Until the Day I Die(92)
We scare the shit out of her, just like I used to scare Dad. I can’t believe how easy it is for us to pin her to the ground.
59
ERIN
By Thanksgiving, I’m living a life I barely recognize. I write it all down in my own slim leather-bound journal. My way of telling Perry.
Shorie’s back at school, taking classes and doing whatever extra work I throw her way from Jax. Right now, she’s working on the new merchant corporate social responsibility feature. I’ve agreed to let her work full time at Jax over the summer. Even though she doesn’t like to talk about it with me, she and Rhys are dating. A little bird named Dele keeps me up-to-date on the general gist of things.
Ben’s stepped back a bit from Jax. Not entirely—just enough so that we have the space to heal. I need to understand what he knew and when he knew it—and I need to know that I can trust him. He let his commitment to Sabine cloud his judgment. Now we just need to figure out how to move forward.
Jax is holding steady. We lost a good chunk of users after the story broke that Arch and Sabine were stealing money from accounts. But because we were transparent about it in the media, and because we recovered most of the money, I don’t believe it will sink us. All we can do is let it play out and concentrate on winning back the confidence we lost. I’m still going in to the office every day, but keeping more reasonable hours, since we’ve hired some new developers, testers, product managers, and data analytics people. I’m going to hang on to the company and try to scale in the next few years. If we get an offer, we’ll entertain it, but we’re not in any hurry.
Dele wrote her article for the Birmingham News, and it was subsequently picked up by the AP. An explosive piece on Hidden Sands, the story laid bare the murders in crisp, vivid detail. She described the cabal of rich old men who were behind the scheme: Arch Gaines, William Monroe (Jess’s father), and Edwin Erdman, all buddies since their college days at Yale, all with problems they needed to be rid of.
Dele set the scene well. The fusty golf club down in Augusta sometime in midsummer. The whiskey and cigars. Old jokes and new complaints. Drunken revelations behind closed doors in the wee hours of the night.
Arch told them about my plan to sell Jax. He confessed to his affair with Sabine, her skimming from Jax, and their plan to run away. If Sabine killed Perry when he became suspicious, as I suspect, he even may have told them about that too. At any rate, William Monroe had a confession to make as well. In a ghastly coincidence, his own daughter, Jessalyn, had become embroiled in an affair as well—and also with a woman named Sabine. Not only that, but William’s beloved son had been involved in cyber fraud, and William was convinced that Sabine had somehow duplicated it at her own company.
As the two men compared notes, both realized they had unsolvable problems: I was jeopardizing Arch’s romantic and financial future with Sabine. And Jess, if she chose, could bring Sabine’s whole operation crashing down, destroying Arch and pointing a finger of blame at her brother, humiliating her family beyond repair. The two men agreed. Something had to be done.
Then Edwin Erdman spoke up, offering a solution. A secluded paradise, run by Edwin’s daughter, that offered an experience to end all experiences. Edwin promised it would be the answer to their financial and family woes. Arch and William agreed on a plan to drug Jess and me to explain the need for a trip to Hidden Sands.
But I wonder what Arch’s story was going to be beyond that. What was he planning to tell Shorie? That I’d inexplicably run off? That in my grief and addiction, I’d deserted my own daughter? I don’t have an answer for that, but the lengths Arch was willing to go appall me anew every day. He is nothing less than a monster.
Now Edwin Erdman, William Monroe, and Deirdre’s husband, who arranged for her death, are in prison. Antonia Erdman’s locked up in a women’s maximum security facility in Bedford Hills, New York. Hidden Sands has been shut down, and I’m not ashamed to say, I hope it rots.
After Shorie emailed the FBI, they contacted Ben, and he immediately cooperated, providing access to all of Jax’s servers. The feds found hard drives in a safe-deposit box in Sabine’s name, proving she’d implemented the cash-skimming program that automatically deposited money from customers’ accounts into hers. As for me, I had my doubts that she’d written it all by herself, but it didn’t matter. In her confession, she took full credit. Like she was proud of it.
What the authorities couldn’t establish was that Sabine had any knowledge of Arch’s plot to have me killed at Hidden Sands. While Sabine and Arch had traded numerous messages about their embezzlement scheme, they never discussed murder. That fact, along with Arch’s connection to Edwin Erdman, has everyone convinced that he planned the L’élu III thing without her knowledge.
But I have my doubts. I think she knew.
Sabine was released on bond and is now under house arrest at her parents’ home, awaiting trial. I drove past once recently and parked outside. Just curious, I guess. And hoping for some kind of epiphany about who my best friend really was.
She’d started sleeping with Arch when she was eighteen, right before we met in college. She dated Ben. But she’d had many other relationships—Jessalyn Monroe, for one. I couldn’t figure it out—who was Sabine Fleming? What did she want? Did any of her human connections have meaning? Or were they all merely transactional?