Let Love Go to the Evening Wind

Chapter 3 The Codicil

Elaine met me at a diner on Sunday morning with two copies of the trust documents and a cup of coffee so large it looked like a vase. She had been my grandmother's attorney before she was mine, and she had a low opinion of sentiment and a high opinion of paper.

"You are telling me," she said, "that Bennett is voting for the sale because Coastline Meridian offered him a board seat."

"On the development company that will control the block if the trust sells."

"And the block includes the foundation site."

"It does."

She flipped through the pages in front of her. "This is a conflict of interest. It is not an illegal conflict, but it is a conflict. It is the kind of thing a judge might look at if you challenged the vote."

"On what grounds?"

"On the grounds that a trustee with a personal interest in the outcome failed to disclose that interest to the other trustees before the vote." She looked up. "Has he disclosed it?"

"Not in writing. Not to me."

"Then that is a door." She tapped the page. "A narrow door, but a door. The codicil requires unanimity. If one vote was cast by a trustee with an undisclosed personal interest, the vote is not clean. You can challenge it."

"For how long?"

"Long enough to scare them. Long enough to make Greer paranoid. Long enough to get a preliminary injunction that stops the sale while the court looks at it." She closed the folder. "But only if you can prove the interest. Not a rumor. Not a hint from a Saturday dinner. Proof."

I thought about the restaurant, the turn of his water glass, the way he had said the words out loud because he was certain I had no way to use them.

"I can prove it," I said. "He told me in front of a room full of people."

"Strangers will not testify. They will not remember. They will not want to be dragged into a family case."

"There were two of us at the table and the waiter in between. And I am not relying on a waiter." I looked at her. "Greer invited me to dinner on Thursday. I turned him down. I am going to call him back and accept. If he is offering Bennett a board seat, he will want to talk about it. He cannot resist it. He thinks I am defeated."

Elaine looked at me over the rim of her coffee. "You are not celebrated for your acting."

"I am not going to act. I am going to be polite. I am going to ask about his wife and his boat and his grandson, and then I am going to ask him what he offered Bennett, and he is going to tell me, because he is the kind of man who believes that a woman who has already lost is not a threat."

"That is a great deal of faith in a bad habit."

"It is not faith. It is data." I put my hand on the folder. "He hung up on me twice last week. A man who hangs up on you is a man who has already won the conversation in his head. He will not be careful with me."

She sat back. "If you get him to say it in front of a witness, it is still his word against yours."

"Not if I have it in writing. He sent a memo last month about the timeline. Greer Whitlock never sends a memo without a reason. He moves the vote up and then writes down why, because he wants the record to look clean. He does not realize the record is the evidence."

Elaine was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "You are more like your grandmother than you look."

"I will take that."

"Do. It is the only compliment I know how to give." She stood and put on her coat. "Call me after Thursday. Do not email me. Do not text me. Call me from a landline if you can find one."

"Landlines are extinct."

"Then build a time machine. This is a small town. Small towns run on who said what to whom. Do not give them a server they can subpoena."

She left. I paid the check and stood on the sidewalk under the white sky and called Greer's office from my phone, because I am not a woman who builds time machines.

His assistant put me through immediately.

"Vivienne," Greer said. "You changed your mind."

"I reconsidered. I was rude on Tuesday. My apologies."

"Accepted. Thursday, seven thirty. Come early. We can talk before the others arrive."

"I would like that."

"Bring your appetite. My wife is doing the whole thing, the lamb, the tart. She likes an audience."

"I will be there."

I hung up and stood on the sidewalk for a moment longer, and I thought about the lamb and the tart and Greer's wife, who had never once looked at me with anything but the polite blankness of a woman who knew her husband's business and did not intend to be questioned about it.

I thought about Bennett, who was not invited to the same dinner, because Greer would never put a man he was using at the same table as the woman he was using him against. That was the whole architecture of it. Greer would be relaxed, because he would be among friends, and I would be the only thing in the room that did not belong, and he would want to show me how little I mattered.

I went home and took the envelope out of my bag and put it in the drawer by the phone, on top of the electric bill, and closed the drawer.

Then I sat on the floor of my grandmother's front hall, in the gray blazer I had not bothered to change out of, and I looked at the photograph on the landing, and I said, "I am going to fight him on Thursday. If you have any ideas, now is the time."

The house said nothing. But the light through the transom over the front door was gold for a moment, the way it got in the late afternoon in October, and I took that as an answer, because I am human and because I wanted one.

Thursday came. The Whitlock house sat on a bluff on the south side of the harbor with a lawn that ran down to a private dock and a view of the whole bay, and I parked in the gravel circle and sat in the car for a minute with my hands on the wheel.

Then I went in.