Echoes of Titanic

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Kelsey shook her head slowly. “I don’t have a clue.”

  Truly, she was stunned. Unable to stop reading and rereading Gloria’s message, she kept zeroing in on those four words: ending my own life. There was nothing ambiguous about that at all. Either someone had murdered her and faked this note, or Gloria really had killed herself.

  “How did she…What method…” Kelsey cleared her throat and tried again. “I mean, I know I saw the body and all, but I don’t understand how it worked. Technically speaking, I mean. How did she do it? For that matter, how do you know it wasn’t an accident?”

  Another ding of the elevator, and this time the person who came around the corner was the one Kelsey had been waiting for all along: her brother Matt. Tall and lean with a runner’s build and a friendly face, he was the most beautiful sight she’d seen in a long time. The moment he spotted her, he rushed to her side and pulled her into a hug.

  Kindly, the detective excused himself for a few minutes and left the room. While he was gone, Kelsey brought her brother up to speed on all that had happened—both this afternoon and this evening.

  When she was finished, Ephraim said, “Looks like you’re in good hands now, so I guess I’ll head out.”

  They both thanked him for staying until Matt got there, and then he was on his way.

  Once they were alone, Matt caught Kelsey up on his side of things, saying that when he saw the news clip and then couldn’t reach her on the phone, he had headed straight over to their parents’ house. Sure enough, as Kelsey had suspected, they were home. They had just stopped answering their calls after the fourth or fifth intrusion by a reporter.

  Still unable to reach Kelsey, they had ended up calling Walter to get the whole story, and he had filled them in as best he could.

  “Miss Tate?” the detective said from the doorway, interrupting their conversation and gesturing for them both to come with him. They stood and did as he asked, though halfway down the hall, Kelsey realized where he was bringing them. Hesitating, she gripped Matt’s arm, her eyes glued to the conference room up ahead.

  Noticing that she had come to a stop, Detective Hargrove came back and assured her that the body had already been removed from the scene. Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be led all the way to the door of the conference room, though she was relieved when the detective said they weren’t to step inside.

  Gesturing toward the projection screen, the detective showed how Gloria could have used the cord to kill herself.

  “That screen is designed to be opened and closed electronically by pushing the button on the wall there, but it also comes with a cord so it can be done manually. The best we can figure, Mrs. Poole climbed up on that chair there, wrapped the cord around her neck and tied it off, reached over and pushed the button to lower the screen—which would in turn raise the cord—and then she jumped. That simultaneous motion of coming down from the chair and being pulled upward by the cord did the job. Frankly, I’m surprised that thing could hold her weight long enough to kill her, especially if she thrashed around.”

  Standing in the doorway, Kelsey couldn’t help but picture what he was describing. Between that and her memory of the sight of Gloria’s dead body once she’d come upon it, she could feel the bile rising in her throat.

  “And how do you know it wasn’t an accident?” Matt asked. “She could have tangled up in the cord somehow without realizing it and then unknowingly bumped into the button.”

  “Highly doubtful,” the detective replied. “The button that raises the screen is too far from the cord to have been hit by accident. Even with an arm stretched all the way out, she probably could just barely reach it as it was.”

  Kelsey’s stomach churned at the thought. With a quick, “Excuse me,” she dashed up the hall to the restroom, where she promptly vomited.

  A while later, once the nausea had passed and she’d cleaned herself up, Kelsey came out of the bathroom and returned to reception, where she spotted not just Matt and the detective but Gloria’s husband as well.

  The moment their eyes met, they moved together into an embrace, one that brought a fresh onslaught of tears to Kelsey’s eyes. Vern was also crying, sniffles that soon became deep, wracking sobs. Eventually, Kelsey pulled away and led him over to a chair.

  Just as Ephraim had stayed there with her, Kelsey felt she should stay with Vern, at least until a family member had arrived to take her place. Fortunately, even though the detective had told Matt he was finished with Kelsey for now and she was free to go, he allowed them to stick around.

  As Vern told his side of things, the story sounded somewhat similar to hers. According to him, he’d been finishing up at work when Gloria called around five thirty and said she needed him to come down to the office right away.

  “She said she was going to do something very difficult and she wanted me by her side when she did it. I had no idea what she was talking about, but she sounded so worked up I figured I better do as she asked and get down here.”

  “So you came right away?”

  “Yes, sir. Took the train from Twenty-Third to Rector.”

  “And what happened when you arrived here?”

  Vern shrugged. “Ephraim let me in. I came upstairs and went right to her office, but she wasn’t there. I called out her name a few times and wandered around looking for her, but after a while I gave up. By the time I left, I was pretty aggravated.”

  “I’m sorry to ask this, Mr. Poole, but when you were looking around for her, didn’t you think to check the conference room?”

  Vern shook his head. “I might have opened the door and looked inside, but the light was off. I mean, I knew she wouldn’t be sitting in the dark, so I just continued on and kept looking elsewhere.” With that, a fresh sob gurgled from his throat, and the poor man collapsed into a sobbing mess. Kelsey patted his back, knowing she had done the same thing when she’d been looking for Gloria herself.

