All Her Little Secrets, page 12
What in the world? He’d just said that.
“Knock, knock!” Willow tapped on my door with a big smile. “I didn’t mean to interrupt, but, Nate, we’re scheduled to meet with Jonathan’s team about the audit.”
“Oh yes, that’s right. Ellice, the office looks great! Keep up the good work. Let’s go, Willow.”
What the hell was that? Is he okay? And that whole play-nice-in-the-sandbox-with Max-and-Jonathan bit even though they try to treat me like crap? I was fuming mad. I really hate it when people piss on me and try to convince me it’s raining.
My cell phone rang. I picked it up from the desk, then I nearly dropped it.
The caller ID: Michael Sayles.
Chapter 13
“Hello?” I whispered into the phone.
“Ellice, this is Anna Sayles. Michael’s wife. I found your number on Michael’s cell phone.”
I froze.
“Is this a bad time?” she said.
My stomach churned. “Uh . . . no.”
“I need to talk to you. It’s about Michael and it’s rather urgent. Can you come over?”
“Okay . . . sure. I can stop by after work.” I said, trying to mask my panic.
“No. Like I said, it’s urgent. Can you come now?”
“Well . . . I guess I could take an early lunch. Is everything okay?”
“Let’s just talk when you get here.”
* * *
Michael’s house was in Buckhead, a lush, hilly old-white-money community that had sprawled across northwest Atlanta to include upscale shopping and a popular spot for celebrity sightings. The entire drive to his house was like some weird excursion into a mistress’s nightmare. How was I supposed to handle the poor distraught widow who suddenly discovered her now dead husband had a side piece? I pulled into the circular drive of the huge French Colonial and cut the car engine. Even in the dormancy of the winter season, the home’s pitched rooflines and lush grounds exuded understated wealth. And despite the size of this house and its tony Buckhead zip code, Michael and his family lived modestly compared to some of the other executives at Houghton.
The thought occurred to me again: Maybe Anna killed Michael. What scornful wife hasn’t dreamed about killing her cheating husband and his mistress, too? I might be walking into some sort of trap. I couldn’t tell whether it was the hammer pounding its way out of my head or the crush of a confrontation with an adulterer’s wife, or maybe my own deplorable behavior in the wake of Michael’s death, but I seriously contemplated starting the engine and getting the hell out of there. But I didn’t. Instead, I planned to give the freshly minted Widow Sayles five minutes and then I’d leave and pretend she never existed.
I slipped out of my car and up the pavestone walkway. A peek through the large bay window into the living room revealed no noticeable activity. I pressed the doorbell and launched a deep melody of chimes that reverberated through the house. A dog barked somewhere off in the distance before the soft pad of feet approached the door.
An elderly woman with small features, blue-gray hair, and a dress in the same shade opened the door. I recognized her from the funeral, sitting in the front row with Anna. “Hello. May I help you?”
“Hi. My name is Ellice Littlejohn. I work . . . uh, worked with Michael . . . at Houghton.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed as she scoped me. “I’m sorry, Anna’s resting right now. I can—”
“I believe Anna’s expecting me.” I was polite but firm with the old woman.
“I’m sorry. She really needs to rest. Maybe you can come back another time.”
“It’s okay, Momma,” Anna interrupted, walking up from the side of the open door. “Ellice, please come in.” I smiled at the blue-gray woman, sliding past her small frame, as I stepped inside the house. The woman gave me a side-eye, a warning of sorts, before she closed the door and disappeared into the back of the house.
“Here, let me take your coat,” Anna said as she closed the door behind me. I hadn’t planned to stay long enough to be without my coat, but I removed it anyway.
“Thanks.”
She hung it on a nearby hook. “You mentioned this was your lunch break, so I prepared a little something.”
Her hospitality was unsettling. The model southern wife, even now as she was about to confront her dead husband’s mistress. I followed Anna through the house. The kitchen was massive but inviting. The hard edges of the stainless-steel appliances were warmed by the cherrywood cabinetry, and the smell of fresh baked bread wafted through the room. The center island was covered in sandwiches and salads.
“Help yourself. Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.” She looked disappointed. “I don’t have much time. I have to get back for a meeting.” I wasn’t crazy enough to eat food from a woman whose husband I’d had an affair with. Martha Littlejohn wasn’t a stellar parent, but she didn’t raise a fool.
I sat in one of the soft-cushion barstools at the center island and watched Anna take a couple wine goblets from the cabinet. Her petite figure was draped in a gray silk shirt and wool slacks, her blond hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. She filled one glass with red wine and the second glass with sparkling water and smiled as she pushed the glass of water in my direction.
“Water for you since you have to get back to work.” She raised her glass in a mock toast. “As for me, it’s five o’clock somewhere in the world. Cheers.”
I wondered how long she had been day-drinking. Probably since Michael’s death. Maybe she knew nothing.
“How have you been?” I said. Awkward, but I didn’t know what else to say. I wasn’t in the habit of socializing with the wife of the dead man I’d been sleeping with. Out of nowhere, a flash of Michael’s bloody body sliced through my mind. I took a deep breath and willed myself not to run out of this house.
