Uncle Jim couldn’t explain it. Wouldn’t. He sat in the chair across from Alice and avoided making eye contact.
They’d been up and down the list of questions he wouldn’t answer. He wouldn’t budge. “Look, it was a business decision, that’s all I can tell you. Ask your dad—he might have understood the lawyer-speak better than I did. There was a good reason, sweetheart. It’s just been a long time since I heard it. And it’s worked out so far, hasn’t it?”
Jimmy watched his dad from the door, his face contorting from one emotion to another. He still had his one share of the company, but now that the dish had been divided with a larger portion for her, Alice knew he was dissatisfied, hungry. She kept catching him staring at her.
“Dad, why in the world would you put the company into the hands of the one person on site who doesn’t care about—”
“James,” JimBig bellowed. When he turned back to her, she flinched.
She had watched her dad look to JimBig King for a nod her entire life: a nod before he spoke, a nod before he acted. And now she knew why. To act against Big’s wishes might draw out this monster. She could barely look at him.
And then just as quickly he was Uncle Jim again. “I’m sorry, kid. I’m not the accountant.”
“Is that all it is?” she said. “Accounting?”
“It’s a gift. Think of it that way.”
It felt more like a weight, something to pin her in place. Another way her dad had built the fortress around her: the job, her apartment, even her car. Now her entire future. He’d negotiated the deal. Every deal.
Once, she would like to make her own way and see what it felt like.
“So is this just so we get hired by the city of Chicago, or is it to safeguard the company from—oh, God, is this tax fraud? Is this illegal?”
“What could be illegal about sharing ownership of the company with your kids?” Not mentioning the uneven split.
“What was illegal about last time?” Jimmy said, moving on his dad a couple of steps.
“Jimmy, shut it.”
“What?” Alice said. “Which last time?”
“He went to jail,” Jimmy said. “When I was a kid—”
“I said don’t, didn’t I?” his dad thundered. No sign of the guy who’d come back from vacation looking weary. JimBig waved Jimmy off. “Made no difference to you whether I was there or not.”
Jimmy didn’t blink at his dad’s rage. He’d seen it before. “I remember—”
“You don’t remember shit. What you got in your head is what your mother put there.”
Alice felt small between them. She might as well not be here.
“I remember plenty,” Jimmy said. “I wasn’t some little kid, not while you were being sent up, and not when you were gone.”
“When was this?” Alice said.
“You were away at finishing school, Barbie Doll,” Jimmy said. “Sent off so you wouldn’t notice a thing, if I had to guess. They didn’t bother to send me away. I thought that meant . . .”
That he was somehow the chosen one. But he’d been cut out of the deal.
Rn, rnn. Her phone, buzzing against her hip. She drew it out.
Text from Juby. Lil wants to dump some info on you. Sneak out for lunch?
Did she even need to sneak? She owned the fucking place.
News? she typed. “What did you go to jail for, Uncle Jim?”
“Prison. Stop calling him that. He is not your—”
“Shut up, Jimmy,” JimBig said. “Not everything is up to you—”
“Clearly,” Jimmy said.
“—and thank God for it,” his dad finished. “You’ve been in your mother’s damned pocketbook like a toy poodle your whole life. You’d never get more than a single share of this place, even if it was all mine to give.”
Jimmy froze, but not quickly enough. Alice felt the stab of pain that flashed across his face. “Uncle Jim,” she said gently.
“No,” JimBig said. “He was supposed to learn the business to learn the business, not to run it, but to start his own when the time came, or to be a good right hand to you.”
“Me?” Alice had been assuming the ownership percentages were just temporary, skewed to maneuver around a barrier, to hold something in trust, to protect. To hide. “I’m actually supposed to own this place someday?”
“You own it now,” Jimmy mumbled.
“But that’s—”
“It makes business sense,” Uncle Jim said. “Like I said, from what I understand—”
“Maybe if you understood more, you wouldn’t have done the time. Did you ever think—”
“I did wrong,” Uncle Jim said, turning to Alice, “and your dad was the one who saved me. He gave me a chance to be a better man this time around. Ask him about it. He’ll tell you why the lawyers set things up the way we did. It was no accident, I can tell you that.”
