311
Megamillionaire
Murders:
FAMILY CURSEMAS
BY ROD KIERKEGAARD, JR.
A
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“The
holly and the ivy
When they are both full grown
Of all the
trees that are in the wood
The holly bears the crown.”
—Traditional.
Chapter 1
“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make rich. Filthy rich.”—From “Filthy Rich; The Fall of the House of Goodman” by Todd Irvine.
All the way home from Germany, Holly Singletary had been dreaming of a white Christmas. But she hadn’t given a thought to love — or murder. It never for a moment occurred to her, as she caught her first glimpse of Greystone through the haze of winter trees and falling snow, that this might be the place she found both.
Or, to be more accurate, that they would find her.
“Merry Christmas!” her mother said, enfolding her in a huge warm embrace, once Holly found her way in through the open garage doors past the catering truck. “I’m so happy to see you, baby girl — I’ve been so worried about you flying today. I was sure they’d be closing down the airport. You heard about this big storm that’s on the way? I prayed for you a safe flight, and thank the good Lord you’re here to share our Christmas with us.”
Her mom rarely bothered to wait for answers to her questions. Pearl Singletary was a short, pretty, but slightly overweight African-American woman in her late fifties wearing a too-large, heavily stained apron. She led Holly into the main kitchen of the huge house, then glanced around and lowered her voice dramatically. Her face had the panicky, cross look it always got under pressure: that of an unhappy child. “I’m praying we don’t get caught here overnight by the snow. This place is a” — she whispered the word fearfully — “hell hole. And these people here are Godless and cold as fish. The less time we spend with them the better.”
“Oh, they’re not so bad.” That was Rachel, Holly’s little sister. Maybe it was time to stop calling her “little”, Holly decided. Rachel was taller than she was. “Their name is the Goodmans. I Googled them. They’re one of the richest families in America.”
“That gives them even less excuse,” Pearl said firmly.
Holly and Rachel embraced. They were used to their mother’s disapproval of her wealthy suburban patrons. “What did you bring me?” Rachel asked her older sister, smiling. Holly smiled back. Her Christmas presents were in one of her kitbags.
“Lumps of German coal.” Holly rolled up her sleeves. “OK, Mom. What do you need me to do first?”
Still, Holly had to admit, the house did look like the set of a horror movie. Or a crime scene. No, maybe that was too harsh, Holly thought. It looked like what it was; a huge ugly old estate in a commuter bedroom community of New York, where a rich family reunited once a year for the holidays. This was how Rachel had described it to her, anyway, in the text messages she’d been sending ever since Holly’s flight from Frankfurt had landed at JFK two hours ago.
“EmergNC!” the first text had read, “U gotta come here quick cuz Joy can’t. HELLLP!!!”
It was some kind of last minute catering gig their mom, Pearl, was stuck with. Two of her kids, Rachel and Benjamin, were already there working for her, but another pair of hands was urgently needed. So, sighing, Holly had rushed out there straight from the airport.
Once she’d cleared the customs area at JFK, the only topic Holly heard on people’s lips was the big winter storm. When her plane touched down at two in the afternoon, EST, nearly two hours late, a foot of slush was already on the ground. The skies were slate-grey, and the snow was falling steadily and patiently in big business-like flakes. City snow-plows and sand trucks were out on the streets, but their efforts looked sluggish and half-hearted, as if even the machines themselves dimly understood that anything they cleared now would swiftly get buried again.
On the subway to Grand Central, then all the way out on the train to Rye, Holly overheard even wilder talk about the nor’easter moving in. Three feet of snow on the way, she heard people saying. Maybe even four or five or six. The businessmen in the two seats across from her on the commuter train were talking about the crippling storms of ’96 and ’78. A lady across the aisle remembered 1964, when the whole metro region was paralyzed for a week. Everything Holly had seen on CNN at the airport or read on her iPhone claimed this one might be even worse.
The Singletary’s family home — Pearl’s house, a small three bedroom house a fraction the size of Greystone — was in Port Chester, New York, the next stop up on the New Haven Line after Rye, but Holly didn’t have time to continue on to get changed and dump her luggage there. So she was still wearing her US Army camouflage fatigues and carrying her kit bags when she finally caught a cab at the Rye Station parking lot.
The roads were already freezing over, and she was lucky the driver had come back for her at all, after he’d dropped off a prior fare from the same train. That was how cabbies operated in these little stations in Westchester County; on a rotation basis, no carrying separate fares together. Holly knew this because her dad had driven a cab for a while — right here in Rye — before he’d finally deserted his family, and they’d been forced to move away from the town, first back in with her mother’s folks in Mount Vernon and later out to Port Chester. She had been seven then, just entering second grade.
So everything in the little city of Rye, its streets and buildings and green woodland, had always felt to her like something seen in a dream whenever she went back. This seemed particularly true of the spectral mansion half-glimpsed through the mist before the cabbie turned into its long driveway.
But Greystone struck a lot of people that way, like something seen in a dream, even in broad daylight. It didn’t look like it belonged in the modern world, if indeed it had ever belonged to any. The house was massive, L-shaped with two wings, one of which, the East Wing, was supposedly haunted. It was set off from Forest Avenue and sat on a steep hill. To get there, you risked your life on a roller-coaster of a driveway, which plunged down to cross a large pond and then climbed steeply up again into the crushed-gravel parking lot in front of the house. It was built of gray stone, hence its name, and its turreted wings had mock-Tudor gabling. It had twelve chimneys and was considered architecturally hideous by magazines, but that had never mattered to its owners.
Greystone had two pools, one outdoors, covered up now for the winter, and another in the basement, along with three kitchens, a grand ballroom, and a small movie theater. It had its own little sandy beach in the rear of the estate; from it, you could see Pine Island (which isn’t really an island) and the dark bulk and glittering lights of Long Island far off in the distance. Today, veiled by the snow and the dark storm-clouds, the latter was invisible. The house had hosted gangsters and presidents, dictators and billionaires and debutantes and movie stars. Several people had been born there — and, according to myth, two more had died on the premises suddenly and tragically.
