Page 49 of Old Money

“ S o do it yourself,” says Jamie again. “Forget Gordon, you don’t need backup.”

He keeps typing as he speaks, this refrain so familiar he doesn’t have to think about it.

“Says the guy who suggested I needed backup,” I reply. “Going to Gordon was your idea.”

Jamie looks up from the monitor.

“Two weeks ago. A lot can change in two weeks. Anyway, it was a bad idea. My specialty, right?”

A lot can change in two weeks, but the trouble is, it hasn’t—not since those frenzied first days of July.

Alex Chapman is still missing somewhere near the Adirondacks.

The car that smashed Jamie’s into oblivion has yet to turn up.

Mr. Brody is still downstairs in his lair, and we are still sequestered in our closet—the three of us in a silent standoff and all of us still employed.

Then again, there’s nobody here to fire us.

“It’s just the lull,” Jamie says, eyes fixed on his screen. “Happens every year.”

He keeps saying this too. When the clubhouse suddenly emptied out, he shrugged it off cheerfully.

(“It’s because of the wedding. Everyone took their August trips early.

”) But it wasn’t just here—the whole village had gone still, and half the stores were shuttered.

Today it’s so quiet you can hear the horses, restless and whinnying down at the stables.

The sky is low and rumbling, always just about to rain.

It’s been like this for weeks. I felt the shift that morning, leaving Gordon’s house—that sudden drop in air pressure.

There’s no name for this strange phenomenon that rolls through every Hudson Valley summer like a mild plague.

The atmosphere turns dense and tactile, gathering itself into a storm that never breaks—just looms and roils above.

Breathing is effortful, and sleep impossible, and you start to get the awful feeling—you’d never say it, but you feel it—that it’s always going to be like this.

The world has stopped spinning, and you’ll be stuck forever, choking in this purgatory

And that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m choking—just like Gordon did. The recording of Mr. Brody’s confession is still sitting in my phone, unknown to anyone but me and Jamie. I haven’t sent it anywhere. I can’t even make myself listen to it again. That’s how hard I choked.

I drove away from Little Farm Lane with every intention of tracking down The Club Kid ’s producers—maybe contacting the magazine too.

I’d started playing it out in my mind, picturing the conversation in some anonymous café.

But—no, that’s not how it would go. There’d have to be a phone call first, where I convinced (or compelled) them to meet me at the anonymous café.

How would I do that? How would I even get someone on the phone?

Would I leave some creepy voicemail? I have information.

I think you’ll be interested. No, of course not—in order to even get a phone number, I’d have to write a creepy email first. The more I thought about it, the more implausible it sounded.

“Who in their right mind would reply to that email?” I say aloud, restarting the conversation we’ve had a dozen times.

“Any journalist,” Jamie says with a thin wire of frustration. “We’ve been over this. You know this.”

“Think it through. Wouldn’t you assume I was a crackpot?”

“But you’re not.”

“And those Club Kid people probably receive four hundred crackpot emails an hour.”

“But you’re not .”

Jamie hooks a finger into the collar of his shirt. He yanks it sideways, displaying the spray of broken blood vessels still lingering on his neck.

“Want me to talk to them?” He lifts an eyebrow at me. “I’ll write the email, no problem.”

In the distance, one of the horses lets loose a ribboning cry. I jerk upward at the sound.

Jamie sighs.

“They’re fine. They act funny when the weather turns—” He gestures upward at the discomfiting gloom. “When it gets like this—something about barometric pressure. They run around in circles.”

Aren’t we all .

“It’s just not enough—one recording,” I say in a guilty whisper. “It’s too big a gamble. You read Jeremy’s report.”

This was the second blow. Jeremy sent his background file on Patrick last week. Up until then, I might’ve chalked my doubts up to anxiety. But there was no chance of that after reading Jeremy’s email—a spooky one, even for him.

Alice,

As promised, here’s the background on Yates.

Sorry it took so long—I really scraped the barrel on this one.

I was hoping I’d surprise us both and turn up something useful.

No dice. It’s the old-money problem, like I said.

They’re too damn discreet. You smell smoke, but you’ll die trying to find that fire—even with a guy like this, who reeks of it.

Hope you don’t mind me saying again, but I’d proceed with caution.

Chapman vanishing is bad enough, but the fact that they haven’t found so much as a security-cam shot of him—that’s the real alarm bell.

People go missing all the time, but it takes real means to disappear someone.

I can’t tell you what to do, but I’m going to bow out now.

