Danielle Steel - Ransom

She called him again later that night; just to reassure him again, worried about him. She hadn't liked what he'd said about his life insurance, and she was more panicked about him than their financial situation. She knew that men did crazy things sometimes, over money lost or businesses that failed. His entire ego had been wrapped up in his fortune. And when she got him on the phone, she could hear that he'd been drinking. A lot presumably. He was slurring his words and kept telling her that his life was over. She was so upset that she was thinking of flying to Mexico the next day to be with him, while he continued his negotiations, but in the morning, before she could do anything about it, one of the men who was there with him called her. His voice was jagged and he sounded broken. All he knew was that Allan had gone out alone on the boat they'd chartered, after they all went to bed. The crew were off the boat, and he went late at night, handling the boat himself. All anyone knew was that he must have fallen overboard sometime before morning. The yacht was found by the local Coast Guard when the captain reported it missing, and Allan was nowhere to be found. An extensive search had turned up nothing.

Worse yet, when she got to Mexico herself later that day, the police handed her the letter he had left her. They had kept a copy for their records. It said how hopeless the situation was, that he could never climb back up, it was all over for him, and he'd rather be dead than face the horror and shame of the world finding out what a fool he'd been and what a mess he'd made of it. The letter was disastrous and convinced even her that he had committed suicide, or wanted to. Or maybe he was just drunk and had fallen overboard. There was no way to know for sure. But the greater likelihood was that he had killed himself.

The police turned the letter over to the insurance company, as they were obliged to. Based on his words, they had refused to pay the claim on his policy, and Fernanda's attorney said it was unlikely they ever would. The evidence was too damning.

When they recovered Allan's body finally, all they knew was that he had died by drowning. There was no evidence of foul play, he hadn't shot himself, he had either jumped or fallen in, but it seemed a reasonable belief that at that moment at least, he had wanted to die, given everything he had said to her right before that and what he'd written in the letter he had left behind.

Fernanda was in Mexico by the time they found his body, washed up on a beach nearby after a brief storm. It was a horrifying, heartbreaking experience, and she was grateful that the children weren't there to see it. Despite their protests, she had left them in California, and gone to Mexico on her own. A week later, after endless red tape, she returned, a widow, with Allan's remains in a casket in the cargo hold of the plane.

The funeral was a blur of agony, and the newspapers said that he had died in a boating accident in Mexico, which was what everyone had agreed to say. None of the people he had been doing business with had any idea how disastrous his situation was, and the police kept the contents of his letter confidential from the press. No one had any idea that he had hit rock bottom, and sunk even lower than that, in his own mind at least. Nor did anyone except she and his attorney have a clear picture of what the sum total of his financial disasters looked like.

He was worse than ruined, he was in debt to such a terrifying extent that it was going to take her years to clear up the mess he had made. And in the four months since he died, she had sold off all their property, except the city house, which was tied up in his estate. But as soon as they would let her, she had to sell it. Mercifully, he had put all their other properties in her name, as a gift to her, so she was able to sell them. She had death taxes hanging over her, which had to be paid soon, and the two Impressionists were going up for auction in New York in June. She was selling everything that wasn't nailed down, or planning to. Jack Waterman, their attorney, assured her that if she liquidated everything, including the house eventually, she might break even, without a penny to her name. The majority of Allan's debts were attached to corporate entities, and Jack was going to be declaring bankruptcy, but so far no one had any idea of the extent to which Allan's world had collapsed, and she was trying to keep it that way, out of respect for him. Even the children didn't know the full implications yet. And on a sunny May afternoon, she was still trying to absorb it herself four months after his death, as she sat in their kitchen, feeling numb and looking dazed.

She was going to pick Ashley and Sam up at school in twenty minutes, as she did like clockwork every day. Will drove himself home from high school normally, in the BMW his father had given him six months before, on his sixteenth birthday. The truth was that Fernanda barely had enough money left to feed them, and she couldn't wait to sell the house, to pay more of their debts, or even give them a slight cushion. She knew she would have to start looking for a job shortly, maybe at a museum. Their whole life had turned inside out and upside down, and she had no idea what to tell the children. They knew that the insurance was refusing to pay, and she claimed that their father's estate being in probate had made things tight for the moment. But none of the three children had any idea that before his death, their father had lost his entire fortune, nor that the reason the insurance wouldn't pay was because they thought he had killed himself. Everyone was told it was an accident. And unaware of the letter or his circumstances, the people who'd been with him weren't convinced it wasn't. Only she, her attorneys, and the authorities knew what had happened. For the moment.

She lay in bed every night, thinking of their last conversation and playing it in her head over and over and over again. It was all she could think of, and she knew she would forever reproach herself for not going to Mexico sooner. It was an endless litany of guilt and self-accusation with the added horror and constant terror of bills flooding in, endless debts he had incurred, and nothing with which to pay them. The last four months had been an indescribable horror for her.

Fernanda felt totally isolated by all that had happened to her, and the only person who knew what she was going through was their attorney, Jack Waterman. He had been sympathetic and supportive and wonderful, and they had just agreed that morning that she was going to put the house on the market by August. They had lived there for four and a half years, and the children loved it now, but there was nothing she could do about it. She was going to have to ask for financial aid to keep them in their respective schools, and she couldn't even do that yet. She was still trying to keep the extent of their financial disaster a secret. She was doing it as much for Allan's sake, as to avoid total panic. As long as the people they owed money to still thought they had funds, they would give her a little more time to pay them. She was blaming the delay on probate and taxes. She was stalling for time, and none of them knew it.

The papers had talked about the demise of some of the various companies he'd invested in. But miraculously, no one had strung the entire disastrous picture together, mostly because in many cases, the public had no idea that he was the principal investor. It was a tangle of horror and lies that haunted Fernanda day and night, while she wrestled with the grief of losing the only man she had ever loved, and trying to guide her children through the shoals and across the reefs of their own grief for their father. She was so stunned and terrified herself that most of the time it was hard to absorb what was happening to her.