Echoes of Titanic Read online

Kelsey ended her search of the fifth floor near the executive conference room, so she decided to take the stairs down to the fourth floor rather than going all the way back to the elevator bay. She’d already checked the conference room earlier on her hunt for Gloria, but one peek had showed her it was dark and not in use. This time, however, she flipped on the light as she went inside so she wouldn’t bump a hip or a shin as she cut through to the back stairwell.

  She’d taken several steps across the well-lit room before she froze, realizing that someone was in there.

  In a moment that turned seconds into hours, she simply stood and stared, trying to make sense of what she was seeing at the other end of the room.

  On the wide expanse of wall, the metal covering for the projection screen hung crooked, its cord dropped down from the lower side. At the other end of that cord hung the body of a person. A woman.

  Gloria.

  At least she thought it was Gloria. The body was wearing Gloria’s clothes. It had Gloria’s hair. But the face was purple, such a dark purple that it was hard to tell. Strangest of all was the neck, around which the cord for the projector screen was wrapped. The skin there was purple and red and even bloody. The colors of death.

  Gloria was dead.

  Kelsey fell to her knees and began to scream.

  She was still screaming five minutes later, when Ephraim found her and called for the police.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  April 10, 1912

  ADELE

  Adele Brennan stood at the hotel room window and looked out at the busy streets of Southampton below. It was early, but already men were funneling in from every side and pouring down the main avenue toward the White Star docks.

  “They look like rats scurrying out from their hidey-holes,” she said, watching the continuous stream of young men with their packs slung over their backs walking along the streets, their breath forming puffs of smoke in the early morning chill.

  The sight reminded her of her home in Ireland in more ways than one. Not only had she watched the shipyard workers similarly head down to the docks of Belfast, but for the past three years the ship they had been heading toward each morning was Titanic. Now that ship had been relocated to Southampton, England, and was ready to set sail on her maiden voyage across the sea. Just as the shipyard workers had done back home, these men were also streaming toward Titanic.

  “How excited they must be to staff the finest ship ever built,” her cousin Jocelyn said from the other side of the room. “Da says these workers are the best of the best.”

  “For the price of passage, they ought to be.”

  “I wonder what kind of accent your father speaks with these days,” Jocelyn said from her perch in front of the mirror, changing the subject. Do you ever think about whether he has begun to speak in the American style now that he has lived there for so long?”

  Adele turned away from the exciting scenery of the window to look at her cousin, who had been pinning up her hair for what seemed like the last half hour.

  “I would imagine he still sounds somewhat the same. Many of his friends and business associates are a part of New York’s Irish community. As long as he’s been surrounded by enough regular speech all these years, he should have retained his ear for it.”

  Adele crossed to sit on the end of the bed, still amazed that they would be leaving for America in just a few hours. One week ago she had been home, getting ready for this next big step in her life. Today they would board the ship that would take them across the sea to a new world and a new life. As exciting as that was, it was also quite melancholy. She might never stand on this side of the ocean again in her lifetime.

  “Perhaps Mr. Myers can teach us a few American phrases before we get there,” Jocelyn said. “We don’t want to sound like complete foreigners, you know.”

  Adele eyed her cousin suspiciously. “Mm-hmm. I know what phrases you want to hear.”

  Jocelyn paused, hands in the air, to give her cousin an inquisitive look. “What?”

  Adele grinned. “Oh, like, ‘Miss Oona Jocelyn Brennan, will you marry me? Will you warm my hearth and love me unconditionally forever and forever?’”

  “That’s better than what you want to hear,” Jocelyn retorted. ‘Miss Beatrice Adele Brennan, will you accept our offer? Will you invest for us and labor here unconditionally forever and ever?’“

  Adele frowned. Just because she had an interest in business didn’t mean she had no other interests at all.

  “Are you going to sit there and fool with your hair all day?” she snapped, rising from the bed and moving toward the window. “We need to get downstairs.”

  Jocelyn dropped her arms and turned around in her chair. “Why are you acting this way this morning?”

  “What way?”

  “Pacing, snapping at me, making fun. This isn’t like you at all.” Jocelyn’s voice softened as she added, “Are you frightened of the voyage? Or of what comes after?”

  Adele studied her cousin. Jocelyn was a born nurturer, a quality that was usually quite endearing. But sometimes her nurturing felt more like mothering, and today that mothering bordered on smothering.

  “Thank you for your concern,” Adele replied, trying to sound sincere, “but I suppose it’s more excitement than anything else. I’m eager to get downstairs and meet up with Uncle Rowan before Mr. Myers gets here. Why is it taking you so long to dress?”

  Rebuffed in her attempt at compassion, Jocelyn returned her attentions to the mirror, her lips pursed, avoiding the question.

  “Wait a minute,” Adele said slowly, her eyes narrowing. “I know what’s taking you so long. You’re nervous about meeting Mr. Myers.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was fine when we thought he was just some older gentleman my father sent here as his representative,” Adele said, a hint of a smile on her lips, “but from the moment last night when we were told he’s practically our same age—and quite dashing besides—everything changed.”

