The Muse Read online

  “You can’t go to New Zealand,” Neil said. “You’re not allowed to leave the country.”

  “I know, Neil,” she said. “But Mom can’t seem to remember that. She’s been able to fly anywhere in the world she wants to go, on about two hours’ notice. The idea that we’re not allowed to leave the state, let alone the country, just won’t take hold in her mind. Not that she’s going anywhere. I talked to her again about leaving Breakers, but she won’t do it. I don’t think she believes they can evict her, much less that they will.”

  “I’ll talk to her again. Then what?”

  “Then she gets furious because the FBI confiscated every electronic device she and Dad owned, and she can’t remember her passwords to get into the email account she uses to bid on eBay. Then she needs to take a Valium and lie down.”

  Neil’s gaze was fixed on the numbers flashing on the elevator’s LED screen. “Speaking of electronic devices . . . until you’re officially cleared, which may be months from now, assume the government thinks you’re guilty and could confiscate your phone, tablet, or computer at any point in time. They’re going to dig through every piece of electronic communication between you, your father, and your brother going as far back as they can convince the judge to subpoena. Even the slightest hint that you were involved, or even knew that something like this was going on, and they’ll indict you so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

  This was the thing she liked about Neil. Of all her family members, he never pulled his punches with her, and never treated her like she was a second-class citizen in a family full of financial superstars.

  The elevator dinged, signaling their arrival at the twenty-second floor. “What are you going to do at this meeting?” Neil said.

  “Say absolutely nothing unless you tell me to,” Arden repeated.

  Neil pushed the button that held the doors closed, giving them a few more seconds of privacy. His gaze searched hers. “I know you hate it, Arden. I know you had nothing to do with this, and that you want to go on the offensive to defend your family, but until we have a better idea of their case against you, it’s in your best interests to give them nothing at all.”

  She did hate it. In the past, she would have been relegated to the background, the panic attacks unpredictable and embarrassing enough for people to solicitously ensure she could avoid the press gauntlets and the combative, frankly dangerous meetings with government entities and law enforcement agencies. That was no longer an option. All MacCarren had was her.

  “Who’s going to be at this meeting?”

  “The SEC, FBI, NYPD, the Justice Department, the attorney general for the state of New York, The U.S. Postal Service—”

  “The post office?” Arden said, incredulous.

  “Mail fraud,” Neil said succinctly. “At this point, anyone who can sue or get a court case that looks like a good conviction on their records is going to want a piece of this action. Think of them as sharks in the water—”

  “—and we’re the chum,” Arden finished.

  As she walked through the doorway, a wave of energy hit her, not unlike the moment she used to experience when she was a child playing on the beach. Every so often she would have her back turned, and her brothers, thinking this was hilarious, wouldn’t warn her when a larger-than-expected wave was approaching. She would be knocked down, then swept out as the wave receded, to surface spitting out saltwater and crying from the burn in her eyes and sinus passages. This was a feeding frenzy, the sharks circling in to rip out chunks of flesh and thrash around in the blood in the water, her family’s blood—

  “How are you doing?” Neil asked in a low voice as they took their seats.

  “Fine,” she said. Pretending to search her handbag, she bent her head and closed her eyes, the better to shut out the visual stimuli, and focused on inhaling slowly through her nose to avoid gasping, and exhaling equally slowly through her mouth for a double count. Initially it was inhale for two, exhale for four, but after a couple of breath cycles, she was able to stretch it to three and six, then to four and eight. She could do nothing about the cold sweats that broke out, except hope no one else at the table would notice.

  His gaze scanned the table, not her. “You sure?” Neil said quietly.

  The situation was ripe for a panic attack of truly spectacular proportions, but she couldn’t allow that to happen. Not now, not in front of all these people who would rejoice at watching another MacCarren tumble and fall.

  Failure was not an option. “I’m sure.”

  She lifted her head and looked around the room. Lawyers, lawyers, and more lawyers. The firm who handled the family’s business, the firm who handled the foundation’s business, the firm who handled their personal business, and of course, the FBI’s and the SEC’s lawyers, and FBI agents, two of whom she recognized from the raid. The room wasn’t really big enough to hold them all, so there was a fair bit of jostling for space at the table, then the seats arrayed along the walls and windows behind the table. For a moment, Arden was reminded of seconds at duels. If someone collapsed, would their second rush forward to take his seat?

  Undoubtedly. The only person who didn’t want to be at this table was Arden.

  “Let’s get started.” Recording devices were turned on, then the man at the head of the table continued. “Let’s do a quick round of introductions for the record.”

  Everyone around the table stated their name and agency affiliation for the record. The room got very quiet when her turn arose. “Arden Catherine MacCarren,” she said clearly. “I’m the chief executive officer of the MacCarren Foundation.”

  “Ms. MacCarren,” Agent Jenkins began, “would you please describe for the record how you were affiliated with MacCarren Investments.”

  “I have no affiliation with MacCarren Investments,” she said, remembering Neil’s injunction to answer the question and offer nothing more.

