Elin Hilderbrand - The Rumor

Barbie said, “The FBI have Eddie because they suspect him of running a prostitution ring on Low Beach Road.”

Grace blinked, then carefully set the water back down.

Barbie said, “Possibly, he’s admitted to it. He didn’t exactly tell me.”

“Admitted to it,” Grace said.

“Ben Winford is with him now, but I think he may have opened his mouth before Ben arrived. Apparently, Eddie hasn’t watched as much Law and Order as I have.”

“Law and Order?” Grace asked.

Barbie said, “I need you to get dressed. You’re going down to the police station to bail him out.”

“Me?” Grace said. “What about you? Are you coming?”

“No,” Barbie said. “I need to distance myself from this. For business reasons.”

“Is it true?” Grace asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Barbie said. “Unless they can prove it.”

For some reason, Nadia, one of Eddie’s housecleaners, was at the police station. Grace blinked, thinking again, Bad dream, nightmare, the kind where people from different parts of her life showed up in places where they didn’t belong. Why would Nadia be here? It was a mistake. But when Grace was ushered into the back of the station to post Eddie’s bail, she saw Nadia, or a girl who looked exactly like Nadia, sitting in one of the interrogation rooms. Grace was so stunned that she took a step backward and peered in the room to make sure. Definitely Nadia. Grace heard her say, “I just clean the houses…” And then whoever else was in the room wisely closed the door.

Then Grace saw Eddie’s other four cleaning girls sitting on folding chairs in front of the officer on duty. Grace had met them all en masse at one point, but she couldn’t remember anyone’s name except for Nadia’s. The girls were in tube skirts, and they had all removed pairs of very high-heeled shoes. One girl was rubbing her feet, one girl was softly crying. They smelled sharp and antiseptic, like hair spray and cheap perfume. They looked… well, here Grace sighed. They looked like hookers. Eddie had been using his cleaning crew as prostitutes. Grace’s stomach turned.

Grace said to the officer, a black woman striking enough to be a supermodel, whose name tag read Peters, “I’m here to post bail for Edward Pancik?”

There was much whispering from the girls. One piped up and said, “You are Eddie’s wife, yes?”

“No talking!” Officer Peters said.

Grace turned to face the girls. “Yes,” she said.

At that second, the door down the hallway opened, and Nadia came walking out, attended by a square-necked man with a silver crew cut and a navy FBI windbreaker.

“Hello, Mrs. Pancik,” Nadia said.

“What’s happening, Nadia?” Grace asked. It could be a mistake, right? It must have been a mistake. Grace could not fathom that Eddie had actually taken these girls-none of them over twenty-five, she didn’t think-and turned them into hookers.

But Nadia didn’t seem capable of explaining. She turned to the other girls and said something in Russian.

“Enough!” the silver crew cut barked out. “Kat, do you have a place I can put Ms. Nadia here while I talk to the next one? She should be isolated. They all should, really.”

“We can’t do what we can’t do,” Officer Peters said. She smiled apologetically at Grace. “We just don’t have enough personnel when something like this happens.”

Grace nodded, as if understanding what this meant. Officer Peters was talking to Grace as if they were in cahoots somehow, and Grace decided to take advantage. She said, “I’d really like to see my husband. Can I see him?”

“Who’s your husband?” the silver crew cut asked.

“Edward Pancik.”

“Ha!” the silver crew cut said. “Better take a seat. It’s gonna be a while.”

“Let me see if I can find a room for Ms. Nadia,” Officer Peters said.

Nadia said something to the other girls in Russian.

Grace wished she could understand! She said, “Are you… in trouble, Nadia?”

“Ma’am, please,” the silver crew cut said. “I need her isolated! Jesus!”

Officer Peters disappeared down the hall. The silver crew cut eyeballed the five girls. He read names off a clipboard. Elise Anoshkin, Julia Vlacic, Gabrielle Bylinkin, Nadia Roskilov, Tonya Yedemesky. The girls raised their hands one by one.

The only good thing about finding out Eddie had gotten into this kind of heinous trouble was that it kept Grace from obsessing about Benton.

Grace had to triage.

And this was definitely worse.

At seven o’clock in the morning, a very weary version of Eddie’s normally impeccably dressed attorney, Ben Winford, shook Grace awake in her chair.

Ben said, “Eddie’s gotten himself into a real pickle this time.” Ben stared up at the ceiling, which made Grace stare at the ceiling. “Why don’t my clients ever call me before they break the law? I’ll tell them ten times out of ten, it’s not a good idea. What did Richard Nixon teach us? What did the Boston bombers teach us? Criminals always get caught.”

“Is he going to jail?” Grace asked. Her voice sounded like broken crackers after the Fioricet, the wine, and nearly no sleep. She thought of being in the garden shed with Benton. It had been the previous morning, less than twenty-four hours earlier, and yet it seemed like weeks ago.

“Oh, probably,” Ben said wearily. He was, Grace realized, wearing his pajama top with his jeans. “This isn’t exactly my specialty, but I know a guy in Boston who handles racketeering, prostitution, more Mob-type stuff. You know me-I’m basically a real estate-estate planning guy.”

“Mob-type stuff?” Grace said. She felt as if she were going to faint.

Ben patted her knee. “The good news is, you’ll get him out of here today.”

Eddie was released three hours later, at ten o’clock. His bail was set at fifteen thousand dollars. Grace tried to pay using their platinum American Express, but it was denied, so she ended up writing a check. When they finally got out to the car and Grace told Eddie this, he laughed like an inmate at the asylum. He said, “The check will bounce, Grace. We’re broke.”

“What does that mean?”

Eddie shrugged. “I guess as soon as they figure out the check is no good, they’ll come for me.”

“No, what does it mean that we’re broke?” Grace asked. “How can we be broke?”

