Chapter 8: Twenty Percent

"You're lying," I said.

"Am I?" Dad buttoned his jacket. "Ask Esther Pickett. She's tired, Molly. She wants her money. Halstead's offering plenty."

He walked to the elevator where Mom and Sadie were waiting.

Sadie looked back over her shoulder at me and waggled her ring finger.

The doors closed.

I stood in the hallway, holding Mitch's hand, with the whole win going gray in my mouth.

"Esther Pickett," Mitch said. "Who is she?"

"Grandpa's partner. They started the company together. She owns twenty percent."

"Where is she?"

"Santa Fe. Dad forced her off the board six years ago. I haven't seen her since the funeral."

Mitch already had his phone out.

"Has she signed anything with Halstead?"

"I don't know."

"Then she hasn't," he said. "Halstead would have announced it. He's that kind of man."

He made one call.

"Get the plane ready. Two passengers. Santa Fe. First thing tomorrow."

I stared at him.

"You have a plane?"

He almost smiled.

"I'm the Keaton who works eighteen hours a day. I have a plane."

At seven the next morning, I walked across the tarmac of a private terminal toward a white jet.

Mitch walked on one side of me. His head of security walked on the other.

I'd put on the only suit I owned. Navy. Bought for job interviews.

I'd pinned my hair back and put on sunglasses so nobody would recognize the homewrecker.

At the bottom of the airstairs, I stopped.

It was a Granger Aviation jet.

The Keatons chartered from us.

"Did you know?" I asked him.

"I found out yesterday," Mitch said. "I chartered it on purpose."

Esther Pickett lived in an adobe house at the end of a long dirt road.

She was seventy-one, tiny and sun-browned and sharp as a nail. She met us on the porch holding a shotgun broken open over her arm.

"Walter's granddaughter," she said. "The quiet one."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Your father said you didn't care about the company. Said you'd never set foot in the hangar."

"I went last week. It still smells like jet fuel."

She looked me up and down.

"And who's this one? Halstead's man?"

"Keaton," Mitch said.

Esther snorted. "Arthur's grandson. God help us."

She made us sit on her porch in the hot sun for an hour.

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