“Well, I’m pretty fucking disturbed.”
“I can’t believe he didn’t call. I know that I told him not to, but this…”
“He thought that he was doing the right thing,” I said, trying to comfort her even though it was the last thing that I really wanted to be doing.
The thought that Eleanor and Hunter had disappeared off of the ship was already upsetting enough. I didn’t need her going through the additional stress of feeling like her best friend had betrayed her.
“What are we supposed to do now?” she asked. “Why haven’t the authorities contacted us?”
“Technically they don’t have to,” I told her. “I’m not the next of kin.”
“Who is?” she asked. “Your father?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe. But if he was, he would have called me.”
Suddenly I could feel the color drain from my face.
“What is it?” Snow asked.
“Virgil,” I said. “They called Virgil.”
“Who’s Virgil?”
“Her ex-husband.”
“Ex?” Snow asked. “If he’s an ex, he wouldn’t be her next of kin.”
“Virgil is anything that he wants to be when it comes to Eleanor. At least he was until she finally got up the nerve to divorce him.”
“The nerve?” Snow asked. “What do you mean?”
This was the one thing about my family that I hadn’t told her about in the little more than a year that we had been together. It was a dark blot in their history that I didn’t want to think about much less give any more attention to by sharing it with my wife. Now, though, he realized that by ignoring it, he might have made the situation even worse than it already was.
“Eleanor’s marriage to Virgil was not exactly the picture of domestic bliss. I was only seven when she married him, but I remember what it was like before he came around and the way that things changed after they got married. She and I have always been really close. I don’t even remember my mother, so she was the closest thing that I had when I was little. We were together almost every day. She and my father had always been close, too, so the whole family would have outings or eat together. Go on vacation together, the very rare occasions when we could pry Dad away from his work long enough to take them. Once she married Virgil, though, things changed. She still came around, but not nearly as often, and when she did, there was something different about her.”
“That must have been really hard for you.”
“It was. I was too young to really understand it and it broke my heart to see what it did to my father. Part of what made it easy for her to understand me was that she had lost her mother, too. My grandfather and her brothers were all she had. They were all each other had. Then her other brother died. It was suddenly just the three of them. Having her pull away from him made my father feel like his world was falling apart.”
“You and Eleanor don’t seem like you had a falling out.”
“We didn’t,” I insisted. “There was never any fighting. Never any animosity. Virgil just kept her from us and when she was away, the way he treated her chipped away at the woman that we knew until she seemed like she was just a shadow of the Auntie I had always known and loved so much. When I got old enough, I started going to her house to check on her. Virgil hated that. He hated any time that she was with anyone but him, but I wouldn’t let him stop me. That’s how I found out what he was involved with.”
I suddenly felt like my legs couldn’t hold me up anymore. I sat down and reached for a cup of coffee that had been sitting and cooling on the breakfast tray. I swallowed it down before continuing, telling Snow about the criminal activity that Eleanor told me Virgil was involved in. She had been so scared, terrified that the people who were part of the shady business were going to turn their sites on her. Of course, they had, but that only came after she had used the documents that she had scanned and the other evidence she had spent years gathering to convince him to finally give her a divorce.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Snow asked.
“I should have,” I said. “I should have, but I didn’t. She begged me not to. She said that she just wanted to be away from him, that she didn’t care if anyone ever found out what he was doing. I told her that he deserved to pay for his crimes, not to mention the way that he had treated her, and she said that one day she would make sure that he did, but she didn’t want to do it yet. She didn’t want to leave one horrible situation only to dive right into trials and paparazzi and everything that would come from such a high-profile case.”
“Virgil,” Snow said under her breath as if the word was reminding her of something. “Virgil.” I knew what she was thinking, but I let her get to it herself. Her eyes rose to me when she did. “Virgil McIntire? The crime boss?”
“That makes him sound much cooler than he actually is,” I said, “but, yes. She was married to Virgil McIntire the white-collar criminal of the century. The one good thing that he ever did for her was keep her so cloistered in the house and away from anybody but the legitimate clients that he hosted that her name and picture didn’t make it into the media.”
“I don’t understand,” Snow said. “If your father and Eleanor were so close, why didn’t he do anything to save her? Why did he let Virgil treat her that way?”
“For a long time, I don’t think that he knew. I really don’t. I think that he loved his sister so much and wanted so much to think that she had a wonderful life with this husband who would take care of her and not use her for her money that he just closed himself off to the possibility that anything else might be happening. He listened to what she said and chose to believe it. I was too young to know that I should have said something to him about the worries that I had, and by the time that I was old enough to make a difference, Eleanor was so deeply entangled that we couldn’t just swoop in and save her.”
“Why not?”
I sighed. Now I had another reason for not wanting to talk about this to her.
How exactly was I supposed to talk about this without making her uncomfortable?
“Money makes things hard, Snow.”
She bristled.
Well, that wasn’t it.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Eleanor and Virgil had a lot of financial interests together. They purchased real estate and investments together. They owned businesses. He came into the marriage with some money, but nothing compared to what she is worth. He convinced her that he wasn’t in the relationship for the money, but just as soon as he could he had her buying businesses, houses, and other things up and putting them in both of their names or even just his name. Early in their marriage everything was completely legitimate and they even donated to several charities through a fund that Eleanor had created in the name of the brother she lost. As the years went on, though, the things that Virgil put her money into got tangled up with his criminal activity. If she had just walked away from him without his cooperation, it would have been all too easy for the links between the legitimate purchases and the criminal ones, and what the money from her foundation had supported, to be uncovered, destroying her. I had to help her go about getting out of that web carefully. That way she had her money firmly in her control and his eventual collapse would have no bearing on her or her foundation. When we finally did, she was able to use all the evidence to secure the divorce.” I gave a short, mirthless laugh. “I didn’t even know she had all of that.”