Chapter Seven
Six Months Ago
A week later Isla was at her three-days-a-week part-time job as an eldercare companion, halving one of the Tuscan turkey sandwiches for Miss Lydia so they could sit for lunch as they always did.
She was half listening to one of Lydia’s daytime talk shows when the local station interrupted with breaking news.
“Goodness,” Miss Lydia said from her spot on the pale-blue couch. She leaned toward the TV to get a better look and listen. “How awful.”
“Passersby noticed three tagged dogs several yards away from the SUV and checked it when the dogs continued to linger near it. There they found the body deceased from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound,” the anchor continued somberly.
“The employee, just identified as Matthew Leonard, worked in the accounting department for an LA-based shopping mall, a subsidiary of the Corrigan Group.”
The steady slicing of the green apple set to be part of today’s lunch slowed to a stop. Isla stood in the kitchen, the knife hovering in the air, the apple a distant memory. Like Miss Lydia, Isla leaned in the direction of the TV to get a better look and listen.
“Mr. Leonard had just recently left the company after coming under increasing scrutiny for alleged misappropriation of funds and was facing mounting legal and financial troubles. He leaves behind a wife and a baby less than a year old.”
Isla moved so she could see the screen in the living room.
It flashed a smiling photo of Matthew Leonard, his arm over his wife and the baby cradled in her arms, with their faces blurred.
Then the screen switched to the company doors as entering employees shied away from the cameras while reporters threw questions at them, asking if Leonard’s alleged dealings and his sudden resignation had played a part in his death.
Of course they did. Isla leaned against the doorframe as she watched Bennett Corrigan and that Danny fellow wave off the throng of reporters with no comment and enter the building.
“They move fast,” she mumbled.
“What was that, honey?” Miss Lydia asked from the couch. “This is the first in a while I’ve heard bad things about the Corrigan Group. They do so much humanitarian work. Even I know them from before I retired.”
She went on, but Isla was in her own head. Leonard had died last night, but the news already had so much information about a misappropriation of funds. Nothing about an affair. Isla didn’t know anything about missing money. How had her team missed this?
The anchor continued, “This incident has left his family and the company shaken and taken by surprise. Chairman Victor Corrigan, through a company spokesperson, said, ‘The Corrigan Group and all its subsidiaries are a family here and worldwide. One of our family was lost. The allegations don’t matter. What matters is that Mr. Leonard’s life is honored and his beautiful family is taken care of.
And if you or anyone in need of help is thinking about self-harm, please dial 988 or contact any of the appropriate local numbers listed below.
Please reach out to someone. We are so sorry for Matthew and his family.
It is a deeply tragic loss, and we at the Corrigan Group hope you will respect the Leonards’ and our grief during this devastating time. ’”
Isla’s mind started working. If Leonard had been embezzling from the company, why blackmail him with photos of an affair?
What was there to blackmail? They had enough to get him and send him to prison.
What’s more, why hadn’t Rey gotten wind of any of it, even with the time they’d had to pull up dirt on him?
And what had driven him to make the choice he did when either choice, the affair or embezzlement, would have hurt his family? No word about his affair either.
Maybe to him, being labeled a thief was better than being labeled an adulterer. Was this what the Corrigans considered “taken care of”?
His death left a mark on her, like the deaths of others who had been in her life.
Her father. Here one minute. Gone the next.
Eden. Here one minute. Gone the next.
Now Matthew Leonard too.
She was hit with an even scarier thought.
What if what had happened to Matthew Leonard had happened to Eden too?
At least what had happened to Isla’s father and Leonard was clear.
They were dead through different circumstances, with their bodies found.
They had had and would have funerals, where their loved ones could grieve.
But what had happened with Eden was left unresolved.
No one even knew she’d gone missing except Isla, because the only two people who would have cared were Elise, who was dead, and Isla, who was just a kid on the run back then, one of the unseens in this country because she didn’t fit the mold of a normal kid with a home and parents.
It was the knowledge, trauma, and guilt that had haunted her every day for the past ten years, and finally apathy, which had driven her to tolerate Charli’s ridiculous get-rich-quick schemes, which sometimes did or did not involve her against her will.
They’d met on the train at Peachtree Station in Atlanta before a long train ride across the country to LA.
By the time they’d arrived at Union Station nearly four days later, Charli was offering a place to stay and a helping hand.
