Both Hands Empty
Chapter thirty-nine
Margot watched from the terrace, both hands on the railing.
She couldn’t hear the words from that distance, but she could see the shape of them. Harker’s measured approach across the asphalt. The badge glinting once in the sun. Two officers flanking him.
Caleb turned from the open trunk of his van with chicken wire in one hand and a roll of tape in the other. A man in the middle of an ordinary errand. The smile he wore for vendors and guests and sisters disappeared.
He didn’t resist. He set the wire down on the bumper, then stood still while Harker cuffed him. The Channel 12 camera drank in every second of it.
Then he looked up. Past the cameras. Past the frozen vendors. Directly at the terrace. Directly at her.
His expression carried nothing she could name. Not anger. Not defeat. A chill walked up her arms in the July heat.
The cruiser door closed. The car pulled out, turned onto the highway, and was gone. The parking lot exhaled. Somewhere below, a vendor laughed.
Evan appeared beside her at the railing. He didn’t say anything. He stood with his shoulder against hers and watched the empty stretch of road where the cruiser had been.
Two weeks. Two weeks of coffee in the dock shed, evidence on butcher paper, and hands finding each other across workbenches and bench seats.
“It’s over.” She exhaled.
“Almost.” He glanced at her. “The ornaments are still out there.”
“I know.” She put her hand on his arm. “But this part is over. The part where we were the only ones who saw it.”
“We were never the only ones.” He nodded down at the lot, where Jolene was herding vendors away from the news crew with the brisk authority of a woman moving furniture. “We just had the best team.”
Margot watched Jolene reposition an entire camera crew with three sentences and a pointed finger, and she almost smiled.
Then she looked at the office windows on the second floor, where the blinds were drawn, and the almost-smile went away.
There was one more conversation to have. And nobody could have it for her.
Elaine’s office door was closed. Through the wall, Margot could hear her voice, tight and controlled. She waited in the hallway, reading the framed photographs of the resort through five decades. Hurricanes. Rebuilds. Ribbon cuttings. Elaine stood in half of them.
Twenty minutes later, the door opened.
The office was the same. Espresso machine gleaming. Folders squared in a grid. But Elaine looked ten years older than she had at breakfast. Her eyes were red and dry.
“You knew.” Margot didn’t sit down.
“I knew he was in trouble.” Elaine’s voice came out hoarse. “I knew about the debt. I’ve been approving inflated invoices for over a year, because he’s my brother, and I told myself I was keeping him afloat until he found his footing.”
“You lied about your alibi. The night the collection was taken.”
“I was in this office, on the phone with Caleb, trying to talk him down from whatever it is I didn’t fully understand.” Her hands were shaking.
She noticed, and she set them flat on the desk, one on each side of the blotter. “When I told you to step back from the investigation, I was protecting the resort. Not him. I want you to believe that, even if you can’t.”
“But you protected him anyway.”
Elaine’s face crumpled. Just for a second. Then four decades of management training pulled it back into shape. “He’s my little brother.”
Her voice broke on the word brother and kept going. “He has been my little brother for forty years. I watched him drown by inches, and I kept throwing him ropes, and not one of them was long enough. Do you have any idea what that does to a person? Standing on the dock with both hands empty?”
Margot stood in the doorway, and what rose in her wasn’t anger. It wasn’t vindication either, though she’d imagined this conversation often enough to expect it.
It was pity. The deep, uncomfortable kind that comes from recognizing someone else’s worst mistake because it wears your own face. Elaine had trusted Caleb the way Margot had trusted David. Blindly. Loyally. Past the point where loyalty stops being love and becomes a kind of lying.
“I didn’t know about the theft,” Elaine said. “Whatever else you walk out of here believing. I didn’t know until it was already done.”
“I believe you.” And she did, which surprised her.
“I’m offering my resignation. I’ve already called the board chair.” Elaine straightened the blotter a quarter inch. “The resort deserves better than a manager whose signature is on a year of fraudulent invoices. And you deserved better than what I let happen to you under this roof.”
Margot said nothing, nodded, stepped back, and closed the door gently behind her.
Jolene was waiting in the hallway. Reading glasses pushed up into her hair like a headband. “The florist found replacement stock from a grower in Manteo. Lou’s cake is on schedule and under armed guard, by which I mean Lou. The ballroom crew is asking for direction. They’re asking for you.”
“I’m technically still suspended.”
“Elaine texted me. She just resigned. Pete is security, not management. I’m housekeeping. You’re the only person in this building who can run a gala. So run it.”
Margot looked at Jolene. “Of course.”
“There she is,” Jolene said. Quiet and sure.
Margot blinked hard, her throat tight. “The ballroom crew needs the linen delivery confirmed and the chandelier circuits tested.”
The words came fast, automatic, the machinery clicking back on like a breaker being reset. “Tell Lou I need the cake on the head table by six. Dana’s flowers to the ballroom by five. And find me Tessa. She’s going to film this gala, and this time I want her to.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes.” Margot looked at her. “Thank you. For holding it together while I couldn’t.”
“That’s the job.” Jolene pushed her glasses back up into her hair. “We hold things. Until the person who’s supposed to carry them is ready to carry them again.”
Margot walked toward the ballroom with her trusty pen held firmly in her hand, the gala five hours out, the ornaments still missing, and a plan assembling itself in the back of her mind, list by list.
Not even Evan had heard it yet.
First, the gala.