CHAPTER 8

CASSIE STOOD IN THE HALL FOR SEVERAL MOMENTS trying to figure out what her childr en were doing in their father's office and why they were talking so loudly. She tried to yawn herself awake, but the yawn wouldn't come because she couldn't open her mouth wide enough to pop her ears. Once again she had the feeling that more than a few inches were missing from her neck and chin area, and a completely separate heart throbbed in her cheeks. Why did they have to wake her up with all their noise? Marsha's and Teddy's voices were so loud, they had disturbed her drugged sleep. Not only that, they had gone into their father's private space without his permission.

As she struggled for a clear thought, Cassie realized that she'd never seen the room from this perspective. Even when Mitch had been home, the door was always closed. He'd kept it locked so not even the cleaning lady who came once a week could get in. The desk where he'd worked was deep and wide. The filing cabinets spread across one wall. Mitch had stored his personal papers here since the early days of their marriage. He'd felt it was safe here. Safe from his secretary, from his managers, his sales force, from whomever it was he didn't trust at the warehouse. He'd been consolidating with other small distributors for years, taking them over, buying them out, trying to get a bigger piece of developing wineries abroad and also the growing American producers' pie.

This was an important point that he'd impressed upon her. American family-owned wineries in forty-three states had grown from 377 to over 1,770, a 430 percent increase since Mitch had started his business in the late 1960s. This was a fact he liked to tell her to let her know how important he'd become in the scheme of things. In the same time frame, while the number of producers had grown, the number of distributors had decreased from 10,900 to just over 2,800. He was very proud of that. His piece of the action was getting bigger. Since laws in the United States prevented direct sales from vintners to consumers and, in many states, the sale of wine in grocery and convenience stores, the distributor's role of choosing which wines to represent, and how to sell them to the consumers through liquor stores and restaurants, was a key one. Distributors like Mitch were desperate to preserve those antibootlegging laws and keep their lock on the market. Cassie was sure much sensitive material was in those filing cabinets.

Now seeing her children eagerly engaged in studying what she herself had never dared to open filled her with a mixture of horror and awe. She hugged her old bathrobe around her excitedly, the hearts in her cheeks and chest beating like mad. Here, finally, was a good reason to find out how much money Mitch had amassed in the bank accounts from which he alone paid the bills, how much life insurance he had, how much there was in the pension fund.

From the way Mitch had talked about his operations, she suspected millions, more than $10 million, maybe as much as twenty, because he was very tight with money. Everyone else they knew had traded up their houses and lives at least once in their twenty-five-year-plus marriages. Mitch was much richer than any of them, but they alone hadn't moved up. He was always telling her he was putting all his earnings into the company, to grow it bigger and bigger. He'd gotten into trading Bordeaux futures. The future was what he was banking on. In the future, they'd be very rich. He'd promised.

Cassie's robe was medium-weight cotton with a raised pattern like turn-of-the-century bedspreads in summer cottages. She'd had it so long, the hem and cuffs were frayed. The bathrobe was comfortable, a little like the ignorance of not knowing how rich they were. She'd always suspected Mitch was hoarding. There was no reason to be so cheap, and now her heart raced with the thrill of acing the control freak and finding out they could afford anything in the world they wanted, after all.

"Hi," she said after a minute. "I must have nodded off for a few minutes. Any word from the hospital?"

"No. Go back to bed, Mom. It's only five o'clock." Marsha spoke sharply.

"I don't want to go back to bed. I'm wide awake. What are you doing?" Cassie was quite pleased that it was they and not she who'd betrayed Mitch's trust and started the digging.

"We wanted to check on the health insurance," Teddy said, avoiding her eyes.

"We have plenty of health insurance, right?" Suddenly she got a chilly feeling. Neither of her children would look at her. "What's the matter? Is something wrong?" she asked.

"Yes, plenty is wrong. Mom, since when did you become a compulsive shopper?" Marsha demanded.

"What? You know I'm not a compulsive shopper." Cassie laughed out loud.

Marsha gave her a scathing look. "Uh-huh. Right. So where's all the stuff you bought?"

"What stuff?" Cassie stared at her.

"Tiffany, $65,000 in March, nearly three months ago? What's that? East Hills Jaguar. You leased a $53,000 car back in January? ABC Carpet and Home, $154,000 for curtains and bedding, are you crazy? Where's the Jaguar, Mom? Where are the curtains? What did you think you were doing?"

"Marsha, don't be silly. You know I don't have a Jaguar."

"Here's your name on the car insurance. Here's your name on the MasterCard. You have an $89,596 balance due at Bergdorf Goodman, for clothes and shoes and accessories, for God's sake. What about that?" Marsha shook a sheaf of receipts at her.

Bergdorf Goodman? Cassie put a hand to her head. She was dreaming. She was having a bad dream. She knew that pill Marsha had given her was a bad thing. Better to wrestle around sitting up all night than to have dreams like this. She shook her head and turned around to go back upstairs, get out of this dream.

"Don't walk away. You have some big explaining to do." Now Marsha was talking to her mother as if Cassie were a teenager arrested on drug charges. "How could you do this to Daddy? To all of us?"

Cassie was agog. "I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't been in Bergdorf Goodman in years. You know I shop in Daffy's. Bergdorf's must be your father's bills. You know how he is about his clothes."

"No, Mom. This is not men's department stuff."

Marsha was the one sitting at the computer. Teddy had pulled up a chair. He had a pile of files on his lap. They had a lot of nerve.

"Teddy, you know your father. What is all this about?"

Teddy was still busy avoiding her eyes.

Marsha went on. "And how about this? Taxes! You paid the taxes with a Visa card at a twenty-one percent annual rate? Are you crazy?"

"I don't pay the taxes at all," Cassie said. "I don't earn the money. I've never paid the taxes. I'm not crazy."

"Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the IRS on a credit card? It's in your name. This debt. All this debt is in your name. What were you thinking?" Marsha lost it altogether and was now shrieking.

Cassie's brain whirled. "We paid that much in taxes?" she said in a hushed tone. "I had no idea he made that much." She did the math quickly. He must make close to a million dollars a year. Wow, she had new respect for her husband. Then she wondered, where was it?

"Mom! You're some kind of psychopath. You're… you're…" Marsha had no words for what her mother was. She'd jumped to a conclusion just like the EMS people.

But things were not as they seemed. Right between the rib cage, above the belly button and below the heart, Cassie was stabbed with a vicious truth. It hadn't come to her slowly over hours or months or years. It hit her all of a sudden, like a sword striking home. She got it in one, then she wanted to cover it up. "Shhh. Let's not talk about this now," she said. A person could only take so much in one day.

"Mom!" Marsha screamed. "We're talking now. What did you do with the stuff? You have to send it back."