$1,000 per person and include cocktails, dinner, and a 90-minute concert by West.
“It’s sure to be the social event of the summer,” Dixon said.
Gavin Andrews was stealing from Nantucket’s Children, though he didn’t think of it as stealing per se, nor did he think of it as embezzling. Rather, the image that came to his mind was that of skimming off the top, as harmless as a child putting his finger through the icing on a cake.
He had started “skimming” back in October, when donations rolled in for the annual appeal. He would get ten or twelve checks, totaling eighty-five hundred dollars, and he would deposit eight thousand, taking five hundred in cash in his pocket. The check amounts were recorded in a file on the computer, but the deposits were made at the bank, and the only record of them was the deposit slip (which Gavin threw away) and the bank statements, which it was Gavin’s responsibility to reconcile. His skimming would be caught eventually, by an auditor, but the auditor only came once every two years and he had come in September and had found everything on the up-and-up, in perfect order, balanced to the penny. Lock was pleased with Gavin, said he expected nothing less, patted him, literally, on the back. Two weeks later, Gavin started the skimming. By the time the auditor returned, Gavin would be long gone.
No one else would catch him. The board of directors did have a treasurer, an elderly man named—you had to love this—Ben Franklin, who lived in Lincoln Park in Chicago, not far from Gavin’s parents. In fact, Ben Franklin and Gavin’s father, Gavin senior, belonged to the same social club, and it was for this reason that Gavin knew Ben Franklin was, in his waning years, losing it. Mr. Franklin was the only board member who had volunteered to be treasurer. He was the father of nine children and the grand-father of twenty-six, and Gavin believed he desired to be treasurer less to manage the finances than to escape the chaos of his summer household. Old Ben expected Gavin to hand him the budget and investment balance in the minutes before each board meeting. Ben Franklin came to only three meetings a year—June, July, and August—and the rest of the time, Gavin sat in as treasurer and presented the budget himself.
Lock was the only person Gavin had to worry about, but Gavin had worked at Nantucket’s Children for nearly as long as Lock had, and Gavin knew his boss as intimately as a spouse. (This might have been presumptuous on Gavin’s part. What, after all, did he know about having a spouse? So let’s say this: Gavin spent more time with Lock than Daphne did.) Gavin knew the following things: Although Lock was a businessman, his predilections ran toward interacting with people and building relationships. He could schmooze, he could negotiate with such a deft touch that the other party did not realize he was doing Lock’s exact bidding. Lock was persuasive and confident and smart, and that was how he had built his fortune. Lock was not, however, a numbers man. Looking at rows and columns of figures made his head swim and his eyes cross until he begged Gavin to bring him an Advil. Gavin learned this early on and kindly suggested that Lock leave the annoying minutiae of the banking to him. Lock was grateful, and Gavin had spent years earning his confidence. The books were perfect, the auditor pleased. Gold star.
Gavin’s decision to steal, embezzle, skim, did not come lightly. Even though his path was clear and his plan foolproof, he was still terrified of getting caught. Getting caught would pretty much end the life he now led—meaning his job and the use of his parents’ enormous house, not to mention his relationship with his parents, with Lock, and with everyone else he knew. So why do it? To be blunt: Gavin felt somebody somewhere owed him something. His life had not worked out the way it was supposed to. He had been born the only child of wealthy parents; his life should have been easy. One of his problems was that he had peaked too early. He had been voted Best Looking by his graduating class at Evanston Day School, but his parents had not been impressed by that distinction; they had seen it as one more thing they had given him. (You were born with very good genes, his mother said.) Gavin then