Okay, girl, get with the program, she told herself. Apparently her plan to take her mind off her problems had worked too well. Focus.
Just then Cole came in. He threw his coat over a chair and greeted the crowd in the living room. “Sorry I’m late. Traffic on Fifth,” he said, eyeing the plate of cookies on the coffee table quizzically.
Eva shrugged as he gave her a kiss but didn’t explain.
His mother waved him over to a seat. “You haven’t missed a thing. We were just about to start.”
Eva looked at them all and felt a surge of affection. Everyone was here because they believed without a doubt that she wasn’t guilty of fixing prices among Wyndham’s, Brooks’s and Davidge’s. If only her own father had as much faith in her. He’d left a very concerned message saying he was sure the whole thing was all a gross misunderstanding and that whatever crime she’d committed it was most likely done in ignorance and if she would just apologize to the nice men at the Justice Department and promise never to do it again, no doubt all would be forgiven. He then promised to get her the best lawyer money could buy.
His
little girl would not rot in jail!
In the background, she could hear her mother telling him over and over again to reserve judgment until he heard the whole story.
Although she had no idea exactly what was going to happen—Loretta had arranged this council of war, even going so far as to enlist the efficient Cassandra as official note taker—Eva thought she should be the one to begin. Sitting down on the couch next to Mark, she said, “I can’t figure out who is setting me up or why they chose me. If I had to guess—and, I suppose, I do—my money is on Cartwright from Davidge’s. He’s the only one who’s getting off scot-free.”
Loretta shook her head. She had known Ardmore Cartwright socially for decades and couldn’t imagine him setting up an innocent young woman. “Let’s pick up the thread at the beginning. Tell us what happened yesterday morning, before the Justice Department came. Was anyone acting strangely?”
Eva detailed her conversation with David for their benefit, emphasizing the certainty he’d felt that something big was going down. “He kept saying he felt it in his bones and that his bones never lie.”
“Hmm. I wonder…” said Mark, his voice trailing off as he thought.
Ruth stopped her pacing long enough to give her husband a considering look. “Wonder what?”
“I wonder if his instincts are so finely honed,” he said slowly, “or if he did in fact know something was going to happen.”
“Good point,” said Loretta. “Cassandra, please make a note of it.”
Cassandra smiled and tapped her pen. “Got it.”
Loretta nodded approvingly. “Excellent. Now, what else?”
Since it was twenty-four hours and a good night’s sleep later, Eva was able to recall the experience with a clarity not available to her yesterday. Some important details did not come to her right away, but pointed questions from Mark or Loretta jogged her memory and made her aware of things her subconscious had noticed.
Although she had always known that Mark had an excellent mind and was keenly insightful, it was thoroughly fascinating to watch it work and she could see up close for the first time why he was one of the best investigative journalists in the business. And Loretta, who gave off the impression of a lady who lunches professionally, had an equally developed eye for detail. She had impressed Eva during contract negotiations for the collection, but nothing had prepared her for this demonstration of methodical reasoning. Still, Eva knew she shouldn’t be surprised: Loretta Hammond had helmed one of the country’s most popular fashion magazines for decades.
Two hours passed quickly as they discussed Eva’s interrogation at the Justice Department. Then she answered questions about the general workings of Wyndham’s offices and the auction business in general. Eva did most of the talking, and she fielded several concerned looks from Cole that she brushed off. She wasn’t an invalid to get tired from a long discussion.
“Let’s go through the timeline again,” said Loretta, reaching for another gingerbread cookie. “When were you hired by Wyndham’s?”
“Well, I worked part-time during graduate school. Then five years ago, when I got my master’s, I was hired as an assistant,” she said.
Loretta nodded. “Right. And when did you get promoted to junior associate?”
“About two years ago.”
Loretta nodded again. She had heard this information several times before but repetition helped her think. “Okay, who else has been promoted in the last two—no, make that three—years?”
