Page 4 of Beau and the Beast

He hated Lincoln for saying it, but he kept his posture straight and proud as he made his way out of the busy bar.

Lincoln knew that Noah was Beau’s weakness. He would always be willing to sacrifice everything he had to make sure that his baby brother stayed out of trouble—and that was a frightening prospect for most people when they realized just how often Noah got himself into trouble.

But what else could Beau do?

He was the only one around to look after Noah.

Beau gritted his teeth and strode out of the bar.

* * *

In 2007, Americans thought the world was changing. The stock market crashed, people panicked, and the government intervened.

But to say that the world had changed would be a gross overstatement. The face of the American market changed—but it was just following the same pattern that markets had followed for eons. Nothing stays forever.

Americans from that particular generation learned what others had come to face centuries ago: Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.

One such hog was Isidore Wolfram, Jr., a Wall Street executive who had made a name for himself in the mortgage-backed security market.

Wolfram—and he had chosen to go by his surname, wanting to distinguish himself from his father, Isidore—had always worked with money. His father was a Wall Street exec and Isidore’s father before him had been in banking. The elder male Wolframs treated banking and money as if they were genetic predispositions, and while Wolfram’s mother may have been open to letting him explore his real interests, his father Isidore had overruled her at every turn.

Isidore saw to it that Wolfram got the very finest education at the country’s most exclusive schools. Honors undergraduate classes, semesters abroad doing graduate work. Wolfram accrued no debt, with his father paying for his education outright. After he graduated, Wolfram only toiled as a low-level executive for two years before, in 1997, he gave into his father, moving to accept his place at the company Isidore had founded, IW Securities Group.

Wolfram may have made a name for himself then, but he never stepped outside the shadow of his father. Isidore insinuated himself into all of Wolfram’s business dealings.

When Harriet Mueller stepped forward in the first days of spring in 2007, sounding the alarm that the end days of the bubble were upon IWSG, Wolfram listened to her. She may have just been a low-level employee within his office, but Harriet had never been wrong before. Steady and reliable, Harriet Mueller delivered the bad news with discretion and confidence.

Wolfram put a temporary hold on the sales of mortgage-backed securities the same day Harriet approached him.

Isidore had been furious—had overruled his son, insisted that Harriet be fired, and reinstated business as usual.

Quietly, Wolfram did not fire Harriet. He lived in a state of anxiety for eight months, waiting for the market to bottom out. He avoided Harriet in the office becauseshe knew he knew.

And when the inevitable did come, life was chaos. IWSG had to trim the fat before they received any bailout money. Isidore put Harriet on the chopping block.

Wolfram should have looked out for her. Of all the people in the office, Harriet should never have taken that fall.

But he was distracted, frightened, and above all obedient to his tyrant father.

Harriet was dismissed, a cardboard box pushed into her hands.

Three days later, Harriet Mueller of unknown age, who had lived a quiet life at 1307 Cedar Street in New Whitby for the past 20 years, died of a stroke—though Wolfram and those on his staff wouldn’t know until later.

(They wouldn’t know until they were going through their records from the safety of Wolfram’s penthouse, looking for Wolfram’s connection to the Mueller family, trying to make sense of what had happened to them—the illogical made flesh.

They wouldn’t know until Violet found Harriet Mueller’s obituary and Geoffrey thought to question why Harriet had seemed to possess a supernatural ability to predict the market—why she had been the only one to see it coming.)

* * *

Five daysafter the crash of the market, Wolfram returned home from a grueling day of refusing interviews and damage control to find that his six top employees had gathered in the foyer of his multi-million-dollar New Whitby penthouse at 330 West.

“What’s the meaning of this?”

Their faces were confused—Violet, Geoffrey, Ryan, Alfie, Song, and James all staring at him as if he’d lost his mind.

“You called each of us,” Violet said. “You told us to be here.”

“I most certainly did not,” Wolfram said, sure they were playing a joke. He tossed his bag down onto the foyer table and massaged the bridge of his nose. “How did you even getinhere?”

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