Travis Beecher glanced out the window at my car. “You sure that’s all you want for that gas-guzzler?”
“It’s all I have on me right now,” I said. “And, actually, can you make it seven, and I’ll take a can of Coke, too?”
I hadn’t had so much as a sip of water before I’d left the house; in fact, I hadn’t had anything to drink since I’d left Woodscape. The realization made me suddenly, incredibly parched, as if all the spit had been sucked from my mouth. Soda isn’t supposed to quench your thirst, but right then it was all I wanted.
“Coke is a buck-fifty,” he told me.
Subtract that from eight dollars, and I’d barely have enough left for two gallons.
“Actually, would you mind letting me fill it with eight dollars of gas?” I asked. “I’m headed to the bank now, so if you can just give me the soda on credit, I’ll come straight back with cash when I’m done. I promise.”
I was asking for a loan of a dollar and fifty cents, which was just about the most pathetic thing I’d ever done.
Even more pathetic—Travis Beecher turned me down.
“Sorry,” he said. “We don’t sell things on credit.”
I felt a rush of anger, and I wanted to shout: You must be kidding me! Your son is living at my house, rent-free, and probably even raiding our cash supply! You should be handing me a case of Cokes—and throwing in bags of Doritos! Instead, my mouth set straight, I pushed the eight dollars toward him. Keep calm, and game on. I’d be an actor to everyone this summer. “All for gas?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“If you come back later with more money, you can buy the soda then,” he offered.
I didn’t bother to reply. From behind me came a rustle, then someone’s voice: “Here, let me help.”
I turned around, and there, in the flesh, was Charlie Copeland. As in Charlie Copeland. The son of Senator Franklin Copeland, and the grandson and great-grandson of a couple former presidents.
If America had a royal family, the Copelands were it. Though lots of people said the line of succession would stop with Charlie. Like the other members of his family, Charlie often had his picture show up in the papers, but not for the same reasons. Charlie was usually snapped while out partying, with an arm slung around Shelby Rhodes, his rock-star girlfriend. A few months ago he’d been arrested for picking a fight with a photographer who’d had the temerity to take a picture of him and Shelby making out in a hotel lobby, when Charlie was supposed to be in lockdown in his dorm at Grosvenor-Baldwin Academy for some other school-rule infraction. GBA was quite possibly the most exclusive boarding school in the country. It basically had a one-hundred-percent Ivy League matriculation record for graduating seniors. Charlie was summarily kicked out, even though generations of Copelands had attended the school. Half of its buildings were built on the Copeland dime and named after the family. I remembered talking to Lennox about it at the time, as if the trials and tribulations of the Copelands were things that actually affected us. “Who would kick out a Copeland?” she’d said, incredulous. The incident was, according to the gossip columns, a major blow to the entire clan.
Now Charlie was just standing there in the Exxon–Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk, like anyone, with a cup of coffee in his hand. I hadn’t known that anyone else was there. But of course someone was; I’d pulled up behind another car, a Porsche.
Charlie Copeland would drive a Porsche.
As far as I knew, the Copelands rarely used their Idlewild home. Though even when they weren’t there, it was still well kept and fully staffed. Mrs. Copeland’s hairdresser spent at least a few weeks there every year. That was according to Lennox, whose moms had been called in to submit blueprints for a new yoga studio in one of the guest cottages while we were away at school. (They didn’t get the job.)
I’d only ever seen Charlie in person once before, back when he was a chubby, towheaded five-year-old and the Copelands used the estate for themselves, not just for guests. I’d been five then myself, too young to know who the Copelands even were. Instead, I’d been focused on the fact that Gigi was delivering a cake to a party, and it was my job to hold it steady in my lap. Charlie and I had both grown up a lot since then. He had slimmed down, and his chest and shoulders had filled out. I’d never seen anyone wear a plain gray T-shirt quite so well. He had khaki shorts, cinched with a rope belt. His hair was fresh-from-the-shower wet and combed back from his forehead. It looked dark brown, but I knew from all the pictures in magazines that it was actually lighter, sandy-colored. In the mug shot seen ’round the world, it was long and hung partly in front of his face.
