Chương 6
“I saved her life.”
Eleanor waited.
He turned back.
“You want a monster because that makes tonight simple.”
“I do not want any of this.”
“You wanted Celeste dead more than you wanted her difficult.”
Eleanor slapped him.
The sound cracked through the empty ballroom.
A catering employee at the far end stopped moving.
Eleanor’s hand stung.
Victor’s head turned with the blow.
For several seconds neither of them spoke.
Then Victor faced her again.
There was a red mark high on his cheek.
He did not touch it.
“That,” he said quietly, “is why she stayed away.”
Eleanor’s fingers began to tremble.
She curled them into her palm.
Victor looked at the staff member across the room.
“Could you give us a minute?”
The employee looked at Eleanor.
“Go,” she said.
The man left.
Victor lowered himself into one of the ballroom chairs.
He suddenly looked exhausted.
“I found Celeste eleven months ago.”
Eleanor remained standing.
“Where?”
“Outside Bethlehem.”
“Pennsylvania?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“A private investigator.”
“We stopped the private search two years ago.”
“You stopped paying for it.”
The distinction irritated her because it was true.
“You continued?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“At first? Because she begged me not to.”
Eleanor stared at him.
Victor rubbed both hands over his face.
“She had Mia. She was living in a rental above a transmission shop. She looked awful. She had prescriptions from three urgent-care clinics and cash in envelopes because she didn’t trust banks.”
“Why did she let us think she was dead?”
“She didn’t plan it that way.”
“Then what happened?”
Victor looked at the portrait again.
“You remember the wreck.”
Eleanor did.
Celeste’s car had been found in a ravine in West Virginia nearly four years earlier, badly damaged after leaving a mountain road. There had been blood inside, her coat, her purse, and no body.
Searchers found tracks leading toward a creek and then nothing.
In the weeks afterward there had been reported sightings.
Most were false.
One was probably real.
Investigators came to believe Celeste had survived and left voluntarily.
Eleanor did not.
Not at first.
Then months passed.
A year.
Two.
Somewhere along the way hope became humiliating.
The family shifted from saying missing to saying presumed dead.
The foundation established an arts fellowship in Celeste’s name.
Victor handled the language.
Victor handled everything.
“She woke up in a stranger’s truck two counties away,” Victor said. “A couple found her walking along the road. She wouldn’t go to a hospital because she had pills on her and she was terrified someone would call you.”
Eleanor’s face went hot.
“That makes no sense.”
“It made sense to her.”
“She had a child.”
“Yes.”
“She had a responsibility.”
“Yes.”
“Then why—”
“Because injured people are not famous for making excellent decisions.”
Eleanor stopped.
Victor leaned back.
“She stayed with the couple for three days. Then took a bus. Then another. She called someone she knew from before. By the time she was thinking clearly enough to understand what the search had become, she saw the news coverage.”
“And decided to let us bury her?”
“There was no burial.”
“Do not correct me.”
“She saw you speaking to reporters. She saw me. She saw the speculation about drugs. About her marriage. About why she’d cut you off. She panicked.”
Eleanor remembered the microphones outside the house.
She remembered saying Celeste had struggled privately.
She had believed she was protecting her.
Perhaps Celeste had heard something else.
Victor continued.
“She moved around. Changed Mia’s school twice. Worked remotely doing design contracts under Carter. She got worse after the wreck. Pain medication, then anxiety medication, then whatever she could get.”
“You knew all this.”
“When I found her.”
“And you hid her.”
“She asked me to.”
“Then why was the door locked?”
Victor looked at his hands.
There it was.
The point at which his story no longer moved easily.
Eleanor pulled out a chair and sat across from him.
“Tell me the rest.”
He gave a bitter smile.
“You’re not going to like your part.”
“I have not liked any part.”
“Celeste still had copies of the Marlowe files.”
Eleanor’s stomach tightened.
The name had not been spoken inside the family for almost five years.
Marlowe Consulting had been an outside strategic firm used during the restructuring of several Vance properties.
Celeste had claimed the company was effectively controlled by one of Victor’s college friends and that money had been routed through inflated consulting contracts to cover losses elsewhere in the group.
Victor said she misunderstood temporary intercompany financing.
The auditors found poor controls, no proof of theft, and enough sloppiness to embarrass everyone.
Eleanor had ended the internal review.
She told herself the issue had been corrected.
Celeste told her she was choosing Victor over the truth.
Three weeks later, she stopped attending board meetings.
Six months later, she left New York.
“I thought that was resolved,” Eleanor said.
“No, you ordered it resolved.”
“Did you steal from the foundation?”
Victor stared at her.
“That’s your question?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Did you move money improperly?”
He looked away.
“Victor.”
“I moved money.”
“How much?”
“At different points? About eighteen million.”
Eleanor felt as if the floor shifted.
“To where?”
“Operating companies that were in trouble.”
“Foundation money?”
“Some.”
“Restricted funds?”
“Some.”
She stopped breathing for a moment.
Victor leaned forward.
“It went back.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“With records showing where it had gone?”
His silence answered.
Eleanor looked down at her hands.
The platinum ring suddenly looked vulgar.
“You lied to the audit.”
“I limited what they saw.”
“You lied.”
“Yes.”
“And Celeste had proof.”
“She had copies of approvals and internal messages.”
“From you.”
“From several people.”
“Including me?”
Victor’s eyes met hers.
“Yes.”
Eleanor remembered signing papers during the year her husband was dying.
Stacks of them.
Victor would mark yellow tabs.
She would ask, “Anything unusual?”
May you like
He would say, “No.”
Sometimes Celeste would call afterward and accuse them both of treating governance like family housekeeping.
