The Dark Tide Free for a Limited Time (29 page)

Like a ghost, Charles stepped out of the thick, close brush.

Karen’s heart came to a stop.

There was a strange tentative smile on his lips. He looked at her and took off his sunglasses. “Hello, baby.”

A knifepoint of shock stabbed through her. “Charles…?”

Staring back at her, he nodded.

Karen’s hand shot to her mouth. She didn’t know what to do at first. Her breath was stolen away. She just stared. He looked different. Completely changed. She might not have recognized him if she’d passed him on the street. He had on a khaki baseball cap, but underneath Karen could see that his hair was virtually shaved. He had a stubbly growth over his cheeks, his eyes hidden. His body looked leaner, more built. And tanned. He wore pink and green floral beach trunks, water sandals, and a white tee. She couldn’t tell if he looked older or younger. Just different.

“Charles?”

He stepped toward her. “Hello, Karen.”

She stepped back. She didn’t know quite what to feel. She was a jumble of confused emotions, suddenly seeing the man with whom she had shared every joy and important moment in her adult life, whom she had mourned as dead, and feeling the disgust that now burned in her for the stranger who had abandoned her and their children. She felt herself rear back. Just hearing his voice. The voice of someone she had buried. Her husband.

Then he stopped. Reflexively, she took a couple of awkward steps to narrow the distance. His gaze was tentative, uneasy. She stared through him like an X-ray. “You look so different, Charles.”

“Comes with the territory,” he shrugged, a thin, wiry smile.

“I bet it does. Nice touch, Charles, this spot.” Continuing to walk toward him, absorbing the sight of him, like sharp, uncomfortable light slowly settling into shade.

He winked. “I thought you’d like that.”

“Yeah.” Karen stepped closer. “You always had a good antenna for irony, didn’t you, Charles? You sure outdid yourself here.”

“Karen”—his complexion changed—“I am so sorry….”

“Don’t!”
She shook her head. “Don’t you say that, Charles.” Her blood was hot now, the shock over. The truth came back to her, why she was here. “Don’t you tell me you’re sorry, Charles. You don’t understand where sorry even begins.” A powerful current of anger and disbelief roared through her. She felt her fists close. Charles nodded, accepting the blow, removing his sunglasses. Karen stared, teeth clenched, narrowing her gaze into his familiar gray eyes.

She slapped him. Hard, across the face. He flinched, taking a step backward, but didn’t cover up.

Karen hit him again—harder, confusion boiling over into unleashed rage. “How could you?
Goddamn you, Charles!
How can you be standing here in front of me?” She raised her hand and struck him again. This time in the chest, with her fist, send
ing him reeling back. “Goddamn you to hell, Charles! How could you do this to me?
To us?
To Alex and Sam, Charles, your family. It killed us. You took a part of us with you, Charles. We can never get that back. But
you,
you’re here…. You’ll never know. We mourned you, Charles, as deep as if it were a part of ourselves that had died.” She pounded his chest again, tears of anger glistening in her eyes, Charles now deflecting the blows, which continued to rain on him, but not moving away. “We cried for you every day for a goddamn year. We lit candles in your memory.
How can you be standing here, Charles?”

“I know, Karen,” he said, bowing his head. “I know.”

“No,
you don’t know, Charles.” She glared. “You have no fucking idea what it is you’ve stolen from us. From Sam and Alex, Charles. And for what? But
I
know. I know exactly what you’ve done. I know what a lie you’ve lived. I know what you’ve kept from me. Dolphin. Falcon. Those tankers, Charles. That old guy in Pensacola…”

His eyes fixed on her. “Who have you been talking to, Karen?”

She hit him again. “Go to hell, Charles. Is that what you want from me here? You want me to tell you what I know?”

Finally he caught her arm, his fingers wrapping around her wrist.

“You say you know!
You don’t, Karen. You’ve got to listen to me and hear me out. I never meant to hurt you like this. God knows, in a million years, I never meant for you to find out. Whatever I did, I did it to save you, Karen. All of you. I know how you must hate me. I know what it must feel like for you to see me here. But you have to do one thing for me, Karen. Please, just hear me out. Because whatever I did, and why I’m standing here
now,
taking my life in my hands, I did for you.”

“For me?”

“Yes, for you, Karen. And the kids.”

“All right, Charles.” Karen sniffed back tears. They moved
out of the sun, near the brush. They sat down in the sand, cooler there. “You’ve always been able to charm me, haven’t you, Charlie? Let me hear your best shot at the truth.”

He swallowed. “You say you know what I’ve done. The offshore trading, Falcon, Dolphin Oil…It’s all true. I’m guilty of all of it. I ran money for years I never told you about, Karen. I ran into some problems. Liquidity problems. Big ones, Karen. I had to cover myself. I panicked. I concocted this elaborate fraud.”

