Chapter 21
“How do you think Flaubert feels about Emma?” Lucy Jacoby asked the room in general. She was pacing slowly back and forth in front of the rows of desks that ran from the front of the advanced sophomore English class to the back, one hand propping up the elbow of the arm that held her copy of Madame Bovary.
“I think he feels bad for her,” a girl ventured. “I mean, like, she’s got such a boring life. It’s like she lives here.”
A wave of self-conscious tittering rippled through the room and a wad of paper, tossed with precision, struck the girl on the back of the neck. She grinned, delighted with the attention. Will raised his hand. Lucy nodded to him, and he felt a slow flush mount in his cheeks as a few hostile eyes turned in his direction.
“I think he hates her,” he said.
The room fell silent. “Go on,” Lucy said.
“I think he likes watching her sink further and further into her mess, regardless of the stuff she does to distract herself—all the guys, the fantasies of having money and buying things—because he knows she can’t escape the way she is. He takes away everything she cares about until she’s left with just herself. Which is so terrifying that suicide is the only way out.”
“—Of what, Will?”
“Well—out of the loneliness—of living, I guess. Out of knowing that dreams never come true, they’re just life’s way of screwing you for believing things could be different or better. I think Flaubert hated the fact that people like Emma kid themselves into thinking that certain things matter—the clothes they wear, the things they own—to get through the day. He probably did it himself and knew it was pointless. So he took it out on Emma. He made her pay for being human.”
Lucy stared at him as though frozen, her thoughts far away. “Well, that’s one view. A lot of scholars would agree with you. Any other thoughts?” She looked around the room at the group of blank faces. “I’d like you to think about the author’s perspective for tomorrow and be prepared to discuss it at some length. Consider the fact that Flaubert, like all writers, created his character out of thin air, and he made choices when he chose to depict Emma as he did. He chose to subject her to loss after loss—the particularly brutal ones being those of her own making.” She snapped the book shut. There was the sudden sound of chairs scraping the floor as twenty kids shoved themselves away from their desks and made for the door. As his classmates passed him, Will stood up and collected his books into a symmetrical pile, his eyes fixed on them as if they were the only significant thing in his life.
“Will.”
Lucy Jacoby was holding out a paperback. Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher.
“You might try this, if you’re looking for a good read,” she said. “It’s kind of a contemporary riff on Emma, but with American kids your age.”
Will turned the book over in his hands. It was about a girl’s suicide and the friends she left behind. Did his English teacher think he was planning to kill himself? “You want me to write a report on it or something?”
“Just think about it,” she said. “That’s all.”
He was studying the book’s back cover as he stood by his locker later that day, figuring out what he needed for the weekend.
“What’d she give you, Starbuck?”
Sandy Stewart, who had been his friend once, before his life had turned so weird.
Will shrugged. “Thing she wants me to read.” He started to shove the book into his backpack.
“Can I see it?”
He assessed the situation. Sandy’s face wore the closed, wary look he usually adopted with him these days, but it wasn’t obviously hostile. He’d left his football buddies somewhere else. None of them had said a word to Will when he’d shown up at practice Wednesday. Coach had liked his sprint times. Will was trying not to think about the game tomorrow, and whether he’d be allowed to play.
“Sure,” he said.
Sandy flipped through the pages. His dad was an ex-newspaper reporter from Washington who’d moved his family to the island five years ago to write a novel. When Will first met Sandy in middle school, he usually had his nose in a book. Steampunk, fantasy, World War II survival stories. But that was so uncool now. Will waited for him to say something snarky.
A few scraps of paper fluttered out of the paperback and fell to the ground. Sandy stooped to pick them up and tucked them carefully back into the book.
“Can I borrow it when you’re done?”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, dude. I’m bored as shit with the stuff we’re reading.”
“Take it now,” Will said.
“K. I’ll drop it by your house Sunday. See you at the game tomorrow.”
Sandy sauntered off and Will cinched his backpack as though nothing momentous had just happened. But for an instant, a crooked smile flickered over his face.
Chapter 22
The rented toyota was British racing green, a color the Japanese never got right, Peter reflected. It felt like a toy after the solid bulk of the Rover, but it took the steep curve of Hamilton Road responsively under Merry’s surprisingly aggressive driving. He had relaxed once he realized she was competent, and kept one eye on the windshield and the other on the ragged bank to his right. Lined with old Westchester houses set amid trees and well-tended gardens, The Hill, as it was known, seemed exhausted after a summer of heat and bloom and braced for the onslaught of falling leaves. He had immediately warmed to this town, to its echoes of his Greenwich boyhood and its train whistle piercing the air with scheduled chaos. The conviction that in Chappaqua he would find the key to the past strengthened with every switchback in the road.
He had collected Rusty’s ashes from a mortuary in Boston three hours before. Then he and Meredith Folger had caught their second flight of the day, to White Plains. Sky Tate-Jackson had gone straight from Nantucket to New York.
“We need to talk about those letters, Peter,” she said now. Somewhere over Rhode Island, while he’d filled her in on his theory about Rusty’s insider trading with ME stock, she’d finally dropped the formality of “Mr. Mason.”
