I head to my office. After forwarding the key emails to Maycock, I turn my attention to Guy. I’ve had to undertake a significant amount of research for each of my books, but mainly it’s involved coaxing people to share their stories, which they often yearn to do. I don’t have investigative-reporter chops, though, and that means I lack the know-how to do a deep dive on someone, finding data that a person is trying hard to conceal. At best, all I’m going to turn up on Guy today is stuff bobbing on the surface.
Since I’ve been to his hometown and met people who knew him at his mother’s memorial service, it’s clear any serious fabrications must have occurred after he left for college. I decide to start there. I remember hearing his mother mention something about his time at UC Santa Barbara, and I assume, at least for now, that’s where he actually did his undergraduate work. I bring up the college’s website and click on “Alumni” in the navigation bar, which takes me to an alumni page. There’s no way I’m going to be allowed access to the directory without a password, but I try to log in anyway. No such luck. As I’m about to leave the page, I notice a search bar up at the top. I type in Guy’s name just for the hell of it.
To my surprise, stuff pops up. Not his profile, but rather a page of links to articles in the alumni magazine featuring anyone with the last name of Carrington. And there’s one that features a Guy Carrington from the class he always said he graduated in.
I click on the link. It takes me to a piece that ran in the alumni magazine when Guy was twenty-six or so, about grads who were born and raised in California and were now living and working elsewhere. There are a couple of photos of graduates, though none of Guy, but halfway down the article, there’s a quote from him about living in Chicago and working in the fund-raising office of the Illinois Medical Center. “The first winter was tough, with a ton of snow,” he reports, “but Chicago is a great city, so all is forgiven.”
It sounds just like him—all smiles and ready to see the upside. The article mentions that he will be headed to UCLA in the fall for a master’s in business administration.
All of this squares with what he’s told me about that period of his life. And he was clearly going by Guy then.
I try the UCLA site next, to no avail. I press a hand to my head, trying to recall the sequence of employment after that, or at least the sequence that was fed to me. After business school, Guy supposedly returned to Chicago and rejoined the medical center’s development office at a higher level. Following that was a stint at a small start-up in Chicago whose name I don’t recall. Nothing to do with fund-raising, but he was ready for a change. Then, just over nine years ago, it was on to Miami and back to fund-raising, launching a firm with a B-school pal who grew up in Florida. They helped raise money for organizations too small to have their own fund-raising department. The friend had the contacts, and Guy was the strategist. It was after they sold the company two and a half years ago that Guy moved to Saratoga—eager, he claimed, to be back with a well-regarded organization and to move up from there.
I steel myself for more. I Google “Guy Carrington, Miami,” as well as “Carrington-Wolfe,” the name of the firm. More than a handful of references actually turn up. The firm is referenced in back issues of online regional trade magazines, and Guy is even quoted in a couple of them.
So far nothing seems off about the Miami stint of his career, but it occurs to me that none of the links are more than seven years old. So maybe part of the time he claimed to be in Miami was covering for the stint in Dallas.
I lean my head back against the top rim of the desk chair and smile grimly to myself. My mother used to say that a key to decorating on a budget was to mix a few quality antiques in with cheaper stuff, and people would assume it was all expensive. That’s kind of been Guy’s MO with me, I realize—to mix truth in with the lies. What he told me about college seems to be legit, and so probably was the info he shared about his first job in Chicago. But I’m left in doubt about everything that followed from there. That’s when he was in Dallas, according to Bloom.
I understand now that my husband is a liar but there’s one detail in particular that confuses me. Guy went back to using his first name when he moved to Miami, but why did he decide to go by Rich when he moved to Dallas? Maybe there’d been trouble in Chicago as well, trouble that he was trying to distance himself from. I wonder if he’d cooked the books other places, like at the medical center.
Cooking the books. I jerk forward in the chair, remembering the night Guy fretted because he said the numbers weren’t coming out the right way. Has he embezzled from the opera company, too?