Magdalene (45 page)

He looked at me out of the corner of his
eye.

“You heard me right. My
life
. Even
though you have been known to go behind my back, you sneaky
bastard.”

“Oh, Cassandra,” he whispered helplessly,
turning his attention back to the contents of the trunk. “You’ve
done everything you wanted with it. Why do you keep it?”

“Insurance. There’s a dead man’s switch on
it.”

“Who?”

“Morgan Ashworth.”

Mitch gaped at me, and I smiled, albeit
sheepishly. “He’s unassailable. I cultivated him years ago when I
figured out the scam Hilliard was running. I gave him a rundown of
what I wanted to do to whom. He didn’t have to be told why because
he has spies in every corner of every back room in Washington.”

“Does Sebastian know this?”

“No.” I shrugged. “Everyone knows I have an
executor. No one knows who—except you, now—but they know it has to
be someone powerful enough to flip the switch and come out
unscathed. And they don’t want to find out the hard way.”

“A lot of people fill that bill.”

“None who are that autonomous and don’t
hesitate to act. Your...pack. They seem to feel that they have
some— I don’t know— Moral high ground? They’re honest. They aren’t
Mafia. They mind their own business. They have no interest in
taking what other people have. They don’t have any connections that
can be used against them and they don’t grant or take favors that
might come with strings. Their first loyalty is to each other and
to anyone else they consider family. Like you. They do what they
feel they have to when they’re pushed, and then they deal with the
fallout. And if they all went broke tomorrow they’d just roll up
their sleeves and start rebuilding.”

Mitch looked at me speculatively. “I didn’t
think you liked them.”

“I like Morgan,” I said, then paused for a
minute to think. “The rest— I don’t know them well enough, and I
may not ever
like
them, but I do admire them.”

“What did he ask you for in return?”

I looked at the moon rising just behind
Mitch’s ear and slowly shook my head. “Not a thing,” I whispered,
and my eyes began to sting. “He was the first and only man who has
never wanted anything from me. I still don’t know the real reason
he agreed to do it.” My lip curled as I looked at my husband. “Fed
me some bullshit answer about feeling
impressed
that he
should.” Mitch’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and I blinked away my tears
to focus on his eyes. “Why is that significant to you?” I
demanded.

“It’s...not,” Mitch muttered, turning away
to pull a box out of the trunk. I didn’t buy that, but it seemed
that I had been dismissed, and I had no wish to pursue it.

Mitch didn’t come to bed at all. I tossed
and turned, wondering if he’d been so disgusted that he’d decided
to sleep somewhere else, but I refused to go looking for him.

“Mitch,” I murmured as the sun came up
through the library window, and touched his shoulder, the only
thing keeping him from sliding from his desk chair to the floor in
his sleep. He started awake and looked up at me blankly, then
around at the library, his desk strewn with documents and empty
boxes everywhere.

Indeed, he had slept elsewhere, but not, I
was far too happy to know, in a different bed.

“Go to bed,” I said. “They aren’t going
anywhere.”

“I—” He cleared the frog out of his throat.
“I may never be able to look at some of these people again.”

I nodded. “And me?”

His face betrayed his surprise. “You?”

“I’m no better than they are.”

He laughed with no humor whatsoever, caught
my hand, and pulled me down onto his lap. “Better or worse. Richer
or poorer. Sickness and health.”

“I see. Falling back on your wedding vows to
justify to
Bishop
Hollander keeping me around.”

“No. I’m not going to lie and say I would’ve
gotten involved with you if I’d known all this up front. I wouldn’t
have. But it would’ve been my loss because you— You are the most
fascinating and exciting woman I’ve ever met. Not having the
opportunity to fall in love with you... I— I can’t imagine that. I
don’t want to.”

I tried to swallow past the lump in my
throat, and waved at the boxes. “But you said you couldn’t look
these people in the face.”

He laughed bitterly. “Do you remember
any
of what’s here?”

That caught me up short. “No,” I said
slowly, wondering what he was getting at. “I haven’t read it in
years. Didn’t need to.”