“I wondered when you’d get around to that.”
“The one to Sundance—an unknown—I think we can ignore for the moment. The ones to Sky Tate-Jackson and your sister have me worried.”
He said nothing, wincing slightly as the car cornered sharply and his weight shifted onto his left side.
She gave him a quick sidelong glance from under her dark brows. “Am I going to have to draw you out in my celebrated fashion?”
“It would seem Sky stepped over the boundary of the law. I’m counting on your celebrated fashion to discover exactly how this afternoon. Rusty seemed to think it was capable of ending his career. I’ll bet it involved helping Rusty on his way out of the country—but who knows?”
So they’d leave George aside for the moment. That was okay. She had all afternoon. “That’d be around the time of the indictment. Sky was where ten years ago?”
“Clerking for an appellate court judge.”
“Guy can get disbarred just for withholding evidence,” Merry said conversationally.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Betcha Sky does.”
Malcolm scott lived just at the apex of The Hill where the road circled and dove back down to the train tracks below. Built in an era when ostentation was considered in poor taste, the house, although huge, had been cast as a modest country cottage with peasant shutters and used brick. When Merry and Peter drove into the gravel drive, an aged golden retriever struggled to its feet and woofed woollily in its throat.
The sound summoned Scott to the apple-green front door. Peter waved to him as they pulled to a halt, struck immediately by the change in the man’s appearance. He stood upright and alone by the lintel, but his once-powerful frame had shrunk, and the sharp-featured head
with its flowing mane of hair was withered and frail.
“Had lunch?” he asked testily, by way of greeting.
“Unfortunately, yes.” Peter had last seen Scott at Max’s funeral, when he had just hit seventy; he must be eighty now. “This is Detective Meredith Folger of the Nantucket police,” he added, as he shook the man’s hand. “It’s good to see you, Mr. Scott. It’s been some time.”
“You’ve grown up. I’ve grown old.” Scott opened the screen door.
Peter motioned Merry ahead of him. She hesitated just inside the doorway, relishing the cool dimness that immediately descended on her sun-struck eyes. The hall smelled vaguely of mothballs and cleanliness. She peered up into second-story rafters, feeling Peter’s height blocking the light behind her.
“In here,” Scott said. The testiness was habitual rather than personal, Merry decided. Scott had moved into a small sitting room, done in yellow-flowered chintz, with wide windows that caught the afternoon sunlight. A woman in a bright orange skirt and a broad straw sun hat stood in the garden. There was a paintbrush in her hand and an easel set up nearby. Merry saw a sharp flash of her late mother.
“Betty,” Scott said, waving vaguely toward his wife. “Sit down.”
Merry settled herself on a couch with her back to the view of Betty Scott and her roses, while Peter took a wing chair facing Malcolm, who sat rigidly at his desk. He had a closed manila file in front of him, and he adjusted the edges restlessly with his thumb and forefinger as he peered at Peter.
“You’ve turned out a fine boy,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
“Yes, it has.”
“You must take after Julia.”
“Her father, actually.”
“Isn’t Max, that’s for sure.”
“I’m supposed to have some of his expressions.”
“Haven’t seen any yet.”
“You’d probably have to make me angry.”
“Well, I might, at that. Not like your brother. Now, he was the image of Maxwell Mason,” Scott said, turning his fierce gaze on Merry. “Didn’t wait for somebody else to make him angry, either. Had the temper of a bull in rut.”
Merry pulled out her laptop and opened it. “Rusty, however, is dead, Mr. Scott,” she said. “His temper—or something else—got him killed.”
“Not surprising.” Scott leaned back in his chair. “That boy lived too long.”
“Maybe.” Merry looked at him severely over her frames. “But I imagine dying isn’t easy at any age.”
“I’m finding it difficult to do myself, and you’d think with eight decades of practice I’d have a little more grace. Doctors say I’ve got a few months yet to learn.”
He opened the manila folder and raised a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles to his nose. He peered at a document carefully, as though seeing it for the first time, and lifted it closer to his face. Then his eyes shifted back to Peter. “You’re here to find out why your father gave up on living, aren’t you? Your brother’s just a side issue.”
Peter considered the old man’s words. “That could be true. I’ve got a gut feeling that whatever happened between the two of them ten years ago ended on my farm this week. That may seem crazy—”
“Seems like common sense. Your brother left town with his business at loose ends; he came back, and some loose ends snared him.”
“You know why he was here?” Merry broke in.
“Haven’t the foggiest. Nosir.”
Merry’s hands hovered over her keyboard. “We had hoped you could tell us about the family rift before Mr. Max Mason’s death,” she said.
“Now, let’s see, that would be—oh, close to ten years ago now, wouldn’t it?” He shifted the papers in the folder as though Max’s death certificate were among them. “How far back in family history do you want me to go? I knew Max Mason thirty-five years.”
“As you know, Mr. Scott, my father died a month after disowning my brother,” Peter said. “A grand jury investigated Rusty for securities fraud, but because of his status as a fugitive from US law—he’d gone to Brazil, and they’re notoriously unresponsive to extradition requests—the indictment was sealed. My father never told us why he broke with my brother, and we never knew exactly what he had done. But when Rusty turned up dead a few days ago, I started to wonder if the past might not have something to do with it.”
