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  “Do I have a problem?” Anders’s face was clouding over. She brushed her upper lip with a hooked forefinger, and I made a mental note to remember the nervous tic.

  “What makes you think that?”

  I was too intrigued to confess that Palmer had been on the line. That I would have done anything to muzzle Scully and Gershon, even if it meant snatching his $125 Hermès pocket square and stuffing it down one of their throats.

  Scully believed my Percy story on Friday for the same reason Anders believed it now. I cover our CEO. He became my client a few years earlier, when the Monthly Nut brokered an arrangement to keep me at the firm. That was the last time I got pissed off and threatened to leave. Anders knew Percy was my client. So did every broker on the floor. Politics has a way of getting around at SKC.

  “Percy’s unpredictable. Two brokers lose control on my watch. And you want to know why I have a problem?”

  “Don’t worry about him,” I said, taking the low road of corporate realpolitik and pretending to hold more sway over our CEO than was actually the case. “I got your back.”

  “Thanks.” She kept brushing her lip with that curled forefinger. “He has a short fuse these days, right?”

  “No kidding,” I agreed, sensing she was about to change topics.

  Anders gestured with her eyes toward the door. I stood up, closed it, and returned to my seat. She leaned forward, conspiratorial and buddy-buddy. Her pose was, forgive me here, a boss-with-benefits moment for the ages.

  “Did Percy and you talk about anything else?”

  “The usual,” I said coyly. Our exchange was showing promise.

  “Then you know what’s going on?”

  One thing was clear. Anders suspected a big event, something that would make page 1 of The Wall Street Journal. But she had no clue what—otherwise she would never have asked the question. I stayed on plan, pretending to know more than I did, squeezing her for whatever she knew.

  “Percy tells me lots of things in confidence.”

  “Stuff about SKC?”

  I studied Anders, her curiosity, her intensity. She was fishing for info, wondering if our CEO had revealed a big strategic decision to me.

  Not a chance.

  It’s not like we shot the breeze about SKC’s corporate direction. But my relationship with Percy didn’t stop me from pretending. “Nothing I can repeat.”

  “Hah! I knew it,” she triumphed. “All the whispering. The conversations behind closed doors. People who stop talking when they see you in the halls. You know, Grove, what happens in this room stays in this room. Right?”

  Tell that to the thirteen managers who preceded you.

  A short knock at the door saved me from answering. I whirled around to find Zola Mancini, dark exotic features, unruly shock of curly black hair, and my partner going on two years. We managed over $5 billion together.

  “Sorry to interrupt.” Zola turned to me. “Claire Kincaid is on the line. She insisted I find you.”

  A client’s daughter trumps a boss with nose trouble all day long. I stood up and asked Anders, “Can we talk later?”

  The interruption was odd. Claire calling me at the office. Asking Zola to hunt me down. I remembered the last time we saw each other. It was bad news three years ago. And I had a feeling it was bad news now.

  * * *

  Claire Kincaid was my Daisy Buchanan. Not that she was pampered and superficial like Fitzgerald’s siren from West Egg. She was far too kind. Nobody could ever accuse her of being some shallow snot with more money than heart.

  If anything, Claire had been friendly to a fault during high school. She’d hang with the cool crowd and then goof off with the dweebs. Afterward, she’d say nice things about everybody. Palmer’s daughter was controlled and elegant with her opinions, a regular Madam Ambassador.

  Perfection makes me nervous. I like a few warts on my friends. Sometimes Claire’s diplomatic polish bugged me—which might be my problem rather than hers. When we were at Bishop England, our high school in Charleston, I often wished she’d break down and gossip like the rest of us.

  Claire played it safe, though. She’d never turn on anyone. And it was generosity of spirit that made her vulnerable. She was spread way too thin to develop deep relationships, the kind where somebody’s in your foxhole. She was everybody’s ally, but nobody’s best friend. Still, I wouldn’t call her superficial. The word that comes to my mind is “unobtainable.”

  Let me explain.

  The historic part of Charleston is located at the junction of two rivers. The Ashley and the Cooper collide, spill into a harbor bordering the Atlantic, and forever leave behind the stiff-legged egrets with S-shaped necks that fish the marshes day in, day out. These waters are more than a home for shrimp and crabs, schools of dolphin, mullet, and red snapper, the occasional alligator or two. They’re walls, natural barriers protecting a way of life that has endured over three hundred years. You’re either from the Charleston peninsula or from somewhere else.

  South of Broad is the rich end of the historic district. The houses are sacred relics, many built in the 1700s and crafted from mahogany and brick, from materials chosen to withstand hurricanes, termites, and other scourges of nature. The residents pride themselves on handing down a way of life from one generation to the next. If your family hasn’t lived there for the last hundred years, you’re not part of the club.

  Then there’s South Battery, the street south of Broad you see in all the tourist photos, the one with the massive mansions overlooking Charleston’s harbor. I’ve heard people call it “High Battery,” because in a neighborhood of the elite, this street is hallowed ground. Home to the capo dei capi. The people living here are the lords of Charleston.

