Amazing Grace

by Danielle Steel

“Of course you can,” the babysitter answered, looking startled. It seemed like a strange request to her, and even more so to Sarah. This was no time to be trying to get to San Jose. It seemed inappropriate to Sarah for him to be obsessed with business now, and leaving them in the city.

  “Can't you just relax? Nobody is going to expect to hear from anyone in San Francisco today. This is silly, Seth. What if there's another quake or an aftershock? We'd be here alone, and maybe you couldn't get back.” Or worse, an overpass could collapse and crush him on the road. She didn't want him going anywhere, but he looked determined and intent as he headed for the front door. Parmani said her keys were in it, and the car was in their garage. It was a battered old Honda Accord, but it got her where she wanted to go. Sarah wouldn't let her drive the children in it, and she wasn't enthusiastic about Seth traveling with it either. The car had over a hundred thousand miles, had no current safety features, and was at least a dozen years old.

  “Don't worry, ladies.” He smiled at them. “I'll be back.” He ran out the door. It worried Sarah to have him venturing out, with no streetlights to drive by, no stoplights to control traffic, and maybe fallen obstacles on the road. But she could tell that nothing would stop him. He had left before she could say another word. Parmani went to get another flashlight, and the candles flickered as Sarah sat in her living room, thinking about Seth. It was one thing to be a workaholic and another to dash off down the peninsula, hours after a major earthquake, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves. She wasn't happy about it at all. It seemed like irrational, obsessive behavior to her.

  She and Parmani sat in the living room talking softly until almost sunrise. She thought about going upstairs to her bedroom, and putting the children in bed with her, but she felt safer downstairs, able to leave the house if there was another quake. Parmani told her a tree had fallen in the garden, and there were things all over the floor upstairs, a huge mirror had fallen and cracked, and several of the back windows had popped out and shattered on the cement outside. Most of their china and crystal lay smashed on the kitchen floor, along with groceries that had literally flown off the shelves. Parmani said several jars of juice and bottles of wine had broken, and Sarah wasn't looking forward to cleaning up the mess. Parmani had apologized for not doing it, but she'd been too worried about the children, and didn't want to leave them for the amount of time it would have taken her to deal with it. Sarah said she would do it herself. At one point she walked into the kitchen to look, after she set Oliver down on the couch, still sleeping soundly. She was horrified at the disaster area the kitchen had turned into in a matter of hours. Most of their cupboard doors had opened, and everything had fallen out. It looked like it would take days to clean up.

  As the sun came up, Parmani went to make coffee, and then remembered they had neither electricity nor gas. Stepping gingerly over the debris and shards of glass, she poured some water from the hot tap into a cup, and dropped a teabag into it. It was barely lukewarm, but she brought it back to Sarah, and it was comforting to drink it. Parmani was peeling a banana for herself. Sarah had insisted she didn't want anything to eat, she was still too shaken and upset.

  She had barely finished the tea when Seth came through the door, looking grim.

  “That was quick,” Sarah commented.

  “The roads are closed.” He looked stunned. “I mean all the roads. The entrance to 101, the whole on ramp is down.” He didn't tell her about the horrifying carnage below it. There had been ambulances and police everywhere. The highway patrol had turned him back and sternly told him to go home and stay there. This was no time to be going anywhere. He tried to tell them he lived in Palo Alto, and the officer had told him he would have to stay in the city until the roads were open again. And in answer to Seth's question, he said not for several days. Maybe even a week, given the enormity of the damage to the roads. “I tried Nineteenth Avenue to get on 280, same thing. The beach to get to Pacifica, they've got landslides there. They have it all blocked off. I didn't bother to try the bridges, because we heard on the radio they were closed. Fuck, Sarah,” he said angrily, “we're trapped!”

  “For a little while. I don't know why you can't calm down. Besides, it looks like we have a lot to clean up. No one in New York is going to expect your call. They know more about what's happening here than we do. Believe me, Seth, no one is going to miss your call.”