They wouldn’t be the last.
***
William Ivor Goodman, or “Ivy”, as his family called him, had just missed Holly at JFK by less than an hour, flying in from Singapore via LA. But instead of being forced to take the subway, then the train, and then trying to find a cab in the snow, a gleaming black chauffeured Cadillac Escalade was waiting for him at the Arrivals gate. So he spent only thirty seconds or so actually outside in the snow. The driver was his mother’s chauffeur, a middle-aged Hispanic man named Antenor. Because Antenor had always disliked him him and, moreover, still spoke English poorly, Ivy had little to say to him and so spent the entire journey Tweeting, texting, or playing Angry Birds on his iPad.
Normally, the Escalade might have arrived at the house before Holly’s cab. But because of the snow, both the Whitestone and the New England Thruway were hellishly backed up with Christmas Eve rush hour traffic, so Ivy was about half an hour behind her. He didn’t look up from his screen and out the windows again until they turned off the highway and onto the Boston Post Road. He felt a sudden urge then to stop the car and go for a walk in the snow—to the library or the ice skating rink, maybe. Or the Playland amusement park, the one where scenes in the movie “Big” were filmed, even though it was closed for the winter. Rye always made him feel the same way he did whenever he caught sight of Greystone again; filled with a wistful, wounded sense of nostalgia. And rejection in some indefinable way, like a spurned lover.
Having grown up in the house (more or less—he had been sent off to flunk out of a succession of private boarding schools after he turned eleven), Ivy didn’t think of the house as “Greystone” or even as his family home, particularly, since the Goodmans owned at least six others. He thought of it as “Alicia’s house”, because his mother had lived there alone since 1997. Alone was a relative term; occasionally over the years several of the younger children, Ivy included, had unsuccessfully attempted to move back in with her for varying lengths of time. And of course, there were the servants, or staff, as they were called these days. Alicia Goodman’s attachment to these was legendary. Or at least to one in particular.
It was this inappropriate attachment that had broken up her marriage. Since then, David Goodman, Ivy’s father, had remarried four times, twice to the same woman. His latest wife, a former porn star, would be in attendance tonight, because Ivy’s mother always made a point of including current spouses, or “partners”, as she now mockingly called them, in the family Christmas she hosted every year. The prospect of seeing his newest step-mother in the flesh gave Ivy some small thing to look forward to this year; he had recently found a small trove of her old hard-core videos—long since bought up in this country and deleted from Internet sites by his father’s lawyers--on pirated DVDs in Hong Kong.
They were in his suitcase, along with the scuba gear he’d brought back from Bali. He had no intention of sharing the videos with anyone except Iona, his baby sister and the only member of the family he was close to. What would be the point of that? His father had already married Kaydra and, presumably, was beyond further social embarrassment anyway, after all his other failed marriages. But Ivy and Iona might at least get a laugh out of them.
The prospect of the rest of the visit, particularly with the looming threat of being snowed in and stranded there past Boxing Day, filled him with dread. Every year, Ivy thought, as Antenor turned the SUV for the long sickening lurch down the driveway, he imagined things might somehow be different. They never were.
This year, however, he was to be proven dead wrong.
Ivy glanced down into the pond as they hurtled, skidding slightly, over the cement and stone bridge across it, and saw it was getting that pastry-glazed look of thickening ice even across its middle where the water was deepest. His mother kept the pond stocked with small fish year-round for the benefit of the Canada geese that used it as a migratory rest stop—and the front lawn as a latrine. A few geese were huddling disconsolately out there now.
Antenor steered the Escalade past a parked white catering truck with the word “Tutti’s” and a graphic of what appeared to be a cannibal cook-pot painted on its side, into the entrance of the main garage and parked it between a Hummer and a Maybach. This garage connected to the pantries off the banquet kitchen, which was where Ivy set eyes on Holly.
She was striding down the pantry hall, her stance widened by her military boots, carrying a huge silver platter of mushroom-polenta hors d’oeuvres. Her hair was pulled up in a severe knot, and tiny kinky black strands of it were escaping, curling over her ears and down the back of her neck. He vaguely noticed her uniform and was startled by it, but it was her face he found himself staring at. God, what a face, he thought. Like a black Madonna.
At the same moment, Holly caught sight of him, too. Their eyes met. She saw a pale blonde too-thin white boy incongruously — considering the weather — dressed like a surfer. He was still wearing shorts and flip-flops. No, not a boy, she decided; a man in his mid-twenties. Which only made the surfer outfit all the more ludicrous, like he was trying too hard to look young. He was festooned with digital cameras and their criss-crossing straps. A “trustafarian” she thought contemptuously. One of these rich peoples’ brats.
But something about him caught her eye. She’d seen a lot of men in her life already, both in the military and in college, but never anybody his age who looked quite so helpless and…not needy, exactly. Not even hungry for attention. Just expectant — expecting to be chauffeured around and waited on and taken care of. A spoiled rich kid.
But it was definitely spooky how he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Even as they tried to squeeze past each other, because there wasn’t a lot of hall space in these narrow pantries, which were all shelving and even had an ancient dumb-waiter, he kept right on staring. Did he know her from somewhere? He did look familiar somehow, thought Holly—but how could their paths have ever crossed? He certainly wasn’t ex-military. Their eyes, his slate-blue and bloodshot, hers dark brown with very white whites, clung to each other as they went by.
Then the moment was broken by her mother.
“I’m so mad I could spit, Holly!” she screeched at Holly from the kitchen doorway. “I turn my back on you girls for a single second, and my crème brulees catch on fire!” And indeed a pall of incinerated egg-nog was wafting into the hallway. “How could you do this to me? Are you two just trying to ruin my Christmas?” Pearl burst into tears and pulled her apron up over her face like a four-year-old.
