Chapter 14
Lola
First thing the next day, I knock on the pale blue door of the private investigator. I know I was supposed to give her two days, but I can’t wait any longer. After seeing my face on the news last night, the urge to move is strong.
“Come in,” Margaret says. “It’s open.”
The office is the same and also more. The rose lamp is on. The orange cat is on the cushion. The desk has a different configuration of organized accumulation on it. The previous files have been replaced by new ones, thicker, with the chaos of someone who has been busy.
Margaret is already looking at me over her spectacles when I come through the door. She has an expression that screams she found things and has been waiting to tell me. I’m optimistic for the first time in a long while.
“I’m sorry I’m early. I’ll understand if you don’t have anything yet.”
She gestures at the chair and I sit. She pushes the spare cup toward me. Tea, already poured. I take it.
“Daniel Marsh,” she says, without preamble.
I go still.
“His full name is Daniel Aubrey Marsh, forty-four years old, originally from the east coast, currently, and this is the interesting part, of no fixed address, which is a deliberate condition rather than an unfortunate one.” She opens the journal to the first page of her notes, which are dense and precise.
“He has three known business identities, all in financial services, none of them entirely legitimate. The legitimate-looking surface covers what is, in my assessment, based on what I’ve found, a fairly sophisticated operation in financial fraud.
Not opportunistic. Structural. He builds things carefully and over time. ”
“What kind of things?” I ask.
“Situations where someone else takes the consequence,” she says plainly.
“That’s the pattern. Every significant operation I can connect to him has a front person.
Someone visible. Someone whose name and face are on the parts of the arrangement that might attract attention.
” She peers at me over her spectacles. “You see where I’m going? ”
“I’m not the first,” I reply.
“No. You’re not.”
I take a deep breath. “How many others?”
“That I can confirm? Two before you. Both similar structure. Someone close to the target, used as access. Both cases where the visible person had a prior relationship with the front person that made the access natural.” She pauses.
“Both cases where the front person had something Daniel held over them.”
“The debt?”
“The debt,” she confirms. “This is where Amber O’Connor becomes… The picture becomes clearer, and also more complicated.”
She opens a second section of the journal and I brace myself.
“Amber O’Connor and Daniel Marsh met approximately three years ago,” Margaret says.
“I can’t tell you the precise circumstances, that information isn’t findable from here, but I can tell you the timeline.
Three years ago, Amber’s financial records, which are, let me be clear, not something I accessed directly, I worked from public filings and some creative cross-referencing, show a period of significant instability.
New debt appeared eight months ago. The kind that accumulates fast and comes from something specific rather than general poor management. ”
“She was in trouble,” I say.
“She was in serious trouble,” Margaret confirms. “And then she wasn’t. The debt resolves. Quickly. Cleanly. The kind of resolution that doesn’t come from a bank loan or a payment plan.” She looks at me. “It comes from someone paying it.”
“Daniel.”
“Almost certainly Daniel. Which means from that point, approximately eight months ago, she owed him. And the owing wasn’t a simple financial arrangement. From what I can piece together about how he operates, the debt doesn’t get repaid in money.”
“It gets repaid in access?” I ask.
“Access,” she agrees. “To situations. To people. To whatever he needs the front person to provide.” She closes the journal briefly, opens it again. “Here’s the thing about Amber O’Connor that I want you to hear, because I think it matters for you personally.”
I look at her, dreading what I’m about to hear. It can’t be anything good.
“She didn’t come to him with you in mind,” Margaret says.
“I don’t believe, from the timeline and the pattern, that she identified you as a target and then found Daniel.
I think it went the other way. Daniel identified the bank as an opportunity.
He identified what he needed, a front person with the right access, the right appearance, the right relationship to someone who could be walked through the job.
And then he looked at what he had available. ”
“He had Amber.”
“He had Amber, who he’d already paid for, whose debt meant she couldn’t say no.” Margaret looks at me steadily. “And Amber had you.”
The rose lamp hums.
The cat snuffles on its cushion.
I hold the tea and look at the open journal.
I think about those three years. Three years of Amber carrying this, the debt, Daniel, the knowledge that at some point he was going to call it in.
