The Step Between

by Penny Mickelbury

  “Miss Gibson,” he said in a deep and melodious voice. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “If your name is Jack, there is,” she replied, and told him and he nodded and led the way down the plushly carpeted hall to a rear staircase that seemed to lead to heaven. They climbed the open-plank staircase, mesmerized by the outside world: the wall of glass at the rear of the house seemed to lead not only upward but out, to eternity. Once again, Carole Ann marveled at the warmth she felt in this house, for as they reached the landing and turned in toward the center of the house, recessed lighting and rich Oriental and kelim rugs scattered on top of the Berber carpeting enveloped her. She turned her head and yes! the snow-covered outside still was within her grasp. She was wondering how somebody could live in such an environment and make a hobby of being unpleasant when the man named Jack stopped at a doorway.

  “This is—was—Annabelle’s suite,” he said, and Carole Ann strained to identify the undercurrent of emotion she detected in his voice. It seemed to have deepened and trembled slightly on the “was.” He stood away from the door and Paolo entered first. Carole Ann followed, expecting their guide to follow; when he didn’t, she turned and caught a definite though fleeting glimmer of something in his expression before he closed it off and nodded politely at her.

  Carole Ann turned her attention back to Paolo and his prowling of the main room of Annabelle Islington’s suite. It was a sitting room/den/library, longer than it was wide, with floor-to-ceiling book shelves on two walls and the outlines of where at least a dozen frames once had hung on the other walls. A matching sofa and arm chair were the only furniture, though a television and VCR remained in the shelf facing the sofa. Otherwise, the shelves were empty.

  Paolo walked around the room twice, touching each piece of furniture and the appliances, and tracing the outlines of several of the phantom frames. Carole Ann followed him through to the bedroom. A much smaller room. Two twin beds on low platforms at right angles to each other, both covered with batik-print bedspreads. Just as she was wondering at the lack of additional furniture, Paolo slid open a mirrored door to reveal a walk-in-closet-size room. Built-in drawers and cabinets and shelves. He began opening and closing drawers and running his hand over shelves. He shook his head slightly, then turned suddenly. “Sir? Jack?”

  “Yes?” the man answered, his lovely, deep voice now completely composed.

  “Did Annabelle do this?”

  “Do what?” he asked, puzzled.

  “Clear out. Leave nothing of herself here.”

  There was a slight pause before the answer: “This is how Annabelle left her rooms,” he said. And since there was nothing more to be seen or said, they followed him back down the stairs and down the hallway to the front door, where he helped them into their coats and boots and, as promised, presented them with an enevelope containing contracts and payment.

  “If that guy’s the butler, I’m the Duchess of York,” Paolo snorted in a stage whisper. They were barely out of the house and down the walkway to the drive, both of them charged by their encounter with Islington and their tour of Annabelle’s suite, though manifesting their energy differently. Carole Ann shrugged off the need for a reply and turned to look back at the house, to admire it again, perhaps even to covet it momentarily, to imagine it in the spring and summer. And she saw, reflected in one of the glass panels, standing paralyzingly still, sadness etched in his face, Jack, the “associate.” When he realized he was being observed, he backed quickly away.

  “Islington called him his ‘associate,’ ” Carole Ann reminded Petrocelli.

  “And I’m the King of Siam,” he replied with total irreverence. “By the way, you poked ol’ Dicky Rae pretty good. Did he tell you anything you didn’t know?” Petrocelli asked as he wheeled the GGI-issue Ford Explorer down Islington’s winding drive toward the street. The roadway was as clear and dry as if it were June, and only the deep drifts of snow, stark against the blackness of the barren trees, validated the need for the four-wheel-drive vehicle. Until, that is, they reached the main road, which had yet to be paid a visit by the city’s snow-removal team.

  “Don’t know,” Carole Ann answered, looking out the window and reveling in the scenery. She truly loved winter and especially days like this one. The sky was brilliantly blue and cloudless, as often happens following a snowfall, and it was bitterly cold. The warmth they’d garnered beside Islington’s fire dissipated the moment they walked out of his front door.

