Silver Girl (17 page)

“Oh,” she said. She thought for a moment that Dev had heard about the slashed tires and was calling to offer her some legal counsel—but that was impossible. “It goes.”

“Listen,” Dev said. “Burt and I had a meeting with the Feds. They’re now convinced there is upwards of ten billion dollars stashed somewhere overseas. Freddy’s still not talking. The Feds are willing to hold off pressing conspiracy charges on you, and possibly Leo also, if they get your cooperation.”

Meredith sank into one of the dining-room chairs. From there, she could see the blue of the ocean. It was a dark, Yankee blue, different from the turquoise water in Palm Beach or the azure water of Cap d’Antibes. “What kind of cooperation?” Meredith said. She sighed. “I’ve already told you everything.”

“I need ideas about where that money might be,” Dev said.

“I thought I was clear,” Meredith said. She took a metered breath. “I don’t know.”

“Meredith.”

“I don’t know!” Meredith said. She stood up and walked over to the window. “You were very kind to me back in New York. And I repaid you by being honest. I told the Feds the truth. Now they’re trying to bribe me with my own freedom and, worse still, my son’s freedom, which we deserve anyway, because I didn’t know the first thing about what was going on. And you know and I know and Julie Schwarz knows that Leo didn’t either. I wasn’t privy to any of Freddy’s business deals. They didn’t interest me. I’m not a numbers person. I majored in American literature. I read Hemingway and Frost, okay? I did my thesis on Edith Wharton. I can give you a detailed explanation on the use of the outsider in
The Age of Innocence,
but I don’t know what a derivative is. I don’t properly know what a hedge fund is.”

“Meredith.”

“I don’t know where Freddy put his money.” Meredith was screaming now, though in a low voice, so as not to alarm Connie. “There was an office in London. Have you checked there?”

“The Feds are investigating the people in London.”

“I never once visited the London office. I didn’t know
a single person
who worked there. And those were the bad guys, right?”

“Those were some of the bad guys,” Dev said.

“I don’t even know their names,” Meredith said. “I was never introduced. I couldn’t pick them out of a crowd of two. Freddy took me to London three times, and the first time we were college kids, backpacking. The other two times Freddy visited the office, and do you know where I went? I went to the Tate Gallery to see the Turners and the Constables. I went to Westminster blinking Abbey.”

“What the Feds are looking for are buzzwords,” Dev said. “Phrases. People’s names. Things Freddy repeated that might not have made sense. One of the words that turned up in the files is ‘dial.’ Do you know the meaning of the word ‘dial’?”

Meredith gave a short laugh. “That was the name of Fred’s eating club at Princeton.”

“Really?” Dev said. He sounded like he’d discovered a gold nugget in his sieve.

“Really,” said Meredith. Freddy had been the king of the pool table at Dial. He had wooed Meredith with his dead eye, twelve ball in the right corner pocket. They used to get drunk on keg beer and raid the kitchen at Dial late at night, and Freddy would whip up his specialty—a fried chicken patty with a slice of tomato and Russian dressing. Nothing Meredith had eaten before or since had tasted better. Freddy had been able to let loose back then—drink too much, stay up late. He had those incredible looks—the black hair, the clear blue eyes. Meredith remembered asking him if he resembled his father or his mother.
I don’t look like my mother,
he said.
And I never met my father, so I couldn’t say.
What kind of name was Delinn, anyway? Meredith asked. Because it sounded French.
It’s a French name,
Freddy said.
But my mother always said the old man was Irish. I didn’t grow up the way you grew up, Meredith. I don’t have a pedigree. Just pretend like I hatched from an egg.

Devon said, “What about the word ‘buttons’?”

“Our dog,” Meredith said. Buttons had been a gift for the boys when they were ten and eight. Freddy had an investor who owned a kennel upstate, where the dogs consistently won awards. Freddy wanted a golden retriever. Meredith had lobbied to give the puppy a literary name—Kafka or Fitzgerald—but Freddy said it was only right to let the kids name the dog, and they named him Buttons. Meredith could still picture the boys and that tiny, impossibly cute butterscotch-colored puppy. Freddy had snapped pictures with this silly grin on his face. That night in bed, he’d said to her,
We’ll give them cars on their sixteenth birthday and Rolexes when they turn twenty-one, but no present will ever beat the one we gave them today.

