The Jinx
Jennifer Sturman
Rachel Benjamin's life might look glamorous, but she has worked into the early morning on more nights, cancelled more weekend plans and slept in more Holiday Inns in small industrial towns than she cares to count (standard practice in the business of mergers and acquisitions).And that picture of her on the recent cover of Fortune? It inspired a reprise of her grandmother's favorite lecture, the one titled "You don't want to be one of those career gals, do you?" (Other popular hits include "Have you met anyone nice?" and "I just want to go to your wedding before I die.")But this week Rachel's job is taking her to Boston, where in between work obligations she plans to squeeze in quality time with her promising new boyfriend. They've just hit the six-month mark and things are going so well, Rachel's not even worried anymore that she'll jinx it.There are just a few little problems: Her friend's been attacked and a serial killer is on the loose–and the two might actually be related. Oh, and her promising new boyfriend? He seems to be squeezing in quality time with his new gazelle-like, model-material colleague…. Now Rachel's making like Miss Marple again, trying to track down her friend's assailant–not to mention get a clue about her relationship. When she stopped worrying about jinxing things, did she jinx everything?
Praise for Jennifer Sturman’s first novel,
The Pact
“Sturman’s debut is a rare delight, and her sharp, sassy writing is wonderfully addictive. Sturman is as adept at detailing a career gal’s search for a good man as she is at crafting a clever mystery, making The Pact a great choice for chick-lit fans and readers who enjoy their amateur sleuthing with a dash of romance.”
—Booklist
“Sex and the City meets Agatha Christie! Jennifer Sturman is an exciting new voice in mystery fiction.”
—Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries and Every Boy’s Got One
“Why is this debut so thoroughly enjoyable? Perhaps it’s because Rachel is such a winning detective: she sifts through clues at the reader’s pace and does so with wit and pluck. The novel’s mise-en-scène—successful, attractive Ivy League graduates at a lakeside mansion—makes for escapist pleasure, and well-placed cliffhangers, a careful distribution of motives and unexpected twists promise readers light, satisfying suspense.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Great mystery, super characters!”
—Michele Jaffe, author of Loverboy
“This mystery is a fresh and terrific new addition to the chick lit genre. Most of the traditional chick lit elements are here—the heroine’s love life, career and friendships—but the whodunit is an excellent and welcome twist. Debut novelist Sturman delivers great characters, a dash of humor and a mystery that keeps you interested—and guessing.”
—Romantic Times
The Jinx
Jennifer Sturman
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This book is dedicated to Michele Jaffe.
Have I mentioned that you’re my best friend?
Acknowledgments
I benefited from the support of many friends and colleagues in writing this book.
Laura Langlie offered her usual mix of kind wisdom and unflappable calm while continuing to humor my theory of jinxing. Farrin Jacobs, Margaret Marbury and the team at Red Dress Ink expertly shepherded the manuscript to publication, improving it with every step in the process.
Friends Anne Coolidge, Michele Jaffe and Rulonna Neilson supplied invaluable encouragement and solidarity. Cameron Poetzscher provided a much-needed refresher course in corporate finance, and Holly Edmonds and Daniel Allen graciously assisted in reacquainting me with Boston and Cambridge.
My parents, Joseph and Judith Sturman, my brothers, Ted and Dan Sturman, and my sister-in-law, Lindsay Jewett Sturman, remain remarkably restrained in their discussions of the path my career has taken—in fact, they’ve even been enthusiastic. Finally, my nieces, Miss Edith (Edie) Michael Sturman and Miss Cecelia (Cece) Esther Sturman, kindly allowed me to borrow their names, although they’ve been far less forthcoming with their Pirate’s Booty.
Thank you.
Jennifer Sturman
Like the heroine of her first novel, The Pact, Jennifer Sturman grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the birthplace of another fictional character, Ward Cleaver. She also attended the same school as actress Margaret Hamilton, the Cleveland native who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Ms. Hamilton visited her alma mater when Ms. Sturman was in the fourth grade and told the students how she melted. While sworn to secrecy, Ms. Sturman does offer the following hint: trapdoor.
Ms. Sturman graduated from Harvard College with a degree in History and Literature, magna cum laude. She began her business career as a financial analyst in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman, Sachs. Unlike her heroine, Ms. Sturman did not thrive on the all-nighters and number crunching demanded by Wall Street, although she managed to sustain herself by consuming a steady stream of Diet Coke. After two years, she enrolled at Harvard Business School where, with the aid of yet more Diet Coke, she earned her MBA with distinction. She then joined McKinsey & Company as a management consultant, advising clients in media, consumer packaged goods and retail on a broad range of strategic issues. She now works in corporate strategy at Time Warner, but she does not get free cable.
Ms. Sturman resides in Manhattan. She has no free time, but if she did, she would probably spend it doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, watching bad teen movies from the '80s and sipping drinks that come with little umbrellas in them.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Epilogue
Prologue
A homeless man found the body.
It was New Year’s Day, and George Lawrence Fullerton IV was up early, rooting through a Dumpster in an alley near the Cambridge Common, searching for any item of value that could be exchanged for a nip of something to seal out the cold. He generally stuck to the tonier neighborhoods across the river in Boston for his treasure hunts—Beacon Hill, Back Bay—but he made a tradition of starting the new year in Harvard Square, close to the familiar red bricks and cupolas of his alma mater.
He poked through the trash using an elegant ebony walking stick. The stick had been an exceptional find, requiring only minor repairs to make it whole. He had reattached the handle with black electrical tape, a neat fix that was barely noticeable to the casual observer.
Skillfully, he swept the top layer of trash over to the side of the Dumpster, revealing a woman’s foot, shod in a red high-heeled sandal, protruding from a heavy-duty brown garbage bag. The lifeless flesh was so pale it looked blue. The toenails were painted gold, but the chipped polish needed touching up. Tacky, tacky, tacky, George remarked to himself. His nanny had always said that good grooming was a mark of good breeding. The garbage bag was nestled between a pizza box (empty) and the shell of an aged television set (worthless).
George stopped his digging to consider the foot. He was not shocked—years spent sorting through other people’s rubbish had schooled him well in the seedy ways of the world. He often thought that he could write a book about the things people discarded. A modern anthropologist. He imagined himself holding forth from a lectern, an audience of students entranced by his brilliance. And, of course, his dapper demeanor and flashing wit.
He used the tip of his walking stick to lift the edge of the bag and peer in for a better look at its contents. The bright winter sunshine illuminated a woman’s body, folded at the waist and clad in a small dress of one of those synthetic materials that George refused to have anywhere near his own skin. Her head was pushed against her knees, and George wondered at the dead woman’s flexibility. He couldn’t even touch his fingers to his toes when he did his morning calisthenics. Her platinum-blond hair gave way at the roots to a coarse brown, and the sliver of profile George could see was garish with makeup.
George cast an indignant look around him. No matter what he did, this body would be the cause of great inconvenience in the neighborhood, inevitably disrupting his routine as soon as the sanitation men came around. The police knew him and the handful of others who made their livings from the area’s refuse. He would be an obvious first step in their investigation. After all, the others had neither his degree of intellect nor his well-spoken manner.
The discovery of this body was likely to attract even greater attention than sordid events like homicide usually did. It was the seventh body of a prostitute to be found in a Dumpster in Cambridge in the past year. And there were rumors that the responsible party was connected to the Harvard community in some way. The bodies found previously had been strangled, as had this one judging by the bulging eyes and protruding tongue. He wondered if the forensic team would find the telltale crimson-and-white fibers from a striped wool Harvard scarf around the neck of this victim, as well.
George mulled over his options. In such situations, he generally thought it best to go on about his business and let the police come find him when they got around to it. But on a bitterly cold day like today, a trip to the police station to answer some questions might not be so unpleasant. Some warm coffee, maybe a couple of doughnuts (a plebian treat in which George occasionally indulged), some quasi-civilized conversation. Indeed, the police would be around eventually to see if he or any of the other local residents had seen anything of interest. He might as well make the most of the misfortune.
He straightened up, brushing off his coat (cashmere from Brooks Brothers—the lining was ripped and the elbows quite worn, but it had still merited rescue from the garbage of Beacon Hill). He adjusted his hat (a perfectly good deerstalker that he’d found in a trash bin the day after Halloween) to its customarily jaunty angle. With purposeful steps, he ventured forth to the nearest police precinct.
He did have a soft spot for doughnuts.
One
I live a very glamorous life. At least, that’s what you would think if you didn’t know any better.
You’ve probably seen my type before—striding briskly through airports with a cell phone clasped to my ear, settling into first class as the gateway doors shut. Power breakfasting at New York’s finer hotels with men in expensive dark suits and silk ties. Or perhaps reading the Wall Street Journal in the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car, heading south on the FDR Drive toward Wall Street.
You may even have seen me on a recent cover of Fortune magazine, posed in a crisply tailored black Armani with several other Yuppie-types under the caption “Wall Street’s Next Generation: They’re Young, They’re Hungry, and They’re Women.”
My father had a copy of the cover blown up to poster-size and framed; it hangs on the wall of his office, incongruous next to his numerous academic degrees. The article also inspired a long-distance lecture from my grandmother titled “You don’t want to be one of those career girls, now, do you?” This was actually a welcome change from her usual repertoire, which includes such popular hits as “Have you met anyone nice?” “My dentist has the most handsome new associate,” and (my personal favorite) “I just want to go to a wedding before I die.”
I am an investment banker for the new millennium. Forget the movies you’ve seen—Michael Douglas with his hair slicked back in Wall Street or Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. This is a kinder, gentler era. We talk to our clients about managing the transition to a global economy and relationship-driven banking. The partners at Winslow, Brown, the firm I’ve called home for the better part of a decade, espouse diversity and teamwork.
This doesn’t mean that it’s all fun and games. My life is far less glamorous than it appears. I have worked into the early morning hours on more nights, canceled more weekend plans and slept in more Holiday Inns in small industrial towns than I care to count—standard practice in the business of mergers and acquisitions. Entire months of my life have passed in a fog of caffeine, numbers, meetings and documents.
So why, one might ask, do I do this?
Fresh-faced, newly minted MBAs ask me this question frequently, and I tell them how rewarding it is to counsel top executives on issues of critical strategic importance and to work with sharp, highly motivated people in a collegial environment.
These might be the reasons I joined the firm when I was a newly minted MBA. Why I’m still here, despite the grinding work and red-eye flights, is much simpler.
Greed.
I know it’s not an attractive answer, but the oversize year-end bonus checks and their promise of financial independence are the only thing that can make hundred-hour work weeks palatable. For me at least. There is the occasional deranged individual who truly loves finance, the thrill of closing a deal and the illusion of power it bestows.
One such individual is Scott Epson, a Winslow, Brown colleague who was sitting next to me this Wednesday afternoon in early January. We were on the Delta Shuttle, bound from New York to Boston, on our way to participate in an annual ritual at Harvard Business School known as Hell Week, when all of the major investment banks, consulting firms and other corporate recruiters compete to lure the most promising students to join our respective companies upon graduation. An advance team from Winslow, Brown had completed an initial round of interviews during the first half of the week, and second rounds were to take place on Thursday and Friday.
I was not sitting with Scott by choice. I had seen him in the waiting area, gesticulating wildly on his cell phone with his customary air of self-importance. I thought that I had crept by unseen, but I was only a few feet down the gateway when I heard his nasal voice behind me. “Rachel! Rachel! Hey—wait up!”
For a split second I’d toyed with the possibility of playing deaf, but remembering my New Year’s resolution to be a nicer person, I turned around, feigned surprise and gave Scott a big fake smile and wave.
