Everything to Lose: A Novel

by Andrew Gross

  I could cut the tutors, all the stuff for me I’d always fit in—mani/pedis every couple of weeks and facials every couple of months and the trips to the mall.

  That was all history now.

  I could cut back on Starbucks, along with eating out. I could even cut back on the barre method and my kickboxing, though sending a spinning, grunting sidekick into a sixty-pound bag was about all that was keeping me sane right now.

  But I saw the wave that was coming at me. Like someone in the path of a tsunami coming onshore with no chance of getting out of the way. Maybe not this month, but certainly the next. It was going to crash over me and snap me in two. Me and Brandon. Like matchsticks. And even if I did find another job, and quickly, the math still didn’t work.

  I looked at the numbers and saw what any person would have seen a while ago.

  Everything was falling apart.

  It wasn’t Slick anymore who was whispering on my shoulder.

  It was survival.

  Something had to change or I wouldn’t last another month.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jim . . .” I had to try him one more time. I had to try anything.

  “Hil . . . ?” His voice was cool and reserved, clearly not delighted to hear from me. “Hil, we’re out in Vail. Can’t this wait until we get back?”

  “No, Jim, I’m sorry, it can’t wait. Not any longer.”

  I heard him whisper to someone, an exasperated tone, like his hysterical ex-wife was on the phone and can you believe he had to deal with this out here, with ten inches of fresh powder on the slopes and an Irish coffee in his hand?

  Maybe I was starting to grow hysterical.

  “Jim, I’ve only got a month’s cushion to my name. I don’t know how I’m going to pay the mortgage. Not to mention Brandon’s school. You said you’d think it over and get back to me, but all that’s past. I need your help, Jim. Now. Not for me, but for your son. I don’t care where you are right now . . .”

  “Hil, hang on,” he said. I heard him excuse himself and there were a few seconds of silence. When he got back on, he was probably outside. “Listen, Hil, I thought I told you we’re pretty much in the same pickle.”

  “I don’t care about your fucking pickle, Jim. You’re out in Vail. Your pickle is keeping your wife’s name in Greenwich magazine and holding on to your Porsche. I’m doing what I can to protect our son.”

  He was silent.

  “Jim, look, through everything we’ve always dealt with things pretty reasonably. But I don’t have the luxury of being nice anymore. You owe me for over a year of child support. You bailed out of Brandon’s school. I can’t sell the house. I won’t get a fucking nickel from it even if I could. And I can’t even sue you—it would take too long, even if there was something I could get from it. Jimmy, please . . . you know I don’t beg easily, but I’m begging. I’m trying to save ourselves . . .”

  I was also begging for him to save me from doing the one thing I didn’t want to do.

  “Look, I shouldn’t even say this . . .” He cleared his throat. “Maybe there is something I’ve kept aside. But we’re not talking much, Hil.”

  “How much is something, Jim?”

  “I don’t know.” He paused. “Maybe five or ten thousand. Max . . .”

  “Five or ten grand?” The blood pretty much stopped in my veins. The math ran over me like a train had plowed into my car. Ten thousand would barely get me past March. No more.

  “I had to pay off some obligations with the company. Otherwise, I was headed to Chapter Eleven, Hil. Anything else is Janice’s. And you know, that gets complicated.”

  “Jim, that’s only a month, maybe two, of Brandon’s school. I’m not asking for anything for me, but—”

  “Anyway, it’s going to have to wait until I come back. This isn’t exactly sitting in my 401(k). And, Hil, all I can say is that this isn’t going to get any easier. I know you don’t want to hear this, but we really are going to have to consider putting Brandon in public school. I’m told the programs are really good up in Chappaqua and Bedford.”

  “Chappaqua and Bedford . . . ?” The words fell off my lips like heavy weights.

  “I checked. Bedford has a separate special ed school. And Ridgefield, I know that’s in Connecticut, but it’s good too and it’s tons cheaper to live up there as well.”

