Miz Scarlet and the Imposing Imposter

by Sara M. Barton

  “When did this guy have time to save the planet?” Bur asked, after one scintillating revelation after another popped up. “How many women did this bastard seduce?”

  I cringed for the hundredth time. My shoulders became used to tensing up every time I heard his name spoken. Thank heaven for safe sex practices. Wearing a condom during all our romantic rendezvous had raised Ned’s ire, but I had insisted on it. I must have instinctively known that he wasn’t a monogamous kind of guy. And Jere and I? We had never progressed to that stage, not after the gut-wrenching emotional battering I took from Ned. And thank God for that.

  The first week was spent with a physical therapist leading me through exercises every morning for two hours, trying to work the soft tissue injuries in an effort to minimize the scar tissue and maintain full mobility. I needed a nap after every session.

  The second week, I began taking walks in the afternoons, enjoying the early days of spring as I was accompanied by my brother, my cousin, or sometimes just the dogs. Kenny was back in New Jersey, working on the case. There was always a security person with me, and in addition, I had a personal alarm pendant I could push at any time.

  As for our finances, Bur took a consulting job with Kenny’s security firm, to provide business intelligence to the forest products industry. He took on the role of assessing the environmental network Ned built over the decades and analyzing its overall impact on the industry. At least we had some money coming in, but it was never going to replace what we lost.

  One afternoon, while Kenny was chasing leads, he stumbled upon a startling piece of news. That Ponzi-style scheme, the one that raided our investment fund a decade ago, was connected to Ned’s gang. Not only that, Kenny tracked down the routing number to a bank in Ireland, held in the name of Sorkin Enterprises.

  We were gathered in the living room of the log home, spread out on the big, comfy sectional, when Kenny dropped the bombshell. That got my blood boiling.

  “But why? Why us? What did we ever do to him?” I demanded. “That’s what doesn’t make any sense! We’re not celebrities! We’re not public figures. We’re not in politics! Why did Ned care about us so much? It’s like he hated us!”

  “Meaning?” Kenny asked.

  “It’s like an old-fashioned vendetta or something!” I cried. How else could you explain Ned spending so much time and energy on destroying us? “Look at Ned’s other victims. He didn’t go to the same lengths to screw them over. He used them. He set them up. But with us, it was different. He wanted to obliterate us!”

  “She has a point,” said Bur. “Ned Sorkin went to an awful lot of trouble to ruin us. He even sent in his younger brother to finish the job.”

  “Actually, Jere’s his half-brother. Different fathers.”

  “Who’s the mother?” I demanded. “Maybe she’s the reason.”

  It took another two days of digging before Kenny came up with a possible connection to the current situation. But he didn’t want to tell us until he was sure it was a factor. Instead, he wanted an expert to explain the significance to him, someone he thought he could trust. Mary Anne Turley.

  “This involves the silk industry?” Bur asked, definitely confused.

  “Not the silk industry. The Four Oaks Pressboard Company.”

  “Oh.” We were all rather stunned.

  “I’ve got to meet with Mary Anne. I’ll be gone overnight.”

  By now, I had recovered significantly, enough so that Kenny and I were exploring our romantic options. The thought of him leaving again, even on business, was distressing. What if something bad happened to him? What if one of Ned’s goons got him before we got the answers? Was the secret worth killing for?

  I accompanied Kenny out to his rented car for the drive to the airport an hour later.

  “Do you have to go? Can’t you just email her the questions? Or Skype the call?”

  “You have to trust me, Miz Scarlet. I know what I’m doing.”

  I looked into those lovely blue eyes, unsure of what I saw. I could feel his excitement. He knew he had uncovered an important clue.

  “You’ll be careful?”

  “I’ll be more than careful. I promise I’ll come back to you in one piece.”

  “This isn’t just about Mary Anne Turley, is it? You’re going for something else, something bigger.”

  “Maybe. Does it matter? If it pans out, you’ll know all about it. If it turns out to be nothing, you won’t be disappointed.”

