Part 28:
He did not resist. The arresting officer said later that he had looked in the moment the agents came through the door, less like a frightened man and more like a man who had been waiting for a long time for something to happen and was mostly just grateful to know, finally, which thing it was. Everett Sharp was arrested in his office.
His son, at the college in Rhode Island, found out from the news before anyone could call him. Celeste had quietly, through Delia, arranged a trust that would cover the boy’s remaining tuition. The boy would not know for another 2 years where the money had come from. When he eventually figured it out, he would write Celeste a letter.
She would keep the letter in her desk drawer behind the fountain pen. Linda Marrow pled out in the first week of December. She gave the government three other names, two of them inside companies that were not Celeste’s. Those companies had their own months to come. Douglas Rineck did not plead out.
He went to trial the following June. He was convicted on 11 counts, including wire fraud, theft of interstate commerce, and conspiracy. He was sentenced to 9 years. In his sentencing hearing, the judge noted for the record that the defendant had abused a position of significant trust and had constructed internal company processes specifically to harm any employee who might have detected his scheme.
The judge read, briefly, from a victim impact statement submitted by a man named Ryan Hale. Rineck did not look up during the reading. Ryan did not attend the hearing. Celeste did. She sat in the back row, alone, in a black coat with her hands folded in her lap. When the verdict came back, she did not cry. She nodded, once, the way she nodded at board meetings, and she got up and left.
That night she drove back to Burlington and she had dinner with Ryan and Emma at a Thai restaurant two blocks from the apartment on Birch Street, and she did not mention the verdict at all, and Ryan did not ask. And Emma, who was eight by then, told Celeste a long and slightly garbled story about a substitute teacher who had, she claimed, eaten a worm on a dare.
Celeste laughed. It was a real laugh. It was the kind of laugh that came out of her when she had been holding something up all day and could finally put it down for an hour. That was June. A lot had happened between November and June. Ryan and Emma did not move out of the apartment on Birch Street right away.
They could have. Ryan’s salary was $140,000 a year now, and there was no reason, financially, to stay above a laundromat. But Emma had said, when Ryan had brought it up tentatively over cereal one morning, that she liked her room, and that she liked that the bus stop for school was on their corner, and that she liked the smell of dryer sheets, and that she did not want to move.
Ryan had said, “Okay.” He had added, because he could not help himself, that maybe next year they would look. Emma had shrugged. “Maybe,” she had said, “next year.” So, they stayed. Ryan fixed the banister. He replaced the cracked kitchen window. He had the building’s landlord, who liked him, repaint the front door.
He bought a new couch. The old couch went out onto the sidewalk on a Thursday morning and was gone by Thursday afternoon, which was how things left Birch Street. He bought Emma a desk for her room. He bought himself a coat that did not have paint stains on it, because now he sometimes had to go to meetings in Burlington, where he met with lawyers and auditors and other people whose time cost money.
And he had learned from Celeste’s assistant that a coat with paint stains on it was a small thing that could cause you an argument you had already won. Work was good. Work was, in fact, the best thing he had ever done. He spent the first 3 months on something he called privately the road tour. He visited every Regus Hollister distribution center in the northeast.
He did not come in as an executive from corporate. He came in as what Celeste called in his official bio on the company website, a deputy to the CEO for field operations, which did not actually mean anything to anyone in the field. What it meant in practice was that Ryan showed up at 4:00 a.m.
at a loading dock in Albany or at 5:00 a.m. at a distribution hub in Syracuse or at 6:30 a.m. at the Rutland facility he had worked at for 2 years and 7 months. And he stood with the men and women unloading trucks. And he drank bad coffee with them in break rooms with broken heaters. And he asked them questions.
He asked them how the schedules worked. He asked them who they reported to. He asked them what frustrated them. He asked them what they would fix. He asked them if they had been worried about something unusual in the last year, who they would have told. The answers he got were at first very careful.
People did not know what to make of him. He was a guy in a nice but not too nice coat with a company badge who sat in their break room and asked questions like a friend. After a few weeks, the stories started. Quiet ones at first, then louder ones. He came back to Montpelier every Friday with a notebook full of things Celeste’s company had not known about itself.