  “Screw off, Jim.” Tears flooded my eyes. I couldn’t hold it back. I’d never said those words to him before.

  “Hil, please . . .”

  The phone in my ear, I flashed back to the day we were married. Me, in my white lace dress, my hair in braids. Jim, nervous, clumsy, a big, cushy walrus, fumbling for the ring. I knew he wasn’t the safest of bets, even back then. Just a big, overgrown boy with his toys. But what I did think was at least I had a partner. Someone who loved me for me, whether it worked out in our marriage or not. Someone who would always be there for Brandon if I ever got sick or was in need.

  “Why don’t you just keep it, Jim? I’ll find another way.”

  “Hil, c’mon. I’m trying my best to—”

  “Just keep it!” I hung up on him, and with it the hope that anything was coming to my rescue.

  “There’s this,” Robin had said, “and then there’s the other side of the road.”

  I threw on a jacket and asked Elena if she could stay another hour.

  Then I drove back out to the accident site that night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The night was clear, the roads mostly empty. Every stop sign, I told myself I could always turn around. You don’t have to do this, Hil. There has to be some other plan.

  I never turned.

  On the Bedford–Greenwich road, the landmarks grew familiar. A stone barn I’d passed ten days before. The apple and vegetable farm. I remembered following that Honda, my life in a shambles, watching him swerve, seeing him spin off the road. I slowed, passing a bend in the road that looked familiar. Was it here? That curve? Or farther along?

  The police tape was gone now. Everything looked back to normal.

  It wasn’t until I passed the election poster that I realized I’d driven right by.

  I turned at the first chance about a quarter mile past it and headed back around. There was a hole in the dense brush about the width of a car where Kelty’s car had gone through. I drove on about a hundred yards and found a turnoff with a chain blocking the drive and a NO ACCESS sign. Maybe for a property someone was hoping to develop.

  I pulled my Acura in maybe twenty yards from the road. There was a long time between cars going by. I turned off the engine. I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to use a penny of it for my own needs. Only for Brandon. And keeping a roof over our heads.

  For a while I just sat there, telling myself that there was this one last chance to drive away. I looked at my face in the mirror. It wasn’t my current face I saw, but strangely, the eyes of a child. Remembering the uncertainty I’d gone through as a nine-year-old, everything I loved and counted on ripped away in an instant.

  It had taken me years to learn to trust life again.

  I wouldn’t let that happen to my son.

  I took my flashlight, and this time my face was filled with resolve.

  Welcome to the other side of the road.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A car sped by in front of me and I ran across the road. I found the break in the bushes and shined my light and still saw the tire marks on the pavement, fresh as if it had happened yesterday.

  I made my way down the slope.

  I slipped this time as well, sliding a few feet down. The brush had been flattened by the path of Kelty’s car as well as all the emergency vehicles and personnel that had been down there. I made it down, casting my light on the tree where Kelty’s car had ended up, now pitched at a forty-five-degree angle. I stood where I was sure I’d been when I climbed inside his car, only a bare patch now. I shined the light over the area in the woods where I had flung the satchel.

  I did
n’t see anything there.

  A flash of fear stabbed me: what if someone had found it? One of the emergency crew who went down there. Or maybe a policeman traipsing around. What if all this had been for nothing and now it was gone?

  A week ago that might have given me some kind of relief. That the decision had been taken from me. But now I was more like a wolf who’d left a stash of food for her cubs that was gone. As if that money was mine all along, not Kelty’s, and someone had stolen it from me!

  I started to walk through the brush, sweeping the light in all directions, knee deep in dried branches and dense weeds. I’d spent so much time conflicted. Now there was no longer any doubt about what outcome I was hoping for.

  Where the hell was it?

  I kept walking, casting the light about haphazardly, nerves kicking up in me. I got to the spot where I was sure it had to be. Ten days ago, I’d seen it sink there amid the leaves and brush.