He was weighted down by a bulging briefcase in one hand, a stack of file folders under his opposite arm and a garment bag suspended from his shoulder. His suit jacket hung loosely from a scrawny frame, and his striped shirt was almost completely untucked. If it weren’t for the rapidity with which he was losing his mouse-brown hair, it would be easy to mistake Scott for a high-school student dressed up in his father’s clothing. I knew from a good source that he needed to shave only a couple of times a week.
“Hi,” I greeted him when he’d caught up to me. “How are you?” I gave myself a mental pat on the back for the warmth I’d mustered in my tone.
“Busy, busy, busy,” answered Scott with an exaggerated sigh. “We were up all night running the numbers on Stan’s new deal. The client has completely unrealistic expectations as to how quickly we’ll be able to close, but of course Stan told him we could get it done.”
Stan Winslow is the head of Winslow, Brown’s Mergers and Acquisitions department, or M&A. Scott spends a great deal of time trying to ingratiate himself to Stan. This can be highly amusing to watch, because our trusty leader is largely oblivious to much of what goes on around him. His attention is usually focused on his next golf game, his next martini and his new, significantly younger wife. The primary value Stan brings to Winslow, Brown is his surname (which is, in fact, related to that on the firm’s letterhead) and his overstuffed Rolodex, the product of an adolescence enrolled at an elite New England prep school and a young adulthood engaged in drinking, puking and otherwise bonding with future leaders at Yale.
Scott and I advanced down the gateway together, and he blustered on about his incredible deal and how incredibly pivotal his role in the entire endeavor truly was. I prayed that the flight would be too full for us to possibly sit together. Alas, an empty row beckoned right up front. I slid into the window seat and Scott took the aisle. We put our coats and briefcases on the middle seat as a silent deterrent to anyone who might be interested in sitting there. Not that I would have minded a buffer between us in the form of a disinterested third party, especially since Scott was all ready to settle in for an amiable chat.
“So, Rach,” he asked, “how goes it with you? What have you got in the hopper?” I hate being called Rach by anyone but a close friend, and even then I’m ambivalent.
“Oh, the usual.” Unable to resist the opportunity to prey on Scott’s insecurities, I mentioned a couple of high-profile deals in progress. “And then there’s the entire HBS effort. It’s a big time commitment but Stan did ask me to take it on—I couldn’t say no. You know how it is when the partners really want you to do something.” I gave Scott my most winning colleague-in-arms smile.
Winslow, Brown was growing rapidly, and to fuel its growth we had intensified our efforts to recruit new MBAs. When Stan asked me to head up the process, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was a prestigious role that offered significant exposure to the firm’s partners. On the other hand, I resented that it seemed always to be the few female bankers at the firm who were asked to spearhead such activities as recruiting and training. However, I knew that Scott had been angling for the honor himself, probably because he derived so much of his identity from his own Harvard MBA. It didn’t help matters that Stan seems to enjoy setting the two of us up in competition.
He eyed me with an expression that was either jealousy or indigestion and straightened his tie. It was a nifty little number featuring white whales on a navy background. “Well,” he harrumphed. “I guess women have a special knack for that sort of thing, what with all of this emphasis on ‘diversity.’” The way he said diversity made it sound like a curse word, which I guessed it was if one had the misfortune to be born a white male.
“Oh, definitely. We really do have a knack for these things,” I agreed innocently. “Well, I wish I could spend the whole flight talking, but I need to catch up on a few things. Do you mind?” I asked, indicating my briefcase.
“Oh, me, too. I’m just incredibly busy. Just an incredible amount of stuff going on.”
I pulled some papers from my black leather portfolio, hoping that he didn’t notice the copy of People poking out from the inside pocket. Eager to demonstrate his equal if not superior level of busyness, Scott started punching numbers into his calculator.
I began flipping through my papers, but it was hard to concentrate on facts and figures, much less a stack of student résumés. I had more on my agenda for this trip than recruiting. The best part was Peter, my boyfriend of nearly five months. Peter ran a start-up in San Francisco, but he would be joining me in Boston to attend a high-tech conference. To my utter amazement, not to mention that of my friends and family, I seemed to be in a successful relationship for the first time ever. The New Year’s we’d just spent together had been pure romantic bliss—a remote ski cabin, very little skiing and lots of snuggling in front of roaring fires. This was in stark contrast to New Year’s with boyfriends past, particularly the New Year’s Eve Massacre three years ago, when my date had taken me to a nightclub and forced me to listen to live jazz as he explained that he’d decided to marry his college girlfriend. Of course, the Valentine’s Day Massacre of two years ago completely trumped the New Year’s Eve Massacre. My date had shown up with his mother, whom he’d surprised with a dozen red roses and a Tiffany heart on a delicate chain. He gave me a pair of mittens.
With Peter, I’d finally stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’d even stopped worrying that I’d jinx everything by referring to him as my boyfriend and making plans more than a week in advance. And I had an elaborate theory of jinxing, one that wasn’t easily discarded. To feel secure, particularly in a relationship with an attractive man, was to invite the wrath of the Jinxing Gods, a nasty pantheon watching from above, taking note of any occasion on which I became too sure of myself and gleefully ensuring that I was punished with an appropriately confidence-depleting blow.
But Peter was honestly what he seemed to be—smart, funny, handsome, considerate. He even smelled wonderful. The time I’d spent with him had thoroughly vanquished the Jinxing Gods. I’d sent them packing, assured that I was no longer their plaything.
The only drawback—there had to be one—was that Peter lived on the opposite side of the country. I’d managed frequent trips to San Francisco for work, and he had made a number of trips to New York. We’d spent the holidays together—Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with his—and everyone had gotten along wonderfully. Still, being with him was bittersweet, always knowing that it wasn’t long before one of us would have to get on a plane.
At least this time I’d have him with me for the better part of a week. He was due in Boston that night and would be staying on after the conference for my annual reunion with my college roommates, which we always held on the second weekend in January. This year Jane, who lived in Cambridge with her husband, Sean, was the designated host. It was convenient for me since I already had to be in the area. Emma purported to live in New York but had been spending most of her time of late with Matthew, a doctor who worked in South Boston, so it suited her nicely. Hilary, a journalist, didn’t really live anywhere, but she was working on a new project and had said that Boston was exactly where she needed to be for her research. Luisa would be flying up from South America and had recently ended her relationship with her girlfriend of three years; she seemed eager for an excuse to flee any continent on which Isobel lived, regardless of the distance she’d have to travel.
I nearly purred with contented anticipation. Peter and my best friends, all in one place, for an entire weekend. It would be perfect.
The only thing I had to worry about was recruiting. And Sara Grenthaler.
The next day, I planned to skip the morning’s schedule of interviews to attend a memorial service for Tom Barnett, who had been my client and the CEO of Grenthaler Media. He had suffered a heart attack the previous Friday and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. That evening I had plans to dine with Sara Grenthaler—Tom’s goddaughter, Grenthaler Media’s largest individual shareholder, and a friend of mine. I was uneasy about the dinner—I sensed that Sara was distraught about more than Tom’s death when we spoke by phone earlier that week, and she’d been insistent that we meet, sooner rather than later. But when I pressed her, asked her what was wrong, she simply said that it would be better to discuss things in person. And I was hardly in a position to disagree.
I wondered why she felt so strongly about seeing me that night.
I shared a cab with Scott to the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square. The ride passed painlessly enough, although it occurred to me that perhaps I should worry that I evaluated so much of my life in terms of pain avoidance. I made polite responses to Scott’s various attempts to one-up me, and he didn’t seem to notice that I wasn’t feeling one-upped. Fortunately, he had some business of his own to attend to, so he didn’t even try to tag along for dinner.
I stowed my bag and briefcase with the hotel concierge and then headed up Eliot Street toward the restaurant where I was meeting Sara. On the way, I pulled out my cell phone and called Jane.
“Hey, there! Are you in town?” Her greeting was warm.
“I just landed half an hour ago. I’m on my way to a dinner, but I wanted to say hello.”
“Great. Hilary’s already here, and I spoke to Emma and she’s at Matthew’s, as usual, and Luisa’s getting in tomorrow morning. It looks like everyone’s on schedule—wait, Hilary wants to talk.” I heard the fumbling noise of the phone changing hands.
“Rach! Is Peter here, too?”
“Not until later tonight. His flight gets in around ten, I think.”
“As if you don’t know the exact time it gets in and haven’t calculated to the second how long it will take him to get to the hotel,” she pointed out, no small trace of amusement in her tone.
I had, of course, but I knew better than to admit it. Hilary’s talent for mockery was finely honed, and I had no desire to supply her with ammunition. Instead, I changed the subject. “What’s the new project you’re working on? I can’t wait to hear about it.” Asking Hilary about Hilary was a guaranteed way to divert her attention.
“It’s a book,” she told me with enthusiasm.
“A book?” I asked. “What happened to journalism?”
“This is journalism. It’s just like a long-form article. I’ll tell you all about it on Friday, but it’s a true crime book. I figure I’ll write it, it will be a bestseller, I’ll sell the movie rights for a fortune, and then I can stop chasing all over the globe for random stories.”
Knowing Hilary, it probably would be a bestseller, so I didn’t bother to question her lofty expectations. “I thought you liked chasing all over the globe for random stories?” I asked.
“I’m getting a little sick of it, to tell the truth.”
“Don’t tell me. Your nesting instinct is finally kicking in.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But it would be nice to have a fixed address. What are you—” I heard more fumbling, and then Jane came back on the line.
“Hilary’s decided to use us as her fixed address for the time being,” she said, her voice neutral. When Jane’s voice was neutral, you knew that she was actually freaking out.
“Has she given you any sense of how long she’s planning on using your guest room as her base of operations?”
“Nope,” she answered with false cheer.
“Well, you know Hilary. I’m sure she’ll move on quickly.”
“Uh-huh.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“How much luggage did she bring with her?”
“Enough.”
“Oh.”
“Oh is right. Anyhow, I know you’re busy with work and Peter, but we’ll see you on Friday for the kickoff dinner, right?”
“Absolutely. Is there anything I can bring? Anything I can do?”
“Don’t even start, Rach. We’re not going to let you cook.”
Two
Upstairs on the Square was new to Harvard Square since my student days. The space it occupied had been a bar and restaurant called Grendel’s when I was in college and business school. I’d spent a lot of time there, particularly as an undergrad, and mostly in the cellar bar, which had been a low-budget affair with scarred wood tables and rickety chairs. The restaurant above hadn’t been much better, so I was unprepared for the grandeur of its current state.
The walls of the foyer were now a deep lacquered red, and I checked my coat at a polished wood counter. I’d opted for the Monday Club Bar on the first floor for dinner, which was more casual than the Soiree Room upstairs and slightly funky, with zebra-striped carpet and red-cushioned gilt chairs. I was a few minutes early for our seven-thirty reservation, but I let the hostess lead me to a corner table, ordered a glass of Pinot Noir, and wondered again why Sara had been so anxious to see me tonight.
Sara’s company, Grenthaler Media, had become a Winslow, Brown client due to the efforts of Nancy Sloan, the firm’s first female partner. Nancy had been a mentor to me, a dynamo of a woman with tremendous confidence. I’d learned a lot from her about not letting myself get stepped on by the wingtips and tasseled loafers that roamed Winslow, Brown’s halls.
Two years ago, at the age of forty-one, Nancy met an artist, fell in love and quit the firm. She and her artist now lived in Vermont with their year-old baby boy, and Nancy divided her time between the baby, managing her stock portfolio and writing the business column in their local newspaper.
