Silver Girl (51 page)

“Have they confessed?” Connie asked.

“They’ve confessed,” the chief said. “Two acts of vandalism for her. That, plus the unlawful slaying of a sea mammal for him. God only knows what they were going to do with the gasoline.”

“Burn the house down,” the man said.

“Hey!” The chief’s voice was like a whip. Meredith looked up in alarm. There was the chief, being chieflike. “I’m happy to book you with attempted arson,” he said. He turned to Connie and Meredith. “I assume you want to press charges.”

“Burn my house down?”
Connie said. “My husband designed that house. God, yes, I want to press charges.”

“But wait,” Meredith said. “Who are they?” She lowered her voice, trying to convince herself they wouldn’t hear her, and if they did hear her that they wouldn’t understand. “Are they Russian?” Were these the assassins the Russian mob had sent? Two people who looked like they’d escaped from the gulag?

“They’re from Belarus,” the chief said. “Minsk.”

Minsk. Meredith looked at the woman.
Like me, also from Minsk.
“Are you a housekeeper?” she said. “Do you clean houses?”

The young woman nodded.

Yes, okay. Meredith said, “Did you give your life savings to your employer to invest with Delinn Enterprises? A hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars?”

The girl twitched her head. “Yes,” she said. “How you know?”

“I met a friend of yours,” Meredith said.

Connie eyed her quizzically.

“At the salon.”

“Ahhh,” Connie said.

Meredith studied the man. She had seen him before.
Burn the house down.
She had heard his voice before. And then she remembered: She had seen him on the ferry. He had been in line with her when she went to get coffee for her and Connie. He must have recognized her then. He must have followed Connie’s Escalade out to Tom Nevers.

“We can drop the two vandalism charges on her,” the chief said, “but the unlawful slaying of a sea mammal will stick with him regardless, as well as a marijuana-possession charge.”

“Drop the vandalism charges,” Meredith whispered.

“What?” Connie said.

“She lost her life savings.”

“So?” Connie said. “It’s
my
house.
My
car.”

“Would you ladies like to talk about this out in the hallway?” the chief asked.

“No,” Meredith said. She smiled at Connie, then whispered, “She lost a lot of money, Con. She lost everything.”

Connie shook her head, unconvinced.

“And here’s the other thing,” Meredith said. “If they hadn’t spray painted the house, you wouldn’t have met Dan.”

“Oh, come on,” Connie said.

“You should be
thanking
them,” Meredith said.

Connie rolled her eyes. She turned to the chief. “Okay, we’re out of it. You’ll punish him for killing Harold? And you’ll make sure neither one of them does anything like this again?”

“That’s our job,” the chief said.

Meredith and Connie stood to leave. Meredith approached the woman, Dmitria Sorchev, and said, “I want you to know how sorry I am. I’m sorry about your money. Your savings.”

The young woman pulled her lips back to reveal grayish teeth. “Fuck Freddy Delinn.”

Meredith sighed and looked at Connie over the top of her glasses. Connie smiled. She liked the girl a little better now.

Connie turned to the chief. “Thank you for calling us.”

“I’m glad we settled this,” the chief said. He escorted the ladies out to the hallway. “There will be paperwork for you to sign, probably sometime tomorrow.”

Connie and Meredith shook his hand. The secretary, thankfully, had left for lunch. Meredith stepped outside into the sun.

“I’m going to take you up on your offer,” Meredith said as they climbed into the Escalade. About eight weeks earlier, Meredith had climbed into this car for the first time, running through a dark alley, dodging the flash of the hidden photographer. “I’m going to stay on Nantucket this winter.”

“Atta girl,” Connie said. And she started the engine.

No sooner had Meredith and Connie settled into their chaise lounges on the deck next to Toby and Ashlyn than the phone rang again.

“You answer it,” Connie said. “I want to tell these guys what happened with Boris and Natasha.”

“Did anything happen here?” Meredith asked. She didn’t want to answer it.

“Just napping and puking,” Ashlyn said. But she seemed marginally more cheerful.

Anything but a ringing phone.
Leo, Carver, Freddy. Freddy, Freddy, Freddy! Goddamn you, Freddy!
she thought (zillionth and eighth). That poor girl, her gray teeth, her life’s savings; she might as well have poured gasoline on the money and set it on fire herself.