This was a new question, and Eva had to think for a moment. The turnover at Wyndham’s wasn’t frequent because it was still a family-owned business. All the top slots went to Wyndham sons and cousins, and bright, young ambitious employees often moved on rather than wait for a promotion that would most likely never come. “David Taverner was promoted eight months after me, to fill Sally Roedale’s slot; she went over to Davidge’s. Sally had been promoted about a year before me. Leticia Walters was just promoted four months ago. Harvey Debenham was hired as a junior associate about a year ago. That’s all,” she said, with an almost apologetic look. “The New York office is pretty small. Oh, wait, there’s also Peter Lilly. He was promoted right before me, say two or three months.”
Ruth, who had stopped her pacing and was now content to lean against the back of the couch
—
sitting was still unsupportable—looked at her curiously in the silence that followed. “What about Ethan?”
Eva turned around. “What about Ethan?”
“Well, what’s his deal? He seems to have come out of nowhere. I’ve been racking my brains trying to remember the first time you mentioned him, but I’m drawing a complete blank.”
This was a reasonable question and Eva smiled. “Ethan is Elliot Wyndham’s elder son. He joined the firm about two years ago when he finally got his Ph.D. in art history from Oxford. He’d been working on his thesis for four years. Or at least that’s the word around the office. His taking over the family business has been imminent for as long as I’ve worked there, but I was as surprised as everyone else when he finally materialized. No one had ever met him before, and some people even doubted that he wasn’t a figment of Mr. Wyndham’s imagination. It was made worse, I think, by the fact that his savvy go-getter brother, Edward, had ingratiated himself with the staff years ago. He worked part-time in the office while getting his degree at Columbia, and everyone liked him—and not just because he took us out for happy hour every couple of weeks.”
“So maybe there’s a little sibling rivalry,” said Ruth softly.
Eva shrugged. “Maybe. But Edward, despite his enthusiasm, never stood a chance and he must have known that. His father is very old school British Empire. He believes in primogeniture and giving everything to the first born. I think that’s why Edward worked so hard, because he knew at some point he’d have to go out into the world and find a job. There would always be a place for him at Wyndham’s, of course, but it would be in Ethan’s shadow.”
“No, no,” Ruth said with a shake of the head, “I don’t mean Edward, I mean Ethan. Think about it: He takes four years to finish his thesis while his overachiever brother is in the New York office making friends and influencing people. It must have been hard to suddenly find himself in his brother’s shadow.”
Mark shifted in his seat and looked at his wife. “I like it. It goes to motive.”
“It would explain Le Bernardin,” Cole said.
Eva looked at the three of them, her eyes wide with horror as she processed the implication. “You think Ethan did this to me?”
All five of them, even Cassandra, nodded.
“He wanted to prove himself, and being a lazy bastard, he took a shortcut,” Cole said. “You said it yourself, Wyndham’s had the most to gain from price fixing.”
Eva raised her head in surprise. “I did?”
Loretta nodded. “Yes, dear, when you explained why it’s too expensive for Wyndham’s to pursue high-profile sales. Davidge’s and Brooks’s can afford to cut rates, sometimes as low as zero, to get the high-profile commissions because they’re large organizations that aren’t dependent on each individual sale. After printing brochures and catalogs, advertising and touring the collection, Wyndham’s actually loses money on any sale in which the seller’s commission is less than 10 percent. You drew a nice pie chart to illustrate the financials. By getting his two largest competitors to agree to a fixed commission, Ethan leveled the playing field. Suddenly, Wyndham’s is able to compete for the blockbuster sales.”
“And then you came down for the Hammond collection,” Ruth said.
Loretta nodded. “Wyndham’s willingness to negotiate over the seller’s commission was one of the reasons I gave them the collection.”
“But you weren’t supposed to,” Mark added.
“Which is why, a panicking Ethan arranged that scene at Le Bernardin,” Cole said, leaning forward in his chair. “Unable to even conceive of your competence, he assumed you were going to get the commission because we were sleeping together.”
They were in the presence of his mother, and Eva felt herself blushing. “We weren’t,” she said earnestly, although there was little point to her denial. They might not have been sleeping together then, but they certainly were now.
“At the time, it didn’t seem strange to me that he’d risk the sale by angering me—I was too jealous to wonder at his motives—but when I’d calmed down, I found it puzzling. But now it makes sense: He wanted to break us up. If I lost personal interest in you, especially because I felt betrayed or used, then Wyndham’s would lose the sale.”
