Page 20 of Most Eligible Billionaire

I brace myself for the bad news.

She smiles, widening her eyes. “It’s up to Smuckers, of course! Have you not been payingattention?”

I watch incredulously as she repositions the dog in her arms so that he faces us, eyes and nose like three raisins in a white cotton-candy cloud.

“What do you prefer, Smuckers? Would you like Henry Locke to write us a check for four point five million dollars? Or would you prefer to take your place alongside him as a visionary member and major shareholder on the board of Locke Worldwide?”

I swallow, mystified. Is she messing with us?

“Smuckers, concentrate,” she says, with a sly glimpse my way. “Do you want some money now? Or to vote on pressing issues while drawing a monthly stipend of seventy-five thousand?”

My blood races. I don’t know what to think—not about any of it. All I know is that she’s on fire. Fierce as an electrical storm, dark clouds flashing bright.

“You have to decide, you just have to. Do it for Jelly Bean,” she adds with a glance at me.

Smuckers wags his little poof of a tail.

“That’s right, boy! That’s right! You decide!”

“Oh, come off it,” I say.

Her lip quivers. Is she scared? Or enjoying this way too much? She turns to me. “You mind?” She turns back to Smuckers. “What do you think, Smuckers? Think hard, because they won’t offer again. It’s an ultimatum. Do you know what that is?”

I fold my arms.

She tilts her head, as if she’s listening with intense curiosity to a communication from Smuckers that she’s not altogether sure about. “Really? That’s your answer? Are you sure? I know, he’s a bit of a bastard.”

She turns to us.

“Smuckers has decided he would prefer to take his seat on the board. As a voting shareholder, with me as his assistant, to interpret his wishes regarding Locke Worldwide.”

Four

Vicky

The insideof the police station is an old friend I never wanted to see again. The shiny institutional surfaces, the hard seats, the sounds of police radios up and down the halls, the emotional distance that the cops and other staffers maintain, everything strangely plain and professional even as you’re scared out of your mind.

And, of course, the little room they make you wait in.

I tell myself it’s different this time, but it doesn’t feel different.

At least I have Smuckers with me. He took a pee on the way here, but he didn’t poop. I’ve got the poop card to play.

I wasn’t on the criminal end during the incident with Denny Woodruff—I was the one who made the accusations and Denny was the one who had to sweat it out in the little room. But after my story was made to look faked, I became the criminal. The false accuser. The one in the little room.

I sat in there alone, thinking I’d be sent to a juvenile facility. Considering home life at the time, it would have been an improvement, except for having to leave Carly unprotected with a mom who’d betray her own daughter for the right price.

Mom wasn’t always that way. There was a sunny “before” picture of us in a tiny but bright little home at the end of a long driveway. I would ride my shiny bike up and down it while Mom and Dad hung out with Carly, a pudgy two-year-old with fat cheeks and a huge smile.

Then Dad died.

The “after” picture was a chaos of lost jobs and increasingly shabby apartments, and us two sisters eating cereal dinners alone in smelly, dirty kitchens. And Mom was either a ball of scary energy or else had the shakes and the weeps and the two-day sleeps. And the kind of boyfriends who were overly friendly to little girls when she wasn’t looking.

The Woodruffs “generously” decided not to press charges; they saw to it that I didn’t get into trouble for supposedly lying to the police, falsifying evidence, and selfishly causing a three-day manhunt. “You owe them a debt of gratitude,” a stern policewoman named Sara told me as she led me out.

I said nothing. I had protested my innocence enough by then to know it was a waste of breath.

I followed Sara out, hungry and tired and beaten down because I’d told the truth and the whole world had turned against me, and I still didn’t understand how those tests came out the way they did, or how Denny’s lies became truth and how my truth became lies. And I didn’t know how I’d get home or if there would be food, or if Carly was okay. She was eight that summer, and Mom would leave her alone to “do errands.”

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