Bleeding Heart (6 page)

Mackenzie asked just as many questions when we went over my AutoCAD drawings with plant callouts and accompanying photos, Phil Welling’s reports, and the designs for the lighting and in-ground watering systems. He obviously enjoyed drilling down into the details. He questioned some of my choices, but more, it seemed to me, out of curiosity than criticism.

“Why buddleias here? I think I would have gone with hydrangeas.”

“They can take a long time to get established. You want this to be a showplace by the end of June, so I had to make some tough choices. I’ve called for groupings of hydrangeas up here in the sundial garden. They may not flower much this year, but they’ll form a nice mass.”

He glanced over my price estimates, which I’d spent endless hours assembling. I’d attached more than twenty pages of itemized lists, together with samples of Nate’s and Damon’s work and their own cost sheets. The grand total seemed astronomical to me, but Mackenzie didn’t question a single number.

“Did you fold in your own fee for overseeing the contractors? I don’t see it broken out here.”

“I wasn’t sure how you wanted to handle that—if you preferred to pay them directly or not.”

“What—and screw you out of a markup? Alice! I thought you were a better businesswoman than that. You found them. You should get the credit—and the cut.”

“Thanks,” I said, though there was another reason I’d submitted their proposals separately. “But that means I’ll need more of the money up front. I can’t afford to—”

“I understand,” Mackenzie said, reaching over and unlocking a desk drawer. He pulled out a checkbook ledger. “Shall we say half now and half on completion?”

“Fine,” I said as I watched him write out in a bold, almost illegible hand the biggest check I’d ever received in my life.

“And I haven’t forgotten my promise to you about the Mackenzie Project,” he said, standing and stretching while I began to pull my things together. “I’ll make a contribution this week. And I’d appreciate it if you gave some thought to possible recipients.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, smiling. One came to mind more or less immediately. I felt almost light-headed with happiness as he walked me across the entranceway to the front door. He glanced down the hall toward the sunroom.

“I’m sorry if I shocked you before,” he said in a lowered voice, “the way I talked about my family. I guess I just thought you knew a thing or two about unscrupulous spouses.”

I stared up at him. So he knew. Of course he knew. He’d told me himself he’d done a little digging around about me. He’d talked to Sal. He’d no doubt Googled me. How many thousands of news items would he have found there, with my name buried somewhere in the fine print? Everyone in Woodhaven knew, though they never
said anything. It was considered such a scandal. Such a shame. But there was something about the casual—almost cavalier—way Mackenzie brought it up that I found oddly comforting. It occurred to me that he operated in the cutthroat, mega-business world where the kind of crime Richard had committed was, if not commonplace, at least not all that unusual.

Not something that would rip a marriage right off its foundations and sweep a lifetime of dreams into oblivion.

R
ichard and I always agreed that you could never really know the truth about anyone else’s marriage. The newlyweds next door, for instance, who seemed so in love—
look, they’re still holding hands!—
but who ended up filing for divorce within the year. Or the elderly aunt who spent a lifetime grousing about her husband and then died of a broken heart a month after his final stroke. But we knew the truth about our own marriage. After being together for nearly two decades, we were still passionate lovers and best friends.

“I hope everyone has as much fun as we do,” he used to say to me as we lay together, happily spent after making love. And that’s what it always felt like to us—an act of love rather than one of mere sex. Something that only got better with time and experience. Along with this—or maybe because of it—we were blessed with two pretty, kind, and intelligent daughters. And Richard’s fortunes were rising at a company he loved: Lerner, Reese, and Hamilton, one of the world’s leading international accounting firms. He had made senior vice president of LRH’s Assurance Services Group by
the time he was forty-three, specializing in something called business risk assessment, with the possibility of even greater glory to come.

“They’re sending me to Hong Kong for the global conference in two weeks,” he told me about a month before our twentieth wedding anniversary. “John says he wants to introduce me personally to the managing partners. I think you should come with me, Alice. We’ll stop off in Paris on our way home and really celebrate.”

But my daughters needed me just then. Olivia, a freshman at the University of Virginia, was in the throes of her first serious breakup, and I’d planned a tour of colleges with Franny. So we decided he should go alone, concentrate on networking and making the best possible impression, and we’d do something wonderful together when he got back. Of course, I’ve wondered almost every day since what would have happened if I’d thrown my parental responsibilities to the wind and gone with him. Or was his invitation some kind of ruse, along with everything else? Surely it was already too late by then? The kind of complicated financial shenanigans he was up to would have taken months, maybe even years, to organize and implement. That’s certainly what the investigators thought when they questioned me—over and over again—about the days leading up to Richard’s disappearance.

“How many suitcases did he leave with? What did he pack? Did he have any cash lying around the house that he might have taken with him?”

I really didn’t know. I honestly couldn’t say. Though I’d spent each waking hour—and so many sleepless ones—raking over every last ember of memory. But all I could come up with was that he seemed mildly upset that I’d forgotten to pick up his dark blue suit from the cleaners the day before he left.

“Why do you think that was?” the investigator from the DA’s office asked me, leaning forward with his mini-recorder.

“Because it was his favorite?” I replied.

“This isn’t anything to joke about, Mrs. Hyatt,” the FBI agent told me. “This is an extremely serious act of criminal fraud that took a hell of a lot of thought and planning. We have good reason to believe he had help. And we are looking into every aspect of your and your husband’s life and finances. So if you want to save yourself a lot of heartache down the pike, you might as well tell us everything you know right now.”

