Hush

by Karen Robards

  Margaret came toward her. Riley stopped, waiting.

  “I can’t get it out of my mind,” Margaret whispered as she reached her. “Was Jeff killed because—?”

  “Shh.” Catching the other woman’s arm, Riley pulled her into the bathroom, which was tiny and ordinary: white tub, sink, toilet, fifties-era avocado green tiles on the floor and walls. She flipped on the light, closed the door. Putting a finger to her lips, she then turned on the tap in the sink as high as it would go. Cold water so it wouldn’t steam up the room, making it even warmer than it was because the central air-conditioning unit was in the last stages of its life cycle. Like she’d told Finn earlier, she watched TV, and sometimes even learned from it: in one of the police procedural shows she favored, the sound of running water had been used to provide the kind of white noise that could foil eavesdropping devices. Not that she was convinced that the shows were accurate, and not that she was convinced that they were being eavesdropped on, but under the circumstances she thought it would be smart to do what she could, just in case.

  Margaret looked at her with surprise.

  “So we won’t be overheard,” Riley explained, low-voiced.

  “Emma’s asleep.” Margaret’s arms were folded over her chest, and by the bathroom’s stark light, without makeup, she looked old. The fine lines in her face were readily apparent. Her lips were pale and dry. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Tension made the tendons in her neck stand out above the lace-trimmed edge of her floral nightgown, which was just visible above the lapels of her tightly tied robe. The running-water precaution wasn’t about Emma, but Riley had no time to explain as Margaret rushed on, quietly but with an edge of near hysteria in her voice. “Could Jeff have known? Could anybody know, and think it was him? Oh, dear God, was he killed because of what we did?”

  — CHAPTER —

  THIRTEEN

  That was the question that had been hammering at Riley since she’d found Jeff’s body. It had chewed holes in her heart, clawed its way through her mind.

  It was the primary reason she had originally taken his phone, and, earlier tonight, the SIM card: in case somehow, in some way, there was something incriminating on it, some kind of clue, some kind of link that might lead to what she and Margaret had done. In case there was something on it that might provide an investigator—or someone even worse—with the kind of aha moment that she had experienced.

  The idea had terrified her even as she had crouched in shock below Jeff’s dead body, and it terrified her still. But having had time to consider, she thought the chance of that being the case was somewhere between slim and none.

  At least, that’s what she thought when it wasn’t the middle of the night and all kinds of horrific scenarios were invading her dreams.

  Once she’d had a chance to plug the SIM card into an e-reader and make a thorough search of the contents, she’d know for sure. But she had to wait until she could figure out a way to make certain that accessing the information on that SIM card wouldn’t send a flaming look-at-me arrow shooting out through cyberspace.

  But for now, for the sake of Margaret’s peace of mind, she was going to go with pure logic.

  “If Jeff had even suspected, he would have said something.” Riley had already mentally reviewed the manner in which Jeff had summoned her to Oakwood on that last night, in case he’d stumbled onto something just before he’d died. If so, it had to have been after he’d texted her, because he’d given her no clue in his message. But she didn’t think that’s what had happened: unless he’d been incapacitated, he would have phone-blasted her with excitement at the discovery as soon as he’d made it. Unless, of course, he hadn’t had time. “I’m almost positive he didn’t know. That’s not why he was killed.”

  Margaret sat down abruptly on the closed lid of the toilet and looked up at her with torment in her eyes. “Then why?”

  Riley had no answer to that, so she just shook her head.

  “Jeff’s the one who found George’s calendar on that cloud thing in the first place,” Margaret persisted. “Wouldn’t there be some trace of him looking at it?”

  “iCloud,” Riley corrected automatically, adding, “I don’t think so,” as she thought back to a Friday night, that Friday night, a little more than a month ago. She’d been giving Jeff a ride home from the Palm Room after he’d stopped in to share the latest results from his investigation into the supposed murders of George’s associates, and, not incidentally, cadge some free drinks (from one of the waitresses who had a soft spot for him, not from her). Accessing the Internet from his phone while she drove, using old usernames and passwords he knew his father had once used, he’d unexpectedly hit pay dirt: a cache of George’s emails, photos, notes, etc., that everyone had believed no longer existed. They were in an account that apparently automatically backed up to the cloud, which would have floored George if he had realized it, because in the days before his arrest, suspecting it was imminent, he had deleted all his files and then destroyed the devices they were kept on in an attempt to prevent them from falling into the hands of investigators.

  Jeff had whooped gleefully upon discovering that at least some of that material was still around. At his insistence, she’d pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot while he went through it, looking for clues that might corroborate his theories about the deaths of his father’s associates being murders, or, alternatively, lead to the missing money. He’d been careful not to download anything since the feds were still suspicious that he’d been involved in his father’s crimes. He didn’t want to leave any cyber trail that would lead back to him in case an investigator should subsequently come across the files and accuse him of some kind of prior knowledge. But he’d shared bits and pieces with her, probably in a bid to defuse her impatience to get going again.

  None of it had seemed to have anything to do with what he was looking into, as Riley had pithily told him. None of it had seemed to have anything to do with anything worth talking about, in fact. It had all been seemingly minor, personal stuff.

