Page 18 of Old Money
He nods at the room, a blank expression on his face.
“Hey,” I say, leaning sideways to catch his gaze. “Don’t know if you caught that, but I said you were right. About staying with you all.”
He nods. “Of course. You’re family, Alice. We don’t have much of that left.” He turns, somber, and locks eyes with me. “I just wish you’d tell me what you’re really doing here.”
My breath catches. I grasp at my stash of prebaked answers—the stuff about reparative experiences and closure, or something like that—but I can’t quite get ahold of them. So I just look back at my brother and nod. We stand there, listening to the thump and holler from upstairs. Theo turns to leave. He waves good night without looking back.
***
I wait until the house is still and I’m that certain everyone’s asleep. Then I reach under the bed, pull out my smallest suitcase and turn the dial on its tiny combination lock. It’s light—the only things in here are four pairs of shoes lined up in vinyl shoe bags, and beneath them, my laptop and thick manila file of printed forms. They’re already signed and notarized, I just need to do a once-over for typos before I bring them to the police station. Tomorrow is my first day of work, and I already have lunch plans: I’m filing a request for all police records related to the death of Caitlin Dale.
This is just a first step, and mostly ceremonial. I don’t expect to get much from village PD (and I loathe the idea of asking them for anything), but I need a public record showing that I tried. I’ll likely spend the rest of my life in some degree of legal trouble over what I plan to do here. I don’tplanto break the law, but if I have to, I won’t hesitate—I won’t mind a bit.
I’m getting Patrick Yates. That’s what I’m really doing here.
Starting tomorrow, I’m going to scrape the whole village for evidence. There’s plenty of it out there—plenty of mouths keptpolitely shut all these years, many of them glugging cocktails at the club right now. Maybe there’s even some physical evidence locked up in somebody’s dusty old safe.
How I’ll get any of this, I don’t know. I’ve got some ideas and I’ve got the summer. All I know is I have to try, and I have to trynow, when all eyes are on the village again. I’ll get whatever I can, and then I’ll report it—not to the cops this time, but to everyone. I’m going to the media and those creepy murder fans to tell them what I know and what I saw twenty years ago. I’ll tell them another thing too: my name.
I flip the last form over and stack it on top of the others, closing the file. I slip it carefully into my tote, then lift the bag and tuck it between the bed and the nightstand. I look down at it for a moment, then lean over, tutting at myself, and zip the tote bag shut with its tiny, decorative zipper. My eyes are dry and clicky, but I’m exhausted in a wired way. I lie back, settling into the fresh sheets and firm, new-smelling pillow.
Make no mistake—I want Patrick Yates locked up and legally demolished. I’ll involve law enforcement eventually, but I can’t go to them first. I reported Patrick “the right way” back when I was the child witness, and I failed. I can’t let that happen again. I need to make it impossible for his family or this village to protect him this time. Because this time, unbelievably, the stakes are even higher.
I pull out my phone, open Instagram, my thumb navigating automatically to the post—the one I stare at every night, sometimes until I fall asleep. It’s a macabre ritual, like picking at a wound until it bleeds again. But I do it—I’ve done it every night for the last four months, because some small, pathetic part of me still thinks it might be gone.Maybe she’s deleted it.Maybe it was never there.
It’s there tonight though. The picture appears before my eyes, each pixel of it painfully familiar and still unthinkably strange. Susannah faces the camera, standing on a beach beneath a duskysunset. Her dark, black-coffee curls have been ironed straight and lightened to a warm chestnut. Her cheeks are pink from the sun, and she’s laughing hard, eyes closed and mouth wide open, showing her molars. She holds her left hand up, displaying the ring.
The man with his arms around her waist looks freshly tanned too—but then, he always did. His head is bent against her shoulder. He wears a reverent smile. His eyes are closed, but even so, he’s instantly familiar. I’d know Patrick anywhere.
Chapter Nine
“And over here’s the library. Usually dead this time of day.”
Jamie opens the door. A fire is crackling in the old stone hearth, despite the fact that nobody’s in here, and also, it’s June.
“Don’t tell me they still keep it lit all summer,” I whisper. It’s approaching eighty degrees outside, and it’s barely 10:00 a.m. “Have these people heard of climate change?”
“Yes, they do, and no, they have not. You don’t have to whisper in here, by the way.”
I shake my head, embarrassed. The library was a no-kid zone when I was growing up, and we all knew to keep silent even walking by, lest we disturb one of the cranky old men who camped out there all afternoon, napping beneath theWall Street Journal.
“Old habits,” I say, speaking up.
Jamie nods, understanding, and waves us back into the lobby.
“You might want to keep quiet about climate change though.”
Jamie is taking me on an orientation tour that I don’t need. I told him as much when I arrived this morning, hauling my bulky tote bag and wearing Jules’s shoes. Jamie sent me the dress-code document last night, attached to an ominous one-line email:Okay. Here it is.Reviewing it this morning, I understood. As a female staffer, there are two types of shoes I may wear: oxfordlace-up or penny loafer, “white only.” I’ll have to hit the mall later, to find a knee-length skirt in “buff khaki,” “buttercup” or—wait for it—“true white.” No pockets allowed. Today I’m making do in Jules’s beige oxfords, which are both too long and too narrow for me, and a skirt which isregularkhaki and has one back hip pocket.
“But it’s sewn shut,” I told Jamie. “Purely decorative.” Then he told me my shirt wasn’t white enough.
I’m now wearing a club-issued polo shirt, in the signature crème de menthe green. My white blouse—with its non-regulation-gray buttons—is stuffed inside my tote, hanging from one of the hooks in Jamie’s office. I’d hesitated to leave my bag, filled as it was with all my police forms. But I didn’t have much choice. Jamie had given me the shirt and pointed me toward the break room, saying I could change there and leave my bag in any open cubby. I’d paused, and he’d looked at me with concern and confusion—a combination that looks a lot like suspicion.
“Or my office, if you prefer to leave it there?” he’d added. “It’s not locked either though.”
“Perfect,” I’d said, feigning relief. “Some things never change!”
Now I remember though—nothingchanges. The clubhouse is just as it was twenty years ago. The further we get into orientation, the more I recall: the toilet in the powder room that was always running (still there, still running). The grill menu, with the same four lunch items: turkey club, Caesar salad, blackened chicken and the clam chowder that no one ever orders. Even the ashtrays are still here, as is indoor smoking.