  “Still think we can find the daughter?”

  “Don’t know that, either. And right now, I’m not at all sure he wants us to find her, though if that’s not what he wants, then what does he want? Because judging by the look and feel of Annabelle’s room, she certainly doesn’t want any part of dear old Dad.”

  “I had that exact same fee—oh shit!” Petrocelli began whipping the steering wheel back and forth as the big vehicle spun around in the middle of the road. “Oh shit!” he said again when he’d regained control of the vehicle. “It’s all ice. The little melt that the sun is producing is turning to ice.”

  Washington harbored several different kinds of exclusive neighborhoods. There were the Federalist front houses of Georgetown and DuPont Circle and Foggy Bottom and Embassy Row. Some of these were enormous in size, and all of them were old and expensive and too close together for nonnatives from the upper East Coast who equate physical proximity to one’s neighbors with poverty. Then there were neighborhoods like Cleveland Park and the Gold Coast and Tilden Park, where the streets were wide, the houses large, and there was enough land to require professional landscaping and a gardener. Then there were those enclaves of exclusivity that bore no names, just addresses on streets unknown to common citizens; the street names that only those who’d been invited had ever heard of. That’s where Richard Islington lived—on one of the streets cut into the cliffs overlooking the Potomac River. The streets were narrow and winding—some of them little more than lanes—and all of them too narrow for the municipal snow-removal equipment. But then people who lived on streets with secret names weren’t required to explain to bosses why an icy hill prevented their presence at work.

  “Four-wheel drive ain’t worth diddly on ice,” Petrocelli said with a relieved exhale of breath when they finally wound their way out of the hills and were back on the properly plowed Foxhall Road.

  “Paolo, be careful, OK?”

  He bristled. “What the hell do you think I was being? If I’d been anything else, we’d be belly-up in the woods.”

  “No, no, no!” She raised her hand and reached across the wide expanse of the vehicle toward him. “That’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about your driving, Paolo!”

  “What, then? You’re making about as much sense as Mr. Islington, and that’s no compliment, I gotta tell ya.”

  Carole Ann grinned at him. He sounded every bit the south Philadelphia native that he was in that moment. “I mean watch yourself, watch your back, cover your tracks as you’re searching for Annabelle. At least until we have a better fix on what he wants with her.”

  He nodded. “It did occur to me that Dicky Rae would be the kind of guy to hire watchers to watch the watcher. But how are you going to find out what he really wants? And what was that business about his favorite color? And what’s the real deal with that Jack character? And it’s for damn sure it’s not just his little girl he’s after. Not exactly a Bill Cosby kind of dad, our Dicky Rae.”

  She grinned at the Bill Cosby analogy, then asked, “Were you able to get anything at all from that room?”

  He shook his head. “Zip.”

  She turned quickly and looked at him. “But what, Paolo?”

  He hesitated. “Wherever she is now had nothing to do with the way she left that room.”

  “What do you mean?” Carole Ann asked, random feelings beginning to connect to one another in a pattern . . .not yet a discernable one, but a pattern nonetheless.

  “That room was emptied in anger.
Annebelle was—is—angry with her father; so angry that she erased herself out of his life. She intended to hurt him when she left.”

  Yes, Carole Ann thought; that made sense. She thought of her own room in her mother’s house. She still had clothes there, and textbooks from high school and college. And there were photographs of her and mementos, running shoes and shorts in the closet and a toothbrush in the bathroom. She hadn’t erased herself from her mother’s life when she’d grown up and moved away. Her mother’s home still was her home, too. But Paolo was exactly and perfectly correct: Annabelle Islington was angry enough with her father to erase herself from his life. Why?

  “That means something to you, doesn’t it?” Paolo asked, stumbling around in her thoughts. “What?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t know.”

  “Just so you know, Miz Gibson,” and he emphasized the words, producing a perfect Islington imitation, “I don’t believe you when you say, ‘don’t know.’ I don’t ever think you don’t know. I think you know plenty, you just don’t tell.”