“So, could I?” he asked me.
At that moment I realized my mouth was a gaping O. I closed it, but then I opened it again to speak. “Could you what?”
“Help you out? It’d be no problem.” He smiled, eyes crinkling. In his free hand he held up a brown leather wallet.
Suddenly it was like Woodscape all over again, having a witness to my humiliation. I deeply regretted being all principled and making good on my bet to Beth-Ann. If I had that extra twenty bucks right now . . .
“So,” he said to Travis Beecher, who seemed unruffled by Charlie Copeland’s presence. Perhaps he didn’t know who Charlie was. “I’m at pump three, and I’m going to fill up with premium unleaded. And I have the coffee, and I’ll take a soda, too.” He turned back to me. “You said a Coke, right?”
“Yes, I said a Coke, but—”
“And do you need to fill up?”
“Don’t worry about what I need,” I told him. “I can take care of it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to imply that you couldn’t. I was just aiming for Mr. Nice Guy.” He paused for a beat. “I guess I missed the mark.”
I took a deep breath. “No, I’m sorry. You caught me on a bad day.”
“How about this—we’ll make it a loan. I’ll front you the money now, and you can pay me back at my party tomorrow night. It’s actually my parents’ party, so there’ll be loads of old men with trophy wives talking about the stock market and their golf handicaps. You can’t tell me you’re willing to turn all that down.”
Wait, I just told off Charlie Copeland, and now he was inviting me to a party—a party his parents would be hosting?
“Hold this, please.” He thrust his coffee at me and opened his wallet to retrieve the bills. When he turned back to me, man, his jaw was square. I felt like I was in a trance, watching him.
“What?” Charlie asked.
“Nothing,” I said, blinking fast.
He rattled off the address of the Compound—that was the name of his family’s estate, a smattering of smaller houses like planets orbiting around one enormous, sprawling, stone building known as the Main—as if it were possible I wouldn’t have known it. Even if I’d never been there, I would’ve known it. Everyone did.
“So, you’ll come? Eight o’clock, tomorrow night. It’s the Fourth of July, you know.”
I nodded. “And thanks for the loan,” I said finally, sheepishly. “I’m Lorrie.”
“You’re welcome, Lorrie. I’m Charlie.” Like he had to tell me his name. “I’ll see you then.”
5
IT’S REALLY NOT THAT SIMPLE
THOUGHTS OF CHARLIE COPELAND PERSISTED IN spite of the task at hand. I tried not to dwell on lingering impressions of his smile, his crinkly eyes, the perfect break of his broad shoulders . . .
Concentrate, Lorrie, I admonished myself silently. Think about your money.
The bulk of the Hollander estate was fairly depleted by the time my grandparents died. Grandpa’s communities had long since been divided up and sold off. Even so, Mom and Aunt Gigi had each inherited a wad of money, in addition to joint ownership of the house, which they used on weekends. During the week, my mother worked as exhibits director at a museum in Manhattan. She lived off her salary and invested her inheritance wisely. But of course Gigi was foolish about her share; she’d wanted to be an artist, and she’d i
nvested in a gallery that went belly-up. She’d wanted to act, and she’d spent thousands on lessons of the craft but never earned back a dime. She didn’t work a day in her life, and when she ran out of money, she moved into Edgewater full-time and relied on Mom to help keep up with her bills. Further evidence that Mom’s trust should now be in my hands, not hers.
When I walked into Idlewild Fidelity, I made a beeline for the customer-service desk at the back, chin up and gaze unfixed so as not to make eye contact with any of the other customers. Idlewild was a small town, and there were a lot of people I wanted to avoid.
“What can I do for you?” the woman behind the counter asked pleasantly.
“Is there a manager I can speak to?”
