Chapter 5 - Whispers in the Country Club
The Charlotte City Club occupies the top two floors of the Bank of America building on North Tryon. It is a place where men who control ninety percent of the state’s industrial bonds eat cold roast beef sandwiches while looking down on the ant-sized commuters forty stories below.
On Friday afternoon, twenty-four hours after Daniel had wept on my rug, I sat in the club’s ladies’ lounge with Rachel.
Rachel was wearing her "hunting tweed"—a dark forest-green jacket that she only brought out when she was preparing to attend a contentious school board meeting or execute a social execution.
"She’s here," Rachel murmured, leaning toward me over her silver pot of Earl Grey. "Two tables down in the private dining room. She’s with Julian Croft."
I didn't turn around. I reached for a lemon slice with the silver tongs. "Julian Croft doesn't take lunch with senior vice presidents unless he’s preparing to fire them or promote them to partner."
"Judging by the way she’s twisting her napkin into a tourniquet, it isn't a promotion," Rachel said, her eyes gleaming with cold, sisterly vindication. "Look at her, Claire. She looks like she’s about to throw up into her lobster bisque."
I glanced casually into the mirrored pillar that reflected the entrance to the inner dining room.
Paige Mercer was sitting across from Julian Croft, the seventy-year-old patriarch of Mercer & Croft. She was wearing a high-necked navy silk blouse—very conservative, very professional—designed to project stability. But her hands were moving constantly: smoothing her hair, tapping her water glass, picking at the silver cuff of her sleeve.
Julian Croft wasn't eating. He had a file folder resting between his fork and his water glass. Every thirty seconds, he would tap the edge of the folder with a blunt, manicured fingernail, say three words, and wait while Paige stammered a response.
"Sarah Sterling filed the preservation order at 8:45 this morning," I told Rachel. "By 10:15, the sheriff had served the registered agent for Mercer & Croft with a third-party subpoena for all communications regarding Catawba Ridge."
Rachel took a delicate sip of her tea. "Did Daniel call?"
"Fourteen times," I said. "He left a message at noon saying that Sarah Sterling was 'extorting' him and that we needed to have a four-way conference with his personal lawyer, Thomas Vance."
"Thomas Vance is ninety and thinks women shouldn't have checkbooks," Rachel scoffed.
"Which is why Daniel likes him," I said.
At that moment, the glass doors to the ladies’ lounge swung open.
Paige Mercer walked in.
She hadn't come to use the vanity; she had come because she had seen us through the glass partition of the dining room. She was pale, her lipstick had been bitten off at the center of her lower lip, and her eyes had that wide, glassy fixity of someone who has spent four hours realizing that the ground under her feet is made of tissue paper.
She didn't look at Rachel. She walked straight to the edge of our low marble table, her heels clicking like small hammers on the parquet.
"Claire," she said.
Rachel didn't even look up from her scone. "The public restrooms are down the hall, dear. This room is for members."
"Shut up, Rachel," Paige snapped, her voice trembling with an ugly, shrill vibration. She turned back to me, leaning over the table so low that I could smell her tuberose perfume—the perfume from my cedar closet. "We need to talk. Right now."
I set my teacup into its saucer without making a sound.
"We have nothing to talk about, Paige," I said. "Anything you have to say can be said to Sarah Sterling’s associates on Monday morning during your deposition."
"A deposition?" Her voice rose, attracting the attention of two elderly women who were reading magazines by the fireplace. Paige lowered her tone to a furious hiss. "Do you have any idea what you’re doing? Julian is threatening to revoke my equity partnership! He’s auditing my entire account division!"
"That sounds like a prudent business practice for an agency of their stature," I observed.
"You’re destroying my career over a six-month fling!" she whispered, her eyes filling with angry, self-pitying tears. "Daniel chased me for nine months! He told me your marriage was a business arrangement! He told me you stayed in Myers Park for the social standing and that you didn't even sleep in the same wing of the house!"
"Daniel lies," I said simply. "You should know that. You helped him draft the invoices."
"I didn't steal anything!" she spat. "Those were legitimate consulting fees! Mercer & Croft provided sixty hours of branding analysis for Catawba Ridge’s land development proposals!"
I reached into my handbag, pulled out a folded sheet of paper, and laid it on the marble table between our teacups.
It was a copy of page twenty-four of Daniel’s black journal.
*July 22: High Rock slip rental – P.M. Range Rover tax/title. $4,200.*
Paige’s gaze dropped to the handwriting.
Her breath stopped.
"Do you think Julian Croft considers the state registration fees on a Range Rover to be a 'legitimate branding expense'?" I asked her, my voice mild, almost conversational. "Or perhaps the twenty-eight hundred dollars for the silk drapes in the lake house primary bedroom that were billed under 'Graphic Design Assets - Phase II'?"
Paige’s skin turned the color of lard. She reached out to take the paper, but Rachel’s hand snapped out like a heron striking a minnow, pinning the document to the marble with her index finger.
"Don't touch the evidence, Paige," Rachel said cheerfully. "Sarah Sterling gets very cranky when the exhibits have greasy fingerprints on them."
"Claire... please," Paige whispered. The venom had gone out of her; she looked young now, stupidly young, like a sophomore who had been caught with the answer key to the midterm exam. "I didn't know he was using the home equity line. I swear to you, he told me that was his private investment capital. He told me he had three million in trust from his mother’s estate."
"His mother was a public school librarian from Gastonia who left him sixteen thousand dollars and an upright piano," I said.
Paige closed her eyes. A single tear tracked down through her foundation, leaving a dark gray streak where it caught her eyeliner. "If Julian fires me, I’m blacklisted from every agency between Atlanta and Richmond. I won't even be able to get a job running social media for a car dealership."
"Then you should probably buy fewer silk robes," I said, picking up my tea. "They’re terribly expensive to dry clean."
She stood there for three seconds, her chest heaving, looking at me with a mixture of terror and absolute incomprehension. She had thought she was playing a game with rules she understood—a glamorous, discreet little drama where the older wife gets a tidy settlement and goes away to Charleston to raise hydrangeas while the younger woman steps into the primary bedroom and the country club membership.
She had never considered that the older wife might know where the bodies were buried because she had spent eighteen years digging the trenches.
"You're a monster," Paige whispered.
"No, Paige," I said, looking up at her over the rim of my cup with eyes that were entirely peaceful. "I’m just the woman who found her blue toothbrush in the trash."
She turned and fled the room, her heels skidding on the parquet as she pushed through the double doors.
Rachel watched her go, then picked up her scone.
May you like
"You know," Rachel said, spreading a layer of clotted cream across the pastry, "I think that periwinkle dress would look hideous on her anyway. The color washes her out completely."
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