House on Fire

65

While we were waiting to disembark, I asked the flight attendant to come over.

“I’m working for Mr. Kimball,” I said. “Doing some investigation on his behalf within the company. Mr. Kimball and I would appreciate it if you would keep my real name confidential.”

“Of course, sir,” the flight attendant said.

“What’s your name?”

“Zoe Garcia.”

“Zoe, I’m Nick. Very nice to meet you.”

It was in the high eighties but dry when we emerged from the plane. We stepped right into a black SUV whose interior was air-conditioned to frigid. The driver had greeted Sukie by name, as “Ms. Kimball.” Our bags were transferred from the plane to the back of the SUV without our having to retrieve them.

It was a short drive to the resort, which was ridiculously beautiful. The water was turquoise, the sand was white, the air was clear. There was steel-pan music playing. It was like being in a TV commercial.

The resort was modern and newly renovated, after the big hurricane of a few years ago, with bleached blond-wood floors and large glass windows. The check-in desk had been carved from knotty pieces of petrified wood. Outside was blond stone and white umbrellas and perfectly straight rows of palm trees.

Sukie checked us in and requested a king-size bed. I was her guest. I didn’t want to check in, in case they insisted on my passport and I’d have to give them the wrong name. A pretty young woman who was probably Anguillan — hair back in neat dreadlocks, a bright smile, an orange-sherbet blouse — greeted us and handed us a couple of key cards.

The bellboy escorted us to a suite on the third floor of the main resort building. All of the Kimball Pharma group was staying in the main hotel building, not in the separate bungalows some guests stayed in.

Awaiting us was a bottle of champagne on ice and a fruit basket. It was an endless suite, with great views of the ocean, which sparkled before us. From the windows, you could see no other part of the hotel, just beach and sea. The four-poster bed, with white linens and coverlet, looked out on the ocean through a huge floor-to-ceiling window.

Sukie had opened the champagne and offered me a flute. I decided to pass. I didn’t have a lot of time, and I wasn’t feeling relaxed. Plus I’d had that Scotch on the plane.

“You Kimballs live well,” I said. “I guess you get used to it. Not sure I would.”

“Yeah, well, it’s blood money,” she said. She poured herself a flute but didn’t pick it up to drink. “I remember when I was filming in Haiti once, not long after that terrible earthquake, and this dreadful cholera epidemic had broken out? This one little girl — I had filmed her with her mother a week earlier, and her mother had died and the girl was in the hospital, terribly weak. And I went to visit her and she looked awful, her lips cracked and her eyes sunken, and she whispered to me, ‘Can I have some water?’ And of course I ran to the bathroom and filled up several glasses of water and gave them to her, and she gulped them all down, she was so thirsty.

“I knew the only way to fight cholera was to get as many people as possible clean, filtered drinking water. They needed cholera treatment centers. A two-hundred-bed center cost a million dollars for just three months. I donated three centers and enough money to keep them going for a couple of years. And when I went back to Haiti a couple weeks later, to see what was going on, I asked to see that little girl.” Sukie looked at the ocean for a long time, then she turned back to me. “And she’d died, of course.

“And I realized that even if I had all the money in the world, there’s only so much you can do. The need is so immense. And that was only one small part of one country at one particular moment in time.”

Our doorbell rang. I assumed it was another gift from the hotel, but through the peephole I saw it was Megan Kimball.

I opened the door.

“Hello,” she said to me hastily as she came into the suite, uninvited. “Sukie?” she called out.

Sukie emerged from the bedroom. “Right here,” she said.

“I had no idea you were coming. I was only just told.”

“I didn’t need an engraved invitation, did I?” Sukie said. “I am an equal stakeholder, after all.”

“Any reason you didn’t tell me?”

“Last-minute decision,” Sukie said. “Nick’s never been to Anguilla.”

“Oh, so you’re here on vacation, right? Well, just to be clear, you don’t have a role here.”

“Nick may go to a few presentations.”

Megan shook her head. “I heard from Stephanie that you’ve been requesting in-depth financial statements on the subsidiaries. Now you’re at sales conference for the first time in your life. Why are you suddenly taking an interest in the company?”

“Because we’re losing money,” Sukie said. She’d clearly prepared an answer. “Maybe I don’t have confidence in the leadership.”

“This is my terrain, and you know it. I have worked my ass off trying to keep this company on track. Bring it into the twenty-first century. And protect against all the lawsuits at the same time. Meanwhile, you’re making your silly documentaries.”

“Have you ever seen a documentary I’ve made?”

“Sukie, grow up. Some of us have been pretty damned busy over the last decade. For me, Kimball Pharma is a challenge. It’s hard work. For you it’s... a piggybank, for your little projects.”

Sukie flushed, looking like she’d just been slapped. “I’m here for support,” she said.

“Bullshit,” Megan said. “You’re here to carve out a bigger share. You think you can suddenly helicopter yourself into the C-suite — well, baby, that ain’t happening. What do you even know about this company? Do you actually care about it? While you’re off making your nature documentaries?”

“White-collar crime isn’t nature,” Sukie snapped.

“Sorry, but I haven’t had large swatches of free time to watch your little stories. I’m too concerned with saving what Dad built. We’re facing the biggest crisis we’ve ever gone through, and the last thing we need is someone like you swanning in from your flower-child fields of heather. You’re suddenly taking an interest?” She shook her head. “Sorry, but I’m not buying it. You think you can parachute in and Dad’s going to make you executive chairman of the company? That’s not going to happen.”

Then she looked at me as if she’d forgotten I was standing there, and she stormed out of the suite.

Sukie stared with wide eyes and a nervous grin.

“Excuse me,” I said. I followed Megan out and caught up with her by the elevator bank.

“I’m sorry,” she said huffily, “but I’m on my way to a drink.”

“I could use one myself. Mind if I join you?”

She gave me a hard look, and finally she shrugged.