  “And if it gets you killed?”

  “Not to worry,” he told me. “At least Ned Sorkin won’t be able to reach out from the grave and finish the job.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, even as Kenny kissed me gently on the lips before climbing into the sedan.

  “I’ll call you tonight,” was his farewell.

  “You’d better!” I replied, churlishly.

  The hours dragged on with the speed of paint drying. I tried to occupy myself with notes. I had already turned over all my emails to Kenny, who wanted to study them for hints of how Ned and Jere had managed to penetrate our family fortunes. The bigger question was still why. Why us?

  I wracked my brain trying to remember what Ned had said about his life over cocktails, in bed, and even on the few occasions we went hiking. He and I usually met half-way between New York and Cheswick. On one weekend, we followed the Appalachian Trail up in Salisbury, doing the stretch known as Lions Head. He had talked about his grandparents that trip. What had he said? His grandfather was a labor organizer, his grandmother was a mill worker. But which set of grandparents? Maternal or paternal?

  I thought about all the years I had known Jere. I didn’t actually know much about his family. His previous teaching job was in Stafford Springs. How did the media teacher at the high school come to get the computer tech position at the community college? Connections? Was that an opportunity too good to miss? What did Jere get out of his professorial position? Prestige? Hardly. Most of the people taking his classes were adults out in the workforce. Power? Most of those people were hardly affluent. So, what was in it for Jere? Access to the college’s computers? The chance to create an undetectable network of Internet thieves who could wreak havoc with our financial data? That was more in Jim Jordan’s line of work, wasn’t it?

  I’ll confess I was still disappointed that Jim had chosen the path he took. I could have sworn he was more decent than that. Why steal what was left of our money, especially after I dragged his sorry ass out of that basement?

  I got my answer the following day, when the FBI and the US Marshal’s Service showed up with four carloads of personnel and one unexpected guest. Bur went just about nuts when he saw him, and had to be restrained by a couple of FBI agents.

  “You son of a bitch!” my brother screamed, even as he struggled to break free.

  “Hi,” said a very contrite Jim Jordan. “You’re probably thinking I’m the scum of the earth.”

  “You think? You freaking think?” A big vein throbbed on Bur’s temple. For a brief moment, I worried he was going to have a stroke. “I ought to....”

  “Why are you here?” I demanded. “Haven’t you done enough to us?” I stepped in front of my brother, just in case he got loose. I didn’t want him to have a clear path to Jim, given Bur’s obvious distress at seeing the man who robbed us blind.

  “I can explain,” he told us. “If you’ll just listen, we can clear all this up.”

  “Right. Did you bring your playmates with you? I don’t see the Easter Bunny here. Or the Tooth Fairy....”

  “Why are you here?” I asked again, this time much more curious.

  “Mr. Tolliver figured it out,” said a second FBI agent.

  “Figured what out?” Boynton wanted to know.

  “The connection to your family. That’s why we’re here. Without it, we couldn’t return the money.”

  “What?” sputtered my brother. “Are you suggesting you stole our money to keep it safe?”

  “That’s exactl
y what happened,” said the lead FBI agent. “Ned Sorkin arranged for your financial data to go out into the Internet jungle if anything happened to him. Your Social Security numbers, your bank account numbers, the whole works. Every digital piece of data on you was sent to the vast hacking network, with instructions to take you down.”

  “This is too much,” I decided. I felt like my head was going to explode with all this bad news. First we lost the inn, and now we lost our personal privacy. For what?

  “I stole all your money to protect it,” Jim acknowledged. “It’s all intact. I just have to transfer it to new accounts.”

  “But why?” Bur was rendered almost speechless. “Why not tell us, so we wouldn’t worry?”

  “Because we didn’t know all the players. We needed to make sure the hackers were convinced you were flat broke. Otherwise, they would have never given up. Now that the truth has begun to come out about Ned Sorkin and his half-brother, the public is becoming aware of the fact that Ned Sorkin wasn’t exactly Robin Hood.”

