Echoes of Titanic (12 page)

“So basically,” Matt said, nodding in comprehension, “these people built a whole campaign around Adele and how her gifts have been passed down through the generations to you.”

“Correct.”

They were both silent for a long moment.

“Guess I can see where you're going with this,” he said finally. “Besmirching the name of Adele the way that guy did today could wipe out the significance of your entire campaign and put the value of B & T stock at an even lower point now than it was when you started.”

“Exactly.”

Matt let out a long, slow sigh. “Well, then,” he said philosophically, “that leaves just one last question, only now it applies to you instead of Tiffany.”

“What's that?” Kelsey asked, leaning her head back against the couch and looking over at her brother.

“How do
you
feel about ramen noodles?”

K
elsey awoke the next morning with swollen eyes and a bad headache. The night before, after Matt left, she'd gone to bed and cried herself to sleep. Today, however, she had no time for grief. She took several ibuprofen and thought about what lay ahead. There was much to do if she wanted to learn more about Rupert's claims and Gloria's death. Surely, if she worked diligently enough, she could get down to the truth behind both events, much as she and her team regularly dug up the facts on the people and businesses involved with each potential investment.

After a hot shower followed by a cold compress on her swollen eyes, Kelsey took a long time with her makeup and hair. She also dressed with care, not wanting to give the reporters she encountered today anything to criticize about her appearance. A navy-blue Ann Klein skirt and jacket felt right, and she paired it with a cream-colored blouse.

Out of sheer habit, she reached for Adele's hat pin, the one with an Irish harp at one end that she frequently wore on her lapel. When she realized what she was doing, she set it back in the jewelry box and looked for something else. Deep inside, a part of her felt guilty, as though the rejection of the pin was somehow a rejection of Adele herself. But that wasn't it. Her action of intentionally
not
wearing the pin had to do with focus and resolve and the need to face this situation head-on without any preconceived notions about what the true, bottom-line facts might actually be.

Adele had been, after all, a flesh and blood person, one who had flaws and made mistakes and, yes, even kept a few secrets. In theory, it was conceivable
that she could have been someone other than who she said she was. On the other hand, Kelsey knew to her core that she wasn't. Adele had
not
been an imposter.

So much for remaining objective.

Still feeling that nagging twinge of guilt, Kelsey picked the harp pin back up and held it in her hand. According to Adele, it had come as part of a set of two, bought for her and Jocelyn by Jocelyn's father. This half of the set had been hand tooled out of gold and was in the shape of an Irish harp. The other half, she'd said, was equally beautiful but had been made of silver and formed the shape of a string of musical notes. Each of the pins could be worn separately, but what made the set so unique was that the two pins could also be clipped together as one and used that way, with the silver musical notes seeming to rise up from the harp like a song.

Looking at the pin up close, it was easy to see the small slit in the side of the harp where the companion pin had been designed to attach. She'd asked her great-grandmother about that slit several times when she was a little girl, but whenever she did, Adele had become upset and changed the subject. It wasn't until Kelsey went to her father with the same question that she finally learned the truth: The slit was to hold the pin's mate, but that mate had been pinned to the hat of Adele's cousin Jocelyn the night
Titanic
went down. When Jocelyn's body disappeared, her pin had gone with it.

After Great-Grandmother Adele passed away, Kelsey learned that the harp hat pin had been left to her in the will. Even as a child, she recognized the significance of that and took on the full weight of the responsibility. She had allowed her mother to store the pin in the family safe until she was older and ready to take care of it. She'd meant to retrieve it at nineteen or twenty but ended up not asking for it until after she graduated from college. Once the pin was in her possession, Kelsey found herself thinking more and more about the other half of the set, the one with the silver notes on top. Surely, a pin set that lovely and unique hadn't been manufactured only once. There must be others out there somewhere.

As time went on, whenever she would pass an antique store or a collectible shop, she would find herself stepping inside and searching the glass cases for the mate to her pin. She knew how much Adele had pined for her late cousin her entire adult life, and even though both women were now gone, it seemed to Kelsey that if she could just find a duplicate of the missing pin, she would somehow bring closure to Adele's heartache as well.

Kelsey knew full well how silly that sounded, which is why she had never shared with another soul the thinking behind her hobby of collecting antique hat pins. Correction, she thought now. She had told one person: Cole Thornton. But that was a good five years ago, back when she thought they would be together forever. As it turned out, she'd been mistaken on that.

Only once had Kelsey requested a professional opinion about the likelihood of her ever finding the pin she so earnestly sought. After a thorough examination, the expert had told her that the set had likely been one of a kind, handmade by an artisan in England, and that no match would ever be found. But he hadn't been able to say that with one hundred percent certainty, so still she searched—in shops, on eBay, at flea markets and antique shows. Perhaps, she realized now, that obsession had been a way of staying connected to Adele even after she was gone.

Kelsey's thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a buzzer. Carefully placing the pin back inside her jewelry box, she closed the lid and headed for the intercom mounted beside the front door. Before she asked who was there, she leaned around the corner to check the time on the microwave. It wasn't even eight o'clock in the morning! Who could be here at this hour?

Afraid this might be a new tactic by a persistent reporter, she pushed the button and asked in her sternest tone who was there.

“It's Lou,” a familiar voice said in reply.

With a grin she pressed the button that would let him in downstairs and then quickly straightened up her kitchen and living room until she heard his knock at her door. When she swung it open, she expected to see the warm, smiling face of her old friend. It was Lou all right, but he definitely wasn't smiling. In fact, he looked mad.

