Chapter Nine
“You know you don’t have to be here, babygirl.”
Samantha sat at the other side of the dining room table, her arms crossed beneath her breasts. “Yes, I do,” she said, her blue eyes sparkling intensely. “Whatever she has to say to us, I want to hear it.” She stared at the back of Mona’s laptop. “But that doesn’t mean I want her to see me.”
It was the next morning, and we’d arranged the entire group in the dining room for the Zoom call.
We’d been so busy lately that the state of the place surprised me when I first walked in—at some point between Morning Harbor and Call Your Daddy, Yui had gotten the cheerleaders and some of the other girls to clean the boxes out of the place.
They’d unpacked and set up the furniture as well, which made the room feel more like home.
The space was set up almost like a movie premiere, just with a very small screen.
The girls had dragged chairs in from other rooms, arranging them in a rough semicircle around the end of the table where Mona’s laptop stood open.
Yukiko sat at my right with a legal pad—because of course she did—and Mona took my left.
Of the rest of the group, only Samantha and Caroline sat across the table outside of camera range; the rest of my women waited behind us, watching.
Marcie was seated just behind Kiki and I: when she leaned forward, it put her head directly between ours.
Our lawyer Saskia Klein was here digitally. A little window in the corner of the Zoom meeting showed her sitting in a suburban kitchen, wearing a pair of thick reading glasses and sipping tea from a chipped mug with the Six Flags logo on it.
Samantha would be thrilled to see that, I thought, if she were watching the call instead of listening to it.
Oh well.
“We won’t let her know you’re here,” Yukiko said, glancing across the table. Then she smiled. “You can’t come at her with a baseball bat this time.”
“You’d just break Mona’s laptop,” Marcie said, leaning forward. “And then we’d have to buy her a new one.”
“Duly noted,” Mona murmured. She looked a hell of a lot better than she had on the porch yesterday—a good night’s sleep had done her a world of good. “I’ll keep that in mind in case I ever want to upgrade to a better MacBook on the company dime.”
“I’d just buy you one,” I protested. “Otherwise we’d be finding pieces of keyboard in the carpet for weeks—”
“She’s here,” Mona said. She tapped a button. “Is legal counsel ready to observe?”
Saskia checked the time with the tiny Casio on her wrist. “Go ahead and add her to the call,” she said, all business. “I’m taking notes.”
Mona tapped the mousepad.
And Jessamyn Fawkes’s face filled the middle of the screen.
I heard a couple of gasps behind me as the image stabilized.
I winced internally at some of the harem’s rudeness, but inwardly I didn’t blame them—Jessamyn looked like hell.
The proud, confident member of Delta Rho’s national leadership had been replaced by a stressed, moderately paranoid young woman somewhere around the time Victoria Ruocchio double crossed her.
The room behind her was nondescript as could be—it looked like a cheap hotel, which made me wonder where she’d run off to.
She looked jittery. She kept glancing to the side like she expected someone to break down the door at any moment.
“Hey!” Jessamyn said, a touch too loud. “I’m here. Am I making noise? Can everyone hear me? Can you see me?”
“We see you, Miss Fawkes,” Mona said. “You’re coming in clear.”
Jessamyn relaxed a fraction.
“Great. Awesome.” She licked her lips, scanning the faces in our dining room. I knew there was one in particular she hoped to see—and it was the one that had made sure it would be nowhere near her. “Thank you for taking this call. I know that I’m—”
“You’ve performed admirably thus far,” Mona said, cutting her off. She was referring to the half-dozen podcast appearances and interviews Jessamyn had done after she sold herself to us, recanting all the awful things Victoria had put her up to saying about our family. “Let’s get down to business.”
“Of course.” Jessamyn leaned in closer, lines appearing on her forehead. “Samantha, is she…?”
I watched my babygirl’s face turn to stone from the other side of the table.
“Samantha's resting,” I said, the words coming out stern. “She doesn’t need to be here right now, Jessamyn.”
“Sure.” Jessamyn’s expression fell, but fell less than I’d expected. “Just… just tell her I’m thinking about her.”
None of us said anything to that.
After a moment, Jessamyn sighed. “Okay. Reading you loud and clear.”
“Tell Jack, his wives, and our legal counsel what it is you told me,” Mona began. “And then tell me what you learned.”
“But first, what does Victoria have on Daniel?” I demanded.
Mona’s head moved on a swivel. That was not what I was supposed to say. I couldn’t help it; it just slipped out. It was what I wanted to know.
Jessamyn’s lips formed a tight little line.
“I couldn’t get what you asked for, Mr. Avery,” she said, sounding honestly regretful.