  Chapter Twenty Two --

  “So? Whoop-dee-doo,” snarled Bur. “How does that fix this mess?”

  “All in due time, sir,” responded FBI Special Agent Focazio. “We’re just waiting for the rest of the team to arrive. In the meantime, how about we all sit down and chill out? Maybe someone can make some coffee.”

  The marshals were busy checking out the perimeter of the property. They were responsible for Jim’s physical safety and it was obvious that was their primary focus. The federal investigators, on the other hand, sat with their leather-bound notepads, scratching words on paper. They were here for the meeting.

  I sat there watching the many eyes float around the room in search of a volunteer. No takers. I shook my head in disgust.

  “Seriously? None of you know how to make a pot of coffee? It’s not brain surgery!”

  “Jane,” said one of the older agents with an air of authority. “Get on that.”

  “But....” said a tiny little wisp of a female agent, protesting her expected role. No doubt she was low man, or woman, on the totem pole, still trying to hold her own in the FBI scrum. It was pathetic that they would go to such lengths to avoid putting water in a pot, throwing coffee in a filter, and flipping a switch. I told them all what I thought of their behavior.

  “Save it. You should all be ashamed of yourselves for being so focused on your pecking order that you find it offensive to make a simple pot of coffee. You act as if only the lowest of the low among you can do the job.”

  That’s the thing about being a high school teacher. You get a solid education on the way cliques work and how important public image is amongst the young and impressionable. Apparently some folks never lost that need to climb over their colleagues.

  As I rose from my seat, on my way out to the kitchen, I saw a couple of heads lowered, eyes averted, but not nearly enough. I made sure to emphasize my limp as I staggered through the kitchen door. Moments later, I reiterated my views by slamming a few cabinet doors as I searched for the coffee filters.

  “Let me get that,” said Special Agent Focazio, reaching past me to the shelf above. The truth was I was still in a whole lot of pain. “I’m sorry about that. We’ve got people pulled from several different units and they’re not used to working together yet. I’m Tim, by the way.”

  “Well, they’d better pull themselves together pronto,” I replied. I was still annoyed. Tim Focazio grabbed the coffee pot and filled it as I slumped against the counter.

  “Ms. Wilson, this case is a whole lot bigger than you or your brother realize. We’ve taken over the murder case.”

  “From the state police?” I thought about Larry, Max, and the rest of the state’s homicide team. “Why?”

  “Gretchen and Lonnie Powick, at least the people who called themselves by those names, had a personal connection to Ned Sorkin.”

  “Lonnie called him Eddie,” I sighed. “She knew him as Eddie.”

  “Exactly. Born Edgar Orlov in the Bronx, to a single mother. She was prosecuted as an accessory for the murder of a cop during a bank heist to fund radical antiwar activities in 1967. Edgar Sorkin is his adopted name. He went into the foster care system at age eight, when the law finally caught up with Katherine Orlov. His foster parents, Joe and Mary Sorkin, were friends of hers and raised him in her absence. Jere, the half-brother, was born in a prison hospital and adopted by the Wellstones, who later renounced their radical past. Long story short, the mother got out ten years later and had a happy reunion with her oldest son. She even moved in with the Sorkins, finished college, and got a job as a community organizer. She was less successful with the Wellstones. Not only had they moved away when they heard she was coming up for parole, they never told Jere he was adopted.”

  “So, how did Lonnie know Ned?”

  “From the neighborhood. She lived downstairs from the Sorkins.”

  “Was Gretchen really her daughter?” The FBI agent shook his head in response.

  “Unfortunately, Lonnie was collateral damage. She hadn’t really had a stroke at all. She was at the inn as an extra set of eyes and ears.”

  “She was spying on us?”

  “The state homicide detectives found a listening device in her belongings, which they recovered in the woods.”

  “That means that the times I was checking on her, when she was sleeping, that was all faked? She wasn’t actually on valium?”

