The Daughter-in-Law (19 page)

“It seemed to be, until I got down a ways, and then it stopped working.”

He nodded, and then knelt down next to Pam. She told him that she had thought it was her brother who had gone back up. He had dropped his light, and she dove down past the wreck to retrieve it, but it sank too fast. When she came back to the wreck she couldn’t find the others. Thinking her brother had gone back to the boat, she thought she was looking for his wife. When she couldn’t find her she figured that her sister-in-law had gone back to the boat, too. But when she surfaced Nicole was alone. It was her brother who was missing.

“I went back down,” Pam said, her eyes still fixed on her futile search rather than present events. “I looked everywhere. There was nothing.”

“He’s an experienced diver?” the policeman asked.

“He should have been able to get back up no matter what went wrong.” Pam suddenly jumped up and went to the rail where the police diver’s ladder hung over the side. “Jesus, where is he? Doesn’t anyone know something?” Suddenly she was crying hysterically.

Nicole tried to calm her but Pam wouldn’t be consoled. “You have to find him,” she cried to the inspector. The police made her comfortable in a canvas chair and wrapped her in a blanket. Nicole brought her hot tea. Then they sat staring out over the water, oblivious to the divers who broke the surface occasionally, received instructions from the circling helicopter and then dove back down. No one spoke what they all knew for certain. Jonathan had run out of air at least half an hour ago. This was no longer a rescue operation. They were looking for a body.

They searched until the sun faded behind the horizon. It was dark on the water when they started back with Jonathan’s boat in tow. Nicole saw the lights twinkling along the shoreline when they made it back to Belize City. The police delivered them to the care of
a trusted rooming house operator, and promised that their things would be brought over from the honeymoon island the next morning. Nicole dozed in a chair, her eyes slowly closing in exhaustion. It was nearly dawn when she finally fell asleep in the landlady’s bed.

She awoke to voices in the parlor. She recognized the police officer’s voice, and then the Americans that she and Jonathan had met in San Pedro. As she stood, she was aware of the strangeness of her surroundings. And she was in her bathing suit, wrapped in a terrycloth robe. Hesitantly, she eased open the door. The conversations stopped immediately. The woman, whom she recognized as the innkeeper, lifted a piece of luggage that was near the door and gave it to her. “Here’s the bag you wanted brought from your cottage,” she reminded Nicole. “Take your time, dear. There’s no reason to rush. They’ll wait for you.” Then she steered Nicole into a bathroom that had an outdoor shower, found her some towels, soap, and shampoo.

“Will you wake Pam and tell her we have company?” Nicole asked.

“Your sister is already up. She said she needed to walk. She should she back in a few minutes.”

When Nicole finally appeared, her hair was brushed and she had made an attempt at makeup. But her face was gaunt and her eyes still dead. She was in a blue shirt with white slacks, and sandals that didn’t coordinate with anything. The officer was stunned that she seemed twenty years older than the woman he had delivered to the boardinghouse the night before.

Pam came through the front door at the same time, still in her bathing suit and shorts. The only thing she had taken from the clothes that the police brought to her was a gauze beach top that she wore as a blouse. The women embraced for a moment while the visitors stared down at the floor.

Victor Crane, the lawyer, then embraced each of them with a brief word of sympathy. He was still in the suit and tie that Jonathan had advised him to shed. Greg Lambert, the Donners’ security chief, took their hands.

Crane alluded to the papers that had seemed so urgent only a few
days before. “Under the circumstances, these can certainly wait. But I thought you might need some help with the legalities of the tragedy.”

Greg Lambert, was more at ease than the lawyer. “The police have everything under control,” he said with a nod to the police officer. “But if I can help you in any way ...” They all waited for the ladies to sit and then sat in a semicircle in front of them.

“I regret that your husband’s . . . body . . . has not yet been found,” the police officer began with genuine sympathy. “But the search continues. We are bringing in a miniature submarine that can go to the bottom with powerful lights. We will certainly recover ...” The words tailed off as inconclusively as the search.

