When did Julie leave for Florida?” asked Badger.
“Summer of 1986,” I recalled, and simultaneously wrote the date and event down on the whiteboard in my office.
“That’s right around the time Fitch’s sister disappeared.”
I wrote that down, too, but in a different color.
I captured everything we had discovered on the board to create one big timeline stretching from today all the way back to the early 1980s. I drew solid lines between connected events and dotted lines where I had a hunch there was a connection but couldn’t confirm it. I’d always felt as though a thread tied these random periods together but only now that I could visually represent them on the board did they take on meaning.
Badger didn’t share my enthusiasm.
“Why do you keep writing down everything I say?” he asked innocently.
I was momentarily flummoxed. Whiteboarding was the darling of the corporate world and the truest signal to everyone watching that there was some serious strategizing going on. While the guy in front of the old-fashioned flip chart was a mere “note taker,” the one in front of a whiteboard was an “ideator.” I’d mastered whiteboarding sessions years ago, much to the benefit of my career advancement, and in all that time no one had ever questioned such a proven approach before.
“I’m trying to visualize a complex scenario by putting words to paper,” I explained, even though there was no paper involved. And for a guy who never used paper, this was clearly a foreign concept to Badger. “Breaking it up into snackable bites allows us to overcome the enemy of all strategic problem-solving—inertia. As we’ve done here, capturing the seemingly random events from the past paints a clearer picture from which we can deliver viable solution sets.”
Badger nodded.
“What are you going to do with it when you’re done?”
“It’s the process that has value, not the output.”
“So you won’t actually do anything with this?”
“I mean, I might take a photo of it with my phone.”
He nodded again.
“And do what with it?”
“Just to have in case we need to reference it…or something.”
As he was about to ask his next undermining question, I quickly grabbed the eraser and wiped the board clean.
“Let’s get back on track,” I huffed, and sat down at my desk. “So where were we?”
We returned to the topic that had everyone’s head spinning—that the Julie St. Jean we all knew was actually Maggie Fitch from Arizona. I had assumed that all of the “roommate” talk in Sierra Madre referred to the affair between Julie and Lois. But it now looked like it was in regard to an entirely different affair, one that transpired some thirty years earlier.
Badger riffed on how it might have played out.
“Say Maggie jumps bail,” he started. “First thing, she needs to get out of town fast. I could see picking Los Angeles. Her brother was out here by then and she probably ran to family.”
According to the old man at the coffee shop, Maggie began renting a room at Julie’s house in Sierra Madre shortly after her arrest in Phoenix. Maybe it started as a business relationship but it apparently turned into something more. The town gossip at the library said as much.
“Within a few years, Julie has quit her long-term job at the library and up and moves everything across the country,” I added to his narrative.
“She doesn’t take everything,” Badger corrected. “The house was never sold.”
The old man at the coffee shop made this point. Maggie continued to live at the house for some period. This raised a few eyebrows over coffee in the shop but nothing more than that. Julie had always been a private woman and neighbors felt it better to leave well enough alone. After a few months Maggie moved out and apparently took Julie’s identity with her. This explained the age discrepancy on “Julie’s” original W-9.
I sat back and smiled. The fact that the ageless guru wasn’t so youthful made me feel better about my own losing battle with time. I also admittedly enjoyed knowing that the sage of the corporate world was actually a former drug addict who had sold her body for the next score. But what really warmed my heart was thinking about how Pat Faber had made critical life decisions based on this woman’s advice. I temporarily basked in a pool of Schadenfreude, but then I remembered watching Rebecca as she processed the same information the night before.
We had driven home in silence from the coffee shop in a rain so heavy it felt like we hydroplaned all the way back to Eagle Rock. I built a fire and warmed some soup, the only thing Rebecca could still stomach anymore. She was wasting away in front of me; the already rail-thin woman somehow had gotten thinner over the last week. The untouched bowl sat in her lap as she stared silently into the fire. After what seemed like twenty minutes, she finally whispered:
“She’s the same person.”
“You think Julie and Maggie are one and the same,” I said.
“So do you,” Rebecca replied, “and that’s not what I meant.” The two who had never delved into each other’s past now had to come to some sort of reconciliation with it. Rebecca’s was one of reluctant acceptance. This new information about Julie’s real identity didn’t change the person she was in love with. After a moment’s reflection, she added, “She’s the same person to me.”