And Meredith had to agree.

“Could it be a code word?” Dev asked.

“I suppose,” Meredith said. “Freddy was very fond of the dog. He took him to work. They walked there, they walked home. Sometimes they detoured through the park. I used to take the dog to Southampton for the summer, and Freddy would get very depressed. Not without us, mind you, but without the dog.”

“Really?” Dev said. Another gold nugget.

Meredith shook her head. This was a wild-goose chase. There was most certainly money hidden; Freddy was too cunning not to have buried millions, or even billions, but he would have hidden it where it would absolutely never be found.

“What about the word ‘champ’?” Dev said. “That was a word that turned up frequently.”

Oh, God.
Meredith coughed, and fought off the urge to spit.
Champ?
Frequently? How frequently? “Champ” was Freddy’s nickname for their decorator, Samantha, because her maiden name was Champion. (Meredith had always thought that the nickname was meant to be a jab at Samantha’s husband, Trent Deuce, whom Freddy disliked and dismissed.)

“ ‘Champ’?” Dev asked again. “Ring a bell?”

Meredith paused. “Where did this word ‘champ’ turn up? I’m curious. In his date book? His diary?”

“I really can’t say,” Dev said.

Right,
Meredith thought. The information flowed only one way.

“Does the word mean anything to you?” Dev asked.

Meredith thought back to the day when she’d come across Freddy with his hand on Samantha’s back. She remembered how he’d whipped his hand away when he saw Meredith. She could still see the expression on his face: What was it? Guilt? Fear? Despite this memory, which always made Meredith uneasy, she didn’t want to turn Samantha over to the
FBI
. Samantha was Meredith’s friend, or she had been. Plus, she was a decorator; she had nothing to do with Freddy’s business or the Ponzi scheme.

Still, Dev was asking. She wasn’t going to be the woman the media thought she was: a woman who lied to her lawyer. And there was Leo to think of. Leo!

“ ‘Champ’ was Freddy’s nickname for our decorator. Samantha Champion Deuce.”

“Oh, boy,” Dev said quietly.

“She was a friend of Freddy’s, but a better friend of mine,” Meredith said. “She was our decorator for years.”

“How many years?”

“Ten years? Twelve?”

“So there are lots of reasons why her name might turn up,” Dev said. “Reasons that have nothing to do with the business.”

“I guarantee you, Samantha didn’t know a single thing about Freddy’s business,” Meredith said. “She used to call where he worked the ‘money shop.’ Like he was dealing in ice cream or bicycles.”

“But now you understand what we’re looking for?” Dev asked. “Words that have meaning. They might be a clue, a contact, a password. The money could be anywhere in the world. I spoke to Julie Schwarz…”

“You did?” Meredith said.

“Leo is making a list of words, and so is Carver. But they said we should ask you. They said Freddy talked only to you, confided only in you…”

“He was my husband,” Meredith said. “But there are a lot of things I didn’t know about him. He was a private person.” For example, Freddy never told Meredith who he voted for in an election. She didn’t know the name of the tailor in London who made his suits. She didn’t know the password on his phone or his computer; she had only known that there was a password. Everything was locked up all the time, including the door to his home office.

“I understand,” Dev said.

How could he understand? Meredith thought. Dev wasn’t married. He hadn’t slept beside someone for thirty years only to discover they were somebody else.

“This could help you, Meredith,” Dev said. “This could save you. It could keep you out of prison. In a year or two, when all this is in the past, you could resume normal life.”

Resume normal life?
What did that even
mean?
Meredith was tempted to tell Dev about Connie’s slashed tires, but she refrained. She was afraid it would sound like a cry for pity, and the image Meredith needed to convey now was one of strength. She would come up with the answer. She would save herself.

“I can’t think of anything now,” Meredith said. “You’ve caught me unprepared. But I’ll try. I’ll… make a list.”

“Please,” Dev said.

That night, Meredith was too afraid to sleep. She kept picturing a man with a hunting knife hiding in the eelgrass. Meredith rose from bed, crept into the hallway, and peered out one of the windows that faced the front yard and the road. The yard was empty, quiet. The eelgrass swayed. There was a waxing gibbous moon that disappeared behind puffy nighttime clouds, then reemerged. At three fifteen, a pair of headlights appeared on the road. Meredith tensed. The headlights slowed down at the start of Connie’s driveway, paused, then rolled on. It was the police. The squad car parked in the public lot for a few minutes, then backed up and drove away.