She’d bequeathed to me several of her clients, including Grenthaler Media. Sara’s father, Samuel Grenthaler, founded the company in 1958 with the launch of a groundbreaking journal on international affairs. He went on to introduce several other magazines, ranging from the obscure and erudite to more popular weeklies, and he became an American success story in the process—a Holocaust refugee who had worked his way up from nothing. In the late 1970s, he’d met Anna Porter, a graduate student studying physics at M.I.T. Anna was the blue-blooded, bluestocking daughter of Edward and Helene Porter, scions of Boston society. Their marriage had been an unlikely one, given their differences in background and age, but by all accounts it had also been a happy one.
Seven years ago, the couple died in a car accident on icy roads. They had been en route to their ski house in Vermont, where their eighteen-year-old daughter was to meet them for the Christmas holidays, when their car skidded off the road, tumbled into a ravine and burst into flames, leaving Sara a very wealthy orphan.
Tom Barnett, Samuel Grenthaler’s best friend and business partner, stepped into the role of CEO. While Tom proved to be a visionary leader and a superb manager, he viewed himself as a caretaker of his friend’s company, and he began grooming Sara to take over. During her vacations from college, she worked in a variety of roles at Grenthaler, and after college, she spent two years at a management consulting firm before enrolling at Harvard Business School. She’d spent the previous summer as an intern at Winslow, Brown, learning the essentials of corporate finance to supplement her formal business education before returning to HBS for her second and final year.
Sara had been assigned to one of my deal teams that summer, and the two of us had hit it off immediately. We had certain things in common—including a love of bad teen movies from the eighties. I loaned her my copy of Valley Girl, and she returned the favor by introducing me to Tuff Turf. But while we had forged a close friendship and our conversation frequently ventured beyond company affairs, I still was surprised that she would want to see me on the eve of Tom’s memorial service. I doubted that I would be among the first people she’d turn to at a time of personal grief.
Seconds after a waitress delivered my glass of wine, I saw Sara framed in the doorway across the room and raised my arm in greeting. A tall woman, she had the slight slouch of someone who was both self-conscious of her height and reluctant to attract notice. But she was striking, and not a few people turned to watch as she made her way through the maze of tables to where I was sitting. She had her mother’s fine-boned features and her father’s piercing dark eyes and luxuriant black hair, and the unusual combination worked.
I rose from the table and gave her a hug. As she settled into the chair across from me, I noticed with concern how thin she’d become and how tired she looked despite the warmth of her smile. She had dark circles under her eyes, and the charcoal-gray of her sweater emphasized her pallor.
I repeated the condolences I’d offered when we’d spoken by phone, and we made small talk about the details of the next day’s memorial service until after we’d ordered. As soon as the waitress departed, we settled down to business.
“I’m glad that you could make it tonight,” Sara began, fidgeting with her place setting in an uncharacteristic display of nerves.
“Of course,” I reassured her. “I know that Tom’s death must be hard for you.”
“It is,” she admitted. “My grandparents are wonderful, and I’m so lucky to have them, but Tom was like a second father to me. And it was quite a shock, too. After he had his first heart attack a couple of years ago, he went on a total health kick. He’d been exercising and eating right and everything. He told me how pleased the doctor was with his blood pressure and cholesterol. And he’d lost a ton of weight.”
“He looked terrific the last time I saw him.” I’d almost been inspired to go on a health kick, too, but a good dose of Diet Coke and chocolate had quickly banished that thought.
She paused, and I could tell she was choosing her next words carefully. “I need your advice.”
“Whatever I can do,” I told her.
“I had breakfast with Tom last Thursday morning, the day before he died. He was worried—very worried—about something at the company.”
“I was scheduled to speak to him on Friday afternoon, but I didn’t know what it was about. He made the appointment with my secretary.”
My dealings with Grenthaler Media had been fairly limited of late. I’d assisted with the sale of a set of trade magazines the previous year, but it hadn’t been a particularly complex transaction, and I’d shepherded it to closing with no major problems. I’d appreciated that Tom had trusted Nancy Sloan and her faith in my ability to handle the deal without more senior supervision from Winslow, Brown. Many of our clients felt that they deserved to see a little more gray hair on the bankers who would be collecting hefty fees from the transactions they handled.
“I know. He thought you might be able to help.”
“Help with what?”
“Tom thought that someone might be buying up our stock in the market. He’d noticed the price had been up a bit—even though there had been no recent announcements that would explain any movement.”
I thought for a moment before responding. “I noticed the price increase. But the market as a whole has been pretty volatile. And even if Grenthaler hasn’t made any announcements, announcements by competitors or suppliers or a whole host of other factors could account for the uptick.” When a company announced shifts in strategy or operations, it could alter the public’s expectation for future performance, thus causing swings in the stock price. Moves by a competitor or a supplier could affect the price as well.
“I told Tom that it probably didn’t mean anything. But he was also concerned about the volume of trading. He thought it was unusually high.”
“Given that less than half of Grenthaler’s stock trades publicly, even a small bit of trading looks like a major increase in the number of shares changing hands,” I replied.
Sara controlled thirty-one percent and Tom Barnett controlled twenty percent of Grenthaler’s four million shares outstanding. Only the remaining forty-nine percent—about two million shares—traded publicly. Each share was worth approximately $250, which valued the company as a whole at one billion dollars. The relatively small number of publicly traded shares meant that only an incremental few thousand shares had to change hands to create a spike in the usual trading volume.
Sara nodded in agreement. “I know that it’s hard to draw conclusions from the trading volume, but Tom was still concerned.”
Now my curiosity was officially piqued. “That somebody might launch a takeover?”
“No, it wasn’t that. I mean, nobody could gain control of the company without buying shares from either me or Tom. He was just worried about someone else becoming a significant power in the company—even with a minority stake somebody can still start changing the composition of the board and influencing company strategy.”
“That would have to be a pretty significant minority stake,” I pointed out. “The investor would need to have at least twenty or twenty-five percent of the company to exert that sort of influence, and he would have to make a public disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding his intentions once he reached five percent. Nobody’s reached that threshold.” But even as I was saying this, I began to wonder if Tom had been right to be concerned.
“That’s true. But it still makes me nervous. Especially now that Tom is dead.”
I had the feeling I knew where she was heading. “Would Barbara sell Tom’s shares?” Barbara was Tom Barnett’s widow.
“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. When they read Tom’s will on Monday, she seemed surprised that he had only left her half his shares and that the other half reverted back to me. I thought she already knew that was the arrangement Tom made with my father years ago, before the company went public. But she’s always wanted Adam to be more involved in the business, and maybe she was hoping that if she had more control she could make that happen.” Tom had adopted Adam, Barbara’s son from her first marriage, when he married Barbara.
“What do you think?”
“I think that Tom didn’t want Adam to work at Grenthaler. He and my father agreed that I would take it over one day, and he didn’t think Adam would be a good fit there, anyhow. He’s much better off where he is.” Adam had worked for an investment company in Boston but had recently opened his own firm. I would bet that he was a superlative number cruncher, but I doubted he had the strategic vision or management skills to lead Grenthaler Media.
“What does Adam want?”
“Who knows what Adam wants? He’s so weird. At least he’s given up on trying to date me.”
I had to laugh. “Adam tried to date you?” Tom had invited me to dinner at his house while I was in town working on Grenthaler business, so I’d met Adam on a couple of occasions. He’d struck me then as a quintessential dork, the sort of guy who was more likely to spend his free time playing Dungeons & Dragons than man-about-town. He and Sara would have made a highly improbable couple.
“I know, it’s ridiculous. But he finally got the message. I wouldn’t be surprised if Barbara put him up to it—she has a blind spot where Adam’s concerned. She thinks he’s a genius.” I’d met Barbara, too, at those dinners, as well as at Grenthaler board meetings, and she was a piece of work, to put it mildly. Her most distinguishing feature, in my eyes at least, was that she’d been Miss Texas in the early seventies, and a close runner-up for the Miss America title. Thirty years later, she still had the perky blond looks and theatrical presence of a pageant contestant, although her aesthetic sense seemed to have stopped evolving at some point in the late eighties. Her marriage to Tom had always been a bit of a mystery to me—she seemed too ditzy for him, and he too staid for her—but she seemed to adore him, and by all appearances he’d been a good husband to her and a good father to her son.
“Does Barbara need to sell her shares? Does she need cash?”
Sara shook her head. “I can’t imagine that she would need anything. The dividends from ten percent of the company should provide a sizable income. She has more money than she could ever begin to spend.”
“Have you spoken to her about it?”
“No. Monday didn’t seem like the right time, and things have probably been so hectic for her, planning the memorial service and everything.” She hesitated again. “I was actually hoping that you might talk to her for me, to see what her intentions are.”
“What if she wants to sell?”
“Then I want to buy,” Sara replied without missing a beat. “My father trusted me with this company. It’s all I have left of him, and I refuse to let it go out of my control. In fact, even if Barbara doesn’t plan to sell, I want to figure out how to acquire another ten percent so that I will be the majority shareholder.”
“You would have to raise one hundred million dollars to do that,” I reminded her.
“I know. I thought you could help me figure it out. I have a trust fund from my parents, but it’s nowhere near big enough to help much.”
“Let me talk to Barbara. Maybe the two of you can work something out that would allow you eventually to own her shares without us having to find the cash up-front.” I wanted to talk to Barbara about as much as I wanted to go out with my grandmother’s dentist’s handsome associate, but Sara was a friend as well as a client.
“Thank you, Rachel. Maybe I’m overreacting—I hope I’m overreacting—but I can’t relax if I know that the company might get away from me somehow. I can’t let that happen.” Her gaze locked on mine.
“I won’t let that happen,” I promised her.
Exchanges like that sometimes made you forget that Sara was only twenty-five years old. She spoke with the focused confidence of the CEO she would one day become. However, once we had finished discussing business it was almost as if she switched that side of herself off. She was still far more self-possessed than most people her age, but as we talked about her classes and her friends her voice took on the casual cadences of her peers.
She described the tension that was gripping the campus now that Hell Week had descended upon it.
“Is there anyone I should look out for who’s interviewing with Winslow, Brown?” I asked Sara after I’d convinced her to order dessert.
“I’m glad you asked—I’d almost forgotten. One of my suite-mates, Gabrielle LeFavre, is trying to get a job in investment banking. I think she had her first round of interviews with Winslow, Brown today. She’s been talking to all of the usual suspects—Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill. She has her heart set on this.”
“What’s her background? Does she have any finance experience?”
“No, not really. She was an accountant before business school. She’d put herself through college at a state school down South, and then she went to New York and tried to get a job in banking, but you know how it is—the big firms only recruit people out of college from Harvard, Princeton and Yale for the most part—nobody even gave her a chance.”
“That must have been tough. So she went into accounting?”
“Yes. She had earned her CPA at night when she was in college. Anyhow, she’s a bit of a stress case, but she’s really ambitious, and I think she’d work like a fiend if she were hired.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for her.” I made a mental note to myself, but from what Sara had said, her friend sounded like the sort of high-strung perfectionist who would fall to pieces the first time a partner yelled at her.
I turned the conversation to a lighter topic. “Now, what else is going on with you? How’s your love life? Besides Adam, of course,” I added with a smile.
“Nice.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist. But seriously, anything of interest?”
“Hardly,” she responded with a grimace.
“That good?”
“I was sort of seeing this guy before the holidays, but it didn’t go anywhere. I mean, he’s sharp and good-looking and everything, but we just didn’t click. It’s awkward, because he seemed to be really into it. We’d only been out on three or four dates and he was practically ready to propose. It was bizarre—we barely knew each other.” She looked up at me. “Actually, I think you might know him. He was an analyst at Winslow, Brown before business school.”