  “Where the hell are you?” I said aloud.

  I started to think how maybe I’d made someone else rich. How I was someone else’s lottery ticket. Some lucky Joe who was probably dragging a towline around. I wondered if he’d declared it. Or turned it in. If the police had it now.

  No, if they did it would’ve made the news, Hilary. I would have seen it.

  Angry, I used my light as a large stick, swatting brush and branches. Then I almost tripped over something. I looked down and didn’t see the bag, only the leather handles peeking through a blanket of leaves.

  Thank God! I let out a grateful sigh of relief.

  I bent, a bramble tearing at my hand, and pulled it out, the bag resisting for a moment. Then there it was! The same stuffed leather case, as heavy as when I’d hurled it into the woods a week before.

  There was no pretending I felt anything but joy.

  I took it back to the clearing and set it on the ground. I pulled open the zipper and shined my light in it. My skin tingled all over at what I saw. I was staring at the same bundles of wrapped bills, Ben Franklin’s wise, nonjudging face over and over and over, alit in the yellow, beatific light.

  My blood surged ecstatically.

  “Forgive me,” I said. To whom I wasn’t sure.

  To Kelty. To the police. To my own conscience.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I zipped it back up, the taste in my mouth bitter and bilelike. I knew the expression, how one bad act opens the door to many others. Acts that flood the world with a hundred awful consequences you could never foresee.

  All from a single mistake.

  This was mine, I knew. No hiding it.

  You’re not just a thief, I told myself as I lugged it back up the hill.

  Congratulations, Hil, you just stole a half million dollars.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The heavyset blond-haired clerk in the Bedford Hills police station looked up at him from her desk. “You said insurance adjuster, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Charles Mirho nodded affably.

  Not that he was an insurance adjuster at all, of course. For him, the whole concept of risk management was simply about staying alive. He’d merely had the business card printed at Kinkos, one he’d used many times in his real line of work, which was mostly uncovering dirt on people who crossed his boss and kicking a little ass when it was called for. And sometimes when it wasn’t. He’d simply embossed the Farmer’s Insurance Group logo in bright red lettering on the front so it would look as real as if he’d passed the insurance licensing exam with flying colors.

  Mirho smiled at the clerk. Maybe a tad chubby, but she had huge breasts under her pink sweater, and maybe a little too much mascara around those pretty, maybe a shade too trusting eyes. He didn’t see any wedding ring.

  “In the vehicular accident division,” he said. “Claims subrogation. You know, two parties put in counterclaims and ultimately the two insurance mammoths go to battle and somehow it gets resolved. Boring stuff.”

  Except in this case, there weren’t two parties at all—only one, and the one was in his grave. But Mirho figured his smile was good enough to charm her into getting what he needed. And the gal, whose desk plate identified her as Chrissie, probably wouldn’t know the difference between claims subrogation and how to figure out the interest on her bank statement.

  “You say you want a copy of the case file?” she said.

  “That would really help me out.” Mirho smiled.

  “And you said the name was Kelty? Joseph.”

  “That’s the one. You know, the guy who went off the road up here a week or so ago. Let me see, claim number, I have it right here . . .” He glanced at his notepad, but it was basically just useless scribbling. “606-410BN . . . Of course, that’s our number, not yours. We’re one of the coinsurers on his life insurance policy. I just happened to be up here on other business and thought I could save all parties a little time.”

  “Of course. Poor guy . . .” Chrissie exhaled sympathetically. “That stretch of road is always a problem at night.” She wheeled her chair across to a computer screen and Mirho got a glance at those wide-load thighs. He always liked women with some meat on them, and tits like calf bladders.

  Chrissie punched into her computer. “Let me see what I can do.”

  It was a standard request; case files were routinely shared between the police and the insurers. Usually by a formal request from one of the claimants, but in this case, there was no criminal aspect to the case, only lawyers arguing against lawyers. Insurance bigwigs negotiating it out. It was no big deal.