  One of the items had been George’s calendar for the month in which he’d been arrested. All the appointments he’d jotted down were business-related, and if they held some significance other than a frantic winding up of his affairs, Riley was too tired to spot it, or care.

  “You know, it’s after three a.m., and I’ve been working for something like eighteen hours now. You want to explain to me why I’m sitting in a parking lot looking at this stuff with you?” she’d growled. “Remind me, next time you come to my club and drink too much, to call you a cab.”

  “You’re the one who insisted on driving me home. And I can’t afford a cab.” Jeff was still paging through the calendar, utterly absorbed. “I don’t want to do this at my mother’s house. Now they can track everything everybody does online. You know these phones have a GPS, right? You never know if maybe the location of whatever device is looking at this stuff is getting embedded somewhere. I want to make it as hard as possible for them to actually trace it back to me.”

  “Oh my God, there you go with the ‘them’ again. You are totally paranoid.” Riley had rolled her eyes and restarted the car. “That’s it. I’ve had enough. We’re out of here.”

  “Riley—”

  “Forget it.” She drove to the exit, pulled out onto the dark street, headed west.

  That’s when Jeff had said, “Even in the midst of everything that was going on, Dad put a note on his calendar about Emma’s birthday.” Which, to add to that particular month’s fun, had been only four days before the FBI had hauled George out of his office in handcuffs. “Happy sixteenth to my baby girl. Whatever happens, we’ll always have Paris.” Riley could still remember the sudden flash of emotion with which Jeff had added, “How did the mean old bastard even have the balls to write that, knowing that he’d done everything he could to basically destroy her life?”

  Riley couldn’t remember what she’d replied to that. Her thoughts were already skipping ahead to three days after that
conversation had taken place, when she’d been standing in the doorway of Margaret’s bedroom chatting with her while the other woman finished getting dressed. Riley’s gaze had happened to rest on the small painting propped on a decorative gilt easel that occupied a corner of Margaret’s dresser. It was one of the of-no-value-to-anyone-outside-the-family personal items the government had had no interest in confiscating.

  It was a five-by-seven unframed canvas, an oil in soft pastels. Emma had painted it, from a photograph, Riley thought. In it, Emma and Margaret stood arm-in-arm in front of the Eiffel Tower.

  Riley remembered that trip: it had been over spring break in Emma’s freshman year. Emma and Margaret had gone alone.

  Whatever happens, we’ll always have Paris.

  George had written those words presumably about himself and Emma. But Riley was as sure as it was possible to be that Emma had never spent a day in Paris with George in her life.

  George never did anything without a purpose.

  Since Emma had painted it, that painting had been on Margaret’s dresser, first in the vast master suite at Oakwood and, later, in this small house.

  While Margaret slipped into her shoes, Riley crossed to the painting and picked it up.

  Even now, she could remember the way her heart had started pounding when she’d looked at the brown paper backing stapled to the wooden frame the canvas was stretched over: four of the staples on the left side were missing. Although the paper still lay flat against the frame, the absence of the staples created an opening.

  Being careful not to rip the paper, she slid a finger inside. There was something there, in the space between the painting and the paper backing. It felt like the cavity was stuffed with tissues. Soft and silky tissues. As in, Kleenex.

  Frowning, withdrawing her finger, Riley shook the painting. Nothing. No sound, no movement.

  It seemed likely that the tissues were put there for just that purpose: to keep something that was inside from moving around, or from making a sound if the painting was moved around. Riley was familiar with Emma’s paintings. To her knowledge, they weren’t routinely stuffed with tissues.

  “What are you doing?” Having finished dressing, Margaret came to stand next to her, frowning at her through the mirror that hung over the dresser.

  “I think something’s in here,” Riley said.

  A moment later, with Margaret’s permission and the help of a nail file, she’d removed enough of the staples to allow her to see that the painting was indeed stuffed with ordinary white Kleenex. More tissues were wrapped tightly around a small, flat, rectangular object that was held in place by the wadding.

  That object, she saw when she pulled the tissues off, was a small black notebook. Pulse pounding, Riley flipped through it.

  “Is that—?” Margaret broke off, swallowing convulsively, clearly unable to finish. She’d seen the small, precise handwriting, too. It was unmistakably George’s.

  “Yes. I think it is.” Riley peered more closely at the neat lines of numbers and scribbled notes on the pages, then looked at Margaret, dry-mouthed.

  She was almost certain that what she held in her hand was a list of bank accounts, along with their locations and the information needed to access them. It was, in other words, a map to the missing money.

  A twenty-first-century treasure map.

  Her heart pounded like she’d been running for miles.

  Margaret recognized it for what it was, too. The knowledge was there in her eyes.

  “Dear Lord, what do we do?” Margaret sounded like she was short of breath.

  “Hand it over to the FBI, I guess.”

  Margaret said, “They’ll think we were part of it. They’ll think we knew.”

