Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

“How much money was there?” she asked him.

“Two hundred thousand and some change.”

She blinked. “Lord, I sure could use it. And soon. Is there any way to get it?”

“I think so. But he was real cagey, your husband.”

“Cagey?” she drew the word out.

“He wanted to hide those assets bad. It’d be a lot easier to find if I knew why he did it.”

“I don’t have a clue.” She lifted her hand and let it fall onto her solid thigh. “Maybe it’s retirement money.”

But Ralston was smiling.

“I say something silly?”

“A four-oh-one K is where you put retirement money. The Cayman Islands isn’t.”

“Is it illegal, what Jim did?”

“Not necessarily. But it might be.” He emptied his cup. “You want me to keep going?”

“Yes,” Sandra May said firmly. “Whatever it takes, whatever you find. I have to get that cash.”

“Then I’ll do it. But it’s going to be complicated, real complicated. We’ll have to file suits in Delaware, New York and the Cayman Islands. Can you be away from here for months at a time?”

A pause. “I could be. But I don’t want to. This’s my home.”

“Well, you could give me power of attorney to handle it. But you don’t know me that well.”

“Let me think on that.” Sandra May took the barrette out of her hair, let the blond strands fall free. She leaned her head back, looking up at the sky, the stars, the captivating moon, which was nearly full. She realized that she wasn’t resting against the back of the porch swing at all but against Ralston’s shoulder. She didn’t move away.

Then the stars and the moon were gone, replaced by the darkness of his silhouette, and he was kissing her, his hand cradling the back of her head, then her neck, then sliding around to the front of her jumper and undoing the buttons that held the shoulder straps. She kissed him back, hard. His hand moved up to her throat and undid the top button of her blouse, which she wore fastened — the way, her mother told her, proper ladies should always do.

She lay in bed that night alone — Bill Ralston had left some hours before — and stared up at the ceiling.

The anxiety was back. The fear of losing everything.

Oh, Jim, what’s going to happen? she thought to her husband, lying deep in the red clay of Pine Creek Memorial Gardens.

She thought back on her life — how it just hadn’t turned out the way she’d planned. How she’d dropped out of Georgia State six months before she graduated to be with him. Thinking about how she gave up her own hopes of working in sales. About how they fell into a routine: Jim running the company while she entertained clients and volunteered at the hospital and the Women’s Club and ran the household. Which was supposed to be a household full of children — that was what she’d hoped for anyway. But it never happened.

And now Sandra May DuMont was just a childless widow...

That was how the people in Pine Creek looked at her. The town widow. They knew that the company would fail, that she’d move into one of those dreadful apartments on Sullivan Street and would just melt away, become part of the wallpaper of small-town Southern life. They thought no better of her than that.

But that wasn’t going to happen to her.

No, ma’am... She could still meet someone and have a family. She was young. She could go to a different place, a big city, maybe — Atlanta, Charleston... hell, why not New York itself?

A Southern woman’s got to be a notch stronger than her man. And a notch more resourceful too...

She would get out of this mess.

Ralston could help her get out of it. She knew she’d done the right thing, picking him.

When she woke up the next morning Sandra May found her wrists were cramping; she’d fallen asleep with her hands clenched into fists.

It was two hours later, when she arrived in the office, that Loretta pulled her aside, gazed at her boss with frantic, black-mascaraed eyes and whispered, “I don’t know how to tell you this, Mrs. DuMont, but I think he’s going to rob you. Mr. Ralston, I mean.”

“Tell me.”

Frowning, Sandra May sat slowly in the high-backed leather chair. Looked again out the window.

“All right, see, what happened... what happened...”

“Calm down, Loretta. Tell me.”

“See, after you left last night I started to bring some papers into your office and I heard him on the phone.”

“Who was he talking to?”

“I don’t know. But I looked inside and saw that he was using his cell phone, not the office phone, like he usually does. I figured he used that phone so we wouldn’t have a record of who he called.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions. What did he say?” Sandra May asked.

“He said he was pretty close to finding everything. But it was going to be a problem to get away with it.”

“ ‘Get away with it.’ He said that?”

“Yes, ma’am. Right, right, right. Then he said some stock or something was all held by the company, not by ‘her personally.’ And that could be a problem. Those were his words.”

“Then what?”

“Oh, then I kind of bumped into the door and he heard and hung up real quick. Seemed to me, at any rate.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s going to rob us,” Sandra May said. “ ‘Get away with it.’ Maybe that just means get the money out of the foreign companies. Or maybe he’s talking about something else altogether.”

“Sure, maybe it does, Mrs. DuMont. But he was acting like a spooked squirrel when I came into the room.” Then Loretta brushed one of her long, purple nails across her chin. “How well do you know him?”

“Not well... Are you thinking that he somehow arranged this whole thing?” Sandra May shook her head. “Couldn’t be. I called him to help us out.”

“But how did you find him?”

Sandra May grew quiet. Then she said, “He met me... Well, he picked me up. Sort of. At the Pine Creek Club.”

“And he told you he was in business.”

She nodded.

“So,” Loretta pointed out, “he might’ve heard that you’d inherited the company and went there on purpose to meet you. Or maybe he was one of the people Mr. DuMont was in business with — doing something that wasn’t quite right. What you were telling me? — about those foreign companies.”

“I don’t believe it,” Sandra May protested. “No, I can’t believe it.”

She looked into her assistant’s face, which was pretty and demure, yes, but also savvy. Loretta said, “Maybe he looks for people who’re having trouble running businesses and moves in and, bang, cleans ’em out.”

Sandra May shook her head.

“I’m not saying for sure, Mrs. DuMont. I just worry about you. I don’t want anybody to take advantage of you. And we all here... well, we can’t hardly afford to lose our jobs.”

“I’m not going to be some timid widow who’s afraid of the dark.”

“This might not be just a shadow,” Loretta said.

“I’ve talked to the man, I’ve looked into his eyes, honey,” Sandra May said. “I reckon I’m as good a judge of character as my mama was.”

“I hope you are, ma’am. For all our sakes. I hope you are.”

Sandra May’s eyes scanned the office again, the pictures of her husband with the fish and game he’d bagged, the pictures of the company in the early days, the groundbreaking for the new factory, Jim at the Rotary Club, Jim and Sandra May on the company float at the county fair.

Their wedding picture...

Honey, don’t you worry your pretty little head about anything I’ll take care of it everything’ll be fine don’t worry don’t worry don’t worry...

The words her husband had said to her a thousand times echoed in her head. Sandra May sat down in the office chair once more.