Everybody Rise (32 page)

“Watch yourself,” Dale said. He pulled a tiny branch off of the tree, and crushed the needles between his fingers. Off in the distance, a truck's horn left a smear of sound.

Her father studied the pine needles in his hand for a minute, then looked at her. “The federal investigators had a wiretap on our phone,” he said. “I assume it's done with, but to be safe, we're talking out here.”

“You think the house is bugged?”

Her father yanked at the bough, and her mother stood with arms folded looking toward the house.

“Guys,” she said in an annoyed tone. “I hightailed it down here even though this is a massively busy week so that we could once again talk about this disaster. Are we going to sit around in silence or are you going to tell me whatever Dad's done now that's apparently so important that I have to drop everything?”

“Don't address your parents as ‘guys,'” Barbara said sharply.

“Your attitude, Evelyn,” Dale said, but he didn't complete the thought. He finished denuding the branch and then threw it on top of his car, which was parked on the gravel. “They've started to turn over discovery in the case, Evelyn. It's not as weak as we, I, thought. I'm not guilty of this. I want to be crystal clear on that. The wiretaps are challenging. An entirely innocent person, which I am, can sound suspect if a wiretapped conversation is taken out of context. The criminal-justice system in this country is so heavily stacked against anyone accused of anything, and white-collar crimes can get into huge suggested sentences, ten, fifteen years. I'm sixty-four. That's an effective life sentence.”

“I thought your whole thing was there was no case,” Evelyn said.

“I can't roll the dice at trial. I know how juries work and I've thought about it, I've discussed it with my lawyer, I've discussed it with your mother, and I, we, just can't take the chance.”

“You've said all along you did nothing wrong.”

“It's not worth the risk of trial. Rudy, my lawyer, is working with the government on a plea deal for obstruction of justice, which is a less serious offense than bribery, and if we can work something out, I think that's the best option.”

“With no jail?”

“Prison,” Barbara murmured.

“What?” Evelyn said.

Barbara pursed her lips. “It's prison. Jail is for short-term offenses, or so I've learned. We've already had to completely separate ourselves from anyone connected with the firm. I saw Sally the other day at the club and had to—”

“You'll avoid prison, right?” Evelyn asked her father.

Dale pressed his hands against his jaw. “We've asked for a probationary sentence, but there's a chance the judge will impose prison time,” he said.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

Evelyn started shaking her head. “Hold on. Hold on. Juries are your thing. You're supposed to be able to convince juries of everything. That's what you always claimed, didn't you? Those newspaper articles and those awards? All those awards? Yet you don't think you can convince a jury of your own innocence? Really? Because I would think if you were really innocent, maybe you could use all your skills so you aren't leaving me and Mom and spending time in prison. I thought you were the guy who got to say what was right and what was wrong and whether my job and requests for money were worthy or not, not the guy who goes to prison because he can't handle the evidence the government has against him. Aren't you that guy, Dad? Or no, apparently, you aren't. Apparently, you, too, can do something wrong. Because guess what? Innocent people don't have to plead guilty. Guess what else? They don't go after innocent people randomly. If you'd been more careful, like your partners apparently were, none of this would've happened. Rules aren't that hard to follow except, apparently, for you.”

She heard a loud thump and jumped back, then connected it with her father's fist, which he'd slammed into the tree. His eyes were deep with anger.

“I do not know, Evelyn Beegan, when you became such a first-class brat,” he said.

The moment did not end; he kept jamming his knuckles against the tree. Then he looked over his shoulder and the hurt Evelyn saw in his eyes made her feel unbalanced. He walked to the car, jumped in, revved the engine, and slammed the door shut as he sped off.

She turned to explain herself to her mother, but Barbara was already heading toward the house.

Evelyn touched her cell phone in her pocket, feeling lost, feeling like she needed someone to tell her she was okay, and, without considering it too carefully, dialed Scot.

“Ev? I'm just getting into a cab, sorry. How's home?”

“I'm fine. I'm good,” Evelyn said.

“Everything's going okay?”

