Echoes of Titanic (8 page)

“All right, kiddo, time to roll,” Lou said, gesturing toward a cab idling at the curb. As she climbed into the backseat, Lou handed a twenty to the driver. “Take her to the Hudson Arms building in Battery Park City. If you stick around until she's safely all the way inside, you can keep the change.”

Quickly, Kelsey rolled down her window. “Lou, don't be silly. I can pay for—”

He brushed off her objections. “I have a meeting in midtown in half an hour, but I'll call you later tonight after I get home. Okay?”

“Okay.” She gave him a smile and a soft thank-you. As the cab pulled away, she turned to see him watching her go, fatherly concern evident in his furrowed brow. Then he gave a final wave and headed for the main street to hail a cab of his own.

S
ettling back against the seat of the taxi, Kelsey closed her eyes, realizing that a big part of her really did want to go home. She was exhausted. Gloria had been right to send her away.

“Your father, he is the overprotective type, eh?” the cabbie asked in a heavy accent. “Trust me, this is good thing. Too many young women in this city have no one watching out for them.”

She didn't correct his misconception. Lou may not have been her father, but he'd always been a father figure to her. Now, with her dad so incapacitated, it felt good to have someone step in and fill that role, even if it was just for today.

A few minutes later, as they turned onto her street and the cab pulled to a stop in front of her building, Kelsey realized she'd left her purse back at the office. Worse, inside that purse were her phone and keys. She hesitated, trying to decide whether she should have this man drive her back to where he'd picked her up or if she could get into her apartment some other way. Weariness won out. Suddenly, the last place on earth she wanted to be was at Brennan & Tate. Now doubly grateful that Lou had paid her cab fare, she thanked the driver, climbed out, and was pleased to note that he remained at the curb, just as Lou had requested, until she got her next door neighbor to buzz her in and she was safely inside the building.

Thanks to the fact that the same neighbor kept a spare of her door key, soon Kelsey was in her kitchen in jeans and a loose sweater, making herself a hot cup of tea and counting the minutes until she could plop on the couch.

What a day.

What a nightmare.

The telephone had not stopped ringing since she'd walked in the door, but she had no intention of talking to anyone right now. As the electric kettle came to a boil, the phone started to ring yet again. Leaning over to glance at the caller ID screen, she saw the name of a local newspaper. She listened for the pause after the third ring that told her the call was being routed to voice mail, and then she picked up the phone, turned it over, and flipped the button to shut off the ringer.

Finally, once her mug of tea was ready, she squeezed past the exercise equipment filling the space intended for a kitchen table and made her way over to the living room area of her small, one-bedroom apartment. With a heavy sigh, she sat down on the love seat and sipped her tea, eyes closed, trying to recover from all that had happened.

Outside, she could hear cars honking, tires rumbling, distant sirens wailing—even the long, low horn of a ship out on the river. She loved living in Manhattan, especially this part of Manhattan, she thought as she set her mug down on a coaster on the end table and rested her head on the overstuffed arm of the little sofa. But at the moment she wished she were somewhere far away, maybe at her grandfather's house down at the Jersey shore, where life was simpler and slower and she always felt safe and loved.

Kelsey must have dozed off briefly, because when she opened her eyes with a start, she realized it was nearly dusk. Standing and stretching, she clicked on the lamp, crossed to the window to lower the blinds, and then reached for the TV's remote control. Might as well see if the story of Adele had made the six o'clock news after all.

Half an hour later, she'd caugh the story on all of the major networks and on a CNN offshoot. Fortunately, no one seemed to have any footage of the actual ruckus in the auditorium, but they had all managed to get cameras rolling by the time Rupert and the redhead were escorted from the building and put into the limo. Walter had done a pretty good job of speaking to the press after that, and the clip most of the stations had chosen to run had him attributing the incident to “
Titanic
fever run amok.”

All of the channels showed professional head shots of Adele and of Kelsey, but somehow CNN had managed to get hold of a full-length picture of Rupert as well. He wasn't exactly attractive in person, but the photo they had chosen made him look positively ugly—not to mention a tad deranged.
A candid snapshot that looked as though it had been taken during a hunting trip, he was dressed in camouflage clothing, leg waders, and a grimy old sailor's hat. Worse, in his hands he was cradling a shotgun. Either Brennan & Tate was lucky, or their PR firm was even smarter and faster than Kelsey had given them credit for. The juxtaposition of images spoke volumes about the truth behind the incident. Obviously, this was a case of some crazy, backwoods yokel coming to the big city and trying to cash in on the hard work of some very upstanding, highly respected business people, past and present, one of whom had even been a
Titanic
survivor in her youth.

Thinking about the way the media had portrayed things, Kelsey was relieved, but in a way she almost felt sorry for the guy yet again. If he'd acted out of maliciousness or ill-intent, then of course he deserved what he was getting. But as neither seemed to be the case—that he was, instead, simply a man in possession of some
Titanic
-sized delusions—he shouldn't have been made to look so foolish.

Refusing to feel guilty for something completely out of her control, Kelsey flipped off the TV and popped a frozen dinner into the microwave. She wanted to draw the family tree and then add in the information from Rupert's claims, just to get a better picture of what he'd been trying to spell out. It would have been easier to do so using an app or an ancestry-related website, but seeing as how she'd left both her phone and her laptop at the office, she'd have to do this the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper.

