“What’s going on, Mrs. Wolfe?” Sandra asked. “Everything okay?”
I frowned at her. She had taken to calling me Mrs. Wolfe in the last couple of days. “Caleb is just having some issues with the stock market, but all should be well.”
“You’re married?” Bradley’s friend suddenly asked, looking from me to Bradley with confusion. Bradley looked shocked before he quickly returned his attention to his order clipboard.
“I’m not,” I replied, and sent a disapproving look to Sandra.
She ignored it. “She basically is,” she said. “She and her boyfriend act like they’ve been married for a hundred years. Since he got here a couple of weeks ago he probably knows more about her than I do, and we’ve been best friends since high school.”
Bradley’s friend laughed. “You sound jealous.”
“I am! A hundred percent,” she replied. “So to taunt her, I call her Mrs. Caleb Wolfe. Maybe one of these days I’ll even slip up and say it in front of him.”
My head shot up. “I’ll kill you if you do!” I threatened, my teeth were bared.
“I know of a Caleb Wolfe from way back. I was in freshman year,” Bradley’s friend, Henry said. “He was quite infamous. He was convicted of murder and sent to prison. Shocked the hell out of the entire county.”
“Whoa,” Sandra exclaimed. “What high school was that?”
“Met West in Bitter Creek,” he said.
Something struck my chest.
Sandra immediately caught the connection too. “Met West? Willow, isn’t that the combination school you attended before you moved here to Folsom?”
“Yeah,” I replied, then turned to meet the surprised look in Henry’s eyes.
“Neat,” he said, with a shrug.
The room had gone eerily quiet. Or maybe it was just in my mind.
“Willow, what if your Caleb is that Caleb Wolfe? Wouldn’t that be creepy as hell?”
She turned to the guy who had just dropped the bombshell. “Do you have any more details? Do you know who he murdered and why? How old was he at the time?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t pay too much attention, you know. I was just a kid, but I think he might have been fifteen, but don’t quote me on that. But I remember it was his age that made the case national headlines. It was the first time a kid had killed a priest.”
“A priest? Wow! That is freaking insane,” Sandra gasped. “That must have caused quite a buzz. Strange I didn’t hear about it. Having said that I had no interest in news at that age. I was so caught up with what was happening in our school even though the most interesting thing that ever happened there was someone getting off with their teacher, or a random hallway fight. A murder takes the cake on high school delinquency.”
“Yeah, it was big news.”
“Do you know what happened to him?”
Henry shook his head. “He’s probably still behind bars.”
I had to admit, until he said the boy killed a priest, I was feeling uncomfortable, maybe even starting to think that boy could be Caleb. After all, Caleb Wolfe was such an unusual name, but the moment the guy said he killed a priest, I completely relaxed.
I knew it would never be Caleb. That was just not him. Even when he threw that man across the dance floor, there had been nothing evil in him. He hadn’t lost control, or taken pleasure in hurting the man. He just wanted to get him away from me.
Killing wasn’t him now, and it wouldn’t have been him as a boy.
41
Caleb
I had lost thirty-five million dollars.
In one afternoon, the entire arbitrage had flopped.
I glanced over our trades and calculations and waited. The evening passed with me staring at my computer and by the time midnight came, I got the expected phone call.
“What the hell happened?”
“‘You saw it too,” I replied. ‘The market went against us.”
“‘That’s not enough to cause this kind of loss. Was there an error or something?”
There it was again. The question of the hour. “I’m trying to work it all out.”
The man roared into the phone so loudly, that I had to pull it away from my ear. “You’re trying to work it all out? You’re trying? My clients have lost millions. In one fucking day. And you’re telling me you’re trying?”
“Tyler, you knew the risk involved with this arbitrage. You’ve been well aware from the start that you could lose all your profit, and you agreed with me that you were willing to take the risk. Well, your clients have lost exactly the profit they made. No more no less.”
“God, damn you. I called you earlier and told you to close me out, but you convinced me to fucking stay, and now this is the result?”
“I’m sorry, Tyler, but your clients should be happy they’re walking away without a real loss. It’s a blood bath on the markets today …”