  It took the fear in Margaret’s voice to make Riley realize that the little notebook she was holding was the equivalent of a suicide bomb. If she turned it over and things went badly, it could destroy her, Margaret, and Jeff, which would in turn also destroy Emma. The investigators had been so viciously aggressive in trying to spread blame to the family. Would they believe that they hadn’t had the notebook and known the whereabouts of the money from the beginning? Would they believe they hadn’t been part of the scam all along?

  Riley wasn’t prepared to bet the rest of her life on it.

  “I don’t think I could face going to prison,” Margaret said in a thin little voice that was like nothing Riley had ever heard from her before. Like Riley and Jeff, Margaret had been threatened with decades behind bars if it could be proved she’d known anything about what George was up to. The prospect obviously scared her to death. If truth be told, it scared Riley to death, too.

  As they’d already learned to their cost, innocence was no protection. It was all about what the investigators suspected, and felt they could prove.

  Looking down at the notebook, Riley said slowly, “Nobody knows we found this. We don’t have to give it to anyone. We don’t have to tell anyone. We can throw the notebook away. Or burn it.”

  “Maybe the money’s not even there anymore. Maybe those accounts are empty.” Margaret must have caught a glimpse of the clock sitting on her nightstand, because she seemed to gather herself together as she exclaimed, “Oh my, look at the time! We’ve got to leave. We can’t be late for Emma’s exhibition. She’s so nervous. She needs us there.” They were headed to Tate Gallery, where Emma’s paintings, along with those of other talented teens in the area, were being exhibited and judged by some of the most respected artists in the country.

  Riley felt like her insides were cramping up. “Okay. We don’t have to decide anything about this right now. I’m going to put it back inside here, and we’re not going to tell anybody about it until we figure out what to do. Not anybody. Not Jeff.”

  As she spoke she slipped the notebook back inside the painting, wriggled enough of the staples back into their holes to secure the backing, and returned it to its easel on the dresser.

  Margaret nodded agreement.

  “Not Jeff,” she repeated.

  Neither of them had to say anything more. They both knew that with his sporadic drinking sprees and drug use, Jeff was too volatile to be trusted with any secret, much less one as potentially explosive as this.

  Throughout the rest of the day, even when Emma won first place at the exhibit and a trip to compete at the international level at the Bermuda National Gallery two weeks later, Riley wasn’t able to get the notebook out of her mind for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Neither, as she confessed later, was Margaret.

  In fact, over the next few days, their secret knowledge made them both so jumpy that they had trouble concentrating during the day and sleeping at night.

  They discussed what to do until they were both sick of the topic.

  Riley finally fished the notebook out and, afraid of somehow being discovered with it in her possession, copied down some of the information in a ridiculous code that she alone could decipher. (On paper—by that time she was as paranoid as Jeff, and the idea of copying anything into the notes app on her phone or taking a picture of the pages or doing anything digitally with the information at all spooked her.) Using one of the computers at the library, being oh-so-careful not to disturb anything on the sites she had to navigate through, she checked to make sure that what they’d found were indeed bank account numbers and passwords and locations.

  They were. As it turned out, there were a total of 137 accounts, some numbered, some in the names of various trusts and corporations, in such far-flung places as Singapore, Hong Kong, the Isle of Man, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Channel Islands, the Caymans, and Panama.

  The total in the accounts was a tad over a billion dollars. More than twenty times that sum was missing, either spent or in other vehicles that George hadn’t recorded in his notebook, but still the accounts held so much money that Riley was staggered as she added up the figures.

  When Riley told Margaret what she had found, Margaret turned around, walked into the bathroom, and vomited.
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  Later, after much discussion, they decided that the best thing to do was nothing. Sooner or later, they felt, investigators were bound to find the accounts on their own, and when they did it wouldn’t have anything to do with them. They would act as surprised as everybody else.

  That’s when Margaret had uttered the fatal, wistful, words: “That’s so much money. If we had even the smallest sliver of it . . .” Her voice trailed away. Then she looked at Riley and said, “Could we somehow get hold of a little bit of it, do you think?”

  Shades of the apple tree in Eden.

  As it turned out, they could. With Riley’s background in finance, it was easy, actually, given that they had the account locations and numbers, the log-in codes, the passwords, and everything else they needed, written right there in George’s little black book. As a precaution, Riley bought a refurbished computer at a secondhand store, for which she paid cash. Using it to access an account in Luxembourg, chosen because the amount of money in it was at the middling level for the accounts, Riley authorized a wire transfer from that account to an account she opened in Switzerland to receive it. From there, she quickly pinged the money through various bank accounts until she felt the trail was sufficiently muddied that no one could follow it even if, at some point, the withdrawal was discovered along with the existence of the Luxembourg bank account. Finally she let the money settle, permanently, in a corporate account she created in Bermuda, chosen for its banking secrecy and because, as far as she could tell, George hadn’t parked anything in that locale. Then she closed all the accounts she’d used to get it there, making Margaret’s “sliver” completely (she hoped) untraceable.

  Since everything had been done online, the whole thing had taken less than a day.

  “Ten million dollars of that was mine, nothing to do with George or anything he did. I inherited it from my parents before we got married.” That’s what Margaret had told her, when they were still discussing whether or not they should even think about trying to skim something from the accounts they had discovered.