Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

Cassie looked wan, ran her fingers through her hair. Nick wondered whether she was even listening to him. “Intracerebral hemorrhage,” he went on. “She died in the hospital the next day.”

“You’re a good person.”

“No,” Nick said. “But I wish I were.”

“You give so much.”

“You don’t know, Cassie. All right? You don’t know what I’ve taken, what I’ve done. You don’t know...”

“You’ve given me a family.”

And I’ve taken yours away . He looked at her for a long time. He felt foolish about how he’d suspected her secret intentions and worried that she’d been trying to dig up the truth about what had happened to her father.

Then again, he obviously wasn’t so good at sizing people up, he realized. He’d gotten Osgood wrong in all sorts of ways, and he’d gotten Scott wrong. Todd Muldaur — well, he had Todd’s number from the start, so no surprise there. Eddie? He wasn’t really surprised, when it came right down to it, that Eddie wouldn’t hesitate to kick the skates out from under him.

But Cassie. He hadn’t known just what to make of her, and maybe he still didn’t know her all that well. Maybe his overpowering guilt and her overpowering seductiveness made it hard for him to see her clearly. She was a little emotionally unstable, that was obvious. Bipolar and having your dad murdered — that was a fairly lethal combination.

And he wondered how she’d react when he came clean.

It made no difference to him whether Eddie would strike some kind of deal with the police or not. He’d leave Eddie to his own smarmy fate.

When he and the kids came back from Hawaii, he was going to tell her the truth. And then he’d tell Detective Rhimes the truth.

And there would be an arrest, he knew that. Because whether a DA decided it was self-defense or not, he had killed a man.

Back in Boston, after his meeting with Willard Osgood, he’d taken a cab over to Ropes & Gray, a big law firm where a friend of his worked as a criminal defense attorney. A really smart guy he knew from Michigan State. Nick had told him what had happened, the whole story.

The lawyer had blanched, of course. He told Nick he was in deep shit, there was no way around it. He said the best Nick could hope for was criminally negligent homicide, that if he were very lucky he might get only a couple of years in prison. But it might well be more — five, seven, even ten years, because there was also the matter of having moved the body — tampering with physical evidence. The lawyer said that if Nick wanted to go through with it, he’d get a local counsel and petition to try the case in Michigan pro hoc vice, whatever that meant. He’d arrange for Nick to surrender, and he’d try to negotiate a plea agreement with the DA in Fenwick. And he said he’d ask for a lot of money up front.

Whatever would happen to him, though, was the least of it. What was going to happen to his kids? Would Aunt Abby be willing to take care of them?

This was the worst thing of all, the thing that truly terrified him.

But he knew it was the right thing to do, at long last, however long it had taken him to come to his senses. It was like that dream he’d had recently, the one about the body in the basement wall that gave away its hiding place by oozing the fluids of decay. He couldn’t hold the horrible secret inside anymore.

So in a week or so, after his last vacation with the kids, he was going to tell Cassie the truth. He’d already begun to rehearse, in his head, how he’d tell her.

“What is it?” she said.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’ve made some decisions.”

“Decisions about the company?”

“Not that, no. My life is about other things.”

An anxious look came over her. “Is this bad?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

“Is it bad for us?”

“No. It’s not about us, exactly.”

“‘Not about us, exactly’ — what’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’ll talk when the time is right. Just not yet.”

She placed her hand on his. He took it in his hand, holding it gently. Hers was small and trembling; his was big and steady.

The hand that killed her father.

“Cass, we’re off tomorrow,” he said. “We’re going to Hawaii for a few days. I already got the tickets.”

“Hawaii?”

“Maui. Laura loved that place most of all. There’s this great resort Laura and I discovered before we had kids. We had our own villa, right on the beach, with its own pool — not that you needed it — and all you could see from it was the Pacific Ocean.”

“Sounds amazing.”

“Until Laura died, we used to take the family there every year. Our big splurge. Same villa every time, Laura made sure of it. I think of it as a time when we were completely happy, all of us. I remember last time we were there, Laura and I were in bed and she turned to me and she said she wanted to spray a fixative on the whole day and keep it forever.”

“God, it sounds beautiful, Nick.” A light seemed to flicker in her eyes. She looked almost serene.

“I called the travel agency we’d used, and — it felt like a miracle — they said that exact same villa’s available.”

“Are you sure you want to return to a place they associate so closely with Laura? It might be better to go somewhere new — you know, create new memories.”

“You may be right. I know it won’t be the same. It’ll be sad in some ways. But it’ll be a new start. A good thing — just going there as a family, being together again. And there isn’t going to be any pressure to talk, or work through ‘issues,’ or anything else. We’re just going to play on the beach and do stuff and eat pineapple and just be . It won’t be the same, but it’ll be something . And it’ll be something we can all remember when things change, because they’re going to change.”

“The kids can miss school, right? No big deal.”

“I already called the school, told them I’d be taking Julia and Lucas out of classes for a few days. Hell, I even picked up the tickets at the airport when I got in.” He pulled an envelope from his breast pocket, took out the tickets and held them up, fanning them like a winning hand of cards.

Cassie’s smile vanished. “Three tickets.” She pulled her hand away.

“Just family. Me and the kids. I don’t think we’ve ever done this. Just us three, heading off for a few days somewhere.”

“Just family,” Cassie repeated in a harsh whisper.

“I think it’s important for me to try to reconnect with the kids. I mean, you get along with them better than I do, which is great. But I’ve let my part in it slip — I’ve sort of delegated that to you, like I’m CEO of the family or something, and that’s not right. I’m their dad, whether I’m any good at it or not, and it’s my job to work on making us a family again.”

Cassie’s face was transfigured, weirdly tight as if every muscle in her face were clenched.

“Oh God, Cassie, I’m sorry,” Nick said, flushing, embarrassed by his own obliviousness. “You know how much you mean to us.”

Cassie’s eyelids fluttered oddly, and he could see the veins in her neck pulsing. It was as if she were struggling to contain herself — or maybe to contain something larger than herself.

He smiled ruefully. “Luke and Julia — they’re my direct reports, you know. And I don’t know when I’ll have the chance again.”

“Just family.” The sound of one heavy stone scraping against another.

“I think it’ll be really good for us, don’t you?”

“You want to get away.”

“Exactly.”

“You want to escape.” Her voice was an incantation.