Chapter 3 - The Thirty-Eight Percent
The silver gravy boat she was holding didn't hit the floor; it stayed in her left hand, but her fingers were shaking so violently that the dark fat began to spill over the lip, running down the polished side of the silver onto the cream wool of her skirt in three long, greasy lines.
Miriam Ashford set her wineglass down with enough force to split the stem, though the crystal held. "Sienna," she hissed. "Look at your apron. You're acting like an idiot."
"She became emotional, Evelyn," Garrick said, his voice dropping into that smooth, corporate register he used when he was explaining to the state auditors why the logistics facility in Joliet had two different sets of environmental permits. "My son simply had to restrain her. A wife shouldn't jeopardize her husband’s future by running out into the road when the neighbors are clearing their leaves."
"What future is that, Garrick?" I asked. I picked up my water glass, took one small sip of the cold lake water, and set it down exactly in the center of the linen placemat.
"My promotion becomes official tomorrow morning at nine o'clock," he said, leaning back in his heavy high-backed chair until the leather groaned. He tucked his thumbs into the pockets of his gray trousers, his face turning toward the high windows that looked out over the dark marsh. "I’m taking over as Chief Operating Officer at Ashford Industries. The board cleared the final compliance review on Friday afternoon."
He smiled—a wide, clean show of teeth that had cost his father four thousand dollars in orthodontic fees back in the nineties. "I’m surprised you’ve even heard of the firm, Evelyn. I thought you only dealt with people who lived in trailers and hit each other with tire irons."
I looked at my daughter. She had dropped her hand to her side, the grease from the gravy boat now soaking through the cotton of her slip to the skin of her thigh. Her left eye was wide, clear, and fixed on the third button of my coat—the exact place where she used to hide her face when she was nine years old and the trains in Chicago were too loud for her ears.
"Oh," I said, my voice dropping into that heavy, unhurried rhythm that makes defense attorneys look for their notebooks. "I know Ashford Industries very well, Garrick."
What Garrick didn't know—what his father, old Thomas Ashford, had hidden from his family until the day his liver finally failed in that hotel room in Boca Raton back in 2018—was that thirty years ago, the firm was nothing but an old gravel pit and six rusted tipple-cars down by the river canal. When the rail strike of ninety-four hit the valley, the company had forty-two thousand dollars in the bank and six hundred thousand dollars in short-term commercial notes held by the German lenders in New York.
My late husband, Frank, had been the receiver for the regional drainage district. He didn't believe in the stock market, but he believed in the limestone beds along the river. We had spent twenty-two years buying up the old tax liens through our family trust—the Fletcher-Davis Trust—until we held thirty-eight percent of the company’s preferred voting shares.
Old Thomas had signed the non-disclosure waiver in my office on Bell Street while his wife was in the car outside listening to the radio. He had agreed that as long as the trust kept the lenders from calling the notes, the voting rights would remain with the trustee.
And I was the only trustee left alive.
"The board meeting is at nine tomorrow, isn't it?" I asked, looking at the grandfather clock in the corner of the dining room. The brass weights were hanging low, the pendulum swinging with a heavy, leaden tick-tock that seemed to catch the rhythm of the wind outside. "At the corporate office on Wacker Drive."
"It is," Garrick said, his eyes narrowing slightly as he checked the gold watch on his wrist. "Not that it concerns the state’s attorney's office. The voting list was closed three weeks ago by the registrar."
"The list is never closed to the preferred blocks, Garrick," I said. "Your father knew that. That’s why he spent the last five years of his life living in a hotel room with two security guards and a lawyer from Delaware."
The doorbell rang.
It wasn't a short buzz; it was the long, heavy mechanical strike of the primary chime—the one connected to the heavy wrought-iron gate at the road.
Garrick didn't move for three seconds. He looked at his mother, then at his brother Julian, who had finally put his phone away and was staring at the doorway with his mouth open.
May you like
"Who the hell is that?" Garrick muttered, standing up from his chair so quickly that his linen napkin slid off his thigh into the roast beef fat. "The gate was locked. The code shouldn't work after five."
"I gave them the code, Garrick," I said, standing up and smoothing the skirt of my coat. "I’ve had the master code since your father bought the land from the canal commission in ninety-eight."
