Chapter 2
2
W hen Charlie Warren was fifteen, he was on his school’s swimming team. The culmination of the season was a sectional meet in Santa Barbara at the University of California’s big pool complex, where six schools competed over a three-day period during winter break. They stayed in the University’s vacated dormitories, ate at the student union, and competed during the day, with each event run in several heats.
On the third and final day, Charlie swam his best event, the 200-yard Individual Medley. He touched the wall a body length ahead of the others and then, panting heavily, grinned up at his friends and coaches and savored their shouts and hand clapping for a moment. As he was getting out of the pool he glanced at the bleachers and saw his mother waving at him.
He’d had no idea that his mother would be at the sectional meet. Since his father had died when he was eleven, she’d continued to attend athletic events as a parental duty, usually only home meets or games, but here she was. She hurried to the bottom row of the bleachers, trotted up as soon as he had his towel around him, and hugged him. Then she pulled back and said, “Charlie, this is Mack Stone. We knew today would be the finals, so we figured we’d drive up and surprise you. Mack, this big guy is my baby.”
Mack had a suntanned face and aviator glasses, and an expensive haircut slightly too long to be showing gray on the sides. Was he about Linda’s age, or had they both just slipped into the vagueness of middle age, not young but playing young, like actors? He was mainly shocked that his widowed mother was here with a man. Mack Stone held out his hand, smiled, and said, “Congratulations, Charlie. That was a terrific effort.”
There was a condescending upward tilt to Mack’s head so he could look down his nose and give a fake smile. Charlie said, “Thank you.”
Linda said, “I guess the meet must be about over. Maybe you can sneak off with us and go to dinner before we start the drive home. I’ll tell the coach so he doesn’t wonder where you are.”
“I’ve still got the relays,” Charlie said. “You go ahead. I’ve really got to ride home on the bus with everybody else.” He glanced over his shoulder. “In fact, the coach is giving me the eye right now. I’ll see you at home tonight.” He brought himself to look at Mack Stone. “Nice to meet you, Mack. Thank you both for coming.”
When the school’s bus dropped Charlie off at home a bit after midnight that Sunday night, a strange not-new Mercedes was in the driveway. He went inside the house and there were only a couple lights burning, one in the foyer and the other on the stairs. In the morning when he woke up, Mack Stone was in the kitchen and Charlie’s mother Linda was cooking breakfast for him.
After that, his mother spent much of her time going places with Mack Stone. Charlie came from school to an empty house many days, and on the other days it was worse, because they were both there. The period when Linda was the clear hostess and Mack was a guest didn’t last very long. Soon she stopped referring to her bedroom as “my room” and called it theirs.
Mack didn’t appear to do anything the way Charlie’s father had. He never seemed to go anywhere, or talk about friends or acquaintances. When Charlie asked his mother, “What does Mack do?” She said, “What do you mean?” He said, “For a living.” She said, “He’s in business.”
Charlie tried out that idea for a couple days, but couldn’t find any substance in it. He tried to google Mack’s name, but there were millions of Stones. He noticed Mack had a laptop computer, and would spend time tapping away at it, but when Charlie would get close enough to look at the screen, it was usually on some catalog or advertisement. Whenever Mack referred to anything on the screen, it was “I found a really great deal on a hotel in Cabo,” or “You’d look great in this dress.”
Finally, Charlie asked him directly what he did for a living.
Mack said, “Why do you ask?’
“I just wondered. You never seem to go anywhere, unless it’s with my mother. Do you work when I’m at school or something?”
“I’m an investor,” Mack said. “My money goes out and works for me. I sometimes direct it from one place to another, or use the profits and dividends to invest in new companies. But most of the time a smart investor picks something good and sticks with it.”
