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

Chapter Eighteen — A Month of Dread

Gordon Ashcroft tried four things in the four weeks before the wedding. He tried them in order, and each one of them failed, and the way each one failed told him something he did not want to know about the world he had spent twenty-two years believing he understood.

The first thing he tried was a phone call to the governor’s office.

He had a relationship there. Everyone in Boston banking had a relationship there; that was the entire architecture of the thing. He called a man named Whitlock whom he had taken to lunch eleven times over nine years, and whose brother-in-law he had placed in a job at a fund in Woburn, and he said, carefully, that he had a situation involving a private party with certain interests, and that he wanted to know whether there was any way to get a discreet regulatory presence at a private event. He said the words private event four times. He did not say the word Moretti.

There was a pause on the line long enough to notice.

“Rock,” Whitlock said. “Are you calling me about the Vescari wedding.”

“No,” Gordon said. “I’m calling you about a situation.”

“Because if you were calling me about the Vescari wedding,” Whitlock said, “I would have to tell you that our entire staff has been instructed, as of the fifth of this month, that there is no such thing as a Vescari wedding and no such name as Lucian Vescari and no such event scheduled in this city. And I would have to tell you that we’ve received, from a source I’m not going to describe, a copy of a filing in the Probate Court, and that the Attorney General has also received it, and that the reason both of us are being extremely polite about all of this is that nobody wants to be the person who explains to a federal judge why they interfered with a court-supervised trust reorganization.” Another pause. “If you were calling about that. Which you’re not.”

“I’m not,” Gordon said.

“Good,” Whitlock said. “Give Vivian my best.”

The line went dead.

The second thing he tried was money.

He needed a lawyer, and he needed one who was not already compromised, and he discovered within eleven days that there was no such thing in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He tried four firms. The first said they had a conflict. The second said they had a conflict. The third — a firm in Cambridge with three partners and no syndicate exposure whatsoever — said they would take a preliminary meeting, and canceled it nineteen hours later, and when Gordon called to ask why, the partner said, with a kind of hollow courtesy, “Mr. Ashcroft, I’ve been retained by the Estelle Marchetti Ashcroft Trust, and I’m afraid that’s a conflict. I should tell you that I called four other attorneys on your behalf before I accepted, and all four of them are also conflicted, and one of them asked me to tell you — off the record — to stop calling.”

“The trust,” Gordon said. “The trust can’t retain anyone. The trust is—”

“Administered,” the partner said, “by a trustee who is no longer you, as of the filing on the ninth. The court appointed an independent trustee on an emergency basis. It’s all on the docket, Mr. Ashcroft. I’d suggest you read it. Good evening.”

Gordon sat in his office that night with the phone in his hand and a burn of shame he could not locate on his body. Retained by the trust. His own wife’s trust. Retained against him.

He read the docket at three in the morning on his laptop, in his study, with the door closed, and found that a woman from New York had filed a petition forty pages long, attaching eleven exhibits, and that exhibit six was a page of ledgers in a hand he recognized — a tiny, precise, tightly-spaced hand, the hand of a girl who had never once in her life used a large capital letter — and that exhibit nine was a scan of a blotter from a prime broker showing that on the Tuesday in the spring when fifteen million dollars of the Moretti Syndicate’s money had supposedly evaporated, the trade had been eight hundred thousand dollars and the rest had been wired to the Cayman Islands.

He sat in his study at three in the morning and read that for a long time.

He was not surprised. That was the thing he would remember. He was not surprised at all. He had known, somewhere, in the drawer of his mind where the fact lived, that his daughter had been in the ledgers; he had known it since the night he had come down the stairs and cried and gone back up and added another four thousand dollars to the account. He had known there was a girl in a library who did arithmetic, and he had known, in the same breath, that she was the only person in the world who could ever have found the wire.

He had just never once believed she would use it.

And the third thing he tried — this was the one that hurt, and he tried it on the ninth day, and he tried it alone — was a telephone call to his daughter.

Not to Maren. To Camille.

He called her into the study and closed the door and sat her down and said, “I need you to do something.”

“Anything,” Camille said. She had been sleeping badly; she had circles under her eyes the concealer could not cover, and she had stopped wearing the ring.

“I need you to call her.”

Camille went very still.

“Call who?”

“Your sister.”

