Echoes of Titanic

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Uh-huh. Well, been there, done that. Got any other theories?”

  “No, but I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure it out.”

  He glared at her, eyes narrowing. “You sure you didn’t already find them when you were here last night?”

  Kelsey resisted the urge to look over at Walter, who could hear their exchange.

  “How did you know about that?” she asked. “Were you the one tracking us?”

  Lou shrugged. “Jumping in on your transmission was the only way I could follow your activities, seeing as how you didn’t think to wear your pin.”

  Kelsey gasped, one hand flitting to her collar, though of course the pin wasn’t there. She hadn’t worn it since yesterday afternoon. “My Quarter Club pin? What did you do, Lou? Put a bug in it or something?”

  He shrugged. “Not exactly. A tracking device. It was the best way I could think of to keep an eye on you and those bonds.”

  Kelsey was dumbfounded. How had she ever trusted him, much less defended him to others?

  “Speaking of transmissions,” he said, holding out a hand. “Give me your cell phone.”

  Only then did she realize that she’d missed an opportunity, that she could have dialed with one hand in her pocket and somehow summoned help. Now it was too late for that. Reluctantly, she handed it over to him and watched as he slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  “Back to the matter at hand,” he snapped, “are you sure you didn’t already find them when you were here last night? Walter says the bonds were never in the safe at all, but I know he’s lying. Now I’m thinking maybe you did something with them.”

  “He’s not lying. The bonds were kept in Adele’s old safe, not this one.”

  Lou eyed her suspiciously. “Adele’s old safe? There’s another safe somewhere else?”

  Kelsey nodded. “I found it last night and even managed to get it open. But it was empty except for my great-grandmother’s diary. The bonds weren’t in there.”

  “Where is it?”

  “The safe? It’s in my father’s office—which used to be Adele’s office, as you probably recall.”

  “I want to see it. Let’s go.”

  “I’ll show you, but it won’t do any good. I’m telling you that it’s empty.”

  Lou snarled, quickly losing his patience. He gestured toward the other end of the hall. With a last, desperate glance at Walter, Kelsey began walking, with Lou following closely behind. Passing the main hallway, she desperately wanted to dash out toward the reception area. Even if she couldn’t get away from Lou completely, at least her actions might be noticeable on the security camera and would alert Ephraim that something bad was going on up here. But then she felt a sharp jab to her shoulder and realized it was the tip of the tire iron. Swallowing hard, she continued forward. As they passed Gloria’s office, Kelsey paused, stunned at the mess she spotted inside.

  “You did this?” she gasped, looking at Lou.

  “I was trying to find the bonds, but no dice. Wherever she hid them, it wasn’t in there. Now keep moving.”

  Kelsey kept going until she got to her father’s office at the end of the hall and opened the door. The smell inside was the same as it had been last night—dusty and unused—but as she flipped on the light, she realized that it looked completely different now. This office had been tossed as well, with papers strewn everywhere, cabinet doors open, drawers upended onto the floor.

  “When did you have time to do all of this?” she couldn’t help but ask as she gazed at the mess in dismay. “How did you even get in without security seeing you?”

  “It wasn’t difficult. You had set up our little meeting for four o’clock, so I called Walter directly and suggested he and I get together an hour early. I told him we needed to speak privately before you joined us. When he showed up at the back door at two forty-five, I was already there waiting for him, so he let me come on in and we walked up the back stairs together. What an idiot.”

  Eyes scanning the disaster he’d made of the room, Kelsey tried to understand what he was telling her. “I’m confused, Lou. What about the merger? Was that just some sort of ruse to get into the building?”

  “Not at all. I really wanted that to happen, more than you can imagine.”

  She turned to look at him, wishing she could find inside the man she’d always thought she knew.

  “Then why do all of this? You had to know that once you roughed up Walter and trashed everything the deal would be off.”

  Lou shook his head sadly. “Kiddo, I knew the deal was off the minute you called and asked me to bring along an audit and the contact info for my investors. You were on to me. You’d figured things out. At that point the only option left was to get the bonds and get out of town. It wasn’t my first choice, but ten million dollars, give or take, can go a long way in helping a guy get established somewhere else with a new identity. A new life.”

  She looked at him, sickened by the normalcy of his tone, his face. They might as well have been discussing dinner plans, not theft and lies and brutality.

  “Enough talk. Keep moving.” With the tire iron, he poked her again on her shoulder blade, harder this time, so she continued on to the closet and opened the door. Though he had clearly rifled through the shelves during his search earlier, it seemed that he hadn’t thought to clear them off completely so he could see what was behind them.

  Pushing aside some papers that had fallen to the floor, she knelt down in front of the left wall and pulled off the stacks of old files. Lou came and stood behind her, and as soon as the black metal door became visible, he let out a low whistle.

  “Good girl. I knew this was going to work out well, having you here. Open it up.”

  Kelsey turned to look at him over her shoulder, realizing for the first time what a strong, imposing figure he was. For years, she’d thought of this man as all bark and no bite.

  Now she realized nothing could be further from the truth.

  “I’ll open it, Lou, but there’s nothing in there.”

