PART 4
I read her letter in my car in the bank parking garage and I did not drive anywhere for a long time.
She had written it over four months, Arthur told me later. A few lines a day, on the good days. It ran nine pages.
Lucia — I could always hear you.
I need you to know that first, because I think you have been talking to me for three years like someone talking into a well. You weren’t. I heard every word. I heard you sing in the shower badly. I heard you cry in the pantry in October and come out with your face fixed.
I heard my son too.
He said things in the hallway outside my room that I am not going to repeat in this letter, because you have to live in that house until you don’t, and I would rather you didn’t have those particular sentences in your head. He believed I was a body with the lights off. Nobody has ever been more wrong about anything.
She wrote about the day she realized what he’d done. A bank statement in a stack of mail she wasn’t supposed to see. It took her nine days to work out how to communicate with Arthur without going through Brandon, and she did it by asking me — in a way I never once thought twice about — to please mail a birthday card for her old friend Arthur, and to drop it in the box outside the post office and not the one at the corner.
I mailed the first one in the spring of the year before last.
I mailed nineteen of them.
Nineteen. I sat in that garage and laughed out loud, one horrible bark of a laugh, alone in a parked car, because I had personally carried every single piece of the case against my husband to the mailbox, and cheerfully, and I had asked her once whether Arthur had a lot of birthdays, and she had made the sound that was her laugh.
You will ask why I didn’t just tell you.
Because you would have confronted him. You are not built to sit on a thing like that. And the moment he knew, the certificates would have been the first thing he tore the house apart for, and I could not have stopped him, and you could not have stopped him, and it would have been over.
So I let you go on thinking I was a chore.
That is the cruelest thing I have ever done to a person, and I did it to the only person who was good to me, and I am sorry, and I would do it again exactly the same way.
The last page had a paragraph that made me put the letter down on the passenger seat.
One more thing, and this is the part Arthur will explain better than me.
Brandon has been telling people he controls forty-one percent of Bayline. He has been telling that to a firm in Newport Beach for most of this year. Arthur says a man who raises money on collateral he does not own has done something with a name and a sentence attached to it, and Arthur says the word is fraud, and Arthur is very rarely excited about anything but he was excited about that.
He signs the deal the week the resort trip ends. I know because I heard him arrange both on the same phone call, standing in my doorway, while he thought I was asleep.
Enough, Lucia. You’ve done enough. Now let somebody else do some.
I called Arthur from the garage.
“The deal,” I said.
“Monday. Ten a.m. Bayline’s boardroom, because he wants them to see the building.” A pause, and paper turning. “Ms. Keller, the subscription documents were executed on the fourteenth. In front of a notary. In San Diego.”
“He was in Honolulu on the fourteenth.”
“Can you prove that?”
I thought about a phone lying face-up on a table full of casserole dishes, and twenty-two people in black, and a young woman’s voice, close to the microphone.
“I recorded the call,” I said. “It’s timestamped. And there’s a resort charge on our joint card the same morning.”
Arthur Pendelton was quiet for a second.
“Ms. Keller,” he said, “please be at my office at eight on Monday. Wear something you’d be comfortable being photographed in.”
