The Willingness to Burn (7 page)

Chapter 10

Years earlier…

Maddy stood inside a recording studio with her friend John. The padded room with its thick glass window was not the place she expected to find herself when she agreed to take a communications elective. Junior year was a hard year in any major, but it was especially hard for her. Not only did she have her regular 300-level classes to attend to, but she also had the overflow of pain from the previous year.

She would tell herself later that she took it easy sophomore year because of her mom getting sick, but she knew that wasn’t true. She had picked out her classes before she knew anything about her mom.

Freshmen year she had a solid fifteen credits each semester which was good for a freshmen. That meant five classes a week and most of her classes, save British Lit., only met once a week and rarely if ever took the full three hours of time allotted. And although she had plenty of time for fun, she felt like she had earned a break for her sophomore year.

Her last semester she had just pledged Delta Pi, a sorority known for pretty girls and fun parties. That’s how she knew them, anyway, and that’s what she hoped everyone else thought, but who really knows? Pledging hadn’t been that bad—it was time consuming. She, along with her newfound sisters, had to engage in a lot of team-building exercises. The focus was always on bringing them together as sisters. That was a far cry from what the guys had to do. She didn’t know anything for sure but had heard stories from friends. She would not have pledged a fraternity, had she been able to.

Her grades suffered a bit as a result of her newfound sisters, her hectic pledging schedule, and her increased social life. Not that a girl like her needed any help enhancing her social life. But the will of new friends often beats out the desire to study or do homework. And Maddy, who was usually an A student felt to a B average for the first time in her life.

So she told her parents that college was getting more difficult. “The work is just so much more complicated and takes so much more time,” was her favorite argument, but rather than an argument, it was more of a self-affirmation. When it became an argument, her favorite defense was, “You never went to college, what would you know about it?” but that was reserved for when her back was against the wall.

Her parents were both intelligent and successful, yet she had them on that one. Neither of them had ever been to college. Her dad was a truck driver. He made good money and was able to start his family in a very affluent neighborhood. But he was a working man, as was his wife. He was an ambitious man who liked a good gamble and double downed on himself when he remortgaged their house to buy another truck and hire a driver.

It was the start of his job becoming a business and he had two small girls in grade school, years when they still loved their daddy, and he didn’t want to miss those years driving around the country. Those were years to be cherished, before the hormone-fueled rage of an adolescent girl overtook his daughters and turned them against him. By the time Maddy was going to high school, he had eight trucks running all hours of the day. He no longer drove at all; he just managed the business and helped his wife with her jewelry store.

Diane was a woman for which the word stunning was created for. She had a very classy, old school Hollywood look to her. Her legs were long and her features were light. She wore a gorgeous length of blonde hair. Growing up, everyone said that Maddy was a carbon copy of Diane.

Diane was a soft-hearted individual with a snappy wit. She was artsy and had a natural inclination toward drawing and beading. That was what inspired her to start her jewelry store. It was before the times when the Internet ruled the world and a small store that sold homemade jewelry could do well. Especially one in a nice neighborhood that also carried an excellent diamond supply. Diane let her knack for beading growing into a knack for jewelry design. She was a natural. It was as though her beauty gave her sway over all things beautiful. All things except her daughter.

Diane’s jewelry business began to really pick up right around Maddy’s 11
th
birthday, and for someone whose stunning features, unmatched spunk, and gorgeous eyes matched her mother completely, the two mixed like water and oil. As a child, Maddy loved her mother for everything that she was, but as her age rounded into the double digits, she began to resent everything that she loved about her mother, as children do at that age. And although as an adult the wounds would heal, the scars would always remain. There were some stains left by hate that time just can’t wash away.

Mid-way through her first semester of sophomore year Maddy’s mom, Diane was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Her mom had been diagnosed in the beginning of November and decided to wait until Thanksgiving when Maddy was home to give her the bad news. Her plan was to keep it to herself until then, but Diane was never much of a poker player and her heart bled through onto her sleeve.

