All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) (17 page)

Not once did I see him look at her full in the eyes.

Oh, definitely, those two have done the deed. No man who isn’t a total boor, and we all know he isn’t, helps himself to a woman’s plate unless he’s already helped himself to her plate, if you get my drift.

If you’re hoping this is all her and it will blow over, forget it. This is serious business, and she knows it. He’s hard to read. But I know how a man looks when he’s having himself a summer fling, and this ain’t it.

I have to ask, would it be so terrible? She’s nice and he needs nice, she’s loaded and he needs money. We all know that place is bleeding money.

Personally, I think she’d make a good Mrs. Senior Partner. I’d much rather have her than Diana at the Queen Bee table. Laura doesn’t look like she’ll drain the margarita pitcher dry before anyone else gets a chance. I know that was years ago, but I’m still mad.

My bill for detective services follows. You may be on the wagon, but I’m not. Bring your special mix.

Ciao!

Mel, ace detective

PS: One last thing. He walked her to her car, since of course she is too feeble to walk the 20 feet outside Mac’s on her own. As they were walking away, his hand
low
on her back (don’t you just love how Southern men always find a way to feel a woman up?), I distinctly heard him say, “This was a setup. Lucy set you up.”

Chapter 6: Secrets Unraveling

LATE ON THE AFTERNOON OF JULY 3, acting on instructions from Mark St. Bride, the attorneys for the estate of Cameron David St. Bride filed a detailed inventory of the assets of his estate. St. Bride Data issued a brief press release that went ignored by most business reporters, who anticipated a slow news day on Wednesday and thus took the day off to extend the long weekend. The writer at St. Bride Data thought nothing of the press release; she had had it ready to go for months.

No one guessed that not only did Mark not inform his brother’s widow of his action, but he was using it to bring her to her senses. He planned to return from Japan on Saturday, just in time before some eager-beaver reporter untangled the maze of shell corporations set up to shield Cat Courtney from discovery. Just in time for her to see the error of her ways and run back to the St. Bride fold (and his arms) for protection before the news broke.

He reckoned without the junior financial news producer at a local TV station who lived near the Collin County courthouse in McKinney. Low man on the totem pole, Brian Schneider drew the unenviable assignment of covering the desk while the senior producer took the day off. He figured he might as well while away the time by going through the inventory of the notoriously press-shy founder of St. Bride Data, so, on his way to work, he swung by the courthouse and picked up a copy.

After three cups of coffee, a surf through the ESPN web site, and two bids on Ebay, Brian settled down to look through the inventory and found it excruciatingly dull. Not for Cameron St. Bride the yacht, the stable of racehorses, the football team, the secluded home occupied by a heretofore unknown mistress. Even St. Bride’s Plano house belonged to the corporation, displacing the wife and child who had decamped to parts unknown. The man seemed to have lived a remarkably dull life until, unfortunately, his last few minutes.

What he
had
done, Brian discovered, was form corporations. And corporations. And corporations. In years of financial reporting, he’d never seen anything like the number of closely-held corporations in which Cameron St. Bride, by himself or through one of his corporations, was the sole shareholder. The only comparable situation had been an energy company whose officers used it as their personal piggy bank and laundered their ill-gotten gains through multitudes of shell corporations.

So that begged the question: why on earth had Cameron St. Bride spent time and energy setting up so many corporations? Some appeared to be legitimate. One owned the computer games St. Bride had designed when he had first started St. Bride Data, before it went public; another was a nonprofit foundation set up to help runaway teens. One was the St. Bride Family Administration; another appeared to be an interior design firm in which St. Bride and his sister were the only shareholders.

And then there was Aural Gem CC, a name repeated in every state. St. Bride owned the Texas Aural Gem; it owned the South Dakota Aural Gem, which in turn owned the California Aural Gem, and on and on throughout the entire country, into the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Canada, and the Cayman Islands.

In the Caymans, the chain seemed to come to an end.

What had St. Bride been up to? He was the majority shareholder in St. Bride Data, and it was unlikely he had been laundering money or dealing drugs. He’d had a reputation as a straight arrow. What had he been hiding?

A call to St. Bride Data yielded a polite “No comment.” An exhaustive search through public and private databases produced nothing. Other than the fact that St. Bride and his wife had married four months after the birth of their child, he found nothing even mildly scandalous. In this day and age, a slightly tardy wedding scarcely rated comment. St. Bride’s wife was twelve years his junior and must have been in her late teens, but even so, she had been of age.

Still, twelve years. Quite an age difference.

He looked for a picture of Mrs. St. Bride, now heiress to a considerable fortune, and found nothing. Not surprising. St. Bride had kept his family out of the public eye; no one remembered ever seeing Mark St. Bride’s name in print until he succeeded his brother as CEO, and Laura St. Bride barely seemed to have existed. A search turned up nothing except a membership in a PTA at an exclusive girls’ school in Plano and a listing as a patron of the Collin County Ballet (as, he noticed,
Mrs. Cameron St. Bride
). For the wife of a near-billionaire, she lived a private life.

Interesting. Was something wrong with the wife? Was she ill? Mentally unstable? St. Bride had appointed his brother as her trustee – lack of trust on his part, or lack of interest on hers? Brian picked up the divorce petition that someone had finally unearthed and looked through it. Nothing there, except that, whether or not something was wrong with Laura St. Bride, her husband had intended to end the marriage until a hijacked plane had ended it for them both.

Or intended to end it, then changed his mind. On September 11, before anyone could confirm his death, St. Bride’s lawyers had filed a motion to dismiss the divorce.

He went back through the file to see what previous reporting had turned up. Kate St. Bride’s will yielded the interesting tidbit that she had left her daughter-in-law sole ownership of residences in London’s Knightsbridge and New York’s Upper West Side, both of which she still owned, according to property records. Had the wife and daughter moved to either of those? Unlikely to be New York, with its unpleasant memories. Had she moved to London?

