A Soft Place to Fall (3 page)

You can't run away from your memories,
Annie,
she thought as Susan barreled into the parking lot at
full speed. The world wasn't big enough. Better to stay in the
house where they had been happy and comfort herself with the dear
and familiar. Didn't Annie know that she would still see him in
every shadow, hear his voice when the room was still, feel his
touch where no one had touched her in a very long time.

It was enough for Claudia. Sooner or later,
it would be enough for Annie, too.

#

Annie was wiping down the sink in the master
bathroom when she heard the Flemings pull into the driveway. They
drove one of those minivans that sounded like a thousand hamsters
spinning one gigantic wheel. The neighbors would hear them coming
three blocks away. She glanced down at her watch, visible above the
worn cuff of Kevin's old denim work shirt. It was only ten minutes
to three.

"You're early, " she muttered as she pushed
her hair away from her face with the back of her hand. What kind of
people were they? Didn't they know that being early was every bit
as rude as being late. She still had to vacuum the bedroom, coax
George and Gracie into their cat carriers, and then make sure the
felines hadn't left any personal messages behind for the new owners
to discover. She would need every single moment of the nine minutes
and thirty-seven seconds she had left.

She tossed the paper towel into the garbage
bag she'd been dragging from room to room then moved to the bedroom
window that overlooked the driveway. The Fleming children were
already in the backyard. She could hear their shrieks of excitement
over the groan of the tree swing that had been Kevin's last project
the summer before he died.

Joe and Pam Fleming were leaning against the
passenger door of their minivan. Her head rested against is chest
and he stroked her hair while they talked. Soft whispers of
conversation floated up toward the second floor window where Annie
watched them from behind the pale green curtains. It hurt to look
at them but she couldn't seem to turn away. She wanted to tell them
to hang on tightly to each other, that life wasn't always fair or
kind, but they would probably think she was crazy. They were young
and in love, with their whole lives stretched out before them like
a summer garden on a sunny day.

Down in the driveway the Flemings stole a
kiss. The sweetness of that gesture made Annie turn away from the
window. She missed the touches, the whispers, the laughter that
smoothed the bumpy patches every marriage encountered. She missed
the lovemaking, that sweet escape from reality. She missed being
the other half of someone's heart, and the temptation to barricade
herself behind a wall of memories was hard to resist. Staying,
however, was a luxury she couldn't afford and, in a way, she was
grateful. She might never have gathered the courage to leave if she
had a plump bank account and endless prospects.

It was time to go. She had known it for
months now. One morning she woke up and the house no longer felt
like home. Suddenly the old ways, the old routines, didn't fit and
she found herself dreaming about starting all over again in a place
that was hers alone. She had had that dream before but this time
was different. This time she was free to do something about it and
so, against everyone's advice, she put the house up for sale and
began the painful process of finally letting go of the past. She
paid off the last of Kevin's debts and bought the tiny Bancroft
cottage with the cash that remained. Warren tried to lower the
price three times but she stood firm when it came to accepting
charity and they negotiated a figure that satisfied both his kind
heart and her need to stand on her own two feet. The four room
cottage near the water was a far cry from her sprawling Victorian
on an acre of land but it represented a triumph of sorts to
Annie.

Her dreams of a family of her own had died
with Kevin but she still had a future, and for the first time in
years, that prospect made her happy.

How long had it been since she had felt
deeply happy? She couldn't even begin to guess. For a long time she
had known happiness only in fleeting bursts: a beautiful sunset, a
well-told joke, a good hair day. She missed that deeper sense of
joy that had been as much a part of her as the rhythm of her
heartbeat and she wanted it back. This move was a step in the right
direction.

Sometimes she wondered how Claudia did it,
living all these years in that big old house without John by her
side. As it was she saw Kevin everywhere, in every room, around
every corner. She heard his car in the driveway, his footfall on
the steps, the wail of the ambulance on that last night when
nothing, not even love, could save him. He had died in their bed,
the big brass one they had fallen in love with and couldn't afford,
died before the emergency crew could slap the paddles on his
chest.