Things remained this way until Charlie’s freshman year ended, and then his mother announced a surprise. She’d decided he was going to attend a summer program at a school in northern California. She gave him a glossy, colorful booklet describing what the place offered. It seemed to value the skills that would have been good for an aspiring knight—horsemanship, archery, martial arts, and literature. There were also tennis, golf, swimming, and kayaking. The place was coeducational, and the photographs included roughly equal numbers of male and female students. Charlie decided that since his mother had already made up her mind, his smartest move would be to agree to it, and since he was going to agree, to do so without visible reluctance or audible complaint.
He went for six weeks in July and August, and they were the best six weeks of his life so far. Being with contemporaries of both sexes in a place where the only real adult supervision consisted of coaching and ended with dinner was like a dream. His only regret at the end of the program was having to leave.
He flew into Los Angeles on August 16, when the temperature was 108. He stepped out of the baggage claim door, waited for forty minutes, and then watched Mack’s Mercedes pull up to the white curb and saw him and his mother both smiling. The air conditioning was blowing through their hair in a frigid breeze.
At dinner on the 19th, Linda announced to Charlie that she had hired a very special and well-known consultant in educational futures, who was coming the next day to present to him a proposal for his. “Her name is Camilla Barton. Mack, tell him what you think of Camilla.”
Mack replied, “Charlie, a guy like you needs an Ivy League school, and getting people into those schools is a whole study in itself. I asked some friends who have hired her for their kids. She knows how to do the trick—what works now and what doesn’t anymore. She also has connections and relationships, and that’s the ingredient you can’t fake.”
Charlie had a strong feeling that this was some kind of scheme to keep him out of their lives a bit longer, but he didn’t want to start an argument without knowing what he was objecting to. He had been skeptical about his mother’s idea of sending him up north for the summer, but the summer had been much better than she knew or would ever have allowed. He would wait a day and see.
Camilla Barton turned out to be a middle-aged woman with very short dark hair and a briefcase. She wore a lot of jewelry—a necklace and bracelets made of large chunks of transparent plastic with wisps of gold leaf embedded in them.
She said, “I’ve studied your records, and talked to your counselor and your academic advisor, Charlie. The smartest move that someone like you could make, and one that could change your life, is to transfer to the right prep school now, before it’s too late. The school that I consider your best bet is old, and it’s known to admissions offices everywhere. It’s in New Hampshire.”
Miss Barton left him with a collection of brochures for eastern prep schools. The one she had recommended most highly was the Thorsen Academy. He looked up the school online and learned it was 2,960 miles from Los Angeles. His mother was trying to do her best for him, but she was also at least acquiescing to Mack’s plan to move him out of the way of their relationship.
There seemed to Charlie to be no point in resisting their effort to push him out. In two years, he’d be applying to colleges no matter where he was, and he’d probably never live at his mother’s house again for longer than a school vacation.
Charlie went off to the new school, made friends easily, and discovered that the place deserved its academic reputation. For a Southern California teenager, the New Hampshire fall was a beautiful curiosity. A bit later the iron-gray skies, rain, cold winds, and then later deep-drifted snow seemed unnecessarily harsh, but by then he’d learned that the strategy for enduring dissatisfaction was to work harder.
When Charlie flew home for winter break, his mother and Mack Stone met him in the front entrance of the house and told him they had decided to get married. When he came home again for summer break, there was the wedding. His mother had told him months earlier that Mack wanted him to be his best man, but Charlie had replied that he wouldn’t. After a lull, she had written him a letter formally asking him, as her only close living male relative, to walk her down the aisle. He had written back, “Down the aisle of what?”
She called him and said they had rented a wedding venue named Ocean Ranch Celebration Gardens for the ceremony and invited three hundred guests. She said, “I know you disapprove. I know you will dread it. But please do this for me because I need you to.”