“What am I, chopped liver?” he demanded.

“What's wrong?”

“What's wrong is that you won't answer your phone and you haven't returned any of my calls. Worse, I had to find out what happened last night by hearing it on the news this morning!”

The man seemed genuinely upset, so Kelsey invited him in. She offered him breakfast, but he said he'd already eaten.

“I'll take some coffee, though, if you have it,” he replied, sitting down on a stool at her tiny kitchen bar. “And since it's eight o'clock in the morning, bring on the high-octane stuff and keep it coming till I tell you to stop.”

Kelsey did as he asked, and once he was settled with a hot beverage in
front of him, she toasted herself a bagel and covered it with cream cheese. As she did, she apologized earnestly to Lou for having upset him. She explained about the numerous calls from reporters and the need to turn off the ringer, but she admitted there was no excuse for not contacting him once she got home last night to tell him about Gloria.

“Did you really find her body? That's what they said on the news anyway.”

Kelsey nodded. “It was horrible, Lou. I was cutting through the executive conference room on the fifth floor when I flipped on the light and spotted her hanging from a cord by her neck.”

He shook his head slowly from side to side and mused aloud about what would lead a person to do something like that. “That is,” he added, “if it really was a suicide. Any chance it might have been foul play, like they were saying on TV?”

“The detective who interviewed me seemed to be leaning more toward suicide,” she told him, “but they were definitely pursuing both possibilities.”

Lou was silent for a long moment. When he finally spoke, there was a deep sadness to his voice. “You know, back when I was at B & T, Gloria was a very good friend to me.”

“Oh, I know. When you left, she was the one who guided me in brokering the start-up money for your company.”

Lou shook his head, and Kelsey could tell that there was something he wanted to say.

“What is it?”

He shrugged. “I was just thinking how much happier she would have been in the long run if she'd done what I did and left the company five years ago, once she found out that she'd been passed over for promotion.”

Kelsey thought back, remembering some of the details of that difficult time. Five years ago, her father had been forced to take an early retirement, doctor's orders. Nolan had been having prolonged and significant blood pressure problems, and his doctor said if he didn't at least take a leave of absence from his very demanding job, he was going to end up having either a heart attack or a stroke.

Knowing he had no real choice in the matter, Nolan had devised what he thought was a sound exit strategy. He changed his own title from CEO to president, a position he could fill in a part-time, limited capacity with the goal of serving as a consultant who could be brought in from time to time to weigh in on important matters.

At the time everyone assumed he would be promoting Lou to fill the CEO position left vacant by the restructuring, and once Lou was in the top spot, the expectation was that Gloria would step into the position he'd vacated as COO. Instead, Nolan surprised everyone by leaving both Lou and Gloria exactly where they were in the hierarchy and bringing in a man from the outside, Walter Hallerman. Kelsey had been fairly new at the firm then, but even she had been able to see what a poor job her father had done of engineering the transition.

Lou and Gloria had both been devastated by the decision—not to mention deeply offended. It had been a stressful time at Brennan & Tate, with lots of closed-door discussions and whispered asides and tense interactions. In the end, Lou had made the decision to leave his job and strike out on his own. With Nolan's eventual blessing, B & T ended up investing in Lou's new business. In the first deal Kelsey had ever brokered on her own, she had managed to obtain a significant amount of money for him, enough for Strahan Realty Trust to get rolling and eventually establish itself as a significant part of the New York financial scene. Business had continued to go well, and that first investment was still providing significant returns.

Gloria, on the other hand, had chosen to stay at Brennan & Tate despite the significant snub. Swallowing her hurt and anger, she poured all of her energies into her job and continued to serve the company well. It was a choice that many at B & T had questioned, but as the boss's daughter, Kelsey had never been privy to the thinking behind Gloria's decision.

Now Lou was sitting in her kitchen, sharing with Kelsey the depth of Gloria's rage and pain back then. “I think if she'd gotten out, like I did, and made a new life for herself elsewhere, she might still be alive. If it really was suicide, I gotta wonder if at least part of it was about all that unresolved hurt from being passed over by your father five years ago. Otherwise, why do the deed at the office, you know? It's almost like she was trying to send a message.”

Kelsey swallowed a bite of her bagel. “I disagree, Lou. Gloria and I have worked together closely ever since, and I've never had the feeling she was repressing anything. When my dad ended up having his stroke last year anyway, in spite of the early semi-retirement and the things he'd done to lower his blood pressure, Gloria just kept saying how sad it was that he had gone through all the grief of restructuring the upper echelon and in the end it hadn't really gained him a thing. She was talking about
Dad's
grief, not her own. Does that sound like someone who was harboring resentment? When
someone's been terribly wronged, do they turn around and show pity for the one who wronged them?”

Even as she asked the question, Kelsey remembered the scene from the day before, in the security office with Rupert Brennan, when she'd been surprised to find that in the midst of her anger at the man she also found herself feeling kind of sorry for him. Rolling that around in her mind for a bit, she wondered if maybe Lou had a point. Certainly, Gloria had been devastated when she was passed over for that promotion. Consummate professional that she was, perhaps she'd only been wearing her game face these past five years, swallowing down her true feelings under the guise of “getting on with the business of business” as she liked to say.

Unable to come to any definite conclusions, they decided to change the subject. Their conversation lightened somewhat after that, with Lou having a second cup of coffee and Kelsey finishing up her bagel and placing her plate in the tiny dishwasher. Then he rose and said he needed to get going.