Chapter 18 Holly
I enter the Ivy Room to find Eli, alone, perusing the display menu.
With just one glance at our “Tripp,” my spirits rise.
We’ve come so far in such a short time. Eli has memorized every detail of Tripp’s backstory, he’s nailed the clean-cut frat boy haircut and shave, and he looks fabulous in the business-casual clothes I ordered last week: crisp slacks and a blue-gray sport coat with subtle overplaid and a butterfly finish.
After squeezing in three more arduous sessions in the language lab, Eli suddenly broke through the accent.
My hunch is that Eli and Luisa’s incident on the side of the highway fixed more than a flat tire.
She blushed furiously when I suggested that her moment of kindness did the trick, then quickly redirected the conversation to my upcoming date with Professor Hugh Pridmore.
At the end of the night, as Hugh and I exchanged numbers, I did manage to sneak a quick two-fingered touch, and that jacket was just as soft as I’d imagined. Since then, I’ve been checking my phone constantly, hoping for texts from Hugh and daydreaming about being close to him again.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait long for the first text. Hugh followed up first thing the next day:
Woke up to blue skies this morning and thought of our surprise encounter.
Reading his text brought me right back to that strange sensation I had, my entire body on high alert, sitting so close to Hugh while Nikki belted out “Blue Skies.”
ME
Really fun to see you there and yeah its really a beautiful day
HUGH
Is springtime in atlanta always this lovely?
ME
As long as you can see through the pollen
HUGH
I quite like the pollen. Gives everything it lands on a lovely chartreuse tint.
ME
You may be the only person in the world who finds pollen lovely
HUGH
Me and the bees! Dreading my return to dreary london.
I was deep in concentration, trying to come up with some pithy response about the weather in England, when his next text came through, saving me from feeble attempts to appear clever.
HUGH
At least i have our Monday date to look forward to when I’m back. Dinner first?
ME
Perfect
So we’re going on a real date—dinner and the Switchyards jam—when he gets back in a couple of weeks.
Exactly fourteen days from today, but who’s counting?
I can’t get all swoony now, there’s work to do: three phases down, one to go.
It’s time to commence with Operation My Fair Lady—the etiquette lesson.
Luisa and I decided to bring Eli to a private dining room at the club for the fourth, and hopefully final, stage of our preparations.
We thought that conducting the etiquette lesson here would give him a chance to become familiar with the club and seem at ease in this type of environment, where he’s supposedly spent a lot of time.
“Didn’t you tell me that my most important run-in with these guys was gonna be over wings and beer in a locker room?” Eli asks, a puzzled look on his face.
“Not exactly a locker room,” I say. “The Men’s Grill, adjacent to the locker room,” I explain, gesturing down the maroon-carpeted hall. “It’s at the other end of the building.”
“Well, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing locker-room-adjacent about this place,” Eli replies, “or the weird menu.”
“Which is why we’re here,” I reply cheerfully. “So you can learn the ins and outs of table setting and dining etiquette, while also practicing that lovely new Mississippi accent.”
Justine breezes through the room, takes a hard look at me, and then pastes a disingenuous smile across her face.
As I expected, she bit her tongue when I asked her to come in today.
I explained Eli/Tripp would be spending time at the club as the guest of a member, and since he’s a fellow Mississippian, I offered to help him feel less nervous about the whole thing.
She knows I’m full of shit, but she also knows not to ask questions, God bless her.
The club is closed on Mondays, so no one’s here except for Byron and Justine, whom I convinced to serve as our sommelier and waitress, respectively, and Irma, who never turns down an opportunity to play in the kitchen.
I point to the framed page. “Just think of the prix fixe menu as a cheat sheet,” I tell Eli. “You pick one item from each category, which helps you understand the structure of rich-people dining, in case Griggs invites you out for dinner to seal the deal.”
“Well, alll riiight,” he says, still inspecting the menu while also beautifully capturing the slow and lilting musicality of his new accent. “But there doooon’t appeeear to be any priiices,” he says.
“It’s a set price,” I reply, pointing to the small print. “That’s what ‘prix fixe’ means.”
“One hundred and twenty-five dollars a person?” Eli blurts out, the lilting accent gone.
“Not including cocktails and wine,” I add. “Absurd, I know.”
“That’s got’dam highway robbery,” he exclaims, sliding back into his country twang.
