Page 27 of Old Money
I dug up the clip on YouTube last month, while gathering tidbits on Whitney and Liv. But to my surprise (and dismay), it wasn’t as galling as I’d expected—two decades and a raging opioid epidemic later. The callous comment just read as clueless. Whit Yates, with his crisp tuxedo and salt-and-pepper hair and that easy, unbothered wave—he seemed more archetype than human. He had the same toothy charm as Patrick, but none of the simmering vitriol beneath. He seemed like someone who knew he was untouchable.
He was probably right, I realized—even more so these days. Whit Yates is aformersenator now, but a profoundly influentialone. He and Liv still put their might and money behind their favored candidates, and a photo of them at a fundraiser is considered a potent endorsement. Age has made them even more immune to criticism.They grew up in a different time. That’s how people talked back then. (They’re not nearly as old as everyone seems to think. Then again, they do live in the land of indoor smoking, and golf at a whites-only club.) Furthermore, they’re even wealthier than they were in the ’90s, now that Liv Yates has inherited her own family’s legendary fortune—and the dubious title of “fourth-largest private landholder in New York state.” In other words, I don’t stand a chance against the Great Yateses as an entity—and frankly, I’m less interested in them. Patrick’s the one I’m after.
***
“Alrighty!” Officer Jessie announces, startling me back to the present. “All set here.”
I stand, twisting the sour look on my face into something like a smile.
She slides another paper across the desk.
“Confirmation doc—that’s yours to keep,” she says, talking in her sing-song voice again. “Just need your filing fee. That’s four hundred dollars, and yes, we do take cards.”
Of course it is. Of course you do.
“Processing time is ninety days,” she continues. “But I can’t imagine it’ll take that long.”
“Right,” I say, handing over my credit card. “Slow summer.”
“Oh, it’s not even that,” she says, tapping her keyboard. “No, archived records take forever. But case records likethese—”
She stops, her eyebrows raised, with a tiny but audible gasp. Her hand jerks up toward her mouth, but she forces it back down. This girl has got to get a better game face.
“I’m so sorry.” She shakes her head, her voice lower—older now. “I just, I saw the case information.”
She gestures to my file of forms, closed beside her keyboard (theirforms now).
“And I recognized your name.” She winces. “I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s okay,” I say, quickly and quietly, placing a hand on the desk. “It’s fine, it’s not really a secret that I’m—”
I bend my head, looking pointedly at the file.
“I certainly don’t expect to be anonymous inhere.”
I give her a little laugh, but she just blinks at me with a look of grave concern.
“Of course you are,” she says, distressed. “I mean, I’d never discuss—not with anyone in here. Not like that, like gossip.”
She sighs and taps the space bar, embarrassment drifting across her face.
“No, I know the case, obviously. But I was little when it happened. And my family wasn’t really a part of that scene, you know?”
She taps her nameplate: Applebaum. Suddenly, I’m embarrassed. All those parties I attended with the Dales, thinkingIwas an outsider.
I nod.
Jessie cracks a smile.
“I’m just saying, it’s not like you walked in here and I thought,Ah-hah! It’s her! She’s here to get the case reopened!”
My stomach leaps into my chest, and I look around instinctively, ensuring we are indeed alone. But Jessie’s laughing now.
“No, Alice, I recognized your name because I used to go out with a friend of yours,” she says, relaxed into her cheery self again. “Well, a friend of your brother’s.”
“Oh.” I peer at her, catching up. “Oh! Jamie Burger, yeah!”
“You remember him?”