Then the officer read back the information they had provided the night before. Both women nodded as he repeated their words even though the words seemed different. The facts were bare and cold with none of the emotion that each of them had felt.

“Now just a few more points, if I may,” the officer said, taking a pen from his shirt pocket. He asked where the tanks had been filled, who brought them aboard, and how they were stored. He noted their responses and concluded, “Then they were always in your possession. Never out of your sight except when they were stored in your boat during the night.”

“Yes,” Nicole said. Pam nodded in confirmation.

He asked Pam why she had thought it was Jonathan who had run into trouble and gone back to the surface. “I guess because he had dropped the light.” She was having a difficult time reciting the events without breaking into tears.

“That’s all, that’s all,” the policeman assured her. He turned his attention to Nicole who was much more composed and asked her to describe the problems that had brought her back to the surface.

“Trouble drawing air,” she answered. “As if the line were blocked, or the regulator was malfunctioning. I had air, and then I didn’t.”

Why hadn’t she brought the tank and the other gear back to the boat when she reached the surface?

“I couldn’t swim with it. It was weighing me down. So I dropped it when I thought I was back over the reef. I thought that Jonathan would simply dive down and retrieve it.”

He pressed for details. Why hadn’t she alerted the others when she decided to go back up? Wouldn’t it have been safer if the others came along with her? When she knew there was a problem, why didn’t she take fresh equipment and go back down?

Nicole’s words broke up as she started to answer. She was fighting to hold back the tears. Victor Crane asked if the questioning might not be postponed. “I think, for the present, our main concern should be locating Jonathan’s body.” The officer nodded and closed his notebook. When he left, the Donners’ attorney and security officer repeated their offers of help. Victor Crane would take care of their local accounts and make arrangements for Jonathan’s body, should it be recovered. Greg Lambert would stay on top of the police to assist the search and answer open questions.

The main issue, they both stressed, was to get the two women back home.

THIRTY-ONE

A
LEXANDRA WASN’T
buying any of it. “An accident? How convenient for her! Just hours before Jonathan would have signed a new will and had her sign a financial agreement.”
Jack was deflated, showing none of his boundless energy. He was wearing a white shirt over the trousers from one of his business suits, a combination that he generally wouldn’t tolerate. “There’s nothing to implicate her. Nothing to suggest that it wasn’t an accident.”

He had talked with Pam who said her brother “had just vanished.” She had been down with him; Nicole had gone back up to the boat. When she came up, Jonathan wasn’t there. Jack had also been on the phone with Greg Lambert, following step-by-step the details of the search and investigation. There was no trace of Jonathan’s body. The area where he was diving was at the edge of Lighthouse Reef, thirty feet of water that fell suddenly to over three hundred feet. The prevailing current was strong right up to the reef. It was entirely possible that his body would never be found.

“Is there anything else I can do down here,” Lambert had asked, “besides escorting the ladies back to New York?”

“Yeah . . . ask around. Jonathan had made arrangements with a bank and a couple of land companies. Make sure that there’s nothing else. Nothing in her name, or that they jointly owned.”

Alexandra was in a dark dress that looked particularly out of place on the sun-drenched patio. But that was her only concession to mourning. Her hair was styled and her makeup flawless. There was a box of tissues at her elbow but the wastepaper basket under the table was empty. She knew she would cry over the loss of her son, but that was something she would do in private.

Victor Crane had returned from Belize the previous night and had arrived at Rockbottom before breakfast. In his dark suit, and with the somber expression on his long face, he might have been an
undertaker. But he had three associates in tow who seemed to be from sequential classes of Harvard, Columbia, and Yale. Their counsel had been grim, indicating exactly how well Nicole would do. “Fifty million, but that’s preliminary. We’ll need several days to assemble an exact figure.” They had listed Jonathan’s assets as only twenty million in themselves, the long-established trust funds he had come into just last year. But he was the owner of record of fifty million dollars parked offshore, and it would be counterproductive to claim that those funds were really untaxed profits of Sound Holdings. Then there were trusts of which Jonathan was the beneficiary, set up to avoid the possibility of estate taxes. Nicole would have a claim on their value. The legalities were, understandably, very complicated. But the overall picture was clear: as Jonathan’s wife, and in the absence of a specific bequest, the courts would rule Nicole entitled to a minimum of one half his wealth. The other half would be contestable. Making matters worse, it would be quite difficult to minimize Jonathan’s paper wealth. In setting up the Donner trusts, no one had imagined that Jonathan would marry without a prenuptial agreement, and then die before his affairs could be reordered.