“Mom, you’re confusing me with Rachel again,” said Holly, with the patience of long experience. “She’s been doing desserts with you, not me. I just got here, remember?”
And so, reluctantly, Ivy stopped gazing at Holly, who had turned away and was trying to lead the sobbing Pearl back into the kitchen and calm her down. He had his own mother to face.
And she was a lot worse than this.
Chapter 2
“Growing up, the person I felt closest to in the house was the family chauffeur. He drove me everywhere, even to school and back, with a loaded revolver in his pocket in case of a kidnapping attempt. I saw little of my parents except when we were all together at gatherings. It was not until I joined the family business and my father Saul began to mentor me that he ceased to be a distant abstraction, and we finally achieved the closeness I had so long yearned for. My mother, on the other hand, was always closer to my own children than she was to me.”— From “A Good Man is Hard To Find” by David B. Goodman, Sr.
The banquet kitchen was huge, four times the size of Holly’s apartment in Passaic, New Jersey, twice that of Pearl’s kitchen in the Tutti’s restaurant. It had been modernized in reverse gravitational order; that is to say it had a new tiled floor, rows of gleaming stainless-steel refrigerators, gas ranges and ovens, but as your eyes traveled up the ceiling, you saw the storage cabinets and exhaust fans needed replacing and that the pipes and ceiling were old and crumbling. Holly would eventually discover that the whole house was like this: layers of luxury and fresh paint and partial modernization laid over each other at eye-level but falling apart underneath.
And it had climate control problems. It was way too hot in this kitchen. To Holly, that still felt pleasant, even in her uniform, after earlier standing freezing, stamping her feet and rubbing her hands, outside the Rye train station earlier. A flat-screen TV was mounted into one of the corners of the room; its closed-captioning was engaged and she could see “Storm of the Century?” scrolling across the Weather Channel’s graphics.
She had a sneaking feeling this Christmas was already pretty much ruined.
But at least she’d get to spend it with Mom and Rachel, and her brother Benjamin, who was away in one of the living rooms right now serving drinks to the Goodman family and their guests. Whatever happens, thought Holly, even if the truck stalls or we get snowed in here, at least we’ll be together. Mom’s house was one town away in Port Chester, but it might as well have been on Mars if the local roads got snowbound. The little city of Rye had its own budget and crews, but typically the county only focused on main roads in snow emergencies and most independent crews would flock into New York City, where they could command higher rates. So the longer they were stuck here preparing and serving the meal, Holly knew, the greater the odds they wouldn’t get home until sometime tomorrow, if then.
Pearl Singletary had raised her five children pretty much on her own. The older two, no longer children at all but adults with kids of their own, had already arrived at her house and had been phoning and texting their siblings warnings about the storm for the past hour. Pearl, after years of working at dozens of different jobs to support her family, had risen to become one of two head chefs at Tutti’s, a small restaurant on Purchase Street in Rye. Most of her work was on the catering side of the business. She loved people but became easily flustered by their demands and so usually let Brenda Hoogstratten, her boss and the owner of Tutti’s, handle them for her. But Brenda was off on her own Christmas vacation in Aruba, and when this last-minute job came up—Alicia Goodman’s longtime caterers in the city having backed out at the last minute over unpaid bills while most of Alicia’s own domestic staff was on vacation—Pearl had been pushed, literally kicking and screaming, into the firing line while Brenda remotely made the arrangements by Blackberry.
And since Pearl was short-staffed today, Rachel and Benjamin had been roped into helping out. As her mother began berating her for the crèmes brulees, which were a total loss and would have to be remade from scratch, Rachel dealt with her the way she always did—by turning up the volume on her iPod. When Pearl, distracted by the oven timers for the ducks l’orange, momentarily wandered away, still muttering crossly, the two sisters exchanged a smile. It might be in a strange house this year, but this was pretty much how they’d always spent Christmas Eve — helping Mom out in the kitchen while she fussed and fumed.
“Glad you made it,” her sister said to Holly sotto voce. “You gonna be around for Nichele’s New Year’s Eve party?” Nichele was Rachel’s best friend from high school. “Her boyfriend’s renting a B-A-R.” She mouthed the letters of the word exaggeratedly, so that their mother, who was still clucking unhappily over the dessert, wouldn’t overhear it.
“That might happen.”
“What might happen?” called Pearl reflexively from across the kitchen. This was another habit of hers; absentmindedly catching the tail-end of a conversation, then demanding to be told what it was about — but wandering off or just not listening when you told her.
The two sisters were still grinning at each other like fools when Holly saw Rachel’s eyes widen and the smile freeze on her face. She turned to see what her sister was staring at. A tiny young white woman, covered in self-inflicted scars and black tattoos with occasional swirls of blue and maroon inside them, was standing in one of the kitchen’s four doorways. She was wearing a black silk cocktail mini-dress that barely covered her breasts and crotch, along with very high heels. Her hair was a big, tinseled mess with dark brown roots. Holly’s first impression was one of extreme prettiness; the young woman seemed like a doll brought to life. But her looks were spoiled on second glance by several things. One was that her face was vaguely horse-like, with a too-long nose. Another was that she was way too thin—you looked at her, and you thought, “eating disorder”. And the third was that she had a little crust of dried puke trailing over the top of one breast and down her dress.
This girl was tottering in the doorway, making gulping faces like a fish, either about to hurl again or else trying to say something. She had a bottle of vodka in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She dropped the cigarette first, then the bottle. Its bottom fell off, then the glass above it delicately shattered before the rest of it rolled around leaking vodka. But there wasn’t much vodka left in it to spill.
The girl took a step or two forward, saying indistinctly, “I was…what was I…”, then toppled over, rolling like the bottle from her side onto her back. Her head hit the floor tiles with the same hollow “clunk”.
“Oh Lord,” said Pearl behind them in her loudest “Sunday church” voice, “What fresh trial is this? Is this meal under some kind of curse?”