She would make a list of words, the way Dev had asked.
Resume normal life
meant life with Leo and Carver. Leo would be safe and free, and the three of them—including Anais, and whatever young woman Carver fancied at the moment—would have dinner together at the sturdy oak table in Carver’s imaginary house.

Meredith would come up with the answer.

Atkinson:
the name of the professor who taught the anthropology class that brought her and Freddy together.

Meredith had given Freddy the used textbook. With that bond between them, they gravitated toward each other on the first day of class. Meredith and her roommate, a girl from backwater Alabama named Gwen Marbury, sat with Freddy and his roommate, a boy from Shaker Heights, Ohio, named Richard Cassel. The four of them became something of a merry band, though they hung out together only in that one class. When Meredith saw Freddy elsewhere on campus, he was usually in the presence of a stunning, dark-haired girl. His girlfriend, Meredith assumed, another upperclassman. It figured. Freddy was too funny and smart, and too beautiful himself, to be available. Through Gwen Marbury, who was far more interested in the social politics of Princeton than in her studies, Meredith learned that the girl’s name was Trina Didem, and that she was from Istanbul, Turkey. Trina was a dual major in economics and political science. Again, it figured: ravishing, exotic, and brilliant, someone destined to be a far-flung correspondent on
CNN
or the head of the Brookings Institution or secretary of state. Meredith’s crush on Freddy intensified the more she learned about Trina, although Meredith realized that what she was experiencing was nothing more than a freshman crush on a particularly cool upperclassman. It was also a way to stop thinking about Toby at the College of Charleston drinking yards of beer with all the sweet, blond southern girls. But Meredith cherished her time in class with Freddy and Richard and Gwen—the three of them cracked jokes about the clicking language of the Khoisan tribe, and they speculated on the advantages of a matriarchal society—and when class was over, Meredith continued her anthropological study of Trina Didem. Trina waited for Freddy outside on the stone steps of the building so she could smoke her clove cigarettes. She, Trina, wore a black suede choker at all times, as well as dangly earrings made from multicolored stones. She wore tight, faded jeans, and she carried a buttery soft Italian leather bag. Really, Meredith thought, she probably had a crush on Trina as well as Freddy. Trina was a woman, whereas Meredith was a girl trying to become a woman.

At the beginning of December, a knock came on the door of the anthropology classroom. Professor Atkinson stopped lecturing and swooped over to answer the door with a perplexed look on her face, as though this were her home and these were unexpected guests. Standing at the door was Trina Didem. Professor Atkinson looked first to Freddy, perhaps thinking there was going to be some kind of lovers’ spat right in the middle of their discussion of Dunbar’s number. But Trina, it seemed, was there on official business. She read off a slip of paper, in her lilting English. She was looking for Meredith Martin.

Meredith stood up, confused. She thought perhaps Trina had learned of her crush on Freddy and had come to call her out. But a second later, Trina explained that Meredith was needed in the Student Life Office. Meredith collected her books. Freddy reached for her hand as she left. It was the first time he’d ever touched her.

Meredith followed Trina out of the building. She was so starstruck in Trina’s presence that she was unable to ask the obvious questions:
Why did you pull me out of class? Where are we going?
It looked, from the path they were taking, like they were headed for the office of the dean of students, which differed slightly from the Student Life Office that she’d been promised. Or maybe they were one and the same—Meredith was still too new to campus to know. Trina took the occasion of being outside in the cold, crystalline air to light a clove cigarette. Because she was a step or two ahead of Meredith, the smoke blew in Meredith’s face. Somehow, this snapped Meredith back to her senses. She said, “You’re Freddy’s girlfriend, right?”

Trina barked once, then blew out her smoke. “Not girlfriend. Freddy is my English tutor.” She blew out more smoke. “And my economics tutor. I pay him.”

Meredith felt her own lungs fill up with the cloying, noxious smoke—it tasted to Meredith like burning molasses, and her grandmother’s gingerbread cookies, which she detested—but she didn’t care because she was so excited. Freddy was Trina’s
tutor!
She
paid
him! Meredith couldn’t wait to tell Gwen.