by Davis Bunn
“Not while my little carnivore is in the house.” She set down her fork. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I actually don’t know what to say to you.”
“Because . . .”
“You make me feel so much at ease. It’s crazy. We only just met, all I’ve done tonight is dump a load of worry in your lap, and already I feel so . . .”
Daniel pushed his plate to one side and leaned in close. “Tell me.”
She stopped avoiding his gaze. “Relaxed. Lighter. Happy.” She breathed softly. “I haven’t used that word in a long time.”
Daniel was caught by a sudden recollection. Back when he was living the high life, up in the stratosphere of LA society, he received so many formal invitations he stacked them like playing cards. He had always liked the ones that included the phrase the pleasure of your company. That was exactly how he felt now. Daniel felt a sudden urge to share how these few short hours in her company had ignited a spark in him at the level of his heart. It was something so foreign, he was not sure he could even name it. But if he tried, if he said what he was thinking, Daniel was fairly certain Stella would gather up her daughter and flee. So all he said was, “Can I make a suggestion?”
She hesitated, the candles painting beautiful designs over her features. “Go ahead.”
He chose his words carefully. “Just for this one night, pretend we’ve been friends for years.”
His words melted something in her gaze. At least, he hoped it was so. But while she was still testing her response, Nicole spoke up from the table’s far end. “Uncle Daniel?”
He was sorry to release himself from her gaze. But at the same time, he felt a moment’s pause wasn’t altogether a bad thing. “I told you. Between us, just Daniel.”
She nodded. “Why doesn’t Mom ever talk about her past?”
He liked this intensely, how the newcomer to his home felt comfortable enough to open up in front of others. People who, until the previous night, had been total strangers. Daniel replied, “What has she told you?”
“Almost nothing.” She adopted Lisa’s singsong crispness. “We were poor, and it was awful, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Daniel took a contemplative bite. “I don’t remember it that way. Being awful.”
Stella asked, “Where are you from?”
“Born and raised in LA. Glendale to start—my dad worked for Boeing—then after the divorce we moved to the Valley, about two miles from the Universal gates. Mom worked as a secretary and bookkeeper. Dad was always late with his payments, then he disappeared entirely. Lisa hated everything about the Valley. She called it ‘the cage.’”
Daniel turned to the night. It was easier to talk about their life when he wasn’t gazing back into three sets of eyes. Four now, as even Chloe was watching him. “Then Mom was hired as the PA to a movie mogul’s wife.”
Chloe asked, “Which one?”
Nicole said, “Harvey Overton. I know that much.”
Stella said, “Wow. Overton Studios. Even I’ve heard of him.”
Daniel went on, “After two years of Mom being on call twenty-four seven, Vanessa Overton insisted we move into a small cottage at the back of their Bel Air estate. It had previously been used by the gardeners, and when we moved in, it stank of machine oil. But for us it was heaven.”
Perhaps it was merely a shift of the candles’ flames, four of them stationed along the table’s center. Or perhaps it was his own relief at being able to fully turn away from Chloe’s shadowed mood. Accept that he had done his best, and move on. Return to the more pressing matter of making his fragile niece feel safe enough here to explore forbidden reaches and perhaps even spread her wings for the first time. Daniel went on, “Lisa was twelve when we moved in.”
Nicole said quietly, “Mom said she was eleven.”
“Maybe. What’s more important is, your mother was already something to behold.”
Stella asked, “Beautiful?”
“Oh, no. LA is full of beauty. Lisa was something else entirely. It was like looking at an open flame. She was a shimmering beacon that could draw looks from miles away.”
The candles turned Nicole’s features into something twisted, like she saw her own absence of such unique beauty in the flickering light. “Sounds like Mom.”
Daniel said, “Lisa attached herself to the mogul’s wife. Vanessa gradually began treating Lisa like her young protégé.”
Amber asked, “Did her mommy mind?”
“Maybe. But she didn’t say anything. Lisa had never been happy. Life to her was a battlefield.” Daniel saw the way Chloe jerked at the words, like someone had stabbed her in the back. He felt the young woman’s pain anew. “Vanessa changed all that. Lisa just blossomed. At thirteen, sis was taking classes in dance and etiquette and cosmetics and fashion. All compliments of the Overtons. At fourteen, she was launched into the world of modeling. At fifteen, she was taken by the Anne Ford Agency. She had her first Vogue cover at sixteen.”
“The youngest ever,” Nicole said, watching the flame dance. “She has a blowup of that photograph on the wall next to her vanity.”
“That’s right,” Daniel said. “I forgot about that picture.”
“Hard to miss,” Nicole said. “What was she like? Then, I mean.”
“I know what you mean.” He spoke to her, and to Chloe, and to the tears on one face and the aching, burning desire on the other. “She would walk into a room, and every light would track her.” He had seen it happen enough, the envy and hatred from most women, and the burning desire she ignited in almost every man. Daniel had loved his sister and admired her. But there was something about that fierce determination, and the draw she created at will, that made him feel like an outcast from his own family. His mother felt that too, he knew. She was proud of her daughter’s accomplishments and accepted that Lisa was leaving her behind. And she was fearful, of course. They were all afraid of what might happen to their brilliant flame of a child.
