Backstabbing Friend's Self-Inflicted Shame novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Garrison

At a freeway diner Rafe lays out his marriage and his lost $1.4 million, and Tate calls an emergency board vote to remove Greer.

The diner off the freeway opened at five, and at six the only other customers were two truckers and a woman asleep in a booth.

I had slept in my car for two hours with my coat over me.

The man who stood up when I came in was taller than his voice on the phone had sounded.

He wore a worn canvas jacket and he had not shaved.

"Greer Haldane," he said.

"Rafe Garrison."

We sat down on opposite sides of a table with a sticky menu between us.

He asked the waitress for a glass of water and nothing else.

I ordered eggs and coffee and watched him not look at the door.

"You said she's your wife," I said.

"She is."

He took an envelope from inside the jacket and laid a paper on the table.

It was a marriage certificate from Portland, Maine, four years old.

Valeria Harmon Garrison.

Rafe Garrison.

I read the date and the signatures.

Valeria had told me she had been married for three years.

The certificate said four.

"She told me she'd married some man in secret," I said. "In July she said she'd finally left him."

"What did she call him?"

"The husband. She never said your name."

He nodded slowly.

"She never said yours to me either. In four years I heard about a friend called G who was always busy."

That did something to my stomach.

I picked up the coffee so I would not have to answer it.

He laid out the rest in a row, one sheet at a time.

A bank statement from two years ago with three wires on it in one night, all to an account in the name of Harmon Ventures LLC.

The total was $1,400,000.

A report from a private investigator in Chicago with a photograph of a woman at a bus station in Cleveland.

A printout of the Haldane Home staff page, with Valeria smiling in the third row.

"I sold my firm at thirty-four," he said. "That was the money. She knew exactly what day it cleared."

"And you didn't call the police."

"I did. A detective told me the account was in her name and we were married, so it was a family matter."

His voice did not rise.

His hand lay flat on the bank statement and stayed there.

"I looked for two years," he said. "Three weeks ago somebody sent a press photo of your company's spring launch to a friend of mine, and she was in the back of it."

"And then?"

"Then I drove up and looked at her building."

He said it plainly.

I noted it, and I did not ask how long he had looked.

"Why are you here?" I said. "You could have gone to the police again with all this."

"I'd get the same detective."

"Why me?"

"Because last night two hundred people watched you answer her, and you didn't blink." He turned the water glass on the table. "And because your company paid Harmon Ventures two hundred and ten thousand dollars in July for consulting. Which means either you're a mark, Ms. Haldane, or you're her."

"That's a lot of words for an accusation."

"It's a question."

I thought about the soup.

I thought about the disk in the inside pocket of my coat, where it had stayed all night against my ribs.

"Tell me one thing only her husband would know," I said.

He did not even think about it.

"She eats toast dry and tells people it's the butter she's off."

"She told me it was a diet."

"She told everyone it was a diet."

I put my hand flat on the table, the way his was.

I did not take out the disk.

"I'm not showing you anything yet," I said. "I'll tell you when that changes."

"That's fair."

"It isn't. It's what I'm doing."

One corner of his mouth moved, and then stopped.

The eggs came.

I ate half of them, and then my phone buzzed on the table.

It was a forward from the chair of my own board, with one line of his own above it.

Greer, did you see this?

Below it was an email from Tate, sent at 5:48 that morning to all seven directors.

Given Greer's very public distress last night, I'm writing with great love and concern to request an emergency meeting on Thursday the 22nd to consider her fitness to lead and her need for rest.

I read it twice.

He had written "with great love" in an email whose purpose was to take my company out of my hands.

I turned the phone around and slid it across the table.

Rafe read it, and when he finished he did not say anything for a moment.

"He moved fast," he said.

"He had it drafted before he came to dinner."

"How many days?"

"Six."

He drank half the glass of water and set it down.

"Then we have six days," he said.

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