The day that she received the diagnosis, she came home, sat in the kitchen, and wept. She tried to hide her emotions but was not able to and despite taking the day off of work to go to the doctor, she was not alone in the house. Maddy’s sister Sarah was home in-between classes and heard the crying. It didn’t take much to break the silent facade. After all, how do you not tell your daughter why you’re crying? Leaving a kid in college in the dark was one thing, but lying to the one in front of you was totally different.

She broke down and confessed her grim diagnosis to Sarah, and Sarah sat and listened and cried with her mom. Then, almost against her will, Sarah swore to her mother not to say anything to her sister until Thanksgiving. That the holiday would be the day that they were all together and that was how they were going to get through all of it—together.

Maddy’s last class was canceled on Wednesday and due to her incredibly lucky schedule, that meant that she was done with school by 1:30. Maddy attended school at the prestigious Penn State University. That was before all of the scandal, when the words Penn State were a status symbol, one of envy. And at a mere two hours from her childhood home, it was the perfect location for a girl in her shoes. With any luck, she would be able to leave right from class and beat any of the holiday rush traffic that everyone else would be stuck in.

When Maddy arrived home, Sarah was the only other person in the house. She pulled open the door and walked in. Maddy dropped her bag by the staircase and considered going outside to drag in the larger bag of laundry, but she knew that a smile and a kiss would get Daddy to do it for her.

Instead, she plopped down on the couch and awaited her sister. Sarah was home. Her car was outside. She must have heard Maddy come in the door, and Maddy could hear her shuffling around upstairs.

Sarah appeared at the top of the steps and started walking down.

“Hey,” Maddy called up the stairs as the sound of footsteps grew closer to her.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Oh, you know.”

“Yeah, how’s school going?” Sarah asked as she hit the bottom of the stairs

“Schools great. Class? Ehh …” Maddy shrugged and smiled, taking her legs off the couch so her sister could join her.

“How’s things on the home front?”

Sarah’s face sported a forbidding expression.

“That bad, huh?” Maddy asked.

Sarah came and sat down next to her. “Okay, look, Mom made me promise not to say anything until you were home for Thanksgiving.”

“Well, I am home for Thanksgiving,” Maddy said, sitting up straight.

“I know, and I don’t want you to get ambushed so that’s why I’m going to tell you.”

“Fuck. Tell me what, Sarah?” Maddy said with growing impatience.

“Mom has cancer.”

The words dropped from her lips and landed in Maddy’s ears with a deafening tone. Sarah continued to speak but the muting thud of the word cancer overtook all other sounds. It was just lips moving. Maddy’s mind was focused on her mom, the memories with her mom. The good, the bad, and the awful. The years of life that she took for granted. Just as a parent might regret not seeing a child as they grew up, a child then regretted not loving a mother.

A few hours later, Diane and Bill came home. Maddy heard the truck pull up and two doors close. Dad always drove when the two of them were together. There was almost no exception to that at all. She stood up, and for the first time since she had been a little girl, stared at the door with ominous anticipation. She’d had a few hours to process, a few hours to accept it. She was certain that she would be fine, but when the door opened and Daddy walked in followed by Mom, she knew she wasn’t.

As soon as her blue eyes met their match, the eerie reflection that Diane always spoke about seeing in Maddy, Maddy, on that day, saw it in Diane. She broke into tears and walked up grabbing her mom in a loving embrace of fear and grief over her past transgressions.

Maddy held on tight, hoping that the grip would hold her tears as well, but then overwhelming emotion rose up inside her and poured over just as a flood does a dam and she began to sob on her mother’s shoulder.

“Okay … It’s okay,” her mom said. “It’s going to be okay.”

Maddy broke from her mom’s embrace and tried to speak, but no words would come. Nothing came but lost sentiments, found in the form of nearly muted sounds and gargles.

Her mom pulled her in and hugged her again. “We’re gonna be okay,” she whispered.

Diane walked Maddy over to the couch and sat down. Her father joined her as well.

“Okay, so cat’s out of the bag, huh?” Diane said trying to make light of the situation and shooting a look over to Sarah. She wasn’t going to tell anyone besides her husband until the holiday for just that reason, but it was as good a way as any to break the news, she thought.