“Why?” Scott asked.
“Because of the things Rusty brought with him,” Merry said. “Letters, a photograph, all of them references to the past. It was very much alive for him; we think it’s possible he wanted to reawaken it in a certain group of people. That may be why he was killed.”
“If someone wants the past to remain dead,” Peter said, “you may know why. You were intimately involved in my father’s business. Was it insider trading?”
“For starters,” Scott replied.
“In the stock of a company my father intended to acquire?”
“If you know all about it, why are you here?”
“That’s the extent of my knowledge, Mr. Scott, and to be frank, it’s all speculation on my part.”
“What else have you guessed?”
“That a brush with insider trading wouldn’t be enough for Max to cut off his son.”
“Go on.”
Peter focused on the line where the white ceiling met a butter-yellow wall. “If I think like Rusty, then making money isn’t the point. I go for the bigger prize: power over Max, whom I’ve loved and hated and striven to beat for most of my life.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“I take my knowledge of Max’s plans—the time, the target, the extent of debt-to-asset leverage—to someone else. A White Knight.” He looked at Merry.
“One of Max’s competitors?” she asked.
“Yes. A White Knight can step in with a higher offering price per share than the initial acquirer of a target company—in this case, Mason Enterprises—and foil the takeover attempt.”
“And if Rusty had bought a bunch of the target company’s stock before your father’s takeover bid, he’d ultimately get a higher price for it from the competitor,” Merry suggested.
“Right. Rusty probably laughed all the way to the bank. Until the feds showed up.”
Malcolm Scott gave vent to a high cackle and slapped the file on his desk. “Ten years,” he said. “Ten years I’ve been waiting for one of you idiots to ask me about it. It’s all right here.” He opened the manila folder. “Max’s target was Ultracom, an aerospace firm that was developing unmanned aerial vehicles for combat.”
“Drones,” Peter said.
“He was leveraging everything he’d got,” Scott continued, “banking on the idea that public distaste for the Iraq war would spur the military to risk machines instead of men. He was right, of course. He’d have made a fortune.”
“Enter Rusty,” Merry said. “Do you know where he got his inside information?”
Malcolm Scott leaned back in his chair and dropped heavy lids over the furious blue eyes. “Max didn’t tell him, that’s for sure. At the time, Max didn’t even tell me.”
“But we can assume Rusty’s information was good?” Peter said.
“Good enough to screw matters up royally. That brother of yours was the devil’s own. I say that knowing full well he was Max’s son. Ever hear of Mitch Hazlitt?”
Peter shook his head. He glanced at Merry.
“The corporate raider,” she said. “He’s doing time in some minimum-security country club upstate.” Reading through the case-law database had paid off.
Scott nodded. “Rusty chose Hazlitt to take on Max. Only Hazlitt had an even better idea. He decided to skip Ultracom and go after Mason Enterprises. Max would be at his most vulnerable, because his liquidity would be sunk in Ultracom. He wouldn’t have the resources to fight Hazlitt o
ff.”
“And suddenly, Rusty was in way over his head,” Merry said slowly.
“If he’d been a little older or wiser, he’d have seen it coming. You give a shark your finger, and he’ll take your arm. He’d handed his father to Mitch Hazlitt, something I doubt even he intended to do.”
“Knowing Rusty, he’d try to ride it out somehow, anyhow,” Peter said.
“Don’t think he had any other option, myself. Other than looking the fool in front of your dad. Probably Hazlitt anticipated that. He made Rusty an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
“Meaning?”
Malcolm Scott looked through the bay window, beyond his wife painting in the garden, at something that had died long ago.
“If Hazlitt succeeded—and he would have—Rusty was to have Max’s job.”
Peter whistled—a low, bated breath. The thing Max couldn’t forgive. The reason Rusty ran.
Scott was still talking. “Not that your brother would have survived very long. The Hazlitts of this world eat the Rusty Masons alive.”
There was a small silence. “To my father, Mason Enterprises was a sacred family stewardship,” Peter said. “It was the core of his identity. He would have fought to the death to keep it.”
“So what happened?” Merry asked.
For once, Malcolm Scott was silent.
“Max discovered what Rusty intended, called off the Ultracom takeover, informed the SEC that inside information had been traded, and disowned his son,” Peter ventured.
“How’d Max find out?” Merry persisted.
Scott’s fierce gaze faltered. “I couldn’t say, Detective, any more than I can tell you how Rusty got the information in the first place. But I know the day it happened. December seventeenth. Max called me into his office and sat me down. I was the one dealing with Salomon’s corporate finance side, leveraging Mason Enterprises beyond anything I thought possible, and I was the one who’d have to explain to them that the whole venture was called off. Max had that look of his—like he’d swallowed a frying pan hot off the fire—and he was dead quiet.” Malcolm shot a blue glance at Peter. “Your father had a habit of holding in his rage, as no doubt you know. Made it all the more terrifying.”
Death in the Off-Season Page 20
