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

Chapter Seventeen — The Invitation

The envelope arrived at the house on Commonwealth Avenue on a Tuesday in September, in the second post, and it sat in the silver tray on the hall table for four hours before anyone opened it, because nobody in that house had opened the second post in four weeks.

That was the state the family was in by then.

Nobody in the house had heard a single word from Maren Ashcroft since the night the black sedan had pulled out of the driveway. Nobody had heard a single word from the syndicate either. The debt had not been called. The men had not come. The phone had not rung, and the silence had gone on so long and so completely that the three of them had begun to organize their lives around not talking about it — which is, as anyone knows, the most exhausting way to live.

Gordon assumed she was dead. He assumed it in the specific, careful, compartmentalized way he assumed everything: he had a drawer in his mind where the fact lived, and he opened the drawer for eleven seconds in the morning, and then he shut it, and he went to the office and lost more of the firm’s money in small respectable increments.

Vivian assumed she was dead too, but Vivian’s assumption had a cost attached, and the cost was that she had started drinking earlier and earlier in the day, and that she had begun to talk in her sleep, and that two weeks earlier she had fired the housekeeper’s daughter for looking at her in a way she did not like.

Camille assumed her sister was dead, and Camille had, in the four weeks since Maren left, discovered something about herself that was not pleasant: that without Maren in the house, the house had no floor, and that she had been standing on her sister for her entire life without noticing. Camille had never once made a decision in her life that did not have Maren’s arithmetic under it — the trust distributions, the horse deductions, the quarterly checks, the small quiet moves that had kept the family’s finances from collapsing into scandal while the family walked around thinking of themselves as solvent. With Maren gone, the numbers had begun to do what unnoticed numbers do: they had begun to look at Camille.

And then there was the other thing, the thing that nobody in the house had said out loud and everybody knew: the invitation.

The second post arrived on Tuesday. The envelope was heavy cream with a hand-calligraphed address, and it sat in the silver tray through the afternoon, and at five, when Gordon came home and poured his first drink, Camille finally picked it up.

She opened it with a letter knife at the hall table, standing up, and read it three times.

Then she sat down on the bottom step of the staircase, in her skirt, with her legs together and her heels on the second step and the invitation in her lap, and said, in a voice that was all wrong:

“Daddy.”

The invitation read as follows. It was engraved. It cost a great deal of money.

Mr. Lucian Vescari requests the honor of your presence at the marriage of his bride, Maren Estelle Ashcroft, to himself, on Saturday the twelfth of October, at six o’clock in the evening, at the Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston. Black tie. Dinner and dancing to follow. Please present this card at the door.

And along the bottom, in smaller type, in the space where a wedding invitation usually says Reception to follow or Adults only:

The bride’s family is seated at Table Three.

They sat in the drawing room with it and did not know what to do.

“She’s alive,” Camille kept saying. She said it seven times in twenty minutes, in a voice that got higher each time, and by the seventh time it had stopped sounding like relief and had started sounding like a diagnosis. “She’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive —”

“Stop,” Gordon said.

“— she’s alive and she’s marrying him and she invited us—”

“Stop,” Gordon said.

Vivian was on the sofa with a glass, looking at the invitation on the coffee table the way a person looks at a photograph of a car accident they were nearly in.

“It’s a trap,” she said.

“Obviously it’s a trap,” Gordon said. He had not sat down. He had been walking the length of the room, from the fireplace to the window and back, for ten minutes, and his hands were behind his back and his fingers were working. “Of course it’s a trap. The question is what he wants. If he wanted us dead he wouldn’t send a card, he’d send men. If he wanted money he’d have called the office.” He stopped at the window. “He wants us in a room.”

“He wants us at Table Three,” Camille said. “That’s what it says. The bride’s family is seated at Table Three. Front. Daddy, we’re at the front, in a ballroom, at the wedding of a man who—”

“— who has not spoken to us in a month and a half,” Vivian said flatly. “Which means something happened up in those mountains. Which means—” She stopped. She drank. She set the glass down and picked it up again. “Which means she didn’t get thrown out. Which means she’s been in that house for six weeks.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Camille looked at the invitation again, and read the name, and something crossed her face that she was not able to stop and would have been appalled to see.

Maren Estelle Ashcroft.

She had never once seen her sister’s middle name written down. She had not known her sister had a middle name.

“She’s going to be a Moretti,” Camille said softly. “Or a Vescari, or whatever he calls himself. She’s going to be married to him.” She looked up at her father. “Daddy, I’m supposed to be married to Preston in three months.”

There was a silence.

“About Preston,” Gordon said.

The engagement had ended the previous Thursday. Camille had not told her father the whole truth of it, because the whole truth was that Preston Hale had called her on the Thursday afternoon from a car, in the middle of the afternoon, without any preamble, and had said:

“Camille, I have to ask you something and I need you to be honest with me.”

“Of course,” Camille had said, in her brightest voice, from her bedroom window seat.

“Is it true that Ashcroft Whitfield is being investigated by the SEC.”

Camille had laughed. It had come out wrong — a little high and a little late — and she had heard it land in the phone line like a dropped plate.

“Who told you that?”

“Randy’s father is on the board at the Bank,” Preston said. “And there’s a rumor going around the club that your father is exposed on something. And there’s another rumor, which I don’t want to say out loud, but I’m going to.” A pause, and then, with the awful carefulness of a very young man about to be very cold: “Is it true that a woman named Maren Ashcroft is the one who—”

“There’s no such person,” Camille said. She did not know why she said it. It came out of her on its own, like something that had been waiting fifteen years. “There’s no such person, Preston. There’s no sister. Whatever you’ve heard, it isn’t that.”

Preston Hale was quiet for a moment.

“Okay,” he said. “Then I think we should take a break.”

“A break.”

“Just a break. For a while. Until things settle.”

“For how long, Preston.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

And he had hung up, and she had sat in the window seat with the phone in her lap for three hours, and had not cried, and had gone down to dinner and told her mother that Preston had had a family thing, and had told her father nothing at all.

Now, in the drawing room, with the invitation on the coffee table, Gordon said: “Preston called me on Friday. He asked me whether the firm was solvent.”

Camille’s face went white.

“I told him it was,” Gordon said. “He asked me what I meant by solvent. He asked me if I meant liquid. He asked me — my daughter’s fiancé asked me, on the telephone, on a Friday — whether I could cover a note of fifteen million dollars if it were called.”

“And what did you say?” Vivian said.

“I said yes,” Gordon said.

Vivian Ashcroft began to laugh.

It was not a pleasant sound. It was the sound of a woman in a velvet sofa in a drawn room at the end of a Boston summer, looking at a cream engraved card on a coffee table, laughing at her husband of twenty-six years.

“We’re going,” she said, when she was done. “Of course we’re going. We’re going to sit at Table Three, and we’re going to eat his food, and we’re going to stand there while that girl — that girl, Rock, that girl you kept in a library — marries a man with an army, and we are going to smile at every single person in that room.” She picked up her glass. “Because if we don’t go, he will come here, and he will come here week after next, and I will not be sitting in this room when that happens.”

Camille was looking at the invitation.

At the name.

Maren Estelle Ashcroft.

Table Three.

She had the strangest feeling, sitting on the velvet sofa in a house she had never once left, that she had already been seated — that the invitation had not arrived at this house today, but had been written years ago, in a library above the kitchen, by a girl in thick glasses whom nobody in the family had ever once thought to look at directly.