Echoes of Titanic (10 page)

“Dear Adele, do you honestly doubt what Mr. Myers' reaction to you will be?”

Adele shrugged. “I don't know what my father told him or what he is expecting.”

Jocelyn's features flooded again with compassion as she stepped toward Adele and took her hands. “I guarantee you, cousin, that this Mr. Myers will find you charming, polite, and refined—everything your father desired when he paid for your finishing school education.”

“You really think so?”

“Of course I do,” Jocelyn said earnestly, dropping her cousin's hands and taking a step back. “Just look at you! You're beautiful, well dressed, articulate, intelligent…You even have a mind for business, which is a rarity among women.”

Adele didn't object, even though she usually did when her cousin made such comments. It had long been Adele's opinion that many women had a mind for business. They just didn't recognize it for what it was.

“I, however, am the one who will probably come off as some uneducated culchie,” Jocelyn continued as she packed the last of her things in her suitcase.

“
Culchie
? But you're a
townie
. We both are. Besides, you are every bit as ‘finished' as I am. Don't forget the hours we spent after each class, where I showed you everything Headmistress taught that day.”

Jocelyn shrugged modestly. “And it all felt fine in Belfast. Yet you know how we were made to feel in London in the past few days. Nothing about us has been right or fashionable—not our clothes or our accents or even our luggage, for that matter. You saw the way the porter in the hotel sneered when he spotted our shabby old bags.”

Adele shook her head, and this time it was her turn to be compassionate.

“Jocelyn Brennan, I feel sure there is a big difference between London and New York City. From what Father says in his letters, people in New York aren't so bound by class and wealth. They honor ideas, industriousness, and vision. If Mr. Myers is a true American, he won't judge either of us by our hair or our clothes. He'll engage with our minds and judge us by our intellect, our conversation, and our ideals.”

Jocelyn grinned. “I'm sorry, cousin, but in that dress, intellect is not the first thought that will come to his mind—nor any man's mind, for that matter.”

She chuckled as Adele felt herself blush again.

“You know you are the prettier one,” Adele said.

“You know you are the smarter one,” Jocelyn replied.

And then they grinned. It was their old balance, the way they measured their differences in the labels they had given themselves years ago. Lately, though, as Jocelyn had begun to expand her world by reading and the discussion of ideas, and Adele had begun to blossom and to pay more attention to her appearance, those differences had begun to even out. According to Aunt Oona and Uncle Rowan, both girls were smart
and
pretty. Adele knew that was true of Jocelyn. Sometimes she almost believed it of herself as well.

The question was whether this Mr. Tad Myers would see things the same way, or if he would take one look at them and sneer, just as the porter had sneered in their fancy London hotel.

K
elsey sat in the reception area just down the hall from where the police were viewing the corpse and processing the scene. Next to her sat Ephraim, who had been glued to her side for the last hour. Though he had already been excused by the police and told he could leave, he had chosen to stay. Somehow, he seemed to know she wasn't up to being alone right now, that she needed a friend. At the moment he was the best kind of friend, because he seemed content to remain silent, a solid physical presence who neither pestered her about how she was feeling nor offered up empty platitudes to try and make things better.

Near the door stood a policeman in uniform. He hadn't said much, but Kelsey knew she was expected to stay where she was for the time being—and that it was his job to make sure she did.

No worries there. She'd do anything she could to help them figure out exactly what had happened and why one of the most important people in her world was now dead.

Dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled tissue, Kelsey kept listening for the elevator, hoping her brother would get here soon. In the wake of this horrific nightmare, he was the only one she'd been able to think of to call. Matt had promised to come from his apartment on the Upper West Side as quickly as he could, but twice now she'd heard the elevator ding and had been disappointed to see someone other than him coming around the corner. The first time, it had been a couple of people with the police department. The second time, it was Walter, the first person Ephraim had called after he'd contacted the police.

Though the CEO had been kind and solicitous the moment he saw Kelsey and learned she was the one who had discovered the body, she hadn't said much to him in return. She'd already spent more than enough time with Walter Hallerman today. At this point, the sight of him just made her feel weary.

At least he hadn't stayed there in reception with her and Ephraim. Instead, he'd received permission from the cops to go to his office, where Kelsey imagined he was on the phone with the company lawyers or whomever else one spoke to when a dead body had been found hanging from a projection screen in one's conference room.

Eventually, a man of about fifty wearing a suit with a badge clipped at his belt came into the reception area from the hallway and introduced himself as Detective Hargrove. Kelsey thought he might bring her into some back room where they would talk, but instead he pulled up a chair right there in reception, whipped out a narrow notebook from his inside suit pocket, and asked her to tell him in her own words what had happened.