“Some of these people have cheated me,
cheated the Steelworks. And I never knew it. They played me. Early
on, I mean. They wouldn’t be able to do that now.”

I stared at him. “Because you were young.
Naïve.”

He nodded slowly, his mouth twisted. “A
Mormon
.”

Does Hollander seem like a nutjob to
you?

Well, no. He’s such a brilliantly sneaky
bastard I assumed he was an anomaly.

“What they did, I— I shouldn’t have been
able to survive. I’m having flashbacks of my mission. If I’d made
just one wrong move...”

The only thing that stood between his
Steelworks and total financial annihilation was the loyalty of
Sebastian Taight, a man whose wrath no one wanted to incur.

I didn’t remember that Mitch had his own
place in my black book. He was an insignificant speck amongst the
constellation of secrets in this pile of trash that I touched only
when I wanted to move it.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I should’ve just
brought you the list.”

“No,” he hastened to assure me. “It’s good.
I needed to know.”

“So you know who to stop doing business
with.”

“The more they need my products, the sweeter
the word ‘no’ gets.”

“Without explaining.”

“
I
don’t have to.”

I loved it when he got arrogant.

We spent the day going through the records,
spreading them out, laying out paper pathways all over the library
floor, into the billiards room, on the billiards table, to give us
a visual, physical representation of any conversation we found that
pertained to Mitch or the Steelworks.

By dinnertime, the picture was clear:

The people who had wanted Jep Industries to
fail only because they hated Roger Oth had never looked beyond King
Midas having taken it over and dismantled it.

The people with competing—inferior—products
had an investment in Jep Industries failing, and had stepped up
their own operations to attempt to fill the void. They couldn’t
figure out why they’d never made any inroads in the market.

And then a couple of those people had
started digging to find out how factories that couldn’t function
without Jep Industries products were, in fact, still
functioning.

They suspected Hollander Steelworks might be
involved somehow, but couldn’t make the connection, as much of it
had been filtered through Ashworth’s name. That was a common trick
the Dunham family used, running their money and property through
his squeaky-clean name and bank accounts. In most situations, one
had to be a veritable bloodhound with a load of evidence to start
sniffing in his direction, but because Morgan hadn’t bothered to
hide his connection to the Jep Industries takeover, he’d made
enemies—enemies who could get to him, yet leaving his cousins
untouched.

“He sacrificed his career to get J.I. and
the Steelworks consolidated,” I murmured, feeling that sacrifice as
I never had before.

“Yes.”

He continually sacrificed his human needs
for the lonely and adrift in his church.

He had sacrificed his intellectual love for
the sake of thousands of people who’d have lost their
livelihoods.

He was willing to sacrifice his last bit of
political power for me for reasons I still didn’t know.

Oh, yes, I’d chosen my executor well. In
retrospect, it was spooky that my inexplicable conviction that
Ashworth—a complete stranger I had lured to a suite at the
Watergate with the promise of a tantalizing story—was the right man
for the job.

Mitch and I looked at each other. We both
knew every detail of the elaborate scheme to consolidate J.I. and
Hollander Steelworks, and how few people were capable of getting it
done so an entire sector of the economy wouldn’t collapse.

“Talk to me,” I whispered, watching the play
of agony over his face.

“I didn’t have the resources to absorb it,”
Mitch said after a moment, “but Sebastian was at war with the only
man in the country who did. I’d have gone under for sure if I
didn’t
take over J.I., and if the Steelworks went down, it
would’ve killed another five hundred jobs. That wasn’t to mention
the rest of the companies that needed those products, and there
were dozens. I was stuck. To go forward with the absorption meant
walking through fire and the possib—
probability
—of failure,
but I had no other choice.”

Forget seventeen hundred jobs between the
two companies: The real collapse would have happened with the
hundreds of dependent businesses. Most of them were microscopic in
the scheme of things, but collectively...

A knot developed behind my sternum.
Mitch
Hollander
wasn’t just a name, some faceless victorious steel
mogul, the savior of the US steel industry—he was a man with
serious family problems, church obligations,
and
the weight
of possible economic devastation on his shoulders if he failed.

