Claire and Present Danger Page 11

  I was calm again now, and grateful. “I’ve called my friend at Shipley, and she’s going to check out Vicky Baer’s school records, find out the name of the Ohio school. The records are archived somewhere, and she needs to contact the person in charge. Plus, I’ve been reading through the San Francisco Chronicle’s archives for last year. I typed in Jake King and last year’s January through December dates and came up with seven hundred and forty-two mentions. Much of it concerning royalty and sports teams. I never realized what a popular surname it was.”

  Mackenzie nodded. I felt let down. I’d expected more recognition of my labors, although I couldn’t have said what: a gold star? Roses flung at my feet?

  “Forget to put a plus between the words?” he asked softly.

  That didn’t deserve an answer. Of course I’d forgotten. Of course the slogging labors were due to my forgetting. But I had gotten information about Jake King, ace sailor who “could read water,” according to friends who’d sailed with him.

  He had been a champion racer in half a dozen Pacific contests, and from what I read, everybody loved him except his ex-wife, who didn’t consider Jake’s death any reason to lessen her fury toward him.

  And reading between the lines, noting what wasn’t on the page, nobody was overly fond of Jake’s actual widow. People were quoted—without attribution—as having been at the funeral and memorial service “for Jake” or because they “loved Jake.” Some expected quotes were notable for their omission. Nobody remembered to express sorrow for the bride-widow.

  The article said that the widow King was the former Stacy Collins, and that as Stacy Williams, she’d been an actor. I wondered, then, whether there was a Mr. Collins, or a Mr. Williams? Mary Elizabeth. Betsey in college. M. E. or Emmie now. Stacy. Cade Collins Williams King. Who else? It felt more like games with lights and shadows than actual name changes.

  “I did some stuff today, too.” He didn’t have class on Tuesdays, but had been home studying most of the day, I’d thought. “Got you a stack of faxes from the Chron.”

  “You know somebody in San Francisco?”

  “More a six degrees of separation thing, like your sister and the Main Line matrons would have been. Guy I know left the force, went out to do security work, mostly with Silicon Valley people. But he knew somebody in the city, who knew somebody at the Chron an’—lots about your lady. And the guy’s ready to put together all the legal records if you want them.”

  “Like that?” I couldn’t believe it. Yesterday, finding anything out about the woman calling herself Emmie Cade seemed daunting. Today, even if I’d spent all the intervening time polishing my nails, we’d have her background, thanks to Mackenzie’s contacts.

  “Bottom line is, the lady never has been arrested, let alone gone to prison. A lot of smoke, but no fire.”

  “Meaning?”

  “After—what shall I call her? She’s got half a dozen names.”

  “Emmie. Live in the moment. That’s who she currently is.”

  “Okay. After Emmie moved here and was gone from Marin, the IJ—that paper that had the big article about Jake King’s death—ran a feature on her. A reporter there—spoke to him today—spent a few months gathering background. Apparently, maybe because of rumors started by Jake’s ex-wife, who didn’t get any money when he died, people were convinced Emmie killed him and got off scot-free, and then somebody knew somebody else in Austin, where she was engaged to the motorcycle man and knew that there was talk about her in Texas, too. It prompted this guy to dig into her past.”

  He passed me five pages of faxed news story. The photo at the top of the page showed the same sweet face and smile I’d met yesterday. This time, future-Emmie wore an abbreviated wedding veil that poufed around her head but didn’t cover her face.

  The headline said, “Out of a murky past—and gone again?”

  “She disappeared from there?” I asked.

  “No forwarding address, apparently.” Mackenzie leaned back, satisfied with himself. “That motorcycle accident bothered folks. It was somewhat weird and thought to be a suicide, which nobody could prove, but that didn’t stop them from blamin’ it on her. This fellow, Collins—”

  “One of her names. But they weren’t married, right?”

  “Right. But he bought a house with her, jointly, with survivor’s rights, and he’d rewritten his will so that Emmie—who was Stacy Williams then—got his estate. Not vast, mind you, nothin’ like Jake King’s, but vast enough to use as a jumping-off place for the next husband-hunt.”