“Who?” I asked, not anticipating what the answer would be.
“Grant Crocker. Do you remember him?”
My heart sank as I tried to keep my expression even. I remembered Grant all too well, having had the misfortune of working with him several times during his two years at the firm, likely due to yet another of Stan’s none-too-subtle plots to torment me. Grant was unusually cocky in an industry where arrogance was nearly a prerequisite. He’d spent several years in the Marine Corps after college, so he was closer to my age than Sara’s, and the military seemed to have trained him well in various forms of chauvinism. He had difficulty following directions from a woman, and he more than once almost derailed a deal due to his reluctance to do the grunt work that fell to the most junior person on a team. Several of the secretaries had complained about his condescension and suggestive statements that came just short of overt passes. Most of the men in the department would have described him as a “great guy” and a “real go-getter,” and he was the star of the department basketball team, but the women in the department had their own nickname for him—Too Much Testosterone Guy—which was quite an achievement in our testosterone-rich environment.
Sara was waiting for my reply. “I remember him slightly,” I hedged. “I didn’t really know him very well.”
“To complicate matters more, Gabrielle has a massive crush on him. As far as I’m concerned, she’s welcome to him, but he won’t give her the time of day. And she seems to be taking her frustration out on me. She’s barely said two words to me since we got back from winter break.”
“That must make for fun times back at the dorm,” I said sympathetically.
Sara shrugged in response.
“How’s your other roommate—Edie, right?”
“Edie Michaels. She’s from L.A., and she wants to go back there and work in entertainment after graduation, so she’s not all caught up in the Hell Week hysteria, like Gabrielle. It’s nice to have at least one sane voice in the suite. Anyhow, enough about me. What’s going on with you? How’s Peter?”
“Peter’s wonderful.” I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. “Absolutely wonderful. In fact, he’s meeting me here tonight. He has a conference to go to this week in Boston.”
“How convenient,” Sara said dryly but with a smile. “I hope I get to meet him.”
“I hope so, too.” It was getting late so I signaled for the check and handed my credit card to the waitress. “Are you still rowing?” I asked. Sara was passionate about the sport, and she worked out regularly on the Charles River in her single-person scull.
“Every morning, before class. Fortunately the river hasn’t frozen over yet. Usually it has by this time of year.”
“It must be really cold. And dark.” The entire proposition sounded unpleasant to me. Exercise was bad enough at a gym, with music and television and the option to skip the treadmill and go straight for a post-workout massage.
“It feels good. I think I’m addicted.”
“Better you than me.”
“You should try it. You might like it.”
“I might like beating myself over the head with a blunt object, too, but I don’t think I’ll try that, either.”
She laughed. “Well, if you put it like that…”
I signed the bill, and we retrieved our coats and walked out into the cold night. I accompanied Sara along JFK Street toward the bridge that led across the Charles to the business school campus. A bitter wind was blowing off the river. When we reached Eliot Street, where I would turn to go to the hotel, I gave her another hug. “Try not to worry,” I said. “I’ll look into what’s happening with the stock. And I’ll talk to Barbara.”
“Thank you, Rachel. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem. Sleep well.”
I watched for a moment as she walked quickly toward the bridge, a lonely dark figure wrapped in a long wool coat.
Three
The hotel lobby looked like an advertisement for Brooks Brothers, thronged with men in dark suits and silk ties, their hair cut conservatively short and accessorized with briefcases and cell phones. Here and there I spotted a token woman or minority in the forest of navy. I’d been so distracted by my conversation with Sara that I’d forgotten to steel myself for the jungle that was the Charles Hotel during Hell Week. It was the preferred venue for recruiting, and most people stayed at night in the rooms that they would use for interviews during the day. Hence the Yuppie invasion.
I retrieved my bag and briefcase from the bell desk and threaded my way through the crowd toward reception, catching snippets of people’s conversations as I passed. A group of large men with loud ties was debating in even louder voices about which bar to start their evening. I guessed that they were probably traders, generally acknowledged as the most uncouth employees of investment banks and treated by those in corporate finance as a necessary evil, even during years when they contributed the bulk of their firms’ profits. Traders were the ones who spent most of their time yelling “buy” and “sell” into the phone with cigars clamped between their teeth. At the Winslow, Brown Christmas party in December a fight had broken out between a renegade group of traders from the Latin American arbitrage desk and their counterparts in corporate finance. Security had arrived before any real damage was done, but my money had been on the traders, hands down.
A Calvin Klein-clad woman was questioning someone intently over her cell phone as she made her way to the elevator. “Did you double-check all the numbers?” she asked anxiously, smoothing the knot in her Hermès scarf. “I want you to check them again, and then rerun the model using the higher discount rates. Fax me here when you’re done.” Somewhere a novice banker had just been sentenced to a sleepless night.
I checked in, collecting a pile of faxes and a packet from Winslow, Brown’s recruiting administrator that was waiting for me. The man at reception gave me an apologetic look. “We’re booked so full that all we have left is a suite. I hope you won’t mind.”
I assured him I wouldn’t, trying to hide my jubilant smile. Four nights in an expense-account hotel room with Peter was enough of a treat; four nights in a suite was more than I could have dreamed of. Sharing a hotel room with a boyfriend always made me think of Love in the Afternoon, one of my favorite movies (aside from bad teen flicks from the eighties). Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier, champagne and gypsies playing “Fascination.” Nothing could be more romantic. Of course, with my red hair, I was no Audrey Hepburn, and Peter was a couple of decades younger than Gary Cooper, and we would both be swamped with work during all of our afternoons here, and it would probably be hard to find a band of gypsy violinists for hire in Cambridge, but knowing all this did little to dim my anticipation. I found myself unconsciously humming “Fascination” under my breath as I headed for the elevator.
On the way, I ran into two separate acquaintances from business school who were also here to recruit fresh blood for their respective firms. I paused to exchange news and gossip and took some good-natured teasing about the Fortune cover. It was nearly ten by the time I’d shut the door of the suite behind me, happily taking in the cozy living room and nice big bed, all furnished with the Shaker furniture and blue-and-white fabrics that were the Charles’s trademark décor. I made quick work of kicking off my shoes and hanging up the clothes in my suitcase. There was no message from Peter, but he was probably still in transit. If all went according to schedule, he’d arrive by eleven. I ran a bath and poured a glass of wine from the well-stocked minibar before undressing and lowering myself into the steaming water, taking care not to splash the faxes I’d brought with me to review.
One of them was from Jessica, my assistant, who had kindly transcribed the voice mails that had piled up for me that afternoon and noted which calls she had already responded to on my behalf.
I scanned the list. Jessica had grouped the calls by subject matter and urgency. Fortunately, nothing seemed to demand immediate attention. Her last notation made me laugh.
No messages from the Caped Avenger. He’s been strangely quiet. Can we hope that he’s transferred his affections elsewhere?
As if. The Caped Avenger’s real name was Whitaker Jamieson, and there was nothing I’d like better than to see him transfer his affections, but I held out little hope. I sighed and took a healthy sip from my wineglass. Whitaker was the bane of my existence. Or, at least, one among many. He was an old chum of Stan Winslow (Stan seemed to know a lot of people with last names for first names) and was known in the business as a “high net-worth individual.” This was a polite way of saying that he was loaded. Generations of inbreeding among extremely wealthy families had culminated in the production of Whitaker more than seventy years ago. He had a personal fortune of several hundred million, much of which was invested with Winslow, Brown’s asset-management group.
Rather than sitting back and collecting his dividend checks, however, Whitaker fancied himself a mogul-in-the-making. All too frequently he would have a “fabulous idea” for a business he should acquire. He would swoop into my office, wearing his trademark cape over a natty custom-made pin-striped suit, and park himself in my guest chair for hours at a time. His breath reeking of gin, he would regale me with the details of his latest scheme, which he invariably described as a “fabulous idea. We simply must do it. It will be too fabulous.” When I was out of the office, he would pepper Jessica with calls, nagging her relentlessly about my whereabouts. She had developed a fierce antagonism toward Whitaker.
Of course, none of Whitaker’s “fabulous ideas” actually came to fruition. In the past year alone, I had analyzed the profitability and prospects of a fire-hydrant distributor, a failing women’s apparel chain and a producer of diet olive oil. An acquisition of any of these businesses would have been disastrous, and I managed to gently curb Whitaker’s enthusiasm.
I had no doubt that Stan had first steered Whitaker in my direction to torment me. I wished I could say that I had since developed any esteem for the Caped Avenger, as Jessica and I referred to him, but unfortunately I still found him just as pompous and tedious as the day I met him. I also had a secret hunch that he wasn’t that serious about any of his proposed acquisitions but had another agenda altogether. While Whitaker’s wardrobe and mannerisms screamed gay, he’d proved himself to be not only straight but lecherous to boot. When he wasn’t invading my office, he tended to favor small dark restaurants for our “meetings” and would encourage me to sit next to him on the banquette, rather than across the table, downing martinis while plying me with wine. I was always sure to order two cars to take us each home separately after these meetings so that there would be no question of any after-dinner activities. I would have loved to be rid of him altogether, but he was far too important to the asset-management group and relatively harmless when handled correctly.
Silence from the Caped Avenger should probably have made me nervous—who knew what he could get up to on his own? But I was glad of the respite, even though I was confident it would be only temporary. I tossed the faxes onto the bath mat next to the tub and turned to the packet the recruiting administrator had left for me.
A team of ten associates had already been at the Charles for three full days conducting the first round of interviews, and my packet included the results, as well as a schedule for the second round of interviews that more senior bankers like Scott and I would conduct over the next two days.
I checked the lists to see what had happened to Sara’s suite-mate, Gabrielle LeFavre. Sure enough, she’d had her interviews that morning—two back-to-back forty-five-minute sessions. Judging by the evaluation forms the interviewers filled out, Gabrielle had not fared too well in the process.
“Seemed extremely nervous and on edge,” one interviewer had written. “I was worried she might start crying,” another had added. Apparently she had frozen during her first interview when she had flubbed a fairly basic question about an item on her résumé. Things had gone downhill from there. Unfortunately, the comments were too consistent from both interviews for me to resurrect her for another chance.
I placed the recruiting packet on top of the faxes, ran some more hot water into the tub, and gave thanks that I was long done with business school and all of its associated stress. I’d loved college at Harvard, and after I’d completed two years as an analyst at Winslow, Brown, Harvard Business School had been the logical next step. I was lucky—I knew I’d return to Winslow, Brown after graduation, so I never had to go through Hell Week. But it had been hard not to get caught up in the competitive warfare that was a constant undercurrent of daily life on campus and erupted to the surface during recruiting season.
Harvard College prided itself on attracting a well-rounded class rather than well-rounded students. Thus, most of the undergraduate student body was extreme in some way. The person sitting next to you in class or at the adjoining table in the dining hall was likely to be the junior world chess champion, or a budding novelist, or a future Nobel Prize winning physicist. Harvard Business School prided itself on its diversity, as well. My class had boasted students from more than thirty countries ranging in age from their early twenties to a woman in her late forties. Demographics aside, however, the place was relatively homogenous, which made sense since everyone there wanted to pursue a career in business. And to pursue it aggressively. My college roommates had always teased me about my Type A personality, but at business school I’d felt practically passive in comparison to the other students.
The water was cooling again, and my fingertips had begun to resemble raisins, so I pulled myself out of the bath and dried off, wrapping myself in a plush terry robe. I padded into the living room with my soggy papers and dialed into voice mail to leave instructions for Jessica. With a thrill I checked the bedside clock—nearly eleven, and Peter would be here any minute.