Holly and Rachel crouched down beside the girl. Holly checked her breathing and pulse while Rachel ran her hand under the girl’s blonde mane for traces of blood.
“She OD’d?” Rachel asked.
Holly opened the girl’s purplishly lipsticked mouth to make sure she wasn’t choking on her own tongue and opened one of her eyelids to look at the white. Then she leaned over and sniffed the girl’s breath, grimacing sourly as she did.
“I don’t think so,” Holly said after a moment. “I think she’s just totally drunk. But we better go get Benj in here.” Holly and Rachel’s brother Benjamin, now acting as cocktail waiter to the Goodmans and their assorted guests, was in his third year of med school.
“Wait a sec, don’t you recognize her? That’s Iona Goodman!” said Rachel excitedly. “Wow, today really rocks!” The emaciated dead-drunk waif on the kitchen floor was a celebrity, star of a TV reality series, a failed singing career, a failed acting career, and several porn videos on the Internet filmed by exes. She was, ironically, a pharmaceuticals heiress who’d been in and out of re-hab a half dozen times for various substance addictions.
And that was when Holly finally put two and two together.
“Ohhhh…” she said, wondering why she was even surprised, “They’re those Goodmans.”
Duh.
***
“Oh well, at least she’ll be here with us tonight in spirit,”said Alicia, the first Mrs. Goodman, when she heard the news, third-hand, that her daughter Iona had collapsed in the kitchen. Alicia began most sentences with “Oh well,” as if life were a series of constant disappointments to her for which philosophy was her only consolation. Certainly her children seemed to be. Iona was her youngest child and in many ways the one most like her mother. Which was why they hated each other.
Alicia’s voice, brittle, sarcastic, and weighted with blame, cut through the hum of conversation. There were a dozen people in the room when Rachel entered it, including Ivy, the latest arrival; mostly family members and a few guests. Most of them were used to Iona’s embarrassing behavior by now — her shambolic public collapses, drunken accusations of incest on cable talk shows, and the occasional sight of her naked and humping members of both sexes in glowing green shades of night-vision on YouTube.
“She’s killing herself,” said Mimi spitefully to her father. Mimi was the oldest of the children. “You need to just cut her off for her own good, David.”
David was their father, sitting on the couch opposite her next to his fifth wife, Kaydra, the former porn star. He couldn’t cut Iona off, and Mimi knew it; the trust funds had all been set up by her grandfather, Saul. However, all of the kids sponged large sums off David, whenever they could gain access to him. These were called “advances against their inheritance”, and Mimi was the worst offender. This didn’t stop her from tirelessly lobbying against any possible generosity on his part toward the rest of her siblings.
The children all called their parents by their first names. When David Bruce Goodman (Sr.) and Alicia Sarah Silbers were married in 1977, they had vowed that in defiance of their conservative parents and grandparents, they would bring up their own children in a completely secular and progressive way. Their children would go to good public schools—this resolve lasted a single day in Mimi’s case, three in Bruce’s (David Bruce Goodman, Jr.), several weeks in Skye’s, and six whole years in Ivy’s, the happiest in his life. They would insist that their children call them not “Mom” and “Dad” or “Mama” and “Papa” but “Alicia” and “David”. And they would bring their children up in a secular household where Hannukah and Christmas were both tastefully and non-religiously celebrated — over the years, the two holidays had been merged into a single Christmas family visit.
These days, the only remaining concession to Judaism in the “Lodge”, the large living room where they were all gathered now, was a single rather self-conscious menorah. The Lodge was so-called because when Alicia and David had first bought the house and moved into it in 1979, this room had been decorated like a Scottish laird’s castle, with dark oak paneling, tartan plaid over all the furnishings, and stuffed stags’ heads on the walls. The room had long since been made over several times, but both the paneling and the name remained. Because both were considered Dickensian, it was where the “Family Tree” was set up by the David Stark Event Design service and where the family traditionally gathered for drinks on Christmas Eve. The service always set up a second bigger fake snow-covered “Kringle Tree” in the front entrance hall, but it was only for guests and staff.
Most of the conversation tonight was about the recent presidential election and whether or not the new Congress would do anything about capital gains or inheritance taxes. Or tighten the loop-holes enjoyed by the super-rich, a subject of great interest to most of those in the room.
“Well, I don’t care, it’s only right that the one percent pay their fair share!” someone was saying loudly and accusingly.
“Still a grad-school Marxist until your granny dies, huh, Laura?”
“Sure, they’ve always been a parliament of whores, but at least an honest whore stays bought —”
“Have you seen her latest Youtube video? It’s gone retroviral…”
Ivy, seeing Benjamin disappear back into the kitchen with Rachel, disengaged himself from his brother’s fiancée, Sophie, and followed them. He found Benjamin kneeling over Iona’s inert body, gently feeling the bones in her neck and the back of her head. Ivy had recognized Benjamin as Rachel’s — and therefore probably Holly’s — brother at once; Benjamin and Rachel looked very much alike, both tall and slender and slightly lighter-skinned than their sister. Holly was shorter, and her face — and what Ivy could glimpse of her figure beneath her loose-fitting fatigues — reminded him of a statue he’d seen once of a goddess carved from black African mpingo wood. He kept stealing glances at her instead of focusing properly on his unconscious sister, as he and Benjamin carried her in a fireman’s lift up the back kitchen stairs to the bedroom suite Iona always used. The goddess, Holly, trailed behind them, carrying Iona’s feet and making sure they didn’t bang against any corners.
“You guys are brother and sister, right?” Ivy asked, to fill the silence once they were in the upstairs hall. They had to traverse a warren of his mother’s sitting and sewing rooms (never actually used for anything resembling sewing — or in some cases, anything at all), before reaching the South Wing, which was where all the guest suites were.
“Yes,” Benjamin said, “I’m Ben Singletary; that’s my sulky little sister, Holly.”