  As Matt went on a hunt for a box of tissues and Kelsey tried to comfort Vern, the detective sat quietly, reviewing his notes and waiting for the man to get a hold of himself. Once Vern had regained his composure, he apologized for having fallen apart like that.

  “It’s certainly understandable,” Hargrove replied evenly.

  Vern reached for another tissue. “Can I ask you a question, Detective?”

  “Yes?”

  Kelsey was afraid that he was going to ask the same thing she had, about the mechanics of the suicide. Instead, he looked up at the man, clearly in agony, and said, “If she really did kill herself, do you think the reason she called me down here was so I would be the one to find her body?”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Simply asking the detective that question had brought Vern to a fresh onslaught of tears. As he cried, Kelsey considered his words.

  “Do you think the reason she called me down here was so I would be the one to find her body?”

  The very idea nearly broke Kelsey’s heart. Vern was a strikingly handsome man even now in his sixties, but over the years he’d proven to be, as Gloria liked to put it, “all flash and no substance.” While Gloria had worked her way up the corporate ladder at B & T and amassed enough personal wealth through wise investments to keep the two of them in a tony condominium overlooking Gramercy Park, he’d flitted from job to job and served primarily as arm candy for Gloria’s corporate functions.

  Truly, their relationship had been an odd one. But the thought that she might have staged her own death so that he would be the one to run across her body first was sickening. Could Gloria really have done something like that? Surely, even at the lowest point in their marriage, she hadn’t been capable of that kind of cruelty.

  The detective seemed to sense that Vern’s question was rhetorical because he didn’t answer. Instead, he just looked back at the man sympathetically and asked if the two of them had been having marital problems.

  Vern took another tissue and blew his nose. “If that was what she was trying to do,
I probably deserved it.”

  At that point, the detective looked over at Kelsey and tilted his head as if to say it was time for her and Matt to leave. She nodded, grateful to be dismissed. Kelsey and her brother headed for the elevator, leaving the two men to continue their conversation in private.

  When they reached the first floor and stepped off, Kelsey was surprised to see the flashing lights of a police car right outside, a uniformed officer standing near the door, and a cluster of curious onlookers peering through the front windows. Except they weren’t just curious onlookers, she realized as she got a better look. They were reporters.

  “Oh, man,” she moaned. “I should have anticipated this.”

  The fact that the vice president of management recruitment and training for Brennan & Tate had been found dead in the company’s executive conference room was newsworthy by itself, but coming on the heels of the incident here earlier today, it was positively titillating. Of course the media was coming out in droves—and it was probably only going to get worse as the night wore on.

  They asked the security guard at the front desk to call them a cab. When it arrived, the cop manning the door escorted them out to the vehicle. After running the gauntlet of several dozen shouting voices out on the street, once they were inside the cab and speeding away toward her apartment, she was exhausted.

  “You Wall Street types sure do live the exciting life,” Matt teased.

  “Hah. Thank goodness Wall Street isn’t actually involved here. Can you imagine if Brennan & Tate were a public company instead of a private one? Then, along with all of those reporters, we’d also be dealing with an angry mob of stockholders demanding to know what’s going on and what it’ll mean to their bottom line.”

  They were quiet for a moment, watching as the cab reached the end of the street and turned right onto Battery Place.

  “Well,” Matt replied, “speaking as a stockholder in this privately held corporation, do you have any idea what today’s events are going to mean to the bottom line?”

  Kelsey rolled her eyes. “Leave it to the econ prof to have one eye on the numbers.”

  “I’m just sayin’. Unlike you, who receives an increase in shares every year that you work there, I’m pretty much capped out at my family dole of one percent.”

  “Hey, nobody made you become a teacher instead of a businessman,” she replied, smiling. “You were perfectly welcome to join the rank and file at the family firm if you wanted to. Still are. You certainly have the brain for numbers.”

  “Maybe, but with neither the patience nor the interest, that brain wasn’t going to do me much good there. Guess I far prefer theorizing about money than I do actually trying to earn it.”

  “As long as Tiffany likes ramen noodles,” she teased with a shrug.

  “Hey, Tiffany’s on the tenure track at NYU. Once we’re married, she’ll be the one bringing home the bacon.”

  “And you don’t mind being a kept man?” Kelsey asked. She was only kidding, but the moment the words came out of her mouth, she thought of Vern, who in a sense had been Gloria’s “kept man” for the past thirty years.

  “Yeah, if I had no assets, maybe,” he replied. “But as long as I have my B & T stock, I’m not a ‘kept man.’ I’m an heir with a temporary cash flow problem.”

  Kelsey laughed. She’d forgotten how much fun Matt could be, especially when he was trying to lighten a dark mood.

  “Well, then, to answer your original question,” she said, “I wouldn’t exactly bank on that one percent to remain at its current value for long.” The topic was complicated, so rather than go into it there in the cab, she suggested he come up for coffee at her place and she could tell him more about it.