Three years of friendship continuing, of the Tuesday dinners and the movie nights and the fifteen years of being each other’s people, while underneath it this was sitting.
“She didn’t tell me. For three years.”
“No,” Margaret says. “She didn’t.”
“Because if she’d told me…”
“You’d have helped her,” Margaret finishes for me.
“Or tried to. And that would have complicated his arrangement. Or she was ashamed. Or she was afraid. Possibly all three, in different proportions at different times.” She clasps her hands on the desk.
“I can’t tell you what was in her head. I can only tell you the structure of what happened. ”
“The structure is that she chose this.”
“The structure is that she was coerced into a situation and made choices within it that hurt you,” Margaret says, carefully. “Those are not the same thing, but they’re also not mutually exclusive.”
I breathe.
I’ve been running the Amber calculation for weeks. The locked box version, the version where I keep the grief and the fury in separate compartments and deal with neither directly. Sitting in this rose-lit office being given the actual facts of it is different from the calculation.
The actual fact of it is that Amber was in a corner for three years and she didn’t tell me.
She didn’t tell me.
I would have done something. I don’t know what, exactly, but something. Fifteen years of being each other’s people and she carried it alone for three years and then she walked me into a bank.
I put the tea down. “Daniel,” I say. “Is he looking for me?”
Margaret opens a different section of the journal.
“This is where it gets less clear. My honest assessment? Probably not actively. You were a means to an end and the end has been achieved. The bank job is done, the money is where he put it, and you running keeps the investigation focused on you rather than him.”
I look at her. “It’s still not safe for me to stop running, though, is it?”
“Yes and no,” Margaret says. “I don’t think anyone knows you’re here yet. But it also benefits Daniel if you disappear completely.”
I frown. “Why?”
“Because if you disappear, the case goes cold and Daniel is safe. But if you’re visible, if you’re in a live investigation, there’s pressure on the case. There’s ongoing scrutiny. And they might come up with the same theory that you did.”
I sit with this. The whole shape of it, laid out in Margaret’s precise handwriting across the pages of a fresh green journal.
Daniel Marsh, forty-four, no fixed address by choice.
Three years of Amber in his debt. The bank job as opportunity rather than vendetta. Me as convenient rather than targeted.
Convenient.
Three states, three weeks of running, a partial bond I didn’t agree to and a town I didn’t plan to stop in. All of it because I was convenient.
“What do I do with this?” I ask.
Margaret peers at me over her spectacles. “You give it to your lawyer. The name, the pattern, the three prior operations. They’ll know what to do with it.” She closes the journal. “And my advice is to stay where you are.”
“In Sweetwater Valley?”
“In Sweetwater Valley. Running will eventually get you caught. Building a defense is the thing Daniel doesn’t want.” She picks up her tea. “You asked me a day ago what’s worth staying for. I told you that you already knew.” She looks at me. “Has that changed?”
I think about the pack house. The couch. The blanket. Archer’s wildflowers on the windowsill. Jack in the maze. Tristan’s honey jar. Ryan wanting me to stay for the lanterns.
“No,” I reply.
“Then stay,” she says. Simply. Finally.
The reality of that is not so simple or final.
“Your fee. I need to pay you.”
“Forty dollars,” she says. “Plus twelve dollars in phone calls to the city and the cost of a very good bottle of wine I sent to a contact who owed me a favor and has now repaid it.”
“What did the wine cost?”
“Forty-five dollars. She has excellent taste.”
“Ninety-seven dollars.”
“I can write an itemized receipt,” she offers.
I count out the cash—I have more now thanks to the carnival wages—and put it on the desk. She folds the bills and records them in a small ledger that appears from a drawer.
“One more thing,” I say.
“Yes?”
“If you find anything else…”
“I’ll knock on Doris Harrow’s door. Or the Calloway’s front door. Whichever seems appropriate.” She looks at me over her spectacles with the clear direct attention that I have decided is her default setting. “I’ve been watching that pack for seven years. They’re good people.” She pauses. “You fit.”
I look at her.
“Don’t argue with me,” she says pleasantly. “I’ve been doing this for thirty-nine years. I know when someone fits somewhere.”