“I don’t have a—”

“Don’t,” Gordon said, and his voice came out ragged. “Don’t start that. We’re past that. Listen to me.” He leaned forward across the desk. “She’s your sister and she’s alive and she’s marrying that man in three weeks, and she invited us, Camille. She sent a card. Cards are not what men like him send.” He put both hands flat on the desk. “She’s still in there. Somewhere. The girl who sat in the library and did the numbers and never said a word to anybody. If you call her, if you find her, if you say the right thing—”

“What right thing,” Camille said.

“— then this could be fixed. All of it. She’s a girl, Camille, she’s a girl who has never once been told she mattered by anyone in this family, and she’s about to be married into a—” he stopped, corrected himself, “— into a situation she cannot possibly understand. If someone from this house called her and told her we loved her, if someone from this house asked her to come home, do you understand what that would do?”

Camille Ashcroft looked at her father across the desk with an expression that Gordon had never seen on her before.

“It would do nothing,” she said.

“Camille—”

“Daddy. Listen to me for once.” She sat forward in the chair. “I know you think I’m the shallow one. I know you think I’m the pretty one who thinks about shoes. But I’m the one who lived with her, Daddy, I’m the one who was in that house with her for fifteen years, and I’m going to tell you something that will make you feel bad and it’s true.” She took a breath. “She never once looked at me. Not once. Not when we were kids, not at Christmas, not when I came home from school. She looked at my shoes, she looked at my jewelry, she looked at the invoice for my dresses — and you know what, I did notice, and it did make me feel — ” she stopped, and restarted. “She didn’t hate me because I was pretty. She hated me because I was expensive and I never knew it. She was balancing me. My whole life, she was balancing me, like a line item, and I never once said thank you, because I never once knew, because nobody ever told me a thing.”

“Camille.”

“And now you want me to call her,” Camille said, “and tell her we love her.”

Silence.

“Preston asked me on the phone,” Camille said quietly, “whether she existed. He asked me if there was a woman named Maren Ashcroft. And I said no.” She looked at her father. “I stood in my bedroom and told a man on the phone that my sister does not exist. And I don’t know why I said it, except that I’ve been saying it my whole life, because it’s what this house says, over and over, every day, in every way, in the furniture and the sheets and the way you never once looked at her.” She stood up. “So no. I’m not going to call her. Because when I do, the first thing she’s going to hear on the line is all the s’s in my voice, and she’s going to know exactly what it means, because she has always known everything.”

She walked to the door, and stopped, and said one more thing.

“Send her a gift,” she said. “That’s what we do. That’s what this family has always done. We send a gift.”

The fourth thing Gordon tried was the safe.

It was a large safe, and it was in the wall of the study behind the Kirtland, and nobody in the household except Gordon and his attorney had known about it for eleven years, and it contained his passport, three life insurance policies, a set of bearer bonds, a manila envelope with the phrase CÔTE DORÉE written on it in his own handwriting, and a single black USB stick.

He had found the USB stick in the safe eleven days earlier.

He had not put it there. It was there when he opened the safe to take out the envelope, and he had stood in front of the open safe for four full minutes trying to understand what he was looking at, and then he had understood, and the understanding had gone through him like a fever.

His daughter had been in the safe.

His daughter had been in the safe at some point in the last eleven years, and had left a black USB stick in the back, behind the envelopes, and had closed the door, and had never said a word about it — and Gordon Ashcroft stood in his own study in front of his own safe holding the object in his hand and did the math that a man like him does at four in the morning: if she was in here, she read the envelope, and if she read the envelope, she knows about the account, and if she knows about the account, she knows about the tickets, and if she knows about the tickets, she knows there are three.

Three.

He had bought three.

Gordon Ashcroft sat down in the chair behind his desk with the USB stick in his hand and did not plug it in. He did not want to know what was on it. He had the terrible sense that the contents had been written for him, at some point, by a fourteen-year-old girl with a stitched cheek and a bag of books, and that reading it would be like reading a letter addressed to him from his own foundation, and that he was not able to survive that on a Tuesday at four in the morning with the house asleep above him.

He sat there until the light came up.

Then he put the USB stick back in the safe, in the back, behind the envelopes, exactly where it had been, and he closed the door, and he turned the dial.

He told himself he did it because he needed the evidence to stay there, in his own safe, where he could destroy it before the wedding. That was the story he told himself, and it was a good story, and it fit into the drawer in his mind with all the others, and what he did not tell himself — what he could not, in that house, at that hour, look at directly — was that the thing he had just closed in the safe was not evidence.

It was a message.

And he had put it back exactly where she had left it, as though she were still watching the dial, as though she were still upstairs in the library, as though the whole house were still standing on her.