People feel more comfortable with you when a kid’s around, Charli had said, with Texas as their scenic backdrop. I know a guy who knows a guy who can help you get an ID so you can make a clean break. Start a new life. I won’t ask and don’t give a damn.
Thus, Isla Thomas became Isla Thorne.
Because it’s better to keep some parts of you true, Charli continued, happy to have some sort of apprentice by now. Then all you gotta do is sign your initials, and no one can say it’s a forgery.
She was just selfish and an opportunist. Isla couldn’t call the brash and overbearing woman an adoptive mother because Charli was anything but. But she had helped Isla out when she’d needed it the most.
Isla worked multiple jobs, earned her GED, went to college, and got her degree.
Met Rey and Nat and was here now, still living with Charli but enjoying life, hanging out with Miss Lydia and not putting her degree to its best use as one-third of their discovery team.
That’s what they considered themselves, because they discovered the needle in all that hay and let their clients decide whether to stick it.
The Corrigans were untouchable. Though they were considered philanthropes, made humanitarian efforts globally, it seemed that when someone crossed or offended them, this family erased them entirely and came up smelling like roses.
Isla hated the smell of roses. She hated bullies with unlimited money and power more.
A fire she had long resigned would never be extinguished had been reignited by Leonard’s frozen face of despair and confusion. A memory had resurfaced. One long hidden away.
Eden, in Daytona, drunk after a night of partying, grabbing Isla’s hands and in a moment of fevered clarity saying from nowhere, “They’d have made me like them, or worse, if I’d stayed. They are a nest of vipers.”
Back then, Isla had smiled and nodded, attributing Eden’s words to the ramblings of a drunk girl taking care of a dying mother.
But there was the other time, when the two of them had stopped in Virginia, in their double-queen room on the second floor of the Red Roof.
They could have afforded a better place, but Eden had been on edge, had been weird the moment they’d arrived.
Isla didn’t know why they’d stopped here when they were going to be the Black-girl version of Thelma and Louise, only live in the end, and bus to Los Angeles.
They’d live on all the money Isla had saved from working at McDonald’s and a backpack of money Isla hadn’t known Eden had been carrying around.
Eden had been her first and only true friend until Rey and Nat.
She had been a big sister. Eden’s mother had been the mom Isla never had until the moment Elise couldn’t fight her illness anymore.
Isla had been there. She and Eden had sworn to always have each other’s backs, but Eden had always been guarded and quirky, which was why Isla hadn’t asked any questions when they’d arrived in this town.
She’d let Eden go in and out without asking where she was going, why, and to see whom.
Eden’s final words to her, before she left the motel room to meet some old friends: “This is the last thing I have to do with them. I might be late, so don’t wait up.”
Old emotions assailed Isla one after the other.
She was no lightweight. In their line of business Isla had uncovered the worst of the worst about people.
Secrets and scandals they’d probably have killed to keep hidden.
Leonard was the first time a job had felt personal, because it had made her feel again.
Pieces of the past began to click together in her mind, one by one.
The way Eden had vanished without a trace.
The silence afterward, with no one to turn to.
And now, seeing the might of the Corrigans and particularly their might against those who’d crossed them.
Had Eden done that? Crossed the Corrigans?
Isla handed Miss Lydia her sandwich and chips and opened her laptop after promising to eat her own lunch in a minute.
She typed in the search bar, pulling up what always came up.
Very little information about the actual family: Victor, Bennett, Myles, Brooke, and Holland.
All upstanding citizens. A beautiful family.
It was as if their digital footprints had been sanitized to the most generic details.
The majority of the information was about the Corrigan Group and all the companies and subsidiaries under it, like the intricate network of a family tree.
No scandals. No disgruntled workers. The final picture was of the family smiling together at a charity function for their foundation. Eden’s words echoed.
A nest of vipers.
“Isla, you need to eat. You look so serious. All that frowning will give you wrinkles, and you’re too young for them,” Miss Lydia said. “So am I, as a matter of fact!”
Isla grinned. “That’s right, Miss Lydia—you look better than me.”
“Damn right I do.” Miss Lydia touched up her hair, posing because she knew she still looked good at eighty.
Isla closed her laptop, appreciating the sweet older lady who favored the late, great Ruby Dee. The idea churning in her head wasn’t about guilt over Matthew Leonard or unfinished business over Eden. Well, maybe a little. But mostly it was about truth.
Victor Corrigan and his crew had entered her world, stoked buried feelings, and reminded her of a debt that she had yet to pay. So it was high time Isla entered his.