He died before she had a chance to say
goodbye.

Before she had a chance to say, "I still love
you."

She couldn't remember the last time she had
said those words to him. She had been angry with him for so long
that love was more a memory than the living, breathing sacrament it
had been at the start. There were times when she had thought about
leaving him -- throwing her clothes into a suitcase, grabbing the
cats, and starting new someplace else, some place where the phone
didn't ring in the middle of the night and strange men didn't wait
on the porch in the darkness for her husband. He had taken
everything they had worked so hard to achieve and thrown it away on
horses and cards and the spin of a roulette wheel -- and in the
process, he had thrown away her love as well.

"Give me time, Annie," he had said not long
before he died. "I know I can make it all up to you."

Why hadn't she told him that she still loved
him, that she wanted to believe in him, that if he met her halfway
maybe they could find their way back to the life they'd dreamed
about when they were high school sweethearts and the world was
theirs for the asking? Instead, she had simply turned away from him
and, after a few moments, the front door closed softly behind him
and the distance between them grew a little wider until three weeks
later, he was dead and there was no turning back.

Susan and Eileen found her on the morning
after the funeral, alone in the bedroom, slamming an old wooden
baseball bat against the tarnished brass. "I hate you!" she'd
screamed with each slam of the bat. "Why did you do this to us?"
They'd tried to grab her arms, to hold her still, but she was wild
with rage and anger, stronger than she had ever been in her life,
and she broke free. She smashed mirrors and lamps, pulled his
clothes from his side of the closet and threw his running shoes
against the wall.

Her sisters-in-law tried to reason with her
but Annie was beyond their reach. It wasn't until they helped her
drag the mattress, box spring, and dented frame down the stairs and
outside with the rest of the trash that her adrenaline-fueled rage
ebbed and she sank to the curb, buried her face in her arms, and
sobbed as if her heart would break.

There had been times when she hated him,
times when she wondered why she stayed, but through it all she had
never once stopped loving him. She knew that now, two years too
late, when it no longer mattered to anyone but herself. Maybe if
she had loved him a little less and helped him a little more, she
wouldn't be a thirty-eight year old widow with two cats, bad
credit, and the feeling that after today nothing would ever be the
same again.

Chapter Two

If somebody
had told Sam Butler last summer that the following Labor Day
weekend would find him sharing the front seat of a used Trooper
with an aging yellow Labrador retriever, a stack of banker's boxes,
and the remnants of a Big Mac with fries, he would have settled
back on the deck of his shorefront rental and laughed.

Twelve months ago he was still the top guy in
the Personal Investment division at Mason, Marx, and Daniels on
Wall Street. He had the fat salary, the fancy car, and the great
apartment that went with it. He was the one they called "the
natural", the kid who had started in a boiler room making cold
calls, then worked his way up to a corner office with a window and
a list of accounts that was almost legendary. "If we could bottle
what Butler's got, we'd rule the universe," Franklin Bennett Mason
had said to the assembled troops at the last Christmas party.
Nobody had Sam Butler's drive, his determination, his ability to
convince strangers to hand over their life savings to a man they'd
met only fifteen minutes ago.

He was the best of the best, Sam Butler was,
and everyone in that tightly-knit world in which he operated knew
it. He was the one you wanted on your team. He kept his emotions
out of the work place. He was everybody's pal, but nobody's friend
and that touch of mystery only served to burnish his glow. The
truth was, he hadn't had time for friends. He'd been too busy
raising five brothers and sisters.

Sam never lied to his clients. He never
encouraged them to take risks he wouldn't take himself but if a
client was looking for a walk on the wild side of investing, Sam
would clear a path and serve as bodyguard. He understood
responsibility in a way few people his age could and he took his
clients' plans for the future as seriously as he took his own.
People responded to Sam. They always had. And in the narrow
universe called finance, he was a rising star. One of the cable
money channels had given him a ninety second spot one Tuesday night
a few years ago and that minute and a half had turned into a daily
three-minute closing bell gig that polished his reputation to the
same high gloss as the one on his leased BMW.

