Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (5 page)

     "How long has
this
been going on?" Charmie asked.

     "About a month," Philippa said. "It happened by accident. I certainly had no intention of getting involved with my secretary." She turned and faced her friend. "Ricky helps take away the pain, Charmie."

     "Whatever works," Charmie said, and then she was silent for a moment, gazing at the rippling water in the pool, a wistful look on her face. Then she said, "What would Esther think?" referring to Philippa's daughter, who was attending college in California. Ricky was only a few years older than Esther.

     "I don't think she'd like it," Philippa said as they walked to the shaded part of the terrace. When Philippa had told her daughter that she had a male secretary, Esther had said that was "cool." But as far as having sex with him...

     "How was your flight?" Philippa asked as they sank into softly cushioned garden chairs beneath a striped awning. The white wrought-iron table had already been set with a chilled bottle of wine, a bowl of Tasmanian apples, mangoes, and kiwifruit, and a wedge of Brie and crackers. All of which Nyree had thoughtfully set out for her employer when she had seen what was happening in the pool.

     "It seemed to take forever!" Charmie said, eyeing the food with some skepticism. During her visits to Australia, she had developed a taste for local food, none of which was in evidence here. "Why does Australia have to be so far away! And how is the book coming?"

     "So far so good," Philippa said as she reached over to a box embedded in the thick white wall and pushed a button. When she heard a masculine voice say, "Yes, Miss Roberts?" she said, "Ricky, please bring me yesterday's pages."

     "Are you in love with him?" Charmie asked quietly.

     "With Ricky?" Philippa said. "No. But I think he is with me, or perhaps with the
idea
of me. It will pass—these infatuations always do."

     "I take it then that Esther isn't coming down to join you for Christmas?"

     "My daughter is in love! And this time I think it's for real." Esther was studying biochemistry with the intention of going into research; she had recently informed her mother that she was having a "real" relationship with
another biochem major. "Esther asked me if it was all right if she stayed in California for the holidays. I told her I didn't mind." She looked at her friend. "But speaking of which, why aren't you in Ohio with Nathan and the kids?"

     Charmie placed the leather portfolio she had brought with her on the table. "Philippa, we need to talk," she said, suddenly serious.

     Philippa looked at the woman who had been her closest friend for years. Charmie was a self-described unrepentant sensualist who embraced life with every one of her five senses. The flamboyant caftan she was wearing, swirling around her generous figure in outrageous flamingo pink and aquamarine rayon, was typical of her wardrobe, which consisted mainly of rayon and silk outfits that draped, floated, or swam around her body. Her hair, a dark steamy blond that was almost the color of butterscotch, was worn on top of her head in a careless cloud tied up in a matching pink and green rayon scarf. Large, blocky jewelry finished the picture: a strand of plastic beads the size of golf balls around her neck, huge plastic bangles clacking on both wrists.

     "Is it bad news?" Philippa asked quietly.

     "It isn't good," Charmie said, and she noted the immediate response in her friend's eyes, a mental squaring of the shoulders that Charmie had witnessed a number of times over the years, whenever challenges had risen up before Philippa. Charmie hoped that her friend would be able to face this new crisis with the same resolve with which she had faced all the others. Philippa was a woman who had fought to believe in herself, just as she had taught others to fight to believe in themselves instead of measuring themselves according to other people's opinions. "Ignore what anyone else thinks," Philippa had once said, standing at a hospital bedside, while Charmie had struggled to stay alive. "Forget everyone else and stand up for yourself and go your own way." Charmie's life had turned around after that moment, and she hadn't looked back since.

     Nyree appeared with a tray of drinks, a tall, frosty gin for Charmie, iced tea for Philippa. She gave her employer an inquiring glance, looked over at the pool, and then disappeared back into the house.

     "Whatever your bad news is, Charmie," Philippa said after tasting the
tea and appreciating its invigorating snap, "I'm glad you're here. I think I have some
good
news. Ivan Hendricks called two days ago. He has news for me, and he's coming to report in person."

