Chapter 2 The Reading

Thursday, August 21, 1975. Brickell Avenue, Miami.

Pruitt, Vail & Mendez occupied the fourteenth floor of a glass tower that Harlan Crane had built and, as he liked to say, rented back to the lawyers at a discount for the

pleasure of watching them squirm.

Solange arrived at seven forty-five in her navy suit, the one with the shoulder pads her mother had stitched by hand, and sat in the corner of the conference room with her steno pad on her knee, because Alden Pruitt had asked for her by name."The Crane reading," he had told her the day before, not quite meeting her eye. "He liked your shorthand. You took the dictation in March. You'll take notes today."

She had not slept in two nights. The ledger was in the toe of a winter boot in the back of her wardrobe, behind her father's medical bag and her mother's wedding shoes, and the knowledge of it sat in her chest like a second heartbeat.

The room filled slowly. Vivienne Crane, the widow, in black silk and pearls the size of marbles, upright as a candle and as cold. Preston Crane, the legitimate son, handsome in the tanned, tired way of a man who had played too much golf to avoid thinking. Two Crane executives. A banker. And, on the far side of the mahogany table, in a chair that was plainly too small for him, a man Solange had never seen at the firm. Big. Rumpled. A work shirt under a borrowed sport coat that did not close across the shoulders. Dark hair that needed cutting, and a jaw like he had been bitten by something and bitten back.

Her stomach dropped.

The taxi.

His eyes met hers across the room and widened a fraction. He looked as if he'd walked into a wall he knew was there.

"Mr. Marsh," Alden Pruitt said, clearing his throat. "Thank you for coming. Mr. Crane's wishes were quite particular."

"I got a telegram," Gideon said. "I don't get telegrams."

"Mr. Crane's natural son," Preston said, without turning his head, in a voice like a spoon in a teacup. "Raised, I understand, in a shrimp shack."

"A very nice shrimp shack," Gideon said. "Smelled better than this room."

Vivienne Crane's pearls clicked once.

The will took twenty-two minutes to read. Solange wrote every word, her pencil flying through the strokes and curves of Gregg shorthand, and she was halfway down the second page before she realized what she was hearing.

"...and to my son, Gideon Marsh, whom I wronged and never acknowledged, I leave fifty one percent of the voting shares of Crane Holdings, with the office of Chief Executive Officer-"

Preston's hand closed on the table edge."-upon the following condition." Pruitt turned a page. His voice was a little too even.

"That on the ninetieth day after my death the said Gideon Marsh shall be lawfully married, and shall be living with his wife as man and wife, and shall remain so for a period of not less than one year. Failing which, the said shares and office shall pass to my son Preston Crane."Silence. A cough. Gideon stared at Pruitt with an expression of such pure bafflement that Solange almost felt sorry for him.

"I'm sorry. Married?"

"Yes."

"To who?"

"To anyone, Mr. Marsh. Provided it is lawful."

"This is a joke."

"Mr. Crane," Pruitt said gently, "was not a humorous man."

Solange had stopped writing.

Her pencil hovered over the pad. She was looking at the will in Pruitt's hands, and her pulse was a drumbeat in her throat, because she had taken this dictation herself on the twelfth of March, in Harlan Crane's study, with the sea air drifting through the open windows and Mr. Crane in his old cardigan pacing the carpet.

I leave to my son Gideon Marsh, he had said, fifty-one percent of the voting shares of Crane Holdings and the office of Chief Executive Officer. Without condition. I have owed him that for thirty-one years.

Without condition.

She had written it. She had typed it that evening and put it in the file. And he had added, low, almost to himself, Mind you, Miss Pierre-Louis, I have a good many sins. Of one of them I think you ought to hear, someday. But not today.

There was no marriage clause. There had never been one.

She forced her hand to move across the page, forced her breathing to slow. Her heart thudded against her ribs. Alden Pruitt did not look at her. Preston Crane did, a quick, bright, sidelong glance, and then looked away, and smiled to himself.

"You can say it," Gideon said afterward, in the corridor, where the air conditioning hummed and the windows overlooked the long flat blue of Biscayne Bay. He had his coatoff and slung over one shoulder. "That I look like a man who just got hit with a two-by-four."

"You look," Solange said, "like a man who did not know."

"Of course I didn't know. I never met the man. He never said a word to me my whole life.

My mother cooked in a shrimp house, and he owned half the Gulf coast, and nobody ever thought I ought to be told." His voice was rough. "And now he wants me married in ninety days. What kind of man does that?"

"One who has a reason."

"Or one who hated me."

"If he hated you," she said, "he would not have given you the company."

She was surprised to hear herself say it. He turned and looked at her properly, and she saw again what she had seen at the pier at dawn: a tired, stubborn, unlovely face, but honest, the face of a man who had never learned to hide what he felt because nobody had ever cared enough to look.

"Why are you being kind to me, Miss Pierre-Louis? Two days ago you thought I was scum."

"I thought you were a taxi."

"Lola said that."

"I know. I heard her." A small, tight smile. "Mr. Marsh, I need to go back to my desk."

"Wait." He caught her sleeve, gently, and let go at once. "Last night I got a phone call. A man with an accent. He asked if I was the captain of the tug that brought in the Haitian boat. He said if I knew what was good for me I'd forget the name of Rodolphe Pierre-Louis."

The blood drained from her face.

"What did you say?"

"I said I couldn't forget a name I'd never heard." He studied her. "Until yesterday, when I looked it up. That's your uncle. And I think you're in a good deal more trouble than I am."

She went back to her desk on the fourteenth floor with her notebook pressed to her chest and sat very still for ten minutes, trying to think. The ledger. The forged clause.

The man on the telephone. Forget what you typed.She did not yet know that last part was a message.

At five-fifteen she opened her bottom drawer, where she had kept every steno pad for the past year, a neat row of spiral-bound books labeled by month in her small, upright hand.

March was gone.

Where it had been there was a single sheet of Pruitt, Vail & Mendez stationery, folded once. She opened it with hands that did not feel like hers. Seven words, typed, no signature:

Forget what you typed. Your uncle will thank you.

Below it, in pencil, in a handwriting she knew from a hundred margins and memos, someone had drawn a small, neat arrow pointing down the hall, toward the office of the senior partner, where, at that exact moment, through the frosted glass, she could see Alden Pruitt standing alone in the lamplight with a telephone pressed to his ear, laughing.