But even if I did know something about what Richard had done, there was nothing anyone could do about saving me from heartache. The whole thing unfolded in the confusing, slow-motion way of so many disasters. First, he didn’t call me when he landed in Hong Kong. Then his assistant at LRH phoned to ask what had happened in London.

“What do you mean? I thought Richard was going to Hong Kong.”

“He was, but he never made his connection in London. We thought maybe he’d taken ill? John Burbank’s e-mailed me three times this morning. Richard’s already missed the first session.”

He was going to end up missing all of them. And a lot more than that. Our anniversary. His daughters’ graduations. Their engagements. Marriages. He simply walked away from everything. He disappeared into thin air. But not without siphoning off—in an apparently brilliant and brazen series of money transfers—nearly two hundred million dollars from LRH’s three largest clients. Richard’s firm tried hard to keep a lid on what had happened, but that ended up only making matters worse. When the press learned about the “cover-up,” they tore into the story with a vengeance.
They smeared Richard’s reputation and LRH’s shocking lack of oversight and transparency all over the business pages and Internet. It was horrible.

And then it got worse.

The article made the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
a week after Richard went missing:

LRH FRAUDSTER HAD FEMALE ACCOMPLICE

Her name was Ilsa Nilsson. She was an account executive working with Richard in Assurance Services, and several named sources within the company offered the opinion that they were having an affair.

“She was always in his office.”

“They used to sneak out to lunch together.”

“You could just tell by the way he looked at her.”

According to the
Journal
, she disappeared the same weekend that Richard had; a brother claimed she was “planning to hook up with a friend in London.” A photo of the two of them sitting together at some LRH function from a year before soon surfaced on the Internet. There was Ilsa with her high Nordic cheekbones and swan neck, gazing adoringly at my husband. And Richard, a bottle of beer in his hand, facing the camera with an embarrassed grin.

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,” Plato purportedly said. Those words resonated with me when I first happened upon them a year or two after Richard vanished. At least, I thought, I wasn’t alone.

Well-meaning people told me it was time to move on. As though I could simply walk away—just as Richard had.

By then I was getting ready to sell the house in Westchester to pay off legal fees, and both of the girls had had to apply for
scholarships and student loans. By then I’d finally come to realize that what had happened wasn’t some kind of gigantic misunderstanding. I’d stopped waiting for the phone to ring. Or the front door to open. I no longer heard footsteps on the stairs at night. Richard wasn’t coming back. I sometimes wondered if he was even still alive. I imagined him dead—with her, of course, it had to be with her—in a car crash, drowned, a suicide pact. Not that I really wanted him to be dead. No, in fact, I actually preferred that he still be alive—so that I could kill him myself. With my own bare hands.

The worst thing, of course, was the self-doubt. Had I actually married a sociopath—or did he slowly change? Had Richard ever really loved me—or had he been deceiving me with consummate skill for more than twenty years? In the beginning, I clung to the belief that our marriage had been real. His love sincere. I knew in my heart that this was true. It
had
to be! Something—gambling, blackmail, bad investments—had forced him to take these crazy, desperate measures. But as the various investigations continued and no such evidence surfaced, I was slowly forced to relinquish even that possibility of solace. The questions continued in my mind, though. Back and forth. Old ones. New worries. Was Ilsa the first? Or had he been cheating on me from the very beginning? Everything we did, every word he said, became suspect. Shadowy. Full of double meanings. Shifting perspectives. I was fighting a hard battle.

It didn’t help that so many people assumed that I must know something about what my husband had been up to. I was interviewed by the FBI, the DA’s office, and the SEC on and off, more times than I can remember.

“Your neighbors claim you two were very, very close,” one of the FBI agents informed me. “In fact, everyone we’ve spoken to says that.”

What should have been a compliment became a curse. And it was impossible to even begin to explain any of this to my daughters. At first I assumed that Franny, who was still living at home when it happened, was taking the brunt of it. She complained about the constant disruptions, the satellite vans parked in front of the house, and the snide comments from her high school friends, but there was something in her essentially sunny and even-tempered nature that helped get her through. Olivia, on the other hand, had always been more introspective and self-critical. She’d also been more of a daddy’s girl than Franny. I didn’t realize just how hard the whole thing was on her until she came home for spring break that first year.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t even
try
to stop him,” she told me tearfully one night. “Why you just . . . let him go like that.”

“But, sweetie, I didn’t know—”

“Mom! Please! It’s
me
you’re talking to. You
had
to have known somewhere deep down inside. If he’d gotten himself into some kind of a financial mess, we should have helped him work it out. We should have
been
there for him, rather than forcing him to run away like that. God, he must have been so ashamed! You know it’s true. Why else would he have abandoned us like that? Just left us—without a word!”

How long can you go on hashing over the same questions—without finding any answers? Whatever Olivia and Franny might have felt or believed about my role in their father’s disappearance, they understood that I, too, was in a lot of pain. They were just beginning their lives. Mine, however, already half gone, had been totaled. Later on, after they graduated from college, started working, fell in love and married, the emotional turmoil surrounding their father’s deception stopped taking center stage in their hearts. And after I
moved up to the Berkshires, I saw less of them. So when we got together, we worked hard to make things go smoothly. Eventually, we stopped talking about what had happened. It had become, in time, something dark and threatening that hovered beneath the surface of our lives. Something that you could manage to ignore if you just kept your gaze on the horizon.

I thought it was better that way. Even Gwen, who had moved in with Franny and me during the worst of the scandal, learned to leave well enough alone when it came to my missing husband. I got short and snappish with her whenever she asked how I was “feeling about everything.” Though the fraud investigation was still officially open, as far as I was concerned the case was closed. That is, until I began to work for Mackenzie.