Echoes of Titanic (16 page)

D
oreen Tate opened the door of the three-story brownstone and welcomed her daughter inside. As she did, just the sight of her mom's sweet, nurturing face brought tears to Kelsey's eyes. She may have been thirty-two years old with a prestigious job and a riverfront apartment and a whole world separate from that of her parents, but once in a while it felt good to be somebody's little girl.

Kelsey's mother hugged her fiercely, stroking her hair and cooing soft words and promising it was all going to be okay. Of course, such kindness only served to make Kelsey cry. Somehow, it had been easier to face the day in full-on business mode, ready to ask questions and gather facts and get to the bottom of things. But now that she was being shown compassion, she feared she might lose it completely.

Her mother was full of questions about all that had been going on, so after Kelsey fixed her face in the bathroom, she went back up the hallway to the bright, sunny kitchen and sat at the table, answering as best she could. Kelsey had plenty of questions for her mother in return, as she was hoping to confirm the things she'd just learned from Rhonda in the cab. Unfortunately, her mother didn't remember a whole lot about the whole Adele-false-identity thing and couldn't confirm or deny much of what had happened back then.

As they talked, Doreen brewed a pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, Kelsey's favorite. Soon she was serving it to her daughter at the table along with a delicate plate of the most heavenly smelling banana bread Kelsey had ever encountered.

The presentation was lovely, and the sight of such artfully served food made Kelsey smile. She'd always been closer to her father than to her mother, not necessarily because she liked him any better but simply because they had more in common—including interests and talents and even personalities. She and her father were so much alike, both of them focused and business minded and visionary, with a tendency to work too much and a brain that jumped to conclusions that could sometimes make them seem callous. Her mother, on the other hand, had always been a far more nurturing and creative soul. The poor woman had had so little interest in stocks and bonds and investments and money that she'd spent much of their family time with her eyes glazed over, enduring the shoptalk while she tried to pretend she cared.

Still, Doreen Tate had always made the perfect corporate wife for her husband, Nolan. After a lifetime of devoting herself to his needs and his dreams, facilitating his career and providing him with a near-idyllic home life, it just didn't seem fair that once he'd retired and had the time to shine some of that attention back on her, he'd ended up having the stroke. A server by nature, Doreen had never complained. But Kelsey knew it had to break her mother's heart sometimes to realize that her handsome, vibrant, brilliant husband had been reduced to a weakened, trembling man in a wheelchair who could barely string more than a few words together at a time.

“How's Dad today?”

“Do you mean in relation to all that's going on or just in general?” Doreen carried a second plate of banana bread to the table for herself and took a seat across from Kelsey.

“Both.” She slid a bite of the warm concoction into her mouth and had to close her eyes as she chewed, it was that good.

“Well, generally speaking, he seems pretty much on the ball this morning,” she said, neatly placing a cloth napkin on her lap. “But I can tell this whole thing has affected him deeply. He even cried himself to sleep last night.”

“Poor Dad,” Kelsey said, trying not to picture it. “Which do you think bothers him more? The attack-on-Adele thing or the death of Gloria?”

Doreen put down her fork and gaped at Kelsey in surprise.

“Oh, honey, Gloria, of course. He knew the woman her entire professional life. He respected her and depended on her and considered her a dear friend for many years. You know that.”

Kelsey nodded, chagrined. “Has he given an opinion on the cause of her death? I mean, whether he thinks it was suicide or…uh…something else?”

“Yes. He feels that the Gloria he knew would never have killed herself. He's sure it has to have been a murder. I didn't know her nearly as well as the two of you did, of course, but I agree. Gloria Poole was a born problem-solver, the kind of person who never accepted defeat and rarely took no for an answer. She wasn't the type to give up and commit suicide. Don't you agree?”

Kelsey did agree, and she had said pretty much the same thing herself to the detective last night. But the more she'd been thinking about it, the more she wasn't so sure. “Up until yesterday, Mom, I would have agreed with you completely. But if you'd seen the way she was acting before the ceremony, if you'd heard the things she was saying…” Her voice trailed off. “I don't know. She was acting so strange yesterday that I'm at least willing to consider the possibility.”

Her mother sighed softly in reply.

“I don't know,” Kelsey continued, “maybe in a sense it's just easier for me to think it was suicide than to consider the possibility of a m-murder. Listen to me. I can hardly get the word out of my mouth. I mean, come on.
Murder?
In the executive conference room at Brennan & Tate? If that's really what it turns out to be, we're talking about a whole different ballgame here. Mom, you can't imagine how many people were in that building yesterday or the kind of chaos that was going on after everything was disrupted. Almost anyone could have sneaked upstairs and done that to her and then simply slipped back out undetected. The list of suspects would be ridiculously long. If you ask me, that detective had better hope the coroner ends up calling it a suicide. Otherwise, he has his work cut out for him.”

“I see what you mean.”

“And as far as the company's concerned, I can't even think about the possibility of murder without getting a headache. For starters, there'd be a whole host of liability issues. If she was murdered, we'd be forced to address safety concerns, security procedures—and we'd have insurance increases, not to mention the added expense and effort of trying to get around the stigma of someone having been killed right in our own office. A lot of people work in that building, Mom. From a business perspective, murder would be a nightmare. Whether it seems in character for Gloria or not, we all better
hope
it was a suicide.”

Kelsey took another bite and looked up at her mom as she chewed, surprised to see that she was looking back at Kelsey with disdain.

“Do you hear yourself?” Doreen whispered. “Can you stop for a minute and listen to what you're saying?”

