The Gold Digger's Ledger novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Lunch at the Club

Honor offers Miranda sixty thousand dollars to disappear, but cannot pay half of it today; Lydia is waiting in the townhouse hall with flowers.

The Calloway Club had a doorman whose only job was to look at women's shoes.

He looked at mine, which were black flats from a discount store, and held the door anyway.

I had worn the navy dress I bought two winters ago for a cousin's funeral.

It was mine, and it was paid for, and it was the best thing in my closet.

Honor Pemberton waited at a corner table with a pot of tea and no food.

She did not stand up.

"Miss Dunleavy. Sit. Order whatever you like."

I ordered the chicken salad and a roll and a side of fries, because nobody had told me I couldn't.

Honor watched me do it with a perfectly pleasant face.

"I won't waste your time," she said, when the waiter had gone. "You are a clever girl, and clever people understand a good exit."

She slid a folded paper across the tablecloth with two fingers.

I opened it.

It was a letter on cream stationery, signed in blue ink, promising me sixty thousand dollars.

"That is yours the day my son's engagement is announced," Honor said. "All you have to do until then is leave quietly."

I read it twice, which is what I do with every number.

"Sixty," I said.

"It is a very generous sum for a bartender."

"It is," I agreed. "I'd like ten of it today."

Honor's smile stayed exactly where it was.

"That is not how it is done."

"In my business, a tab gets paid when it's run. Ten thousand today, fifty on the day. In cash is fine."

"I do not carry cash."

"Then it's not an offer," I said, and set the letter down. "It's a hope."

Her fingers moved to her napkin and stayed there, and I saw them shake once before she pressed them flat against her knee.

I had noticed that shake on the yacht too.

"The funds are held by our lawyers," she said evenly, "until the Beaumont papers are signed."

"Why would your own money wait for somebody else's signature?"

"Because that is how families of our kind arrange things."

The salad came. It was huge and cold and perfectly good, and I ate the chicken first.

Honor poured herself tea and did not drink it.

"Let me be plain," she said. "Tristan has a pattern. He loves things very hard for a very short time. The watches, the cars, the girl at the bar. Then he's finished with them."

"Is that what you tell Lydia?"

"Lydia is not a thing he picked up. Lydia is two hundred years of Beaumonts and Pembertons at the same table."

"And I'm a girl at a bar."

"You are a girl at a bar who wrote down the price of a coat." Her voice dropped. "I understand that. I come from people who counted too. I stopped counting where anyone could see."

For a second, that sounded almost like respect.

Then she leaned across the pot.

"Take the sixty and go, and I will let you keep every dollar in that little book. Stay, and you will be the most expensive mistake he ever makes."

I picked up a fry and ate it slowly.

"Mrs. Pemberton, I've got seventy thousand dollars from your son, if I stay thirty days. I've got sixty from you, if I leave. I can't see why I shouldn't take both."

"You would take both?"

"You never said I had to go before the thirty days were up. You said, leave quietly."

Honor's mouth went thin.

"You are being very clever."

"I'm being very hungry. I'm also not stupid. I'll take the letter and put it in my book. When your lawyers have the money, I'll hear about it."

I folded the page and tucked it into my bag.

Honor stared at me for a long moment.

"Girls like you always think there is more money behind the next closed door," she said quietly. "Ask Tristan how many doors he has left."

"I will," I said.

I paid my own cab home, nine dollars and forty cents, and I wrote it in the book under a heading I had never used before: Mine.

The townhouse door was open when I climbed the steps.

Gus stood halfway up the staircase with his cane, looking down into the front hall.

At the bottom, with her arms full of white roses and her cheeks wet, stood Lydia.

And Tristan, beside her, was holding the door.

"Miranda," he said, and he did not look at me. "Lydia's come to apologize."

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