Page 24 of Old Money

I turn out of the police-station parking lot, make a left and floor it. My hands shake as I grip the wheel, glancing in the rearview mirror. I don’t know what Jessie’s given me, but I know it’s something. I have something.

It’s barely a ten-minute drive to get home, but I can’t wait that long to find out what it is. I reach the village center and park in the near-empty lot beside the grocery store. I pull the little box out of my bag and open it. It’s a thumb drive. I knew it. I knew it.

I pull out my laptop and slot the drive into the USB port. It takes an eternity to load the drive’s contents, and when the files finally appear, I see why. Because it’s everything. Jessie has given me absolutely everything.

The records are all tucked into zip files—a dozen or so in each.

Each PDF inside is labeled with what looks like a random string of characters.

You can’t tell what an individual file contains until you open it.

At first I wonder if Jessie obscured them on purpose, but my guess is she didn’t have time for that.

There are more than sixty files in here—more than I even requested.

She must have been dragging and dropping the entire time I was in there with the redacted files.

(Don’t rush!) And she’d handed them over to me right in front of another officer.

Why? I wonder. But that’s for later. For now I have reading to do.

I sit in the parking lot for over an hour, the car and my laptop growing uncomfortably hot. It’s nearly ten thirty when my phone rings.

“Alice, where are you?”

“Jamie? I’m just— Where are you ?”

There’s a loud, metallic clatter in the background, and someone starts shouting.

“Here!” he barks. “Everyone is here but you!”

The person shouting in the background shouts something about “goddamn salad tongs” and I realize Jamie is in the clubhouse kitchen.

“Right but—yesterday,” I begin, unsure if he can hear me over the racket. “I thought I was fired.”

“What? No. But you are extremely fucking late,” Jamie replies. “Can you be here before eleven?”

I slump back in my seat, fiddling with the touchpad on my laptop. Can’t I just be fired for a day?

“I’m actually out on an errand,” I say. “I’d have to go home first. I’m not in dress code.”

“What are you wearing?” he counters. “I mean—it doesn’t matter. If you’re wearing clothes and in the tristate area, please come to work as soon as you can.”

My computer wheezes, exhausted and overheated. I give up.

“Okay, yeah,” I sigh, ejecting the thumb drive and closing the laptop. “But what’s going on?”

“I don’t have time, Alice. Can you please just get here, and bring a pound of lemons?”

“What?”

Jamie’s voice is muffled for a moment, and all I hear is the muted cacophony around him.

“Sorry,” he says. “Ten pounds of lemons. I have to go.”

***

I catch on quickly once I’m at the club.

The member lot is packed with cars, and half the golf carts are gone.

Crossing the staff lot, I can hear the thwack of tennis balls—at least two games going—and the distant shriek of kids at the pool.

There’s a tinge of grease in the air—the snack bar is getting a jump on things.

An hour from now, a throng of wet, ravenous children will line up for burgers and curly fries.

And their parents will be drinking in earnest. Hence, the lemons.

Jamie calls this “The Descent.” It’s the unknowable day when high season truly begins.

Jamie explained it to me a few days in: the early days of summer are typically quiet, with maybe a dozen members on-site at any given time.

And then, suddenly, they arrive en masse—usually on a Thursday, sometime in late June.

“Like Thanksgiving,” he’d said. “Except you don’t know the day in advance. And there are never any leftovers. And no one says, ‘thank you.’ ”

I get it now. Coming through the boot room, I can already hear how full the clubhouse is. I head to the kitchen first, sacks of lemons swinging from each hand.

“Hello?” I say, pushing the door open with my shoulder. The kitchen is as chaotic as it sounded.

“Thank God,” says a sweating line cook, diving for one of the bags. “The rest go to the grill.”

I take the back way, using the staff hall.

The gallery would be faster, but I’m in shorts, sneakers and a wrinkled pink shirt.

The only dress-code violations I’m not breaking is the no-pockets rule.

I stashed the thumb drive in my bra, too nervous to leave it in the car, though now I’m just nervous that it’ll fall out.

“Alice!” a voice calls behind me. “Wait up!”

Jamie jogs toward me, with Cory in tow. I drop my hand to my side, perching the lemons on my hip in an awkwardly casual pose. Jamie doesn’t notice—all he sees are lemons.

“Thanks,” he says, taking the bag and handing it to Cory.

“Grill. Go,” he orders. Cory nods and marches onward like a soldier to the front.

“You.” Jamie points at me. “Freight elevator. Let’s go.”

***

The lemon crisis began with an unexpected flood of Tom Collins orders. The drink is always on the menu, but today it’s all anyone wants.

“Every year, it’s something like this,” Jamie explains, shoving an ancient key into the ancient elevator operating panel. It jolts to life.

“In 2016 we ran out of gin. Fuck, man, that was a day.”

He recounts the great gin disaster as we descend to the cold-storage room where the kitchen staff keep a backup stash of frozen lemon juice. (“We have to ration fresh. When martini time hits, we’re gonna need those twists.”) Jamie’s so jacked on manic energy he’s practically bouncing on his feet.