“Take a seat,” she said, waving toward a row of chairs, her voice now a little sharper. I hadn’t meant to offend her sense of competency, but I wanted to start at the top of the food chain. “I’ll see if anyone’s available.”
Twenty minutes later I was finally ushered into a small back office by a man whose name tag, JIM TRAYLOR, had me thinking about all the drives out to Idlewild we’d taken from the city in Mom’s Volvo, her James Taylor CD the soundtrack to our ride. Our favorite was “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You” because Mom would put Susannah’s and my names into the lyrics. I had no idea what had happened to that car. Had Mom shipped it across the ocean? Or driven it to the airport and left it there?
Jim Traylor listened as I recited my information—name, date of birth, social security number—and he punched keys on his keyboard as I explained my objective. “I’m not trying to be spiteful or hurt my aunt or anything like that. I just want what’s mine, and I’d like to get the ball rolling. So, if you could tell me exactly what needs to be done and how to do it . . .”
“It’s really not that simple.”
“I know, I know. I’m under eighteen. But aren’t there cases where minors can get control of their own money? Is that power of attorney? Is there a form for it?”
“That’s not the problem,” he said.
“So, what is? Do I need to bring my aunt in? I can probably make that happen within a few days.”
Traylor tapped one last tap on his keyboard, then pushed the screen so that I could see it. “Miss Hollander, your checking account, your joint checking account with your sister, and your savings account are all at a negative balance.”
The screen was a spreadsheet, each column in the red. My chest tightened in fear.
Years before, Gigi had taken Susannah and me to a meditation class. The teacher taught us to close our eyes and repeat a mantra—a private, nonsense word he gave each of us—to calm down and become Zen. Predictably, Susannah was all into it, and I thought it was hokey and strange. But right then I closed my eyes for a couple beats longer than a blink and said my mantra in my head—yim, yim—while Jim Traylor waited for me to respond.
Finally, I did: “This is precisely why I need to have control of the trust,” I told him. “Because my aunt is not responsible enough to keep track of bills and bank balances on her own. Once I’m in control, I’ll transfer money over, and Susannah and I can get out of the red.”
“I suppose that’s what I’m trying to explain.” Jim Traylor’s hands, skimming over his computer keyboard, were pale, as if they’d known only this windowless office, time unending. “There is no trust.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. I laughed, and it sounded strange, as if I were making the sound from underwater. “Of course there is.”
I’d seen the letter from Mom, explaining it all. She needed her freedom, Mom had written to Susannah and me; in exchange, she was leaving us, her two daughters, all the money her father had given her, now augmented with the interest she’d earned over the years. She’d start fresh in England with Nigel. She’d included a bunch of syrupy, Hallmark-card assurances about what wonderful daughters we were, how she wanted only the best for us. I love you forever and ever, my lovely Lorrie and my sweet Susannah. Love, Mom. I had clung to that letter, along with the cards that came on Chanukah, our birthdays, and occasionally on random holidays like Valentine’s Day or Halloween. She ended them the way she’d always ended the notes she’d stuck in my kindergarten lunchbox: a stick drawing of her, Susannah, and me. Mom in the middle with her arms around her two girls. “The Three Musketeers,” she’d called us. But we weren’t a threesome anymore, at least not that one.
As time went by, notes from Mom arrived less and less frequently, and the ones I’d saved seemed to mock all she’d taken away. Up to the attic they went. Out of sight and out of mind.
Jim Traylor’s voice broke me from my thoughts. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” he asked.
“But . . .” I began. “But the trust is there. I know it is—at least I know it was. My mother set it up. It was supposed to last us . . . oh, I don’t know how long it was supposed to last, but certainly at least until I finished high school.”
But sitting there, across from Jim Traylor, I realized how implausible that was. Gigi hadn’t been able to make her own trust fund last; how could she have managed ours?
“According to our records, Miss Hollander,” he said, “there’s no trust. And I have no record of you ever having one.”
“You’re making a big mistake,” I told him.
