The cabinet had held the truth for forty years. It would hold it a little longer, until the day I opened it again in front of the people who needed to see it. Landon had tried to sell my fleet with a paper that was never his to use. The paper was mine. The cabinet was mine. The key was mine. And the company, despite everything he had done, was still mine too.
Chapter 16
— A Son Announces His Mother's Death
I learned what my son had done from a newspaper, which is a strange way to learn that you are dead. Wesley brought it to the small room on a Tuesday morning, folded open at the business pages, and he laid it on the table without a word, and I read the headline, and then I read the article beneath it, and I sat very still for a long time, because the words on the page were about me, and they were a lie.
The article said that Theodora Haversham, founder-chairwoman of the Haversham Danube Line, had drowned during the company's sixtieth anniversary cruise on the Danube Empress, near the Wachau Valley, after falling overboard at dusk. It said that her son, Landon Haversham, had been on deck with her, and that he had tried to save her, and that the river had taken her before anyone could reach her. It said that the board of directors had met in emergency session and had appointed Landon as acting chairman, and that the board chairman, Rhys, had praised Landon's composure in the face of tragedy and had promised a full inquiry in due course.
There was a photograph of Landon, standing on the deck of the Danube Empress, his face solemn, his hand resting on the rail where he had pushed me overboard. There was a photograph of me, taken years ago, smiling at the launch of the Vienna Star. Between the two photographs, the article told a story that was almost true, and the almost was the lie that made it work. I had been on the deck. I had gone overboard. But I had not fallen, and I had not drowned, and the man in the photograph had not tried to save me. He had stood at the rail and watched the water close over me, and then he had gone below and told the crew that his mother had fallen, and then he had gone to the board and told them that she was dead.
Wesley had more to tell me. Landon had not stopped at the newspaper. He had called the board together the morning after the cruise, while I was still lying in Kieran's cottage with river water in my lungs, and he had told them, with tears in his eyes, that his mother was gone. He had told them that she had been confused in recent months, that she had been talking about audits and frauds that did not exist, that she had been unwell, and that her fall had been a terrible accident, the kind of accident that happens to old women on riverboats at dusk. Rhys, the board chairman, had believed him, or had chosen to believe him, and had seconded the motion to appoint Landon as acting chairman, and the board had voted, and just like that, my son had taken my chair.
"He has been to the house," Wesley said. "He told Renata the house would be sold. He has been to the offices. He has been telling the staff that the company is his now, and that there will be changes, and that anyone who questions him will be replaced. He has told the press that a memorial service will be held, and he has already chosen the hymns."
I listened, and I felt a coldness settle in me that was not the coldness of the river. It was the coldness of a woman who understands, at last, the full shape of what has been done to her. Landon had not only tried to kill me. He had buried me, in public, in print, in front of the board and the press and the city, and he had taken my chair and my company and my house, and he had done it all while I was alive, hidden in a cottage above a lock, waiting for proof.
"Rhys sides with him," Wesley said. "He has always sided with Landon. He likes the money, and he likes the quiet, and he does not ask questions. But not everyone on the board believes it. There is one man who doubts. Zane. He telephoned me yesterday, and he asked questions I could not answer, and he said he wanted to meet."
I folded the newspaper and put it aside, and I looked at my grandson, and I thought about the memorial service my son had already planned, with the hymns chosen and the flowers ordered, for a woman who was sitting in a small room above her own offices, reading about her own death in the morning paper. I thought about Rhys, who had sat in my boardroom for years and called me a friend, and who had handed my chair to my son on the strength of a story he had not bothered to check. I thought about the river, and about how it had kept me alive, until I could walk back into that boardroom and show them all that I was not dead.