An hour later, as Gin slid into the passenger seat of her brother’s dark gray Porsche, she closed her eyes and shook her head. “This has been the worst six hours of my life.”
Lane made some kind of grunt, which could have meant a lot of things—but most certainly didn’t come close to the “Oh, God, I can’t believe you lived through that” she was looking for.
“Excuse me,” she snapped. “But I was just in jail—”
“We’re in trouble, Gin.”
She shrugged. “We made bail, and Samuel T. is going to make sure that it stays out of the press—”
“Gin.” Her brother looked over at her while shooting them into traffic. “We’re in real trouble.”
Later, oh, so much later, she would remember this moment of their eyes meeting across the car’s interior as the start of the downfall, the tip of the first domino that made all the other ones fall so fast it was not possible to stop the sequence.
“What are you talking about?” she asked softly. “You’re scaring me.”
“The family is in debt. Serious debt.”
She rolled her eyes and slashed a hand through the air. “Seriously, Lane, I’ve got bigger problems—”
“And Rosalinda killed herself in the house. Some time in the last two days.”
Gin put a hand to her mouth. And remembered calling the woman and getting no answer just hours ago. “Dead?”
“Dead. In her office.”
It was impossible not to have a case of the skin crawls as she pictured the phone ringing next to the corpse of their controller. “Dear God …”
Lane cursed as he glanced in the rearview mirror and changed lanes with a jerk of the wheel. “The household’s checking account is overdrawn, and our father has somehow managed to borrow fifty-three million dollars from the Prospect Trust Company for God only knows what. And the worst part? I don’t know how much farther this goes and I’m not sure how to find out.”
“What are you … I’m sorry, I don’t understand?”
His reiteration didn’t help her at all.
As her brother fell silent, she stared out the front windshield, watching the road ahead curve to the contour of the Ohio River.
“Father can just repay the money,” she said dully. “He’ll repay it and it’ll all go away—”
“Gin, if you need to borrow that kind of cash, it’s because you’re in deep, deep trouble. And if you haven’t paid it back? You can’t.”
“But Mummy has money. She has plenty of—”
“I don’t think we can take anything for granted.”
“So where did you find the bail? To get me out?”
“I have some cash and also my trust, which I broke away from the family funds. The two aren’t nearly enough to take care of Easterly, however—and forget about paying back that kind of loan or keeping Bradford Bourbon afloat if it comes to that.”
She looked down at her fucked-up manicure, focusing on the decimation of that which had been perfect when she’d woken up that morning. “Thank you. For getting me out.”
“No problem.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
Except with what? Her father had cut her off … but worse, what if there was no money to give her her allowance anyway?
“It’s just not possible,” she said. “This has to be a misunderstanding. Some kind of … a miscommunication.”
“I don’t think so—”
“You’ve got to think positively, Lane—”
“I walked in on a dead woman in her office about two hours ago, and that was before I found out about the debt. I can assure you that lack of optimism is not the problem here.”
“Do you think …” Gin gasped. “Do you think she stole from us?”
“Fifty-three million dollars? Or even a part of that? No, because why commit suicide—if she embezzled funds, the smart thing would be to take off and change her identity. You don’t kill yourself in your employer’s house if you’ve successfully taken cash.”
“But what if she was murdered?”
Lane opened his mouth like he was going to “no way” her. But then he closed it back up—as if he were trying that idea on for size. “Well, she was in love with him.”
Gin felt her jaw drop. “Rosalinda? With Father?”
“Oh, come on, Gin. Everyone knows that.”
“Rosalinda? Her idea of letting her hair down was to tie that bun of hers lower on her head.”
“Repressed or not, she was with him.”
“In our mother’s house.”
“Don’t be naive.”
Right, it was the first time she had ever been accused of that. And suddenly, that memory from all those years ago, from New Year’s Eve, came back … when she had seen her father leaving that woman’s office.
But that had been decades ago, from another era.
Or maybe not.
Lane hit the brakes as they came up to a red light next to the gas station she’d visited that morning. “Think about where she lived,” he said. “Her four-bedroom Colonial in Rolling Meadows is more than she could afford on a bookkeeper’s salary—who do you think paid for that?”