Madam of Maple Court by Joan Elizabeth Lloyd Read Free Book Online Page B

to lengthen the time before she had to make a decision about the rest of her life. There was three hundred forty dollars inside his wallet as well as his driver's license, several credit cards, and the other pieces of plastic that his complicated life demanded. She flipped through them. No real surprises there, although what had she really known of his life.
    His keys. She picked up the heavy ring. She recognized the front door key, a key to his Mercedes, now returned to the dealer, and her Lexus, as well as the key to his Corvette. She'd complained when he bought it that, since it was a standard shift, she couldn't drive it. "Of course it's standard shift," Vin had said. "You don't put an automatic transmission in a car like this. It would be silly." No sense keeping that key, she thought, nor the key to the Mercedes. She pocketed the key to her car and dropped the other two into the garbage can under the desk.
    There were several other keys. She knew he kept his office keys in his briefcase, so she hoped the key to his desk was one of these. She tried each in the desk drawer lock. The third one fit and unlocked the center drawer. She opened the drawer and found nothing of immediate interest. The top two side drawers contained little more. The bottom draw on the right, however, was filled with files. She glanced over the tabs. Vin was well organized, so they were carefully labeled with machine made labels. HSBC Bank statements. She didn't remember an HSBC account. All their personal banking was with Citibank.
    She hurried upstairs, found the list Mark had given her, and returned to the den. There was no HSBC account listed there, either. Maybe it was a corporate account. Sure. That was it. It had to be. But why was the folder here and not at the office? She pulled the folder out of the drawer and opened it. Bank statements, deposits of cash—more than ten thousand a month—and transfers to pay a credit card bill. Credit card? She went through his wallet again and found an HSBC platinum Visa card.
    She returned to the drawer and found the folder that contained the credit card statements. Some of the charges were for hotel rooms in the city, expensive dinners in the best restaurants, many of which she and Vin had been to. She tried to remember which credit card he'd usually used, but that kind of thing never registered with her. She looked at the dates and opened his date book to a calendar. The charges were almost exclusively on Thursdays, evenings she almost always had committee meetings. If these were clients of DePalma Advertising he'd have used the company American Express platinum card.
    The most puzzling charges were for CF+Co. The amounts were pretty consistent, two thousand dollars almost every week. CF+Co? What the hell was that about? Another woman? She didn't want to consider that there had been anyone else, but it was difficult not to entertain the possibility.
    If he'd been unfaithful, if he'd had sex with another woman, did she care? She would be hurt by the idea, of course, and hate the idea of the lies he must have had to tell her, but if she were being honest, she realized that things hadn't been going well between them, in and out of the bedroom, for a very long time.
No! Stop it! Don't go there, not yet
!
    She glanced back at the credit card statement, picked a date at random, and checked it against Vin's date book. Blank. There was nothing in the book about any dinner and nothing to indicate what CF+Co was. However, there was no doubt that this was where much of the missing money had gone. She thumbed through the credit card bills. More than one hundred thousand dollars had been charged to that credit card in the last year. That was more than he could have been paying for another woman. Unless he'd set her up in an apartment in the city? But what else could this be? Blackmail? Gambling? Drugs? No, probably not drugs. She'd have known if he'd been using something illegal, wouldn't she? Anyway, dealers