Suite 601
Part 5: Suite 601
Claudia arrived at 10 AM with coffee and a flash drive and the particular, hunted look of a woman who hasn't slept.
She stood in the doorway of Suite 601 and looked at the room. Helen's room. The furniture, the curtains, the harbor painting back on the wall. She looked at it the way a person looks at a church when they know they've sinned in it.
"I helped him change the locks on this suite," Claudia said. "After Helen died. Marcus said it was for security. He didn't want anyone going through her things."
"He didn't want anyone finding what she hid," Emma said.
"I know that now."
They sat at the writing desk. Two women who had, twelve days ago, been on opposite sides of a glass door in the rain. Emma inside the role of the discarded wife, Claudia inside the role of the triumphant other woman. Both roles written by the same man. Both women performing for an audience of one.
"I need to tell you something before we start," Claudia said. "And I need you to hear it even though you have every reason not to."
"Go ahead."
"I didn't know about you when it started. With Marcus. In Nantucket, he told me he was single. When we came to the Langford, he told me the marriage was a business arrangement. That you knew about us. That you and he had an understanding."
"That's not true."
"I know. I figured that out about six months ago. When I saw the way you looked at him at the Christmas party. You looked at him like he was real. Women who have an 'understanding' don't look at their husbands like that."
Emma filed this away. Not forgiveness. Information.
"Show me what you brought."
Claudia opened her laptop. She plugged in the flash drive. The screen filled with folders, organized by date, and Emma recognized the precision of a woman who kept records not out of virtue but out of survival instinct. The same instinct that had made Helen keep records. The same instinct that had made Patricia Devlin too trusting not to.
"These are the vendor invoices," Claudia said, opening a folder. "Coastal Maintenance Solutions, Premier Hospitality, the others. Marcus created the companies. I created the invoices. He told me what amounts, what descriptions, what dates. I generated the paperwork and submitted it through the hotel's accounting system."
"You had access to accounting?"
"I was events director. I had authorization to submit vendor invoices up to $15,000 without additional approval. Anything above that needed the GM's sign-off. Which was Marcus."
"So he approved his own theft."
"He approved invoices submitted by me to companies owned by him. Yes."
Emma looked at the documents. Clean. Professional. The kind of paperwork that passes audits because audits are designed to catch mistakes, not crimes that look like procedures.
"Where did the money go after the shell companies?"
"Into a brokerage account. In Marcus's name. He told me it was 'our' account. That when we had enough, we'd cash out and disappear." Claudia's mouth did something bitter. "There is no 'our' account. I checked after I found the Charleston emails. The account is in his name only. I'm not on it. I was never on it."
"How much is in the brokerage?"
"As of last week, $743,000. The rest he's spent. Living expenses. The apartment you share. That watch he wears."
Emma thought about the watch. The TAG Heuer that Marcus wore every day, that he'd told her was a gift from a college friend. Three thousand dollars on his wrist, paid for with money stolen from a hotel built by a woman who used to patch the roof herself because she couldn't afford a contractor.
"There's one more thing," Claudia said. She reached into her bag and pulled out her phone. "I have a recording."
"Of what?"
"A conversation. Marcus and me. From about four months ago. We were in his office. Late. He'd been drinking. He gets honest when he drinks, which is the most dangerous thing about him, because the honesty is worse than the lies."
Claudia pressed play.
The recording was tinny, the sound quality of a phone placed on a desk while two people talk. Background noise. The hum of an air conditioner. Ice in a glass. Marcus's voice, loose, the consonants soft the way consonants get after three bourbons.
"...don't worry about Emma. Emma's easy. She's the easiest one yet."
Claudia's voice on the recording: "She's your wife."
"She's a name on a marriage certificate. That's all she's ever been. I married her because Helen was dying and I needed to be inside the family before the will was read. Emma was the door. You don't fall in love with a door."
"Marcus..."
"What? You want me to pretend? I like her fine. She's nice. She makes good eggs. She doesn't ask questions. That's the perfect wife for what we're doing. The kind of woman who trusts you because she doesn't know how not to."
"And when it's done?"
"When it's done, I file for divorce. I take half of whatever she thinks she owns. And we go somewhere where the water's warm and the extradition treaties are complicated."
"You said that in Nantucket too."
"Nantucket was practice. This is the real thing. Helen's hotel is worth twelve million on the open market. Even if I only walk away with the cash in the accounts, we're set. But I'm not going to walk away with just the cash. I'm going to walk away with the hotel."
"How?"
"Because in six months, I'm going to convince Emma to transfer her trust shares to me. For 'tax purposes.' She'll do it because she doesn't understand finance and because she trusts me. And then I'll own the Langford outright, and I'll sell it to the highest bidder, and Emma can go back to whatever she was doing before I found her."
The recording ended. Claudia pressed stop.
The room was quiet. Helen's room. The harbor painting. The lily of the valley perfume.
Emma sat in the chair and she felt the words settle into her body the way sediment settles to the bottom of a glass. Slowly. Completely.
She's the easiest one yet.
You don't fall in love with a door.
She makes good eggs.
She sat there and she felt every breakfast she'd ever cooked for that man, every egg she'd scrambled, every time she'd stood at the stove making something with her hands for a person who described her to his mistress as "easy" and "a door" and "the kind of woman who trusts you because she doesn't know how not to."
And somewhere in the feeling, beneath the hurt and the humiliation and the eight weeks of pregnancy that this man had not bothered to learn about because he was too busy planning his exit, something else arrived. Something cold. Something with edges. Something that Helen would have recognized.
Resolution.
"Forward me that recording," Emma said.
"Done."
"The financial documents too. Everything on the drive."
"All of it. What are you going to do?"
Emma looked at the harbor painting. The boats waiting. Not anymore.
"My grandmother left me a hotel and a letter and a team. Richard is the executor with legal authority. You're the inside witness with documentary evidence. And I'm the owner that Marcus doesn't know is the owner." She stood up. "Tomorrow night is the quarterly board meeting. Marcus will be presenting the hotel's financials to the advisory board. Richard sits on that board."
"You want to do it at the board meeting?"
"I want Marcus to stand in front of a room full of people and present numbers that I can prove are fraudulent, with evidence that his own partner provided, in a hotel that belongs to me." Emma paused. "And I want him to find out about all of it at the same time."
"He'll be blindsided."
"The way I was blindsided in the rain."
Claudia looked at Emma. Not the way she'd looked at her through the glass doors, not the martini look, not the stray-cat look. A different look. The look of a woman recognizing something in another woman that she hadn't expected to find.
"Your grandmother would be proud of you," Claudia said.
May you like
"My grandmother would tell me I'm running behind schedule," Emma said. "Let's go."
Keep reading Part 6, because the board meeting is tomorrow night. Marcus will be standing at the head of the table presenting fake numbers. And he won't see Emma walk through the door until it's too late.