It had been just a few days since I’d seen him last, when he’d put me on the plane after our New Year’s ski trip in Utah, but it felt like an eternity. It was hard to believe that I had only known him since August. Our meeting had been less than auspicious, taking place during a disastrous wedding weekend. Peter was supposed to be the best man. But Richard, who was to marry my old roommate, Emma, ended up dead before the ceremony could take place. By the end of the weekend, I’d managed to fall in love with Peter, decide he was a murderer, turn him into the police, realize I was completely wrong about him being a murderer, and force a confession from the actual killer, who’d tried to kill me twice.
The entire series of events hadn’t cast me in my most attractive light, but Peter hadn’t seemed to mind. The past five months had been nearly perfect, marred only by the difficulties inherent in a long-distance relationship.
I heard a knock at the door, and I rushed to throw it open. There he was, in the flesh.
He enveloped me in a long hug accompanied by a delicious kiss. “Mmm. You smell good.”
“I just took a bath. You smell good, too.”
“You smell better.” He kissed me again.
“No, you smell better.”
“No, you do.” Another kiss.
“You do.”
“Let’s not fight about it. We both smell really good.”
“Agreed.” And yet another kiss.
“Can I come in?” We were still standing in the doorway.
I laughed. “Absolutely.” I waited impatiently while he put down his bags and tossed his coat over the back of a chair. He looked so cute in his standard Silicon Valley wear—khakis and a navy sweater, his sandy hair slightly mussed from the long flight. I hurried to pour him a glass of wine from the half bottle I’d opened. He took it from me, set it on the coffee table and pulled me down on the sofa next to him.
“Good trip?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, running his hands through my hair. If I were a cat, I would be purring.
“Four nights,” I said.
“Four nights,” he replied with a grin. “And a suite. How did you pull that off?”
“I have my ways.”
“You definitely do,” he said, moving in for another kiss. And then his cell phone rang. “Crap. I should take this.” He jumped to his feet and dug the phone out of his coat pocket. “Peter Forrest.”
He was silent for a moment, listening. “That’s great, Abigail. Thanks for letting me know…yes…no…sure…I agree.” He began pacing as he talked.
I stood and crossed to the window. The room had a view across the small park to the river, which was still and dark in the moonlight. A vague feeling of unease settled over me as I listened to Peter’s one-sided conversation. Peter had hired Abigail to be his head of business development a few months ago, and even though I was more secure in this relationship than any I’d ever been in before, it was hard not to feel a tiny bit threatened by the knowledge that my boyfriend spent most of his waking hours with a woman who was brilliant, accomplished and bore more than a passing resemblance to Christy Turlington.
Peter finished his call after a few minutes and came to stand behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and resting his chin on the top of my head.
“What’s going on?” I asked, leaning back into his embrace. “Is everything all right?”
“Um, yeah. It’s just that we’re, uh, trying to sign up a new client. They’ll be at the conference.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Yes. The only problem is that there are a couple of other companies trying to beat us out, and they’ll be at the conference, too. Abigail and I have been working pretty hard on our pitch—it’s going to be a hectic few days.”
“How’s Abigail?” I asked, striving for a casual tone.
“She’s great. A real firecracker. Hiring her was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. She’s been instrumental in going after this new business.”
“I’m glad,” I said, trying to sound like I was. But I would have been a lot more glad if I didn’t know what Abigail looked like. Or if she’d been a man. Or gay. Or, at the very least, only brilliant and not beautiful.
“Anyhow, enough work talk. I brought you something.”
“A present?” I spun around to face him, thoughts of Peter’s brilliant, beautiful, model-material colleague nearly forgotten. “Where? What is it?” I loved gifts. Especially surprise gifts.
“Don’t get too excited. Just a little something from the airport.” He unzipped his suitcase and began rummaging through it, extracting a paper bag. He handed it to me.
I shook it. “Hmm. It doesn’t rattle.”
“Good. It’s not supposed to.”
I opened the bag and withdrew an oversize bar of Ghirardelli chocolate. “Yum.” Peter had known me long enough to recognize that I considered chocolate to be one of the four major food groups, along with caffeine and alcohol. I always forgot what the fourth one was. “Should we eat it now or later?”
“I’m thinking later,” he said, a gleam in his eye. He had hold of the dangling end of my bathrobe’s belt and was pulling me toward the bedroom.
It occurred to me that perhaps I should be annoyed that Peter’s gift hadn’t shown much forethought, but instead had been picked up at the newsstand on his way to catch the plane. But he quickly put any such peevish thoughts right out of my head.
Four
I was sleeping like the proverbial baby, sweetly tangled in Peter’s arms, when he gently untangled himself and got out of bed.
“Where are you going?” I asked, still half asleep.
“Shh. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Then come back.”
“I can’t. I have to meet Abigail before the conference starts. We need to go over the pitch we’re making one more time.”
“But it’s dark out.” There was only the faintest glimmer of murky light coming through the windows.
“It’s nearly seven. I’m supposed to meet her at the convention center at eight.”
“She won’t mind if you’re late.”
“Yes, she will. And I will, too, if we don’t get this client signed up. The company we’re pitching is hot.”
“But how can you even be effective if you’re sleepy?”
“I can’t be sleepy when I’m this stressed.”
“You’re stressed?” Peter? My calm, unflappable, good-smelling Peter was stressed?
“A little. Nothing to worry about.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead.
“I know an excellent way to relieve stress,” I offered, holding out my arms.
“I’m sure you do.” But he was already out of reach. “I’m just going to jump into the shower.”
I leaned back against the pillows. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
“Funny.”
“You can’t expect great wit in the middle of the night.”
“It’s not the middle of the night,” he protested, then thought better of trying to argue with me before I’d had any caffeine. “Never mind. Go back to sleep.” I heard the bathroom door shut behind him and the sound of the shower running.
I rolled over, trying to recover the nice dream-state I’d been in, but it was no use. I was awake, and there was no going back. I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed, bending down to pick up the bathrobe I’d discarded the night before. I wrapped it around me, tying the belt tightly around my waist, and ran my hands through my hair to restore some semblance of order. Perhaps I should call room service for breakfast, I thought. At least I could make sure Peter was well fortified for his stressful day.
Then I had a better idea.
I knocked on the bathroom door but received no answer, so I pushed it open. Peter was in the shower, whistling an unrecognizable tune. I let my robe slip to the floor, pulled the shower curtain aside and stepped in behind him.
Between the running water and his whistling, Peter hadn’t heard me come in. When I reached around him he gave a shout of surprise.
“Jesus Christ! Are you trying to give me a coronary?” His hair was lathered with shampoo, standing up in a sudsy Mohawk.
“That would be counterproductive,” I said. “Your hair looks cute like that. May I have the soap?”
He laughed. “Allow me.”
The shower took longer than Peter had expected, so he was racing around the room, frantically getting dressed, when his cell phone rang. “Peter Forrest,” he answered, holding the phone with one hand while he awkwardly tried to buckle his belt with the other. “Oh, hi, Abigail.” He listened for a moment. “You’re kidding.” He listened some more. “I knew they’d be all over this. Listen, I’m out the door right now. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. See you soon.”
“Problem?” I asked.
“Hamilton Tech trying to outmaneuver us. Nothing we can’t handle. Abigail just saw Smitty Hamilton having breakfast with the head of the company we’re trying to—I mean, that we’re pitching.”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure they’d much rather hire you than anyone named Smitty.”
“I hope so.” Peter pulled a dark green V-necked sweater over his head.
I reached up to smooth his damp hair, and he gave me a quick peck on the lips. “I’ve got to get going.” He picked up his overcoat and briefcase. “I’ll see you later?” he asked.
“Definitely,” I said, wrapping my arms around him for a hug.
He returned the hug but let go way too soon. “I need more affection,” I said. “That was completely insufficient to sustain me for a whole day.” He sighed and hugged me again, tightly, but I kept holding on after he let go.
“Rachel,” he said, trying to extricate himself. “Really. I’m not that great.”
I laughed and relinquished my grasp. “Go get ’em, Sparky.”
So much for a romantic hotel-room morning and leisurely breakfast.
I dried my hair and put on the black suit I’d packed for Tom Barnett’s memorial service. I wasn’t due at my recruiting meeting until half past eight, so I took a Diet Coke from the minibar and called into voice mail to clear out any messages that had accumulated.
It had been only nine hours since I had last dialed in—hours when normal people were asleep—but I already had five new messages. Four were from colleagues in our Asian offices. The last message made my heart sink. It was time-stamped 2:00 a.m., never a good sign. It was from Gabrielle LeFavre.
“Ms. Benjamin,” she began, her voice betraying her Southern roots. “This is Gabrielle LeFavre, a student at Harvard Business School. Sara Grenthaler may have mentioned my name to you. I had my first round of interviews with Winslow, Brown, and I’m concerned that I was not able to convey the full extent of my capabilities, or my commitment to a career in investment banking. I know that it’s very unusual to reconsider the results of an interview, but I strongly believe that if you would allow me to try again, I could convince you that I would be a valuable asset to your firm.” She left her contact information.
I hung up the phone, annoyed. Between the time Gabrielle had left her message and the precision with which she’d spoken, it sounded as if she’d spent hours carefully scripting what she’d say. Turning people down was one of the things I disliked most about recruiting. There were always a couple of candidates who wouldn’t take no for an answer and would besiege the recruiting team with phone calls, letters and, in a few instances, gifts. Dealing with these cases was always uncomfortable, and the fact that Gabrielle lived with Sara made the situation even more so. I would have to talk to this woman sooner or later, and I was not looking forward to it.
I took another Diet Coke from the minibar. Something told me that I would need even more than the recommended daily allowance of caffeine to get me through the day, what with a memorial service and the inevitable unpleasantness of my recruiting duties to look forward to. I popped open the can and crossed to the window to check out the weather, wishing it was evening already and time to meet Peter for dinner.
The morning light showed the view off in a way that I hadn’t been able to appreciate the previous night. The sky was gray, in keeping with the forecasts, which called for lots of snow. Still, the air was clear, and across the river I could see the familiar red bricks of the business school campus to the south and Soldiers Field Stadium to the west, nestled in the slush-spotted green of the athletic fields. In the foreground, a traffic jam was taking place on Memorial Drive. Its source appeared to be a flock of police cars parked at the junction of the drive and JFK Street, at the foot of the bridge.
I pressed my nose against the glass for a closer look.
There was a crowd surrounding the Weld Boathouse, home to several of Harvard’s crew teams. A bright stripe of yellow crime-scene tape held back onlookers, while uniformed policemen clustered in front of the building.
I wondered what could have happened. Some sort of crew team prank, perhaps, gone awry? One never knew what sort of hijinks rowers could get up to. I’d had the misfortune to date a rower my freshman year, and I’d never been so bored in my entire life. Our relationship consisted of lots of long, tortured conversations about his rowing, usually conducted over dining-hall meals with his teammates. I would watch in awe as they consumed enough food to feed small developing countries. I still vividly remembered my boyfriend commandeering an entire loaf of bread, loading it onto the toaster, slice by slice, then using up two sticks of butter, packet upon packet of sugar and a shaker-full of cinnamon to make cinnamon toast. He’d eaten it all in one sitting. And later that night he’d ordered in pizza. He was the only guy I’d ever gone out with who made my eating habits seem birdlike.
I pulled my attention from the view and my gluttonous ex-boyfriend and gathered my coat and purse. It was time to get going.