  “I am so confused. When was Collins? Before or after her other marriage?”

  “After it. Husband number one was—is—he survived her—William Stacey. Most people take their husband’s name when they marry. His last name. She did that, but changed her first name to Maribeth.”

  “Which is really only a variation on her given names.”

  He shrugged. “Still, who takes her husband’s name after a divorce? She was Betsey before she married him, Maribeth Stacey durin’ the marriage, and Stacy Williams—his name backward—afterward.”

  “And Stacy Collins by the time she met up with Jake. I wonder how she ever remembered who she was.”

  He grinned. “An’, may I say, according to the gossips who consulted with that writer, she walked away from William Stacey with a handsome bundle as well, and that despite rumors that she was having entirely too much fun on the side durin’ the marriage with another rich guy who loved giving expensive gifts. A married rich guy. The woman has a talent for other people’s money. Then she comes here and snares another one.”

  “It could all be gossip,” I said, glancing through the long article.

  “Far as I know, nobody sued about that article,” Mackenzie murmured. “I asked.”

  “She might not have ever known about it.” I skimmed over comments about Betsey’s—or Stacy’s—or Maribeth’s flirtatiousness, and what you’d call the step beyond flirtatiousness. Open approaches to “men of substance,” as the writer put it. Between marriages she’d made requests for loans while she was getting started with acting, for start-up money for a business that never materialized, for short-term help while she had a cash-flow problem with vague “trusts.” I looked up at Mackenzie. “Nobody I’d want my son to marry.”

  “Well, as I hope to co-create any son of yours, let me go on record sayin’ me, neither. But—here’s the point: When you strip away the innuendos and the theories of, and the suspicions, what do you have? A woman with a bad rep, whose morals are less rigid than we like. A woman whose love of money might be greater than her love of men, but that’s not for sure. Remember—our question was only: Who is she?”

  I took a few minutes to go through the articles, making notes to which I added what now felt like the pathetic crumbs I’d gotten from the computer today and dinner the night before, and then I was ready to read off the list to Mackenzie.

  “According to this article, and to Vicky Baer, she was born Mary Elizabeth Cade, daughter of Michael and Patricia. Born in Chicago, moved all over the place. Attended a series of schools. I know that one of them was in Ohio, where she met Vicky Smith, now Baer.”

  “Do you think Mrs. Fairchild needs quite all that?”

  I had no idea what or how much a client wanted. If I’d hired me, I’d want every single thing I could dig up. “She was still Mary Elizabeth then, and their paths crossed again at Cornell, where she called herself Betsey and stayed only a short while. In Mrs. Fairchild’s version, she got mono and didn’t come back. In Vicky Baer’s version, she ran off with a guy. Might be that both are true. Anyway, she never graduated from any college. She married William—Billy—Stacey when she was twenty-one, moved to Atlanta, where she called herself Maribeth Stacey. They had an ugly divorce, many rumors of an extramarital affair or two—on her part—and she walked away with money.”

  “And unpaid loans.”

  “Then she moved to Austin and Geoffrey Collins, motorcycle man.” I considered his name. �
�I don’t think of Geoffreys with a G as Harley types.”

  At that, Ozzie turned his head, and I nodded. “He died in an accident, Ozzie,” I said.

  “That proves she’s no good, then,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant Emmie of the many names or Geoffrey’s motorcycle, but I plugged on.

  “Geoffrey had a car dealership.”

  “He should have driven what he was sellin’ other people to drive,” Mackenzie said.

  “Are you saying nobody has accidents in cars?” Ozzie snorted his derision of slow-moving four-wheeled vehicles before he returned to his work. A chemical corporation paid him a small annual stipend to do background checks as needed, mostly for job applicants, who apparently lied alarmingly about their academic and work backgrounds. Emmie might be vague about her past, but as far as I could tell, she hadn’t lied. Except, perhaps, about killing a person or two along the way.

  “You were sayin’,” Mackenzie prompted.

  “The car dealership. Right. Guess who inherited it, then sold it? And guess when that legal document had been worked out?”