He did as she asked. The scene of the wedding was lush, a parklike expanse above the ocean with a pavilion shaded by tall eucalyptus trees. He noticed that just about every one of his mother’s friends and her supposedly extinct male relatives was there, together with spouses and children, including some surviving Warrens. She wore a light blue gown that looked elegant on her long, thin body and her slightly graying hair was styled the way it had been when he was a child. Everyone seemed to have a good time at the wedding. Early the next morning she and her new husband Mack Stone flew off to their European honeymoon. Before they returned ten days later, he had left for New Hampshire, where he’d enrolled in a late summer session.
When Charlie returned at the end of that year, Mack and Linda were living about the same, but he could see that there was tension. The first time Mack was out and he was alone with his mother he said, “You and Mack aren’t getting along the way you were when I left. Did something happen, or what?”
She said, “It’s nothing, really. It’s just that some of Mack’s investments haven’t been doing so well this year. And you know how I can be—worried and anxious when there’s really no need to be. You probably remember how your father used to be. He could tell you the bank balance without looking at the checkbook, how much was coming in or going out. I didn’t realize how comforting that was for me. Things are different now. Mack isn’t like a man who works in an office and operates a firm. Investing is different. And he has the personality for it.”
“What’s that?”
“You know. Optimistic and confident. If I say we shouldn’t buy something, he tells me I’m being silly, timid for no reason. ‘The markets go down, but they always go up again.’ ”
Charlie began to ask her more questions when she was alone. Even with her vague answers, he came to realize that Mack had been living for two years like a very expensive pet. He had a beautiful new BMW. It had been bought only in his name because he said that made it easier for him to bargain for the best price, insure it, and take it in to be serviced. He also had a new wardrobe and a lot of stories about the wonderful places they had visited in the past year.
It settled on Charlie that his parents had not been very good at survival. His father had achieved himself to death and died of a heart attack unselfish but early. His mother had judged her second man by assuming he was just like her first, but on no evidence. Over the summer the strain on the marriage became impossible for Linda to hide. Around the Fourth of July, Charlie heard her ask Mack if he knew why the June deposits from the investment accounts hadn’t turned up. He said “They have. I used them for the kid’s June 30th tuition payment.”
Charlie knew there was no June tuition payment. Tuition was charged at the beginning of fall semester and at the beginning of spring semester. Schools didn’t defer billing until the end of an academic year in June. That night, when Mack and Linda were out to dinner, Charlie looked around in his mother’s office that Mack seemed to have taken over. He checked the file drawers where his mother had always kept the account statements from her banks and investment companies and was able to trace a decline in the balances, which seemed to have accelerated over the school year. His mother’s bank statements showed large checks written to credit card companies, and her long-term accounts had numerous cash withdrawals.
The most disturbing to him were the investment statements. This seemed to have been a good year for stocks. Each of the accounts had some increase in value each of the nine months while he’d been away, a couple of them large, but a decrease in balance. On the first day of each month for years, there had been a transfer of the same sum of money from the stock funds to the joint bank account. But last year, beginning in September, sometime before the fifteenth of each month, there had been an additional withdrawal of an irregular sum that seemed roughly proportional to the recorded increase in stock value. If the value went up five percent, the withdrawal was about that much. Mack had been tapping the accounts, but trying to make it less glaring by timing it. Charlie noticed that Mack was an optimist. Four times he had overestimated the rise in prices, twice drastically.
Each time Linda and Mack were out together, he looked deeper, searching for signs of where the money had gone. Charlie needed to wait for a day when Mack was out without Linda before he could show her what he had discovered. She sat at the desk and stared down at the figures as he pointed them out, then went back month by month and showed her the same phenomena. Charlie watched her closely, and it was only about ten minutes before she began to cry. He pulled the paper she’d been looking at away from her. “Don’t get the statement wet,” he said. “We’ve got to keep him from knowing.”
“I don’t want to keep him from knowing,” she said. “I can’t believe he’s been doing this to us. The minute he gets back here I’m going to be in his face.”
“If you do that, he’ll know that you caught him,” Charlie said. “As long as he doesn’t know, maybe there’s something you can still do.”
