Magdalene (63 page)

“Finally, may Greg Sitkaris burn in hell for
what he did to my friend, my brother, Mitch Hollander. Mitch
protected the savings and livelihoods of thousands of people, and
then endured a devastating personal attack. However. Although I
wouldn’t wish on anyone what happened to Mitch, I believe it was
absolutely necessary to effect justice today and that without
Mitch’s sacrifices, the employees of J.I. would never have been
vindicated.”

When asked to respond to Taight’s comments,
Senator Oth said only, “I’m glad justice is finally being
served.”

Mitch Hollander, founder and CEO of
Hollander Steelworks, and his wife, Cassandra St. James,
restructuring specialist for Blackwood Securities, could not be
located for comment.

The kitchen remained silent, and Mitch
realized that he was the only one dumbfounded.

Sebastian’s face appeared on the screen
again, as did his two-year-old daughter’s when she went barreling
through Sebastian’s office and threw herself on her father. “Oof!
Watch it, Celie.”

“Stowy, Daddy!” she demanded, hitting him
with a big storybook.

“In a minute.”

“No, now!”

The raven-haired toddler immediately had his
full attention, but probably not the kind she wanted. His face
stony, he stared down at her. “Celia. Dianne. Taight.” But she
giggled, reached up, dug her hands in his hair, and pulled his face
down to rub noses until he laughed. “Okay, you got me. Where’s
mama?”

“Sweeping widda baby.”

“Then go play with your brothers until I get
off the phone, and do
not
wake her up. Understand?”

“Okay, Daddy!” She ran out of the room
screaming, “Mommy!”

He was still chuckling when he looked back
into the camera. “Looks like the wild things are up and about, so
I’m gonna bail. Cass was the project coordinator, so she can
explain.” Sebastian looked at Cassandra, and grinned.
“Allergies?”

“It’s lavender season,” Cassandra muttered
with a sniffle, turning to hide her face in Mitch’s shoulder.

“I love you, man,” Sebastian said just
before the screen went black.

Mitch stood dazed. “You did it,” he
whispered as he looked down at his wife, feeling a burden lift from
his shoulders, one he hadn’t realized he still carried or that
still mattered to him.

“Well,
we
did it,” she said, wiping
her tears. “See, I started getting interested in J.I. when I did my
thesis proposal on Sebastian Taight’s failures as a fixer.”

Mitch stared at her, confused. “There
weren’t any. He’s never failed.”

“That’s what everybody
thinks
,” she
corrected. “There was one. J.I. The underlying theory of why he
does what he does was interesting, but his pattern of getting
thieves jailed stopped at J.I., then picked up again with every
company he went into after that. It led me to conclude that while
everyone—including you—saw your absorption of J.I. as a success,
albeit incomplete,
he
considered it a failure. Getting them
prosecuted wasn’t your goal. It was
his
goal.
His
failure.
That
is why I almost got laughed out of my program,
so I changed my thesis to something I could defend on stats and
evidence.”

He blinked. “And...you didn’t ask Sebastian
to help you defend your proposal because they wouldn’t have taken
you seriously.”

“Right. My whole time in college and in the
MBA program, I was just an uppity rich Upper East Side stay-at-home
divorcée trying to keep myself occupied because my kids were old
enough to have their own lives. My theories were already tenuous;
it could’ve been argued that I’d just paid him to show up and
validate them.”

Giselle snorted.

“So how did this all happen?” Mitch asked,
knowing he was missing a big piece of the puzzle.

“Cassie’s black book,” Bryce said. “That was
the key. It connected the mastermind of the J.I. operation to the
head of J.I.’s human resources department—Sitkaris—although in her
transcripts, he wasn’t mentioned by name. But he was then connected
to the records at Vorcester & Minden. Cassie worked her magic
to herd Sitkaris one way, and Knox worked the accounting backward
to herd him the other way until they had him corralled. We used the
evidence against
him
to get the others’ probable locations,
then we hired a team of bounty hunters. They tracked ’em down and
brought ’em in. DIY extradition.”

“Actually,” Cassandra murmured, casting a
wry glance at Giselle, who lazily twirled a steak knife in her
fingers, “the bad-tempered bitch over there was the one who got
Sitkaris to cough up the information. Finally.”

Giselle smiled beatifically and fluttered
her eyelashes.

“How—” Mitch stopped. He didn’t want to
know.

“He succumbed to my sunny disposition,” she
offered sweetly, caressing the blunt edge of the knife blade with a
finger. Clarissa laughed, clearly at ease with Giselle and her
disposition.

“They’ll be tried in federal court,” Bryce
continued. “Of course, we’ll all be called as witnesses, so you’ll
have to be moving home pretty soon.”

“What about the black book? That’s evidence,
right? Cassandra could—” He stopped, unwilling to think about what
could happen to her if it came to light.

“It’s gone,” Cassandra murmured. “I
destroyed everything. The only copy remaining is the one in Knox’s
head.”

“Didn’t need it to
prove
anything,”
Bryce rumbled as he popped grapes in his mouth. “It only pointed us
in the right direction. The Vorcester & Minden documents and
that list of names Cassie’s friend gave her did the heavy lifting,
gave us the connection in retrospect. It’s all over but the
shouting.”

Finally.

The black book he resented so much—

—the one Morgan had agreed to protect
without knowing why—

—the one thing they needed to finish the job
they’d started so long ago, one they’d been prepared to
abandon.

He gulped, gratitude heavy in his chest.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Good work, boy.