She listened in silence as Eddie told her: the money was all gone. The spec houses were a financial noose around his neck. He’d sold two of the three to Glenn Daley, of all people, but that had only helped to pay Eddie’s backed-up debts. Number 13 Eagle Wing Lane was still a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand dollars away from completion, and Eddie had exhausted his options. He hadn’t sold a house in nine months; the market was a wasteland. He had managed to keep corporate groups at 10 Low Beach Road, but that had only led him into this mess.

“Yes,” Grace said. “Let’s talk about this mess. What the hell is going on, Eddie? What have you done?”

“I can’t tell you,” Eddie said. “If I tell you, they might be able to get you for conspiracy.”

“They will not get me for conspiracy,” Grace said, “because I knew nothing about it. But you are going to tell me right now.”

“I can’t,” Eddie said.

“Tell me!” Grace screamed.

Eddie held his face in his hands. Grace thought he might cry, and that would have frightened her, because Eddie never cried. He hadn’t cried when either of his parents died, and he hadn’t cried when Hope had been born blue. He hadn’t cried over finding Grace with Benton in the garden shed yesterday morning. Would he cry now, at his own ruin?

No. He raised his head and said, “I needed money, and last year I had a client who had asked about the girls-could they come over and hang out with the guys?-and last year, I said no way.”

“But then…?”

“Then, this year, I got in such deep water, Grace. I can’t tell you how bad things got, moneywise, and I needed cash, and the guys who rent this house, baby, they are just loaded, so loaded that they pay ten grand per night.”

Grace gasped.

“A ton of jack, right? And I needed it, but I wouldn’t have forced the girls. I asked them, just asked what if? And they were all excited. It’s a lot of money for them.”

“They’re immigrant girls that you can exploit,” Grace said. “What did you expect them to say? I think I’m going to be sick.”

“The girls never complained,” Eddie said. “I think they saw themselves as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. They loved the money. The money was ridiculous-for me and for Barbie, too.

“So Barbie is in on this?” Grace said.

“No.”

“Eddie.”

“Yes,” Eddie said. “Yes, she’s in on it. But the authorities don’t know that, and they’re not going to know it. I need Barbie to keep the business afloat while I’m…”

“In jail,” Grace said. The words were incomprehensible, but she had to accept that they might be true. Eddie might be going to jail. Ben Winford had said, Oh, probably. Grace swallowed. Something else was nagging at her. “Did you… I mean, Eddie, did you… sleep with any of the girls?”

“No!” Eddie said. “God, no! I have never been unfaithful to you.”

Grace nodded. She believed him.

“You’re the unfaithful one! You were having an affair with Benton Coe under my nose, in my own house.”

Grace was quiet. “Well, he’s gone. It’s over.”

“You sound sad about that,” Eddie said. “Are you sad? Do you love him, Grace?”

She wanted to scream, Yes, I love him! I love him more than I love breathing!

But instead she said, “I can’t even think about that right now, Eddie! We have bigger problems! We have criminal charges!”

“What do we tell the girls?” Eddie asked.

“We tell them nothing,” Grace said. “They’re children, Eddie. They do not need to know about the nefarious affairs of their parents.”

“They’re bound to find out,” Eddie said, “the way this island talks.”

“We’ll shelter them as long as we can,” Grace said. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Eddie said.

When they got home, the girls were reading side by side in chaises by the pool, the two of them lithe and lovely in their bikinis, Allegra’s red, Hope’s black-no, wait, it was the other way around. Grace shook her head; it was the first time since they were infants, practically, that she’d gotten them mixed up. They were both wearing their hair down. Hope had fixed her hair to look like Allegra’s, and it was really fetching. Here was a snapshot of the family life Grace had always wanted but had never quite been able to achieve-because of Allegra’s tempestuous moods, because of Grace’s wild and straying heart, because Eddie had always, always, always been working.

Grace called out, “Are you girls hungry for lunch?”

“Starved,” Allegra said. “Where have you two been?”

“Out,” Grace said.

“Out where?” Hope asked.

“Just out,” Grace said.

“Wow,” Allegra said. “You sound like me.”

Grace made chicken-salad sandwiches, and she brought out a bunch of cold grapes from the fridge. She sliced some hothouse tomatoes, spread them with fresh pesto, then dotted them with tiny balls of mozzarella. She and the girls sat down at the outdoor table in the sun, but Eddie excused himself, saying he needed to sleep. He went up to the bedroom.

Hope said, “Is Dad okay?”

“Not really,” Grace said. She cleared the girls’ plates and stood up, not wanting to say anything else. Eddie was right: the girls needed to learn what was going on from Eddie and Grace before they heard it elsewhere-but she would let them have today.

Madeline read the completed first draft of B/G three times. It was good; it was addictive. The power and the urgency of the affair and the forbiddeness of it made it irresistible, but the genuine love between B and G made it luminous.

She wasn’t going to publish it.

Oh, how she dreaded calling Angie. And yet, call Angie she must.

Angie’s assistant, Marlo, answered. “She’s at lunch.”

“She is?” Madeline said. It was ten fifteen. No one ate lunch at ten fifteen, not even Angie Turner. Maybe “lunch” meant she was meeting her tile guy at a suite at the Warwick Hotel. Madeline decided to just tell Marlo, and Marlo could break the bad news to Angie. “Listen, Marlo, I’m not going to publish B/G. I have to pull it off the list.”

“Please hold,” Marlo said. “I’m putting you through to Angie.”

“I thought she was at lunch.”

“She just walked in,” Marlo said.

“How’s my favorite author?” Angie said when she came on the line. “How’s the Next Big Thing? I’m just going to start calling you Number One, because that’s where you’re headed, Madeline. Straight to the top spot. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today.”