“What? Send him to jail? Sue him? He’s my husband.”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I’m not married to him, and I’m not even legally an adult, so nobody will listen to me. If somebody does something, it’s got to be you.”
“But what can I do about it now?”
“Something. Get on the phone and cancel anything they’ll let you cancel—his credit cards, his permission to sign things at your banks and brokers. Withdraw anything you can and transfer it to a new account. Change every password. If there’s any card you can’t cancel, report it missing, maybe stolen, so they have to freeze it and send you a new one. You must have an accountant you had before he came along. Call him and tell him what’s going on. How long is Mack going to be gone?”
“He said he’d be back around six. He has a haircut appointment, some kind of business meeting, and then he was going to shop for clothes.”
“It’s not even ten now. That gives us some time. Pick out the accounts that are worth the most and try to save those first. I’ll try to find the right phone numbers and dial them so you can just talk.”
They both worked frantically. There were papers that would have to be signed in person, accounts she couldn’t deny Mack access to, things that couldn’t be done until the next day when Mr. So-and-So could approve them, or couldn’t be done by phone, or needed both her signature and Mack’s. If Mack’s access to an account couldn’t be canceled, she would withdraw funds and have the checks mailed. If she couldn’t withdraw everything from an account, she withdrew what she could and moved on. After the most obvious things had been done, or at least attempted, Linda called the attorney she and Charlie’s father Matt Warren had hired to write a will leaving their money to Charlie, and then more recently, to change her will so Mack was included. Linda told her what had happened and said she needed a new will and a divorce.
A couple hours later, the lawyer called back. She and a colleague had been working on securing large assets, and he had discovered that McKinley Stone had approached a real estate agent within the past week and tried to arrange a sale of what he called “the family house.” The title search had revealed that the house had been placed in a living trust in Matt and Linda’s names with Charlie as the only contingent beneficiary sixteen years ago. Mack had no right to sell it. She would try to find out more and let Linda know what she learned. She also said, “Meanwhile, get out of that house before he comes back. When these guys get found out, they aren’t ever pleasant, and sometimes they’re violent.”
Mother and son packed suitcases. They agreed to each drive one of the cars to keep them both out of Mack’s hands. They would meet at a hotel in Santa Barbara and keep working on preventing Mack from finishing the job of stealing the money Linda and her first husband had put away for them. Linda would drive the Jaguar, and that would leave the Toyota Charlie had driven whenever he’d been home from school.
Charlie carried his mother’s luggage to her car and saw her off. As he was about to leave, he realized that he should bring some more of the financial papers with him. He went back into the house and selected the monthly statements from Linda’s account drawer that were the clearest evidence of what Mack Stone had been doing, put them in his bag, and then, as he was opening the back door, heard the whisper of the BMW’s tires on the paving stones of the driveway.
The BMW stopped on the driveway, blocking Charlie’s car in. The only thing he could do was retreat into the kitchen, unlock the back door, then slip into the pantry and wait. He heard Mack come in the front door talking loudly on his cell phone. He said, “Well, I’m home now, and I can prove this is just a misunderstanding. My wife will explain to you that I have a perfect right to move any of our assets from one place to another any time I please.” There was a pause while the other person said something, and then Mack said, “Then first she can explain that they are joint assets.” There was a pause. “Linda!” The next time his voice came from the staircase. “Linda!” The third time, the voice was faint because it was coming from the second floor. “Linda!” Charlie could hear strain and frustration in it. Charlie slipped out the back door with his suitcase, carried it across the front of the house and the next three to the nearest corner, and took out his phone.
His friend Kyle Sung lived a couple blocks away, so he called him. He said, “Look, I’ve got to go out of town for a few days, and my car is blocked in the driveway. It will be clear in a couple hours, but I’m in a big hurry. Could I borrow your car for the trip and leave you the keys to mine?”
“Sure,” Kyle said. “I don’t need to drive anywhere tonight. I’ll pick you up in a minute.”
