Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!

Chapter Sixteen — The Price of Eighteen

Vivian Ashcroft’s eighteen percent was the problem on the board, and the solution to the problem was that Vivian Ashcroft was, and had always been, a woman who could not resist a bargain she was not supposed to have.

They did not approach her directly. That was Maren’s instruction, and it came from eleven years of study of her stepmother: never approach Vivian with a proposal. Approach her with a secret. Vivian had no interest in transactions; she had interest in advantages. She would buy anything she believed was off the market, and she would sell anything she believed was on fire, and the trick was to make it look like both at once.

So on the second Monday, a woman named Carla Farrow called Vivian Ashcroft’s cell phone.

Carla Farrow existed. Maren had verified her — a real broker’s license, real registrations, a real small office in Woburn that had been paid a real retainer to accept a file and make some calls. What Carla Farrow did not know was who was paying her, because Carla Farrow did not need to know, and Maren had made sure of that with a structure that had taken her three days to design and that a forensic accountant would need two years to unwind.

“Mrs. Ashcroft,” Carla said. “I represent a buyer. I understand you hold eighteen percent of a firm on State Street.”

“What buyer.”

“A family office.”

“Which family office.”

“I’m not permitted to say.”

“Then goodbye.”

“I understand,” Carla said — the exact words Maren had written for her, down to the comma — “that you might want to hear the number first.”

Vivian did not hang up.

That was the whole hinge of it. Maren had told Carla exactly what would happen: Vivian would hear the phrase a family office, and Vivian would hear the word permitted, and her entire nervous system would light up with the specific pleasure of being on the inside of something. Vivian Ashcroft had spent twenty-six years being the second wife of a man whose first wife was still, in every Boston drawing room, the standard against which she was measured. She had married for access and had never gotten inside the door. She was the kind of woman a discreet buyer could hold for three weeks with nothing but the correct adjectives.

Vivian counter-offered on the following Friday, and Carla held. Vivian counter-offered again on Tuesday, and Carla held, and mentioned — as instructed — that the family office was also speaking to a group in Chicago about a similar position in a different firm, and would need to conclude by the end of the month.

Vivian called the next morning with a price.

Two point one million dollars, cash, for eighteen percent of a firm whose shares had not been valued above eight hundred thousand dollars in eleven years. It was not the highest price Vivian could have gotten. It was, in fact, exactly the price Maren had told Carla to accept, because Maren had calculated the number that Vivian Ashcroft could not say no to and could not brag about, and the number was two point one, and Vivian said it out loud at eleven forty on a Wednesday, in a voice that was trying very hard to sound bored.

“Done,” Carla said.

“There has to be a closing,” Vivian said. “I want my money—”

“There will be a closing. In Boston. On a date we’ll confirm.” Carla paused, on the script. “One condition, Mrs. Ashcroft. The buyer wants the transaction quiet. There will be no public announcement until the buyer is ready. If you speak about it to anyone — including your husband — the buyer will walk, and there is no second offer.”

Vivian Ashcroft agreed instantly, enthusiastically, and lied about it on the very same afternoon.

Maren heard about the lie three days later, from a source she had not built and would not have thought to build: Ines.

Ines had family in Boston. Ines had a cousin who cut hair in the salon where Camille’s stylist worked, and Camille’s stylist had a chairmate who did Vivian’s color, and Vivian’s colorist had heard, on a Thursday afternoon, while Vivian was sitting under the dryer, a phone conversation that Vivian had conducted with a friend in a voice pitched precisely loud enough to be overheard.

“She’s telling people she’s selling out of wisdom,” Ines reported, standing in the doorway of Maren’s office with a tray. “That’s the word. She told her card group that she has information about the firm that makes her think it’s time to exit, and that she’s not allowed to say what, and that she sold to a family office that she ‘can’t discuss.'”

Maren sat back in her chair.

“She took the confidentiality clause,” she said, “and she used it as a status marker.”

“She used it as jewelry,” Ines said, unbothered. “That’s how she’s always been. You know she used to tell people the scar on your face was from—”

“Ines,” Maren said.

Ines closed her mouth.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. That was—”

“It’s fine.” Maren turned back to her screen. “What did she used to say?”

Ines looked at the tray for a while.

“She used to say you’d been in an accident,” she said. “At the club. When people asked. She’d say, Oh, poor Adelaide, there was an accident when she was small, and then she’d change the subject before anyone could ask which accident, because if they asked which accident, she’d have to say that your mother died in it, and that would make it a sad story, and a sad story is a heavy thing, and Vivian Ashcroft has never in her life picked up anything heavy.” Ines put the tray down. “She’d say it in the exact voice you’d use to describe a dog that limps.”

Maren sat very still.

“You’ve been listening to her for eleven years,” she said.

“I’ve been working in that house’s satellite operations for eleven years,” Ines said. “The Boston house uses our service in the summer. I’ve seen the family four times a year for eleven years. I know how Camille takes her coffee. I know your father’s accountant’s name. I know that they have a room in the attic with forty boxes of your mother’s belongings that they never opened and never threw away, and I know that because I’m the one who goes up there twice a year to check the roof.” She picked the tray back up. “The master says you’re not to think about the house. He says you’ve got a machine to build.”

“He said that?”

“Word for word,” Ines said, and went out.

Maren sat in the windowless room for a long time after that.

Then she opened a new file and typed a heading at the top: Attic, Commonwealth Avenue — forty boxes, Estelle Marchetti Ashcroft.

And underneath it, she typed: Add to the day-after list.