Daniel watched Chloe sigh hard enough to blow out the nearest candle. And he wished he knew what he had to do.
As they were clearing up, Stella followed him into the kitchen. “What you said out there . . . It touched me like few things do.”
Daniel took his time, lining up his plates in the dishwasher like little porcelain soldiers. “I feel like everything I said was wrong.”
“I know you do. And that’s why I’m here. To tell you that it was very beautiful.”
There was something new to her gaze, an openness that kindled another spark at heart level.
She liked his silence enough to smile and say, “Thank you for a lovely evening.”
CHAPTER 15
Daniel woke at six, his normal hour. The house was silent as he entered the kitchen. Even so, he could still sense lingering traces of the women who had been there the previous night. A faint hint of Stella’s fragrance, and something more. Stella’s tightly suppressed fears. Chloe’s bitter enmity. Amber’s effervescence. And strongest of all, Nicole’s tremulous regret and remarkable determination. Daniel was tempted to walk back and place a hand on the closed door of her bedroom, to see if he could detect her mood through the wood.
He slipped on a jacket and took his first cup of coffee in the rear garden. The sky was overcast, and he thought he could smell coming rain. The previous winter had brought some heavy storms. Mudslides had caused havoc farther south in the Santa Barbara hills. The cliffs around Lompoc had also been hard hit. But Miramar had been mostly spared. Four times Daniel had volunteered to serve with groups cutting out the hilltop brush, reducing the risk of wildfire ravaging their area. It was the first time he had become involved in a regional activity. His group had been drawn mostly from professionals, lawyers and teachers and two accountants and their families. Daniel had heard from the volunteers that other groups contained some truly wild men, clans from the inland hills who normally had nothing to do with the more affluent seaside towns. The state’s fir
e service had ended the season with a pot roast supper for all the volunteers, where Daniel had met several of the bearded folk, with their electric eyes and their raw-throated roars. They reminded him of the life he had left behind, only with more hair.
He made a second coffee and took his mug into the glass-fronted office. He gave the markets a perfunctory check, then opened his laptop and slipped Stella’s drive into the slot. He used the device for all personal activity and e-mail and general Internet searches. His office system was monitored hourly by professional online security. This was definitely an investigation he needed to keep off-line.
Daniel scanned the files by name, then drew up the earliest, going not by the file’s internal date but rather the point at which Stella had saved it onto the memory stick. He figured she would have started with the one that was most worrisome. Ninety seconds later, he was lost in the intricacies of a numerical maze.
He had possessed this ability for as long as he could remember. As a child, he had begged his mother for magazines filled with number puzzles. For Daniel, their move into the Bel Air gardener’s cabin had meant a bedroom of his own and access to a private pool. He could swim as long and hard as he liked, so long as he was out by eight-thirty, when the movie mogul emerged for his morning paddle. Swimming had become his haven growing up. He had joined the municipal league as a young teen, then swum for the city, and this had led to a partial scholarship to UCLA. He had twice competed in the nationals and might have made the Olympic team if he had been willing to give up on his other passion. The one that had brought him here.
Daniel had been tempted to major in higher mathematics. But the company of single-minded geeks had not interested him, just as he had no desire to take a rifle-shot approach to life as a jock. So he had majored in business. The result was a new first love.
In truth, he fell in love twice. The first was with economic trends, analyzing the constant flow of numbers generated by the American economy and predicting which way people would jump.
The second passion arrived unexpectedly during his first year in the graduate business program, when a professor introduced Daniel to forensic accounting.
In the wildest days of LA’s electric highs, Daniel had often looked back to those moments of discovery and wondered what his life might have looked like. If he had not allowed himself to be lured down the road to ruin. If he had stayed locked in his comfort zone, unraveling mysteries people assumed were hidden in their balance sheets. Revealing truths and righting wrongs. On many sleepless nights, coming down from his latest thrill ride, staring out over the treetops and his glistening pool, Daniel had pondered that stabbing mystery. How things had gone so wrong. Wishing he could take it all back and return to those first heady days of finding a task that he was great at, something it almost felt like he was born to do.
Just like now.
* * *
Three hours later, the two of them were seated in the coffee shop closest to the town hall. Daniel had offered to meet Stella alone, and he had promised to return in time for Marvin’s arrival. But Nicole insisted on coming, and Daniel found himself enjoying the young woman’s company. Even today, with all the shadows looming just out of sight.
The very first time Daniel had come to Miramar, he had wanted to call the place home. There was a singular vibe to the entire central coast. But as far as Daniel was concerned, Miramar was the jewel in the crown.
He considered Miramar to be a way station on the route to California’s new millennium. He had never thought of it as a throwback to some distant time, when women wore modest two-piece bathing suits and the Beach Boys promised a life that began and ended in the sun. Miramar was very much anchored in the here and now. And yet it also stubbornly defined which here and which now.
