Chapter 43: The Recording

Rachel listened to it three times between Rockefeller Center and Columbus Circle, and the third time she made the cab driver turn off his radio.

“Lady, it’s the Christmas station.”

“I’ll give you ten dollars to let Mariah rest.”

He turned it off.

She’d left the party five minutes after the toast. Julian had walked her to the elevator with his hand flat on the small of her back, so mad she could hear his teeth. “Go home. Change. I have to stand up there in twenty minutes and thank three hundred people for a great year, and I can’t do that if I’m watching you stand in a wet dress.” Then, lower: “He’s going to regret that.”

“Don’t,” she’d said. “Not tonight. Let him have it.”

Let him have it, because she had something better in her purse.

Now she sat in the back of a yellow cab that smelled like pine air freshener and somebody’s old lo mein, one earbud in, one finger pressed over it to block out the honking on Sixth Avenue. The recording was forty-one minutes long. Most of it was garbage. Band, laughter, glasses, a woman somewhere shrieking “Shut up, shut UP” about somebody’s engagement.

She’d been standing right there, a foot from both of them, and she’d caught maybe half of it over the music. The phone had caught the rest.

At minute twenty-six, the band took a breath.

Her own voice first, small and ordinary. “I’m talking to you.”

Then Michael, turning away from her, clear as day, same as it used to come through the bedroom door when he was on the phone with “Halvorsen” and thought she was asleep.

“Relax. I told you. January’s fine. The Linden account’s clean. Nothing touches us. It all washes through her.”

Ice. A cough. Then Harold Kemp, dry as an old newspaper, the voice of a man who’d never once had to raise it.

“And when they come asking?”

“Look at her, Harold. Grief counseling, the bridge, the boss. Nobody’s going to believe a word she says.”

A pause. Somebody laughed near the mic and drowned out a second. Then Kemp again, not even lowering it, because why would he.

“The maid will do as told. They always do.”

He’d said it with her standing there holding a club soda. That was the part she kept going back to. Not that they’d said it. That they hadn’t bothered to wait until she walked away.

Rachel pulled the earbud out and sat there with it in her palm like a pulled tooth.

It all washes through her.

Her. Not the company, not some vendor in New Jersey. Her.

The bank in Scarsdale in October, the nice young banker asking which of her business accounts she’d like to discuss. The shredded strip on Julian’s study floor. RM CONSUL. The envelope on the dash of Kemp’s Bentley. Linden Court Holdings.

Her street. Her house. Her initials. Her.

“Ma’am?” The driver was watching her in the mirror. “You okay? You look like you seen a ghost.”

“I’m fine.” She wiped her face, and her fingers came away wet, and she was annoyed about that. “It’s the pregnancy. I cry at commercials.”

“My wife was like that with our second. Cried at a Subaru ad.” He shook his head. “Subaru. Who cries at a Subaru?”

* * *

Back at the penthouse she peeled off the green dress in the guest suite and hung it up. Ruined. She wasn’t throwing it out. She was going to keep it in the closet like a trophy.

Then she put on Julian’s Columbia sweatshirt and sat in her window seat with the laptop and typed Delaware corporation search.

Michael always used Delaware. He used to say it at dinner parties like a joke. Delaware, baby. Where money goes to take a nap.

The state website looked like it had been built in 1998 and nobody had been allowed to touch it since. She typed LINDEN COURT HOLDINGS into the box and solved a captcha of blurry fire hydrants. One result. A limited liability company, a file number, and a registered agent on North Orange Street in Wilmington, a plain little office building that was the legal home of a few hundred thousand companies. A mail slot with delusions of grandeur.

Who owned it? Delaware didn’t say. That was the whole point of Delaware.

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw colors. Fine. She couldn’t solve it tonight. But she could protect what she had. She texted Owen.

Got something at the party. Audio. Michael and Kemp. Can you back it up somewhere safe before I do something dumb with it?

He called instead of texting back. Owen never slept, as far as she could tell. He just went into power-saving mode.

“Where were you when you recorded it?”

“At the bar. With them.”

“With them how. Behind a curtain? Under a table?”

“Standing there. I said hi. I asked Michael for my mother’s jewelry box. Kemp told me red doesn’t come out.”

A breath on the line that might have been relief. “Good. Then you’re a party to it. New York, one person in the conversation can record it. If you’d been hiding behind a plant taping two men who didn’t know you were there, that’s eavesdropping, and it’s your name on the felony, not theirs.” Keys clicking. “Don’t email it. Don’t put it in iCloud. I’m sending you a link to my server. Upload, then don’t touch anything.”

The link came. A plain gray page with a blue bar. She chose New Recording 14, forty-one minutes, and watched the bar crawl.

Twelve percent. Thirty. Fifty-one. Sixty-one.

It stopped there. The little wheel spun. She told herself it was the Wi-Fi, which was always doing something weird in the guest suite, and walked to the hallway with the phone held out in front of her like a divining rod.

She was in the kitchen pouring a glass of water she didn’t want when he called again.

“Did it go through?” she said. “It got stuck at sixty-something, I think the Wi-Fi…”

“Rachel.” His voice was all wrong. Owen’s voice was usually flat, a little bored, like he was reading you the terms of service. This was clipped and tight. “Open Voice Memos. Tell me what you see.”

She put him on speaker. New Recording 13. Some grocery list from last week. New Recording 12.

No 14.

She checked Recently Deleted. Empty.

“It’s not there,” she said. Her voice came out very small. “Owen, it’s not there.”

“I know. The upload didn’t fail. The file got pulled out from under it while it was still sending, and then somebody emptied the trash behind it.” He stopped typing. “Rachel. Your Voice Memos sync. Whose Apple ID is that phone signed into?”

She looked at the little gray icon in the corner of the screen. The one she’d never once tapped in three years, because he’d told her he’d handle all that.

“Michael’s,” she said. “Michael made it.”