In a voice that sounded monotone and flat even to herself, Kelsey recounted her story for the third time this evening. She gave him the basic facts, starting with her visit to Gloria's office prior to the ceremony and ending with her walk across the executive conference room when she spotted the body. Tears spilled from her eyes as she spoke, but she made no attempts to wipe them away. “I just can't make sense of this.” Her voice broke as she concluded her tale.

“Let's back up a little bit,” he said, flipping through his notes. “You said you spoke with Mrs. Poole around four this afternoon, just before you went from the stairwell to the backstage area. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“And that's the last time you saw her alive?”

Kelsey nodded. “I mean, we talked on the phone later, but that's the last time I saw her in person.”

“How did she seem then? What was her demeanor?”

Kelsey wasn't even sure how to answer that question. All over the map? Totally out of character? Crying one minute and giving a pep talk the next?

The problem was, if this man hadn't known Gloria while she was alive, he sure wasn't going to be able to get to know her now that she was dead. Yet, as the detective assigned to this case, it was up to him to figure out exactly how she had died, and why. Kelsey wasn't sure he could accomplish that. She had
known Gloria for years, and even she couldn't say what had been going on with the woman and why she'd been acting so strange.

As honestly as she could, Kelsey tried to explain her final encounter with Gloria. She stressed several times how unusual such behavior was for this woman who had otherwise always been the consummate professional. To his credit, Detective Hargrove seemed to take her at her word, listening intently, taking copious notes, and asking questions that were phrased as respectfully as possible. His face was expressionless throughout, but the tone of his voice had a kindness to it that she appreciated.

It wasn't until he asked her to again describe the two messages that Gloria had left on her home phone that Kelsey thought of her cell, still sitting in her purse in the bottom drawer of her desk where it had been all afternoon and evening. In the messages Gloria had left on her home machine, she had said she'd been calling Kelsey's cell phone. She told that to the detective, saying that if they were lucky, there might be more information on there about what had been going on.

Ephraim offered to go down to the fourth floor and retrieve the phone, so Kelsey gave him the code that would unlock her office door and then asked him to bring her whole purse, explaining where he could find it.

While he was gone, the detective began pursuing a new line of questioning, one that shed insight into what he was thinking about Gloria's last minutes of life.

“You think she killed herself?” she asked, though it came out sounding more like a statement than a question.

“We haven't ruled it out.”

Kelsey thought about that. “She wasn't exactly the suicide type.”

“What's the suicide type?”

“Hopeless? Depressed? Self-destructive?”

He jotted something in his notebook. “How about the opposite? Did you see any euphoria here at the end?”

She shook her head, saying that except for Gloria's weird behavior prior to the ceremony today, she had been pretty even-tempered lately, as always.

“Have you noticed her settling her affairs in any way?”

“You mean, like writing a will?”

“Or making changes to her insurance, telling people goodbye. Anything like that at all?” He waited patiently while Kelsey searched her memory.

“Not that I noticed,” she said finally. “She always finished her projects. She
wasn't a procrastinator. But tying up loose ends so she could kill herself? No.” She became more certain as she spoke.

At that moment, they were interrupted by yet another ding of the elevator. Still no Matt. Instead, Ephraim came walking around the corner holding Kelsey's purse far out in front of him, as though it were full of snakes.

“What's wrong?” she asked, hesitant to take it.

“Nothing,” the burly man replied. “I just didn't want anybody to think it was mine.”

Stifling a smile, Kelsey took the purse from him, opened it, and pulled out her cell phone. She pushed the button and the screen sprung to life, indicating twelve missed calls, four voice mails, and seven text messages.

She had the feeling that the detective would have preferred she review those voice mails on speakerphone so he could listen in too, but she did nothing of the kind. She specialized in investments, and some of her calls could be financially related and contain confidential information.

In the end, she told him Gloria had called five times and left a message twice. Those she did replay on speakerphone for him, but neither message shed any new light on the matter.

Then she went through the text messages. Of the seven, three were from Gloria. Her first two were more of the same—
Call me, I have to talk to you
—but the final one came as a complete shock. Sent at precisely 5:52 p.m., it looked like a suicide note. It said:

“Tater Tot?” the detective asked.

Tears sprung into Kelsey's eyes. “It was her pet name for me.”

He was quiet, waiting for her to go on, so she explained. “My last name is Tate. When I first started working at the office, she would refer to me as Little Tate and my father as Big Tate. I guess it just evolved over time. Somehow Little Tate became Tater Tot.”

The detective nodded, a flash of pity reflected in his eyes. “Any idea what she's talking about where she says ‘Forgive me for taking what wasn't mine'? What did she take?”

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.