With that sentence came a horrible sense of déjà vu. I’d said those words before, just about twenty-four hours ago, when I sat in front of Pamela Bunn and her battered desk.
But Pamela hadn’t made a mistake, and it was entirely possible that Jim Traylor hadn’t, either. The common denominator in all of it was Aunt Gigi. What had she done with our money? And how had she managed to erase all record of its existence?
Was this all just a game to her?
I didn’t know. What I knew for sure was this: I had no money to my name, a horse stranded five hundred miles away, and a tank of gas bought on credit from a stranger, and I had to get to the bottom of it.
6
WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU
MY HANDS WERE SHAKING AS I FUMBLED WITH MY cell phone to call Lennox. It took me three tries to press the right buttons, but then instead of ringing, a mechanical voice informed me that my phone bill was past due. It went on to recite a phone number for AT&T. “Press one to be connected now, or call back at your earliest convenience.” Digits were recited, but I hung up before the recording was done. The cell-phone issue would have to take a backseat to all the others.
I went straight home to confront Gigi, storming into the house and not even noticing the smell. Maybe because I hadn’t bothered to inhale; I just screamed, “Gigi! Gigi!” BP or not, she was going to have to give me some answers. Right now.
“GIGI!”
“Lorrie?” came a call from the kitchen.
Gigi was standing by the counter when I walked in, all dressed up in a flapper dress, low-waisted, with fringe on the bottom. Behind her, the radio was plugged back in, and I could just make out her favorite oldies station coming in through the static.
“Darling girl!” she exclaimed, and she swooped toward me, arms wide open.
I ducked out of her embrace. “I just came from Idlewild Fidelity. They said all our accounts are in the red.”
“Mmm-hmm.” A L’Eggo My Eggo waffle popped up in the toaster, and Gigi turned back to grab it with her bare hands. “Ouch, ouch.” She dropped it straight onto the counter—no plate.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“How am I supposed to know the ins and outs of how they conduct business at that bank—if they keep accounts in the red or in the green or in the mauve? That’s their business.”
“According to them, it means we don’t have any money.”
“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” she said, bending down to adjust the strap on one of her shoes. “Worrying is pointless. Worrying is negative goal setting.”
“Give me a break,” I said. Gigi barely lifted her head. “Look at me,” I demanded.
When she looked
up, she lifted a foot to show off a five-inch heel, as delicate as a Cinderella slipper, crystal-detailed, with a black patent-leather strap. “What do you think?” she asked.
“I don’t care about your goddamn shoe,” I told her.
“This isn’t a shoe,” she said. “It’s a Louboutin.” She drawled the word out as only Gigi could: Lou-bouuuu-tahhhhn.
But I knew the brand from its trademark red sole, and I knew that a pair of them cost upward of a thousand dollars.
“I got them for my party,” she said.
“What party?”
“My birthday party, of course.” She shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe I was so dense. “You only turn forty-two once, and I’m planning a big celebration. It’d be a shame to limp around my own party because I didn’t have the forethought to break in my new shoes. Though sometimes shoes don’t break in no matter how hard you try. I could write a book about it—When Bad Shoes Happen to Good People. I have a feeling this strap will be a problem. A design flaw I’d never—”
I cut her off. “Do you even hear yourself when you speak?”
“I’m an excellent designer,” Gigi said with a bit of indignation. “I used to design all my own clothes. You were just too young to remember.”
“Jim Traylor at Idlewild Fidelity said there isn’t a trust at all,” I told her. “Design your way out of that.”
“The trust isn’t at Idlewild Fidelity anymore,” Gigi said. “I moved it.”
“You moved it? Why?”
“It’s not good to stay in one place,” said the woman who barely left the house anymore.
“So, where is it?”
“Enough of the twenty questions,” Gigi said. “What I do with the money is not your concern.”
“It’s the very definition of my concern,” I said. “Susannah’s, too. Mom set up the trust for us.”
“I had plans of my own, you know. I put everything on hold to raise you girls, and you just keep hitting me up with your demands.”
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