“How … How did this …,” Maddy sputtered out.

“These things happen in life.”

“So what happened?”

“I went to Doctor Purshel a few weeks ago. I was bleeding and wasn’t sure why,” Diane paused. “I figured if anything it was menopause coming on.”

Maddy nodded.

“But he didn’t seem convinced so I went for a MRI and they found a tumor in my ovaries.” Maddy started to weep again, it was as though the words carried with them the truth that she hoped was absent in her sister’s.

“And after the biopsy, they were able to determine it was cancerous,” Diane finished.

Maddy sniffled.

“Can they treat it?” Maddy asked through restricted breathing.

“Yes, there are treatments. I go in for surgery just after Christmas.”

“W-Why wait?”

“Because. The treatments are rough and I want to have these holidays with you both. I want to be with my family,” Diane explained.

“But shouldn’t you be getting treatment now?”

“A month won’t make a difference.”

“But it might.”

Diane tilted her head and shot Maddy a sympathetic look. “Honey, there are times when it’s about the quality of life you have and I want to enjoy the next month or so while we’re all here together, before it starts.”

Maddy nodded in understanding but didn’t really accept the answer.

“But they can treat you, right?”

“Yes of course, honey,” Diane said, the number 50/50 bouncing in her mind. But she wasn’t going to share that with her daughter or even her husband at that point. There was no need to worry them.

“But for now, we’re going to focus on the positive. The doctor said that’s a big part of it. We’re going to have a great holiday together, a great Christmas, and then I’m going to start getting better.”

“Okay, Mom,” Maddy said with a sympathetic understanding. Bill reached his arms around Maddy as did Diane and Sarah. The family was together, and together they shared an embrace of love.

Chapter 11

“Jace, your one o’clock is here,” the voice spoke through the speakerphone.

Jace pressed a button on the phone and spoke into it. “Thank you, Meghan.”

Jace stood up from his desk and patted his tie down. He walked out of his office and closed the door behind him. Upon reaching the lobby, he looked about for the well-spoken investors that had come highly recommended by one of his clients, but he did not find quite what he was expecting. Jace’s eyes fell upon two men both wearing jeans and short-sleeved shirts. The two men stood up.
You must be joking
, Jace thought to himself.

Jace paused, seemingly distressed.

“Gentlemen…”

“You must be Jace,” a tall skinny man wearing jeans and a polo shirt said.

“Yes.” Jace extended his hand, and the tall man gripped his hand firmly.

“I’m Nick, and this is my partner, Tony.”

The shorter man gripped Jace’s hand, smiled warming, and spoke. “It’s great to meet you in person.”

“You’re the person I spoke to on the phone?” Jace asked, still unsteady.

“That’s me.” Tony beamed.

“Oh, yes, fantastic,” Jace said, his words dragging out.

“Not quite what you were expecting I take it.”

“No, not at all, if I’m being honest. If I’m really being honest, I don’t know how you made it past security. Most people that I meet with follow the two-button uniform.” He let out a nervous chuckle and motioned to his suit jacket.

“I promise, you won’t be disappointed.”

Jace smiled politely, hiding his thoughts of,
This is going to be a waste of time.

“C’mon. Let’s go to my office.”

“Lead the way,” Nick said, extending his lanky arm.

Jace led the men to his office, rather than the conference room. He didn’t want to clog up a conference room if someone else could be using it.

“You’re not going to the conference room?” Meghan at the front desk asked.

“No, we’ll be fine in my office.”

The two men followed Jace back to his office. He opened the door and they walked in.

The office had two large windows and a small sitting area, that was usually occupied by Mark or Dexter, and occasionally a good place to nap. It was fairly informal and not the place that Jace would take clients, not when the massively-impressive board room was always at his disposal. But that day was different; those two weren’t what he would consider to be worth the effort.

“Please, take a seat,” Jace said, extending his arm to the couch that lay against the wall.

“Thanks,” Tony said, and the two men sat down as Jace walked past them over to the bar.

“Can I get you a drink?” Jace began shoveling ice into a glass. If the meeting was going to be a complete waste of time, might as well have a drink as compensation.