Accident. That made Alice think of Matt. It’s been X days since our last health and safety violation— Oh, God. Was that her responsibility now? The lawyers and the hospital and the insurance? She had no idea how to run things, really—that joke about being the boss was . . . a joke.
Her phone revved again. In the silence, the sound was huge.
“We keeping you from important business, boss?” Jimmy couldn’t even sneer through it anymore. He was a kid, trying on bravado, as scared as she was. While their fathers were busy growing old and turning over the company to them, they hadn’t been paying attention. They were the fucking grown-ups?
Rnn.
Jimmy rolled his eyes as she reached for her phone.
The problem of Richard Whatever is being Slapdashed.
Lil is on the case. Come pick up what she’s got?
Alice glanced at the time on her phone. Sure, why not? She’d put in a good hour of mind-blowing revelations here. Time for a break. She stood up and grabbed her backpack from the drawer. Time for a drink. She might not come back today, actually. There had to be perks to holding the controlling share, and to having Warden Harris Fine gone for a day or two.
“Wait, seriously?” Jimmy said. “You’re going?”
“I have to run an errand,” she said, wondering what would happen if she told him he was fired. “And frankly—”
“Take the day,” Uncle Jim said. “This can wait. When your dad’s back, we’ll talk it out. It’s all fine, OK? This doesn’t have to change a thing. It’s only paper.”
Alice wouldn’t look at him now. He’d been to prison? She’d always been a little afraid of JimBig King. She didn’t know that it was going to be fine. Maybe it never had been.
She made it down the steps before Jimmy came bursting out of the trailer behind her. The door bounced against the frame, hanging open behind him as he rushed across the gravel.
“What the fuck, Alice? Is this how you’re going to run the place?”
“I can’t deal with you right now.”
“Oh, sure, another day we have to feel sorry for little Alice from Wonderland. Because your mom died when you were an adult, you poor thing.”
His mother had died when they were in high school. “Your mother had cancer, Jimmy, God. It’s not the same— OK, you want to know why I’m rushing off? I’m this close to finding the guy who kidnapped me.”
“What? I thought you didn’t know— Wasn’t it a couple?”
“Right, it’s a long story, but we found that baby.” This was the good Doe Pages had done her. She could hand this guy’s guts over to the police and show Jimmy King she was capable of more than cleaning up after him. “The baby my dad didn’t have a chance to rescue? She’s fine. She’s OK. Her name is Merrily Cruz, and we had Chinese food with her last week.”
He looked at her sharply. “Who’s we?”
“My friends. They’re really good with, you know, finding out stuff.”
“From that crazy website? The dead people site?”
“Don’t—” She sighed. “Yes, through the site. We think we might be able to find him, and—”
“And then what? What will it accomplish?”
She didn’t like his tone. This was one thing she had that he had zero share in. “I’m seeing something through, OK? It’s the first time I’ve ever had the chance to— I don’t know . . .”
“Own something?” He laughed. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I really do.”
“Jimmy,” she said. “I’ll talk to my dad, figure out what’s going on. You put in a lot of work here. You deserve to understand, and if I’m in charge—fuck, right? I’m going to need you.”
His gaze was searching. “Merrily Cruz, huh? That’s good, I guess, that she’s OK.”
“Yeah, and she’s cute, too. Maybe I’ll set you up.”
He smiled, tried not to. “Only if she’s like you.” He turned to go.
“Hey, Jimmy,” she said. “Were you on the site the day Matt fell?”
“Yeah,” he said, frowning. “Of course I was.”
She remembered the ring across his forehead from the hard hat. “With the tour?”
He shook his head. “Just one investor. Dad said he could handle it. Why?”
“Which investor?”
“Didn’t recognize him. Prospect, maybe, or scouting for someone else? He seemed younger than the regular Scrooge McDucks we get.”
She thought of the man she’d pointed the pepper spray at outside the gate that day. An investor? That guy had been right; she was curious. “Matt fell from the third floor, right?”
“Second,” he said. “Luckily. Three floors would have killed him.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Lucky.”