  “You’ve never worked for MacCarren Investments?”

  “I worked for the firm briefly after I graduated from business school three years ago,” Arden said.

  “And that was . . . ?”

  Arden gave the dates. They were clear in her head because she’d fought for a job that had been offered without question to Charles and Garry, and won. She began work as every other new associate would, the Monday after Labor Day. The end was equally clear, as it dated to exactly one week after her epic panic attack on the trading floor.

  “Why did you leave the investment bank your family had run in one form or another for over a century?”

  “It was decided that the family’s interests would be better served if I went to work for the foundation.”

  “And why was that?”

  “My father and brother already comprised a significant portion of the leadership team at MacCarren Investments. My brother Garry was not interested in taking a leadership position in any of the family’s other interests. My mother was getting older and wanted to step back. It was time for new blood at the foundation,” she added hastily, remembering the party line in the press releases.

  “And since that time you had no dealings, no discussions, no involvement whatsoever with the day-to-day operation of MacCarren Investments?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “It’s unbelievable,” Jenkins said. “You expect me to believe that your family never talked about the investment side of the house over dinner, at meetings, with other members of the family?”

  She bristled at his incredulous tone. Under the table, for her eyes only, Neil’s hand lifted in a placating gesture. “My mother’s rule was that we did not discuss business at family events.”

  Jenkins’s gaze flicked over her suit, the pearls in her ears, the ring on her finger. “What did you discuss?”

  She felt her eyebrows lift a little, knew she was straying dangerously close to imperious arrogance. “The same sorts of things that any family would discuss over dinner,” she said. “Art, music, concerts, books, newspaper or magazine or blog artic
les of interest, friends, family, vacations—”

  “So anything but business?”

  Arden felt her face flush at the agent’s disparaging tone of voice. As if he’d just tarred Arden and her mother with the same brush her father and brother always had. Her mother loved conversation about beautiful things, the arts, fashion, decorating, and approached them as seriously as her father approached making money. She didn’t feel like explaining golden handcuffs shaped by class and generational expectations, or giving this man any more ammunition. “Yes,” she said.

  “And will your mother corroborate that?” Jenkins asked.

  At that, all the blood drained from Arden’s face. Her heart seemed to stop beating for moments, even though years of conversations with doctors told her that was a physical impossibility. But stop it did. In that one smooth sentence, the agent made perfectly clear that whatever privacy and independence Arden had was now gone. This man had the right to demand Arden’s presence, her mother’s presence, and to drag every single element of her family’s personal, professional, and financial lives into the public view.

  The possibility terrified her.

  Beside her, Neil had done that thing men so frequently seem to be able to do, somehow making himself a little larger, and a little more intimidating, all without moving. “Watch your tone of voice, agent,” he began.

  It was Arden’s turn to put her hand on Neil’s arm. “Agent Jenkins,” she said, quietly, because she’d learned that was the best way to keep her voice steady, “if you’ve done even a cursory examination of my family and our business, you know my mother never worked a day in her life, much less at MacCarren. She raised three children, and nearly half a billion dollars for various charitable organizations in New York and around the country. Confine your questions to the investment banking side of the house and leave my mother out of it.”

  There was a moment of silence while everyone in the room digested her statement. Then Agent Jenkins smiled gently, as if he were allowing an obstinate child to think she was getting her own way. “Of course, Ms. MacCarren,” he said. “When do you expect your brother back in town?”

  It was a calculated slap. Garry, older than her by nearly five years, had turned his back on the family business shortly after entering MacCarren Investments. He first moved to Colorado to work as a ski instructor, spending his summers on various dude ranches, moving cattle from one pasture to the other. Over time he worked in Canada and then made his way to New Zealand, where he was currently raising sheep. What would have stood out in an examination of phone records for her father and brother is that neither of them had talked to Garry since he left six years earlier. Maybe they thought Charles or her father fed her scheme details and she passed them on to Garry, who did what with them?

  All the family’s chickens were coming home to roost, in a very public way.

  Remembering Neil’s injunction, she merely said, “He’s out of cell phone range in New Zealand. As I’m sure you know. He’s had no contact with Dad or Charles since he quit MacCarren. As I’m sure you know. I’m doing my best to get in touch with him. As soon as I do, I’ll let you know.”

  Jenkins smiled genially. “We have some questions about your family’s financial records,” he said.

  * * *

  The next few hours detailed exactly how the Ponzi scheme worked, every horrible detail of money coming in, then being spent on some expensive new toy or trip or home or piece of art for Charles or her father, and were the longest, most painful of Arden’s life. That included the night Nick sat down and told her he was in love with her best friend, and he had to call off their engagement. It also included Nick and Betsy’s wedding day, and funerals for three of her grandparents, a beloved aunt, and two friends who had died of overdoses. But sitting at that oval table in the conference room while lawyers and accountants from the SEC and the FBI crawled through every financial record ever generated by the MacCarrens was almost as humiliating and painful as the day she had a panic attack on MacCarren’s trading floor.