Tony looked at Nick, and they both shrugged.

“Sure thing, how about a scotch?”

“Scotch drinkers, huh?”

“Absolutely.”

“Perfect.” Jace shoveled some ice in the other two glasses and gave all three of them a healthy pour. Then, sitting down in the chair across from them, he placed the glasses on the table..

“So, Tony tells me that you guys have something big in mind.”

“Yeah Jace,” Nick began, “we’re going to show you an investment with a 200% return in the first twelve months.”

“Okay, I like that,” Jace said, taking a sip from his drink and not believing them at all.
How did these guys even get in this room?
he thought to himself.

“Tony, take it away,” Nick said.

Tony put his glass down and began talking with his hands for extra expression.

“All right, so, you read the papers, you’re an educated person, you know that foreclosures are absolutely rampant.”

Jace nodded, his boredom obvious on his face.

“But your fund doesn’t invest in real estate at all, do you?”

“No, no, we don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Well, because … “Jace looked up, reaching for a stock answer that would end the meeting abruptly.

“Because it’s a pain in the ass, right? There’s management, depreciation; it’s an asset that you can’t control without a fuck load of effort on your part.”

“That’s the simple way to put it, yes.” In fact, pain in the ass was exactly what he was thinking.

Tony nodded. “What we can do is handle all of that for you. You get the real estate returns without the real estate headaches. We buy property at 25% of the appraisal price, then resell it quickly under market value.”

“Okay.”

“Are you with me so far?”

Jace nodded.

“Okay, so we have a contact inside Bank of America that can get us all of their foreclosures.

“Okay. I feel like I’ve heard this pitch before,” Jace said, interrupting Tony. It was a common thing that hedge funds did from time to time, and always, everyone he had spoken to who tried it, never did it again. It was just not worth the hassle.

“I’m sure you have. But what you haven’t had is people like us.”

Jace raised his eyebrows, intrigued.

“Look at us. We don’t look anything like what you were expecting. And that’s because you have to act as if until you are as if. We don’t need to look the part. We
are
the part.”

“I like your confidence,” Jace complimented.

“It’s bread from competence,” Tony responded quickly. “Currently, we manage a private portfolio valued around fifteen million.”

“That’s impressive.”

Tony shrugged. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg. “

“With a ten million dollar investment, secured by real estate, we can double your money in a year.”

“What do you mean secured by real estate?”

“We use your money to buy the deeds. You hold the deeds, and we sell them.” Tony took a sip of his drink and continued, “Now, the reason this never works is that people don’t understand what they’re getting into. We know the Jersey market. We know what sells and for what. And how to get in and out quickly without being greedy, but still making our numbers.”

“Okay. So I give you the money, and you give me the deeds, then you sell them off.”

“Yes.”

“What if you can’t sell them?”

“We can. If a house is worth four hundred grand and we’re selling it for three hundred, they will fly off the market. We won’t be able to keep them long enough.”

“And if we can’t, you have forty million dollars of property that you bought for ten million. You can’t lose,” Nick interjected.

Jace leaned forward and thought a moment. He took a sip of his drink and quietly tapped his fingers on the glass. The other two men sat in silence watching him. “So why do you need me?” Jace peered suspiciously. If the numbers really were real and if they really
did
have fifteen million in a portfolio, then they should have no problem raising the rest.
Something doesn’t make sense.

“Long-term growth,” Nick said.

“We can borrow money, a million here, 500k there, and piece it together, but by the time we do that, the appraisals are old and the properties aren’t there anymore.”

“Ten million is just the start. But that’s all were asking, is for a start. Let me double your money and then we can talk about growing.”

“Okay, so in theory, I like the idea. But I would need to see details, and paperwork,” Jace stated.

“Done.” Tony opened up his backpack and took out a stack of papers. “This first list here is the list of properties.”

“You know I’m from New Jersey …”

“I know. That’s why I wanted to meet with you. You can look at this and see that a house in Bergen county for fifty grand is a deal no matter the condition. The land is worth more.”

“And in this stack, are appraisals for all of these houses. Two for each of them.”