Meredith dragged her feet for so long that the phone stopped ringing. She exhaled. Then it started ringing again. The starting up again was worse: whoever it was really wanted to talk to her.

But maybe the call wasn’t for her. Maybe it was Bridget, calling for Ashlyn.

Meredith checked the display. It was the law firm.

Meredith picked up the phone, saying a Hail Mary in her head. Now that she had decided to stay on Nantucket, the most devastating thing she could think of was for someone to take her away.
Please don’t take me away.
“Hello?”

“Meredith?”

“Dev?”

“Thank
God
you answered,” he said. “I tried a second ago and no one answered.”

“I just walked in,” she said.

“We found the money!” Dev said. He sounded amped up, triumphant; he was
crowing.
“And you were right! It was in a bank in Malaysia—nearly four billion dollars in Samantha Champion’s name. That money had been transferred from the four numbered accounts in Switzerland on Mrs. Champion’s birthday last October.”

“Four billion dollars,” Meredith said. For Samantha, on Samantha’s birthday, which was exactly one week before Meredith’s birthday.

“The word ‘champ’ was all over Freddy’s confidential papers, and so, thanks to you, the Feds brought Mrs. Deuce in. And when the Feds questioned her, she copped to the affair. I think she thought if she confessed to the sexual stuff that we’d be thrown off the trail of her financial involvement. But the information you gave us really helped.”

“Great,” Meredith said, but her voice was flat. On the one hand, she no longer cared about money. On the other hand, she couldn’t believe Freddy had transferred $4 billion to Samantha on Samantha’s birthday and had left Meredith with nothing.

“And we found eight billion dollars in other accounts at the same bank… in the name of David Delinn.”

David Delinn.

“His brother,” Meredith said.

“His brother.”

“But his brother
is
dead, right?” Meredith said. God, what if Freddy had been lying from the very beginning? From their first walk together, their first conversation?

“His brother was shot and killed in a training exercise outside of Fort Huachuca in nineteen seventy-eight. Freddy used an existing account of David’s from the nineteen sixties. Freddy had been depositing money into that account for decades. He was listed as trustee. The money was transferred out in nineteen ninety-two, then, apparently, transferred again. It was a web that was almost impossible to untangle.”

Meredith shut her eyes. It was a web of lies involving David, Samantha, Kirby Delarest, and Thad Orlo, but not her. Not her. They knew that, right? Not her.

“So, that twelve billion dollars was recovered,” Dev said, “largely thanks to you. This is going to help out a lot with the restitution to investors.”

“Right,” Meredith said. She wondered if Amy Rivers would get any money back. Or the poor girl from Minsk, who would need it now for her comrade’s legal fees.

“The Feds are going to issue a statement at five o’clock today,” Dev said. “And they will include mention that information provided by Meredith Delinn was instrumental in the investigation.”

“So I’m not in trouble anymore?” Meredith said. “I can call my children?”

“The
SEC
is going to be sifting through the rubble of this for years, Meredith,” Dev said. “But for now, the Feds are satisfied that you had no knowledge of the Ponzi scheme. They now believe what you said in your deposition: Freddy asked you to transfer the fifteen million dollars, and you transferred it. You were his pawn, but that’s not a crime. So, yes, you can call your children.”

“Thank you,” Meredith whispered. She took a huge breath. She was getting her kids back! Leo! Carver! As soon as Meredith hung up, she would call Carver’s cell phone. It would ring in the pocket of his Carhartt overalls. Meredith imagined him standing on a ladder leaning against the great big beautiful old house that he was restoring. He would answer the phone, and it would be Meredith. And after she’d told him about what had happened, she would ask to speak to Leo. Carver would call out, “Hey, Leo? It’s Mom.” He would toss the phone down to Leo, and Leo would grin, and he would say, “Hey, Mom.”

In the days that remained of the summer, news of Freddy Delinn and the spoils of his kingdom hit the front page of every paper in the country. All reports mentioned that Meredith Delinn had been working with federal investigators to help locate the missing money.