“I don’t know. Most days are tough. The kids went back to school.” Anna took a sip of wine. “Anyway, how about you? I heard about the promotion. Congratulations.” Anna’s eyes brightened a bit.
“Thanks.” I was uncomfortable as hell. I eyed the door. Surely, she hadn’t summoned me to her home to pop the champagne cork on my promotion and provide a lunch spread. “You mentioned something urgent about Michael.”
She gazed at me for a beat. “Ellice, I need to know something. And I want the truth, okay?”
“Sure . . . of course.” Oh God. Here it comes. Just be honest, apologize, and leave.
“What was going on in that office?” Anna asked, her voice soft and low.
My mouth went dry. My hands moistened and trembled. “I . . . um . . . I don’t know what you mean.”
“I know something was going on at the office, Ellice.”
“It’s . . . well—” I stopped. I noticed something in her. Her demeanor changed. Her shoulders slumped and her faced flushed with worry. Not what I expected from a wife about to get into a dustup with her dead husband’s mistress. My instincts kicked in. Just be quiet. Let her do the talking. Admit nothing.
“Ellice, I want to know what was going on in that place that would make Michael change.”
“Change? Wait . . . what?” Were we talking about the same thing?
“He spent a lot of time working on some case. I didn’t press him at first. I just figured he’d resolve it at some point, that things would get back to normal. I know you lawyers have your confidentiality rules, but this time, whatever he was working on, it was different. It consumed him in a way I’d never seen before.”
I picked through my brain, trying to recall the last few weeks between Michael and me. How had I missed what was apparently obvious to Anna? I remembered Hardy telling me the security guards noticed Michael working over the weekend before his murder.
“Did he tell you anything about it? A name or what the case was about?”
“No, he didn’t, but I want to show you something.” I followed her down the hall to Michael’s study. “Last Friday, while we were at Michael’s memorial service, we had a break-in, here at the house.”
“A break-in?”
Anna flung open the door of the study and clicked on a light switch. Books and papers were scattered across the floor on one side of the study. On the other, a few picture frames and papers were stacked in short uneven piles on the desk.
“Pardon the mess. I haven’t taken leave of my housekeeping skills,” Anna said. “During the break-in, this room was ransacked—the only room in the whole house. The police dusted for fingerprints but didn’t find anything. I’ve tried to pick up in between everything else going on.” Anna stood in the middle of the room, hands on her hips, shaking her head, perplexed, as if it had just happened.
“Oh, good Lord. Did they take anything?” I scanned the chaos across the room. From the looks of things, Michael had something someone was looking for.
“As far as I can tell, no. And that includes jewelry that was upstairs and china and silver in the dining room. Computers. TVs. Nothing stolen. They disabled the alarm system panel and everything. They knew what they were doing, a real professional job. The police think the break-in is tied to Michael’s death. But they can’t be sure. I can tell you for a fact, whoever came in here was looking for something in particular. But I happen to know they didn’t find it.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“I was going through Michael’s things upstairs in our closet. I found a key and a lease document to a safe-deposit box at Wells Fargo.” Anna lifted a large manila envelope from the desk. “This morning, I went to the bank. I found this in the safe-deposit box. I think this may be what they were looking for.”
I opened the envelope and pulled out a small stack of papers. The first document on the top:
January 3
To: Nathaniel C. Ashe, CEO & Chairman Houghton Board of Directors
From: Michael Sayles, EVP & General Counsel
Effectively immediately, I resign from my position as Executive Vice President & General Counsel.
Short. Sparse. Thirteen words. The resignation letter was dated the same day Michael was killed. I peeled my eyes away from the paper and stared at Anna, speechless.
“Exactly! Did you know Michael was planning to resign?” she asked.
“No . . . no, I didn’t.”
“Well, I didn’t either. Keep reading.”
I flipped to the next page, a copy of an email thread between Michael and an outside lawyer named Geoffrey Gallagher. From what I could discern, Michael had enlisted Gallagher to review documents regarding a joint venture between Houghton and a company called Libertad Excursiones.
Libertad. There was that name again.
Gallagher’s reply email to Michael came exactly seven minutes after the request: Call me ASAP!!! Written in the margin of the paper, a 614 area code phone number.
“Who is Geoffrey Gallagher?” I asked. He was not our usual mergers and acquisitions outside counsel.
“I looked him up. He’s a lawyer who specializes in defending executives who get into criminal trouble. Some kind of collar or something. Do you know him?”
“White-collar defense?” I shook my head, confused. “No. I don’t know him.”
“Well, whoever he is, I think he and Michael may have found some trouble with that company . . . Libertad, is it? What is this all about?” Anna said, with impatience in her voice.
“I’m not sure. Were these the only documents in the envelope? Just this?”
“What kind of business deal is this?” Anna asked, more forceful this time.
I bit my bottom lip and gave Anna an I-wish-I-could-tell-you kind of look.
“Ellice, this is my husband we’re talking about. Someone thought this business deal, or whatever it is, was worth more than my husband’s life.”
“Anna, I’m not even sure what all this means myself. Have you shown this to the police?”
