“Well, you must know the town pushed back against it,” Greg said. “There were all kinds of people trying to give me money to quiet certain people down. Big players were involved, and a lot of money changed hands. They wanted their own ecosystem up there. Their own town lines drawn. They thought I could do more for them than I could.”
“Did you take the money?” Elena asked.
Greg cackled. “Some of it. Yeah. Of course I did. Should I feel bad about it?”
Elena and Natalie exchanged glances, unsure of what to say.
“I see from your expressions that you think I’m a bad man,” Greg said. “But I’m just as bad as you or your mother or your grandmother before you. I’m bad, and I’m good, and I contain multitudes. Like all of us.”
Up on stage, a little girl (probably someone’s granddaughter) had begun to do a tap-dance routine for a jazz version of “Silent Night.” Elena’s heart pounded along with the little girl’s shoes. She needed to get out of there, if only to take a breath. She stood and thanked Greg for his honesty. But before she could pull away, Greg grabbed her hand and said, “Follow the money. You’ll find more than you can handle.” He let her go, and she slipped through the crowd, away from the song and the smellsof cooling turkey. Natalie chased her, her camera clutched in her hands.
Chapter Eighteen
Back at the newsroom, Elena and Natalie poured steaming cups of coffee and talked deliriously about next steps. Their notes for the retirement facility’s Christmas party were spread out on Carmen’s desk, nearly forgotten. One of them would have to put the article and the photographs together before tomorrow’s paper went to the press. But corruption was a far more titillating topic. It led them to forget, again and again, about the fluff piece theGazettehad slated.
“I can’t believe how honest and proud of all of it he was,” Natalie said of Greg for maybe the fifth time, clutching her mug with both hands. “It makes me think they’re all like this.”
“It definitely echoed Judge Drury,” Elena said. “He gave me the heebie-jeebies. They both did.”
“It’s like they’re raised in an entirely different universe than the rest of us. They’re told they can have whatever they want.” Natalie snapped her fingers. “Your grandmother knew that. Your mother still knows it. Why were we none the wiser?”
“I think when I left, I discredited what a small town really was,” Elena admitted. “I dealt with war and big cities and mega-political parties. I didn’t imagine that corruption on such a small scale would affect so many people.”But maybe, she thought,small-scale corruption and small-scale reporting are equally powerful tools—one used for bad, another for good.
Natalie collapsed into the chair across from Elena and ran her fingers through her hair. “What now?”
“He said follow the money,” Elena said. “But I’m not sure how we can pull, like, bank transfer information without breaking any laws. My first thought is, we have to meet more of these people. We have to go to Cranberry Cove and see what they say. It feels to me like they’re unafraid to flaunt their wealth and their power. Maybe they’ll say something that gives the game away.”
Natalie went pale. Again, Elena knew, she was having second thoughts about involving herself in such a terrifying plot. But she felt the rush, too. Elena could sense that.
Elena and Natalie worked diligently for the next two hours, editing articles, throwing together a fluff piece about the Christmas party at the retirement facility, and assigning other articles to the journalists still in the office that day. They assumed that an idea would come to them—something that would help them break the case. But Elena’s mind was going too fast in too many directions.
When five o’clock rolled around, Natalie burst back into Elena’s office and said, “Why don’t we pretend we want to interview one of them?”
It was perfect. It spoke to the wealthy and elite members of society’s sense of importance. It also allowed them easy access to their homes, to their minds.
Together, after a thirty-minute research session about who lived on Cranberry Cove and for how long, Natalie and Elena decided on Henrietta Isaacson, a fifty-something woman who’d been raised in Cranberry Cove and, like the judge, had inherited her ugly mansion and her perfect view of the water. Henrietta’s father had been a filmmaker, and her mother had been an Italianactress and model. Now, Henrietta did very little, as far as Elena and Natalie could understand. She was married to a mysterious man in his sixties, and they had three children, one of whom had returned home after a few semesters at Yale.
When they called Henrietta at home, she answered on the second ring, which felt like proof that she was out of her mind with boredom. When Elena explained that they wanted to interview her for a feature on Henrietta’s parents’ legacy, Henrietta leaped at the chance.
“I have a dinner party tonight at eight, but you can come before that,” Henrietta explained, her voice breathy. “You’ll want to take photographs, I assume? I’ve just gotten my hair done, and I’m wearing the perfect dress.”
Elena smiled into the receiver. “Sounds incredible. My photographer and I will be there in half an hour at most.”
It was hard to believe how simple it was.
On the drive to Cranberry Cove, Natalie and Elena discussed how they wanted the interview to go. Natalie was bubbly, alternating between fear of being discovered and fear that they wouldn’t get enough out of her. When they first saw the mansions that surrounded the cove, Elena inhaled sharply. They were entering enemy territory. Through the gaudy mansions, she could see the glinting water just beyond, as well as the still-glorious stretch of forest and beach on the yonder side, the area that the current Cranberry Cove residents wanted to destroy in pursuit of their country club and their “better life.”
Natalie drove her car into Henrietta’s driveway, and the two journalists peered up at the horrible dark-green house, lined with red brick, decorated to bursting with Christmas gear. It looked like someone had thrown a bunch of glittery trash onto the house. It spoke to incredibly poor taste.
“Just because you’re born into wealth doesn’t mean you know how to use it, I guess,” Natalie mumbled as they got out of the car.
The minute they pressed the bell, the front door burst open to reveal Henrietta herself: six feet tall and slender, with arms sculpted from Pilates and eyes open as wide and full as saucers. She wore a dark-green dress, and her hair cascaded in waves of red and gold. When she smiled, they saw perfect white teeth, teeth that couldn’t have been natural, based on the older photographs they’d seen of Henrietta online. She smelled like too much perfume.
“Aren’t you both beautiful?” Henrietta said by way of hello. “I didn’t know they made pretty journalists. Come in. Come in.” She beckoned for them, and Natalie and Elena followed her into the overly ornate mansion, traipsing all the way to the sunroom, where Henrietta had laid out rosé and expensive-looking French cookies.
“This was really wonderful timing,” Henrietta explained as they sat. “My husband and I’ve just returned from Istanbul. We weren’t here for weeks and weeks.”
“Istanbul! What brought you there?” Elena asked, pressing Record on her phone. Later, she wanted to investigate every word Henrietta said.
