Love's Door
(cont'd) a short story written for our writers group anthology: Passages
Passages is a collection of short stories loosely based on the theme: When one door closes, another opens. What door opens for which person makes all the difference.
I write the Mackenzie Wilder/Classic Boat mystery series. The protagonist is Dr. Mackenzie Wilder, a widowed small-town physician with a passion for old boats and a knack for fixing both boats and her patients.
The following story (presented in eight installments) is about Mackenzie’s cousin, Lara, who feels she has been unfairly compared to Mackenzie (Mackie) her whole life.
Installment 8 [FINAL INSTALLMENT]
Love’s Door
Lara let Bev – and everyone else – assume she was in mourning for the death of her relationship with Rodger. It was natural. Anyone would need some time alone in these circumstances.
In point of fact, Lara was working at waiting patiently for events to proceed.
She glanced at the calendar open on her computer. Over the last two weeks the emails had gone out, the Facebook and Twitter items posted, the Instagram photos – oh how she’d labored over those Instagram photos! No one would know they were old, right?—circulated. She checked the clock. In a few hours the trading floors would be open, the post-dated investment transfers made. Her plan had gone operational. She had a plane to catch.
A phone call a day later led to a last-minute interview. A tearful one with much patting of the shoulder and grimacing on the part of Rodger’s boss, Gary Reichmann, son of the company’s founder and a family man with three daughters. Nonetheless lousy at dealing with tears.
Surreptitiously Lara watched as it became clear her story was making Gary furious with his prize financial whiz who’d wangled a promotion to the new Sri Lanka office fast on the heels of the break-up of his engagement and—as told by Lara—hot on the scent of this Camille person.
He groused and bellowed over Rodger’s behavior during what he and his father had assumed was a sincere and uneventful courtship of Lara.
Then Lara directed him to the Facebook posts, and Gary’s eyebrows raised to his hairline.
If he were smoking a cigar, I bet he’d be puffing up a storm by now.
“A discotheque? I didn’t know they still had those!”—his response to the Instagram story composed of multiple shots of Rodger clearly enjoying himself with drinks and women, multiples of both.
“Well,” Lara acceded, “it is Sri Lanka, after all.”
“I can put a stop to all that. Lara, my dear, I am very sorry you’ve had to endure this outrage at the hands of someone I thought was a fine young man. Now, leave everything to me – Susan!” A smile spread across his face at the entrance of his wife. “You brought in refreshments. I’m sure Lara here could do with some tea. I – I won’t bother. You two stay here and have a quiet chat. I’ll—I’ll uh …“
Susan poured and handed Lara her tea, shooing a non-existent fly away from her own cup, wifely code for ‘leave the room now, dear.’ “We’ll be fine, won’t we, Lara?”
Were all men deficient? Lara wondered, nodding agreement with Susan as Reichmann left the room, backing away with noises about phone calls and consequences.
Susan continued to murmur and coo, doing her hostess best to sooth the young woman. Lara strained her ears as she heard Reichmann take a phone call in the hallway.
“Yes? What is that about?....You know how to settle irate clients, Jessup – Oh! They saw that did they? I have his ex-fiancee here today … There’s SEC officials waiting for me? About – also Fenton?... I’ll check the sites before I come in. You’re sure this is Fenton too.” That one had more the tone of a death sentence than of a question.
Lara smiled thinly as she nibbled one of Susan’s cookies. Reichmann was sounding like he thought Rodger Fenton was either a complete screw-up or an embezzlement genius. She had prepared him to take Rodger to task for his tasteless and caddish behavior, sins bad enough to get him sent back to the U.S. and placed in the digital equivalent of the mailroom in the most rural under-served outpost the company had. His father—and therefore the company—took these things seriously. These new incidents in the business arena were another matter entirely.
Reichmann barked instructions at his assistant Jessup.
“Assure those clients their investments are secure, convince the SEC officials – calmly, please—that this aberration is attributable to a rogue employee who has obviously lost his mind. Tell them you’ll agree to cooperate in the fullest way possible with any subsequent investigation, and call the police to request a warrant for Fenton’s arrest. Give them any details they want, anything they need to proceed.”
Apparently satisfied his orders would be precisely followed, Lara detected a pause as Gary Reichmann punched in another number. “It’s already taken care of, Dad, but I thought you’d want to know….”
***
Months later, Lara sat at her new coffee spot, sipping her latest choice drink—a mocha caramel frappe—while answering emails and idly shopping on her laptop.
One email sat in the corner of her screen like an irritant, unopened. Mackie. Again. Bev had told her all about it. Mackie and Bryan were—finally, Lara snorted—getting married. Sometime in the winter. And Mackie was already whining about the problems she was running into with planning.
Poor Mackie! Try planning a wedding with a predatory bitch who seduces your fiance! See what real trouble is like!
Tsk, tsk. Don’t be rude, chided her conscience.
Puh-leeze! Mackie will be fine; she always is. Lara contemplated her frappe, almost at the bottom of her glass. What she really wanted was bourbon. Has anyone ever tried a mocha caramel bourbon frappe?
Lara shrugged and minimized the email app and pulled up her folder of obscure news articles. She liked pulling out news stories her blog readers had never read and amazing them with how weird shit could be. Not her purpose this time, however.
Today she was double-checking a story out of Sri Lanka, a couple paragraphs about an American expelled as undesirable after offering ‘inappropriate’ services while assisting with the planning of mass weddings at the largest meditation center in the country. The final sentence noted said individual was also linked with recent investigations into the disappearance of American Rodger Fenton, reportedly missing after an extended drunken spree thought to be a response to an evaporation of his financial career with conservative-stripe American financial firm, M.H. Reichman. Fenton was currently being sought for questioning regarding suspected misadministration of investment funds.
Camille was returning to the US. And against her will at that.
Rodger was gone, somewhere in the wilds of Sri Lanka, buried under a cloud of suspicion and disgrace. She smiled at the thought.
Well, she’d gotten back at one of them at least. Maybe that was enough.
Her inner self raised an eyebrow.
Maybe.
There was still Rodger’s money. Not the money they claimed he embezzled; that was confiscated for return to the investors. The rest of his money already resided in his and Lara’s joint account, secured by both their passwords, and set on an automatic reinvestment track that would periodically double it without any further action on her part. Rodger wouldn’t be needing it where he was now. He could hardly return home under the circumstances. This money was all hers. Call it compensation for heartache. Call it justice.
It would be Lara’s new start. Love’s door closed on her the day she learned Rodger was unfaithful, and the gates of revenge had creaked wide. She’d gone through the gates, now it was time to close them. Close the gates on everything that happened; start fresh. Open a new door on a new future. She could start again.
Lara smiled down at the ring now encircling the finger of her right hand, just as sparkling as when it had adorned the left. She could do it again.
*** THE END ***
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading Love’s Door. There will be more fiction appearing here periodically—Please feel free to comment on anything you read.
I was all into the drama and scheming through this series. So descriptive and surprising! Very enjoyable!