In the lobby she stopped briefly at the front desk. “Good morning, Leeta.”
The receptionist choked on her doughnut. “Sorry, Mrs. Smith.” Leeta patted her throat while Miranda waited for her to swallow and catch her breath. “With Mr. Smith away on business, I wasn’t expecting . . .”
Miranda’s mind leaped at the tidbit of information. They knew Tom was gone and they thought he was coming back. Evidently they hadn’t gotten their kiss-off notes yet. “It’s okay, Leeta.” Miranda pulled her gaze from the receptionist’s closely cropped fingernails to meet the middle-aged woman’s gaze, wishing she could come out and ask exactly where Leeta thought Tom was. “Tom, um, asked me to pick up a few things from his office.”
“Do you want me to . . .”
“No, it’s okay. I’ll show myself in.”
Miranda sailed down the corridor and through Tom’s office door. Closing it behind her, she leaned back against the hard wood surface, surveying her husband’s domain while she stilled her heartbeat and got her breathing under control.
She wasn’t sure what she was afraid of. She was a Ballantyne, and the current, if abandoned, wife of the president and CEO; it was unlikely anyone would demand an explanation for her presence. It was equally unlikely that Tom had circulated a memo announcing his intention to desert her. All she needed was a clue or two, something that would help her figure out where Tom had gone and why.
The knot in her stomach loosened slightly as she sank into a chair behind the mahogany partners desk that had once belonged to her grandfather. In its glossy reflection she could still see herself and Tom, fresh from business school at Emory, newly married and ready to carve out their niches within the company.
She’d intended to be the first woman of her family since Great-grandmother Rachael to take a hands-on role in the business. She’d thought she would sit behind this desk one day—or at least share it with Tom. She blinked back tears as she thought of all the other things she’d thought that had turned out to be wrong.
She’d had her first miscarriage that year. And her second the year after that. Everyone was very careful of her feelings, but her role as the bearer of the future heir was clear, and it never occurred to her to stop trying. She’d been waiting a lifetime to be the kind of mother she’d wanted hers to be.
Two years later she was on progesterone and off her feet for long periods of time—not exactly conducive to the running of a thriving corporation.
Before she knew it, she’d been relegated to family spokesperson—a role for which her years as a beauty pageant contestant had amply prepared her. And Tom, who refused to even discuss adoption, became the chosen one, learning the business from her father, earning his praise, and apparently developing a very personal affinity for the fruits of his labor.
Her father
. Miranda reached for the phone, already imagining the relief she would feel at the sound of his voice. She could lay her troubles at his feet just as she had as a child, and then . . .
Her hand froze. She wasn’t a child any longer; at thirty-eight she was long past the age when she could go running to her daddy.
“Okay, then,” she said aloud as she began her search. “You’ve tossed two houses, you should be able to finish this place in ten minutes, tops.”
Unfortunately, Tom’s laptop wasn’t there, and none of the files stacked neatly on his desk were labeled “All the Bad Stuff I Did” or “This Is Where I’m Hiding.” She worked her way through the desk drawers, hoping to stumble onto something important, hoping it would turn out to be like shopping, and she’d know what she was looking for when she found it.
What she found was a box of paper clips, six dog-eared business cards, a roll of stamps—God, she hated irony—and an ancient Ballantyne catalogue. She found absolutely nothing of interest—no photos, no ladies’ underwear, in Tom’s or anyone else’s size—and nothing that could remotely be construed as a clue to where Tom had gone. Or what he’d done to Ballantyne.
Leaning back in the chair, she drummed anxious fingers on the desktop and tried to figure out her next step. An attempt to buzz Tom’s assistant, Carly, produced no response.
“Leeta?” she said into the intercom, “where’s Carly?”
“Carly took a personal day today, Mrs. Smith. Her little girl is sick. And with Mr. Smith out of the country . . .”
Okay, here was another sliver of potentially useful information; at this point she’d take anything she could get. “You know, Leeta,” Miranda said, “I seem to have left Tom’s contact number at home, and I have a question about some of the things he wanted me to pick up for him. Do you have a phone number handy?”
She waited hopefully.