“No one but Nicole,” Alexandra had chided her learned counsel. Then she had raised the point of Jonathan’s body: without the body there was no proof of death. So, there would be no inheritance.

Victor Crane was pursing his lips before she finished. Although still in his forties, he had mastered all the expressions and mannerisms of an older, more learned man. “Technically, you’re right,” he agreed. “But given the circumstances, the presumption of death is strong. It won’t take her very long to get a death certificate. And, in the meantime, she has full access to everything he left behind. His apartment, the car, stocks and bonds, checking account. . . Mrs. Donner can live quite nicely while she waits.”

Jack had growled impatiently at the details. “So what do we do?”

The attorneys paused and glanced from one to another. Then Victor cleared his throat. “In matters such as these . . . it’s often advisable to settle privately.”

“Never!” Alexandra slapped the table to drive home her point.

Jack folded his hands on the edge of the table in front of him. He was listening.

“We can drag this out for quite a while, and keep her in court for maybe a year or two. That, plus the possibility that she might
lose, could be used as an incentive to take a lesser amount free and clear.”

“Why should we agree to pay her anything?” Alexandra demanded.

“Because it’s highly probably that in the end she would walk off with much more. And, during the litigation, financial arrangements would be brought to light that are best kept confidential.” The lawyer focused on Jack who knew exactly what “financial arrangements” he meant. A thorough investigation of all Jonathan’s affairs might involve Jack and Sound Holdings with the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities Exchange Commission, and maybe the federal prosecutor.

“But wait until we have all the numbers and have done a tight review on the law involved. There may be a better way to handle this, and you’ll want a decent interval anyway before approaching the widow with an offer.”

THIRTY-TWO

N
ICOLE AND
Pam landed at LaGuardia Airport and were met by a limousine sent from Rockbottom. The driver’s instructions were to bring them both back to the estate where the rest of the family waited in mourning. But Nicole countermanded the instructions and had the car take Pam by herself. She took a taxi to Jonathan’s Manhattan apartment. There she spent the evening unpacking her suitcases and moving her things into the master closet. Twice the phone rang, once with a call from Ben, the other a call from Jack. She let the machine handle both promising herself that she would return them as soon as she was settled.

There was a lot that she had to do. There would be a cold welcome awaiting her out on the North Shore and she had no desire to meet Alexandra face-to-face. On the flight up from Miami she had decided not to accept a room in the main house, or even use of the caretaker’s cottage, but instead, to move into Jonathan’s Manhattan apartment and keep her distance from the family. So, there were the housekeeping arrangements of closing down her own apartment, gathering her own things, and arranging for Jonathan’s belongings to be delivered to his family home.

Then, there were the legal implications. She knew that there would be an avalanche of attorneys bearing papers for her signature, most of which she wouldn’t understand. She needed to find a legal firm that wasn’t on retainer to the Donners or to any of their business holdings.

Finally, there were the few allies she had won over in her brief appearances as Jonathan’s woman. Pam, of course, could be her advocate within the fortress, and Ben Tobin might be her legal representative. Jonathan had told her she could always count on Ben, but she had to wonder whether his loyalty would survive the assault of the Donner millions. She would have to meet with both of them and find out exactly where they stood.

Nicole had to steel herself. It was going to be a long and difficult battle, in the courts, and probably on the society pages. There were volumes of information about her past that would be dug up and used against her. There would be moments when she would welcome the chance to run off and hide in her previous obscurity. She had to be strong.