“Those empty tankers…You were falsifying oil.”

Charles nodded and sucked in a breath. “I needed to. My reserves were so low, if the banks found out, they would call in my loan agreements. I was leveraged up eight to one, Karen. I had to create collateral. Yes.”

“Why, Charlie, why? Why did you have to do these things? Didn’t I love you enough, Charlie? Wasn’t I there for you? Didn’t we have a good enough life together? The kids…”

“It was never that, Karen. It had nothing to do with you.” He shook his head. “You remember years ago when I got overleveraged and Harbor was about to go under?”

Karen nodded.

“We would have been totally underwater. I would have had
nothing,
Karen. I would have ended up on some trading desk again, with my tail between my legs, trying to work myself back. I would’ve spent years paying off that debt. But it all came at a price, Karen.”

“A price?”

“Yeah.” He told her about the funds he’d been overseeing. “Not the birdshit little accounts I had at Harbor.” The private partnerships. Falcon. Managed offshore. “Billions, Karen.”

“But it was dirty money, Charles. You’re a money launderer. Why don’t you call it what it is? Who did this to you, Charles?”

“I’m
not
a money launderer, Karen. You don’t understand—you don’t judge these kinds of funds. You run them. You manage
the money. That’s what I do, Karen. It was our way out. And I took it, Karen, for the past ten goddamn years. I didn’t know where the hell it all came from or who they fucking robbed or stole it from. Just that it was there. And you know what? I didn’t care. They were accounts to me. I invested for them. It was the same, the same as the Levinsons and the Coumiers and Smith fucking Barney. I’ve never even met these people, Karen. Saul found it all for me. And what do you think, there aren’t others? There aren’t people doing this every day, respected people who come home every night and toss the ball with the kids, and watch
ER,
and take their wives to the Met. People like me! It’s out there, Karen. Drug financiers, mobsters, people siphoning off their country’s oil pipelines. So I grabbed it. Like anyone else would have. It was our way out. I’ve never laundered a penny, Karen. I just managed their accounts.”

Karen looked at him—like a laser, looked through him. The truth, like some haze in the sky, melting away. “You didn’t just manage their accounts, Charlie. That sounds so good, doesn’t it? But you’re wrong.
I know….
This is what Jonathan Lauer wanted me to know, Charlie. After you so conveniently ‘died.’ But now
he’s
dead, Charlie. For real. He’s not coming back on some island. Like you…He was set to testify at some hearing a few weeks back, but he was killed, run over, just like that innocent boy in Greenwich, Charlie.”

Charles averted his face.

“The one you went to see, Charlie, after Grand Central, when you stole that person’s identity. The kid you helped kill, Charlie. Or
did
kill for all I know. I have no fucking idea.

“What was he going to do, Charlie, turn you in? Blow your little scam out of the water? You’re not some money launderer—you’re a whole lot worse, Charlie. These people, they’re not coming back. Not to mention how many thousands were ruined or murdered in the name of all this money you so sacredly invested. Oh, Charlie…
what the hell did you do?
How did you lose
your way? This was your big way out, right, baby…? Well, look at you! Look at what the hell it’s done.”

Charles stared at her, eyes pleading. He shook his head and moistened his dry lips. “I didn’t do that, Karen. What you think. I swear. You can hate me if you want, just hate me for the things I’ve done.” He took off his cap and ran his hand over his shaved scalp. “I didn’t kill that boy, Karen. No matter what you think. I went up there to try to save him.”

“Save him?” A surge of anger flared up in Karen. “Like you were going to save
me,
Charlie?”

“I went there to stop him, Karen! I knew what they were threatening to do.”

“
Who,
Charles?” Karen shook her head in frustration. “Tell me who?”

“I can’t spell it out for you, Karen. I don’t even want you to goddamn know.” Charles’s face dimmed, and he drew in a harried breath and puffed his cheeks, slowly exhaling. “I had met with him once before. Near his shop. I tried to persuade him to convince his bullheaded father to simply let things go. If it got out, what we were doing with the tankers, it could unravel everything. You don’t have a fucking clue where it would go. So I went there. Back to Greenwich. After the bombing. I was totally rattled. Part of me saw this as a chance to simply disappear. I should’ve died there anyway. These people had threatened me, Karen. You have no idea. Another part of me just wanted to make this whole thing go away.

“So I called him. Raymond. To come and meet me. I rang him from across the street, using the dead guy’s name. And I sat there, in that goddamn booth, not knowing what I was going to do or what I was going to say. Just thinking, this whole thing has to end.
Now
. These people are bad. I can’t have this poor kid’s blood on my hands.

“And then I saw it.” Charles looked through her, staring blankly. “I saw that kid through the goddamn window, coming toward me, crossing the street, flipping open his phone…. I saw the car, a black SUV, coming down the Post Road parallel to him, picking up speed.