  Growing up, Claire was next in line to the throne. More money. More looks. More body. Enough sex pheromones to make teenage boys forget all the lingerie in Hollywood. Every guy in high school had a secret crush on her. I know I did. Claire was taller and more athletic than the other women on varsity track, too well built to ever devolve into one of those size 0 anorexia queens prowling around Manhattan. She had it all.

  I grew up on an Air Force base. And when my dad retired, we moved into a three-bedroom ranch in the area known as West of the Ashley. South Battery—give me a break. We didn’t live anywhere near south of Broad. We didn’t even live on the peninsula.

  Translation: O’Rourkes were outsiders.

  No matter how nice Claire Kincaid was to me, I never dared to indulge my high school crush and ask her out. There was too much distance between us: a caste system of Southern manners, that and about eight miles of fiddler crabs along the Ashley River.

  I saw her all the time, in AP classes and outside Cathedral after Mass every Sunday. I drove her home after a party once—me, the designated driver for Daisy Buchanan—when her busted trade of a boyfriend passed out in the back of Palmer’s BMW. But we never had one of those moments, two people sharing something intimate, until long after high school.

  You know the kind I mean.

  It was three years ago at the funeral of my wife and daughter. Claire held me for a long, long while, and when we parted she brushed tears from my cheek. Standing there, dressed in several shades of charcoal, she bored into my eyes. Hers looked like black headlights.

  “You okay, Grove?”

  Claire refused to let me look away. She wanted to hear everything. How Evelyn and I met in college. What our daughter, Finn, was like. And yes, how they crashed on I-95 heading toward New Haven.

  Fucking eighteen-wheelers.

  I wanted to put on a game face with Claire, thank everybody who came to the funeral, and then crawl into a spider hole where, alone with memories of my wife and daughter, I could gnaw off my arm in peace.

  After the funeral, Claire phoned a few times. She worried about me. She’d ask how I was. And she got nothing in return, because I had perfected the fine art of plastic replies:

  “Awesome.”

  “Fine, and you?”r />
  “Living the dream.”

  That’s the thing about my profession. You talk money. Explain risk. Throw in a few snide cracks about I-bankers, all the toxic crap they cook up, and you have the perfect place to hide when you’re brain-dead from grief.

  Long before Annie and I became an item, Claire reached out to me. I never gave her a chance, for reasons that elude me to this day. Maybe her deadbeat of an ex-husband was still in the picture. I don’t remember.

  * * *

  Anticipation sends time to the penalty box. You watch from the sidelines. You see everything in slow motion. The seconds don’t tick by. They get under your skin. It’s the wondering, worrying, and waiting for resolution that are so maddening.

  After Zola said Claire was holding, I sprinted to my workstation. Ten years had lapsed, or so it seemed, by the time I picked up the phone and stabbed the blinking light to take her call. Inside, I was screaming, What’s wrong?

  But I exercised control and hid my alarm. “How are you?”

  “Not great.” Claire’s voice quivered, the timbre shaky and unfamiliar, a shadow of that rich mix between CNN anchor and Charleston drawl.

  “It’s your dad, right?”

  The question surprised Claire, the way I’d guessed the reason for her call. At some base level, I hoped Palmer was okay.

  Then she confirmed my fears with a question of her own. “How’d you hear?”

  The room started to spin.

  “What happened?”

  “Dad’s body washed ashore early this morning.”

  Zola watched my eyes, rolled her chair next to me, and rubbed my arm. I could feel my partner’s breath. It was fresh and warm, moist like a heated towel rubbing my face. She knew there was a problem. And without speaking, she was telling me, We’re in this together.

  But inside my head, I left Zola and the buzz of Private Client Services. I returned to that black, barren, bleak place where I had spent eighteen months flogging myself for missing a flight back to New York. I should have been the one driving Evelyn and Finn to our place in Narragansett. Now something had happened to Palmer, a guy who had sounded an alarm only three days ago.

  It’s on me.

  “I spoke to Palmer on Friday.”

  “He went night sailing and never came back.” Claire started to sob.

  Her words made no sense to me. “Palmer’s an elite sailor.”

  “The police said he was drinking. They think Bounder’s boom hit him in the head.”

  He’s too young. I could feel my eyes welling up.

  “Dad said to call you first, if anything ever happened to him.”

  “I’ll be on the next flight to Charleston.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  I wanted to hug Claire through the phone. My wife and daughter—I knew the vulnerability that comes from loss all too well. “We’ll get through this. I promise.”

  “He said you’re his ‘thousandth man.’ Do you know what that means?”

  I knew all right. That’s when I lost it. Zola’s face dimpled with empathy. So did Chloe’s. She’s our sales assistant. They both saw the tears streaming from my eyes. It’s hard to appear stoic when you wear your feelings on your sleeves.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BROKERAGE FLOOR AT SKC

  After hanging up with Claire, I called Annie first thing. It’s what I do. Those eighteen months of despair I mentioned—she’s the one who rescued me. We’ve been together for two years now, and I’ve been okay, even happy.