  Jocelyn was silent for a moment as she finished her hairstyle and moved on to placing her hat just so. “Perhaps,” she replied. “But I don’t think I’m the only one. I noticed you’re wearing one of your new dresses already. I thought you were going to save that one for when we disembark in America.”

  Adele could feel her cheeks flush. “Headmistress says that first impressions are important. As Mr. Myers is a representative of my father’s company, I realized that it was important his first impression of me be a favorable one.”

  Jocelyn slid her new hat pin into place and rose from her chair at last. Watching her, Adele could see the teasing glint of her eyes change to a look of sincerity.

  “Dear Adele, do you honestly doubt what Mr. Myers’ reaction to you will be?”

  Adele shrugged. “I don’t know what my father told him or what he is expecting.”

  Jocelyn’s features flooded again with compassion as she stepped toward Adele and took her hands. “I guarantee you, cousin, that this Mr. Myers will find you charming, polite, and refined—everything your father desired when he paid for your finishing school education.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Of course I do,” Jocelyn said earnestly, dropping her cousin’s hands and taking a step back. “Just look at you! You’re beautiful, well dressed, articulate, intelligent…You even have a mind for business, which is a rarity among women.”

  Adele didn’t object, even though she usually did when her cousin made such comments. It had long been Adele’s opinion that many women had a mind for business. They just didn’t recognize it for what it was.

  “I, however, am the one who will probably come off as some uneducated culchie,” Jocelyn continued as she packed the last of her things in her suitcase.

  “Culchie? But you’re a townie. We both are. Besides, you are every bit as ‘finished’ as I am. Don’t forget the hours we spent after each class, where I showed you everything Headmistress taught that day.”
r />   Jocelyn shrugged modestly. “And it all felt fine in Belfast. Yet you know how we were made to feel in London in the past few days. Nothing about us has been right or fashionable—not our clothes or our accents or even our luggage, for that matter. You saw the way the porter in the hotel sneered when he spotted our shabby old bags.”

  Adele shook her head, and this time it was her turn to be compassionate.

  “Jocelyn Brennan, I feel sure there is a big difference between London and New York City. From what Father says in his letters, people in New York aren’t so bound by class and wealth. They honor ideas, industriousness, and vision. If Mr. Myers is a true American, he won’t judge either of us by our hair or our clothes. He’ll engage with our minds and judge us by our intellect, our conversation, and our ideals.”

  Jocelyn grinned. “I’m sorry, cousin, but in that dress, intellect is not the first thought that will come to his mind—nor any man’s mind, for that matter.”

  She chuckled as Adele felt herself blush again.

  “You know you are the prettier one,” Adele said.

  “You know you are the smarter one,” Jocelyn replied.

  And then they grinned. It was their old balance, the way they measured their differences in the labels they had given themselves years ago. Lately, though, as Jocelyn had begun to expand her world by reading and the discussion of ideas, and Adele had begun to blossom and to pay more attention to her appearance, those differences had begun to even out. According to Aunt Oona and Uncle Rowan, both girls were smart and pretty. Adele knew that was true of Jocelyn. Sometimes she almost believed it of herself as well.

  The question was whether this Mr. Tad Myers would see things the same way, or if he would take one look at them and sneer, just as the porter had sneered in their fancy London hotel.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Kelsey sat in the reception area just down the hall from where the police were viewing the corpse and processing the scene. Next to her sat Ephraim, who had been glued to her side for the last hour. Though he had already been excused by the police and told he could leave, he had chosen to stay. Somehow, he seemed to know she wasn’t up to being alone right now, that she needed a friend. At the moment he was the best kind of friend, because he seemed content to remain silent, a solid physical presence who neither pestered her about how she was feeling nor offered up empty platitudes to try and make things better.

  Near the door stood a policeman in uniform. He hadn’t said much, but Kelsey knew she was expected to stay where she was for the time being—and that it was his job to make sure she did.

  No worries there. She’d do anything she could to help them figure out exactly what had happened and why one of the most important people in her world was now dead.

  Dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled tissue, Kelsey kept listening for the elevator, hoping her brother would get here soon. In the wake of this horrific nightmare, he was the only one she’d been able to think of to call. Matt had promised to come from his apartment on the Upper West Side as quickly as he could, but twice now she’d heard the elevator ding and had been disappointed to see someone other than him coming around the corner. The first time, it had been a couple of people with the police department. The second time, it was Walter, the first person Ephraim had called after he’d contacted the police.

  Though the CEO had been kind and solicitous the moment he saw Kelsey and learned she was the one who had discovered the body, she hadn’t said much to him in return. She’d already spent more than enough time with Walter Hallerman today. At this point, the sight of him just made her feel weary.

  At least he hadn’t stayed there in reception with her and Ephraim. Instead, he’d received permission from the cops to go to his office, where Kelsey imagined he was on the phone with the company lawyers or whomever else one spoke to when a dead body had been found hanging from a projection screen in one’s conference room.