  She shrugged. “I’m a lawyer behaving like a cop. What do you expect?”

  The Christmas–New Year holiday can be a perfect time to conduct business in Washington, or a perfectly lousy time, which was the case for all open and active GGI investigations. And it perhaps was for the better, since the GGI principals were, in truth, more interested in the festivities of the season than in working. For the first time since her husband’s death, Carole Ann remained home for the holidays, and was joined by her mother from Los Angeles and her brother and sister-in-law and their children from Denver. Dave Crandall, Al’s father, and his wife, from Atlanta, stopped in for a couple of days en route to New York, and Tommy and Valerie Griffin came home to D.C. from their new home in L.A. for the week between Christmas and the new year. And Warren Forchette came up from New Orleans to celebrate, on New Year’s Eve, the fifteenth wedding anniversary of a college and law school classmate and took Carole Ann to the best New Year’s Eve party she’d been to in a decade.

  And for the first time in anybody’s memory, D.C. was presented with a white Christmas. It began snowing on Christmas Eve and continued for the next two days. Thick, heavy, pillowy snow. A relatively small city by most city standards—like Chicago or Los Angeles—D.C. became a village for a week. People walked in the middle of streets, pulling children on sleds. People skied and tobogganed and rode cut-up cardboard boxes down hills. The scent of burning firewood, hot chocolate, and mulled cider hung over the entire city. Overexcited dogs, their tongues lolling sideways and pink, followed perfect strangers home to be fed leftover turkey and ham and duck.

  By the time the last glass of Cristal was downed and the final “Auld Lang Syne” sung, everybody was holidayed out and ready to return to the calmer, more restful pace of work. And indeed the first week of the new year was predictable in its ordinariness. Then things changed, beginning with the weather. By the middle of January, D.C. was behaving like the South: temperatures were in the fifties and the elders were sourly predicting that everybody would be sick as dogs before it was over. They were, as usual, correct, despite the continued denials of the medical experts of the existence of a correlation between viruses and the weather. Whatever the cause, Carole Ann and a half-dozen GGI employees were visited by nasty, ugly colds. Jake and another half dozen got the flu. A mean, brutal, kick-ass flu that consigned them to their beds.

  Dehydrated and headachey and with a nose worn raw and peeling from repeated blowing, Carole Ann was ending her fifth consecutive sneeze—they came in fives—and was trying to gently blow her nose when she heard a “God bless you” from the doorway. She looked up to see Patty Baker standing there with a box of tissues in one hand and a thick file folder in the other. Patty, too, had wrestled with the cold and, C.A. knew, several of her crew had not been so fortunate, having been felled by the flu.

  “Feeling better?” C.A. asked, waving her visitor into the room and toward the sofa.

  “Depends” came the nasal reply. “Better than what?”

  Carole Ann laughed. “Thanks, Patty, I needed that.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and dropped wearily down into the couch. “And you needed it more than you know.”

  Carole Ann looked up at her and pondered the meaning of the words for several long seconds. Then she pondered the true meaning of a visit from Patty, who never voluntarily left her subterranean domain. Then it registered that Patty had tightly and securely closed the door when she came in. She sat up straight, folded her hands on the desktop, and looked steadily at her visitor.

  “What is it, Patty?”

  “The Islington girl left with close to three million dollars—all of it hers, by the way. And that OnShore thing that Jake is working on? The man who’s supposed to be the COO doesn’t exist. He’s dead. Been dead since 1971.”

  Carole Ann literally didn’t have a single thought for several long seconds. She merely absorbed the information. Then she thought what an effort it must have been for Patty Baker to condense into those few sentences information that it had taken her weeks to retrieve from sources C.A. probably didn’t want to know about. Then she thought how good it didn’t feel at that moment to be right. Then she smiled at Patty, which completely unnerved the other woman, until she heard the reason for it—Carole Ann, in a complete departure from the norm, actually shared her thoughts and feelings. Then she laughed.

  “You’re a one, C.A., truly you are.” Patty lowered her head and blushed. “You don’t give me lawyer-speak, so I can at least try not to give you computer-speak.”