  He didn’t reply, so she reached up and began twisting the dial, her hands trembling fiercely. In fact, they were shaking so much that she messed up twice and had to start over.

  “Come on, come on!” he snapped.

  “I’m trying! You’re scaring me.”

  He grunted as he took a step back. “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want what’s coming to me.”

  “What’s coming to you? Those bonds belong to my family and to this company, not to you. How could you possibly think you have the right to take them for yourself?” She glanced back to see him shaking his head.

  “This is a last resort, kiddo. It wasn’t the original plan, not by any means.”

  Jaw clenched, she told herself to calm down as she turned to the numbers in the combination. “And what was the original plan?”

  He didn’t respond, so she added, “I’m assuming Gloria was in on it with you?”

  Again, he was quiet for a long moment. “Yeah. We’ve been working toward this for five years, ever since the day your father passed us over for promotion and brought in someone else from the outside.”

  Kelsey swallowed hard, her fingers still slowly turning the dial. “What were you guys hoping to accomplish?”

  “Can’t you guess? We wanted to set things right, to establish the leadership structure your father should have put in place when he first retired—me as the CEO, Gloria as the COO, and Walter nowhere to be found.”

  “And how were you going to do that?”

  “It was all a matter of mathematics. We knew that with Nolan no longer at the helm and stupid Hallerman in his place, this company would eventually devalue enough that I could afford to merge back in. That’s all we wanted, to be in the top two spots at B & T. Nothing else would have changed. You would still have been our rising star. All we were doing was fixing what your father broke when he made the wrong decisions five years ago.”

  “And that’s why you gave me faked da
ta in your financing request?”

  “Oh, you figured that out too? Gloria worried that you and Cole would talk, but when Cole quit in a huff over your beating him out on the deal, we knew we were set. He played right into our hands.”

  Kelsey’s mind worked hard to grasp what he was telling her. She couldn’t fathom how they allowed her to suffer such collateral damage.

  “And where did the bonds figure into that plan?” she asked tightly.

  “Don’t be naive, Kelsey. The bonds were the key to everything. It was to be a simple acquisition asset sell-off.”

  Stunned, Kelsey spun around to face him. “Do you mean to tell me you were going to use this company’s own assets to finance your purchase?”

  He grinned proudly. “That’s the way it’s done, kiddo. With the bonds as collateral, I could easily get a short-term loan to buy controlling interest of B & T, and then once I had control, I could authorize the sale of the bonds to pay back the loan. It’s brilliant, don’t you think?”

  She merely glared at him.

  “Oh, don’t look so shocked,” he sneered. “You were trying to do the same thing—find the bonds, cash them in, and use the money to buy controlling interest and stop the Queen’s Fleet takeover.”

  “That’s not the same thing at all! B & T has a right to those bonds. You don’t.”

  “A mere technicality. The end result would have been the same, except with my plan, the leadership would have been far more effective. Walter Hallerman is a fool—and so was your father for putting him at the helm. This company needed the vision and the experience that Gloria and I would have brought to the table instead.”

  “That’s debatable, Lou. I think we were starting to do pretty well without you.”

  “Are you kidding me? Five years ago this company was worth upwards of seventy million dollars! By December it was down to less than half that much.”

  “Well, sure, but an initial dip was to be expected, especially after my dad’s stroke. We’ve been rebounding lately.”

  “Yeah, I know you have. That’s what finally forced our hand. We knew if we didn’t move soon, the value would rise so high that I’d lose any chance of buying back in forever. That’s where your cousin Rupert came in.”

  Kelsey’s eyes widened. She wanted to stall so he would keep talking, but he was watching her too closely. When he slapped the tire iron in his hand again, she had no choice but to end the turn of the dial at the final number in the combination.

  With a click of the tumblers, the safe was unlocked. Kelsey gripped the handle, twisted, and pulled the door open to reveal the small, empty chamber inside. She was tempted to say, “I told you so,” but she didn’t want to antagonize Lou. Instead, she just sat back on her heels so that he could peer inside. “See? Like I said, they’re not here.”

  Bending, he craned his neck to take a look, his face hardening into stone. Terrified that his next move might be to rough her up as he’d done to Walter, she tried desperately to think of some way to change his focus and calm him down.

  “Listen, Lou, we’re not going to get anywhere if you keep insisting I have the bonds. I don’t. But if we put our heads together, maybe we can still figure out where they are.”

  He didn’t reply, but neither did he strike out against her.

  “Obviously, Gloria took them out of the safe and put them somewhere else,” she continued. “It would help if I understood why she did that. Can you explain it to me? What were you two planning, and how did Rupert Brennan fit into that plan?”

  Lou stood up straight and walked to the doorway of the office. Then he gestured for her to get up and move to the nearest chair. Was it now her turn to be bound and gagged and beaten? Her eyes scanned the room for any potential weapons she could grab, but nothing was within reach that could begin to compete with his tire iron—especially given the muscle he could put behind it. She sat and waited for him to continue.

