Sidney Sheldon’s After the Darkness. Tilly Bagshawe
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I can’t.’
Grace was in the boardroom of the law firm Carter Hochstein. Around the table were six forbidding-looking men in dark suits. John Merrivale introduced them as Lenny’s trustees, the men responsible for overseeing his estate.
‘I’m afraid you have no choice. Put simply, Mrs Brookstein, you do not have the money to continue paying the mortgage on the apartment. We’re going to have to put all your assets on the market. Historically, your husband funded his lifestyle by borrowing large sums of money against the value of his stake in Quorum. Those loans have now been called in, and you have no immediate means of paying them.’
Grace turned to John Merrivale in bewilderment.
‘But how can that be? Can’t I, I don’t know, sell some shares or something?’
John looked pained. ‘The thing is, Grace, until this mess is sorted out at Quorum, you d-don’t have any shares to sell.’
‘Mrs Brookstein.’ Kenneth Greville, the most senior partner, spelled it out in black and white. ‘You must understand. Vast sums of money remain unaccounted for at Quorum. Hundreds of thousands of your husband’s investors have been financially ruined. They’ve lost everything.’
Grace thought, And I haven’t?
‘Until your husband is determined to be legally dead and the criminal investigation is completed, we can’t draw any firm conclusions. But it does look increasingly likely that Mr Brookstein was involved, to some degree at least, in fraudulent activity of a most serious nature. The amounts that were stolen – ’
‘No.’ Grace stood up. ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t sit here and listen to this. My husband never stole anything. Lenny is not a thief! He’s a good man and he built Quorum up from nothing. Tell them, John.’
Kenneth Greville thought, She still refers to him in the present tense. The poor child’s delusional.
‘Your loyalty is admirable, Mrs Brookstein. But it is my unpleasant duty to inform you of the facts with regard to your current, and probably future, financial circumstances. You will not be able to continue living at the Park Avenue apartment. I’m sorry.’
Tears rolled down Grace’s cheeks. She felt as if she were manacled to a runaway train. Her life was collapsing around her, and she had absolutely no power to stop it.
That evening at dinner, Caroline Merrivale watched Grace staring listlessly at the dining-room wall. She’d barely touched her soup and looked thin and drawn.
‘Eat up, Grace. In this house we make it a rule never to let good food go to waste. Don’t we, John?’
John saw the triumphant flash of cruelty in his wife’s eyes. She’s loving every second of this. Turning the tables on Grace at last. She’s like a cat with a mouse, playing with it before the kill.
‘Caroline’s right, Grace. You must try to k-keep your strength up.’
Grace brought a spoonful of soup to her lips. It was cold. She fought down the urge to gag. ‘I’m sorry. I really don’t feel very well. If you don’t mind, I think I’d like to go to bed.’
The sooner today was over, the better. After the meeting with the lawyers, she’d felt lower than she had since the day the coast guard told her the awful news. The whole world was talking about this stupid money. As if I care about the money! All I want is for Lenny to walk back through the door.
A maid appeared in the doorway. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, Mrs Merrivale. But there’s a policeman at the door. He says he has urgent business with Mrs Brookstein.’
Instinctively Grace panicked. ‘No! Tell him to go away. It’s late. Tell him to come back in the morning.’
Caroline laughed. ‘Don’t be silly, Grace. It’s the police, not a social call. You must go out and meet him.’
‘No, please, Caroline. I can’t.’
Caroline was unmoved. ‘Melissa, show the officer in. Tell him Mrs Brookstein will be with him momentarily.’
A few minutes later, Grace walked nervously into the entryway. She expected to find an aggressive FBI agent there to interrogate her. Instead, she was greeted by a shy young man in uniform. As soon as he saw Grace, he took off his cap politely. Grace felt the tension in her shoulders begin to ease.
‘Good evening, Officer. You wanted to see me?’
‘Yes, Mrs Brookstein. I, er…I have some news for you. It’s about your husband. Perhaps you’d like to sit down?’
Irrationally, Grace’s heart soared.
He’s alive! Lenny’s alive! They’ve found him! Oh, thank God. Lenny will come back and everything will go back to the way it used to be. We’ll have our homes again and our money, no one will hate us anymore…
‘Mrs Brookstein?’
‘Oh, I’m fine, thank you. I’ve been sitting all day. You say you have some news for me?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ The young man looked at his shoes. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this. But this afternoon the Massachusetts coast guard recovered a body. We believe the remains to be those of your husband, Leonard Brookstein.’
Donna Sanchez enjoyed her work at the city morgue. Her friends and family couldn’t understand it. ‘All those dead people. Aren’t you creeped out?’ Their reactions made Donna smile. A heavyset Puerto Rican woman with fat, sausagelike fingers and a round, doughy face, Donna had grown up in a big noisy family before starting a big noisy family of her own. Outside of work, the sound track to Donna Sanchez’s life was screaming children, smashing crockery, beeping car horns, blaring television sets. Donna liked the dead because they were silent. The city morgue on Clarkson Avenue in Brooklyn was white, clean and orderly. It made Donna feel peaceful.
Of course, she still had bad days. Even after eight years, the sight of small children’s bodies could make Donna choke up. Some of the accident victims were pretty gruesome, too. And the suicides. The first time Donna saw a ‘jumper,’ she had nightmares about the mangled corpse for weeks afterward: bones erupting through the skin, skull collapsed like a rotten melon. Normally, drowning victims were among the easiest to deal with. Immersion in cold, deep water tended to delay decomposition. Donna also noticed that many of the water-dead had a happy, almost beatific look on their faces.
Not today’s body, though. The revolting, waxy hulk lying on the slab had no face. The fish had seen to that. All that was left beneath the ravaged stump of a neck was a great, bloated midsection. The left arm and hand were miraculously intact, but the rest of the limbs had gone, snapped off like crab claws. It was, as Donna’s friends would have said, creepy.
‘Are they really dragging his poor wife in here?’ Like everyone else at the morgue, Donna Sanchez knew that the cops believed the body was Lenny Brookstein’s. That’s why it had been brought back to New York, almost two hundred miles from where it washed up on the Massachusetts coast. ‘No one should have to see their loved one like this.’
Duane Tyler, the technician, sneered. A handsome black kid, fresh out of high school, Duane was a born cynic. ‘Save your sympathy, Donna. One thing Grace Brookstein ain’t is poor. You know what they saying? This son of a bitch ripped off thousands of people. Ordinary people.’
‘I know that’s what they’re saying, Duane. It doesn’t mean it’s true. Besides, so what if he did? It’s not his wife’s fault.’
Duane Tyler shook his head pityingly. ‘Don’t you believe it, girl. You think the wives don’t know? Those rich white bitches? They know. They all know.’
Harry