Page 294 of Poor Little Rich Girl

We circle around the food table, stuffing our faces with tiny foods until the fifteen minutes are up. I check that my father is occupied with Eldritch Club members, then we slip away into the coatroom. There’s no attendant on duty – in this den of thieves, there must be a semblance of honor. Thou shall not steal thy neighbor’s Burberry coat.

We hunt around behind the jackets, but can’t find the anteroom Grace told us about. I’m starting to panic when an arm waves at us from behind a mink.

“Pssst. In here.”

Grace ushers us into a narrow door disguised in the paneling. She pulls it shut behind us, plunging us into darkness. I pull out my mobile phone and flick on the ‘fireplace’ app, and a flickering pixelated fire lights up a small storage area filled with boxes and racks of skimpy costumes for the club. Grace sinks into a pile of peacock-feather fans, her eyes closed as she takes the weight off her legs. Her hands tremble around her cane.

What’s wrong with her? That doesn’t look like nerves. It looks like she’s really fucking sick.

“That’s better,” she says. “I can hear myself think in here.”

“How do you know this room exists?” I ask.

“Nero invited me and your father to tour the new club while it was being built. I happened to notice this little room.” She taps her forehead. “I guess he didn’t expect I’d have such a journalist’s memory for details.”

“Grace, are you okay? You look really sick—”

“We don’t have much time.” She glances at the door. “I need to get this out. You’re going to find out tomorrow anyway, but I… I couldn’t go through with it without telling you in person. You need to hear this, too, Mackenzie. It concerns your late father. And my sister.”

Fear churns in my gut. “Grace, what are you talking about?”

“Harriet didn’t kill herself.” Her breath comes out in ragged gasps.

I know.

We figured this out weeks ago, but hearing Grace speak it aloud brings it all rushing back – the memory of finding her, of clutching her suicide note in my hands. First Felix left me, and now you. Everyone I love leaves me to face the darkness alone.

The rage clouds my vision. I don’t want to sit in this tiny room for another second. I want to storm into that party and tear my father’s face off with my bare hands. I glance at Claudia, needing her presence to steady me. She plasters a look of shock on her face. “Are you sure? What makes you say that?”

“When I started seeing John after Harriet’s death, he made me feel close to her. You both did.” The tenderness in Grace’s gaze makes my dark heart hurt. “I felt that by being with him, by loving him, by loving you, I could keep a piece of my sister alive in my heart. I even quit my job at the newspaper because you both needed me. And I was struggling with the stress, too. That was part of it. But mainly, I wanted to be there for you.”

I remember it all so clearly. Grace worked for the Emerald Beach Examiner covering local stories. My parents actually met through her. My mother, Harriet, accompanied Grace to some event she was covering where my father was speaking, and they got to talking during the cocktail hour. Grace used to laugh when she told their friends the story. “Here was the up-and-coming politician in a room with all these influential people – the kind of connections that could make or break his career – and he ignored them all to hide in the coatroom with my sister.”

As a kid, I always loved this story. It gave me a sick, sad hope that beneath my dad’s tempestuous exterior was an actual person. But now I see the truth behind Grace’s sunny version – that my dad spied a woman who was pliable, naive, and who would fit the wholesome image he wanted to portray. And he pursued her with the full force of his personality until she was powerless to resist him.

And as a cynical, broken teenager, I watched Grace fall for the same shit – his surface charm, lavish holidays, and grand gestures that hid the reality of living with his anger. Through her eyes, my father became the hero once again – the family man looking after her widow’s sister, finding love again in the darkness. All the while, behind the doors of our gilded prison, he was as cold and remote as ever. Never violent, but cruel beyond words.

I swallow back the bile as I think about everything Grace gave up for two men who never appreciated her. “If you’re telling me that you’re leaving him, I’ll help you pack your bags.”

She shakes her head sadly. “That’s not it. I wish that was all it was. The truth is, Noah, for a long time I’ve wondered about Harriet’s death. I stayed with your father long after his grief made him ugly because I wanted the truth. And this week, I found an old laptop hidden at the back of the closet. It’s your mother’s laptop. One she was using to write her romance novel. I don’t think your father knows she hid it there.”

He doesn’t. I remember Mom laughing as she lay on the sofa with an iced tea, the keys clacking beneath her fingers. Writing the romance she didn’t get to have in real life, then shoving the computer under the cushions when my father entered the room. She couldn’t bear the scathing cruelty he’d lob at her if he knew she was writing something so frivolous, and I couldn’t bear the idea of him taking this joy from her, too. She smiled when she wrote, and her smile was so rare and precious.

“You’re going to publish her novel?” I guess.

“No, omigod.” Grace grabs my wrist. “Harriet was many things, but a skilled wordsmith she was not. Just give me a second to get this out, okay? I boot up the laptop and connect it to the WiFi and I find your mother’s second email account, the one she used to use for things she didn’t want your father to see. There’s an email in the draft folder that she wrote to me but never sent.” She swallows. “She wrote it the day before she died.”

My mouth dries.

“In this letter, Harriet told me that Howard Malloy stormed into the house a couple of days prior, demanding to speak to John. Apparently, Howard was trying to move a large shipment out of the city when it was stolen from under his nose. He seemed to think it was John’s problem. He kept saying ‘if this gets out, you’ll be on the hook just as much as me.’ Your father told him to leave, and he did. But Harriet was worried about what she heard. She wanted me to look into it. She couldn’t think what business Howard and John could possibly have together, and then…”

And then I found her face down in the swimming pool.

Grace’s eyes flutter shut again, and I know she’s thinking the same thing as me, remembering that awful sight. Why can’t I remember my mother alive and happy? Why does my brain fixate on her blue, bloated body? “If only Harriet had sent that email, I’d have looked into this much sooner. Better late than never. It wasn’t hard to get the key to your father’s office while he was out and dig around. I’ve found some pretty horrible things. Your father was accepting large campaign donations from Malloy – way in excess of his other donors. Bribes to make sure Malloy’s company was allowed to continue doing what they were doing. But I think it’s more than that – I think John was in business with Malloy. That’s what Malloy meant when he said ‘you’ll be on the hook just as much as me.’ Plus, John took out a large sum of money right before the Malloys disappeared. You don’t take out that kind of cash unless… unless you plan to do something illegal with it. And there’s more… paperwork from the trial was fabricated. It looks as though your father made certain that Howard Malloy could never go to jail. I think he did it to save his own ass, to cover up whatever he and Malloy were working on together. And then Malloy disappears, the only person who knew about John’s involvement… and Harriet started to figure it out and then…”

This tracks with everything my father has already told us, except… except that he said Malloy killed my mother to get back at him for the treasure going missing. But what Grace is saying…

…is that my father might’ve killed my mother to keep her quiet.

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