Chapter 4: The Seat at the Head of the Table
I didn’t run. I’d done that once already.
“You should be careful,” I said. “Parking garages have cameras.”
“Not this level. Not tonight.” Brooke folded my notes into a neat square and tucked them into her purse. “I had maintenance take a look at them.”
“Like you had someone take a look at my brakes?”
Something moved behind her eyes. Not guilt. Calculation.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she said. “You’re going to resign as chair. Kestrel is going to sell its shares back to Grant at a fair price. And you’re going to go back to being dead, because honestly, Laura, you were so much better at it.”
“Or?”
“Or I call the police and tell them Laura Holloway faked her death to escape a forty-million-dollar fraud she signed for. Your name is on every page.” She tilted her head. “Who do you think they’ll believe? The CFO who stayed and cleaned up? Or the woman who ran?”
I unlocked my car.
“There’s a board meeting Monday at nine,” I said. “Come early. Get a good seat.”
I drove out past her with my hands steady on the wheel, and I didn’t let them shake until I was on the bridge.
That weekend, I made three phone calls.
The first was to Special Agent Priya Nair of the FBI’s Portland field office, who had been reading Theo’s files for two months and had been waiting, very patiently, for me to stop hiding.
The second was to Marcy Pike in Longview. I didn’t tell her everything. I asked her if she’d be willing to give a DNA sample. She cried so hard I had to wait.
The third was to Hal, the fisherman, who was seventy-four now and still had the moving blanket.
On Monday morning, the boardroom was full. Eleven directors. Two lawyers. Grant at the seat to my right, gray under his tan. Brooke beside him in white, her bracelet on her wrist, as if she wanted me to see it.
Agent Nair sat against the back wall in a dark green blazer, a visitor’s badge clipped to her lapel. Nobody paid attention to her. That was the point.
“Item one,” I said. “The Riverside guarantees.”
Grant sighed. “We’ve been through this. Laura signed them.”
“She didn’t.” I slid a report down the table. “Three handwriting experts. The signatures were traced from her signature on your marriage license. The pressure lines are uniform. People don’t sign their names in one perfect stroke six times in a row.”
“Forensic opinions,” Brooke said lightly. “Everyone can buy one.”
“Item two.” Another report. “The Riverside money left this company through three shell companies. It ended up in an LLC managed by B. Sinclair.”
The directors turned, almost together, to look at her.
Brooke didn’t blink. “That’s an investment vehicle. It’s all disclosed.”
“Item three,” I said. I took off my glasses and set them on the table.
I’d practiced this in the mirror a hundred times. In none of the practice runs had my hands felt like this.
“Grant,” I said, in my own voice. My real voice. The fast one. “Three years ago, you drove to Columbia County, looked at a woman who’d been in the river for four months, and swore under oath that she had a healed fracture in her left wrist. That she was me.”
He stared at me. The color left his face in a single wave, like someone had pulled a plug.
“You buried the wrong woman, Grant.”
Nobody in the room moved.
“Laura,” he whispered.
“Her name was Joanna Pike. She was thirty-nine. Her sister has been looking for her for three years.” I pushed the missing-person poster across the table until it stopped in front of him. “You put her in the ground under my name and you never asked who she was.”
“I thought,” he said. “I thought you were…”
“You thought it would be easier if I was.”
Brooke stood up so fast her chair hit the window. “This is insane. She’s a fraud. She faked her own death. Somebody call security.”
Agent Nair stood up too.
“Ma’am,” she said, “please sit down.”
Brooke looked at the badge. Then at Grant.
And Grant, my husband, the man who’d forged my name and buried a stranger and cried for the cameras, turned slowly in his chair and looked at his wife like he’d never seen her before.
“I signed the papers,” he said, very quietly. “God help me, I did that. But I never touched your car, Laura.”
His voice cracked.
“Ask my wife who cut the brakes.”
