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Evan Snow
“Maddy. Where are you going?” Evan paused at the base of the wrap-around staircase and watched as his youngest daughter, seventeen-year-old Maddy, strolled across the foyer in tight-fitting blue jeans and a crop-top. Her curls flounced playfully, and her eyeshadow was reminiscent of a Broadway star. Evan had always heard that teenage girls longed for older age in a way that no one else did. He just hadn’t reckoned he would have to deal with it like this.
“Just out,” Maddy told him flippantly. She paused as she slipped her puffy jacket over her shoulders and drew her hair out from beneath it with a dramatic flip. “Is that a problem?”
Evan wanted to tell her that yes, in fact, it was a problem that she didn’t ask his permission to go out, wherever “out” was. He longed to tell her that, in fact, she needed to stay in, to sit with him for a two-person family dinner, so that he could uphold some sense of responsibility and family values there at the Snow Mansion. But she glared at him with eyes that told him just what she thought of him: that despite all his money and his place in the community, she had little to no respect for him.
Evan knew what he’d done; he knew he could never crawl his way back into her heart.
“Okay. Just don’t be home too late, okay? You have school tomorrow.”
“I know I have school tomorrow,” Maddy returned as she strutted toward the door. “You don’t have to tell me what day of the week it is.”
The slam of the door echoed through the enormous, empty house. Evan collapsed at the edge of the lowest step and stared at his overly large feet, which he’d covered with expensive wool socks, handcrafted in Switzerland. “The best of the best,” his butler, Henry, had called them. Evan felt suddenly like the stupidest man in the world. He couldn’t control his daughter; his children thought he was the scum of the earth.
“Is anyone in this old, dusty place?” A familiar voice called out from the eastern side of the house, where the garage was located. “Or just ghosts?”
Evan’s heart sputtered with surprise. Last he’d seen his brother, Elijah; he’d been preparing to jet off to gallivant through New York City. He’d spoken of all the women he wanted to meet, of the ways he would flaunt his money. Evan, who had chosen to do the “family thing,” had never been particularly jealous of Elijah’s way of life. Elijah was a free spirit, but what did freedom mean, exactly? To Evan, it meant nights of wild partying that left your soul empty and fatigued.
Evan forced himself upright. He couldn’t very well allow Elijah to find him at the base of the staircase, wallowing about his daughter’s hatred for him. When Elijah meandered into the foyer, Evan had already ducked out of sight, into the study, where he collapsed on his father’s old antique desk chair, grabbed a bottle of scotch, and poured himself and his brother a two-finger glass.
“There he is,” Elijah said as he appeared in the doorway. “I should have known you’d be here— always working.”
Evan wagged his eyebrows playfully and lifted a glass toward his brother. “You’re back from the city in one piece, I see.”
“Hardly,” Elijah replied as he collapsed across the desk and placed his shoes across the mahogany. Evan wanted to protest but held his tongue.
“I didn’t expect you till November,” Evan said.
“It was enough debauchery for one trip, I reckon,” Elijah flashed him a crooked smile. “I got back to the old homestead this afternoon and fielded a call from the family lawyer. Funny to hear from him. I supposed he took all his news to you, the One True Snow Brother.”
Evan knew Elijah felt endless disdain toward Evan, as their father had left Evan the Snow Mansion and more shares of Snow Enterprises, as Evan had been the “family man,” the responsible one. Evan didn’t like to talk about it, as there was nothing to point to except Elijah’s genuine lack of respect for rules and his previous desire to spend as much of his father’s money as possible. What else was Darwin supposed to do in the face of that?
“I’ve been in the gym all afternoon.” Evan leaned back in his chair and then took a sip of his drink.
“Right. Getting that perfect, toned body so you can march around Snow Mansion all by your lonesome,” Elijah quipped. His tone was sinister, dark.
“If you could please fill me in on what the lawyer said so that I don’t have to investigate myself,” Evan said as he delivered a wicked smile of his own. “I don’t have a great deal of time and I would prefer not to waste it.”
“Come now, brother. Don’t you want to spend the evening with me? Catch up? I can give you the full details on some of the women of NYC. You wouldn’t believe it. The minute Maddy’s out of the house...”