“I’m Ivy,” said Ivy, then added, “Goodman.”
“We know,” said Benjamin. They reached the door of Iona’s rooms, and Ivy fumbled with the knob.
“Why is Holly sulking?” he managed to ask.
“For the same reason as me!” Benjamin laughed. “’Cuz she’s working on Christmas Eve.”
They dumped Iona on the bed, and Holly lingered behind for a minute, unclasping and removing the younger woman’s stiletto heels. They looked like they might tear holes in the coverlet. The bedroom had the shabby look of a formerly luxurious hotel. There was nothing personal inside it other than the contents of Iona’s suitcases, which were strewn all over the floor. Otherwise the room was utterly anonymous. Alicia had removed every single personal effect of all her children from the mansion the moment they had moved out and either had their possessions shipped to them or else thrown out. These included all their toys and files like their childhood medical records and report cards.
“I used to know a Holly. In first grade here in Rye,” Ivy said conversationally when Benjamin had gone into the bathroom to check the medicine cabinet. He didn’t say “a black girl named Holly”. Race was still remarkable in Rye.
The effect of these words on Holly was immediate and extraordinary. Her body went completely rigid. She had been leaning forward, pulling a quilt over Iona — the bedroom, as were all at Greystone — was kept far too cold. Now she froze in this position, her face averted from Ivy’s. She said nothing.
“Damn!” Benjamin was saying as he reentered the room. He had several small prescription bottles in his hands. “If she’s on these, she shouldn’t be drinking anything. Seroquel, Abilify, Paxil, Effexor…you know if she’s been taking all these at the same time?”
Ivy shook his head.
“You noticed any symptoms—slurred speech, trembling, short-term memory loss?”
“I haven’t seen my sister since…since last summer,” Ivy said lamely. But that pretty much described her all the time these days, if her TV appearances and iPhone conversations were anything to go by. Though she had good days, even weeks. However, Ivy suspected that was probably the ecstasy and ketamine.
Benjamin shook his head, pityingly, Ivy thought. Holly, meanwhile, had stood up and was walking around the foot of the bed, clearly on her way out of the room. She was carefully not looking at Ivy. Her face, it seemed to him, had turned an even darker shade of black, almost the color of a plum. He imagined he could feel the warmth of her body and even smell her scent. Coffee and vanilla. Mixed something else, he thought: warm girl. He didn’t want her to go.
Meanwhile Holly’s brother was saying, “That’s not all she’s taking, is it? If I was licensed yet, I’d call an ERV out here and have her stomach pumped, honestly. You might mention that idea to your parents or whoever. In the meantime, if you love your sister, try to check her pulse and breathing every fifteen or twenty minutes, OK? Elevated is bad. Depressed is worse. You know how to do that, right? I’ll come up back here myself whenever I can, but I’ve got to…well, you know…” he indicated the waiter’s uniform — shiny black jacket and trousers with black bow tie — he was wearing. It was obvious they were rented; the cuffs of his shirt stuck out too far.
“OK, Benjamin,” said Ivy. “Thanks.”
“If she wakes up, try to get her to puke. I’ll mix an emetic in the kitchen.”
Typical Christmas Eve, thought Ivy, sitting heavily on the bed after both the Singletarys had left. Just me and Iona. Poor little rich kids. He eyed her Valium bottle longingly, then put it back, along with the rest, in the bathroom. Which smelled of mold.
Chapter 3
“Outside of the arms and tobacco industries—in which the Goodmans have also massively invested over the years-- probably no other business in the world has caused as much suffering and as many needless deaths to innocent victims as Big Pharma. The ghosts of those they have deliberately murdered by knowingly supplying toxic or tainted chemicals or by falsifying or rushing through clinical test results in order to bring a lethal product to market must surely haunt all the Goodmans in their sleep.”—From Filthy Rich; The Fall of the House of Goodman by Todd Irvine.
“Damn, that white boy’s got a crush on you,” whispered Rachel when Holly came back into the kitchen. Unfortunately Rachel’s iPod ear-buds had deafened her so that she spoke too loudly, and their mother overheard her.
“Who has a crush on who?” Pearl demanded. “And Rachel, that’s another dollar in the swear jar when we get home.”
“You see the way he was staring?” Rachel said, ignoring her.
“Rachel, you quit playing, take the egg-nog out to them. Holly can’t do it—just look how she’s dressed.” Rachel was wearing the female equivalent of Benjamin’s waiter uniform, only she’d done her best to brighten it. She was wearing a red Santa hat she’d bought at CVS on the way over and had pinned a plastic Rudolph the Reindeer brooch to her breast pocket, whose nose lit up and chimed electronically whenever a little bell-string was pulled.
“Those rich folks out there can’t see her wearing her army uniform — she’d probably give somebody a heart attack thinking she was a terrorist or something. What was she talking about, Holly? Were you making eyes at somebody? I won’t stand for you getting involved with any of these people, you hear? They’re Godless trash.”
“I wasn’t doing anything, Mom. Rachel’s just teasing.”
Abruptly, Pearl screamed. The fingerling potatoes she’d been caramelizing for the oregano rack of lamb were charring, and Holly had to spend the next few minutes helping her put the fire out. Then there were the cookies to glaze. And the pepper-crusted tenderloin to broil. If they burned anything else, Pearl said, they’d be operating at a loss for the evening, and Brenda would take it out of her pay-check. This last was patently untrue, but Holly said nothing.
Instead, the next time Rachel and Benj had bustled in and out of the kitchen again and the two of them were alone, she said, “Mom?” in a different kind of tone. “Remember when I was in first grade and wanted to quit school and never go back? Because a little boy was following me around and acting like a fool about me?” Even now, after all those years, she couldn’t directly mention exactly what it was she’d been so embarrassed about at the time.
“I sure do.” Pearl stopped frowning and fretting for a moment and smiled. “I had to make you all kinds of promises and bribe you to go back. And look at you now.”