“He didn’t leave one this trip. He said he was going to be on the move until it was time to come back.”
Miranda clamped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from asking “when” and “from where.”
“Can you spell the name of the city he’s in for me? I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble getting it right.”
There was a long silence, and then Leeta complied. “Sure, Mrs. Smith. That’s H . . . O . . . N . . . G”—she paused to let the first four letters sink in—“K . . . O . . . N . . . G.”
There was another protracted silence.
“Right, then,” Miranda said brightly. “Um, thanks.”
Okay, so Leeta thought she was a moron, but she now knew that Tom had made his absence appear work-related, which meant Carly might have booked his flight and made his hotel reservation. Even if he weren’t still in Hong Kong, at least she’d have a trail to follow.
Miranda thought about Tom moving on to a new life, not coming back. A much-too-familiar lump formed in her throat, and her eyes welled up. Shoving away the hurt, she forced herself to think. In order to go anywhere beyond Hong Kong and stay there, Tom would need money. Lots of it.
Miranda’s stomach dropped as she realized that the company wasn’t the only monetary source Tom might have tapped.
With a sudden sense of urgency, Miranda picked up the phone and punched in the main number of the local bank where they kept their personal accounts.
Her heart raced as she followed the prompts to put in their joint account numbers, first for the household checking and then their savings and money market accounts. She barely breathed while the computerized voice spelled out the bad news with all the emotion of a tin can. But it hardly mattered, because she had enough emotion for all of them.
She called back again, hoping she had misheard, but the tin voice refused to change its story. It was gone. All of it. Except for a balance of two thousand dollars and seventy-five cents in her household checking account, which now constituted her entire net worth.
Tears formed and her lower lip quivered. Stretching an arm out on the cool mahogany, Miranda laid her head down on her arm and squeezed her eyes shut in a futile effort to halt their flow.
When the knock sounded on the door, Miranda scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand and sat up in her chair. “Yes?”
The door opened and Ballantyne’s head bookkeeper stepped into the room. Helen St. James was a few inches shorter than Miranda and a couple of years older. She was what Gran would call a handsome woman—not beautiful, but nice enough to look at—with shoulder-length auburn hair and classically even features that Miranda was having a hard time focusing on.
Closing the office door behind her, the bookkeeper crossed to the desk. “I’ve been trying to reach Mr. Smith for almost a week now.”
Miranda bit back the “Join the club” that sprang to her lips.
“It’s very important that I speak to . . . Mr. Smith . . . right away.”
Miranda noted the strange emphasis on the word “Mr.” and dropped her gaze from the other woman’s face to the hands clamped at her sides. Helen St. James’s manicure was both French and impeccable, and she had an amoeba-shaped birthmark on the back of her wrist. Were these the hands that had rested so familiarly on her husband’s butt?
“If you speak to him, will you ask him to call me?”
Sure she would. Right after she had him hauled off to jail for emptying all their bank accounts and scaring her to death.
“He needs to know that . . .” The bookkeeper cleared her throat and started again. “He needs to know that I’m having a little trouble reconciling the numbers.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll be sure to . . .” Miranda stopped as the bookkeeper’s words sank in. With great effort she dragged her gaze from the French manicure up to the bookkeeper’s face. She didn’t like what she saw there at all.
“Fidelity National called,” Helen St. James said. “They want to move up our audit. Something’s not right with the receivables.”
The house was cold and univiting, the afternoon sun too weak to offer any warmth. Miranda walked through the downstairs, hiking up the thermostat, turning on lights, trying to chase away the chill in the too-empty house.
Upstairs her unmade bed beckoned. She could curl up and hide there, maybe turn on the soaps and watch fictional people suffer for a while—anything would be better than this crushing quiet and emptiness. She felt like a compass without its North point, whirling around aimless and lost. She’d never considered herself dependent on Tom, but she was beginning to realize how much she’d been defined by him. If she wasn’t Mrs. Tom Smith, who was she? And what was she supposed to do now?
