Page 73 of The Woman Who Couldn't Scream
“The stockholders’ information and the actual records don’t match.” When it profited her, Rose pretended to be a feeble old lady, but she knew her numbers. “Dear boy, you ought to check it out.”
“All right. Send me the information. I imagine someone keyed something incorrectly.”
The voice tremor disappeared, and Rose sounded more like the woman who, with her husband, had transformed the family business into a multibillion-dollar corporation. “Heads will roll.”
“Of course.” She had drilled into him a simple truth: little discrepancies were sometimes harbingers of big trouble. “I’ll look it over.”
“Tonight?”
“In the morning. Give Albert my greetings, and enjoy your voyage.” He hung up, more annoyed than he should be, and flung one shoe across the bedroom. With a satisfying punch, it hit the wall inside the closet. When Benedict talked to Rose, she always made him feel as if he was a slacker, a disappointment, a failure. As Albert had once said in his hearing, his father’s son.
His parents’ deaths had changed Benedict. The joy was gone from the world, and by the time he had struggled up from the depths of his grief, he was living a scheduled life of education and work experiences. That was what Uncle Albert called having Benedict spend his summers in the company mail room: “work experiences.” Albert and Rose taught Benedict their values: earn a profit at all costs, make more tomorrow than today and be damned to joy, to leisure, to love. He had grown up responsible, the valedictorian, a man of measured tastes and careful passions.
Never again had Benedict experienced anything like his parents’ brand of delightful madness—until Merry.
Merry was dead, too. Yet lately, she had been on his mind, a sweet, sad ghost. He had never had the chance to say good-bye…
He wasn’t going to sleep now, so he might as well look over those reports.
***
Rose returned to their stateroom, where Albert sat at the desk, computer open, scrolling through the reports and making notations. “He’s found her,” she said.
Albert turned away from the screen. “Who? Benedict? Found who?”
God, Albert could be annoying. “Who do we not want him to find?”
“Merry Byrd? Impossible! Why would he even want to find her?” Albert asked the obvious question. “Where’s the profit in that?”
“Remember when he first met Merry? The way he acted?” Rose looked down at her hands. The skin was spotted, thin, wrinkled. Every bone, sinew and vein showed. “Business took second place to her and her do-gooding.”
“He’s had other women, more practical women. He needs to marry. He needs to have a son to pass the business on to. Why not one of the women who live for the business?”
“He said he loved Merry Byrd.”
“Stupid name!”
“Yes.” She was too old to deal with this nonsense: from Albert, and from Benedict.
“All cats are gray in the dark,” Albert said.
She eyed him: tall, bony, bad eyes and wispy hair. “So they are.” Knowing Albert, he didn’t even start to comprehend the irony of her answer.
“Why do you say he found her?”
“He’s on vacation in Virtue Falls, Washington.”
Albert squinted at her, his reading glasses making his blue eyes wide and round. “Where’s that?”
“I don’t know, dear. In Washington, I suppose. But Benedict sounded happy, and he refused to immediately look over the reports.”
“You told him there was something wrong.”
“Yes.”
Albert leaned back in his chair and stroked his forehead. “Could be a different woman.”
“Could be. Butshedisappeared.”