“Well, I think that blonde guy, Ivy—the one in that stupid surfer shirt—I think he’s that same little boy. Only grown up, I mean. I think that’s why he was staring at me or whatever.”
Unexpectedly, Pearl burst into loud laughter. “Well, I declare!” she said. “Wouldn’t that be something? Of all people to run into…remember how he made your life a torment that year? Didn’t he bring you candy and flowers to school, too? Well, at least one person in that family’s got good taste. Now, you just quit fretting about trivial little things, Holly, and relax like the rest of us. Have yourself just a little taste of that dry sherry. It’s Christmas Eve, so we won’t be sinning…”
Holly shook her head. As always, her mother was utterly contradictory and crazy. Screaming one minute, giggling the next. But as always, Holly felt better for having told her. Why seeing that boy again had bothered her so much, she couldn’t have said.
***
The Goodmans were gathered at Greystone tonight — it was six o’clock now and officially evening, which was why Pearl Singletary was able to allow herself and her daughter a modest alcoholic drink — not only to celebrate Christmas in their usual fashion but also to toast the official engagement of the older Goodman son, Bruce, to his girlfriend, Sophie de MacMahon. The family was all down here in the Lodge, with the notable exceptions of Iona, still lying unconscious upstairs, and Skye, the middle sister, who hadn’t spoken to anyone in the family in five or six years. Though, as Mimi never failed to point out, Skye still cashed her trust and SWIMD checks. SWIMD was the family group investment company, an acronym of the five children’s initials, which like Goodman Humanis had suffered recent losses in value and liquidity.
Rumors about Skye continue to reach the family from to time—that she’d become a Buddhist, a Scientologist, a Branch Davidian, that she was dead or an organic dairy farmer, or had married into the British or Virginia hunting aristocracy. But no one knew anything for sure.
With the death of his father Saul several years before, David Bruce Goodman, Sr. had become the family patriarch. He was a tall man in his late sixties, sitting very straight on the couch with the permanent look of a startled store-window dummy. This was due to the Parkinson’s Disease he’d battled for the past decade. He had the finest care—including, naturally, the best and most advanced drug treatments available—so the progress of his symptoms was scarcely noticeable to anyone who hadn’t seen him in some time. He rarely displayed any tremors, but his gait was somewhat halting and over-precise, and he held himself ramrod-stiff. He never seemed to physically relax, but that was a trait of his since childhood.
At first meeting, what was most remarkable about David’s face was its naked need for love — the same permanent expression Holly had already noticed in that of his younger son. But in David’s case, this was mixed with a curious coldness and arrogance in the set of his mouth. He rarely said anything, preferring to let Kaydra act as his mouthpiece for the endless private requests he received. When personally confronted, he was fond of quoting his own father. “How much is this gonna cost me?” he would snap. Then his excessively pale blue eyes became unblinking and icy.
His hair was sandy, now turning gray; out of vanity, he wore it too long, and child-like wispy strands of it drifted over his balding crown like the locks of a mad professor. He was dressed very conservatively in a navy blue sports jacket, no tie — because of his illness, he couldn’t bear to feel choked — and cream slacks. When David had taken over sole operations of Goodman Humanis from Saul Goodman in 1992, his personal wealth was estimated at close to eight billion dollars, making him at that time one of the wealthiest men on the planet. Now, due to his incompetence, bad decisions, and growing indifference to the family business, David was worth perhaps half that.
It was still a lot of money. He always traveled with security staff. The two he’d brought with him tonight were in the Servants’ Wing, sitting inside the antiquated security office, where a number of monitors connected to outside cameras and burglar alarms flickered. The two men, both former Green Berets trained as bodyguards, were drinking beer and watching the fourth quarter of the Christmas Eve “Battle of New York” NFL game between the Jets and the Giants on an Android tablet.
Seated in a deep leather armchair very deliberately placed at the farthest end of the room from where David Goodman was sitting was his hostess, his first wife, Alicia Goodman. Alicia was wealthy in her own right; she had grown up as the Magnin department store group heiress. Her public attitude — and one she particularly impressed upon her children — was that she had no head for business, had frittered away most of her own inheritance on worthy causes, and so had no money to lend or give to anyone, however deserving. “Ask your father,” was her standard response to any request.
In reality, Alicia was a human pocket calculator. She usually knew to the nearest round figure the current net worth of all her assets and kept a close eye on the markets. No one else, except for a pair of cousins she employed as her head lawyer and chief accountant respectively, had the slightest idea of her true net worth. Alicia’s grudgingness over paying her bills, particularly local ones to small businesses, which she somehow seemed to view as personal affronts, was one of the reasons she had so much trouble retaining services from year to year. And was, in fact, why Pearl Singletary and her children were there tonight instead of Alicia’s usual caterers.
“Oh, I don’t see any need to trouble the local fire department on a holiday,” Alicia was saying now to Ivy, referring to Iona’s condition. “Do you?” She wasn’t soliciting advice or being vague by adding this last; it was a dare to voice an opinion. She was a small woman and had looked very much like Iona when she was young, though they’d gone to different plastic surgeons and so now had different noses. Alicia’s nose, like the rest of her, was thicker and heavier than Iona’s. Alicia was ten years younger than her ex-husband, David — she’d only just turned fifty-eight — but she’d allowed her formerly glossy dark brown hair to go completely gray, giving her a witchy, yet still distinguished, look. Her face was elegant and relatively unlined; she wore startling bright red lipstick and expensive jewelry but a shapeless, shabby-looking house-dress, as if they’d all intruded on one of her drinking bouts uninvited, and she couldn’t be bothered to dress up for their visit. Normally, unlike Iona, Alicia kept her drinking under tight control — “strict rations”, she called it — but she tended to cut loose on holidays. This year she had a particular reason for doing so; her longtime lover was absent from the festivities.
