More Than Words(70)

Nina walked the twenty feet alone. She had a distinct impression that everyone was staring at her—the people in the offices on the other side of the hallway and the people in the cubicles out front. She nodded at Melissa, her father’s former administrative assistant, and then walked into his office and closed the door.

She looked around. There was a picture of her and Tim on her father’s desk from the day Nina was born. Tim’s red hair was in corkscrew curls and he had a bundled Nina in his lap. The look of awe on his face was unmistakable. Nina’s heart clenched. She could make out Caro’s hand in the photo, reaching in to avert any potential disaster. No matter how hard Caro tried this time, disaster struck. Even with evening plans to see Rafael on her mind, Nina still felt the hole that Tim left behind.

She kept looking at the shelves. There was a picture from her business school graduation. The mosaic picture frame she’d made for her father the Christmas her mom died was there, too. The picture inside showed Nina and her dad sitting next to each other on the couch, their heads bent over a book of children’s crossword puzzles. Her mom had taken it one Sunday—up in the country, Nina now realized, recognizing the print of the couch. Not in 21-B.

Nina opened her father’s desk drawer and found the usual office supplies. Pens, pencils, Post-it notes, paper clips. She opened the drawer a bit farther and found a coupon she’d made him one Father’s Day, good for a Yankee game of his choosing. Even though Nina had tried, she could never really get into baseball. Her father loved it, though, so she went with him once in a while. Though sometimes he just took TJ and Tim and left Nina and Caro to spend the day together. Once Caro had signed them up for a self-defense class, where Nina learned what to do if anyone ever tried to kidnap her. Poke them in the eyes. Knee them in the groin, if it was a man. Scream as loud as she could. Another time they’d climbed the rock wall in Chelsea Piers. “Women have to be tough,” Caro had told her. Nina hadn’t understood what she’d meant then. But she’d been figuring it out.

Her cell phone’s vibration pulled Nina back into reality. It was her father’s lawyer. “Miss Gregory?” he said, when she picked up the phone.

“Nina, please,” she responded.

“Nina,” he repeated. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to call you sooner. But that company you asked my secretary about—Manxome Consulting.”

“Oh!” Nina said. “Yes. I’d love to get in touch with them. Did you find contact information?”

He cleared his throat. “Nina,” he said again. “That was your father’s company. I set it up for him years ago.”

Understanding struck her almost immediately.

Nina swallowed hard. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m—I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go.”

“Wait,” the lawyer said.

“I’ll call you back,” Nina told him, her heart pounding hard in her chest. “I’m sorry.”

She’d taken forensic accounting. She knew what it meant when the chairman of the board created a company and billed his own corporation for services. He was increasing their compensation package illegally. This was embezzlement.

She picked up her father’s phone and pressed the button that said Melissa. “Can you get me Irv?” she asked.

The phone rang out, and the CFO picked up. “Do you have access to the canceled checks from payments we made six or ten years ago?” Nina asked after she said hello.

“I do,” Irv told her.

“And each check needs to be signed by two members of the executive team?”

“The big ones, yeah,” he told her.

Nina looked down; her knee was bouncing. She tried to still it. “Could you tell me who signed the checks to Manxome Consulting? They worked for us from 2008 to 2011.”

Irv had been in the business long enough to know he shouldn’t ask questions, just answer them. “Of course,” he said. “Let me just type in a few . . . here we go. I’m scrolling. Your father and TJ Calder signed all of those checks.”

“Thank you,” Nina said. “I appreciate the help.”

“Any time,” Irv responded before he hung up the phone.

Nina sat, dumbfounded. She thought for a moment she might be sick. Her world was turning upside down again. She was like Alice, through the looking glass. Her father and TJ had embezzled from the Gregory Corporation. There wasn’t any other explanation. Literally none.

She wished that she could call her father and ask what the hell was going on. Why he’d risked the hotel’s reputation, his freedom, their family name. The one he had built and grown and was so proud of.

How much more could come at her? How much more could she handle? She pressed the button marked Melissa again.

“Yes, Miss Gregory?” Melissa answered.

“Can you ask TJ Calder to come here, please? Tell him I need to speak with him?”

She had no idea what she was going to say, no idea what she was going to do. But without her father here, TJ was the only person left to talk to.





66



The look on TJ’s face when Nina told him she’d found out who owned Manxome Consulting was almost exactly the same as the look on Tim’s when she’d told him she didn’t think he should be the CEO of the Gregory Corporation.