“Why two?” Jace asked, thumbing through paperwork.

“Because appraisals are subjective. There’s never a real number, there’s always a range. The high and the low and based on a 20% decrease from the lowest estimates, we can still double your money.”

Jace glanced over the addresses and noticed that a few were from the town he grew up in.

“Interesting.” Looking over the houses and the numbers, Jace began to believe that the proposal might make sense after all.

“And when would you need this by?” Jace asked, his eyes deep in the pages.

“We have the exclusive contract until next Friday,” Nick said.

“Next Friday?” Jace chuckled.

“Yeah.” Nick nodded with an almost somber expression, as though he understood what he was asking for.

And then it
did
make sense. Why would someone give up profits to a hedge fund if they were actually competent?
They are running out of time.

“What happens after that?” Jace inquired, a grin spreading across his face.

“We lose our deposit, but more importantly, this opportunity passes you by,” Tony said firmly.

Jace looked over the paperwork some more.

“Look, we’re not wearing suits and I’m not pitching you because these numbers speak for themselves. We only operate where we know. All of us.”

“Okay. I’m going to look this over.” Jace put the paperwork to the side. “Now, assuming that these are real numbers, and I can verify everything that you just said—”

“Yes, they absolutely are.”

“Okay. Let me process this a second.”

Jace stood up and walked behind his desk with his drink in hand. He stared out the window. That was where he did most of his thinking. He sipped the scotch, but slowly. He didn’t want to be drunk any longer; there was potential business here.

After a few moments, Jace snapped back into the conversation.

“Okay. Here’s what I need from you. Assuming that after I have our people verify all this, your numbers are correct.”

Tony nodded. “They’re correct.”

“And assuming that you truly are the part, which our guys will also find out.”

Nick nodded confidently. “We are.”

“Okay. I need two million down, and the deeds.”

“Two million down?” Tony shrieked.

“Yeah, and for the guys, who manage a private portfolio valued around fifteen million, two should be easy. Or at least doable. Assets, cash, either way. And if you fuck up, I keep them all.”

“Okay, I think we can do that.”

“And for this first one, I need 65% of the net profits. After that we go to 50%.”

“Sixty-five!” Tony cried out. Nick extended a hand as to say calm down, but that response was all that Jace needed. Someone who didn’t plan on following through wouldn’t care about the back end pay out. Someone who couldn’t turn his ten million into forty wouldn’t care. Someone who just wanted eight million to run would have smiled and agreed.

“65%. You need money in a week, it comes at a cost,” Jace began. “That’s 35% of 40 million. That’s enough to keep the lights on and enough for me to take this risk.”

Jace finished his drink then looked down at his watch.

“Those are the terms. Now, I’m going to get to reviewing these documents right away, because we are on a time constraint. I suggest you start getting your assets together.”

Tony and Nick nodded.

“Okay, I think we can do that. With the understanding that next time, it’s 50%, and there’s no deposit next time,” Nick stated his terms.

“You pull through with this without me having to deal with it and still yielding me sixteen million in profit and we can talk. If the numbers change, ours will stay the same.”

“Understood.”

Moments after Nick and Tony left, Jace grabbed the stack of documents and began going to work. First and foremost finding someone to check the values, then having a private investigator check into his two new associates. The door opened, but Jace didn’t look up.

“Jesus Christ. What were those guys here for? Did you order lunch?” Dexter joked.

Jace smirked and looked up from the documents. “Nah, I’m trying to diversify a bit.”

“So you’re investing in homeless people. Wait, don’t tell me: You hire the homeless and in exchange for their work, they get one McDonald’s cheeseburger per hour,” Dexter said taking a seat at the chair opposite Jace’s desk.

“Jesus, man, I’m not even that cruel.”

“Hey that’s not so bad, I could have said the McRib.”

“If I wanted them to take poison, I’d just hand them a bottle with a skull and crossbones on it. I feel like it would be easier and cheaper.”

“Yeah, yeah. So what did the hobos have to pitch?”

“There looking for money for a real estate fund,” Jace said, his eyes more focused on his computer then on the conversation.