael to cover their shortfalls, too? Claire speculated that Mac Kessler might be one of these desperate partners, looking for information that would provide the solution to whatever this Janus deal might be up against. But the fact that Michael had deleted those particular e-mails still troubled Claire. Had the golden boy lost his famous touch and credibility? And just what kind of alchemy was he practicing to get it back? She also began to wonder how deep the losses had hit them personally.

She made a pot of coffee, determined to understand what were still
her
finances, too, and what she might be facing. Forty-five minutes of fishing around, however, provided little further enlightenment, apart from the fact that there were indeed more deals underwater, and that Michael was short on life preservers. And then Claire stumbled across a QuickBooks icon buried in an applications folder. She opened the accounting program and took a sip of the coffee. Michael’s personal and corporate bank account registers appeared, along with their brokerage account statements.

She scrolled back to the previous January in his personal check register and scanned the payments and deposits. Credit cards, insurance, utilities—all of these payments showed up with regularity, along with their other routine expenditures and charitable contributions. On the deposits side were occasional dividend checks and the monthly salary he took out of New Haven Investments, his holding company. She continued rolling slowly through the entries, the unremarkable numbers resuming their abstract blur, until she came across a five-hundred-and-thirty-thousand-dollar deposit from their Schwab account in June—half of which appeared to be transferred to New Haven that same month. She began taking notes on the curious details and figures. There were the monthly checks to her, but as she continued through the summer months, Claire also noticed Michael’s salary deposits diminishing, until there were none at all for September forward, as well as smaller than normal credit card payments. She wiped her eyes and finished her coffee.

Pushing on, she located their online brokerage statements from Schwab, which revealed that she and Michael had taken a bigger hit in the market than she had realized. When they last discussed their portfolio over a year before, it was a discussion of “paper losses” and no real cause for concern given that most of the companies in their portfolio were long-term holds. But Michael apparently had other ideas come that June, and had cashed out two of their larger positions. Glancing at the clock, Claire tried to dispel a growing sense of foreboding. It was getting late, and her hope for straightforward answers was thinning.

Uneasily, she opened Michael’s corporate ledger. There were tabs for each of his investment deals, in addition to checking and money market accounts for New Haven. The books looked bleak—very few deposits, and lots of money going out for payroll, overhead expenses, capital calls, and operating fees for his use of the plane (which in light of the circumstances seemed absurd, but inspiring confidence in his investors with the appearance of success was something on which she knew Michael placed a premium). There
were
a couple investment distributions in the first quarter, but then nothing until the Schwab transfer in June, which was practically depleted by early fall.
Jesus.
The business was running on fumes. The unpaid country club bill, the credit cards, Michael’s volatility and visible stress—it was all starting to add up. Claire looked from her notes to the computer screen, feeling her nerves collide with a simmering headache. How the hell was he keeping it all afloat? And how was she going to come up with a clear game plan for her future when there was nothing clear about the game?

Scrolling down through the months, Claire found a vague answer to her first question. In September there was a deposit for two million dollars from Wells Fargo, followed by a “loan payment” of ten thousand dollars to Wells the next month. She slumped back in her chair, running scenarios through her head, and growing increasingly ambivalent about her cockeyed attempt at sleuthing. She worked the tightness in her forehead, reevaluating her commitment to the Gail Harrold school of marital detective work. The forensic accountants could sort through the disorder far more methodically, while sparing her the mind-game spiral. Maybe she should just tell Jack to serve the divorce papers and subpoena Michael’s records, and officially move on with the business of moving on.

Claire dragged the mouse across the screen, fairly resigned to let the professionals handle things. But just as she was about to close out QuickBooks, the driving mystery behind the entire Mikey-Leaks operation practically leapt up and announced itself to her. She froze, staring at the first entry for the month of November—a deposit for 3.2 million dollars wired from Janus Capital. She swallowed slowly, and moved forward through the month. There was a 4.8-million-dollar check to the San Diego condo LLC, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar check to a Wincor Technologies, and another loan payment to Wells Fargo. She reread the information, feeling foolish for assuming that Janus had been some real estate deal, and clicked on various subheadings looking for a brokerage account statement from the investment firm. But there was none.

With her eyes burning and brain at capacity, Claire went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, trying to recall any discussion of an account at Janus. But she knew
they
didn’t have one. Had he been accumulating assets in a hidden account, as the Hamster Wheel book had warned? And why was this Mac person asking for information? The whole picture seemed even murkier than before. But what
was
imminently clear was that their extremely comfortable life had become a house of cards. And that Michael really couldn’t be trusted. She pressed a hand towel to her face, exhausted by all that he had been hiding. A week ago she would have wondered if her involvement with Andrew had pushed Michael into silence about the state of their financial affairs. But Claire now understood that silence and secrecy had long been his true MO. She walked back into the kitchen and stared at the USB drive, thinking of crystal balls and all the inconvenient secrets they held.

 

“It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. A huge, convoluted mess between the affair and the financial disarray. And what I really need right now is some distraction. Tell me something good, Mother. Please. I just want to turn my brain off until tomorrow.” Claire lay in her bed fully aware of the irony that she was curled in the fetal position and looking to her mother for a few moments of grace.

“Okay.” Cora paused before softly continuing. “Remember when you were a little girl and Daddy would take you out for malted milkshakes and hot dogs for breakfast on Sunday mornings?”

Claire warmed at the memory, missing her adventures with her father and the confidences she could always discuss with him.

“I got you all to myself during the week after Jackie was big enough for school, but I knew how special your weekend time was with him.”

“I miss him so much.” Claire closed her eyes remembering her father’s strong hands wiping mustard from her chin, his upbeat voice suggesting a trip to the record store with the friend she’d accidentally angered.

“So do I, honey. And if Daddy were here, he’d do everything he could to help his little girl out of trouble, and to make that cheating BASTARD pay for what he’s done.” Cora’s voice shook with anger and loud, clear regret.

“Mother, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you swear.” Claire stretched her legs out under the covers and put her free hand on her belly, feeling it rise and fall.

“I just may call him worse,” she seethed. “I can’t even begin to comprehend why he would run around with some . . .
woman
when he had you.”

Claire found a strange comfort in Cora’s fury, while wondering just how much presence and comfort Taylor had provided her husband.

“And I certainly don’t understand why, with all the money his family has, Michael’s gotten himself into this financial pickle, whatever it is. Paul and Margot could give him a loan until everything gets—”

“Michael would never ask them for money.” Claire reiterated the Montgomery philosophy of not spoiling the children with anything so gauche as cash or, God forbid, emotional support. And how, for the most part, it had worked beautifully. “All the boys have been wildly successful. Screwed up and dysfunctional, but very rich. I thought Michael had dodged that bullet, but apparently not.”

“They’d always seemed like such lovely people.”

“Well, they’ve been good to Nicholas. And to me, before the accident. Michael just preferred to keep some emotional distance. Goes back to the lack of cozy memories.”

“Oh,” Cora said softly.

“Paul would invest in his deals, but it was always business between the two of them. No friends-and-family favors. In fact, Paul is one of the investors on the San Diego deal I mentioned, and I suspect Michael’s desperate to turn that one around for more than just the sake of his equity. There’s nothing he loves more than sending daddy a nice fat profit check. A negative return would not go over well.”

“So Michael’s up against the wall and he’s cashing out everything you have to salvage his deals. I’m not condoning his behavior, but I can see how—”