Skeleton Key(46)

She got down to her office without seeing anybody. She sat at her computer and booted up. The club seemed very, very busy, full of people. It was a Sunday afternoon in October and people didn’t have anything else to do.

She got to her desktop screen and then from there to the accounts. She typed in Kayla Anson’s name and waited. A second later, a window popped up, making a sound like a cymbal being struck, that said FILE NOT FOUND.

“Shit,” Sally said, under her breath. Then she felt instantly guilty. You didn’t use words like shit at this club. Even the men didn’t use them.

She tried Anson, Kayla. She got another window: FILE NOT FOUND. Then she tried the account number. She knew that number by heart. The cymbal went off and the window went up: FILE NOT FOUND. Just to check, just to make sure, Sally typed in “Marian Ridenour.” The account document flashed into the window, accessible and complete.

There was a small rivulet of sweat going down the back of her neck. Sally could feel it. Any minute now, it would soak into the silk of her pale blue blouse. Somebody had deleted Kayla Anson’s account file, or moved it, or put it off limits. She had absolutely no idea what she was supposed to do now.

“Did we mess up your program?” a voice asked from the doorway. “I told them to be careful, but you know what those people are like. And they were in an incredible hurry.”

Sally looked up and saw Ruth Grandmere standing in the doorway. Ruth was the club’s weekend manager, a salt-and-peppered-hair woman with a sensible figure and a penchant for dresses in floral prints. Unlike Sally, she had never been a member of the club—and never even wanted to be.

“What what people are like?” Sally asked her. “Do you mean someone’s been in here playing with my machines?”

“The Anson people. Kayla Anson’s trust lawyers. Tons of them. Well, I suppose it was only three. But still. Can you imagine getting three eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour white shoe Wall Street lawyers out to the Northwest Hills of Connecticut the first thing Saturday morning just to get the records on an account that had, what, in it—maybe a thousand dollars?”

“I don’t know,” Sally said. Her throat felt raw and bloody, as if she’d swallowed glass.

Ruth had come all the way into the office. Now she sat down on a corner of Sally’s desk.

“If you ask me, it’s Margaret. I don’t mean Margaret made them come out. I mean they don’t trust Margaret. Not as far as they can throw her. And I can’t say I blame them. Lord, but that woman is god-awful. And rdon’t think she ever cared about Kayla at all, except for the money. That girl lost everything she had when her father died.”

“Yes,” Sally said.

“Anyway,” Ruth said, “they wanted the account records, so I gave them to them—I hope you don’t mind. You weren’t here and I couldn’t get you at home. Not that there’s anything wrong with that It’s your weekend. But they were in a hurry. And I called Mortimer and he said to make every accommodation.”

Mortimer was the club’s regular manager.

“No,” Sally said. “I don’t mind.”

What was she supposed to say?

Ruth hopped down off the desk. “I didn’t think you would. And you’ll get the account documents back—you’ve still got them, really, they’ve just been moved and protected with a password or something, I don’t remember how it works. They just want to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, if you see what I mean. Did you really come in to work today?”

“What? Oh, no. No. I came to have some coffee and get out of the house. I just thought I’d check on some things while I was here.”

“Well, good. Good. I keep telling Mortimer that we ought to put you on full-time. We need you on full-time. But you know how Mortimer is. Now I’ve got to go and make sure that the golf caddies aren’t ready to kill Stephen Holdenbrook again—why that man has to be so awful to the caddies, I don’t know. It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it, about Kayla Anson?”

“What? Oh, yes. Yes, it is.”

“There’s nothing else on tap for conversation around this place today. If you want to get away from the news, you’d better go to Hawaii. I can’t imagine what it would be like, to be dead at an age like that.”

“Yes,” Sally said again.

Ruth retreated into the hall. Sally looked at the screen of her computer. There wasn’t anything she could do about this mess, not here, not now. Maybe there was nothing she could do about this mess ever. She wrapped her arms around her chest and held herself tight.