She stared at the house, beige dust in front from where her father had squealed off. Okay? Her father was going to prison and thought she was a wretch.

“He might plead,” she said loudly. “My dad. My mom just told me.”

“Lex and Forty-third,” Scot said. “Your dad might what? Sorry, the connection's bad.”

“Plead. Plead guilty. I don't know what you know, if you know, about the investigation. The indictment. But he's going to plead guilty. It might mean prison.” Her voice was getting increasingly bitter. “My father in prison. Nice, right? The host committee of the Bal is going to be psyched about that one.” For once, she wanted to talk about it. “Did everyone know? Does everyone know? I know Camilla says indictments are no big deal, but Scot, the idea of my dad in prison. He's not that tough, my dad, and prison, and my mom has never worked, and she's going to be alone, and it's going to be such a mess. And the money, Scot. I don't know what to do about the money.”

“Ev?” Scot blurted.

“What?” She needed to hear that he loved her, that he would help her.

“Evelyn? Hello? Hello?”

“Scot. Scot?”

“There, I can hear you now. Sorry. I lost you there. So who did what?”

Evelyn's face constricted. “You didn't hear any of that.”

“No, sorry. What's going on?”

Her eyes were still trained on her house; her mother hadn't bothered to shut the front door. “Never mind,” she said, after an empty silence.

“No, I'm sorry, tell me.”

“It was nothing. It is nothing.”

“Something with your father?”

She walked to the front door and saw her mother sitting on the stairs. “No. Nothing. I have to go.” Evelyn pressed end.

“Who was that?” Barbara asked.

“No one. Camilla,” Evelyn said.

“Have you told her your father can't do her party?” Barbara said. “The party he was so flattered by?”

“God.” Evelyn pressed her head against the cell phone and made it jam into her head “No, I know. I'm just—just give me a minute.”

“So many phone calls to make, and things to do,” Barbara said. “I remember that. Life. It used to be so short, Evie. Is that what yours is like? When I see the pictures of you, I think maybe it is. When the days went by in a whirl and the nights weren't long enough, and we were frantic with excitement for the next party. I can't grasp, now, how it all seemed like that. Can you imagine, wishing the next day would hurry and arrive? Now I wish it would hurry and pass. Life gets so long when you grow old.”

“You're not old, Mom,” Evelyn muttered without much conviction, still pressing her head into the phone.

“What's my obituary going to say, Evelyn?”

“What?”

“Don't say ‘what'; you sound like a duck. I've spent all my life raising you and tending to your father, and what's my obituary going to say?”

“Mom, you're not dying.”

“Mother and wife; that's a single line. Resident of Bibville; that's two.”

Evelyn swallowed, watching her mother stare up at the ceiling. She wasn't wrong.

Dully, Evelyn turned and with heavy legs walked into the piano room. The one thing Evelyn could do over the muted roar in her head was play. If she could get her fingers to move over “Somewhere” she felt like she could get her mind away from this.

When she walked through the door this time, though, she saw the cabinets first, which should have been blocked by the piano. It took a moment for her to understand that the piano was gone. The only sign that it had ever been there was a rectangular patch on the floor where the rug had been.

“Mom? Mom?” Her voice was an octave higher than usual. She ran back to the foyer. “Mom, where's the piano?”

Her mother hadn't moved. “Evie,” she said. “Along with a plea deal would be millions in restitution. The firm is suing him separately. And the legal bills are just astronomical. The Steinway dealer had an inquiry from an auction house.”

“You sold it?”

“We didn't have a choice.”

All those mornings of songs. All those late afternoon sunshine-drenched sessions. All the pieces she had mentally set aside as ones she would play with her own daughter, showing her the fingering and the pressure and imagining how patient she would be with the girl. Gone. She didn't get to play it one last time. Didn't get to tell it what it had meant to her. The smooth ivory and the shiny black keys and the heavy pedals and the cool wood, and the songs she could coax out of there and the times her mother had played and Evelyn had sat in the sunshine and been happy.