Her husband had taken off and left her behind. Alone. Unwanted. Unnecessary to whatever new life he was planning to live. An image of Tom on a white sandy beach materialized. Palm trees swayed in the breeze and a big blue ocean shimmered in the background. He had a great big pirate’s chest full of money, and a naked woman was rubbing coconut oil on his naked buttocks. With her perfectly manicured fingers.
Miranda located the magnifying glass in the kitchen junk drawer and carried it into Tom’s study. Opening the packet of photos, she pulled out the hand-on-butt shot and forced herself to study it through the glass.
Magnified, the blond hairs on Tom’s rear became . . . magnified . . . as did the intricate weave of the fuchsia lace, but the woman’s hands must have been moving when the picture was taken—Miranda definitely didn’t want to think about that—because they were slightly blurred and the angle wasn’t right to expose the back of the woman’s wrist. If it had an amoeba-shaped birthmark, she couldn’t make it out.
But if they were Helen St. James’s hands, what would that prove? Wouldn’t he have taken the woman and her hands with him?
Miranda’s mind swam with questions for which she had no answers. Over and over she asked herself: If Tom was so unhappy, why hadn’t he said something? Why sneak away rather than ask for a divorce? And how could there have been so many things about him she hadn’t known?
What she wanted to do was sic the police on him, or at least tell her family so her father could beat Tom to a bloody pulp while Gran tucked her back into bed with a bowl of soup and a beautifully laid tray. But it was all too humiliating. And she couldn’t bear to become fodder for the Truro gossip mill until she knew where Tom was and what action she could take. And, of course, there was Ballantyne. Given how easily Tom had jettisoned her, who knew what he had done to the company.
Desperate to
do
something, Miranda hauled out her laptop, set it up on the kitchen table, and logged on to AOL. Holding her breath while she keyed in Tom’s password, she sighed with relief when she was able to pull up his mail. Only to discover there was nothing there worth finding.
No mail had been sent from Tom’s account since the day before he’d left, and the incoming mail, which consisted primarily of Helen St. James’s progressively more panicked pleas for his attention, had tapered off to almost nothing as he’d apparently failed to respond—at least from this account.
Scrolling down she found unread ads for Viagra, a penis enlarger, and discounted antidepressants. A brief tour of his Favorite Places revealed porn sites and other men in women’s underwear—none of whom looked half as good in them as her husband did.
Logging off, she dialed Tom’s older brother Brad in Richmond, hoping Tom’s only living relative might be able to provide a clue.
“Oh, hey, Randa,” he said. “How’s Tom?”
No help there. “He’s away,” she said, once again sticking as close as possible to the truth. “I wondered if you’d heard from him lately.”
“We talked on New Year’s Day like we always do, and he said he was going to be out of the country. Been meaning to call and see if he was back.”
But Miranda knew that call would probably have taken place on Easter; the Smith boys were not much for chitchatting in between major holidays.
Tears pricked her eyelids as Miranda contemplated all the information she’d managed to gather: Tom had initiated no E-mail activity or contact with his only living relative. And he had a hairy butt. If this represented the extent of her sleuthing abilities, Nancy Drew had nothing to worry about.
The damned tears welled up again until she could barely see through the sheen of them. She was no Nancy Drew, and her husband needed ladies’ underwear and other women. But he didn’t need or want her. The tears slid down her cheeks and plopped onto the keyboard. She wasn’t even good at being Miranda Smith.
And what was she doing about it? She was sitting at her kitchen table in her horribly empty house blubbering like a child. Again. How pathetic was that?
The tears kept coming and the dull ache that had begun in the center of her chest spread outward. She tried to whip up fresh anger at Tom, but deep down inside she knew that somehow she had failed.
Stumbling upstairs, she searched for something—anything—positive to cling to. In the end she was forced to settle for feeling lucky Truro didn’t have a tattoo parlor. Because then she’d feel compelled to have an
L
for loser tattooed on her forehead.
chapter
4
C
hief of Police Blake Summers cruised the main business district of Truro, which took about ten minutes. It was colder than any mid-January he could remember—it had barely hit the teens yesterday—and not too many folks were rushing to work any earlier than they had to. The snow was undoubtedly piled high up at Ballantyne Bald, and most of the narrow mountain roads outside of town were bound to be impassable.