  “Ten minutes before his accident?” Mackenzie suggested.

  “Close. Two weeks. Guess she didn’t want it to look suspicious. By now, she was trying to act, and called herself Stacy Williams—her ex-husband’s name in reverse. You wonder how she managed her I.D. cards and drivers’ licenses. Acting didn’t work out, and I guess she figured new name, new chance, so she took Geoffrey’s last name, even though they’d never married. Now she was Stacy Collins, and she moved to the Bay Area, met and married Jake King. They were married as soon as he could divorce his wife. He apparently got sole custody of his ketch—a seventy-five-foot ocean-going aluminum yacht.”

  Ozzie turned at the words and nodded his approval. “You have any idea how much a thing like that would cost?” he said softly. “This is a well-off widow indeed.”

  They were married aboard the boat and then sailed off to Tahiti. Six months after their return, during an anniversary celebration aboard the boat, the man who could sail the Pacific, continent to continent, drowned on a sunny, calm spring day. Despite a boatful of people, no one had seen the accident, nor could anyone explain it. Repeatedly, mention was made of his expertise. “He could have been in the Olympics if he’d wanted to,” one person had said. And there endeth the western newspapers’ report because their trail got cold. She was gone.”

  The article said she’d told people she was going away for a short while to “heal” after Jake’s death, and it wasn’t until the Kings’ home was put on the market, six months later, that people realized she was gone for good. No forwarding address, no further contact with former neighbors and acquaintances.

  No close friends, apparently. A few who said they’d felt close to her—until she came on to their husbands.

  “At which time she drops Jake’s name and appears here as M. E.—or Emmie—Cade, with, once again, the cash to rent or buy the right place in the right neighborhood, meet the right people at the right clubs and charities, and catch her a new one. Did she ever hold an actual job, or try running the businesses she borrowed money for?”

  “The article didn’t mention any occupation except home-wrecker and fortune-seeker. She said she’d been an actress for a while.”

  “Great. One of the untraceable jobs, unless she’s listed with Equity. And she won’t be.”

  “Odds are against it,” I agreed.

  “She’d have a story for it. Never made it that far, didn’t get the parts that would qualify. Waited tables, waited for a break. Moved on.”

  “Which could be exactly what happened. It certainly wouldn’t be unique—and might further the desire to find money instead.” I looked at my notes from the day before. “She did interior design in Austin, too.”

  “Again, nearly impossible to prove or disprove. Given that we have no evidence of her being trained for that, you have to hope she paid her dues to a professional organization. A lady has a sense of style, good taste, a retail sales number, and affluent friends she’ll shop for, and sometimes, like that, she’s got a new title. How do you trace her through that? Besides, once she had her first nest egg, she probably didn’t need an actual job.”

  “It looks good to seem to be living off a trust fund,” I said. “It’s attractive—literally. Money goes to money. If it’s obvious you don’t need it—you’re given full access to it.” I took a breath and considered the woman’s sketchy past and the reason Mrs. Fairchild had hired us. “I wonder why the person who sent those warnings about the praying mantis didn’t send this story instead. This is so much more damning.”

  C. K. pulled at his right earlobe. That unconscious gesture seems to pull a switch in his brain. Someday, when we’re both in rocking chairs, and he’s had so many good ideas, one of his earlobes will rest on his shoulder blade. “Maybe that person didn’t know about this article,” he finally said. “Somebody who doesn’t live in Marin County, who never knew the paper wrote about Ms. Cade.”

  “Somebody with a never-ending hate for her? Like the person who told the reporter the rumors in the first place?”

  He nodded. “A Texan, wasn’t it? Remember, that story came out six months after Jake King died, when the house was sold and Emmie Cade—or Stacy King, as she’d been—was long gone to places unknown.”

  “And we’ll never find out who that person was, right?”

  “Doubt it. Newspaper confidentiality about sources.”

  “But none of the postmarks were from Texas.”

  “A mystery,” C. K. murmured. He didn’t seem that concerned, though it remained significant to me.

  “So what next?” I asked.

