Echoes of Titanic

by Mindy Starns Clark

  In the past, Kelsey and her dad had shared many a work-related victory, something they usually met with a high five and a hearty “Way to go!” Missing those moments so badly she could feel an ache deep in her chest, Kelsey knelt down beside his chair and held up her open palm just a few inches away.

  “Can you believe it, Dad? I finally made it into the Quarter Club.”

  It was a struggle, but finally he managed to raise a trembling hand and press it against hers. “Waaaay,” he said, which was all he could manage to get out. It was enough.

  “Yeah, way to go, huh?” she whispered.

  Then, with a last goodbye, she stood and walked out of the room as quickly as she could, somehow managing to hold in her sobs until she had gathered her things and made it all the way outside.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Kelsey went to a bench on the corner of the next block, sat down, and allowed herself to cry. Though her sadness was bubbling up from deep inside, hers were silent tears, and not a single person who passed by even noticed. Or perhaps they did but pretended not to.

  Once she’d gotten control of herself, Kelsey headed to a deli on Lexington and went into the restroom to put herself back together again as best she could. After that she bought an egg salad sandwich and a bottle of water then made her way to the subway entrance and took it straight down the island, all the way to Wall Street. The subway ride took almost half an hour, but from there it was a quick, two-minute walk to the office.

  As she drew closer, she looked up ahead for the sight of any reporters or photographers hovering outside the building, but the coast looked clear. Once inside, she saw that Ephraim was manning the front desk, but at the moment he was busy with someone, so Kelsey just gave him a wave and continued on to the elevator.

  Up on the fourth floor, Sharon looked surprised to see her but also somewhat relieved. Kelsey invited her into her office, shut the door, and asked how things were going. Though Kelsey was never one to congregate around the water cooler, she managed to stay up on all the office scuttlebutt via the shrewd eyes and ears of her ever-alert executive assistant.

  Sharon shared all that had been happening—the announcement, the dramatics, the shuffling around of office space—but she didn’t tell Kelsey anything she hadn’t already learned from Walter. When she was finished, they spent a few minutes going over the calls that had come in during the morning and the various appointments Sharon had managed to shuffle around for the next few days. After that, Kelsey said that she’d be working in her office for a while and that she didn’t want to be disturbed.

  “You got it, Chief,” Sharon replied, rising to go. “Anybody who tries to get in here will have to go through me.”

  Once she was alone, Kelsey turned on her computer, but rather than logging in as herself, she wanted to try going in as Gloria. According to Walter, though the actual hardware of Gloria’s computer had been removed by the police, virtually anything of importance would still be on the server. And though she wasn’t even sure what she was hoping to find, she just wanted to poke around a little bit to see if anything unusual jumped out at her.

  Last month Gloria had been out with a bad cold for almost a week but had called Kelsey repeatedly for help with various matters that required her to sign in under Gloria’s name. She still remembered the password, 5tgbNHY6, because of how easily it typed out in a line straight down the keyboard and back up again. Her hope was that it hadn’t changed since then. The IT department made everyone on the system go to a new password each month, but perhaps Gloria’s reset cycle was different from hers.

  No such luck. Kelsey tried it once but her entry was rejected with the dreaded response, Invalid Password. She considered trying a few guesses but didn’t dare because she knew the system would lock her out completely after two more tries. Instead, she called the extension for Yanni, the EA Gloria shared with Walter, hoping to get the password from her. Yanni didn’t answer, however, so rather than leaving a message, Kelsey just hung up and headed upstairs to Gloria’s office herself on the off chance she might find it there, scribbled on a piece of paper or something. The woman wasn’t big on technology and tended to cling to old habits.

  The door to Gloria’s office was closed. When Kelsey swung it open, she was startled to see Yanni there, leaning over the desk, her long, black hair hanging in a straight, glossy sheet. She straightened, quickly dropping her hands to her sides.

  “Yes?”