  “Rupert, right,” he said, going on with his story. “Like I said, B & T was starting to rebound. We had to do something to reverse that upward trend, so I came up with the Rupert idea. Gloria had dealt with the man in the past and had his address and stuff, so I made her type up a letter that would convince him to come to the meeting. She gave it to me, along with an invitation to the event, and I was supposed to add in some cash and send it on. But then, when it was almost time to put the letter in the box, she chickened out. Told me to wait, that there was something else she wanted to try first, something that would be far less damaging to the company in the long run.”

  “What was that?”

  “What do you think? The threat of a hostile takeover. She figured if Pamela Greeley started breathing down everyone’s necks, B & T’s board might just get nervous enough to accept my offer for a friendly merger instead. It wouldn’t be ideal, as far as they were concerned, but it was still better than getting Clean Sweeped, if you know what I mean.”

  Kelsey felt nauseated. She had played right into Lou and Gloria’s hands, encouraging Walter to reconsider Lou’s standing offer. She’d even said something like, “A friendly merger has to be better than a hostile takeover.” How could she have been so blind?

  “But you got your hostile takeover attempt,” she said, shaking her head. “Why did you end up playing the Rupert card too?”

  Lou switched hands with the tire iron and began slapping it against his other palm. “Because Pamela took too long. Gloria gave her the tip about making an offer almost a month ago, but the woman didn’t act on it until Monday. By then it was too late. We had already given up on that and gone back to plan A.”

  “But actually you got both—a takeover attempt and Rupert’s outburst.”

  Lou nodded gleefully. “I know! We didn’t plan it that way, but it ended up being a real one-two punch. It worked like a dream. Between those two events, the value of B & T fell to an all-time low.”

  Kelsey closed her eyes, terrified to ask the obvious question. “So if everything was going so right with your plan, what went wrong? How did Gloria end up dead?”

  Lou began to pace, holding the metal rod in front of him as if he might strike out with it at any moment.

  “Gloria killed herself out of remorse, I’m sure. She started going weak on me in the eleventh hour, losing her nerve.”

  Kelsey held her tongue, waiting for him to continue. When he spoke, it was in a high-pitched imitation of Gloria.

  “‘We can’t destroy the Tate name just for our own selfish gains,’ she told me. The closer it got, the more she kept talking about Adele and the legend and the legacy and all that. Give me a break.”

  As he spoke, an idea came to Kelsey, a way that she could get in front of a security camera after all.

  “The display case!” she cried suddenly. “What if Gloria hid the bonds in the display case?”

  Lou hesitated, his eyes narrowing. “Out there in the lobby?”

  Kelsey nodded. “Yeah! I saw the key to that cabinet just the other day in Gloria’s desk. What do you want to bet that the reason she had it out was because she went in there the other night and hid the bonds inside?”

  He studied her suspiciously, but after a few moments he nodded, gesturing toward the hall. “Worth a try,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

  Kelsey stood and began moving up the hall, praying that Ephraim was still downstairs and that he was watching the security screen. Stopping by Gloria’s office to get the key, she had to dig through the rubble but finally found it. Holding it aloft like a prize, she looked to Lou, who nodded approvingly. They continued onward. As they went past Walter’s open door, she tried to look inside but felt the sharp jab of the tire iron. Even the brief glimpse she’d gotten told her that nothing had changed. The man was still bound and gagged in his chair.

  Out in the reception area, Kelsey walked straight to the display case and unlocked it with trembling hands. She wasn’t sure of her plan, but somehow she needed Ephraim to notice what they were doing. How could she send him a signal
of some kind? As she swung open the mahogany-framed side door of the case, it came to her: The slower she worked, the more frustrated Lou would become. Eventually, he might even start waving around the tire iron or even push her aside and start trashing the case’s contents himself, the same way he’d torn up the offices. Ephraim would never miss that.

  Kelsey dragged things out as long as she could. Slowly, she began by removing Adele’s old Bible with care, and then she flipped through the pages one by one, searching for the bonds inside.

  “Hurry up,” Lou barked, crossing to a nearby chair and having a seat. Though he rested the tire iron on his lap, on the camera it probably just looked like some innocent cane or a pole.

  Kelsey set down the Bible and moved on to the next most logical hiding places for the bonds—the memoir, the menu, and the stationery. As she carefully flipped through each, she glanced at Lou, looking for signs of frustration to appear. Nothing else yet.

  The clothing would have to be next, she realized, so she started with the hat, and even as she reached for it, she wondered if perhaps she might actually be onto something. This case would have made an interesting hiding place for the bonds—at least on a temporary basis. With trembling hands, she lifted the hat from the display but was disappointed to see that it was empty.

  She reached for the hand muff and then the gloves, also to no avail. Finally, she was just peering down inside the second glove when she heard the “ding” of the elevator. The doors whisked open and off stepped Ephraim. Immediately, he came through to reception.

  “Kelsey, what are you doing with those things? I’m not comfortable with this, not comfortable at all.”

  At that moment he glanced over toward Lou and something seemed to register in his face. Was it the tire iron? The aggressive posture? Whatever it was, Ephraim reached for something at his waistband just as Lou’s hand slid into his jacket. In a flash, Lou drew his hand back out, bearing a gun.

  Then he shot.