  “Oh, she was on tranquilizers alright. Lonnie, or rather Mary Plocek, was responsible for tracking what went on during the night, when her accomplice, Hannah Dubowski, was sleeping. She took the pills to help her rest during the day.”

  “And Hannah was no relation?”

  “Just a hooker in need of some money. Ned used her in honey traps, to compromise targets. She worked for him, off and on, for the better part of ten years, before he took her on exclusively. He flew her all over the country, put her up in luxury digs, and gave her a pretty good salary, but apparently she started making demands over the last few months. She wanted to retire from the sex business, and that made Ned nervous. He couldn’t afford to have her off on her own, in case she went back to hooking and got busted. He probably was afraid she’d make a deal with the cops and give him up to get a lighter sentence.”

  “He planned to kill her? He planned to kill Mary, too?” I took a long spoon and stirred the beef stew I threw in the Crock-pot earlier in the day, before replacing the lid. The aroma was making me hungry.

  “What he planned, Ms. Wilson, was to set your brother up on first-degree murder charges.”

  “But why?”

  “That you’ll find out when the rest of the team arrives. Coffee’s ready,” he smiled. We grabbed some coffee cups, a creamer, and the sugar bowl from the shelves. “I promise you that you won’t be disappointed.”

  “Oh?”

  “Ma’am, I’ve been an agent for almost fourteen years now. I have never seen a case like this before. It’s a doozy.”

  Kenny pulled into the driveway at four on the dot and parked. January announced his arrival with a happy bark. Huck joined in, rushing to greet him as he climbed out of the white sedan.

  “Hey, beautiful!” he greeted me. “Back in one piece, just as I promised.”

  “Lucky for you.”

  “I see you’ve got visitors. Does that mean you’ve been briefed?” Kenny kissed the top of my head.

  “Sort of. The FBI agent in charge of the team says we’re waiting for others to get here.”

  “True. But I promise you it’s worth the wait.”

  “Oh?”

  “Trust me. This will knock your socks off.”

  An hour later, we were gathered in the living room, killing time. Kenny and Boynton were talking about the start of spring training with Bur and Jim, discussing possible rosters for their favorite teams, when one of the marshals received a heads-up.

  “Company’s coming,” he told us. I felt my stomach muscles flutter. The rest of the team with the r
est of the answers. “Everybody away from the windows, please.”

  I’m not sure what I was expecting, or who I expected to come through that door, but it wasn’t Mary Anne Turley.

  “Good to see you all again,” she greeted us, carrying a briefcase as she stepped over the threshold. She was followed by Larry and Max. What were the homicide detectives doing here with the historian?

  “Shall I ‘wow’ you?” Mary Anne asked. We all sat ourselves at the table, save for the marshals and a couple of the FBI agents.

  “I took the information that Ken gave me,” she said, glancing meaningfully at the man seated on my right. “Ned Sorkin was born Edgar Orlov, son of Katherine. His birth certificate had no father’s name on it, so it took some doing before I found what I was looking for in the genealogy records, but it was there. Katherine Orlov was born in San Francisco, California, to Herbert Orlov and his wife, Rita. And Rita was the illegitimate daughter of none other than George Boswell Toms, the father of Boswell and Frederick.”

  “Ned Sorkin was the great-grandson of the original owner of the paper mill? That’s why we were targeted?” I could barely get the words out, I was so stunned.

  “Who was her mother?” Boynton asked, with more than a little curiosity.

  “Minnie Vandersloot, the daughter of Ernie Vandersloot, mill foreman,” Mary Anne announced.

  “So, who was Ned’s father?” I wondered.

  “Wait for it...wait for it,” Kenny advised. “Here it comes....”

  “Darryl Jacoby.” Mary Anne dropped that right into our dumbfounded laps.

  “The Luddite revivalist?”

  “None other.” Darryl Jacoby was a fervent anti-Capitalist who spoke out in the sixties and seventies against man and machine. Last I heard, he was living in an unheated cabin in Utah, still singing the praises of Entropy Law and the Unabomer. He must be well into his eighties by now.