Winslow, Brown had set up its recruiting headquarters in a suite identical to my own but one floor down. I arrived a few minutes before the meeting was to start. Cecelia Esterhazy, the administrator from Human Resources, was already there, setting out name tags and schedules on a side table. While I was the titular head of the recruiting effort, most of the actual work fell to Cece, who had the unenviable job of liaising with the Career Services office, scheduling information sessions, reserving blocks of hotel rooms and cajoling unwilling bankers into showing up to interview eager students. Fortunately, she had an unflaggingly sunny disposition, and her fresh good looks ensured that most of my male colleagues were easily persuaded to do their part.
“Hi, Cece. How’s it going?”
She gave me a look that managed to be both harried and good-natured at the same time. “The usual. Three interviewers have already canceled on me. But I overbooked, so everything should be okay.” While recruiting was vital to Winslow, Brown’s future, it didn’t generate fees, and fees were the lifeblood of the firm. It wasn’t uncommon for bankers to decide at the last minute that whatever deals they were working on took precedence over a commitment to participate in recruiting.
“I’m sorry. I’m not making things any easier for you by cutting out this morning.”
“You, at least, have a valid excuse.” I’d told her about the memorial service earlier that week, and she’d been sympathetic.
“You’re doing great,” I reassured her.
She rolled her eyes.
“Courage,” I said. She rewarded me with a smile.
Colleagues from Winslow, Brown began trooping in, descending upon the breakfast buffet like vultures, most of them simultaneously talking on their own voice-enabled Blackberries. I helped myself to a bagel and cream cheese and another Diet Coke and found an empty chair. We needed to wait for a quorum to get things started, so I used the downtime to scroll through the accumulated e-mails on my own Blackberry before pecking out a quick message to Peter, wishing him luck with his pitch. Scott Epson was among the last to arrive. Today he was wearing a tie that put yesterday’s to shame—green silk dotted with little red golf tees. If he had been anyone else, I would have suspected sartorial irony.
When the room had filled, I cleared my throat and called the meeting to order. “I’d like to thank you all for being here. I know how busy everyone is, but we have an ambitious hiring goal this year, and your participation is very much appreciated.” I said a few more words by way of introduction, reminding everyone of the qualities Winslow, Brown deemed desirable in its prospective employees, and then turned the meeting over to Cecelia to explain how everything would work over the next two days.
I ate my bagel and listened while she smoothly ran through the day’s logistics. “We need everyone back here at five o’clock for the roundup session. Please don’t be late—we’ll try to finish up as quickly as we possibly can.” With that, she began handing out name tags and schedules.
No sooner had she finished than the first students began trickling in for their interviews, neatly turned out in aspiring Wall Street wear. Cece efficiently matched them up with the pairs of bankers to which they’d been assigned and sent them off to the interview rooms. By ten past nine, she and I were the only ones left. I was relieved—Scott Epson hadn’t seemed to notice that I wouldn’t be interviewing that morning. If he had, I was sure he would waste no time in letting Stan know in some backhanded fashion that I was shirking my duties. My absence that morning could be easily explained, but I’d rather not have to explain it. The partners at Winslow, Brown had strange ideas regarding how one should prioritize one’s various commitments. The memorial service for a client seemed to me to be an important event, but firm lore was sufficiently rife with stories of bankers being called back from hospital beds, bar mitzvahs, honeymoons and graveyards to make me hesitant to publicize the trade-off I was making.
I exchanged a few final words with Cece, thanking her and assuring her I’d be back by noon. Moments later I was in a cab bound for Trinity Church in Boston.
Five
The taxi turned from Eliot Street onto JFK Street, passing the police cars that still swarmed around the Weld Boathouse. We crossed the bridge over the river and made a left onto Storrow Drive.
“What happened back there?” I asked.
“Dunno,” the driver said. “But whatever it is, it’s sure screwing up traffic.”
Unenlightened, I pulled out my phone and dialed Emma’s mobile number. I’d talked to her the previous day, on my way to the airport in New York, but she was my best friend, and we usually talked daily, at least.
It took several rings before Emma picked up, and when she did, she sounded distracted. “Hello?”
“It’s me.”
“Oh, hi, Rach. I’m glad you called. Did you get into town all right?”
“Yes. I’m in a cab on Storrow Drive right now, heading into Boston. Are you at Matthew’s?”
“Yes. He just left for the clinic, and I was about to start on some sketches for a series I’ve been thinking about.” Now I understood the distracted tone. When Emma was starting a new series, her existence bifurcated into two worlds, one filled with ideas and shapes and color, and the other filled with reality. Needless to say, the former usually eclipsed the latter. Emma was a gifted artist, the daughter of a world-famous painter. After a difficult summer, during which she’d narrowly escaped an unfortunate marriage via a set of even more unfortunate circumstances, she seemed to be back on an even keel, happily dating Matthew and climbing to new heights of artistic success.
“Anything interesting?”
“Maybe. It’s too soon to tell.” I could almost feel the effort it took for her to pull her thoughts away from her work and back to our conversation. “But did you say you were going into Boston? I thought you were supposed to be at Harvard, interviewing. What’s in Boston?”
“A memorial service. A client of mine passed away last week.”
“It seems like a lot of people are dying lately,” she mused.
“Like who?”
“Actually, not a lot, I guess. It’s just that a patient of Matthew’s was found murdered yesterday, in Cambridge. And then hearing about your client. It just feels like a lot.”
“What happened to Matthew’s patient?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but the police want to talk to him today. She had an appointment at the clinic a couple of days ago. It probably hasn’t made the New York papers, but there have been six or seven prostitutes murdered in the Boston area over the last year—the police think Matthew’s patient might be the most recent victim.” Matthew worked at a free clinic in a particularly seedy neighborhood in South Boston, so it didn’t surprise me that a prostitute was among his clientele.
“Matthew’s being interrogated by the police?” I commented, amused. Matthew was a skilled doctor and one of the kindest people I knew, but he bore more than a passing resemblance to Shaggy from Scooby Doo, and the mental image of him confronting hardened police detectives was an entertaining one, although he’d managed it with aplomb the previous summer.
“Yes, I know. His second time in six months. He must be getting good at it by now.” Emma laughed at the thought. “On to happier topics, did you have a nice time with Peter last night?”
I thought about last night. And the morning’s shower. “I always have a nice time with Peter.”
“You sound like you’re blushing. Is he still too good to be true?”
“Absolutely,” I sighed blissfully.
“Well, I’m glad to hear you say it. Usually you’re so worried about jinxing everything that you refuse to admit you’re actually happy.”
“You don’t want to mess with the Jinxing Gods.” To tell Emma I was rid of them was a bolder statement than seemed safe. It was one thing to have vanquished them in my mind—it was a wholly different thing to say so aloud.
“There is no such thing.”
“Okay, now you’re just tempting fate.”
“I don’t know if I believe in fate, either.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that. Next thing I know you’ll be looking for ladders to walk under.” The cab turned off Storrow at the exit for Back Bay. “I should let you get back to work,” I told Emma. “And I’m nearly at the church. But we’ll see you guys tomorrow night, at the kickoff dinner, right?”
“Sure. I’m getting there early to help Jane cook.”
“I wasn’t invited for that part.”
Emma laughed again. “Gee. I wonder why not.”
The taxi deposited me in front of the weathered stone and brick of Trinity Church a few minutes before ten. I joined the slow-moving queue to sign the guest book and then found a seat in one of the ornately carved pews halfway down the nave. The church was packed, which was fitting given Tom’s prominent role in the community. I could barely make out the tops of Barbara’s and Adam Barnett’s heads in the first pew.
The service began, and I alternately stood, sang and sat as directed. The formal rituals that accompanied death always left me numb, and I had a bad habit of automatically tuning out during any sort of lecture. My eyes wandered, taking in the crowd. I recognized both the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts, along with one of the state’s U.S. senators. Several other faces were familiar to me from Grenthaler board meetings. I looked for Sara, wondering how she was holding up, but I didn’t see her, which wasn’t surprising given the masses of people in the church.
As the minister rambled on, I thought again about Tom and Barbara and their unlikely union. They really could not have been more different—even if you accepted that opposites did, in fact, attract. Tom was descended from a long line of erudite and genteel New Englanders. He had joined the staff of Grenthaler Media as a graduate student in international affairs, intending to work part-time as he pursued his doctorate. Soon he had dropped his classes and joined the company full-time, becoming Samuel Grenthaler’s partner and a significant force in the growing enterprise.
Nancy Sloan theorized that Tom had been slow to marry because he was secretly in love with Anna Porter, the wife of his best friend and partner. He was nearly forty-five when he met Barbara. By then, she’d left her pageant days and an unsuccessful first marriage behind and had moved to Boston with her young son to take a position as the host of a local daytime talk show. A statuesque blonde, perfectly coiffed with the signature big hair of her home state and always dressed in bright Escada or Chanel suits, she was a surprising success in a town that prided itself on its intellectual heritage. But she retired from show business shortly after marrying Tom to dedicate herself to home and family. Nowadays her skin had the tight shiny look that betrayed the attentions of a plastic surgeon, and she maintained her size four with a fierce devotion to exercise and diet, but she was still a stunning presence. Every time I saw her I felt dwarfed and frumpy by comparison and immediately noticed that my stockings had a run or that my nails were a mess. She was also an aggressive extrovert, invariably peppy and talkative and with a Texan drawl that coated her words like syrup.
Her son, Adam, was in his late twenties now, tall and lanky and completely lacking in his mother’s charisma. Tom had formally adopted him soon after he and Barbara married, but there was something nervous about him, as if he never felt that he really belonged. He was a bit of a mama’s boy, too, and he still lived at home, in a third-floor apartment that Tom and Barbara had fashioned into a bachelor pad. I doubted, however, that the pad was seeing much action. I was amazed that he’d actually gotten up the guts to try to romance Sara. It seemed obvious to me that she was way out of his league.
I spied Grant Crocker across the aisle and a few rows up, recognizing him from the rigid set of his broad shoulders and the military-short brown hair. Yet another man who didn’t seem to realize that Sara was way out of his league. He turned and met my gaze, as if he’d felt my eyes on his back. He gave me a friendly but subdued nod before turning back around. I wondered, and not for the first time, how such a handsome boy-next-door face could belong to such a domineering jerk.
After a eulogy from an old friend of Tom’s and a final benediction, the service drew to a close. The guests were invited to the Barnetts’ house for a reception directly following the service. Tom’s body had already been cremated, per his request. The congregation stood to let Barbara and other immediate family pass before we filed out.
Barbara’s blond head was bowed, and she had linked her arm through Adam’s, who guided her dutifully up the aisle. Several older couples followed, whom I imagined to be assorted relatives. Edward and Helene Porter, Sara’s grandparents, were among the group, a stately white-haired pair I’d met at Grenthaler board meetings. Then the other rows began emptying out. I still didn’t see Sara. I wondered if maybe she’d left through another door, wanting to avoid the crush outside.
I’d turned to walk up the aisle when Grant Crocker materialized at my side. “Rachel,” he greeted me, his voice appropriately hushed to reflect our surroundings. “What brings you here?”
“Tom was my client,” I explained, “and Sara Grenthaler and I worked together when she was a summer associate at Winslow, Brown. And I needed to be in town for recruiting, anyhow. How are you, Grant?”
“I’m fine. But this is a sad day.” He put his hand on my elbow as we made our way up the aisle. He’d always been quick to go through the motions of chivalry—opening doors and offering to carry stacks of heavy client presentations—but from him they’d always rankled, knowing as I did that the flip side of his chivalry was chauvinism. And his sanctimonious tone made me wish somebody else was there to hear it, so that we could joke about it later. “I felt it was important to be here,” he added. “For Sara. Since they were so close.” He said Sara’s name with a proprietary air, which I thought was odd given what she’d told me the previous night.
