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Chapter 16

Kennedy Carter

Los Angeles, April 2015

A flight attendant placed a flute of what Kennedy assumed was champagne (but could have been prosecco) on the glossy surface that mimicked wood in front of her. Next to her, Asher was already a single bourbon deep, and the plane had just taken off.

Kennedy hated the Gulfstream G280, the smallest jet in the Carter Corporation fleet that shuttled the family back and forth to Martha’s Vineyard. She found it cramped, suffocating. She flattened her palm and drummed her rings on the shiny fake-wood table.

Her parents sat directly in eyesight on the sofas that took up the long wall of the cabin, completely disinterested in their children not forty feet away. She watched them, distantly remembering how at one time in her life, the ride to the Vineyard was the epitome of fun. Either they were anticipating an amazing summer, buoyed by the temporary suspension of work and school in place of lobster rolls and lawn games, or they were contentedly returning to so-called real life, wrung out with exhaustion from overindulgences and sunshine. They hadn’t had a summer like that in years. The Vineyard was once a source of joy but had since become another extension of the family business, an office with a better view. Even now, in transit, both her parents appeared to be animated models in a Norman Rockwell painting about Black people in corporate America.

Her mother was furiously scrolling on her iPad, glasses balanced on the tip of her slender nose, her blown-out, light-brown hair elegantly held in a claw clip at the nape of her neck. She was doing work, which in this case was loosely defined as party planning for her husband’s seventieth birthday. Her father was dialed into a conference call and was simultaneously texting his first assistant that his second assistant should be terminated. In the terminal before the flight, Kennedy had snuck a peek at his phone screen as he typed expletives full of errors at a snail’s pace. The assistant had failed to expose the source of escalating security alerts that were not only a nuisance to him personally but also alarming in general for a corporation with a reputation to protect.

No one in the family had made eye contact with each other in quite some time. Since they were comfortably at cruising altitude, Kennedy tried to get her brother’s attention by rising from her seat and waving her hand in front of his face. He removed his left headphone. “What, Ken?” he asked, clearly irritated at having been disturbed.

“Can I ask you a question?” she whispered.

He shifted his head downward and his gaze upward and opened his palms as an invitation to speed things along. The Carter children, from birth, had been schooled in the notion that time was a precious resource. Not many kids understand what a “hard out” is before they’re hitting certain developmental milestones. But that’s why Kennedy initiated this conversation: for at least the next thirty-eight minutes, Asher had nowhere else to be.

Kennedy leaned over the table and dropped her voice to an even lower whisper. Asher did not mirror her closeness. “I’m working on something,” she said. Her brother remained impassive.

“What’s the question?” he deadpanned, signaling even further that he had no desire to engage with her as a coconspirator.

“Well, do you know, how—” She paused and instantly regretted not coming up with a more rehearsed question. She really should have practiced something. She didn’t even know what she was trying to achieve with asking Asher. He knew just as little as she did, although at this point, she was betting she knew just a little bit more. “—how Dad started the company? Like, what’s the story of it?”

“Kennedy ... what?” Asher looked vaguely disgusted. “Why are you even whispering about this? You know how Dad started the company.”

“I don’t think we do,” Kennedy responded, still whispering and trying to telepathically communicate to her physically close but psychically distant sibling.

“Ken, we do. It’s very well documented and publicized, okay? The story has been told a million different times.” Asher began to put back on his headphones.

“Wait!” Kennedy whispered to him, really trying to convey urgency. “What I’m trying to say is ... I’ve been working on something, and some weird stuff has come up, and I think there’s something else going on. I don’t think we know the full story.”

“‘Working on something.’” Asher contorted his face and put air quotations around his sister’s words. “You’re ‘working on something’ that investigates our family? Are you crazy, Kennedy? After everything they’ve done for us, you’d do that?”

Kennedy shrank back. “It’s just—”

“No, cut it out, Ken. You’re being a fucking baby. You’re trying to punish everyone else for your mistakes.”

“I’m not!”

“You are,” he said reaching across the table to slide the glass of still-untouched champagne directly in front of her. “Less think. More drink.”

Asher raised his empty glass to gesture to the stewardess that he wanted a refill. She immediately reappeared with a bottle of Weller’s Antique Reserve. He set his glass on the table, and the small jet lurched. The stewardess expertly steadied herself by placing her free hand on the side of the plane, balancing the bottle in her other hand.

Kennedy’s heart rate quickened, but no one else seemed flustered by the turbulence. In fact, no one else moved. The stewardess returned to her task of refilling Asher’s bourbon, which he downed in a smooth, steady swallow, then dropped the glass onto the table for another. The plane suddenly and unexpectedly dipped to the left side. Kennedy gasped from the shock and frantically looked again at her parents, both of whom remained unbelievably committed to their devices. The plane once again righted itself after a few seconds.