Until arriving in Miramar, Daniel had secretly assumed he would never find a place he liked enough, identified with so intensely, that he would want to call it home. He had met any number of people like that in Los Angeles. That high-octane world attracted the sort who were only half alive. They thought that, because they were beautiful enough, or rich enough, or temporarily held sufficient power, they could overlook the fact that a core component of their being was missing. Daniel had always assumed he was fated to remain one of them. It was why he had found no need to resist the lure of sex and drugs. Rock and roll had never done it for him. But the on-air stage and the lights, well, that was something else entirely.
Nicole broke into his thoughts by asking, “How long do we need to wait?”
Daniel could see she was borderline terrified. Which was another reason why he had thought it was good for her to come along. There was nothing he could do about their meeting with Marvin that afternoon, except remind Nicole with his presence that she was not going into it alone. He replied, “Yesterday Stella called me as she was walking to a coffee shop. She said she came here every day. The next one is three blocks farther away.”
“Meaning, you don’t know when she’s coming.”
“If you like, go for a walk, get something at the other place, and I’ll text you when we’re done here.”
“You really think she’s in trouble?”
Daniel nodded. “That’s why we’re sitting here. Why I didn’t call and ask to meet.”
She pulled out her phone, checked her screen, and said, “Marvin again. He’ll be here at two.”
Daniel said the same thing he’d told her when he’d emerged from his office and found her hunched over her coffee mug, staring at the dregs with eyes shaded by another broken night. “I will be there for you. If you like, I will carry the conversation.”
“I don’t know what I want.”
“Then I’ll start, and you jump in whenever you’re ready.”
“Or jump out the window, more like.”
“Another joke. I like that.”
She sighed. Stuffed the phone back in her pocket, dismissing Marvin and the coming confrontation. “So what is it you mentioned, that thing with the numbers?”
“Forensic accounting. That was where I got my start. On the good days, I could play detective with a balance sheet.”
She lifted her gaze, showed him the determined young woman lurking behind the purplish half-moons bruising her eyes. “No. I mean, what is it really.”
He liked that, how she felt comfortable enough to demand a clear look at a reality beyond her own crisis. “The actual definition of forensic is ‘suitable for use in a court of law.’ Studying forensic accounting starts with learning the laws that govern bookkeeping, corporate taxation, board governance, and so on.”
This was the point where Daniel watched most people’s eyes glaze over. Instead, Nicole leaned her elbows on the table, like she had finally found something interesting enough to focus on. Even today. “Did you go to court?”
“A couple of times. I was very junior. But yeah, I went. And testified in three cases.”
“How was it?”
Daniel pushed his cup aside and leaned in as well. “It was great.”
“Really?”
“Terrific. The senior forensics expert in our firm liked to say that discovering the bad guys and learning what they did was only half the battle. A great forensics expert was somebody who could make it live for the jury.”
“Did you?”
He nodded. “That’s how I got my big TV break.”
“Get out.”
“The board of a major San Diego manufacturer suspected their executives of malfeasance. That’s a fancy word to describe a senior figure using their powers to steal.”
“Which they did.”
“Big-time.”
“And you discovered it?”
“I was part of a team of eight.” But she just sat there, watching him, the light back in her gaze now. So he added, “Yeah. Okay. I made the discovery.”
“Cool.”
“The day of the trial, the senior guy was out sick. He appointed me as spokesman. So I did my schtick on the stand, and the four executives were con
victed. And then I was invited onto the local business hour. The producers saw something they liked, so they started asking me back. I was brought in half a dozen more times to talk about stuff. Then they offered me a Friday afternoon gig.”
“Were you excited?”
“I was scared out of my tiny mind,” Daniel replied. “But yeah. I was excited, too.” Daniel smiled at the memory. “All the other on-air talent were so on top of things. So authoritative. They wouldn’t give me the time of day. I was just this newbie, in to fill an empty chair. I’d get bounced out soon enough.”
“You showed them, though, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “The producers who had hired me were the ones who decided what topics were going to get covered. I talked to them. Showed them things the other analysts had missed. Explained how I wanted to cover the issues. They gave me some rope, and then waited to see if I’d hang myself.”
“The other talent must have hated you.”
“All but one. This lady—the first ever they’d given a lead position to on the business side—she was a former Wall Street analyst, the smartest person I’d ever met. She didn’t like me, but she didn’t try and shut me out.”
“She gave you a chance to prove yourself,” Nicole said. She was totally into it now, the café somewhere out there beyond her zone of attention.
“I did what I’d been trained to do. One in-depth study each week. Sometimes it came from the producer, a couple of times from the on-air lady. Mostly, though, I found cases myself. Companies who defied the trends. Or had potential the market had not yet picked up on. Or were overpriced and potentially headed for a big decline in stock valuation.” He smiled at the memory. “That got me in a lot of hot water. One company threatened to take us to court after their stock tanked.”
“What happened?”