  Kelsey explained what she needed, but Yanni apologized, saying she wasn’t privy to Gloria’s password.

  “Any idea where I could get it?” Kelsey asked, her eyes taking in the space where Gloria’s computer used to be. The polished desktop was bare now except for the phone, an empty inbox, and a small potted plant.

  To her core, Kelsey could feel the void of what was missing from this room—not just the computer, but Gloria herself. Standing there, Kelsey tried to picture her mentor sitting at the desk, inviting her in or offering some advice. But slowly that image began to morph into something else entirely.

  Gloria’s purple face. Gloria’s limp body hanging from a cord.

  Dead.

  Suddenly dizzy, afraid she might faint, Kelsey gripped the door frame. Yanni must have seen that something was wrong, because she jumped forward to help Kelsey over to Gloria’s desk chair, where she sat.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think I just need to sit here a minute,” Kelsey said, pressing a hand to her forehead and closing her eyes. After a long moment, the dizziness seemed to pass. Once it did, she was left feeling a little embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry. I guess it just hit me that she’s really gone. Something about seeing her empty desk, you know?”

  Yanni nodded, assuring her that it was perfectly understandable. She looked as if she were about to say something else when the sound of Walter’s voice came ringing from down the hall, calling Yanni’s name. She excused herself and then dashed from the room gracefully despite her three-inch heels, the magenta scarf artfully draped around her neck flowing behind her as she went.

  It wasn’t until she was gone that Kelsey realized the woman’s dark eyes had been red and swollen. Though the relationship she had shared with Gloria hadn’t been nearly as chummy as the one Kelsey and Sharon had, the two women certainly had a mutual respect for each other. It wasn’t surprising that Yanni would mourn Gloria’s passing.

  They all would, each in their own way.

  Kelsey was feeling better, so she began to snoop around a little, opening drawers and gently rifling through their contents, looking for some notepad or scrap of paper that might contain Gloria’s current password. She couldn’t help but notice that Gloria’s sticky notes and paper clips and other supplies were much more neatly organized than the jumble in her own drawers downstairs. But the only pads of paper she found were completely blank, stacked in the bottom drawer beside a small tray of neatly-labeled keys. Washroom. Display case. Supply closet.

  Pulse surging, Kelsey checked the tags on every key, hoping against hope that one might read The Wonder. No such luck, but as she was going through them it struck her that Gloria was the caretaker of many things around here. It made sense that she would have been the one in charge of storing the bonds as well.

  I’m sorry for taking what wasn’t mine, her suicide text had said.

  Was it possible that she had taken something that had been in her charge?

  Was it possible she had taken the bonds?

  Refusing even to consider it, Kelsey put the thought out of her mind and continued her search. The only other place she could think of to look for paper was underneath the telephone, where Gloria always kept her “scribble pad.” To Kelsey’s surprise, when she lifted up the large, multi-lined office phone, the pad was right there where it always was. The police must have missed it when they took away Gloria’s things as part of their investigation.

  It probably didn’t matter anyway. It wasn’t as though Gloria used it for wri
ting down important information. She just liked to doodle and jot down notes to herself whenever she talked on the phone. Kelsey doubted she would have written her password there, but she skimmed the pages just in case.

  She didn’t see any likely candidates but pocketed the pad anyway, partly for sentimental reasons and partly so she could take a closer look at it later for any clues to Gloria’s odd behavior.

  Back downstairs, Kelsey stopped at Sharon’s desk on the way to her own office and asked if she would call the IT department to get Gloria’s password. A few minutes later, she was scanning through the scribble pad more slowly this time when Sharon buzzed her and said that IT wouldn’t give it to her without permission from Walter.

  Kelsey grunted in frustration. “Fine. Can you take care of that for me, please? I know he’s in a big meeting right now, but tell Yanni to interrupt him. It’s important and it’ll only take a second.”

  “Sure. I’ll get back to you.”