  “You don't understand,” he muttered darkly, and then ran up the stairs and slammed their bedroom door. Sarah left the children with Parmani, who had watched the scene with interest, and then followed her husband upstairs. He was pacing around their bedroom, looking like a lion in a cage. A very angry lion, who looked like he was about to eat someone, and for lack of any other victim, he seemed as though he was going to attack her.

  “I'm sorry, baby,” she said gently. “I know you're in the middle of a deal. But you can't control natural disasters. There isn't anything we can do about it. The deal will hold for a few days.”

  “No, it won't.” He spat the words angrily at her. “Some deals don't hold. This is one of them. All I need is a fucking phone.” She would have produced one for him if she could, but she couldn't. She was just grateful that their children were safe. His obsession with continuing to do business, under the circumstances, seemed more than extreme to her. She realized at the same time that it was why he was such a huge success. Seth never stopped. He was on his cell phone night and day, making deals. Without it now, he felt utterly and totally impotent, and trapped, as though someone had severed his vocal cords and tied his hands. He was nailed to the floor in a dead city, with no possible communication with the outside world. She could see that he viewed it as a major crisis, and she wished she could convince him to calm down.

  “What can I do for you, Seth?” she asked, sitting down on the bed, and patting the spot next to her. She was thinking about a massage, a bath, a tranquilizer, a back or neck rub, or holding him in her arms, or lying beside him on the bed.

  “What can you do for me? Are you kidding? Is that a joke?” He was almost shouting in their beautifully decorated bedroom. The sun was up now, and the soft yellows and sky blues she had done it in looked exquisite in the early morning light. Seth was oblivious to the room, as he stared angrily at her.

  “I mean it,” she said calmly. “I'll do whatever I can.” He stared at her as though she were insane.

  “Sarah, you have no idea what's going on. None. No concept.”

  “Try me. We went to business school together. I'm not a moron, you know.”

  “No, I am,” he said, sitting down on the bed and running a hand through his hair. He couldn't even look at her. “I have to transfer sixty million dollars out of our fund accounts by noon today.” His voice sounded dead as he said it, and Sarah looked impressed.

  “You're making an investment that size? What are you buying? Commodities? Sounds like risky stuff in quantities like that.” Admittedly, buying commodities was not only high risk but equally high profit if you did it right. She knew Seth was a genius with the investments he made.

  “I'm not buying, Sarah,” he said, glancing at her, and then away again. “I'm covering my ass. That's all I'm doing, and if I can't, I'm fucked … we're fucked … everything we own will be gone …I could even go to jail.” He was staring at the floor beneath his feet as he spoke.

  “What are you talking about?” Sarah looked panicked. He was kidding obviously, but the look on his face said he wasn't.

  “We had auditors in this week, to check on our new fund. It was an investors’ audit to make sure we have as much in the fund as we claimed. We will eventually, of course, there's no question of it. I've done it before. Sully Markham has covered me for audits like that before. And eventually we make our money and put it in the account. But sometimes in the beginning, when we don't have it, Sully helps me pad things a little when the investors do an audit.” Sarah stared at him, stunned.

  “A little? You call sixty million dollars’ w
orth of padding a ‘little'? Jesus, Seth, what were you thinking of? You could have gotten caught, or not been able to make the money up.” And then, as she said it, she realized that that was what was happening. He was there now.

  “I have to get the money, or Sully will get caught in New York. He has to have the money back in his accounts today. The banks are closed. I don't have a fucking cell phone to use, I can't even call Sully to tell him to cover it somehow.”

  “He must be able to figure that much out. With the whole city down, he must know you can't do it.” Sarah looked pale as they talked. It had never even remotely occurred to her that Seth was dishonest. And sixty million was no small slip. It was major. It was criminal fraud on the grandest scale. She had never for a moment thought that Seth would be corrupted by greed into doing a thing like that. It put everything between them in question, in fact their whole life, and more importantly, who he was.