     "Ivan!" Charmie said, brightening suddenly, as the memory of an explosive sexual encounter she once had with the private investigator flashed into her mind. "What's it about?"

     "He says he thinks he's found my sister."

     When Charmie gave her a guarded look, Philippa quickly added, "I know, he's said that before. But this time he sounded quite certain. He says he has hard evidence to show me. Oh, I know I shouldn't get my hopes up, but I can't help it." For years, Philippa had been searching for her sister, a twin from whom she had been separated at birth.

     "When will he be here?"

     "Soon. He said he was coming in on the morning Qantas flight."

     A tall shadow fell over them and they looked up to see Ricky standing in the sunlight, his wet golden hair combed back into a neat ponytail. The jeans had been replaced by crisp white Bermuda shorts, and he wore a starched safari shirt, open at the neck. He smiled broadly as he handed Philippa a sheaf of papers, and said, "Yesterday's pages, Miss Roberts."

     "Thank you," she said, taking them. Charmie watched him walk back into the house. "My, my," Charmie murmured, still amazed at what she had seen in the pool.

     "Here you are, my latest notes," Philippa said, handing the pages to Charmie. "Tell me what you think."

     Charmie read the points out loud. "Point Thirty-six:
Soft
butter spreads more thinly. Thirty-seven: AbdomIN." She looked at Philippa. "I like that one. It's new, isn't it?"

     "I thought it up last week."

     Charmie resumed reading: "Point Thirty-eight: A pint of fluid weighs a pound. Point Thirty-nine: Don't eat over the sink." She looked at Philippa again and their eyes locked for a second, both remembering the days when Charmie would make a panful of spaghetti carbonara and stand over the sink and eat it, straight out of the skillet, and then hastily do the dishes before her husband came home.

     Charmie sighed and handed the pages back to Philippa. Old habits, conquered long ago. "I like it," she said. "Do you have all ninety-nine?"

     "Not yet, I'm shy about ten."

     "How about 'Sex burns calories'?"

     Philippa laughed. The book had, in fact, been Charmie's idea. Four years had passed since the last Starlite best-seller, and writing a new book had seemed to Charmie good therapy for Philippa, who was still trying to deal with a tragic and untimely death.

     "So," Philippa said. "Why are you here?"

     "For two reasons, actually. Here's the first," Charmie said as she laid an item from
The Wall Street Journal
before Philippa. "This company has been quietly buying up Starlite stock."

     After Philippa read the article, she gave Charmie a puzzled look. "They've bought nearly three percent of our stock. What do you suppose it means?"

     "We have no idea. I did some looking into this Miranda International, which is based in Rio, and they're mainly involved with importing rubber and tropical nuts."

     "Have you contacted them?"

     "Alan was on it when I left," she said, referring to the chief financial officer of Starlite, also a member of the executive committee.

     "Do you suspect they're planning a takeover?"

     Charmie shrugged. "It's a mystery to us. But we'll have to hurry and put a stop to it. Alan is going to request that they sign a standstill agreement. Keep your fingers crossed that they do."

     As she reread the article, Philippa's bafflement deepened. Who or what was Miranda International, and why had they suddenly shown such aggressive interest in her company? "A takeover wouldn't make sense, Charmie. We don't have a lot of cash on our balance sheet, which would make us desirable. And Starlite has never been regarded as a good short-term investment. What on earth do these people have in mind?"

     Charmie felt more concern than she showed. Heavy buying posed a real threat to Starlite; she and Philippa could lose the company. She was praying Alan Scadudo would get Miranda to sign a friendly standstill agreement.

     "That's what I asked myself," she said, reaching into the folio again and bringing out another set of papers. "All of a sudden there's a lot of active trading involving a company that has had very little activity recently on the New York Stock Exchange. And people want to know why.

     You should have seen the switchboard light up when this article came out. Everyone wants to know if Starlite is planning on coming out with a dynamite new product, or if we've brought in some high-powered executive, or if maybe there's a larger company that wants to take us over. Everyone is asking what inside information does Miranda International have that suddenly makes Starlite so desirable? And Philippa, there isn't anything. There's no reason at all why another company should suddenly go after us. So I did some research to see what it was that Miranda could possibly be interested in."

