I added detergent to the washer, punched a few buttons and started the machine, then took a quick detour to my office across the hall.
Ruth had sent me an e-card from the "Get Well Police." Har-de-har-har. Maybe I'd been drunker last night than I thought. I sent her a thank-you, and since I was already at BlueMountain.com, I picked out an e-card for Dennis: a Chesapeake Bay blue crab saying "Sony I've been so crabby." I personalized the e-card and sent it off, feeling slightly better about myself.
Emily had e-mailed that Jake was cutting a new tooth; Chico's wanted to offer me twenty-five percent off; Paul had forwarded several jokes from his usna.edu account, one of which, about a cat that survived a close encounter with a garbage disposal, made me laugh so hard I nearly fell off my chair.
I quickly deleted the obvious spam-Viagra (Deep discount!), eager teenage Russian brides, offers of creative ways to enlarge certain portions of my anatomy, none of which I possessed-until I got to an e-mail address I didn't recognize: sailingphool@aol.com. The subject line was "Hello, Hannah!"
I suspected it came from a gal I met at Womanship, a popular sailing school for women. (Their motto? Nobody yells!) Tina races a Cal25 and keeps urging me to sign up for the Annapolis Frostbite Series. Sailing in the summertime is a delight, but in November? If you have to wear long underwear, fleece pants, three sweaters, two pairs of mittens, foul weather gear, and plastic Baggies over your toes in order to stay warm, I draw the line.
But when I opened the e-mail, fingers poised to type "Brrrrrr, no way!" I was astonished to find the message was from Gail Parrish.
"Hey, Hannahmail! Snitched your address from Gil's Rolodex. Need to talk to you. Seriously. Call me at home. Gail."
Gail's signature line included a telephone number, thank goodness. I dialed it at once, but the line was busy. I was surprised that no voice mail kicked in, especially in this day and age, but then, it wasn't exactly Gail's telephone. It belonged to a couple of diehard sailors, and sailors, in my experience, don't always live on the cutting edge of technology.
Maybe it was busy because Gail was working on-line and had *70'd the call to keep voice mail from knocking her off-line. We both used AOL, so I added Sailingphool to Hannahmail's buddy list, then checked to see if Gail was logged on. She wasn't
Just to be sure, I sent her an instant message. I waited a few moments. Sent another one. Waited. There was no reply.
I went back to Gail's message and clicked on Reply.
"Dear Gail," I e-mailed back. “Tried to call. Line busy. Where the hell are you? Hannah."
At one o'clock I tried telephoning again, with equal lack of success. Gail could still be on-line, of course. I imagined her cruising the Internet, searching Yachtworld.com for the previously owned sailboat of her dreams, or for one in her price range, at least.
Although I was desperate to talk to Gail and wanted to hit my "redial" button every four or five minutes until she picked up, I had a problem. I had told Harrison Garvin on Friday that I was close to finishing my report. "Just a bit of tweaking here and there," I'd boasted. "It'll be on your desk first thing Monday morning."
Garvin had beamed. He was meeting with his management team on Wednesday, he said, and would move my report to the top of the agenda.
Now I had to make good on my promise.
I toasted a bagel for lunch, washed it down with the last of the coffee, located my security card and drove out to Victory Mutual.
Once I got settled in the cubicle I'd borrowed from Mindy, I tried Gail again. Busy. Damn the woman! She wanted to talk to me. I wanted to talk to her. The least she could do was stay off the phone.
Then again, maybe it wasn't Gail's fault. I decided if I hadn't been able to get through by three o'clock, I'd call the operator and ask her to check to see if the phone was out of order or off the hook. There was probably a perfectly reasonable explanation. No use stewing about it
I logged onto Mindy's computer, and after several trial runs my SQL scripts finally ran flawlessly. I'd been massaging the data for so long that the results didn't surprise me, but I felt quite certain they would knock the socks off Harrison Garvin.
One data table proved that forty-five percent of the policies that had changed from personal to corporate ownership over the past five years had been reassigned to ViatiPro, and that sixty-two percent of that number had been paid, meaning the viator had died.
Another table showed that fully seventy-six percent of the total number of policies that had changed hands had been for amounts under $100,000. Clearly, ViatiPro wasn't the only investment company scrambling aboard the gravy train, but thanks to me, that train was about to come to a screeching halt.
I revised the script and reran it, this time limiting my results to policies for $100,000 or less that had been written during the past two years. Like most insurance companies, Victory Mutual had a two-year contestability period. If the company's investigators could prove any of the policies had been falsely obtained before the two years was up, the policies could be cancelled and crooks like Steele and his unwary investors would be left holding worthless pieces of paper. As far as I was concerned, Steele could take his lumps. It was the unwary investors-like my friend Mrs. Bromley-whom I felt sorry for.
In my opinion, the reports said it all, and in terms so clear that even my three-year-old granddaughter could understand. Nevertheless, I had to spend another hour converting the data I had collected into graphs and pie charts that Garvin could plug into the PowerPoint presentation he planned to show his team. I fiddled with the slide layouts and backgrounds for a while, then ran the slide show, sitting back and impressing myself with the results. Damn, Hannah, you haven't lost your touch.
When I was satisfied, I printed a paper copy of the presentation and slipped it under Donna's door. I also e-mailed the file to her as an attachment just in case she logged in over the weekend. Donna struck me as the type who liked to get a head start on her Mondays, and I was happy to oblige. In any case, there was no way I would take the report to Garvin without discussing it with Donna first. Although information on specific underwriters had not been captured in Victory Mutual's database, I had the feeling that when the actual policies were pulled, some of Donna's underwriters were going to have a lot of explaining to do. Donna deserved to be the first to know.
On my way back to my cubicle from Donna's office, I grabbed a Coke out of the vending machine in the staff lounge. I popped the top and took a long, refreshing swig. Then I logged onto the Internet and went to aol.com to check for any messages from Gail. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
I stared at the screen for a good two minutes, sipping my Coke and planning my next step. You're supposed to be good with computers, Hannah Ives. Don't just sit there, do something!
I put the Coke down and lifted my fingers to the keyboard. When in doubt, Google.
I Googled "Gail Parrish." There was an African-American playwright by that name, and a jazz musician, and a Gail Parrish who, according to a genealogy website, had married her first cousin in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1837. That would make her 166 years old. Not the Gail I was looking for.
I browsed through Google's features: calculators, street maps, spell checkers, phone books. When I clicked on phone books, I was delighted to see a new feature, Type in a phone number, with area code, and Google would look up the address for you. Hot damn!
I typed the telephone number Gail had given me into the Google search box. Reverting to an old childhood ritual, I crossed my fingers for luck, closed my eyes, and hit the Enter key.
When I opened my eyes again it was like magic: next to a telephone icon, the address of the house Gail had called me from was staring back at me from the screen. "Thank you," I breathed aloud to whatever angel had sprinkled me with fairy dust that afternoon.