* * * * *

I didn’t leave Pennsylvania because I was
unhappy or because my commitment was long over. I did it because I
was bored. Bored with baking, bored with my job, bored with Prissy
and Louise, bored with the perfectly provincial French mansion and
the little red shoe car.

I didn’t get on an overseas flight because I
was running from Pennsylvania or my job or the ward that had long
forgotten I wasn’t a member of the Church, and thus didn’t realize
I never would be. I did it because I was bored.

Bored with my children, who’d had the
temerity to do something with their lives, leaving me high and dry
with no one to fuss over. Helene and her husband, with Doctors
Without Borders, were somewhere in Venezuela at the moment.
Clarissa, a junior attorney at Hale and Ravenwood, PC, made no
secret of where her real ambition lay: marriage and motherhood,
preferably in a chichi Kansas City neighborhood—once she found the
right guy. Olivia and Paige co-owned a physical therapy and rehab
center that had just started to offer franchises; Olivia’s husband
ran the business, Olivia did therapy and personal training, while
Paige and her boyfriend, who both still danced with Ailey, taught
dance classes that increased the center’s value.

Bored with my stepchildren and
grandchildren, who also had the temerity not to come entertain me
in my boredom. Lisette and Geneviève now both had two, and Trevor
had been called to the LDS Brazil Rio de Janeiro mission to get his
precious sales training in a foreign language. He felt two years of
celibacy was worth it for the experience, and though his father had
refused to sanction or pay for his mission (blown his top, rather),
Sebastian didn’t hesitate to pony up the cash along with a stern
lecture about not fucking around while he was there and to “return
with honor.” From
Rio
. That boy couldn’t have pulled a more
difficult assignment if he’d tried, what with all the women walking
around nude or close to it.

Bored with my best friend and ex-husband,
who’d decided to trot the globe in the other direction from me.
Bastards.

Bored with my adopted family because they
were a thousand miles away and, since most of them had been too
stupid to start their families before they turned forty, were now
in full-throttle childrearing mode. That would last a while and I
had no wish to mix myself up with ten children not, in fact,
related to me.

A sea of faces surrounded me when I stepped
off the plane in Japan, all races, colors, heights, sizes. In front
of me, a staid Nigerian businessman thumbing his hand tablet as he
walked right into an exquisitely attired Filipina. Next to me, a
bleach-blonde Japanese gothic Lolita with an enormous lollipop in
one hand and a Hello Kitty plushie in the other. Behind me, an
Australian surfer frantically trying to find out where in the world
his expensive board went.

I started walking, pulling my rolling
carry-on behind me, to see what I could see in this new place. I
have not been to Japan, though Gordon had brought the girls at
least twice that I could remember.

I left Pennsylvania and flew to Japan
because I was bored. Bored without my lover of five years, my
sparring partner and playmate, who had come here six days ago with
his legal team to negotiate the sale of his alloy to the Japanese
government. He’d bet me a cool million I wouldn’t be able to stand
being without him for the entire three weeks of his trip.

There.

Standing arrogantly relaxed in jeans and a
rugby shirt. Longish dark sandy curls. Marvelous blue eyes. Scruffy
sandy goatee.

Victorious smirk.

Oh, please.

I refuse to accede the bet because it wasn’t
him
I missed. I was just bored being all alone in the house
with all my reorganization projects in my teams’ hands and nothing
new on the horizon. So I abandoned my friends and hopped a plane,
wondering what church would be like in Japanese.

You aren’t
ever
going to get your
fill of me.

I’ll have to find something else to do when
he starts to bore me, because he will.

Eventually.

* * * * *

Acknowledgments

Dude and my longsuffering Tax Deductions, who
hear, “Mommy’s
working
!” way too often.

Sabrina Darby, RJ Keller, Sheila Reams, Inez
Kelley, Bettie Sharpe, Galen Dara, and Teresa Knezek for pointing
out all the potholes so I wouldn’t trip over them in front of my
editor (or anyone else) (I hope)

Eric W Jepson for his edit and Elizabeth
Palmer for her proof

Adam Figueira for the absolutely gorgeous
cover and illustrations, and Lisa Rosen for suggesting the
illustrations in the first place

and

Every reader who’s taken a chance on an
upstart self-published author.

Thank you.

* * * * *

About the
Author

Since before Moriah can remember, she wrote
stories in her head to put herself to sleep at night.
Unfortunately, they grew like kudzu and took over her neural
pathways until, around age fourteen, she had to start putting them
on paper before they choked out everything else. She’s been writing
ever since, with the exception of a five-year sagging middle—er,
uh, hiatus—during which a lot of stuff happened. The trouble
started when she woke up one morning in 2007 with the solution to a
plot problem that had plagued her since 1995...

[email protected]

moriahjovan.com

twitter.com/MoriahJovan

* * * * *

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theproviso.com

theproviso.com/stay

theproviso.com/magdalene

For vignettes, outtakes, FAQs, stats, and
more on all the characters from
The Proviso
,
Stay
,
and
Magdalene

Book 1 in the Tales of Dunham

Giselle Cox & Bryce Kenard

Sebastian Taight & Eilis Logan

Knox Hilliard & Justice McKinley

•

Book 2 in the Tales of Dunham

Vanessa Whittaker & Eric Cipriani

•

Book 4 in the Tales of Dunham

Elliott Raxham, Earl Tavendish & The
Honourable Miss Celia Bancroft

Where it all begins.