  Eventually, a man of about fifty wearing a suit with a badge clipped at his belt came into the reception area from the hallway and introduced himself as Detective Hargrove. Kelsey thought he might bring her into some back room where they would talk, but instead he pulled up a chair right there in reception, whipped out a narrow notebook from his inside suit pocket, and asked her to tell him in her own words what had happened.

  In a voice that sounded monotone and flat even to herself, Kelsey recounted her story for the third time this evening. She gave him the basic facts, starting with her visit to Gloria’s office prior to the ceremony and ending with her walk across the executive conference room when she spotted the body. Tears spilled from her eyes as she spoke, but she made no attempts to wipe them away. “I just can’t make sense of this.” Her voice broke as she concluded her tale.

  “Let’s back up a little bit,” he said, flipping through his notes. “You said you spoke with Mrs. Poole around four this afternoon, just before you went from the stairwell to the backstage area. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s the last time you saw her alive?”

  Kelsey nodded. “I mean, we talked on the phone later, but that’s the last time I saw her in person.”

  “How did she seem then? What was her demeanor?”

  Kelsey wasn’t even sure how to answer that question. All over the map? Totally out of character? Crying one minute and giving a pep talk the next?

  The problem was, if this man hadn’t known Gloria while she was alive, he sure wasn’t going to be able to get to know her now that she was dead. Yet, as the detective assigned to this case, it was up to him to figure out exactly how she had died, and why. Kelsey wasn’t sure he could accomplish that. She had known Gloria for years, and even she couldn’t say what had been going on with the woman and why she’d been acting so strange.

  As honestly as she could, Kelsey tried to explain her final encounter with Gloria. She stressed several times how unusual such behavior was for this woman who had otherwise always been the consummate professional. To his credit, Detective Hargrove seemed to take her at her word, listening intently, taking copious notes, and asking questions that were phrased as respectfully as possible. His face was expressionless throughout, but the tone of his voice had a kindness to it that she appreciated.

  It wasn’t until he asked her to again describe the two messages that Gloria had left on her home phone that Kelsey thought of her cell, still sitting in her purse in the bottom drawer of her desk where it had been all afternoon and evening. In the messages Gloria had left on her home machine, she had said she’d been calling Kelsey’s cell phone. She told that to the detective, saying that if they were lucky, there might be more information on there about what had been going on.

  Ephraim offered to go down to the fourth floor and retrieve the phone, so Kelsey gave him the code that would unlock her office door and then asked him to bring her whole purse, explaining where he could find it.

  While he was gone, the detective began pursuing a new line of questioning, one that shed insight into what he was thinking about Gloria’s last minutes of life.

  “You think she killed herself?” she asked, though it came out sounding more like a statement than a question.

  “We haven’t ruled it out.”

  Kelsey thought about that. “She wasn’t exactly the suicide type.”

  “What’s the suicide type?”

  “Hopeless? Depressed? Self-destructive?”

  He jotted something in his notebook. “How about the opposite? Did you see any euphoria here at the end?”

  She shook her head, saying that except for Gloria’s weird behavior prior to the ceremony today, she had been pretty even-tempered lately, as always.

  “Have you noticed her settling her affairs in any way?”

  “You mean, like writing a will?”

  “Or making changes to her insurance, telling people goodbye. Anything like that at all?” He waited patiently while Kelsey searched her memory.

  “Not that I noticed,” she s
aid finally. “She always finished her projects. She wasn’t a procrastinator. But tying up loose ends so she could kill herself? No.” She became more certain as she spoke.

  At that moment, they were interrupted by yet another ding of the elevator. Still no Matt. Instead, Ephraim came walking around the corner holding Kelsey’s purse far out in front of him, as though it were full of snakes.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, hesitant to take it.

  “Nothing,” the burly man replied. “I just didn’t want anybody to think it was mine.”

  Stifling a smile, Kelsey took the purse from him, opened it, and pulled out her cell phone. She pushed the button and the screen sprung to life, indicating twelve missed calls, four voice mails, and seven text messages.

  She had the feeling that the detective would have preferred she review those voice mails on speakerphone so he could listen in too, but she did nothing of the kind. She specialized in investments, and some of her calls could be financially related and contain confidential information.

  In the end, she told him Gloria had called five times and left a message twice. Those she did replay on speakerphone for him, but neither message shed any new light on the matter.

  Then she went through the text messages. Of the seven, three were from Gloria. Her first two were more of the same—Call me, I have to talk to you—but the final one came as a complete shock. Sent at precisely 5:52 p.m., it looked like a suicide note. It said:

  Goodbye, Tater Tot. I’m so sorry for what I’ve done. Please forgive me for taking what wasn’t mine and for ending my own life. With love and regret, Gloria

  “Tater Tot?” the detective asked.

  Tears sprung into Kelsey’s eyes. “It was her pet name for me.”

  He was quiet, waiting for her to go on, so she explained. “My last name is Tate. When I first started working at the office, she would refer to me as Little Tate and my father as Big Tate. I guess it just evolved over time. Somehow Little Tate became Tater Tot.”

  The detective nodded, a flash of pity reflected in his eyes. “Any idea what she’s talking about where she says ‘Forgive me for taking what wasn’t mine’? What did she take?”