“It's not just the piano,” Barbara said quietly. “It's the house. Sag Neck.”

“The house?”

“We're going to have to sell it, Evie. The lawyer is working out some pittance for us to live on. It's beyond the legal fees we're dealing with. If your father does go to prison, that's months without income, and of course he can't practice law again, so what we're left with we have to make last until death.” She gave a bitter laugh. “You asked about rent money? Well, I've been looking at condos. Do you know what it feels like, having Jude Carea show me around a rental condo? How happy that trollop is that I've fallen so far?”

Evelyn's hand flew to her shoulder, where she began massaging it, pressing, pushing against the knots. This couldn't all be vanishing. She could do something. It wasn't too late yet. Any shot that her family had at survival, both social and financial, was now up to her. She was almost out of time.

The light was changing in the foyer, becoming cold and gray, when Evelyn turned to her mother with a clear, hard look in her eye. Her breathing was loud; she could hear it huffing out of her nose. “It's going to be all right,” she said. “I have to get home. There are some things I need to do.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Trophy Hall

Camilla's erratic driving had gotten the foursome of Camilla, Nick, Scot, and Evelyn to Lake James with just one speeding ticket outside of Saratoga on the Northway; Camilla had been going ninety-three, she negotiated with the trooper to knock it down to eighty-seven, and Camilla said that by the time her family's upstate vehicular attorney contested it in traffic court, she could get it dropped to a $200 fine and no points on her license.

Evelyn had called Camilla the moment she left Sag Neck to say that she'd love to come up for the weekend and sorry for being so flaky. She wondered whether Camilla would put both her and Jaime in rooms along the main hallway, which would make things easier. What did not make things easier was Scot being invited. When she'd met Camilla the previous night for drinks to float the idea of breaking up with Scot and see what the reaction would be, Nick had shown up at the bar with Scot at his side. The assumed inclusion annoyed Evelyn, and her digs at Scot that night got no cheering on from Camilla or Nick, which annoyed her further. Here, in the car, Scot was jabbing away at his BlackBerry and not partaking in the conversation at all. Barnacle Scot. Ubiquitous Scot.

In Bibville, after the cold thud she'd felt seeing the missing piano, she had identified Scot as being at the center of her problems. If she hadn't spent all this time dating him, she would be in a solid position. She would be engaged to someone more prominent, blithe about her family issues, confident and settled, with money to spare. She closed off her memories of the parts of Scot she liked and made the case to herself that Scot's sole function, the reason she'd put up with the wet kisses and the giant hands pawing at her, was to be supportive, to be the one person she could talk to about all her family problems, and he couldn't even get that right. Her father would be sent to prison, her mother would move into a condo, and she would be out of money and tethered to this oafish midtier banker who was unable to do anything about her situation.

Unless.

Camilla pulled the car up to the marina, and the four of them headed to the waiting motorboat. At Sachem, Evelyn was relieved, for once, that she hadn't gotten one of the best guest rooms; she and Scot had a twin-bed room, which meant she could get out of sex tonight easily.

While Evelyn read
Vogue
on one of the beds, Scot had gone out to do his “regimen,” as he referred to his calisthenics that he had evidently lifted from a 1910 athletic-training booklet. He returned with sweat rolling down his face forty minutes later, and Evelyn hoped he'd had the sense to exercise where no one could see him. When he bounded over to her to peck her on the cheek, Evelyn drew back and wiped his lip sweat off.

“Did anyone call?” he said, picking up the BlackBerry, which he'd left on his bed.

“Not a one,” she said, flipping the page of her
Vogue
. She was still in the thicket of advertisements before the masthead, as she'd spent the time he'd been working out trying to catalogue his faults and theorizing when and how Jaime might arrive. But nice memories of Scot kept creeping in, and she'd think of how he brought her warm milk in a grainy homemade mug one night when she was unable to sleep, then she'd push herself to counter that with the Greenwich Country Club golf game where every shot of his went sideways, and she, Nick, and Preston had to spend about four hours over nine holes looking for his lost balls. “Workout good?” she asked.