Chapter 8 - The Ledger of 1988
The library of the Lake Forest estate smelled of old paper and dry cedar.
A single green banker's lamp burned on the massive oak desk near the window, throwing a circle of soft green light across a thick, leather-bound book that lay open on the blotter.
Marin Hollis sat in a deep leather armchair across from the desk. She was holding a cup of hot black tea Rafe had poured for her himself from a copper pot.
Rafe sat behind the desk, turning the yellowed pages of the heavy ledger with slow, careful fingers.
"Here," Rafe said.
He turned the book toward her.
Marin leaned forward, setting her teacup on the wooden rim.
The page was dated April 14, 1988. Written in narrow, precise blue ink was a list of twelve names:
Vance, Arthur — Night Foreman
Miller, David — Crane Operator
Hollis, Thomas — Senior Engineer
Beside Thomas Hollis’s name was a handwritten note in the margin, written in the broad, heavy stroke of Rafe’s father’s hand:
Permanent trust allocation: 15% of west dock yield to be paid to spouse/descendants until the third generation. Non-transferable. Non-revocable.
Marin stared at the blue ink. Her eyes moved across the numbers beside the note—numbers that represented thirty years of dock revenues, compound interest, and quiet capital allocations that had sat untouched in a vault beneath the Central Bank of Chicago since the year she was born.
"My mother..." Marin whispered, her voice shaking for the first time all night. "My mother lived in a three-room basement on 47th Street. She died three years ago waiting for a pension check that was thirty-two dollars short every month."
Rafe leaned back in his chair, his broad shoulders shadowed against the dark bookshelf behind him.
"My father’s second attorney, Arthur Vance, hid the ledgers after the fire," Rafe said, his voice deep and dark as the room itself. "He told my family the trust was settled in 1991. He spent twenty years taking two percent of that account for his own family's development firm."
Marin looked up from the page. "Julianna’s uncle."
"Yes," Rafe said. "Senator Vance."
Marin felt the room tilt slightly around her. The twenty years of cold mornings, the double insoles in her shoes, the white rubber tape around her wrist, the three brown paper envelopes sitting under the floor mat of her silver sedan... it had not been a string of unfortunate bad luck.
It had been a calculated theft executed by the very people who sat in the high dining room of L'Etoile every Saturday night, sipping forty-dollar glasses of wine while she picked up their dropped napkins from the carpet.
"How much?" Marin asked softly.
Rafe closed the heavy ledger with a low, solid thud.
"One million, eight hundred thousand dollars," Rafe said. "Plus interest."
He pulled a small, black steel pen from his pocket—the same pen he had used two days earlier to force Warren Pike’s signature in the cold warehouse—and laid it horizontally across the ledger.
The tip pointed straight at her hand.
"The account is locked under your father's name, Miss Hollis," Rafe said. "I cannot release it to the city state. Only you can sign for the transfer."
Marin looked at the pen. She looked at her right hand—the skin rough around the nails, marked with three small white scars from hot grease splatters.
She picked up the pen.
Her fingers did not shake. She signed her name on the red line at the bottom of the page: Marin Elizabeth Hollis.
May you like
As she laid the pen back down, Rafe did not take it away. He picked it up, wiped the barrel with his handkerchief, and slipped it into her coat pocket.
"Keep it," he said softly. "It has finished its work tonight."
