Chapter 3 - The Fifty-Floor Silence
The car was not a normal car. It was a long, black machine with windows so dark they looked like pieces of coal set into the doors. Inside, the seats were made of gray leather that looked like it had never been sat on by anyone who didn't wear silk. There was a small television screen built into the back of the front seat, showing a series of numbers that kept changing—red percentages, green arrows, names of companies I had never heard of in my life.
Julian sat in the front seat next to the driver, his head turned away from us as he looked out into the rain. Christopher and Adrian sat on either side of me in the back.
Nobody spoke for twenty blocks.
The only sound was the rhythmic thump-thump of the wipers against the glass and the occasional low, digital buzz from Adrian’s phone. He was streaming—or trying to. He had a small earpiece in his right ear, and I could hear a tiny, tinny voice coming out of it like a cricket in a wall.
"...yeah, chat, we're off-stream for the night... emergency... no, it's not a sponsor event... shut up, Liquid_7, it's family business..."
"Turn it off, Adrian," Christopher said. He didn't look at his brother; he was looking at his own reflection in the dark glass of the side window, adjusting the knot of his beige scarf with two fingers. "The lawyers said no social media until the probate court clears the notice. If the press gets hold of the maternal line before the quarterly report, the stock will drop four points before the opening bell."
"The stock's already down two points because Julian liquidated the copper futures this morning," Adrian muttered, but he slid the screen into his hoodie pocket anyway. He looked at me, his eyes tracking the red dirt on the edge of my sneakers. "Where'd you live, anyway? The police report said some place called 'Clay Creek'?"
"It's near Cincinnati," I said. "We had a garden. My mother grew tomatoes in the summer. She sold them at the church market."
Christopher let out a short, dry sound that might have been a laugh if his mouth hadn't stayed so straight. "Tomatoes. Jesus. The old man spent forty thousand dollars a month on organic greens from a greenhouse in Vermont, and she was growing them in Ohio dirt."
"It wasn't dirt," I said, my voice rising until Julian’s head turned slightly in the front seat. "It was our yard. We paid for it."
"With what?" Julian asked from the front. He didn't turn around completely; I could just see the edge of his cheekbone and the dark gray of his irises in the rearview mirror. "The exit agreement gave her five hundred thousand dollars in 1999. That was supposed to buy a house in a good district. It was supposed to pay for a private academy. We have the banking records, Autumn. The account was cleared out by 2004."
"My mother had surgery," I said. My throat felt like it was full of sand from the tangerine. "The insurance company said the clinic wasn't in the network. Then the roof leaked, and the bank took the second mortgage. She didn't spend it on herself. She spent it on the doctors."
The car stopped. Not at an office building, but in front of a pair of high, wrought-iron gates that opened into a small, private courtyard between two limestone townhouses on Upper East Side. The rain was heavy here, the water pouring off the stone cornices in thick, gray sheets.
The driver—a man in a black cap who hadn't looked at me once since I got in—opened my door, holding a massive golf umbrella over my head before my sneakers could touch the wet pavement.
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"This isn't Park Avenue," I said, looking at the stone steps leading up to a pair of double doors that looked like they belonged to a museum.
"The Park Avenue office is for people who have appointments," Julian said as he got out of the front seat, his coat falling perfectly around his shins without a single wrinkle. "We don't do appointments in this family, Autumn. We do results. Inside."