It took a moment for Kelsey to understand what her mother was getting at, but when she did she had to resist the urge to roll her eyes. What was the big deal? She'd spoken like an executive, her mind jumping first not to the human element but to corporate concerns. So what? She knew her words must have sounded harsh, but this was her reality.

Okay, in a sense, her mother was right. Maybe she had sounded a little cold and unfeeling. On the other hand, her mother lived in a whole different kind of world than Kelsey did. Doreen Tate could not begin to understand what it would be like to be in her daughter's shoes.

Kelsey took in a breath and was about to speak out in her own defense when Doreen cut her off to continue her lecture.

“When did your heart check out of the equation entirely and turn you into this, this automaton? This shell? I didn't raise you to be this way. I taught you to have compassion. I taught you to put others first, to care about their needs. Your whole life, I tried as hard as I could to help you understand the value of living a balanced life, to avoid the tunnel vision that a big-time business career can bring. I've seen it dozens of times in colleagues of your father's, and now I'm sitting here seeing it in you, and I can't believe I didn't recognize it before. I don't even know who you are right now. I love you, honey, but I do not know you. What could possibly have happened in your life to bring you to this?”

Doreen stood and turned away, busying herself at the sink as she angrily wiped away a few tears of her own. Stunned, Kelsey remained at the table, her heart pounding with guilt and grief and shame. Her mother was right. Somehow, in the past few years, she'd turned into exactly the kind of person she had never wanted to be.

Why? What
had
happened to bring her to this? Even as she asked herself that question, she already knew the answer.

Cole. Her breakup with Cole Thornton. Five years ago, she'd had at least some compassion, some selflessness, some sense of that balance that her mother had tried to instill in her. Kelsey had been so happy back then, loving her new career, dating a fantastic man, making big plans for the future. That future had been all about Cole, who was everything she'd ever wanted in a husband. Smart and sweet and funny and handsome and successful and attentive and considerate and loving, he was everything she'd ever dreamed of in a mate.

By the time things started to go wrong, they had already exchanged the “I love yous.” They had already had the joking, flirting what-if conversations
about how many kids they could see themselves having and where they would most like to live in the future and when might be the best time of year for a wedding.

Then, in the space of a few weeks, everything had fallen apart.

She didn't think about that period much anymore, but back then it had consumed her every waking thought. It was her investment in Lou's company that started it all, just one single stupid business deal that messed everything up. She knew she'd been the one to start the ball rolling by undercutting Cole's investment proposal with a better one. In her defense, the proposal he'd put together for Lou had been poorly done and extremely insubstantial, considering the data. At the time she'd known she could do far better, and so she did. Afterward, she told herself that Cole was too timid to be good at this job, that he wasn't visionary enough to spread his wings and really fly with it. Even Gloria had assured her that in offering Lou a better deal than Cole had she was just doing business as usual. After all, she couldn't go easy on a coworker just because she happened to be dating him.

But he hadn't seen it that way.

When her deal with Lou was announced and Cole realized what she'd done, he'd been devastated. To him, it was bad enough that she'd slipped in behind his back and stolen an investment opportunity he'd been actively pursuing. But the fact that she'd done it with neither warning nor apology had made it unacceptable. Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that she'd tossed out a few careless comments about the situation to the woman who had been her administrative assistant at the time. That woman had a big mouth, and before Kelsey knew it, things she'd said to her privately about Cole had been spread from one end of the company to the other. Of course she'd fired the woman soon after, but that had been small comfort. By then the damage had already been done.

When it was all over, Cole had ended not just his relationship with her but with the company as well. He broke up with her, quit his job, and walked out of her life completely. From what she heard, he'd even stopped going to the little church they had been attending together, though she could have told him not to bother. Once he was gone, she never went back there anyway.

Kelsey wished she could explain all of that to her mother, that she could help her understand how the loss of Cole from her life and the pain that came with it was the thing that had started her down the wrong road she'd been on ever since.

In the wake of her breakup with Cole, she had buried herself so deeply in
her work that over time she had become this person she was now, one who could witness the gruesome death of a beloved friend—a tragedy of monumental proportions—and process it in terms of damage control.

This was not who she wanted to be.

Before Kelsey could articulate any of these thoughts, her mother surprised her by turning around and apologizing for her outburst.

“I'm sorry, Kelsey,” she said, leaning her hip back against the counter and drying her hands on a towel. “We all have different coping mechanisms. You've been through a horrific trauma, and if you need to focus on the business side of the situation to get you through this, you have every right to do so. It's certainly understandable. I shouldn't have said anything.”

Her eyes filling with fresh tears, Kelsey stood and went to her mother and wrapped her arms around her and told her that no, she was right. Everything she'd said was true. “I don't want to be this way, Mom. I really don't.”

“Oh, honey,” her mother cooed, once again stroking her hair. “Maybe this can be a wake-up call for you then, you know? One that helps you get back on track.”

“Maybe.”

The two women shared a long embrace, and when they pulled apart Kelsey excused herself to go repair her makeup. Once she'd fixed the damage and had a solid hold on her emotions, she emerged from the restroom and went in search of her father. She found him right where she'd expected, in what used to be the living room but now served as pretty much the extent of his limited world.

This space that used to be the very heart of the home was no longer a plush, inviting gathering place. Gone were the custom couches and the big wooden coffee tables and the Hubbardton lamps. Instead, now the decor centered on a hospital bed, a portable toilet, and an old man who could usually be found slumped in a corner in his wheelchair.