  “I was supposed to do it yesterday,” Seth said grimly. “I promised Sully I would, by close of business. But the auditors stayed till almost six o'clock. That's why I got to the Ritz late. I knew he had till two o'clock today, and I had till eleven, so I figured I could take care of it this morning. I was worried about it, but I didn't panic. Now I'm panicked. We are utterly, totally, and completely screwed. He has an audit that starts Monday. He has to put it off. The banks here won't be open by then. And I can't even goddamn call him to warn him.” Seth looked as though he was about to cry as Sarah stared at him in shock and disbelief.

  “He must have checked by now and seen you didn't make the transfer,” she said, feeling slightly dizzy. She felt as though she were on a roller-coaster ride, barely able to hang on, without a seatbelt. She couldn't even imagine what Seth felt. He was risking prison. And if so, what would happen to them?

  “Yeah, so he knows I didn't make the transfer. And then what? With the goddamn earthquake shutting the whole city down, I can't get the money back to him now. He's going to have a sixty million shortfall when his auditors show up on Monday morning, and I can't do anything about it.” He and Sully Markham were both guilty of every kind of fraud and theft, crossing state lines. Sarah knew, as Seth had when he did it, that it was a federal offense, and about as bad as it could get. It didn't even bear thinking. She felt as though the room were spinning as she looked at him.

  “What are you going to do, Seth?” Sarah said in barely more than a whisper. She fully understood the implications of what he'd done. What she couldn't understand was why he'd done it, or when he'd become a criminal. How could this be happening to them?

  “I don't know,” he said honestly, and then looked her in the eye. He looked terrified, and so was she. “I may go down on this one, Sarah. I've done this kind of thing before. And I've helped Sully out too. We're old friends. We just never got caught before, and I was always able to clean it up at my end. This time I'm up shit creek.”

  “Oh, my God,” Sarah said softly. “What happens if they prosecute you?”

  “I don't know. This one's going to be hard to cover. I don't think Sully can postpone the audit anyway. The timing of it is at the discretion of his investors, and they don't like giving anyone time to do fancy footwork or cook the books. And we sure cooked them. We fucking fried them. I don't know if he tried to postpone his audit once he saw we had an earthquake and I didn't transfer the funds back to him. Sixty million is a little tough to slip under the rug. And it's a hole they'll notice. Worse yet, the trail leads directly to my door. Unless Sully pulls off a miracle at his end before Monday, we're totally fucked.

  “If the auditors figure it out, the SEC will be after me in about five minutes. And I'm a sitting duck waiting for it to happen here, but I can't run away from it now. If it happens, it happens. We'll have to get a terrific lawyer and see if we can make a deal with the federal prosecutor, if it comes to that. Other than that, I'd have to run away to Brazil, and I'm not doing that to you. So I guess we sit here, waiting for the other shoe to drop, after the dust settles from the earthquake. I tried my BlackBerry a little while ago, and it's as dead as a doornail. We just have to wait and see what happens … I'm sorry, Sarah,” he added. He didn't know what else to say to her, and there were tears in her eyes when she looked at him. She had never, ever suspected him of being dishonest, and now she felt as though a wrecking ball had hit her.

  “How could you do something like that?” she asked, with tears rolling down her cheeks. She hadn't moved. She just sat staring at him, unable to believe what he had said. But it was obvious that it was true. Her life had instantly become a horror movie.

  “I figured we'd never get caught,” he said, shrugging. It seemed incredible to him too, but for different reasons than what was upsetting Sarah. Seth didn't get it. He had no idea how betrayed Sarah felt by his confession to her.

  “Even if you didn't get caught, how could you do something so dishonest? You broke every imaginable law, misrepresenting your assets to your investors. What if you'd lost all their money?”

  “I figured I could cover it. I always did. And what are you complaining about? Look how fast I built my business. How do you think you got all this?” He waved his arms grandly around their bedroom, and she realized she didn't know him. She thought she did, but she didn't. It was as though the Seth she knew had vanished, and a criminal had taken his place.

  “And what happens to all this if you go to prison?” She had never expected him to be this successful, but they had a big lifestyle now. The house in the city, another mammoth house in Tahoe, their plane, cars, assets, jewelry. He had built a house of cards that was about to fall down around them, and she couldn't help wondering how bad it could get. Seth was looking stressed and embarrassed, as well he should.