Kennedy hated this small, stupid plane and the treacherous fog-filled flight pattern to and from the Vineyard. She cursed under her breath as she watched the stewardess fill her brother’s glass a third time. He defiantly stared back at her with dull, glazed eyes and put his sunglasses on when he felt he’d sufficiently intimidated her into silence.

And the plane made a terrifying drop. This time, it didn’t immediately rebound into place. It kept falling, picking up speed. Her breath caught in her throat but no sound came out. Asher’s head arced upward as it followed the liquid flying out of his glass. The stewardess was brought to her knees by the sheer force of the decline.

Her parents’ eyes remained locked on their devices as the plane plummeted, as Kennedy closed her eyes and gripped her armrests and shrieked and shrieked ...

“What the fuck, Ken?”

Kennedy jerked awake at the sudden flood of light in her eyes. As she tried to focus her vision, she immediately saw the slippered feet of her roommate, Brianna Glen, who stood in the doorway with her hand on the light switch, wearing a confused expression and an oversize silk bonnet.

“You’re screaming , in your sleep ,” Brianna said, willing Kennedy to understand what was happening.

“I’m ... I’m sorry.” Kennedy panted. “I was having a bad dream. I just—it was so real, I—”

“Yeah, it was so real for me too,” Brianna interrupted. “Look, it’s four a.m., Ken. Can’t you just take a Klonopin like a normal person and relax?”

“Yeah, I’m really sorry, Bri.”

“You said that,” Brianna replied, angrily turning the light back off and closing the door as she made her exit.

Kennedy shook herself further awake and settled back into bed, realizing that she hadn’t actually been talking to Asher. He had been dodging her calls for several weeks. This wasn’t unusual. She figured that she was going to have to go to Boston and see him in person to get his interview done. That was fine since she planned on being at Watcha Cove to finish her film before the party.

She strained her eyes in the dark. She was back in California in the downtown high-rise that she shared with Brianna, the daughter of an actor and comedian. As one of the stipulations of her West Coast relocation, she needed to find someone to live with, a partner to help navigate the transition, but even whom she chose was met with her father’s disapproval. He had always looked down on Black people who had made their money from entertainment, considering it cheap and demeaning. He also felt it was a fickle industry, but who else was she going to live with in Los Angeles if not the descendants of entertainers? It wasn’t exactly a hotbed for the “right kind” of professional aspirations.

Kennedy patted the top of her hair to check if she’d sweated out her silk press with the intensity of that nightmare. She’d wrapped her hair before bed and secured it with a scarf, but the scarf was on the floor. She hadn’t worn her hair like this since she graduated high school. The sleek look was the preference of her mother and her father, and at this point, she wasn’t even sure why she still did it.

Most of the time, while alone and free in California, she’d worn goddess braids, a natural style that her mother coined “ragamuffin chic,” which suited Kennedy fine. But now, with the school year wrapping up, Kennedy would be heading back east for the summer, and that meant she needed to look exactly how her parents wanted her to look. Relieved that her hair was fine, she reached over to her nightstand to retrieve her laptop.

The screen read 4:25 a.m. She groaned. She wanted to smoke but was too tired to go outside. Instead, she opened her emails. Not that many people were sending correspondence at 4:00 a.m., but she just wanted to see if she’d gotten any responses to the dozens of probes she sent out recently trying to get in touch with her father’s former roommate from college. She first contacted Harvard, then Kofi’s family, who owned a hotel in Accra, and lastly hired a private investigator, who, for a flat fee of $12,000, would actually go to the hotel and see what he could find. As suspected, nothing on that front, but there was an email from Russell Johnson (sent 7:04 p.m. EST).

Subject: Meeting

Kennedy, would love to participate in your father’s tribute. Let me know when you’ll be coming to my place. We’ll coordinate schedules.

Best, RJ

Kennedy opened a folder labeled CC DOC , which housed all the research that she’d done so far on the Carter Corporation and her father. After Kennedy’s trip to Northern California, Tashia had texted, Heard there was a secret society at Harvard for Black men when your dad was there. People say it kind of disappeared. Maybe one of them knows something about Kofi? But it wasn’t as if she could just google “Secret Black Society/Harvard,” because she had tried that and gotten nowhere.

In a week, she would be flying back to the East Coast to finish her film project, so she could stop at Russell’s Connecticut house on her way up to Watcha Cove. At least this interview might hold some promise. Russell was the second of her father’s high school classmates to be included in the film, but she’d yet to find anyone from college willing to talk. On her laptop, she once again brought up the photo of the Polaroid of Kofi, which she’d saved so that it was part of her files.

“Who are you?” she whispered in the dark, moving her eyes close to the screen, enraptured by this mysterious figure who she thought held the key to her father’s past.