Anxiety rises in my chest as I take in his last lingering slip—the North Georgia expression Eli can’t seem to drop: got’dam. I just hope the new accent will stick around long enough for us to get our information on Griggs and get out.
As if on cue, Justine returns. “May I bring you a cocktail while you wait?”
This, of course, is precisely the trick question that I told Justine to start with.
I’ve already instructed Tripp that under no circumstances will he order a cocktail.
He will order bourbon, neat. This does not mean a shot of Wild Turkey, as he initially assumed.
It means he will make his way down a priority-ordered list of Kentucky bourbons, beginning with Blanton’s—which feels very Tripp Bedford to me, but can be hard to find.
If he wants to mix it up, he can order Widow Jane from a hipster distillery in Brooklyn, but he’ll need to joke that it doesn’t really count as bourbon, since it’s from above the Mason-Dixon Line.
Excellent opportunity to demonstrate that he’s a Bubba at heart.
Eli sails through his first test smoothly, and when Justine returns with our drinks, he even remembers to sip on (not shoot!) his Blanton’s, as we peruse the menu together.
Luisa arrives, late and stressed, as tends to be the case for her, but looking fabulous in a fire-engine-red dress with matching lipstick.
“God, I could use a drink,” Luisa mutters over an anxious breath. “Finally made some progress on my forensic audit side project.” Her voice drops as she adds, “A third of the nonprofits Griggs’s family foundation gives money to, don’t actually exist.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, disbelieving. “How is he getting away with that?”
“Easy—” she scoffs. “You move the money enough times, it becomes untraceable. And Jim Wade is probably making sure nothing is audited.” She pulls up a very complex-looking spreadsheet on her phone. “I scoured their tax records. The money trail leads straight to that offshore bank in Panama.”
“Is that enough to take Griggs down?” I ask, hopeful. Luisa shakes her head.
“I’ll get you what you need,” Eli assures her, resting his hand on her shoulder and giving her a gentle squeeze.
To my surprise, Luisa doesn’t recoil from the touch. Interesting.
“My source at the DA’s office says we’ll need the bank statements,” she adds, leaning into Eli’s hand. “Or a way to track the money back to Griggs’s development.”
Justine interrupts, then discreetly ushers us to our table. We take our seats, and she heads back to the kitchen. Luisa and Eli bicker over whether he should have pulled out her chair (which he did), or stood until the women were seated (which Luisa insists he should have done).
“I have news!” I clap my hands together, vying for their attention. “I found the perfect place for our trial run.” They stop their banter to look at me, their expressions expectant. “This morning, as I was dragging my recycling bin to the corner—”
“Jesus. What’s the headline, Holly?” Luisa cuts in.
“My neighbor Aunt Edna rushed over,” I continue, ignoring her, “calling out that she was just desperate for someone to drive her to Madison next weekend for the bridge ladies’ event of the season.
” I pause for effect, thrilled that the universe must find our cause just, because it had dropped the perfect invitation into our laps.
“Judy Swanson’s Annual Kentucky Derby Party,” I exclaim.
“Won’t there be Atlanta people there?” Luisa asks, unconvinced.
“The Swansons are members of the club,” I explain, “but they split time between Atlanta and Madison. They don’t run in the same circles as Griggs.”
“Do I need to wear one of those hats?” Eli asks derisively.
“We all will,” I respond effusively, much to Luisa’s dismay. “It’s going to be perfect!”
Luisa and Eli launch into a debate, and I excuse myself to head into the kitchen. I want to make sure Irma has found all the ingredients I ordered and then hid in the back of the walk-in.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Justine fires off as I come into the kitchen. “ ’Cuz that got’dam boy ain’t from Mississippi.”
Leave it to Justine to nail our one lingering weakness.
“I don’t know where he’s from,” Irma says, her voice swoony, “but I know he’s gooooorgeous.” She turns to me. “When was he born? I bet he’s a Libra rising.”
“I have no idea, Irma.” I laugh. “I don’t have a habit of asking people exactly what time of day they were born.”
“You’d need to know the location, too,” she says in a tone that suggests I’d seriously consider grilling a recent acquaintance on these minuscule details.
“But you don’t even need to ask your friend Luisa.
I’m sure she’s triple Aries.” She waves her hand as if to stoke a flame. “That one’s pure fire sign.”
“And totally hot for the not-from-Mississippi kid,” Justine adds.
“Wait, what?” I ask, suddenly anxious. Eli and Luisa? That would complicate things.