“Great. Can you make it at the corner by Nora Hartz’s house?”
“Sure.”
Kyle’s car was much better than the one Charlie had been using. It was a practically new Audi and had a big engine, but it was sleek and had a dark gray color that made it look understated and expensive. Charlie left the house and walked down the street past Nora Hartz’s house carrying his suitcase. When he got near the corner Kyle was already in sight. As soon as Kyle pulled over and popped the trunk, Charlie put his suitcase in and got into the passenger seat. As Kyle drove back to his house he said, “You feel like telling me what’s going on?”
Charlie said, “It’s basically my mother breaking up with the asshole she married. I’ve got to stay out of his way for now, and he just pulled his car into the driveway and accidentally blocked my car in.”
“Wow. That’s bad timing. You think he’ll give me a hard time when I come to get your car?”
“I think he’ll be gone in a couple hours. If he isn’t gone yet, he’ll be all smiles, pretending to be a great guy. Thanks for this.”
“No problem.”
When they reached Kyle’s house, Kyle got out and left the motor running. “Good luck with all of it, man.”
“Thanks,” Charlie said. “I owe you a big favor.” He handed Kyle the keys to the Toyota.
Charlie got into the driver’s seat and pulled away very smoothly, not going too fast so Kyle wouldn’t worry. He thought about heading for the 101 freeway to Santa Barbara, but then he decided that there was no reason now to be in such a hurry. If Mack was gone already, he could return Kyle’s car and go back to the plan. He was driving a car that Mack wouldn’t recognize, so he could just drive past and look for the BMW.
As he reached his street, he saw that the BMW was still in the driveway, but immediately saw Mack stepping out of the front door. He slowed down and watched. Mack slammed the front door, hurried to his car, got in, and pulled away fast.
As soon as Mack turned the corner, Charlie parked Kyle’s car, ran to the house, and went inside the back door to the kitchen. Everything looked the same. Charlie was about to go back outside, but then he sensed something was off. The air was wrong. It smelled different. Had Mack left the oven on, or something? He checked the dials and burners, then touched the oven door, checked the air fryer and microwave, and walked toward the front of the house. Suddenly there was the screech of the fire alarm. It was coming from upstairs. He ran back to the kitchen, grabbed the fire extinguisher off its rack on the wall, and sprinted to the stairway and up to the second floor. His mother’s bedroom was filling with smoke. Charlie saw that the flames were just taking hold, flickering up the curtains. Mack must have lit sone papers in the trash can and pushed it under them.
Charlie sprayed the curtains and the trash can, and the fire went out in seconds. He turned on the air conditioning fan and threw open the French doors onto the balcony, and in a moment the terrible noise of the alarm died out. He closed and locked the French doors, pivoted, and ran down the stairs. His eyes seemed to be seeing things through a red film in front of him. Mack had tried to burn the house down on his way out. As soon as Charlie had seen the fire, the rage had gripped his chest. He dashed out the front door to the street, already reaching into his pocket for the keys to Kyle’s car. He was not going to Santa Barbara anymore.
He threw himself into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and had the car in motion before his seat belt buckle clicked. He knew the intersection where Mack Stone would be stopped. It always took sitting through the long traffic signal, sometimes twice, before a car could get through onto Sunset in the late afternoon. Mack’s car wasn’t stuck at the signal so Charlie didn’t wait for the light to change. He just veered left, shot straight through, and kept adding more speed. In another second or two he was weaving in and out of traffic, knowing that he would be able to see the BMW before long. He was not used to driving this car, but he was quickly building a feel for its controls. The car was small, but it had a powerful engine and was the right weapon for what he was determined to do.
It was three days before he spoke to his mother again. When he reached her hotel, she demanded to know where he had been and what he’d been doing. He told her he’d needed to be alone to think. She never asked him again, maybe because within another day or two, the authorities had notified her about her husband’s death, and she knew a reason not to.