  Kelsey clicked off the phone, wishing such a simple request didn’t have to be so complicated. The thing was, most people in the company used passwords that were sequential in some way, just to help them remember month to month what their passwords were. But what was sequential to 5tgbNHY6?

  Suddenly, on a hunch, she turned to the computer screen and decided to take a guess, knowing that would still leave one try before the system locked her out. Instead of typing 5tgbNHY6, Kelsey tried shifting her finger over one row. She typed 6yhnMJU7 and pressed enter. After a beat, the screen came to life.

  Welcome, Gloria.

  “Yes!” she whispered.

  Grinning, she buzzed Sharon to tell her never mind on the password, and then she began to poke around. Mostly, she just wanted to get a picture of Gloria’s recent activity and see the kinds of things she’d been working on and dealing with before she died. Maybe one of them would offer a clue to why she had ended up dead.

  She began by doing file searches by keyword, starting with her own name, “Kelsey.” That brought up numerous documents, but they were all ones she and Gloria had worked on together. There was nothing there she didn’t recognize.

  Trying a different approach, she wondered if perhaps Gloria had been dealing with any serious personal issues Kelsey hadn’t known about, ones that could have possibly led to suicide. She tried “marriage,” “marriage counseling,” “marital problems,” and “depression.” Those brought up nothing, so she put in “Vern,” but even Gloria’s husband’s name linked to surprisingly few entries, all quite innocent looking.

  Next, she focused on the stolen identity issue, trying “Adele,” “Jocelyn,” and then “settlement.” The first two resulted in nothing, but the third came back with way more results than she felt like slogging through. She tried narrowing those down by adding the name “Rupert,” and that time it came back with just half a dozen files. Skimming the list, she decided to take a moment and click through each one.

  It looked as though most of them were from ten years ago, the last time Rupert showed up and started making trouble. Gloria had apparently written to the man five different times, and though her letters had started out nicely enough in the beginning, they had steadily progressed toward more “cease and desist” language. The final one contained a strong message and numerous legal warnings and ended with the words:

  Make no mistake, if you persist in pursuing these ridiculous, unfounded delusions, you will feel the full weight of our legal team crashing down upon your shoulders. Please understand that this is not a threat—it is a promise.

  Sincerely,

  Gloria Poole

  Kelsey read that last paragraph twice, understanding how such a missive could have shut him down for a while. She couldn’t imagine how Rupert must have felt when he got this letter. Was it possible that he’d been stewing in rage ever since? If so, could that rage have led him or his sister to act out in some way that had ended up resulting in Gloria’s death?

  Kelsey was thinking about that as she double-clicked the last file on the list. It opened and she began to read:

  Dear Rupert,

  You should know that on April 3 at 4:00 pm there will be a ceremony at the offices of Brennan & Tate in New York City, during which the Tate family will continue to perpetuate the lie that Adele Brennan Tate survived the sinking of Titanic…

  Kelsey gasped. This was the letter, the one that Rhonda had shown her in the cab, the one that had been sent to Rupert anonymously, encouraging him to come to the meeting and “seize the opportunity to set the record straight.”

  Heart pounding, Kelsey sat back in her seat, her head spinning. She couldn’t believe it. The letter that got Rupert all stirred up again and convinced him to come here and disrupt the ceremony had been written by none other than Gloria herself!

  Kelsey was still trying to process that thought when Sharon buzzed her. She wanted to ignore it, but she knew if she did that a knock at her door would be next. Gathering her wits about her, Kelsey pushed the button to answer.

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry to bother you,” Sharon said, “but Walter wants to see you in his office.”

  “Did you tell him never mind on the password?”

  “Yes. I don’t think it has anything to do with that.”

  “Okay then. I’ll head up as soon as I’m finished here.”

  “Um…” Sharon’s voice had an odd tone, and Kelsey frowned at the speakerphone. “He said right now.”

  “Fine. Thanks.”