  He looked at me without saying anything, as if he was waiting for me to say something more. It’s always a pleasure to contemplate his fine features and shocking blue eyes. They are such an acute blue, you want to search for bluer words—azure, cerulean, cobalt—except they aren’t cobalt, they’re lighter and brighter. They’re so blue, you’d notice them from around the corner.

  But at the moment, I wanted him to teach me this business, and he wasn’t, so his eyes were simply blue, and annoyingly amused, and I wasn’t into gazing upon them much longer. “Manda,” he said softly after too long a pause, “it’s okay.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “C’mon. You don’t have to play the ingénue, the apt pupil, the disciple. My ego can handle your charging forward on your own. I’m countin’ on it and proud of you for it.”

  “I don’t understand a thing you’re saying. In plain English, what would an experienced investigator do next?”

  “No need to ask me that. Suppose you gave an assignment to research a question about Lord of the Flies, and your smartest student finds the stuff she needs and writes it up. What should she do next?”

  Oh. That.

  No. “I can’t call her up and tell her this,” I said. “Not now!”

  “Why not? It says who Emmie Cade is and was. That was the assignment. If she wants more, she tells us so, and we continue.”

  “She hired me twenty-four hours ago, and I barely did a thing—you did it.”

  “The newspaper in California did it, and that’s called research. How different is it from the databases online? You thought it would all be nosing around with a magnifying glass?”

  “I thought it would be—different.”

  “Sometimes it is, but the thing is, this is now. What else does Claire Fairchild need to know before she decides to tell her son about his intended? Do you think she needs more?”

  “What about the identity of the letter-sender?”

  “That wasn’t what the client requested. Ms. Cade has no arrests, no records. I checked. A speeding ticket outside Austin, but that’s about it. What’s left to find out?”

  It seemed hasty, unprofessional, slipshod. Too easy.

  Mackenzie laughed out loud, a sound I usually relish and savor, but not when I’m the butt of the joke, and I knew I was this time. “Had a mech
anic like you once. Every job, no matter how small, took a couple of days. Finally, I said, ‘If I pay you the same exorbitant rate you charge for three days, could you have my car back in an hour?’ He could and did, and said he didn’t want me to think what he did so well and quickly was easy, was all, so he kept the car in his garage those needless extra days. That’s what you think we should do. Hold back on the information so she thinks it was harder to get.”

  It sounded shabby when he said it that way, but indeed, that was not far from the feeling I had.

  “Instead, dazzle her with our incredible professionalism.”

  “Your professionalism.”

  “We’re a team,” he said softly, the blue eyes back to their indescribable color. “A little dumb to be competitive on this, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll write the report,” I said. “Leo Fairchild is going to be furious. Vicky Baer said his mother had ruined all his previous romances. And now this one, most likely, as well.”

  Mackenzie shrugged. “I don’t know that this will ruin anything. This is all—”

  “I know. Rumor, speculation, and ever-increasing assets.” I turned to face my computer, but Mackenzie put a hand on my arm.

  “Claire Fairchild’s worried. Her son set a wedding date. She’s playin’ sick to stop his plans until she hears from you. Talk with her. Today. Now. Phone her, tell her the facts, and that you’ll send a written version and copies of the news stories, and so forth, later—if she wants anything around where Leo might find it.”

  “She wanted—wants—him to be happy,” I whispered. “I think this information is going to make her very sad.”

  “Gonna make a lot of people sad,” he said.

  For reasons I couldn’t have fully explained, except for the nonstop barrage of bad-mouthing Mary Elizabeth Betsey Maribeth Stacy Emmie Williams Stacy Collins King Cade had received, I thought about sixth grade, when for a few months, I was labeled a slut. It was a laughable, pitiable choice of insults, because puberty was taking its good old time with me, and while I can’t say I’d never noticed boys, or suspected that someday they’d interest me, they didn’t yet matter much, and I am not sure I even knew what the word slut meant—except that it was a bad thing to be. But somebody, for some reason, decided I was too something that annoyed them, and stories circulated, took hold, and grew. A time of torment, of prepubescent hell.