  “Found it,” she said. “Officer Polluto was first on the scene.”

  “Polluto,” Mirho said. He already knew that. “Maybe I can talk to him as well.”

  “Neil’s out on patrol. I saw him earlier today.” Chrissie punched a key. “Photocopy or PDF?”

  “A hard copy would be great,” Mirho said appreciatively. “This sure is saving me a ton of work.”

  “You, maybe.” Chrissie chuckled. Her boobs jiggled as she stood up. “Be back in a flash.”

  Mirho winked and took a seat on the edge of her desk. He picked up the photo of two smiling teenage girls.

  He knew how to manipulate people. It all started with that easy way he had, and conveying what he needed without blinking an eye. Extracting information, that’s mostly what he did. Rule Number One: the more brazenly you asked for something, the greater the likelihood you’d get it. Boldness created its own trust.

  No dad in the photo, he thought. Maybe a single mom. Or they could be her nieces.

  It took six or seven minutes, but finally Chrissie shuffled back holding a manila envelope.

  “You’re lucky. It’s not a very large file. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to wait.” She handed it to him.

  “You’re a gem!” Mirho knew he wasn’t exactly George Clooney. He was big shouldered and large, with a round head and short shaved orange hair. A ruddy complexion. But he knew he had that smile. Women trusted him. At least they did for a while. “Maybe I’ll see you next time,” he said. “When something else comes up.”

  “Something else . . . ?” Chrissie laughed. “This isn’t exactly the South Bronx up here.” She placed her ass back in that chair and smiled up at him. “But I’m always here.”

  “Then we’ll just have to see about that.” Mirho waved the envelope at her with a wink as he backed away.

  Back in his Escalade, Mirho opened the envelope and pieced through the file. Photos of the accident—the Honda a mangled wreck. He’d watched Kelty drive away with the cash not thirty minutes before. Shit, he’d handed the fucking thing to him. The guy probably got a woodie for the first time in a decade, carrying around that kind of cash, and couldn’t handle it. Popped through his pants, hit him in the face, then he slammed headfirst into a tree.

  There was an eyewitness report. The police case write-up. He saw that a deer had bolted across the road. That much he’d been able to pick up from what he’d read in the papers.

  Sergeant Nei
l Polluto, Mirho underlined in the report. Maybe it would be worth paying the good officer a visit somewhere down the line if nothing else panned out.

  Only one eyewitness, Mirho noted. That made the job easy. He knew his next call might prove a bit more troublesome. But anything was doable with the right kind of persuasion.

  He centered on the name, from Briarcliff Manor according to the report. The witness, the first to arrive at the scene.

  The only one on the scene.

  He underlined it, knowing his next stop wouldn’t be quite so social.

  Roland McMahon.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  He was always a difficult child.

  As a two-year-old, if he didn’t want to eat something or wanted to get down, he would bang his G.I. Joe milk cup so hard, he actually shattered it once and needed ten stitches in his hand. Hardly a day would pass when he wouldn’t tell me how much he hated me; a minute later he’d look up at me with the most contrite and innocent eyes and say, “Give me a hug, Mommy. You didn’t think I really meant all that, did you?”

  Did I?

  It makes me ashamed to admit he always scared me a little. Of what he would grow into one day.

  He always had a dark edge, my son, from the day he was born.

  What a thing, living in fear of my own child.

  Sometimes he got so angry I had to lock him in his room, but he would only tear up his bed and rip down all the books from his bookshelves. Break his brother’s toys and smash his little wooden chair against the door. A hundred times. Until he ran out of strength. And then he’d whine in that repentant voice of his that he would never be this way again.

  But when he was good, he was the most lovable and likable boy any of us knew. We called him Curious George. Because he was so smart and needed to understand everything. It just seemed, somehow, his brain got ahead of his heart, his father always said.

  He’ll grow out of it, I would say. He will. You’ll see. Just wait.

  Until he left.