Badger continued to build the narrative.
“Maggie reinvents herself in Los Angeles. She needs a new identity, a new everything.”
“So she takes on Julie’s identity and starts fresh in the leadership coaching business.”
“Let’s hope that’s all she took,” Badger shot back.
He verbalized the unstated fear behind all of the arched eyebrows, the whispers in the coffee shop, the back-of-the-library conversations—that the real Julie never made that trip to Florida after all.
“I’ll check that county in Florida where she was raised. If she went back there, there must be some record of it.” And not that I needed further clarification, but Badger added, “I’ll start with the death records.”
“How does the money work?” I asked. “We know it’s old so it probably originates from Maggie’s time in Arizona and is connected to her arrest.”
“It could have been the real Julie’s money.”
“That doesn’t match the librarian profile.”
“It has to be drug money, then.”
“That sits for thirty years,” I added. “Why didn’t she spend it?”
“How do you know she didn’t?”
I had heard the story of Power of One’s rise from obscurity countless times over the years. Self-made people have an insatiable appetite for chronicling the steps leading to their success, and Julie was no exception. In all of the retellings, I never got a sense that there was a large pool of money funding the business.
“Also, the money only surfaced in the last year or two,” I added. “Large transfers to Lois, payments to Fitch, activity at a secret bank account in Pasadena.”
“And Fitch declared that his sister croaked last year,” Badger threw in. “One reason you make it official is to get access to their belongings.”
“Next of kin,” I finished for him.
One question partially answered only succeeded in spawning several more to replace it. Our attempts to unravel this crisscross of relationships led to the same place—a vague trail pointing back east and disappearing on the horizon leading to the desert.
“Maybe that detective in Phoenix can fill some stuff in for us,” I offered.
“As long as the Alzheimer’s hasn’t kicked in,” Badger scoffed.
Badger often felt threatened when anyone trespassed on his turf, but I ignored his snub and placed a call on speaker. Detective Fortin was a key link in this story and we needed his help. He answered on the third ring.
“I’m mad at you, Mr. Restic.”
“Why’s that, sir?” I said into the conference phone.
“Because you got me thinking about work again,” he answered. “I’m supposed to be retired.”
“Enjoy the rest of your life,” Badger threw out.
“What’s that?” Fortin asked.
“Nothing,” I answered, and shot Badger a look. “I got the sense you rather enjoyed your work.”
“Love-hate, more accurate,” he said. “Cost me a family, among other things. I’d rather not have it cost me my retirement, too.”
I thought about that statement and momentarily got lost in an evaluation of my own life’s work. I struggled with the passion he expressed, not because I didn’t think it was sincere, but because I had so little for mine. While the detective’s career-long struggle was that of never finding the right work-life balance, I grappled with the question of whether I could remain in such a state of indifference about my career for forty years.
“I’m having a hard time hearing you,” I said. There was a fair amount of background noise coming through his line.
“That’s my retirement,” he said. Detective Fortin explained he was on his way to the mountains for a week’s worth of fishing and drinking.
“Alone?”
“Is there any other way?”
“I’m just looking for some more information on Maggie Fitch,” I said. “I think I found her.”
The only response I got was the road noise from his phone. The detective ember still burned. I let him stoke it for a while in silence.
“Good ole Maggie,” his voice whistled.
“The one who got away,” Badger quipped.
“Oh, I got her,” he shot back. “I just never had her mounted on my den wall.”
I asked the detective a series of clarifying questions about Maggie’s arrest and subsequent disappearance. I was particularly interested in how she made bail, given that it was such a large sum. I purposely ignored Badger’s gaze, knowing it was his idea in the first place.
The detective answered some of my questions half-heartedly. The rest he ignored. He was clearly distracted, but it was the good kind of distraction.
“Did he fall asleep?” Badger whispered to me.
Over the speakerphone, we heard the car noise slowly die down. There seemed to be some movement and then the noise picked back up again.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You know what I’m doing,” he replied.
“Having a stroke,” Badger said under his breath.
“How long will it take you to get out here?” I asked with a smile.
“Give me a day or two to collect some stuff back in Phoenix then I’ll look you up in La La Land.”