My Father Went to Prison for Their Money, So I Married Their Heir novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Ravenel House

She moves into the Ravenel house, takes Winston's cruelty at dinner, and finds the study ledger shelf stripped.

The Ravenel house sat at the end of a lane of live oaks, white and wide, with a porch on every floor.

I had driven past its gate a hundred times on my way to nowhere.

Beau carried my two suitcases up the front steps himself.

"Don't look at the staircase," he said. "It has opinions."

The front door opened before we reached it.

A very small woman stood there in a cardigan and pearl earrings, with a silver bob and a cane she was not using.

She looked me up and down once.

"You're thinner than your photograph," she said. "Come in and eat something. I'm Clarice. I'm the one who gave him the ring."

"Grandmother," Beau said.

"I'm eighty-three, Beauregard. I'll say what I like."

She took my arm and walked me inside, and I did not have the heart to pull away.

Dinner was at eight in a dining room with a table for twenty.

Six were seated.

Winston sat at the head, Clarice at his right and Beau and I across from her, and a married couple from the company's board filled in the end.

Nobody had told me the board would come.

The soup was cold and the wine was warm and the silverware had been laid out in a row I did not understand.

I picked up the outside fork because it looked right.

"Where did you grow up, Sabra?" said Winston pleasantly.

"West Savannah."

"Near the docks. Of course. And your mother's garden, wasn't there a fig tree? I remember your mother. She brought us figs once, at the Christmas party."

My mother was dead twelve years.

He had said it kindly, and he had chosen the one thing that would hurt.

"Yes," I said.

"A good woman," said Winston. "Such a pity about the trouble after. I always said Amos was taken in by bad company. It must be wonderful for you, to be somewhere with a proper table."

The board wife smiled into her wine.

The board husband said, "Hear, hear."

My face went hot.

I looked at Beau.

He was cutting his fish, and he did not look up, and he did not say a single word.

Under the table I pressed my nails into my palm until I could breathe again.

"Thank you for having me," I said. "The figs were Early Violets, by the way. She grew them from a cutting my father took off a tree behind the union hall."

Clarice laughed once, loudly, into her napkin.

Winston's smile held, and he turned to the board husband and asked about his boat.

After dessert Beau showed me to my room on the third floor.

It was at the far end of the hall from his.

"Goodnight, Mrs. Ravenel."

"You didn't say anything," I said. "At dinner."

"No."

"Is that in the terms?"

He opened his mouth and shut it again, and stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, looking at the floor.

"Goodnight," he said, and went.

I lay awake with the window cracked open and listened to the house settle.

At one in the morning I put on my cardigan and went down the back stairs in my socks.

Winston's study was on the ground floor, behind a door with a brass lock.

I had a bobby pin and nine years of Opal's late-night lessons in how to get into a stuck pantry.

It took me four minutes.

The room smelled of cigars and old paper.

One wall was built-in shelves, floor to ceiling, with the company's annual ledgers in green cloth, one for each year back to 1949.

I ran my finger along the spines until I reached 2012.

The place was empty.

Two years on either side were gone too.

A clean strip in the dust showed where they had stood.

I stood in the dark with my finger in the gap.

Somebody had moved them.

Somebody had moved them recently, because the dust on the shelf below was still disturbed.

"You're looking in the wrong room."

I spun around.

Beau stood in the doorway in a T-shirt and sleep pants, with his hair on end.

He had not made a sound on the stairs.

"Everything that matters came out of this house on the day you picked up the microphone," he said quietly. "My father isn't stupid."

"Then where is it?"

He looked at me for a long moment.

"The real ledger was never in this house," he said. "It's on a boat I haven't stood on since I was nineteen."

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