  Despite a small throng of reporters at Kelsey’s building when they arrived, she told the cabbie to drop them at the front door. As they mounted the steps and questions were being shouted out to them from left and right, a part of Kelsey was tempted to stop and reply. But she knew better than to field questions with words that could get twisted around or misinterpreted for the next day’s news. Instead, once she got to the top of the steps and unlocked the door, she turned and gave them a smile, an apology, and a simple statement.

  “Gloria Poole was my business mentor and a dear friend. Along with everyone else at Brennan & Tate, I will deeply mourn her passing.”

  With that she thanked them all and went inside, Matt following along behind and closing the door in their faces. She collected her mail from the row of boxes, and then they took the elevator to the tenth floor. Once they were inside her apartment, Matt went to the TV to look for a news channel while Kelsey headed for the kitchen and read out the flavor names for all the coffee pods in the cabinet.

  “That one,” he said, interrupting her about halfway through. “Hazelnut raspberry cream decaf.”

  While he made himself comfortable on the love seat and continued to flip channels, she brewed first one steaming mug of coffee and then the next, carried them both into the living room, and sat down on the tiny sofa next to her baby brother. Together, they watched several different reports about Gloria, and in every case the conclusion was drawn by the reporters that her death tonight and the scene with Rupert earlier today had been somehow connected. And while Kelsey could see why that was the natural conclusion to draw, she couldn’t imagine what the one might possibly have to do with the other. She said as much to Matt, and they tossed around ideas for a while but couldn’t come up with any theories that connected the two events.

  Ultimately, their conversation came back around to the discussion they had been having in the cab, about the value of Brennan & Tate stock and the impact today’s incidents would have on it. To help Matt fully understand, she had to go back a bit and describe for him the bigger picture of what had been going on at the compnay lately.

  She started with what he already knew, that the company had originally been founded by their great-great-grandfather, Sean Brennan, back in 1904. Even though it had grown since then into a multimillion dollar corporation with nearly fifty employees, it was still thought of in the finance world as a “family business,” one synonymous with the Brennan and Tate names. Their father, the highly respected Nolan Tate, had served solidly at the helm for decades, but after his stroke last year the company’s value had begun to plummet from a high of seventy million before Nolan’s stroke to a low of thirty-six last December.

  “Ouch. Merry Christmas.”

  “I know, right?”

  In January Walter had called in consultants, who identified the problem as “a lack of public confidence in the wake of Nolan Tate’s sudden departure from the firm.” Something drastic needed to be done to restore that confidence, so they ended up hiring a big public relations firm to come in and fix things. The goal was to show the world that even though Nolan was no longer around, the Tate name was still alive and well in his daughter Kelsey. The impression they were trying to give was that she possessed the same sharp instincts and business acumen for which her family and her firm had long been known. It was a heavy weight to bear, one that had been feeling heavier all the time. But the general consensus was that their campaign was succeeding even better than predicted. These days, B & T’s value was back up in the high fifties, she was a rising star in the financial realm, and the impression people were getting was that not only did she possess the same talents and instincts as her father, but that in time she may just prove to be as adept at successful investing as her great-grandmother, the legendary Adele Brennan Tate herself.

  “So basically,” Matt said, nodding in comprehension, “these people built a whole campaign around Adele and how her gifts have been passed down through the generations to you.”

  “Correct.”

  They were both silent for a long moment.

  “Guess I can see where you’re going with this,” he said finally. “Besmirching the name of Adele the way that guy did today could wipe out the significance of your entire campaign and put the value of B & T sto
ck at an even lower point now than it was when you started.”

  “Exactly.”

  Matt let out a long, slow sigh. “Well, then,” he said philosophically, “that leaves just one last question, only now it applies to you instead of Tiffany.”

  “What’s that?” Kelsey asked, leaning her head back against the couch and looking over at her brother.

  “How do you feel about ramen noodles?”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Kelsey awoke the next morning with swollen eyes and a bad headache. The night before, after Matt left, she’d gone to bed and cried herself to sleep. Today, however, she had no time for grief. She took several ibuprofen and thought about what lay ahead. There was much to do if she wanted to learn more about Rupert’s claims and Gloria’s death. Surely, if she worked diligently enough, she could get down to the truth behind both events, much as she and her team regularly dug up the facts on the people and businesses involved with each potential investment.

  After a hot shower followed by a cold compress on her swollen eyes, Kelsey took a long time with her makeup and hair. She also dressed with care, not wanting to give the reporters she encountered today anything to criticize about her appearance. A navy-blue Ann Klein skirt and jacket felt right, and she paired it with a cream-colored blouse.

  Out of sheer habit, she reached for Adele’s hat pin, the one with an Irish harp at one end that she frequently wore on her lapel. When she realized what she was doing, she set it back in the jewelry box and looked for something else. Deep inside, a part of her felt guilty, as though the rejection of the pin was somehow a rejection of Adele herself. But that wasn’t it. Her action of intentionally not wearing the pin had to do with focus and resolve and the need to face this situation head-on without any preconceived notions about what the true, bottom-line facts might actually be.