“Because?”
“My father’s reputation.” Sitting stiffly now, Joy locked her fingers together. “Our company’s reputation, and the public trust. Call us selfish, but we didn’t want the company, our employees, and certainly not our family to suffer for something Henry Barrister had done. We wanted to plan out a way to return all of it, somehow, and anonymously if at all possible.”
For the first time she picked up the tea, drank as if to soothe her throat.
“Alternatively, we tried working on a statement—but what could we say? Our father, the founder of Zip Global, was a thief, a man who paid to have paintings, jewels, objets d’art stolen, then hoarded it for his own personal, private enjoyment.”
“Our poor girls,” Aileen mumbled. “They’d be smeared by this. They’d rise above it, but they’d bear the weight. I asked Nate to let me research every piece—some had been stolen from individuals. We could find out the heirs. Maybe it would be possible to contact each one, separately, work out a return, explain we hadn’t known, but now we did, and wanted to do what’s right. We could ask to have our names kept out of it.”
“But in case we couldn’t guarantee that—and how can you?” Joy asked. “We worked on a statement, and on the best way to deliver that statement, if necessary. We would put our PR team on alert to help us handle any fallout.”
“And when did you intend to do all this?”
“Nate talked to the lawyers—the estate attorney, Garrett Beyer—last Monday. We thought we should start there. We felt it was best to have legal advice and representation before we made contact with the list of owners I compiled.”
“Who else knew about the contents of the vault?”
“Oh, just the family. Nate, me, the girls, Joy. We didn’t even tell the staff.”
She looked down at the tea she still held in her hand, but didn’t drink.
“I have to confess we lied to the crew working on the house. We told them the vault held Henry’s old files, newspaper clippings, magazines with articles on him or the company, that sort of thing. I mean to say, it had all been in that vault for so long, some of it for a couple of decades, even more, we didn’t see the harm in taking our time, making sure it all went as smoothly as possible.”
“We never intended to keep any of it.”
“Oh, no! Absolutely not!” Aileen set down her cup, held out her blood-smeared hands to Eve. “You can ask Nate. We…”
And she looked at her hands. Eve watched the entire night fall around her again. The hands trembled, and she threw back her head and wailed.
Uma Acker, a tall bony woman with hair the red of a fading sunset twisted into a clip at the back of her head, got up quickly, strode over.
“Please, let me take her. She can’t sit here covered in his blood this way. Please, let me take her upstairs.”
“Go ahead. I need her clothes.” Eve took out an evidence bag. “Please put them in here, close the seal.”
“All right. Come on now, Ms. Carville, come with me. We’ll go upstairs, we’ll get you freshened up, get you clean clothes.”
“No, no. It’s Nate.”
“He wouldn’t want this for you, sweetheart. He’d want you to let me help you.”
“I don’t know what to do, Uma.” She let Uma help her up. “I always know what to do, don’t I?”
“You’ll know in the morning. That’s soon enough.”
“They fell in love in college.” Joy watched them go, swiped at another tear. “They never fell out of it.”
“You heard your sister-in-law scream?”
“What? Yes. Or I wasn’t sure it was Aileen. I just heard screams—I think I thought it was a show at first, turned up too loud. Then I realized it was real, and came running.”
“Is the house soundproofed?”
“No. I’m a light sleeper, especially when I’m not in my own place. I think—I can’t be sure now, as it just blurs—but I think I was half awake before the screaming started. I think I might have heard Aileen go by my room. She’d have to pass my door to get to the stairs. But I might be imagining that.
“Lieutenant, we have to tell their daughters. Aileen’s not thinking straight yet. We need to get them home. I can arrange for a company shuttle to bring them here from Cambridge. Aileen and her girls will need each other now.”
She pressed a hand to her face. “We’ll have to make some sort of statement, but I can do that, as his sister.”