     "And what did you find?"

     "Plenty, and all of it mighty peculiar. First of all, I went through our books and found out that, for some reason, Starlite's financial reserves are way down. So I went through accounts payable and receivable. At first I didn't come across anything unusual. But then I found this." She handed Philippa a computer printout.

     "As you can see," she explained while Philippa read the sheet, "this is a list of our vendors, everyone who supplies Starlite. Now here you see Specialty Foods, from whom we buy products for our frozen food line. If you recall, we switched to them last year when we dropped our account with Canaan Corp."

     "I remember," Philippa said.

     "But look here." Charmie pointed to an item on the list, her plastic wrist bangles grazing the page.

     Philippa read it. "Canaan is still on the books. Why?"

     "Look again. It's not Canaan, it's
Caanan.
The spelling is different."

     Philippa looked at Charmie. "A typo?"

     "That was what I thought until I went back through the payouts for the past year and discovered that we've been paying regularly to this Caanan Corporation. I called our plant in San Francisco, and they said they've only received supplies from Specialty Foods. Nothing from Canaan in over a
year. So then I went back through the invoices, and I found this." She handed Philippa a standard invoice sheet, with a logo and the name "Caanan Corporation" at the top in red print.

     "If you look closely," Charmie said, "this looks very much like an invoice from Canaan Corporation, but there's that misspelling. And look, the logo is slightly different."

     "What about this address?"

     "It doesn't exist. And this phone number is out of order."

     "A bogus company? How much have we paid out to them?"

     "Nearly a million dollars."

     "My God."

     "Do you know what I think, Philippa? That after we terminated our account with Canaan, someone got into the main computer bank, doctored the Canaan name so that at casual glance it still looked the same, had some invoices printed up, and then had checks sent out."

     "But why wouldn't accounts payable catch it? They know we stopped dealing with Canaan over a year ago."

     "Philippa, do you know how many people we have working in that department? An accounts clerk with a daily printout load looks at this invoice, runs it through the computer, sees that Caanan is one of our regular accounts, and cuts the check. She probably doesn't even know we changed over to Specialty Foods."

     As Philippa looked at the papers spread before her, the enormity of it began to sink in. "This could only mean that someone
inside
Starlite is embezzling."

     "And what's worse," Charmie said, "if it hadn't been for this Miranda thing I never would have caught it. Whoever it is could have kept it up indefinitely, or at least until we ran a major audit, by which time he or she would have gotten away with an even bigger bundle."

     Philippa looked at Charmie. "But who could it be, Charmie? Surely it couldn't possibly be one of us."

     By "one of us," Philippa meant one of a small group of friends who went back many years to the very early days of Starlite, when Philippa had run the business from her living room.

     "I was wondering if the two could be related," Charmie said. "Could someone inside Starlite be embezzling funds and then turning around and buying up shares? Because then it would mean that someone inside Starlite is planning a takeover."

     "Charmie," Philippa said as a new thought struck her. "Who at Starlite knows you're here?"

     "No one. I didn't think it was a good idea to alert the culprit, if there is one. They all think I'm in Ohio with Nathan and the children. Nathan has instructions to call me here if I receive any calls at his place."

     "But Alan knows you came to see me."

     "No. I didn't think it wise to tell him. Or Hannah."

     "Do you suspect Alan?" Philippa said in alarm. Alan had been with the company since the beginning; he was one of the founding members.

     "No, I don't suspect Alan. But I thought it prudent to practice extreme caution for the moment, until we know for sure what's going on. The two items might not be related at all. Or they might be. But whatever is going on, it's damned serious and we have to be careful."

     "Yes, of course," Philippa said, but she felt suddenly cold inside the thick bathrobe.

     Nyree appeared from the living room just then to announce the arrival of Ivan Hendricks, the private investigator.