“Have you seen her anywhere?” I asked.
“No. In fact, I was just about to ask you the same thing.”
“We probably missed her in this crowd,” I replied as we emerged from the church into the crisp air. A few flakes of snow had started to fall, precursors of the major storm that was expected that weekend.
“Probably,” he agreed. “Are you going to the reception?”
I made a quick decision. My presence among the several hundred who were likely to descend on the Barnett house would hardly be missed. Nor would it be an appropriate time to discuss Barbara’s ten-percent stake in Grenthaler Media. “No, I’ve got to get back to the Charles. We’re doing the second round of interviews today and tomorrow.”
“I guess I’ll see you at the Winslow, Brown thing tomorrow night, then.” I’d almost forgotten that Winslow, Brown was hosting a cocktail party Friday for the candidates we were asking back to New York as well as previous analysts, like Grant, who had offers outstanding to return to the firm after graduation. I stifled a shudder at the thought of once again having to work with Grant on a daily basis.
“I guess so,” I said, striving to be polite. There was nothing technically wrong with anything Grant had said or done in our brief exchange, but just being around him seemed to rub me the wrong way. I said goodbye, glad to extract my elbow from his grasp and be at least temporarily done with him, and walked down Boylston Street in search of a cab. I found one idling at the corner of Clarendon Street and got in, asking the driver to take me to Harvard Square.
I felt apprehensive, and I tried to figure out why. Clearly, a memorial service was not the most soothing event, nor was it comforting to think about Grant Crocker being back in my life full-time should he return to Winslow, Brown in the fall. But there was something else. I realized that I would have felt better if I’d known for sure that Sara had been at the church. It was strange that neither Grant nor I had seen her. And I couldn’t imagine that she would have missed the service.
I busied myself on the trip back to Cambridge by calling my office to check in with Jessica. I also tried Peter, just to say hello, but his cell phone went straight into voice mail. I left a message then leaned back in my seat, staring out the window. The cab rounded a final curve, zooming past the business school campus to the left and the familiar red brick buildings and cupolas of the undergraduate campus across the river. We turned off Storrow Drive and made a right-hand turn onto the bridge and into an unmoving line of cars.
The driver braked abruptly, cursed at the traffic and added his horn to those that were already honking. After several minutes during which we traveled only a few feet, I paid him and got out. I’d get to the hotel faster by walking. The driver happily pocketed my money and made an illegal U-turn, tires squealing, to return to Boston.
I turned up the collar of my coat against the harsh wind and made my way across the bridge. At its foot, the yellow crime-scene tape remained with its accompanying flock of police cars. Those rowers must have been up to some serious hijinks.
Curious, I stopped to ask one of the uniformed policemen what had happened.
“A young woman was attacked this morning,” he told me.
“Attacked?”
“Uh-huh. In the boathouse. Really early.”
Suddenly, I knew why I hadn’t seen Sara at the church. I felt the blood drain from my face.
Six
I rushed up JFK Street to Mount Auburn, hung a right and sprinted the remaining block to Holyoke Center, which housed University Health Services. The run on the uneven brick sidewalks was no easy feat, dressed as I was in a skirted suit and heels, and the mere act of passing through the building’s entrance instantly brought back unpleasant memories of the times I’d gone there as an undergrad, nursing a bladder infection or something equally embarrassing, but these concerns were eclipsed by my concern for Sara.
Flu season was in full gear, and the clerk at reception was busy with other visitors, but I guessed that Sara would be in the Stillman Infirmary on the fifth floor, so I headed for the elevator bank, punching the call button impatiently. Nobody ever seemed to stop you when you gave off the air of knowing exactly where you were going.
The elevator arrived, and I jabbed at the button for the fifth floor, and then the button to close the doors. The elevator rose at a glacial pace, ticking off each floor with a beep. When the doors finally parted, I strode to the nurses’ station. “I’m here to see Sara Grenthaler,” I announced in my most authoritative tone. While UHS was probably less strict than a normal hospital, I worried that visitors would be restricted to family, of which Sara didn’t have much.
“And you are?” asked the nurse behind the desk.
“I’m Rachel Benjamin. Sara’s cousin.” If you were going to lie, I knew that the only way to do it was simply and with confidence. And there was, after all, a small chance that we were distantly related—her father’s family and my father’s family could have lived in the same Russian shtetl, many generations back, being persecuted by the same Cossacks. It wasn’t a complete lie.
My bluff seemed to work, or it may have been completely unnecessary, because the nurse consulted her computer terminal. “She’s in five-oh-six, ma’am.” I ignored being ma’amed—now was not the time to get hung up on concerns that I’d become prematurely matronly. Instead I hurried off in the direction she’d indicated, counting off the room numbers on either side. The door to Sara’s room was ajar, and I gave it a gentle knock before going in.
She was lying in one of the two hospital beds, and she looked awful. Her head was wrapped in white gauze, and she was hooked up to a variety of tubes and monitors. Her eyes were shut, and her skin was nearly as white as the gauze that framed her face. I let out an involuntary gasp.
“It’s okay. The doctor said she’s going to be all right.” I turned, startled, to the corner, where a young woman rose from a chair. “I’m Edie Michaels,” she said, proffering her hand.
“The roommate,” I answered, putting the name to the face.
“Well, one of them.”
“I’m Rachel Benjamin. From Winslow, Brown.”
“Oh, sure. You had dinner with Sara last night.”
“Yes. So what happened?”
Edie sank back into the chair, running a hand through her mass of curly black hair. Her big dark eyes were worried in her olive-skinned face. “Well, you know how Sara rows every morning?”
I nodded, perching myself on the second, unoccupied bed. “We were just talking about it.” The previous evening suddenly seemed very far away.
“Apparently, she did her workout, and she was putting her scull away when somebody hit her over the head with an oar. A homeless man saw the whole thing—he’d come in to use the bathroom in the boathouse.”
“Did they catch the guy who did it?”
“No, he ran out when he realized he’d been seen. And the homeless guy was too busy checking that Sara was all right to follow him. He’s the one who called the ambulance and the police. All he saw was somebody wearing a ski mask and a big coat with a hood—it was still pretty dark out, and he wasn’t even sure if it was a man or woman.”
“And what did the doctors say?” I asked anxiously.
“They think she’s going to be fine. She has a bad cut on her scalp, and she had to have stitches. They did X-rays and everything, and there’s some swelling, and they said she might have a slight concussion, but they didn’t think too much damage had been done. She was conscious when they brought her in, but she didn’t remember seeing anyone. They gave her a sedative after the stitches, and it knocked her right out.”
“So she really was attacked,” I said in disbelief.
“I know. I can’t imagine who would have done such a thing. It’s so…gritty.”
“Maybe it was a vagrant of some sort? Maybe she surprised somebody who was hiding out there?” There was a pretty sizable and less than mentally stable homeless population in Harvard Square, and I could easily imagine one of them using the boathouse as a temporary shelter and freaking out that his space had been invaded.
Edie shook her head. “I thought that, too, at first. But I’ve been sitting here, trying to figure it out, and I don’t think that makes sense.”
“Why not?”
“If somebody were hiding out there, she would have surprised him when she went into the boathouse in the first place, to get her scull. And if he were going to attack her, why wouldn’t he have attacked her then? But she was attacked when she was leaving.”
“Sort of like someone was waiting for her when she came back from her row?”
“Exactly. Especially when you think about the ski mask. I mean, what sort of random attacker would come equipped with a mask? That sort of thing just screams premeditation.” I recalled Sara mentioning that Edie planned on finding a job in entertainment, and going by her dramatic choice of words, it seemed that she would be well-suited to it.
“And you’re sure it wasn’t the guy who said he witnessed the entire thing?”
“I don’t think so. George, the homeless man, is sort of a fixture around Harvard Square. There’s a shelter at the University Lutheran Church, and both Sara and I have volunteered there. He knew Sara and had talked to her—I mean, it’s not like he’s the most sane person you’ll ever meet—in fact, he’s a total nutcase—but he has no history of violence. If he’d run into Sara, he would have just tried to engage her in conversation of some sort. He thinks he’s a real intellectual, and he’s always trying to debate philosophy or literary theory or whatever with students. He wouldn’t hurt anyone. Bore them to death, maybe, but that’s as bad as he gets.”
“That’s funny. I think I might remember him from my college days.” I hazily recalled a shabby man who would sit in on my English lectures, occasionally posing an interesting and clearly well-informed question.
“Yeah. He’s a bit of a legend around here. Anyhow, the hospital called our room, and I picked up the call and came right over.”
“So it probably wasn’t George.”
“No. I’d be really surprised if it were.”
“Then I wonder who. And why.”
Edie was quiet for a moment. I had the sense that she was taking my measure, wondering if she could confide in me.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” I asked.
She nodded. “Look, I feel sort of uncomfortable talking about this, but I know that Sara trusts you. And looks up to you.”
The idea of anyone viewing me as a role model was a bizarre one, and coming so soon after being ma’amed, it made me wonder if the time had come to ask my doctor about Botox. “Well, I don’t know about the looking up part, but she can definitely trust me. And you can, too.”
“Okay.” She seemed to make up her mind. “Sara’s been getting these strange letters.”
“Letters?”
“Yes. Like love letters, but sort of sinister. I mean, they’re all flowery and gushy and go on and on about how beautiful she is. But they’re never signed, and there’s no return address or even a stamp or postmark on the envelopes, and they show up in the weirdest places—not just her mailbox at school, but slipped into her bag or a notebook. She once even found one on her bed.”
“Creepy,” I said.
“And invasive. I mean, the letters seem harmless enough—really badly written, but harmless. But when they show up in her personal space, it’s really disturbing. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it’s like she’s being stalked.”
“Does she have any idea who might be sending them?”
“No. Not a clue. We’ve been over and over it, but we just can’t come up with any likely suspects. It would be hard to imagine any of the guys at school writing anything like them, much less giving them to her.”
“But it must be someone who has access to the school—otherwise, how could he get the letters to her? How could he get into your dorm?”
“Well, it’s not like security is that tight. Anyone who looked like he could belong on campus could probably walk around without too much difficulty. And people are always letting people into the dorm, even though they shouldn’t.”
“What about Grant Crocker?” I asked, remembering the odd, proprietary way in which he’d spoken of Sara earlier that morning.
“Sara told you about Grant?”
“Yes. And I knew him from when he worked at Winslow, Brown. He was at the memorial service this morning, and he was asking me if I had seen Sara.” It would be a great way to deflect suspicion from himself, I thought—acting like he was perplexed not to see her at the church, even if he knew exactly why she wasn’t there. My distaste for him made me more than willing to cast him as a creepy violent stalker.
“We talked about it maybe being Grant, but it’s hard to picture. If you could see the letters—they’re not a Grant Crocker type production. I mean, he’s an ex-marine and a fanatical weight lifter—he even takes those weird supplements that build muscle or whatever. But this stuff is really lovey-dovey, and also sort of pretentious with all of these esoteric quotes from various poets. We just couldn’t imagine that Grant had it in him. He’s been a total pain since Sara broke things off with him—he still calls all the time. In fact, he called last night when you guys were having dinner, and he practically had a jealous fit on the phone. But these letters—they’re just not his style.”
“Do the police know about the letters? Did you tell anyone about them? Did Sara?”
“Actually, she did. Just yesterday. I’d been urging her to go to campus security, but she was worried that she’d be overreacting. And the letters weren’t threatening, really, except for being anonymous and showing up in strange places. So she decided to show them to her section leader and get his advice.”