  Neil guided her out of the conference room and down the hall to his corner office, where he closed the door behind her. Arden all but folded into the white leather sofa that made up part of the seating area in Neil’s large office.

  “You did well,” Neil said. He set his laptop on the large credenza aligned on the wall by the door. “Really well.”

  “How else could I do?” she asked, twisting the ring on her right hand. “There’s no one else to do this.”

  “What the hell is up with Garry?”

  “He owns a ranch outside Wellington, and all his manager can tell us is that he’s out with the herds. It’s like he’s gone back in time to the 1860s.”

  “You don’t have to go that far back,” Neil said with a smile. “He’s basically back in the mid-1980s.”

  She massaged her scalp with her fingertips, seeking out all the tight muscles behind her ears and at the nape of her neck. “I can hardly remember a time when people weren’t instantly reachable 24/7/365.”

  “Arden, what happened with Garry?”

  She thought about her artistic, sensitive, gay-as-the-day-is-long brother, trying as hard as she had to measure up to Charles in their father’s eyes. “Dad happened to Garry,” she said, knowing Neil would understand the shorthand.

  “Is that all?”

  She looked at Neil, remembering the fights over the dinner table, the cutting remarks, wondering how he could classify the total dismissal of a human being as all, when the other shoe dropped. “You think he left because he figured out what they were doing?”

  “I’m asking if it’s possible.”

  The fist tightened in her chest at the implication. Had her brother known about a long-running scam to defraud investors of tens of millions of dollars, and done nothing about it? “Oh, God,” she said faintly. “The timing is right.”

  “The timing is your problem, too,” Neil said. “You both quit right after starting at MacCarren. It looks suspicious as hell—like you knew, but didn’t tell.”

  “I didn’t know,” she said. “Dad and Charles kept us at a football field’s length. Garry didn’t know. He would have said something. I would have said something! What is the point of playing the game if you cheat? Everyone finds loopholes in regulations and exploits them, but stealing from investors? It’s all meaningless! How could they not understand that?”

  “Let’s hope that’s the case,” Neil said. “From now on, you have to treat your cell phone, laptop, your work computer, as if they can be seized and searched by any law enforcement agency at any point in time. Do not, under any circumstances, put anything in writing that you would not want repeated in court. Don’t comment on the case to anyone, not even in circumstances you would normally consider to be trustworthy.” He pulled a cell phone out of his jacket pocket and held it up and demonstrated. “Remember Mitt Romney and a video that was made by a waiter at what was considered to be a private, supportive event. Everything you say and do in public from here on out will be considered not just tabloid fodder but media fodder, and relevant to the case. We cleaned out your cloud account. I suggest for the time being you stop saving things there, and change your passwords. And try not . . .”

  “Try not to what?” she said.

  “I mean.” He stopped, obviously considering how to phrase what he needed to say. Arden took pity on him.

  “You mean, if I can help it at all, don’t have an epic, flailing panic attack in some public place where people will see it.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Yes, it is.” She stood up and straightened the jacket of her tailored black pantsuit. “I’m the face of MacCarren. I know that as well as you do. I’m the last person in the family anyone would choose to be the one who holds us together through a crisis. I know that, too. But I’m the person we’ve got right now.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Neil said.

  She wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince—himself or her—but eith
er way the statements were not reassuring. Simply repeating something over and over again like an incantation did not make it true. “Anything else?”

  Neil nodded, then gave her a wry grin. “This isn’t the end of this. Don’t go anywhere without letting me know, not even to the Hamptons. I’ll call your car for you and have your driver meet you in the parking garage underground.”

  Two weeks ago she could walk out the front door of the building without being photographed. “I appreciate it,” she said, and let herself out of his office.

  * * *

  Derek was waiting for her in the secured-access parking garage underground. He opened the door to the SUV and held her back as she got into the backseat. “Where to?” he asked when he buckled himself then.

  “Home,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Only a few photographers had staked out the exit from the parking garage. Through the tinted window glass she could see the flashbulbs going off, and hear the clamor of people shouting questions and insults at the window before Derek pulled out into traffic and headed uptown. The street outside her Ninety-second Street town house was clear; with cops routinely on duty outside the Jewish Museum, it was easy enough for her neighbors to complain to the police to run off the press. Derek pulled up outside. Arden opened the low black wrought-iron gate at the sidewalk level, then hurried up the offset flight of stairs to the front door, half a story up from the sidewalk. Derek waited, passenger window open, while she jammed her key into the front door and disabled the security system, then he drove away, headed for the garage in East Harlem where she paid to park the car.

  When the door opened, she felt a sense of relief so profound it nearly made her weep. Mail was scattered on the doormat at her feet, so she picked it up, carried it up the stairs to her home office on the same floor as the small kitchen and dining room. The dining room overlooked the back garden while the office faced the street. Up another flight was the main living room and her bedroom, where she stripped out of the suit and the silk tank top she’d worn underneath it, and changed into jeans and a tailored button-down shirt.