When he first began to suspect something was
wrong, he told nobody. He was pulling in the same amount of
business, but his cumulative numbers were going down. The market
was bullish, bonds were soaring, neither recession nor inflation
were anywhere on the horizon. His closing bell reports were sunny
and bright, visibility unlimited. The economy was about as good as
it could get and the fact that his clients weren't raking in the
bucks disturbed him but he did nothing about it. At least they
weren't losing money. Not yet. One more year, he told himself. That
was all he needed. One more year and the last of his siblings would
be finished with college and ready to tackle the world on her own.
Maybe then he'd have time for niceties like ethics.

He spent a few long weekends at the office
going through his files and an unsettling trend began to appear
through the endless streams of data. His clients were actually
beginning to lose money. Nothing significant -- at least not yet --
and nothing that couldn't be explained away with terms like profit
taking and seasonal adjustments but Sam could easily see the
pattern being established. Someone was quietly shifting small
quantities of blue chips into high risk ventures that, in Sam's
eyes, had FRAUD written all over them in capital letters and signed
with his name.

He told himself that it didn't matter. His
clients were only names and social security numbers attached to a
dollar figure. Hell, he wouldn't know most of them if he bumped
into them on the street. He had learned a long time ago that
personal attachments had no place in his business. He didn't want
to know about hospital bills or new grandchildren. He didn't want
to see family photos or share any of his own. He had made that
mistake early on in his career and it was a dangerous one. They
were accounts, not friends, but sometimes it was hard to remember
that.

Ten more months, that was all he needed.
Forty weeks longer and he'd be able to walk into Mason's office and
say goodbye.

And he almost made it. Nine weeks before the
day he planned to hand in his resignation, he came home to find two
guys in black suits waiting for him inside his apartment. He didn't
ask how they got in and they didn't volunteer. He didn't need to
ask why.

It seemed he wasn't the only one who had
caught onto what was happening at Mason, Marx and Daniels and,
thanks to some clever planning, so far all roads led straight to
Sam. The scope of what they were telling him almost made his knees
buckle. While he had been busy looking the other way, someone had
managed to erase one set of fingerprints from the scheme and
replace them with another set: Sam's. The men in the black suits
had a proposition for him, one he could refuse if he didn't mind
going directly to jail without passing go. They needed information
culled from the inside and they pointed out to Sam that it was in
his best interests to become their number one source.

He began to keep a detailed log of names,
dates, and percentages and when that log became too hot to store on
his computer, he started snapping photos of the data on screen with
a tiny camera he kept hidden in his shirt pocket. He filled
notebook after notebook with contemporaneous data, suspicions, and
thoughts, then locked them away in a safe deposit box back in his
old Queens neighborhood, along with the files and the photos and
everything else he'd been able to lay his hands on. A second key to
the box had been mailed to an address in Arlington, Virginia.

He probably would have been able to pull it
off if it hadn't been for Mrs. Ruggiero. Mrs. R was his first
client, a widow from the old neighborhood where he'd grown up. Mrs.
R was the one who'd made sure the Butler kids were fed and watched
out for during those first few weeks after their mother's death and
then again after their father died. Years later, she had come to
him with the insurance monies from her late husband's policy and
asked him to invest it for her "so I should be comfortable one
day." Something came over him when he saw what was happening to her
bottom line. It hit him in a way nothing else had. He thought of
the box of homemade cookies that arrived at the office every
Christmas, the invitations to Easter Sunday dinner that he always
refused because the old neighborhood sometimes seemed light years
away. He thought about his mother and how she and Mrs. R used to
head out to All Souls Church on Francis Lewis Boulevard for the
Friday night bingo games.