He ran a search on the daughter, Margaret, but the kid was only thirteen. She was unlikely to have made news at her age, even if she was worth a third of a billion dollars.

He was no closer to finding out why St. Bride had set up so many Aural Gem corporations. But the answer was here, he felt it with his newsman’s instinct. Somewhere in these papers lay the answer and possibly a very interesting story.

Brian ate lunch at his desk, running web searches on Aural Gem. The phrase showed up nowhere other than in reviews of various CDs; nowhere did he find it as a name or proper noun. But St. Bride had used the name repeatedly. It must have meant something. Brian wrote it down on a legal pad, then printed it absently over and over again in a line….

He’d written it ten times when the letters began to rearrange themselves in his mind.

Aural. An anagram for Laura.

Gem. An anagram for Meg? And Meg was a slightly old-fashioned nickname for Margaret.

He sat up.

The mysterious wife. Somehow connected with this corporate maze. And the daughter? CC wasn’t a normal corporate abbreviation. What could it mean?

He sat and thought some more.

~•~

At four, after taping the latest stock market news, he judged that he could leave for the day. No earth-shattering financial stories were likely to break; the markets had closed for the holiday, and he had his cell with him anyway. He lived a normal thirty minute drive away, but with the holiday traffic, it would take an hour to get home. But if he detoured past the St. Bride home, in Plano’s most exclusive neighborhood… it was worth a shot.

He drove through Plano, the upper middle class suburb of SUVs, high-dollar shopping centers, and conservative values, to the country club community off Parker Road. Not for the St. Brides of the world were the oversized McMansions on zero lot lines, the postage stamp lawns, the leased autos in the driveways. The men in these households did not spend their Saturday mornings mowing the front yard; their full-time gardeners did that for them. The women did not spend time cleaning bathrooms; their maids, illegal immigrants, took over those chores. Instead, they chauffeured their 2.3 children from dance lessons to soccer practice to cotillions in their Hummers, shopped till they dropped, and ate antidepressants like candy. Teenagers drove BMWs to the public high school. Everyone attended church and voted Republican. Unlike many of the other ritzy neighborhoods in Plano, here no one worried about paying the mortgage; they paid cash for these houses.

This was the world of Cameron St. Bride and his wife; this was the world of Aural Gem.

He found the St. Bride house easily. Like many of the other houses, set back and far apart from each other on enormous lots, a gate across the entrance guarded the long drive that led through a
porte cochère
to a motor court behind the house. That might have presented a problem, except that the gate was open and a large moving truck –
Johnson Piano Movers
– was parked in front of the house.

Moving. Brian’s skin prickled. Who was moving? Mark St. Bride? The sister?

He drove in, parked behind the truck, and got out. Four men were struggling to move the largest concert grand piano he had ever seen through the enormous double doors of the house. To the side, a hostile look on her face, arms crossed across an impressive bosom, stood a pretty blonde who looked as if she was in her mid-thirties – which, in Plano, meant that she was at least five years older than that. Probably St. Bride’s sister, Emma.

She was saying testily to one of the movers, “I don’t care if the damn thing falls into the Chesapeake. Watch the door, please.”

He crossed the drive to mount the steps to her side. She noticed him and took the opportunity to look him up and down. He wasn’t a bad-looking man; he knew that, and if it meant she might talk to him, he didn’t mind her looking at him. Not that she was hard on the eyes herself. She was nicely dressed, and like most upper crust women, well-manicured and so expertly made up that you could hardly tell she was wearing makeup. She must have had Botox injections; the scowl on her face didn’t touch her forehead.

Brian nodded at the piano. “Problems?”

Emma seemed to relax. “Oh, just my damn sister-in-law, throwing a temper tantrum about her precious piano.”

The damn sister-in-law had to be St. Bride’s mysterious wife, since Mark St. Bride wasn’t married. Emma didn’t ask who he was, and he took advantage of that to stand there and survey the situation. He was no expert on pianos, but he’d helped his former wife look for one, and he knew that they certainly hadn’t seen anything like this at the piano outlet store. Most of it was wrapped in some protective material, but he saw enough. It was an unusual wood, rosewood, if he guessed right, and an exotic shade at that, polished to an incredible sheen, and it was huge – nine or ten feet long. So Laura St. Bride played the piano, or perhaps this was just a very expensive decoration for her home.

Something about the piano chipped at his memory. He’d seen this somewhere.

Emma said, “Who are you?”

“Brian Schneider. I produce the financial news for KTXX.” He produced his press credentials. Often, at this point, people tended to freeze up and stop talking, not that she’d been a chatterbox so far. Then, again, often people got intrigued at the idea of meeting someone who worked for TV, even if the stories he produced were about the gyrations of the stock market.

“Oh,” said Emma flatly. “We’re not supposed to talk to the press. Mark isn’t here right now. He’s in Japan. He’ll be back this weekend.”

He tucked that information away for future reference. She hadn’t said she wouldn’t talk, just that she wasn’t supposed to. He said, “I can understand. You’re very private people, which is refreshing these days. But there’s going to be some public interest in your brother’s estate now that the inventory has been filed, so do you mind if I ask you some—”

“The inventory’s been filed?” Emma interrupted. “Mark didn’t say anything. That won’t sit well with little Miss Cat—”

She broke off.

She really didn’t like someone, he thought. Who little Miss Cat might be, he could only guess, but he suspected it was the same damn sister-in-law whose piano – whose strangely
familiar
piano – was being lifted with hydraulics into the moving truck. And Mark St. Bride hadn’t warned his family that a document of public interest was being filed in his brother’s estate.