If you intend to pursue this further, I’ll ask you not to contact me again.

Anyhow, PDF and invoice attached. Per your contract, please delete each email individually before deactivating this account within thirty days.

Take care,

Jeremy

The report was five pages long, and as underwhelming as Jeremy said.

His email itself was far more incriminating than the “dirt” he’d managed to dig up on Patrick’s last two decades.

Most of the records were traffic violations—all paid.

To my dismay, Jeremy had also included discharge papers from the two treatment programs Patrick had completed.

Rehab hardly qualified as dirt, and just looking at the documents made me feel filthy.

What made it worse was the little note Jeremy had added: It’s your call, but I wouldn’t go public with stuff like this. Makes you look like the bad guy.

“But you’re not,” Jamie says for the umpteenth time. “And Jeremy said he wouldn’t find anything. He told you that up front, right?”

“He did, but—”

But he also told me to back off for my own safety. He said he wouldn’t do “boots on the ground” work because it wasn’t worth the risk.

“Hello?” Jamie prods. “Alice?”

“That’s it. I need to get more intel myself. More substantive evidence, or at least more witnesses.”

“Ok ay ,” Jamie says slowly. “And when were you planning to do all that? Because the wedding’s next week.”

“I am well aware.”

“And you literally aren’t working,” he says, adding in a rush, “which is fine. Not much you can do this week anyway.”

“Okay, boss. What are you trying to say then? What would you like me to do?”

He gives me a warning look.

“That’s your call. All I’m saying is now’s the time to make it.”

We stare at each other for a long, crackling moment of silence, neither of us certain which way the conversation will tip.

This too has complicated matters—this thing between the two of us that we’ve yet to name in daylight.

I knew it would that first evening—flirting over pizza like a couple of middle-schoolers.

But it seemed like such a harmless complication that I’d followed the impulse all the way back to Jamie’s apartment.

We were adults; we’d figure it out. Why not have one sweet, messy bit of fun in this grim summer?

This is why. Because we haven’t figured anything out.

We’re stuck in a holding pattern, like the rest of the village: each day, we muddle through work hours, having strange, stilted conversations like this one.

Then we clock out, and without saying anything, we leave the club together, sometimes for the Martha, and sometimes for his place.

From sundown on, everything’s easier—it is sweet and messy and fun.

Then I wake up at dawn, drive back to the Alcott, and a few hours later we both walk into work and wave at each other.

Jamie gives the desk blotter a final, firm tap.

“Okay, I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to say it.” He swallows. “You don’t have to do this.”

I look at him sideways. His shoulders shrug up even higher.

“I’m just saying, you can bail. On Patrick—on all this.”

“Seriously?” I say, incredulous.

“ Absolutely. No judgment.”

“No, I mean is this seriously your move? You think if you call me chicken, I’ll—”

“What? No. No , that’s not what I—”

“I’ll just snap out of it?”

“Wow.” He turns back to his computer. “You know what? Never mind.”

“No, go on.” I lean back in my chair, crossing my arms, my heart thumping. “Go ahead.”

“Forget it.”

“Come on, Jamie. I’m listening.”

“Yeah. Got that.”

“What does that mean?”

I watch him click absently around his computer, eyes fixed forward.

“Jamie.”

“Shit, Alice!” he bursts out. “You’re not doing anything. You’re talking about evidence and witnesses, but you’re not out there knocking on doors. And that’s fine ! That’s probably—”

“Whose door, Jamie?” I ask, my voice clear and unchecked.

“But this lull, right here?” Jamie jams a finger on the desk, blowing past my question. “ This is your window. It’s not going to be easier in a couple days when everyone’s back in town, plus a few hundred wedding guests. It’s going to be chaos, you know that, right?”

“Whose door should I be knocking on?”

He tosses his hands up.

“Your aunt’s? Your brother’s? I don’t know, anyone’s ? Isn’t that literally what Alex said?”

“Right, and now he’s literally a missing person.”

“Yeah! And I got run off the fuckin’ road! You’re scared because this is scary shit. So how about you get over yourself and call it off already?”

“You know what? I’ll take it from here.” I gesture at the air between us. “This part I’m calling off.”

“Okay. What?”

“You’ve got doubts—totally fair. You’re out. I’ve got it.”

I get up, gathering my things.

“Where are you going?” Jamie says wearily. “Alice, don’t be a child.”

I pause to look at him, watching regret bloom on his face.

“It’s after five,” I answer calmly. “And you’re right, I’ve got doors to knock on.”