  He’d probably finished his meeting with the PR folks and wanted to give her a rundown. And while Kelsey wanted to hear what they had to say, she was still so shaken by what she’d just found among Gloria’s documents that she did not feel like having this conversation at the moment.

  Still, he was the boss. And he needed to know what she’d just found among Gloria’s documents. After taking a moment to print it out and save the letter to her local drive, she signed out of the computer, grabbed the page from the printer, and headed upstairs to Walter’s office.

  When she got there, she was surprised to see him waiting for her at his door. His face was rigid, his hands clenched at his sides, and he greeted her with a curt, “Kelsey, what are you doing here?”

  Startled by both his words and his tone, at first she didn’t even know how to respond.

  “Sharon said you wanted to see me.”

  “I don’t mean what are you doing here in my office,” he said, stepping back so she could come inside and he could close the door, “I mean in the building. I told you not to come in.”

  She sat, blinking at him. “You what? Why? When?”

  “When you called me from your parents’ house,” he replied, practically yelling. “I said we needed to distance ourselves from the whole emphasis on the Tate name, and I told you not to come in.”

  Kelsey’s face flushed with heat, though she wasn’t sure if it was from anger or embarrassment. “No, you didn’t, Walter. You said don’t come to the PR meeting. You never said don’t come to the office.”

  He sat back and harrumphed, his cool, Wall Street demeanor cracking around the edges. Finally, he spoke. “You can’t be here, Kelsey.”

  She simply stared at him.

  “You need to leave the building and not come back until things have calmed down. I’ll tell you when it’s okay to return, but I don’t want you on the premises until then. Do you understand?” His mouth remained tight, and his eyes seemed hard and impersonal.

  “No, I don’t. Walter, I have business to conduct. I have open cases I’m working—”

  “I understand that. I’ll go through your schedule with Sharon personally and see which things must be taken care of while you’re out. If I need you, I’ll let you know, but otherwise you have to distance yourself from this company completely and immediately.”

  A lump was growing in Kelsey’s throat. She wasn’t sure she could speak, so she looked down until she felt she had regained control of her faculties.

  “You can’t do this t
o me,” she said, looking back up, her voice breaking at the end.

  “Listen,” he replied, softening just a bit, “this isn’t forever. It’s just for right now. I’m sorry, but I would prefer that you stay away.”

  Kelsey eyed him narrowly. “You’d prefer that I stay away? From my own office, from my family’s own company?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, but for right now this is how it has to be.”

  Stunned, she stood, folded the letter she’d printed out, and slipped it into her pocket. She turned and walked to the door. As she reached it, she realized Walter was at her side. He swung it open to reveal the massive, uniformed figure of Ephraim just outside. The kindly man had been a loyal employee of this company and a friend of hers for years, but at the moment he couldn’t even look her in the eye.

  “I hate to have to do this, Kelsey,” Walter said, “but I’ve asked Ephraim to escort you from the building.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  April 11, 1912

  JOCELYN

  When Jocelyn awoke, it took her a moment to remember where she was. Then it came to her as she looked around: Titanic! They were aboard the ship Titanic.

  Last night she had been disappointed when Adele chose the top berth, but now that it was morning she was glad. Jocelyn liked to be first up, and her position on the bottom bed allowed her to slip out from the covers without disturbing her cousin. Back at home, those calm, early morning moments alone while the rest of the household slept always helped Jocelyn to organize her thoughts and communicate with her Maker before the busyness of the day set in.

  Of course, it was a bit harder to be quiet in this small room, where things were unfamiliar and the washbasin was mere inches from where Adele slept. Somehow Jocelyn managed to get dressed and make herself generally presentable regardless. Then, with a final glance toward her cousin, she slipped from the room into the corridor, eager to take a walk on deck and clear her mind. She would have preferred to leave Adele a note, but she had nothing with which to do so. She decided that acquiring pen and paper from the library was goal number one for the day.