“The Daniel thing. I know it exists, but I don’t know the details.
I want you to know I’ve tried, and that I’m not holding out on you.
I… I want to be useful. I know that’s the only path I’ve got to any sort of redemption—”
“You don’t know anything about it?”
Jessamyn winced. “There’s something big. I know that much. It’s got something to do with money—money going places it shouldn’t.” She paused, as if weighing whether giving less solid information would help or hurt her case. “I get the impression it’s old.”
Now Mona perked up. “Old? How old?”
Jessamyn shrugged. “Years. Decades, maybe. Whatever it is Daniel’s involved in, the tracks are covered well. Any time I try to follow the trail, it just… vanishes.” She threw up her hands. “I don’t know how Victoria found it, whatever it is.”
“There’s nothing,” Mona insisted. “Miss Fawkes, I have gone over Daniel Ramsey’s business dealings with a fine-toothed comb…”
Jessamyn gave a little start. “I don’t think it’s a business thing. You would’ve found a business thing.”
Mona went very still. “Then what?”
The blonde woman swallowed in her box on the screen. “I think it’s deeper than that. Like it's personal.”
The room got very quiet all of a sudden.
“So that’s a dead end, then,” Mona said.
“For now.” Jessamyn’s eyes flicked to the side again. “I’ll keep digging. As much as I can behind Victoria’s back. But that’s not why I called.”
Just like that, Mona was on firmer ground. “I know. Mr. Avery wanted to know if you’d made any progress on that front. Now tell us what happened with Victoria.”
“What did she fuck up?” Marcie asked.
Jessamyn did a double take. Marcie dropping casual profanity in a meeting with her had clearly not been on her bingo card.
Then her face changed. Because whatever Jessamyn had, she considered it a coup. And she was excited to give it to us.
“Victoria just lost the Harringtons,” she said.
Saskia Klein let out a startled noise. The lawyer sat up straighter, her nostrils flaring as she set down her mug. Next to me, Mona did something similar.
Harrington? The name rang a bell—
Marcie nearly sprang out of her seat. “Mr. Harrington?”
Saskia leaned forward. “Carl Harrington is dead,” she said, like she wanted to believe Jessamyn but couldn’t help poking holes in her story the way a good lawyer would. “He died two years ago—”
“Not that Harrington,” Jessamyn said. “His widow.”
The wheels spun behind Mona’s eyes. “What does this mean?” she snapped, directing the question to Saskia.
The lawyer caught it. “A very great deal, potentially,” she said, clearly working through it at the same time. “Jack, if that’s true, if the Harrington account is up for grabs…”
“Oh my gosh!”
I turned around. Marcie was standing in front of her chair, her face pale.
“Victoria talked to Tallulah?” she blurted.
I cleared my throat. “The name Harrington rings a bell for me,” I admitted, looking from the screen to Marcie. “I don’t quite understand why it doesn’t ring a bigger one, though.”
Marcie let out a shocked little sound. “Mr. Harrington was one of the clients at Dad’s firm. One of the biggest.”
It was starting to come together. “Harrington Structural,” I said, the words coming from way in the back of my brain. “Daniel never assigned me to do any work with them. They are… I guess they were pretty old school, right?”
“Dad always said Carl Harrington was the best structural man in New England. You and I both know he didn’t say things like that unless he meant them.”
The picture cleared further. Carl—a tall, bald man with coke-bottle glasses and absolutely no social niceties. I’d met him maybe a half-dozen times in ten years, usually on his way out of a meeting in Daniel’s office. Daniel had never assigned me to work with him.
As I was about to learn, that was because he took a personal interest in the Harringtons.
“They knew each other when they were first starting out,” Marcie explained.
“Dad always handled his requests himself as much as possible. They were friends. They came up in the world together.” I could tell she was remembering.
“He could be kind of rude sometimes, Carl could. But Tallulah was always so nice.”
“Tallulah is his wife?” I clarified.
Marcie nodded. “The last time I saw her was at Mr. Harrington’s funeral.
” She gave a small, sad smile. “She wore a red dress. No black. When I asked her about it, she said he’d always hated funerals.
And that every time he’d ever seen her in that dress he whistled, and she was hoping he’d get up and do it one last time. ”
There were a few chuckles at that last part.
“Sounds like a feisty lady,” Maria said.
“I can think of a couple girls in this room who’d do something similar,” Yukiko murmured.
Marcie’s face changed. “If Ramsey Engineering lost Harrington, that’s huge,” she said, her eyes going wide. “That relationship was such a big part of my dad’s reputation.”