“No.” Anna shook her head. “No.”
“You need to go to the police.”
“NO!”
“Listen to me. Someone murdered Michael. You really need to turn this information over to them.” For as much as I hated the police, even I knew this was big enough that Detective Bradford needed to be involved.
“Absolutely not. The media—everyone—tried to make Michael out to be some sort of suicidal nut job. And then when I finally convince that detective that Michael would never kill himself, she starts acting like I was involved in his murder. No”—she shook her head forcefully—“I will not have them drag my husband’s good name through the mud again. If I take this to the police, they’ll take it to Houghton and . . . the company will spin it in some way to make Michael look bad. And besides, that detective . . . Bradford. I don’t like her. That’s why I called you, Ellice. You were one of the few people in that place that he trusted.”
“I don’t know how I can help you, Anna.”
“I think Michael was in some kind of trouble—maybe he did do something he shouldn’t have. I don’t know. I do know I can’t live through that scrutiny again. News stations had trucks parked out front last week at all hours of the day. People calling here, saying all sorts of crazy stuff. Some people think my husband’s murder had something to do with the protests against the company, like it was Michael’s fault that Houghton didn’t want to hire Black people. Ellice, . . . I can’t . . .” Anna’s eyes welled as she cradled her arms across her chest.
“Everyone knows Michael was aboveboard. He’d never be involved in something bad,” I said.
“I need you to help me, Ellice. Find out if Michael was in some sort of trouble. If he did something wrong, I want to know about it without the police smearing his good name.”
“What?” I didn’t know how to do what she was asking of me. “Listen, Anna, if Michael was in some sort of trouble, the police need to investigate it. That’s the only way they’ll find his killer.”
“You don’t understand. Michael had changed over the last few weeks and I think this is the reason why. It has to be pretty awful if he couldn’t talk to me about it.”
“That’s exactly the reason you need to go to the police.”
“Maybe you could just call that lawyer—Gallagher? Find out what all this is about.”
“Anna—” I looked at the papers again. “I’m sorry, Anna. I don’t think I can . . .” I tried to hand the documents back to her. “I’m sorry.”
“You have to. Not for me.” Anna composed herself and gazed at me with a sly, calm look. “Weren’t you in his office the morning he was killed?”
“Wha— What are you talking about?”
“We both know what I’m talking about. I know you two had one of your early morning meetings.” She bent over, lifted a few papers from the floor, and gently placed them on the desk. “I know all about your early morning meetings in the office, the legal conferences, Michael’s Saturday morning golf outings, too . . . to your condo.”
I shot a look at Anna. All my worst fears knotted up in the pit of my stomach. She knew. She had known all along.
“Anna . . .”
“I made peace with it a long time ago. I had no choice. From the first day you stepped foot inside Dillon & Beck, you were all he talked about. Do you know how hard it is to compete with the woman who has captured your husband because she’s so smart, so hardworking, so . . . so perfect? Then it dawned on me. Michael’s feelings about you had nothing to do with your looks, your education, any of that. It didn’t even have anything to do with me. You made him feel something that I couldn’t replicate. My husband was in love with you. And how do you tell a man to stop loving who he loves?”
I remembered Vera’s saying, A woman just knows. I glanced at Anna then averted my eyes. A deep and painful sadness swept over me. “I have to go.”
“Do the police know you were in his office that morning?”
I nearly dropped the papers. “What are you talking about?”
This time, Anna casually picked up a book from the floor as if she were doing her Saturday morning chores. She glanced at it before she placed it on the bookshelf. She walked closer to me, leaned against the side of the desk, and gave me a sympathetic look.
“I stayed in my marriage because I didn’t want my kids to become a casualty of divorce. Why did you stay in my marriage all those years?”
Her question sliced like a steel blade, forcing me, yet again, to contend with the stupid decision I made to get involved with Michael.
“And what do you have to show for those years? A few weekends and some dinners at a remote restaurant on the outskirts of town?” She raised an eyebrow. “What are you? Forty-one? Forty-two?”
She was off by a few years in my favor, but I didn’t respond.
“Have you ever been married?” Anna asked.
“No.”
“Then you might not realize every marriage is perfectly imperfect. It’s just the way things are. Every couple has some pact. Some tacit agreement neither of them discusses but both fully understand the terms. I suspect if Michael had made his way to a marital bed with you, you would have struck your own pact with him too. Men don’t change.”
She inhaled deeply before she spoke again. “I know you didn’t kill Michael. Maybe you thought you were in love with him. But the police might think otherwise if they knew what was really going on, don’t you think? Listen, I just need you to help me find out if he was in some kind of trouble. You and I both know my husband was no Boy Scout. But I’m his wife, we have kids. And I don’t want his legacy tarnished in some sort of scandal after he’s dead and can’t defend himself. Just help me.”
I wasn’t prepared for this type of appeal. I wished she had set off on a screaming match. I wished she had yelled and called me a home-wrecking bitch, slapped me. Anything but this. I couldn’t look at her anymore. I just stared at the papers in my hands. Her request, the silence between us, the secrets— All of it dragged like lead weights around the collar of my conscience.