“I better go back up and check on her then,” Ivy said. Lacking any place to sit nearby to hold a private conversation with his mother, he was crouching beside her armchair like a Roman slave or pet monkey. The “then” was because Alicia had just refused his request to phone for an ambulance.
“Oh well, whatever will be, will be,” was all she would say. “Iona already blames me for everything, anyway. Whatever I advise you to do will therefore be wrong.” Whatever I “advise” you to do, her son thought? OK, that settles it. If I can’t get Iona awake enough to start puking, then I’ll call one on my own. And to hell with Alicia and the rest of them. He stood up.
“Please apologize for me to Bruce if I’m out of the room for a few minutes delaying the big moment,” Ivy said, meaning his brother’s engagement announcement, but his ill-chosen words reminded his mother of another issue, one closer to her heart. She seized his wrist and tugged Ivy closer toward her.
“Can’t you do something about Sophie?” Alicia hissed at him. “She’s embarrassing herself.”
Sophie. Oh, god.
That had always been the problem with Ivy and his brother. Or one of many problems between them, anyway. Bruce always dated his exes. And of course, Sophie hadn’t even been an ex yet when Bruce had made his move. Why hadn’t he, Ivy, put up more of a fight at that time? Who knew? Because he was used to giving in to Bruce on pretty much everything? Because he wasn’t that into her?
For whatever reason, Sophie had managed, during the course of nearly a year, to come around to completely blaming Ivy for their break-up. Or rather, blaming his indolence and inattentiveness for forcing her to dump him.
Which would have been OK with him, if it had stopped there. Being blamed by women for shit was normal in his experience. But now suddenly, as Bruce was about to make his big engagement announcement to the family — and have his publicist release the photos Ivy had agreed to take to websites like TMZ and any of the traditional New York media still remotely interested — Sophie seemed to be repenting her choice. Or maybe she just wanted to start up some fresh melodrama about having his “blessing.” Ivy didn’t know, because he hadn’t hung around long enough to find out. Every time Sophie had made an attempt to corner him, he’d managed to escape, first to the kitchen, then to button-hole Alicia, and now, as he made his way back through the room, back upstairs again.
“Ivy..?”
Sophie had caught sight of him and immediately detached herself from the side of her best friend, Laura Gookin, a gawky red-haired girl with funny teeth and some slight trace of a childhood speech impediment. Laura had been a big hippie in college and had, Ivy remembered, used to wear an “Eat the Rich” T-shirt, but tonight she was all dressed up like a debutante. Hell, maybe all Sophie wanted was to set him up with Laura, but Alicia was right; it looked bad. All this attention made it look like Sophie was chasing him.
This impression wasn’t helped by her…well, Sophieness. She was soft and sweet-faced, with big, sincere grey eyes and long thick caramel-colored hair that erupted from a very low hairline, accentuating the babyishness of her oval face with its bright red cheeks. This disguised the world’s most humorless and purposeful mind. She was no beauty but was used to getting her way and being doted on by everyone from grandmothers to doormen. Everyone but Ivy.
Maybe that was the attraction.
“Um, just a sec, OK, Sophe? I’ll BRB.”
As he practically ran out of the room, Ivy could feel his brother’s glare all the way from where Bruce stood sipping egg-nog with Mimi’s husband, Warren, in front of the blazing fireplace. Everyone had drinks in their hands except Ivy and David; David because he couldn’t drink due to his medications and Ivy because he’d formerly been an alcoholic but had successfully managed to stay out of rehab for two years and wanted to keep it that way.
What he missed most about drinking now, Ivy thought on his way up the side staircase (as opposed to the main staircase, the kitchen staircase, or the servants’), was the taste. He’d caught the aroma of egg-nog from his mother’s ignored glass of it on the side-table — she generally stuck to Scotch, though she would have wine with dinner — and it had filled him with an intense yearning. His mouth was actually watering. Maybe the Singletarys would have some of the mix left that they hadn’t added alcohol to. Their mother had sounded religious; maybe she didn’t drink, either.
It would be an excuse to go back and see Holly again, anyway. If Iona was OK.
When Ivy got back up to Iona’s room, he found her making spasming motions on top of the bed and unsuccessfully trying to sit up. Horrible wheezing, retching noises were coming out of her, as if she couldn’t breathe, and her eyes rolled back in her head when she tried to open them. Ivy felt a moment of sheer panic—he was certain his beloved baby sister was choking to death. But then she said, quite clearly, “Bathroom.” He just barely got her there in time.
He was sitting next to her on the bathroom floor holding her hair back while she vomited into the toilet, her face almost half-way down into it, when Benjamin walked back into the room carrying two glasses. When he saw what was going on, he emptied them one by one into the bathroom sink.
“I doubt this would have worked anyway,” he said cheerfully. “You didn’t have any mustard powder, so I used liquid mustard in warm water. Then I remembered a trick a nurse told me about last year — putting a few drops of dish soap in water. If that doesn’t make you puke, I guess nothing will.”
When she heard the word “puke”, Iona groaned and started heaving again.
“Is she going to be all right now?” Ivy asked him.
“Until the next time.” Benjamin leaned down and said to her, “You do realize you’re killing yourself, right? I shouldn’t be saying this, but no reputable physician would have prescribed all those prescriptions of yours at the same time — not at those strengths. And let you drink on top of it. You should be in treatment.” Incredibly, Iona managed to produce a noise that sounded very much like a laugh.
“Ben, can I ask you a question, you know…man to man?” Ivy’s face had turned bright red; he looked profoundly embarrassed, as if he was about to describe the symptoms of Donovaniasis or some other exotic venereal disease.
“Well, sure, I guess,” Benjamin said. He looked dubiously at Iona, who was now cooling her cheek on the toilet rim. He sure as hell wouldn’t want of his sisters hearing personal shit about him. But he didn’t say that.
“Is your sister, is Holly, I mean — is she seeing anyone?”