Evan cleared his throat. “What did the lawyer say, Elijah?”
“Oh. Yes. Right. Well. You know that old Keating Inn? Never been there myself.”
“I do.” Evan wanted to interject that Elijah knew very little about Bar Harbor in general, that he took just enough to profit from his family name and then fled elsewhere.
“Apparently, the family has refused to make their payments, and their lawyer has suggested that the arrangement our family has with them is extortion,” Elijah said, his tone laissez-faire and bored. “I guess that’s something you can work out easily. What do you think Dad would have done? Threaten them and then kick them to the curb if they didn’t follow his rules?”
Elijah’s laugh was particularly horrendous. Evan wondered if he’d developed it while in the city, something louder than a pigeon’s caw.
“What’s the situation with the contract?” Evan asked an eyebrow cocked.
Elijah’s cheek twitched as his smile faltered. “What do you mean?”
Evan couldn’t help it. He suddenly remembered his recent experience with the Harvey-Keating girls. Heather Harvey, poor dear who’d recently discovered that Adam Keating hadn’t been her father at all (or so the gossip was) had fallen hard on the dock outside of one of his restaurants, resulting in him and that sous-chef, Luke, carrying her inside and lying her on a couch. Evan himself had gone into that dank little office space that had once belonged to Adam Keating to find the old boxes of his belongings. The dust in that place had been outrageous; he’d seen a spider half the size of his hand.
And then, there was Nicole Harvey, who’d recently taken over as head chef of the Acadia Eatery. There was something about her — about the glint of her eyes and the way she spoke to him like she would never respect him a day in her life. It intrigued Evan Snow to be around women who had little to no comprehension of what it meant to be a “Snow” in Bar Harbor. He’d begun to think that maybe, being a Snow in the first place, had cursed him.
“I just mean— what are they supposed to pay us per month?” Evan asked. “I haven’t looked over that paperwork in ages.” Or ever. He guessed the contract was decades old.
“Oh. Who cares? They aren’t paying it,” Elijah shot before he took another sip of scotch. “The people of this town are meant to bow down to our will, you know? And you’ve got yourself some bugs to squash, Evan. Let me know if you need a heavy foot.”
“Maybe we should look at what Dad had them sign. Just to be in the loop,” Evan said. He turned toward his computer, his fingers poised.
But Elijah scoffed at that. “If you show even an inch of weakness to these people, they’ll start to take what they can from you. It’s best to hold your ground. Threaten them, if need be. I thought Dad picked you because you were the strong brother.”
Evan balked. “Excuse me?”
Elijah rolled his eyes back into his head, reminding Evan of Maddy all over again. He grabbed the thirty years old bottle of Laphroaig Single Malt Scotch, which had cost over a thousand dollars, and poured himself another two fingers.
“Don’t worry about it, Evan. I know you wouldn’t do anything to disrupt our deliriously successful family business. I’ve just never seen you look so soft, is all.”
“I just want to ensure that everything is up to our legal standards.”
“What legal standards?” Elijah asked, again delivering that arrogant smile of his. “I don’t think I ever heard Dad ask, ‘Is this allowed?’ He lived outside the boundaries of other people. And I, for one, always respected him for that. In fact, I thought you did, too. I thought that’s part of the reason why you—”
Evan cut through the air with a single hand. He wouldn’t talk about that, not about what he had done. Elijah respected him for the worst thing Evan had ever done in his life; this, in and of itself, had broadened the already-wide gulf between the two brothers.
“Well, whatever.” Elijah’s blue eyes flashed wickedly. “We both know the Keating family will go down if we want it to go down. Now, let’s move on to a better conversation, shall we? What do you plan on for dinner? I’ve traveled all the way from the streets of New York City, and I’m starving.”
But Evan couldn’t think of food. As Elijah sauntered toward the kitchen to deliver his order to the chef, who they always had on hand, Evan stewed in resentment and fear. Everything Elijah said about their father and their family was correct. Evan had once counted himself amongst the Snow members; he’d made intelligent business decisions and built up his family’s fortune.
Now, he had to ask himself: how much of his family’s fortune was built off the backs of the good people of Bar Harbor? And how much longer would he allow something like that to go on?