I still didn’t know. I motioned at him. “I don’t have my phone. I need yours!” I did a quick Google search of the correct price per share of the Capstone Fund from June, and from December. Then I started talking out loud. “Okay. So, basically, what is coming on the investor statements from the Capstone Fund is correct. The share price and the share number reflect each other. But on the broker-facing side, the total is the same, but the number of shares is… well, it’s less.” I gasped again. “That’s why that guy was stealing my statements!”

I felt wild and panicked and thrilled all at once. “You have to take me back to the mommune to get my phone. I have to get Oliver.”

Merit nodded and gripped my forearm. “Iris, I don’t totally understand what’s happening here, but you have to calm down a little—or at least explain it to me.”

“The Capstone Fund was the one forging client statements, not my dad. And I’m pretty sure I just proved it.”

Alice Backfired

I don’t know when the anxiety started, exactly. It certainly intensified after Jeremy died. I’d wake up in the night, sweating, panting after having dreams of trying to save him, of that moment he stepped onto the gondola to go up the mountain, the last minute I ever saw him. What if I had kissed him goodbye one more time, and he had missed the ride? What if, instead of veering left at the top of the mountain, he had veered right? Had he fallen? Hit his head? Died right away? Had he screamed for help, suffered, suffocated? I always felt like that was closure I needed, but, then again, maybe knowing would only have made it worse.

That said, this feeling of being followed wasn’t a new one, I thought as I walked down the beach, trying to clear my head. Neither was the idea that every time I went to church, every time I did a good deed, I was working off a little bit of my sin. Or, in a larger sense, that maybe I was making people see that all those things they said about me weren’t true. I often wondered: If they knew just how much it hurt, would they continue?

If I looked deep down, maybe that was the impetus for starting the mommune. Certainly, I did want to help my niece and her kids. And I wanted to help sweet Merit and Emma. But I also wanted the town to see how kind I was, how giving, that I hadn’t killed my husbands for their insurance money or whatever they thought. How could a woman who opened her home to people in need do that?

But then, of course, that had backfired. And rumors about the sinister things going on within our four walls started.