“But I also had a sick wife I couldn’t bear
to turn over to twenty-four-hour nursing, two teenage girls and an
eleven-year-old boy who needed my time and attention, and I’d just
been called as bishop for the second time. On top of all that, if
the Steelworks went down, it would’ve bankrupted me and I wouldn’t
have been able to get Mina the medical care and domestic help she
needed. I didn’t know what to do, how to do it all. I don’t think I
slept for two years.”

I couldn’t imagine that kind of
pressure.

He gestured to the floor and its haphazard
pattern of papers leading straight to a concerted effort by many
powerful people to make sure the few failed. “If I’d known any of
this— Other than Fen Hilliard, I was the only one.” Indeed, Knox,
Morgan, and Sebastian’s uncle had had the cash and the connections
and the political clout, but Sebastian would have never let that
happen.

I said nothing as there was nothing to say.
The what-might-have-beens were too awful to contemplate.

“I’m going to assume Sebastian doesn’t know
about any of these schemes, either.”

He shot me a look. “They’re still in
business, aren’t they?”

“More bloodshed on the horizon, then. Can I
play? Any of this help?”

“I think it may, but not quite sure how.
Yet.” He pointed to one trail across the room. “I can see where Tye
Afton had a large financial stake in making sure J.I. failed
completely, but Eric—Knox’s protégé—” I nodded. “—took care of him,
so I don’t have to worry about that.”

“
And
put the fear of God into the
rest of the Republican party.”

Eric Cipriani, a young, small-time
prosecutor in a semi-rural county in a midwestern state, had
successfully steamrolled an entrenched senator into resigning his
seat. Senator Afton had left Washington under a cloud of suspicion
and a grand jury indictment. Whatever Afton had done to spur
Cipriani into taking on a powerful senator and exposing his
career-ending secrets, Cipriani’s arsenal and his willingness to
use it had been enough to serve as a warning to others like Roger
Oth and his cronies.

They were terrified of the damage a
brilliant, charismatic self-proclaimed libertarian could do to the
party from the inside—especially one financed by Oth’s biggest
enemies—and were doing everything they could to keep him out of
Washington. He was no less feared by the rest of the party, but the
Republican National Committee would keep its friends close and its
enemies closer.

Because the enemy had a trump card: They
desperately wanted Morgan back in Washington as the chairman of the
Federal Reserve or, at the very least, Treasury Secretary. And,
because Cipriani was yet another unrelated member of the Dunham
family, he was the only politician in the country who could make
that happen.

“That kid’s fearless,” I said. “I like
him.”

“Me, too.”

I sighed. “Too bad about him and
Vanessa.”

“Oh, that’ll work itself out,” Mitch said
absently.

“How do you know?”

He shrugged. “I just do. I didn’t see Afton
on your list,” he said abruptly.

“God, no! He’s a filthy pig. I wouldn’t even
attend dinner parties if I knew he’d be there.” I paused. “There’s
another senator in here somewhere—not one on my list. J.I. was
mentioned, I think. I vaguely remember one of my clients being
really upset with him and trashing him.”

“Oh?”

My mouth twitched. “His wife.”

Mitch closed his eyes and rubbed his temples
with his thumb and middle finger. I might have laughed, but we were
still too close to the issue to make light of it yet. I wasn’t sure
he’d ever be able to.

I changed the subject. “Life is just one big
chess game for your family, isn’t it?”

He slid me a look. “And it’s not for
you?”

He had me there. “Birds. Feathers. But you
don’t play the games.”

“It’s because I produce something,” he said
as he grabbed a blank piece of paper and a pen to start mapping the
trails we’d made. “Real things. I don’t have time to play the games
the way they do because what I do is more important than what they
do. They shift money and power around to clear the way for me.
They’ll always defer to a producer—any producer—and the only games
I play are to make sure I get the best deal I can and pay my people
well.”

I stared at him. “The pack sees you as
superior to them?”