“You’re not fired, by the way,” he says, as the elevator bumps to a stop. “But—we need to talk.”

The elevator doors clank open and Jamie leaps forward, running toward the freezers.

“Later though,” he calls, his voice echoing in the dark. “When they’re gone.”

They never leave though. They just keep coming.

The Descent is an endless, lawless day, with the whole staff working overtime and some of them not even staff.

Jamie and I return from cold storage to find Cory by the elevator, waiting with some blond kid I’ve never seen before.

Without a word, they swoop in to help unload the tubs of frozen lemon juice, all of us running them down the hall like vital organs to all the suffering, Tom Collins–less people at the grill.

The rest of the day is a sweaty blur. I spend most of it in a golf cart, ferrying coolers of lemon juice to the satellite bars set up around club grounds, with the help of the blond kid—who, it turns out, is both Cory’s brother and thirteen years old.

“It’s cool!” the kid tells me. “Cory said it’s okay as long as they don’t pay me, because of child labor.”

I drive him to the staff parking lot and tell him to call his dad, wondering how many laws I’ve broken, serving cocktails mixers from a vehicle, with a minor, in ninety-two-degree heat.

I go inside for a bottle of water and somehow end up carrying a pallet of them to the snack bar.

The snack bar needs napkins, so I hike up the hill and go in through the basement door, where an attendant pops out of the men’s locker room with a wild-eyed look, implores me to fetch more mouthwash, then disappears before telling me where to find it.

I ask a grill server who tells me to ask the valet, who tells me to fuck off because he’s on his first break in six hours and he just wants to finish his sandwich in peace, please .

“Sorry,” he says after a moment, a fleck of tuna on his lip. “Long day.”

That’s when I look at my watch and realize it’s almost 6:00 p.m.

“Holy shit, what happened,” I say to my wrist.

“Right?” the valet answers, wiping his mouth. “Worse every year.”

***

I knock on Jamie’s open office door and lean in.

“Got a minute?”

I’m officially gross, my skin tacky with dried sweat and a Picasso-esque sunburn on the left side of my body from my afternoon in the golf cart.

But Jamie’s even more wrecked. He’s reclining in his desk chair, eyes shut, mouth ajar and clutching the armrests with a white-knuckle grip.

He looks like he’s fallen asleep on a roller coaster.

“Hi. Hey.” He jolts forward, shaking himself awake. “What’s wrong, what happened?”

“Nothing. I just thought we could talk.”

“It’s not about Matthew, is it?”

“Who? Oh .” Cory’s brother. Feels like that happened a month ago. “You mean the child bartender I drove around without a seat belt? No.”

I risk a smile and sit down.

“Look,” I begin.

“You know what?” Jamie says. “I know I said we should talk, but—another time. I really don’t want to get into it.”

“Okay. I do though.”

He takes a bracing breath, beginning to protest. I raise my voice above his.

“Jamie, I came home to get Patrick charged with Caitlin’s murder. I’m here to— Well. What I—”

I hear myself starting to hedge. If I’m telling him the truth I’ll have to tell it all, plain and messy as it is. I clear my dry, throbbing throat.

“It’s exactly what you think it is. I’m trying to fix it—get the whole thing reinvestigated properly.

I’m reinvestigating. I hope the state will too, eventually—or the county.

But I’m, like, forty steps away from that.

It’s a huge deal getting a closed case reopened—even with all the publicity this year.

I mean that helps, but the village certainly won’t reopen the case unless they’re forced to.

And in order to do that you either need ‘compelling evidence,’ or—”

“Or a judge,” says Jamie quietly, slouched back in his chair. “Yeah, and even then they can appeal.”

He drums a finger on the desk, rubs his eyebrows and sighs.

“I looked into it once.”

“What?” I lean forward, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “When?”

Jamie shrugs.

“Years ago. Briefly,” he adds. “Not like that.”

He raises his eyebrows, pointing at me with his chin. Not like my wild, rambling plan.

“Why?” I ask him, still stunned.

Jamie looks up, his eyes narrowed—offended.

“Why the hell do you think, Alice?” he murmurs. “Did you think you were the only one who remembered what happened?”

In the silence I can hear the distant, tipsy roar of cocktail hour in the clubhouse.

“Okay then,” I say, whispering too. “Then you understand.”

He nods.

“You should’ve told me though. Me, of all people.”

At this, I drop my chin and give him a look.

“Come on.” I smirk. “I take your point, but no way would you have hired me if I walked in here and told you all that.”

Jamie stands, buttoning his jacket, looking toward the door. Dinner service will be starting soon.

“Yeah, maybe not,” he concedes. “Still wish you’d told me though. I would have have helped.”

I watch, speechless, as he steps sideways from behind the desk, heading for the door. He pauses in the door frame for a moment.

“Yeah,” he says, nodding to himself more than me. “I’m helping.”