The business school class was divided into sections of about ninety students each. During the first year, students took all of their classes with their sections. It was an interesting arrangement. On the one hand, it allowed students to become comfortable with their peers and thus, in theory at least, more willing to put forth unconventional opinions. On the other hand, by the end of the first year you could pretty much guess what any one of your section-mates would say in answer to any question before he opened his mouth, and you spent a lot of time hoping he wouldn’t open his mouth. A professor was assigned to each section as its leader, acting as an ombudsman of sorts.
“That’s good. What did he say?”
“Professor Beasley said he would take a look and help her figure out whether she should report the letters to campus security.”
“Professor Beasley? Is he new?” The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember a Professor Beasley.
“I think he’s been around for a couple of years.”
“Well, given what happened this morning, it seems like he should definitely tell the police.”
“I think so, too. I was going to go see him later, but I don’t want to leave Sara right now. I called and left a message but he was in class.”
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t I go talk to Professor Beasley?”
“Would you do that? I’d feel so much better if I knew somebody was looking into it, but for all I know, he doesn’t even know what’s happened to Sara yet.”
“Well, I’ll make sure he knows.”
“That would be great,” Edie said, visibly relieved. “I’d just hate to leave before Sara wakes up.”
We exchanged cell-phone numbers so I could call her after I’d spoken to Professor Beasley and she could let me know when Sara awakened.
I called Cecelia back at the hotel as I left UHS, explaining what had happened. It was just after noon, and interviews wouldn’t resume until two o’clock. I hoped that I could get to Professor Beasley’s office, talk to him and make it back to the Charles in time for the afternoon’s interview schedule. I also tried Peter’s cell phone again.
He picked up this time, but he sounded harried.
“Hi, it’s me.”
“Oh, hi, Rachel. What’s up?” His greeting was warm but rushed.
Just as I was about to relate the morning’s events, it occurred to me that given how busy he was, and how stressed, unloading on him right now was probably not the most considerate thing a supportive girlfriend could do. “Nothing,” I said lamely. “Just wanted to say hello.”
“Great. Hi.” I heard a voice in the background, and a trill of female laughter. “Listen, I’m sort of in the middle of something right now. Abigail and I are at her hotel, refining our proposal for this pitch. Things are really heating up. Could I give you a call back later?”
“Um, sure,” I said.
“Okay. Talk to you later.”
I started to ask him about our dinner plans, but he’d already hung up.
I know it was irrational, but I felt annoyed, even while recognizing that there were plenty of times when Peter called me and I couldn’t talk. But the laughter I heard tapped into some well of insecurity in my heart, and the thought of Peter and Abigail working closely together in a hotel room wasn’t a particularly welcome one.
Stop it, I told myself. It’s Peter. You have nothing to worry about. He’s just busy.
With his gazellelike business associate, a mean little voice in my head reminded me. In a private place with a big bed. I shushed the voice, but not before registering a flash of jealousy so intense it made my stomach churn.
I’d reached the river and was passing the boathouse once more. There were only a couple of police cars left now, but the yellow crime-scene tape was still up. I crossed the bridge, leaning into the wind coming off the water and burrowing my hands in my pockets. I tried to take my mind off Peter and Abigail, and instead imagined what Professor Beasley would be like.
Old, I decided. Very old. With a walking stick, bow tie and lockjaw, like the professor in The Paper Chase. But imagining the decrepit Professor Beasley did little to quell the anxiety that my truncated conversation with Peter had stirred. I crossed Storrow Drive to Harvard Street and then took a left onto the business school campus, still wrapped in insecurity and fretting about Peter’s strangely distant tone.
The grounds of the business school looked more Harvard than the college campus on the other side of the river. Here there was even more red brick, and more ivy, with patches of green grass broken by stone paths. A large endowment from corporate donors and successful alumni ensured that everything was maintained beautifully, and every time I came here a new building had risen, doubtless graced with the name of one of those donors. A couple of students walked by me, dressed in suits and overcoats. Judging by their clothes and serious expressions, they were on their way to interviews at the Charles.
I mounted the stone stairs to Morgan Hall, which housed most of the faculty offices, checking the directory in the foyer for Professor Beasley’s office and quickly finding the listing—Beasley, J.—on the third floor. I heard the swoosh of the elevator doors opening behind me and dashed to catch it.
And collided, head-on, with the love of my life.
Seven
“Oof,” I said.
The impact sent me sprawling, and I lost my grip on my shoulder bag. Its contents spilled out to surround me on the cold stone floor. My Blackberry ricocheted off a wall, and a lipstick rolled into a distant corner, but my first thought was of my nose, which felt like it had suffered some serious damage from its run-in with the man’s chest. He must have been made of steel—either that or he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
“Are you all right?” The voice was rich and deep and it sent a shock of recognition down my spine. Along with a delicious tingle that made me promptly forget about any need for an emergency rhinoplasty. The man knelt down beside me, and with a strange sense of destiny I looked up and into Jonathan Beasley’s blue, blue eyes.
Suddenly I was eighteen all over again, sitting across from Jonathan in English 10 (A Survey of English Literature from Chaucer to Beckett) and wondering how such perfection was possible in one human being.
I had worshipped him for the better part of a year. He was a senior when I was a freshman. He was brilliant. He was beautiful. He played varsity ice hockey. He was the Ryan O’Neal to my Ali MacGraw. Except that he never actually spoke to me, and if he had, I would have been tongue-tied, completely unable to conjure up a comment that managed to be both clever and alluring at once. Then he graduated, and I never saw him again. I went on to form other unhealthy and unacted-upon crushes from afar, but Jonathan had been my first, and on some level I’d never forgotten him.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked again as I stared at him, openmouthed.
“Y-yes,” I stuttered. “I’m fine, thank you. And I apologize. I was in such a rush that I wasn’t watching where I was going.” Think of something witty to say, I implored myself. Please, please think of something witty to say.
“Don’t worry about it.” He smiled—how I remembered that smile! “Here, let me help you.” He began gathering my spilled belongings and putting them back in my bag. He handed me my Blackberry and gave me a quizzical look. “I think I know you from somewhere. From college, maybe? Across the river. An English course, right?”
I nodded, speechless, as he extended a hand to help me to my feet. What would Ali MacGraw do in a situation like this?
“I thought I’d seen you before. It’s been a long time. I’m Jonathan. Jonathan Beasley.”
“I’m Rachel Benjamin.” I covertly looked him over, taking in the blue shirt that set off his eyes and dark blond hair and the slightly battered tweed jacket that stretched over his shoulders. He’d been beautiful a decade ago, and the years since had treated him well. My knees were shaky, and while I could blame their condition on my fall, the warmth I felt in my cheeks could only be blamed on simple, old-fashioned lust. He seemed to be having even more of an impact on me now than he had when I was eighteen.
He leaned against the wall. The elevator had long since come and gone. “So, what are you doing here? Are you a student at the business school?”
“No, at least not now. I graduated years ago. I work in New York. At Winslow, Brown. And you’re a professor?” Now I knew why Professor Beasley’s name had sounded familiar, but somehow the title of professor had managed to blot out the less-than-professorial associations I had with the name Beasley. This Professor Beasley was a far cry from the bow-tied, lockjawed curmudgeon I’d imagined.
“Believe it or not. Organizational behavior. Incentive systems, things like that. I put in some time on Wall Street and then went to Columbia for a Ph.D. I’ve been teaching here for three years now.”
I remembered, with great difficulty, why I was there. “You know, it’s funny, running into you like this. I was actually on my way to see you. Only I didn’t realize it would be you, specifically. I didn’t realize that you were Professor Beasley.”
“Really? Why?”
“It’s about Sara Grenthaler.”
His expression changed from friendly to somber, but it was equally enthralling. “How do you know Sara?”
“Well, she’s sort of my client. I mean, Grenthaler Media is. And she worked with me last summer at Winslow, Brown.”
“So you’ve heard what happened to her.” His voice was laced with concern.
I nodded. “In fact, I just came from UHS. I was talking to her roommate, Edie Michaels, and she explained about the letters Sara was getting. I told her I’d come talk to you. She’s anxious that the police know about them, just in case there’s a connection of any sort with the attack.”
“Let’s go up to my office,” Jonathan suggested. “I can fill you in there.” I willingly let him escort me up to the third floor and lead me down a corridor, nodding to various colleagues and staff along the way. He ushered me into his office and took my coat, hanging it next to his own on a peg on the back of the office door. I looked around while he cleared a stack of papers from one of his guest chairs. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and I scanned his collection. It was extensive and varied, ranging from the usual business texts to history and biography. I even saw the familiar double volume of Norton’s Anthology of English Literature, its bindings worn and tattered.
“English 10,” he said, following my gaze.
“I know. I’ve got the same set.” I sat down in the now-empty chair, relieved to no longer have to trust my shaky knees, and he settled himself across from me at his desk.
“I was an Economics major, but I took that course senior year. I loved it. It made me wish I’d taken more English courses, but it was too late.”
“It would be great to go back and take all of the courses that I missed. Well, except for the exams and papers.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” he replied with a rueful smile. “So, now that I think about it, it’s all coming back to me. You know, my roommate had such a crush on you.”
“He did?” I didn’t remember his roommate. I’d had eyes only for Jonathan.
“It was almost pathetic. Clark Gibson. Do you remember him? He would spend every class staring at you and then make me rehash everything you said for the rest of the day. He was obsessed.”
“Oh.” I thought back and dredged up a hazy image of Clark Gibson. He had seemed to stare a lot, but I’d assumed he was staring at Luisa. Most men did. “Why did he never ask me out?”
“Well, you were always with your boyfriend. What was his name? The guy with the dark hair and little round glasses?”
“Who? Oh—you mean Jamie. He wasn’t my boyfriend. He just lived in our dorm room. Because he hated his roommates. You know how that is.” Jamie would invariably sit on one side of me while Luisa sat on the other, each silently rolling their eyes at me when I passed them notes commenting on something Jonathan had said, or what he was wearing that day, or any of the other trivialities that are so important when you have a massive, hopeless crush on somebody who doesn’t know you exist.
“You’re kidding. I’ll have to tell Clark. He’ll kick himself, especially now that he’s married and has three kids.”
“And just think, they could have been mine.” Jonathan chuckled. Little did he know how much time I’d spent dreaming of him and our three kids.
“So, the letters,” I said, once again having to remind myself why I was there.
“Yes, the letters,” he repeated. He used a key to open a desk drawer and pulled out a stack of folded papers held together by a rubber band. “Take a look,” he invited, handing the stack across the desk.
“What about fingerprints?” I asked.
“So many people have handled these—Sara, Edie, me—I doubt that there will be any useful prints. And I suspect that whoever wrote these was pretty careful. They could have been typed on any computer and printed on any standard laser printer.”
I freed the folded pages from the rubber band and opened the one on top, scanning it quickly. Jonathan was right—it was entirely typewritten on regulation letter-size paper.
Darling Sara,
I saw you today, at a distance, your raven hair bent over your studies, a pen grasped in your graceful hand, and my heart overflowed. I wanted to rush to your side and take you in my arms.
I see you and hear the words of the poet:
“She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies”
You are my night, you are my starry skies. But how can I confess my forbidden love? I cannot. One day, perhaps, but not today.
I didn’t blame whoever had written it for leaving it unsigned—it was awful.
“Yeesh,” I said. “Are they all like this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nauseating?”
“You think it’s nauseating?”
“Well…” I cast about, trying to find a more appropriate word, but came up empty. “Yes. Nauseating. So gushy and gross.”
“Which one are you looking at?” he asked me.
I handed it to him, and he skimmed it. “Oh. I thought this one was sweet. Romantic, with the Keats and everything.”
“Are you sure it’s not Byron?”
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