“The vehicle veered around the corner. The kid, these locks of red hair in a ponytail, realizing what was about to happen. That moment I knew that the door had closed for me, Karen. I had lost all that money. Falsified my reserves. These bastards wanted blood. And now I had this kid’s blood on my hands.” He looked at her. “You have to see it, Karen, I was at risk.
You
were at risk, the kids…. There was no turning things back for me. I wasn’t going to spend ten years in jail. I might as well have perished in that train. So I did.”

“For what, Charles? To protect those monsters?”

“You don’t understand.”
He shook his head at her. “I lost over half a billion dollars, Karen! Every day I watched, having to cover my long contracts, the spread between my position growing larger. Our life sliding away. I crashed through my reserves. I could no longer cover my loans. They were going to kill me, Karen. I needed to hold them off. So I started to fake things. I had these goddamn tankers crisscrossing the fucking globe—Indonesia, Jamaica, Pensacola…. All empty! And this goddamn bullheaded fool in Pensacola who wouldn’t go away…”

Karen touched his arm. He flinched slightly. “You could have told me, Charles. I was your wife. We were a family. You could have shared this with me.”

“How could I
share
it with you, Karen? They sent me Christmas
cards with the kids’ faces cut out. Would you have liked me to share that? They killed Sasha. They sent me this note saying the kids were next.
How about that, Karen?
These kinds of people, you don’t just send them out a report promising you’re going to make it up next quarter. Our home, that fancy life of ours—it all came at a price, Karen. Should I have
shared
that? Who I was? What I did? These people are killers, Karen. That’s the deal I made.”

“The deal you made? Goddamn it, Charlie, look at it now. Look at us. Are you happy with it?”

Charles drew in a deep, painful breath. “You know, I thought about leaving a hundred times. Taking us all. I even went as far as to get us passports. Fake ones. You remember, when I had us all take pictures? I said they were for visas to Europe, a trip we never took?”

Karen blinked, biting back tears. “Oh, Charlie…”

“So tell me,” Charlie went on, “should I have come to you, Karen? Is that the life you would have wanted? If I told you what I was and what we had to do, uprooting the kids, you, in days. Taking them out of school in the dark, away from everything they knew. Put all of you at risk. Made you all a part of this, too. What would you have said to me, Karen? Tell me, honey, would you have gone along?”

Charles looked at her, his gaze reflecting a shattered ray of understanding, answering the question for her. “These people have the means to track anyone, Karen. You would always have been at risk, the children…. When the bombing occurred, it was almost like a gift. The answer suddenly seemed so clear. I know you can’t see it like that. I know you think there were ways I could have dealt with this, and maybe there were. But not one that was safer, Karen. Not for you.”

“But it hasn’t been safe for us, Charlie.”
Harried, she told him about the visit of the people from Archer that first scared her, then the man who accosted Sam in her car. And recently
how she’d been sent that brochure from Tufts, where Sam was going to go, with the words
We’re still here
. They keep demanding all that money.”

“Just who have you been talking to, Karen?”

“No one, Charlie. This detective who’s been helping me. Saul. That’s all.”

Charlie’s jaw went tight. He took her hand. “How did you find out about me here? How did you first know I was alive?”

“I saw your face, Charlie!”
Karen’s eyes shone moist and wide, and she looked at him, fighting back a rush of tears.

“My face…?”

“Yes.” She told him about the documentary. How for a year she’d grieved for him, kept the parts of his life intact that she couldn’t put away, tried to heal the hole in her heart. “You don’t know what it was like, Charlie.” And then the documentary, on the anniversary. How she forced herself to watch but it was too much, and she went to shut it off.

And then the instantaneous flash of him. On the street. After the explosion. Looking away from the camera. “I saw you. Rushing by, in the crowd. I must have watched it a thousand times. But it was you. Impossible as it was for me to believe. I knew you were alive.”

Charles leaned back, his palms outstretched behind him. He chuckled, almost amusedly at first, in disbelief. Their lives, separated by death, crossing in a captured moment, despite a thousand precautions. “You saw me.”

“I didn’t know what to do. I was going crazy, Charlie. I didn’t tell the kids. How could I, Charles? They love you. They would die.”

Moistening his lips, he nodded.

“Then I found your safe-deposit box.”

His eyes grew wide.

“The one with your other passport, Charlie. In a different name. And all that money.”

“You found it how?”

Karen told him about the framed note sheet she’d received. From after the blast. Someone had found it at Grand Central. With all that scribbling on it. “Part of it was the information on the box. I had nothing else to go on, Charlie.”

Charles looked back at her. His face in shock. Almost ashen. A notepad. That had led her to him. Something that hadn’t been destroyed in the blast. Then he stiffened. His eyes grew hooded and dark. He squeezed her hand, but this time there was a coldness there, the pressure firmer than just support.

“Who else knows about this, Karen?”