Chương 6
Lily had not noticed it.
“Yes.”
He turned it off.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
She peeled the crust from her sandwich.
Mr. Palmer looked at the yogurt lid.
“Your dad says only cowards eat strawberry.”
Lily looked up.
“He says that?”
“He said real yogurt has no fruit.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“I know.”
“He eats blueberry.”
Mr. Palmer considered this.
“That changes how I feel about him.”
Lily smiled.
Then her eyes filled.
She looked down so fast her hair covered her face.
Mr. Palmer did not ask if she was okay.
She appreciated that more than she could explain.
By Tuesday, Arthur’s lawyer had found a law firm willing to represent Owen without demanding an upfront retainer.
Owen refused.
Dana threatened to hit him with a saucepan.
He accepted.
The attorney was Rebecca Sloan, no relation to the Sloanes in the old collection records. She was forty-eight, wore flat shoes, carried two phones, and had no interest in becoming part of the online drama.
At their first meeting, she turned both phones face down.
“I need you to understand something,” she told Owen.
“I understand plenty.”
“That sentence is generally a warning sign.”
Dana coughed to hide a laugh.
Rebecca opened a yellow pad.
“Do you want money?”
Owen frowned.
“Is that how you start?”
“Yes.”
“I want what belongs to my family.”
“That is not an answer. Suppose what belongs to your family is worth eight hundred dollars.”
“It isn’t.”
“Suppose.”
Owen shifted.
“Then I want the eight hundred dollars.”
“Good. Suppose it is worth eighty million.”
He did not answer.
Rebecca waited.
Lily sat beside Dana, doing math homework she had been instructed not to listen through.
She listened through all of it.
Owen said, “I don’t know.”
“Better answer.”
“I want my father’s name fixed.”
“Where?”
“What?”
“In what record?”
“All of them.”
“That is not a thing.”
Owen’s face tightened.
Rebecca continued.
“Catalogs can be corrected. Provenance records can be amended. Corporate records can be challenged. Property can be returned. Sales can be voided or disputed under some circumstances. Money can be negotiated. Public statements can be made. None of that equals ‘fix his name.’ Tell me what result you could recognize if it happened.”
Owen rubbed paint from the side of his thumbnail.
“The portrait comes back.”
“Why that one?”
“My mother.”
“Anything else?”
“The rest depends on the schedules.”
Rebecca nodded.
“That sounds like an actual case.”
She asked for every document in the burgundy case.
Owen handed over everything except one sealed envelope.
Lily noticed.
Rebecca did not.
Not then.
The first useful discovery came from the least impressive paper in the collection.
A water-damaged stock certificate for Carter Family Holdings showed an embossed registration number that matched an entry in a 1997 corporate ledger Arthur’s office still possessed.
The second came from Harcourt & Venn.
Their lawyers, after several days of resistance, acknowledged that the consignment file contained a title memorandum prepared eighteen months earlier. It referenced a 2004 settlement involving Margaret Carter.
Owen read the phrase three times.
He went silent.
Rebecca noticed.
“You knew about a settlement?”
“My mother mentioned taking money.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know.”
“For what?”
“She said she was tired.”
Rebecca leaned back.
“That is not a legal category.”
“I was twenty.”
“What exactly did she tell you?”
Owen looked toward the conference-room window.
Traffic crawled along Lexington Avenue twenty floors below.
“She said my father left a mess. She said she signed something so we could keep the apartment.”
“Did she say she sold the collection?”
“No.”
“Did she say she gave up claims?”
“No.”
“Did she say anything about Carter Family Holdings?”
“She hated the name.”
“Why?”
“He spent more time on it than he spent home.”
That was the first time Lily heard anybody speak about her grandfather as something other than a wronged man.
She looked at her father.
He did not look back.
Rebecca asked, “Do you have your mother’s copy of the settlement?”
“No.”
“Did she have a lawyer?”
“I think so.”
“Name?”
Owen shook his head.
Rebecca wrote something down.
Then Lily said, “There’s a letter.”
Owen turned.
“What?”
“In the case.”
Rebecca looked at him.
Lily continued before he could stop her.
“Grandma wrote a letter after Grandpa died. Dad said he didn’t know who it was for.”
Owen’s face flushed.
“That is not the settlement.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
Rebecca held out her hand.
“Where is it?”
Owen said, “Personal.”
“Does it mention the company?”
“No.”
Lily said, “Yes.”
Owen looked at her.
She looked frightened now but kept going.
“It says Carter Holdings at the top.”
Rebecca’s hand remained extended.
“Owen.”
“It’s a letter from my mother.”
“You can keep it from me. That is your choice. If the other side has a copy or knows what is in it, I would prefer not to discover that in a conference room full of people who charge nine hundred dollars an hour.”
Dana muttered, “Nine hundred?”
Rebecca said, “Not me.”
“Good.”
Owen stood.
“I need air.”
“You’re on the twentieth floor.”
“Then I need a hallway.”
He left.
Lily stared at her homework.
Rebecca capped her pen.
“Did I just cause a family problem?”
Dana said, “That ship left port years ago.”
Owen returned five minutes later.
He placed the sealed envelope on the table.
Rebecca did not open it.
“You do it.”
He sat.
The paper crackled.
Inside was a three-page handwritten letter dated November 18, 2004.
Margaret Carter had written it to Benjamin’s older sister, Helen.
The first page was ordinary grief.
She complained about the heating in the apartment. Owen, then twenty-one, was dropping classes at City College and lying about it. A kitchen pipe had burst. Somebody from the bank had called three times.
May you like
The second page changed.
I signed the Rosen agreement yesterday. They gave me eighty-two thousand and called it a final family settlement. I know you’ll be angry. I cannot keep fighting Arthur’s people, Sloane’s people, lawyers, banks, whoever owns what this week. Ben believed the company would take care of Owen. The company did not sit with him when his father died. The company did not pay Con Edison.
