though.” There was a pause. “They found something. Of Father’s. I tried to call you earlier.”
“Oh? A little piece of the man left behind? Does it have a monetary value? We could use any help we can get.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“You just told me that there is no money anywhere, essentially. Fairly reasonable optimism given the cash constraints.”
There was another period of quiet. And then Lane explained what had been found in an ivy bed.
When Edward said nothing, his brother muttered, “You don’t seem surprised. About any of this, actually.”
Edward’s eyes went to the drapes that were pulled over the windows.
“Hello?” Lane said. “You knew, didn’t you. You knew the money was gone, didn’t you.”
“I had my suspicions.”
“Tell me something. How much life insurance did Father carry?”
“Seventy-five million,” Edward heard himself say. “Key man insurance through the company. At least that’s what he had when I was there. I’m going to go now. I’ll call you.”
Edward hung up and took a deep breath. For a moment, the cottage spun around where he stood, but he willed things to rights.
“I need to leave,” he said.
Shelby glanced over her shoulder. “Where are you going?”
“It’s business.”
“The new mare you were talking about to Moe and his son?”
“Yes. Save me dinner?” As her brows lifted, the center of his chest hurt as if he’d been stabbed. “Please.”
“You gonna be real late?”
“I don’t think so.”
Edward was halfway to the door when he remembered he didn’t have a car. His Porsche was gathering dust back in Easterly’s bank of garages.
“May I please borrow your truck?” he asked.
“Aren’t you going with Moe or Joey?” When he just shrugged, Shelby shook her head. “It’s a stick.”
“I’ll manage. The ankle’s already doing better.”
“Keys are in it, but I don’t think—”
“Thank you.”
Limping out of the cottage, he had no cell phone, no wallet, no driver’s license and nothing in his belly to sustain him, but he was sober and he knew exactly where he was going.
Shelby’s old pickup had a steering wheel that had been worn smooth, a faded dashboard, and carpets in the wells with so little nap that they were all but tile. The tires were new, however, the engine started with no problem and ran like a top, and everything was neat as a pin.
Hooking up with Route 42, he headed into the suburbs. The clutch wasn’t all that stiff, but it killed his ankle and knee nonetheless, and he found himself spending a lot of time in third. Overall, though, he was numb as he drove along. Well, emotionally numb.
After many miles, the houses started to get big and the land began to be professionally tended as if it were an interior space, not an exterior one. There were fancy gates, stone walls, and pieces of sculpture on rolling lawns. Long drives and specimen trees. Security cameras. Rolls-Royces and Bentleys on the road.
Sutton Smythe’s family estate was up on the left. Its hill was not as tall as the one Easterly had been built on, and the Georgian brick mansion had only been constructed in the early 1900s, but the square footage was well over thirty thousand square feet, making it bigger than Edward’s old haunt.
Approaching the gates, he rolled down the window by hand and then stretched out and entered in the pass code on a keypad. As the great iron bars split down the middle, he headed up the winding lane, the mansion unfurling before him, its tremendous footprint sprawling over the cropped grass. Magnolias framed the house, just as they did at
Easterly, and there were other massive trees on the property. A tennis court was off to the side, discreetly hidden behind a hedgerow, and the garages disappeared off into the distance.
The driveway circled in front of the mansion, and there was a black Town Car, a Mercedes C63, a modest Camry, and two SUVs with blacked-out windows parked in a line.
He halted Shelby’s four wheels and a bed as close as he could to the front entrance and then hobbled out and over to the mansion’s carved door. As he put the brass knocker to use, he remembered all the times he’d come here in black tie and just walked right in. But he and Sutton weren’t like that anymore.
The Smythes’ butler, Mr. Graham, opened things up. As composed as the man was, his eyes peeled wide and not just at the fact that Edward was in jeans and a work shirt instead of some suit.
“I need to see