"Let him plan the memorial," I said. "Let him choose the hymns. Let him tell the press whatever he likes. Every word he says in public is another rope he is tying around his own neck, because I am alive, and I have the logbook, and I have the bank records, and I have the papers from the cabinet, and when I stand up in front of them, there will be no more room for his story. He has announced my death. He will have to live with the fact that I am here to answer it."
Chapter 17
— The Board Member Who Doubted
Zane came to the small room on a Wednesday evening, after the offices had emptied and the river had gone dark beyond the windows, and he came alone, which told me that he understood the danger of what he was doing. He was a board member of long standing, a quiet man with grey hair and a careful way of speaking, and he had sat in my boardroom for fifteen years and said very little, and what he said was usually worth hearing. He looked at me for a long moment when Wesley opened the door, and then he said, very simply, "So it is true. You are alive."
I asked him to sit, and I poured him tea, and for a while he did not speak at all. He looked at the logbook on the table, and at the bank records, and at the copies of the partnership agreement and the power of attorney, and I could see him taking in the shape of the thing, the way a careful man takes in a balance sheet, line by line, until the totals no longer add up.
"I did not believe him," he said at last. "Not from the first morning. Landon came to the board and he wept, and they voted him in as acting chairman before anyone had asked a single question. But I have known you for fifteen years, Theodora, and I have known Landon for fifteen years, and I know which of you is steady and which of you is not. You do not fall off boats at dusk. You do not wander the deck alone and confused. You are the most careful woman I have ever met on a river."
He told me what he had seen in the days since the cruise. Landon had moved quickly, too quickly, and that was what had first troubled him. Within a day of my supposed death, he had begun selling things: office furniture, a launch, a piece of land the company owned near Passau, all sold cheaply, all to buyers who asked no questions. Within two days, he had begun changing the staff, dismissing the old hands who had worked for Nelson and me. Within three days, he had asked the board to approve a new loan, secured against the fleet, and Rhys had supported him, and Zane had been the only voice against it.
"I asked him where the money from the sales had gone," Zane said. "He told me it was for the memorial service and for the company's debts. I asked him to show me the debts. He told me the figures were being prepared. They are still being prepared. A week has passed, and I have seen nothing."
I showed him the logbook, and I showed him the list Wesley had made, the phantom invoices, the payments to Alpen Trade, and I watched his face as he read, and I saw the doubt in him harden into something else, something colder and more certain. He read the bank records, and he read the partnership agreement, and he read the power of attorney, and when he had finished, he sat back and said, "He sold the boats with this? A medical power of attorney? He must have thought you were dead, or he must have thought no one would ever read it."
"He thought both," I said.
Zane nodded slowly. "I will help you," he said. "Quietly, for now. I will stay on the board, and I will vote with Rhys when I must, so that Landon does not suspect me, and I will listen, and I will tell you what he plans. I will keep the minutes of the meetings, and I will make sure there is a record of what he says. And when the time comes, when you walk back into that boardroom, I will stand beside you, and I will say what I have seen."
It was a brave offer, and I told him so, and I told him that it was also a dangerous one, because Landon was a man who had tried to kill his own mother, and he would not hesitate to destroy a board member who stood against him. Zane smiled, a small, tired smile, and he said that he was an old man, and that he had spent fifteen years on a board that was supposed to protect a company founded by two good people, and that he was not going to spend his last years watching that company be stolen in silence.
Before he left, he gave me something: a copy of the minutes from the emergency board meeting, the meeting at which Landon had been appointed acting chairman. The minutes recorded, in dry official language, that Landon had told the board his mother had drowned, that Rhys had supported him, that the vote had been unanimous except for one abstention. The abstention was Zane's. He had refused to give his name to the lie, and that refusal, written down in the minutes, was the first crack in Landon's story.