Dennis Stamm, the head of the SEC’s investigative team, was quoted as saying, “We couldn’t have found this money without salient bits of information provided by Mrs. Delinn. She showed herself to be a truly great citizen with the effort she put forth in cracking the code and recovering this money for Mr. Delinn’s former investors.”

Meredith fully expected the reporters to reappear, but they didn’t. Maybe because Ed Kapenash was an effective police chief who had finally learned how to protect the island’s most notorious summer resident, or maybe because the
Post
only followed trails of blood. Girl Scouts didn’t make the front page.

Meredith didn’t want to waste the final days of summer watching reports about the rediscovered money on TV, and luckily, she didn’t have to. She and Toby went kayaking in the Monomoy creeks, where the only sounds were the water lapping against their paddles and the cries of seabirds. When they got home, they found Connie and Ashlyn sitting together on the sofa, Ashlyn weeping, Connie rubbing Ashlyn’s feet.

“Everything all right with the baby?” Meredith asked quietly later.

“Everything’s all right with the baby,” Connie said. “She misses Bridget.”

And Meredith thought about how it felt to yearn for something that you absolutely knew you weren’t going to get—in her case, a phone call from Butner. “Yes,” Meredith said. “I bet she does.”

They managed to get Ashlyn out of the house the next day. Dan took everybody on an expedition to Smith’s Point, where Toby and Dan caught eight inedible bluefish—so they ended up having fish tacos on the outdoor deck of Millie’s as the sun went down. The next morning, Meredith and Toby and Connie and Dan biked to Bartlett’s Farm and found themselves on a road that cut through two resplendent fields of flowers. As far as the eye could see, there were snapdragons and zinnias and marigolds and lilies, a palette of color upon color such as Meredith hadn’t seen since she viewed the Pissarros during her private tour of the Musée d’Orsay.

Meredith stopped her bike and inhaled. It was an intoxicating sip of freedom.

On their final afternoon, Meredith and Connie sojourned into town. Meredith bought two novels, which she would read after the others had left the island, and Connie bought a white baby blanket that had the word “Nantucket” embroidered across the bottom in navy thread. Then Connie wanted to zip into the kitchen store, and Meredith took the opportunity to light candles at the church.

The interior seemed brighter than it had the last time; muted light shone through the stained glass windows. Meredith stuck ten dollars into the slot, a small fortune, for despite all that had happened, she still believed.

She lit a candle for Connie first, then Toby, then Dan. She lit candles for Leo and Carver. Then she lit a candle for heartbroken Ashlyn and one for the baby inside her. Then Meredith lit a candle for her mother and her father. She had one candle left. She thought about lighting it for Dev or for Amy Rivers or for Samantha. She considered lighting it for herself. Of everyone she knew, she needed a candle the most. One thing was for sure: she was
not
going to light a candle for Freddy.

She pushed the button and thought,
For Dev.
He had been so good to her.

She slipped through the double doors into the vestibule, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the church. She rummaged through her purse for another dollar bill and went back and lit another candle—for Freddy.

Because that was how she was. She couldn’t seem to abandon him.

No matter what.

Out in the sunny world, Connie waited on a bench.

Connie said, “Did that go okay?”

Meredith said, “I lit candles.” She didn’t tell Connie that she’d lit a candle for Freddy—but who was she kidding? Connie already knew.

“I got you something,” Connie said. She handed Meredith a big white shopping bag with cord handles from Nantucket Gourmet. “Sorry it’s not wrapped.”

Meredith peered inside. It was an eleven-cup Cuisinart food processor. “Of course you can use the one in my kitchen,” Connie said. “But this is one of your very own. A graduation present”

Meredith was so overwhelmed by the perfection of the gift that she closed her eyes. She thought back to the cruel summer weeks right after Toby had broken up with her. Connie had dragged her to a party at Villanova, and Meredith had drunk too much, and Connie had carried Meredith home on her back. This summer was like that night times fifty billion (this was the largest real number Meredith could think of). This summer, Connie had carried Meredith on her back once again. She had carried Meredith all the way to safety.

“I almost lit a candle for myself in there,” Meredith said, nodding at the church. “But then I realized I didn’t need to.”

Connie put a hand up. “Don’t say it, Meredith. You’ll make me cry.”

Meredith said, “Because you, Constance—you are my candle.”