  Carole Ann smiled grimly. “Well, you can give it to me now. Do your thing, Patty. Tell me how you know what you know.”

  Patty talked for almost an hour and Carole Ann found herself appreciating the excruciating detail of the discourse. It was clear that the computer expert loved not only information itself, but the pursuit of it: how many places information could be; how many ways it could be stored; how many ways it could be accessed; and how many ways it could be hidden, camouflaged, manipulated, and transformed. But Patty’s bottom line was that if it existed, all information could be retrieved and that she, Patty, could retrieve it. To wit: Annabelle Islington inherited a million dollars on her eighteenth birthday, and another million on her twenty-first birthday, and when she graduated from college, which occurred seven and a half months after her twenty-first birthday, she received another eight hundred thousand dollars.

  The money, Patty said, came from a fund established by Annabelle’s mother, to whom Richard Islington had given one million dollars as an incentive to leave him and their daughter. She hired an Arlington, Virginia, lawyer who had invested the money wisely enough that it almost tripled itself. Richard Islington had had no knowledge of the existence of the fund until Annabelle’s eighteenth birthday, when she received the first one million dollars. Patty did not know whether Annabelle had prior knowledge of the money or prior contact with her mother; she knew only that the money remained under the control of the Arlington lawyer until the day that Annabelle left, when she took possession of the money in the form of bearer bonds, securities, certificates of deposit, cashiers’ checks, and cash.

  “As for this second bit of business,” Patty drawled, the South in her voice enhanced by the clogged nasal passages—it came out “biniss”; OnShore Manufacturing’s chief operating officer, John David MacDonald, was, according to the curriculum vitae attached to the documents that OnShore submitted to GGI, a Canadian by birth and educated at the University of Toronto. And true enough, Patty said, a John David MacDonald did earn a B.S. in business at the University of Toronto. He entered the United States on a work visa more than fifteen years ago and became a naturalized American citizen five years later. The only problem, she said, was that the Social Security number included in the vitae belonged to a John David MacDonald who was a native of Atlanta, Georgia, born there in 1946, and who was killed in a car crash in 1971. “That’s where they screwed up,” Patty
said. “They didn’t know that your SSN tells where and when you were born. They thought they’d done their homework with the two John David MacDonalds.” She spat the words out, the taste of disdain obvious. “People are so smart they’re stupid,” she said.

  Carole Ann didn’t say anything for a long time, which didn’t seem to matter to Patty, who sat quietly and comfortably on the sofa, periodically sniffling and blowing her nose. When finally she ordered her thoughts, Carole Ann stood and crossed to sit next to Patty on the couch. “You weren’t just a government secretary all those years, were you?”

  Patty’s raucous hoot of laughter would have sailed up and down the hallway had the door been open; thankfully, it was not. “I see why Jake calls you the best trial lawyer in town. When you ask a question, you leave only enough room for somebody either to tell the truth, tell a lie, or make a fool outta themselves trying not to do one or the other.” Then she turned serious. “I won’t make a fool outta myself, but I will say that I once heard that a smart lawyer didn’t ask a question he—or she—didn’t already know the answer to.”

  Carole Ann accepted the folder that Patty offered and thanked her for her work. She escorted her to the door and then stood for a moment deciding whether to leave it open and thereby signal her accessibility to the staff since Jake was absent, or close it and claim the privacy she needed to read the file and think through all she’d just heard. The ringing of the phone decided for her. And since it was her private line ringing, she knew that she had mere seconds to decide whether to keep what she knew to herself long enough to assess all the potential implications, or to tell Jake immediately, since nobody but Jake ever called her on that line. And instead of the cussing she expected when she told him, there was deadly, unnerving silence. She didn’t even bother trying to dissuade him from getting out of bed and coming in. She sat down and began reading so that she could tell him, as succinctly as Patty had told her, everything that there was to know about Annabelle Islington’s surprise trust fund and OnShore Manufacturing’s bogus chief operating officer.