Eva wanted to poke holes in their argument. She wanted to dispute their claims one by one because arguing was easier than accepting the truth: Her boss had set her up to take a very large fall. Months ago, perhaps even years ago, he’d looked over the staff at Wyndham’s and decided that she, above every other employee, including David Taverner, whose mouth ran off continually in every direction, would make the perfect stooge. For months, perhaps years, he’d been sitting on his secret stash of incriminating evidence, willing and able to duck behind her if the need ever arose.
It was a devastating realization.
“I went over his head,” she said thoughtfully. “I deliberately waited until Ethan was unreachable and then called his father to get approval to discount the seller’s commission. I thought the fixed policy in general was a good idea, but the Hammond collection was so spectacular, I thought it was worth bending the rules. If Davidge’s or Brooks’s had countered with five or six or even nine percent, I would have bowed out because we couldn’t afford to get into a bidding war.”
Cole nodded. “And when Cartwright found out that you’d betrayed the very policy that you’d set up—or, rather, that he thought you’d set up—he assumed the agreement was off and he might as well cut a deal with the DOJ while there was still one on the table.”
“But why give Eva the sale in the first place?” Ruth wondered. “It was an unusual choice, right? You said so yourself: Your specialty is eighteenth-century furniture, not nineteenth-century painting, and usually only managers are sent to court clients. So why did Ethan give it to you?”
“He wanted her to fail,” Mark said. “Having given her the promotion she’d supposedly demanded in her email, Ethan wanted to start laying the groundwork for her dismissal.”
Now Eva shook her head. For some reason, it was easier for her to believe he would set her up for a ten-year prison stint than he would arrange for her to be fired with cause.
“Think about it, Eva,” Cole said. “Your appointment, which you swear you made, somehow disappeared from Mrs. Hemingway’s calendar. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ethan canceled it himself. And the fact that you were meeting with me to begin with was suspect. My mother made it clear to all the auction houses that she was the point person for the sale. And yet you were told to contact me. Ethan wanted you to screw up the sale so he could use it against you.”
Eva stood up and walked over to the window to stare at the traffic on North Moore Street. A yellow cab pulled away from the curb just as a jogger in a red hoodie ran in front of it. The car stopped short and honked. “I don’t know if I’m more appalled or saddened by how little control I actually have over my life. With seemingly no effort at all, Ethan cloned my email, established a bank account in my name and set me up to fail.”
“Ah,” said Ruth, wrapping her arm around her friend’s shoulder, “but you didn’t fail. And you’re not going to take the fall for this. What is being used against you now—the email account, the bank records—is going to work in your favor later. Trust me, this is the electronic age and everything leaves a trail, even the most skilled hack. We’ll find it and trace it back to Ethan.”
Sure, it sounded good when Ruth said it in her best publicist voice. “What if it doesn’t? What if Ethan’s frame job is perfect?”
“Impossible,” Mark said. “Nothing is perfect.”
“Are you sure about that?” Eva asked. “Because I feel like a perfect fool.”
Deciding they could all use a break, Cole called the restaurant on the corner and ordered some hard-core comfort food: mac and cheese, fried chicken, spaghetti and meatballs, apple pie. Although he’d asked for it to be delivered, Eva volunteered to pick it up.
“I could use the fresh air,” she said, slipping into her jacket.
Cole insisted on going with her—fresh air sounded good—and as soon as they stepped onto the sidewalk, he pulled her into his arms and gave her a deep, soul-searing kiss. Then he rested his forehead against hers and said, “You know everything is going to be okay.”
She sighed because she didn’t know it. She wanted to, but it was such a big leap of faith to make: that she would somehow dig herself out from under the pile of shit Ethan had shoveled her way.
He tipped her head back, looked her in the eyes and said it again, his tone as earnest as it was confident. “You know everything is going to be okay.”
Eva took a deep breath, willed herself to know it and somehow, staring into those beautiful sapphire orbs, found what she needed to believe that everything would be all right.