  “I guess it goes down the tubes,” he said simply. “Even if I don't go to prison. I'm going to have to pay fines, and interest on the money I borrowed.”

  “You didn't borrow it, you took it. It wasn't Sully's to give either. It belongs to his investors, not either of you. You made a deal with your buddy so you could lie to people. Nothing about that is okay, Seth.” She didn't want him to get caught, for his sake and theirs, but she knew that it was only justice if he did.

  “Thanks for the lecture on morality,” he said bitterly. “In any case, to answer your question, all this would probably go, pretty quickly. They'd seize all our stuff, or some of it, the houses, the plane, and most of the rest. What they don't take, we can sell.” He sounded almost matter-of-fact about it. As soon as the earthquake hit the night before, he knew his goose was cooked.

  “And how are we supposed to live?”

  “Borrow money from friends, I guess. I don't know, Sarah. We'll have to figure that out when it happens. Right now, today, we're okay. Nobody is going to come after me in the middle of the aftermath of an earthquake. We'll just have to see what happens next week.” But Sarah could figure out as well as he could that their whole world was about to come down around their ears. There was no way to avoid it, after the fancy footwork he had done. He had put their life at risk in the worst possible way.

  “Do you think they'd take our house away?” She suddenly looked panicked as she glanced around the room. This was home to her now. She didn't need a home as elaborate as this one, but this was where they lived, the house their children had been born into. The prospect of losing everything frightened her. From one minute to the next, they could be destitute, if Seth got arrested and prosecuted. She started to feel frantic about it. She'd have to find a job, a place to live. And where would Seth be? In prison? Only hours before, all she had wanted was to know that her children were alive and safe after the earthquake, that their house hadn't fallen down around them. And suddenly, with what Seth had revealed to her, everything else had, and all they had for sure now were their kids. She didn't even know who Seth was, after what he'd told her. She'd been married to a stranger for four years. He was the father of her children. She had trusted and loved him.

  She started to cry harder as she th
ought about it, and Seth came to put his arms around her, but she wouldn't let him. She didn't know if he was ally or foe now. Without even thinking about her and the children, he had put them all in jeopardy. She was furious at him, and heartbroken over what he'd done.

  “I love you, babe,” he said softly, and she looked at him in amazement.

  “How can you say that? I love you too. But look what you did to us, all of us. Not just yourself and me, but the kids too. We may get thrown out into the street. And you could wind up in prison.” And almost certainly would.

  “It may not be that bad,” he tried to reassure her, but she didn't believe him. She knew too much about SEC regulations herself to swallow the platitudes he was handing her. He was in extreme danger of being arrested and going to prison. And if he did, their life, as they knew it, would go with him. Their lives would never be the same again.

  “What do we do now?” she asked miserably, blowing her nose on a tissue. She didn't look like the glamorous young socialite of the night before. She was like a very frightened woman. She was wearing a sweater over her evening gown, her feet were bare as she sat on their bed, crying. She looked like a teenager whose world had just come to an end. And it just had, thanks to her husband.

  She took down her French twist and let her dark hair fall over her shoulders. She seemed half her age as she sat there, glaring at him, feeling betrayed as she never had before. Not for the money and lifestyle they would lose, although that mattered too. Everything had seemed so secure and that had been important to her, for their children. But more than that, he had robbed them of the happy life he had set up for them, the sense of safety she counted on. He had risked all of them, when he transferred the money Sully Markham lent him. He had shot her life out of a cannon right along with his.

  “I guess all we can do is wait,” Seth said quietly, as he walked across the room and stared out the window. There were fires burning below them, and in the morning sunshine, he could see damage to houses near them. Trees were down, balconies were hanging at odd angles, chimneys had toppled off roofs. People were walking around outside with a dazed air. But none of them were as stunned as Sarah, crying in their bedroom. It was only a matter of time now before life as they knew it now would end, and maybe their marriage with it.