Benjamin smiled, but managed not to burst into laughter. Not quite the conversation he was expecting. “Nope,” he said. “Go for it, dude. But not in front of my mom, yeah?”
If anything, Ivy looked even more embarrassed. “And it wouldn’t be a problem, you know, that I’m white?”
Benjamin gave him another of his pitying looks before he left. “No,” he said, on his way out. “We’re OK with white people.”
Beside Ivy on the floor, Iona was making more vomiting noises. But all that came out of her mouth was, “God, Ivy. Seriously, how lame are you?”
Chapter 4
“My philosophy always was: what’s the use of having a wealthy father if you don’t spend his money?”— From “A Good Man is Hard To Find” by David B. Goodman, Sr.
Once, an estate like Greystone would have employed at least a dozen full-time servants; perhaps twice that number before the First World War. There would have been cooks, parlor maids, ladies’ maids and valets, footmen, under-footmen, secretaries, and gardeners. But these days, service contractors and modern gadgets and appliances had vastly reduced the need for domestic staff, and Alicia employed just six, seven if you counted Heidi. There were only three in the house tonight.
One of these was Antenor, the chauffeur, who was also trained as a bodyguard and security guard. He had been in the military — as a torturer for the secret police, Iona claimed — of some Central American country before immigrating to the US with his wife, Norma, who served as one of the two housekeepers. In fact, Norma and Editha, the other housekeeper, were really just maids; they pushed vacuum cleaners around all day and cleaned toilets. The actual housekeeper, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, was Heidi, who hired and fired the rest of the staff and ruled them with a will of iron. But Heidi was off in Norway for the holidays, visiting her parents.
Antenor and Norma, neither of whom spoke very good English, lived quietly in a double suite in the old Servants’ Wing—or “East Wing”, as Alicia referred to it. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses and so didn’t celebrate Christmas, believing it to be a pagan and therefore demonic holiday; tonight they were sitting in the room they used for a lounge, watching Telemundo.
The only other staff member in the house was the estate manager, Claudio. Despite his name, Claudio was only vaguely of Hispanic heritage; he was, in fact, a “townie”, meaning he’d grown up in Rye. He was a plump man in his forties, always affable and smiling, who was never seen to actually do any work. Heidi and Alicia doted on him, however. When Claudio had first been hired a decade ago, he’d been married with a teenaged son. His wife had divorced him almost at the same time, and he’d promptly remarried one of Greystone’s then-housekeepers, a small, very pretty young Mexican woman. They had a daughter, so for several years there had been a child in the big house again, something that had unexpectedly pleased Alicia — to the point that she and Heidi had even considered adopting one. But during the past year, the child’s mother had abruptly moved out of the house and filed for a separation, so that the little girl, Emily, instantly vanished from the household almost as if she’d never existed. Alicia was so upset by this that she’d even permitted Claudio to keep Emily’s room unaltered — “for weekend visits” — something she’d never allowed any of her own grown children. However, the child never visited, refusing to set foot there again. Something had spooked her.
Claudio, always a heavy drinker, had gone to pieces. Over the years, he’d managed to confuse himself with a guest, or even distant relation, rather than an employee, and tonight, instead of supervising setting up the dining hall for the Christmas dinner or liaising with Pearl in the kitchen, he’d just hung around the party in the Lodge all afternoon, nodding and beaming, with a constantly refilled glass of wine in his hand. Claudio was dressed in a soiled grey golf shirt, teal medic’s pants, and battered Nikes; he’d worked as a nurse-attendant in an old folks’ home before being hired at Greystone and had never made any attempt to upgrade his wardrobe.
So it was Rachel, Benjamin, and Holly who had to set the long dining table, using china, a silver service, and crystal glassware they found in the back pantries. They had no way of knowing which Alicia preferred or how the places should be set or the table decorated, beyond the Christmas dressings they’d brought with them from Tutti’s. Benjamin had tried several times to focus Claudio on the topic, but Claudio just smiled vaguely and shrugged at him. They were on their own.
Rachel, meanwhile, was making Bambi eyes at Ivy, who had wandered back into the kitchen to stare at Holly some more. He was hoping for some opportunity to strike up a conversation with her, but Holly resolutely kept her back to him, and Pearl, rushing around now like “a chicken with its head cut off”, as she put it, emptying the ovens and getting everything ready to be loaded onto serving carts, kept shooing him out of her way.
“There isn’t any Christmas music in this house,” Rachel said to Ivy.
“You’re right, there isn’t.” There was an antiquated Macintosh house stereo system that operated in the Lodge and several of the other living rooms and parlors over invisible ceiling speakers; Alicia generally kept that tuned to WQXR, a PBS classical music radio station, but tonight someone, Claudio most likely, had forgotten to switch it on. The dining hall had its own sound system.
“Would it be OK if we sang some when we bring in the Buche de Noel?” Rachel asked.
“Sure,” said Ivy. “Only…”
“What?”
“Maybe if you could sing some carols without too much Jesus in them?” he said hesitantly.
“Oh, these nice people don’t want to hear us making a racket with our singing and carrying on.” Pearl had paused in her rushing around long enough to interrupt their conversation. “If you’ve got nothing better to do, how about icing these Christmas cookies?”
“OK,” Ivy said.
Pearl reacted with dramatic horror to this idea. “I didn’t mean you, bless your heart! I meant my lazy daughter!”
“No, I’d like to,” Ivy said. There was a tray of cut-out gingerbread men, Santa Clauses, and pine trees that had just come out of one of the ovens; a row of plastic pastry bags filled with colored icings sat next to it on a counter.
“OK, I’ll show him how,” said Rachel. “See, this is frosting and this is icing. You want to frost the main colors first with a spatula, then pipe the icing out over it for decoration like this. Santa gets an iced beard and fringe on his hat, then a little blob at the end of it. Got it? If you’ve got any questions, just ask Holly. I’m sure she’d be happy to help you.”