Chapter 3
Mac Coltrane’s sheets were a little bit scratchy, which also described his mood.
They were about a three hundred thread count. And cheap. He liked that they had body and heft and didn’t cling to him on hot nights or tempt him into lingering in bed, and they had cost practically nothing, and these days he knew the cost of everything.
He didn’t like anything that clung. Or tempted him to linger.
And that included nearly every tie of every kind.
Except, well, maybe the goats. He was pretty committed to the goats.
But his bed was vast, because he was a restless sleeper. He often woke up diagonally across it, limbs flung out, like he was afraid someone would steal his territory. Once upon a time, a lifetime ago, it seemed, when he was test driving the kind of lifestyle one expected of a billionaire’s son, he’d slept on satin sheets. Until that night he’d rolled over and his shifting knee had accidentally punted his date out the other end of the bed. She’d emerged with a soft plop onto the floor as if she’d gone down a waterslide, astonished. They’d laughed like giddy fools. That was a few months before his whole world caved in.
He’d gone from knowing exactly who he was, where he was from, and where he was going to feeling as blank as the checks his dad used to give him.
And just as worthless as those checks would be now.
He’d shifted the rubble painstakingly off himself, one piece at a time, as strategical as a Jenga player and as methodical as any crew sent in to free survivors of earthquake wreckage. The hard way, step by step, he learned exactly who he was.
Someone who got what he wanted.
In some ways, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. As the saying went. Even if the tree was in prison for fraud.
“When the bidding starts, put me on speaker. I want to hear it.”
“Of course, Mr. Coltrane.” His attorney’s tone didn’t at all betray that Mac had said this to him a hundred times. Mac liked to subtly tweak Graybill, who was English, starchy, correct, and possibly the most literal man Mac had ever met.
Because, well, frankly, “smartass” was another of the things Mac Coltrane definitively was.
“Have you changed your bidding cap, sir?”
“Well, I checked the dryer, the sofa cushions, and all the pockets of my clothes, and came up with nada. So no.”
He’d also checked the mailbox, and no promised big white envelope from Mike was there, either. He wished he was surprised by this.
“Ha ha. Ha. Very well, sir.”
Graybill was humoring him. Mac suppressed a grin.
Like his father, Mac had the knack for turning virtually nothing into something, and then something into something big. Methodically and skillfully, but not as quickly as he would have preferred. Because unlike his father, he had a littlethingabout doing it the right way.
Graybill had worked for Dixon Coltrane and was perhaps the only person on staff who’d managed to remain untainted by the scandal. And Mac knew Graybill shared some of his own life philosophy about how to stay on the straight and narrow.
And he, just like Mac, knew of one possible way Mac could significantly change his bidding cap. He also knew it would be a cold day in hell before he took that route. Because it would involve forgiving.
How about that. There was yet another way Mac was his father’s son: he was implacable when he decided not to forgive.
“Okay then. To reiterate: the bidding cap is still three hundred. And that’s firm because it has to be. But I doubt we’ll even hit two hundred.”
He didn’t mention all the reasons he didn’t think they’d hit that cap: the grounds were gorgeous, but Hellcat Canyon was in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, California; the house was immense, idiosyncratic, costly to maintain—beautiful but ridiculous. It needed updating. Rumor had it there was also a ghost. He’d never met the ghost, but then he’d lived there during the summers only, sometimes not even a whole summer, for just short of eight years.
But there were other ghosts. These were more of the figurative kind. For instance, sometimes when he closed his eyes after staring into the sun an image would hover for an instant behind his lids: a girl with big mahogany eyes filled with gold lights, her hair a few shades deeper in color, impossibly gleaming. But there had never been anything ethereal about her. He knew, because he’d held her. She was the realest person he’d ever known. The truest thing he’d ever felt.
She’d wanted to be an elementary schoolteacher and she loved animals, and he supposed that described millions of girls. “A common little person,” his dad had called her. Among other things.
It took Mac years to fully understand now how definitively untrue this was.
Shehaddisappeared, however.