Sitting down on the floor at the coffee table, she ate her dinner as she worked. She decided to start with herself and her brother, Matt, at the bottom and work her way up, creating a chart. She only got as far as their parents, however, when she realized she hadn't even contacted them yet about what had happened today. Mortified, she immediately got up and retrieved the phone. Though her father may or may not understand what she was saying depending on how lucid of a day he was having, her mother definitely needed to hear this from Kelsey herself and not by accidentally running across it some other way, such as online or in the newspaper.

Unfortunately, there was no answer at her parents' house, so she left them a message saying there had been a big problem at the office today and that she needed to talk to them about it as soon as possible. It was odd not to find them at home, she thought, glancing at the clock on the microwave as she disconnected the call. These days, taking her father anywhere was so much trouble that her parents rarely went out at all anymore, except for doctor
visits and the like. Where could they possibly be at a quarter to seven on a Tuesday night?

Frustrated, she dialed Matt instead, thinking he might know where their parents could be. She thought his call was about to go to voice mail too when he surprised her by answering.

“Hey, Kels,” he said loudly, “sorry about the noise. I'm on my way home from work. I was just about to head down into the subway. Listen, I'm so, so sorry I couldn't make it to your thing today. I thought I'd be able to pull it off, but then one of my students had a big meltdown when I caught her cheating on an exam, and after that things kind of fell apart. There was this whole big drama with her and me and the dean, and it dragged on all afternoon. I feel terrible about it, but there was nothing I could do.”

Clearly, he was oblivious to what had happened at Brennan & Tate, so rather than competing with the street noises to bring him up to speed, she simply told him the same thing she had said in the message she'd left for her parents, that there had been a big problem at the office and that he should go straight home and turn on the TV to see what he had missed. “Try the Headline News channel. The story's on their loop. Oh, and don't talk to any reporters, okay? They'll probably start calling you soon, once they track down who you are and how they can reach you.”

As soon as she said it, she realized that maybe her parents were home after all, but that they, too, had simply turned off the phone's ringer, as she had, because they were being badgered by the news media.

“Did you say reporters?” he yelled, his voice nearly drowned out by what sounded like a passing train. “What are you talking about?”

“Just turn on the TV as soon as you get home and then call me!” she yelled back before hanging up the phone.

How frustrating. Glancing over toward the fridge, she thought about hopping on the stair stepper to work out some of her tension but decided she was getting too far off track. First things first. She would check her messages to see if maybe her parents had called earlier, and then she would get back to work on her family tree.

Dialing into voice mail, Kelsey was shocked when the automated system announced she had twenty-seven messages.
Twenty-seven? Lou wasn't kidding. The vultures are circling
. With a heavy sigh, she carried the phone over to the love seat, sat down, and began working her way through from the beginning, finishing her now-cold dinner as she did.

Just as she'd suspected, the messages were primarily a mix of media requests and well-meaning and/or curious friends calling to find out firsthand what had happened. Most of the calls could be deleted after the first sentence or so, and she quickly worked her way through, barely pausing until she reached message number seventeen and heard the voice of Gloria.

Snapping to attention, Kelsey pressed the button to make the message start over again and then listened more closely this time.

Sitting up straight, Kelsey listened to the message once more, just to make sure she was hearing correctly. What was Gloria talking about? Pulse surging, Kelsey quickly zipped through the rest of the messages, just to see if she had left any others. Sure enough, there was one more, message number twenty, and that time her voice sounded even more frantic than it had before.

The message ended with a sob and then a few clicks before it went dead, as if Gloria had been so overcome with emotion that she could barely even hang up the phone. Poor thing!

Face burning with guilt for having turned off the ringer and missed Gloria's calls, Kelsey dialed the office and then punched in the woman's extension as fast as her fingers would go. It rang five times and went to voice mail, so Kelsey left a brief message and then tried Gloria's cell. It, too, went to voice mail, so she left another message, hung up, and then began pacing while she waited for her to call back.

Nothing.

When the phone still hadn't rung after five minutes, Kelsey tried both of Gloria's numbers yet again and then, on the off chance that she'd changed her mind and gone home, called there too. No answer anywhere. Eventually, Kelsey knew she had no choice but to head back over to the office. In Gloria's message, she'd said she wasn't leaving until they talked, and if Kelsey
couldn't reach her by phone to just come back. That's what she would have to do. Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was now almost seven fifteen. She hoped that meant enough time had passed since the incident that everyone, including the press, had gone home by now.

Kelsey went to the bedroom closet and rooted through a few spare purses until she came up with one that had some money in it, just in case. Slipping the bills into her pocket, she grabbed a jacket and her spare apartment key and headed out.

Down at street level, she was almost at the front door when she spotted a small cluster of people gathered on the walkway outside. With a gasp, she darted behind a pillar, her heart pounding. Reporters. Of course. She should have expected this.

Careful to keep out of the sightline of the front windows, she inched along the wall until she was able to turn the corner and head for the back exit instead. Unfortunately, that meant walking out between two extremely smelly dumpsters, but it was worth the trouble. Five minutes later, she was at the elevated walkway over West Street, and no one even knew she'd left her building.

Kelsey's commute from home to work was just under half a mile, an easy walk at any time of day but especially now, when there was less foot traffic to contend with. As she quickly covered the distance and neared the office building, she thought about going in through the back but decided to take a peek around front first, to see if the coast was clear.