  Annie is blazing through life on the verge of volcanic explosion. Not because of a temper. It’s her energy. That’s what I love about her, most of the time. She doesn’t hold back. Opinions, emotions whether happy or sad, and those uncanny observations about details the rest of us miss—she’s always erupting about something.

  In stockbroker lingo, my girlfriend is “long” conviction. Right or wrong, she thinks she’s right every time. And mostly, she is. But I have to be honest. Every once in a while, her certitude bugs the shit out of me. That’s when Annie teases me and says, “Come on, Grove. You know I’m adorable.”

  And I say, “‘Adorable’ is such a girl word.”

  And she says, “It’s like our version of ‘hot,’ except we mean cute women with spunky personalities.”

  Only now, we weren’t bantering with each another. Annie was counseling me, the way she always does. “You belong in Charleston.”

  “Palmer told Claire I’m his ‘thousandth man.’”

  “Like the Kipling poem?”

  “He made me memorize it one summer.”

  “That’s weird.” Classic Annie. She’s quick with an opinion.

  “Not weird, I worked for him.”

  “But, Grove, a poem?”

  “Just our relationship. I’d drive Palmer out to his developments. And we’d talk business, deals, people, the whole shebang. He said military brats get the big-picture stuff right, but we suck at the instinctive stuff. Like horse-trading with people.”

  “What’s this have to do with Rudyard Kipling?”

  “Palmer said he got more out of Kipling than he got from business school.”

  “I can’t remember how the poem goes.”

  “And I’ll never forget:

  ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine depend

  On what the world sees in you,

  But the Thousandth Man will stand your friend

  With the whole round world agin you.’”

  “Wow,” she said, almost whistling. “He loved you.”

  “And I blew it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was odd last Friday. Said he might need some help.”

  “That’s why you were phoning him all weekend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not beating yourself up, are you?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Good, that’s my job,” Annie replied, breezy, never pausing to catch her breath. “How’s his daughter?”

  “About what you would expect. She’s a wreck.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “You want to come?”

  “Can’t. Two papers due this week.” She paused for a moment. “Hey, Grove.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re Palmer’s thousandth man based on what you do now. You had no control over what happened Friday.”

  “Sure.”

  * * *

  That afternoon I forgot the markets. I didn’t care about the Dow Jones. As far as I was concerned, the index could blow up with or without my help.

  Same thing with SKC. I didn’t care about the drama du jour. I had no idea why Anders was squeezing me for information. And for the moment, I had no reason to believe anything was out of the ordinary. My shop is a fucking soap opera 24-7.

  Palmer Kincaid pounded through my brain the rest of the day. Dead at sixty-six. I couldn’t believe he was gone. Frankly, there were a number of things I couldn’t believe.

  Palmer was a skilled drinker. We had eaten at all the top restaurants, Le Cirque, Le Bernardin, whatever suited his fancy whenever JoJo and he boarded their private jet for New York City. I had seen him guzzle wine, vodka, every form of alcohol you can imagine. Even grappa, which tastes like turpentine if you ask me. He never got sloppy, not once. He was always in command, always in control.

  Palmer was also a skilled sailor. He had won countless regattas through the years. He was more comfortable on Bounder than he was on land. So he said. I didn’t buy the flying-boom-to-the-head explanation. Not on Bounder. Not with his experience.

  Nor did I buy the news from Chloe. “All the flights to Charleston are sold out,” she said. “JFK, LaGuardia, even White Plains.”

  “There’s got to be something.”

  “I’ll keep trying.”

  Chloe was right.

  * * *

  On Tuesday, I boarded an early flight and arrived in downtown Charleston around noon. Palmer’s vigil was that night. And me being an O’
Rourke, I refused to miss it.

  “Real friends,” my dad used to say, “show up at your wake.”

  If you ask me, the night before your own funeral seems a little late to find out. But I never challenged the big guy, then or now. I make the wakes.

  The Charleston Place Hotel was what you expect from luxury accommodations down South: crisp, clean, the temperature cold enough to hang meat. I dumped my bags upstairs and headed outside to Meeting Street, where Charleston remained exactly how I’d left it. Heat that saps your energy. Palmettos everywhere and, because they offer no shade, not much help with the sun. The air smelled sweet, muggy with camellias and horse piss from the carriage rides. There was no hint of the fall, just a few days away.

  I began walking toward Palmer’s place on South Battery, through the time capsule of buildings two and three hundred years old. And the old feeling returned, the sense that I had joined an ongoing epic with Southern heroes and Yankee barbarians, that I had entered a consecrated land where the families had been hallowing their homes, their way of life, and sometimes each other for generations. Given the circumstances, it was a coin toss whether I wanted to be back.

  About ten minutes later, I pushed through a black wrought-iron gate into the Kincaids’ front garden. There was a crepe myrtle off to my right, its flowered branches blasting with lavender. Two columns of gerberas, potted in Charleston-green containers, lined the painted wooden stairs. And hanging baskets of pansies, laced with violas, sprayed the porch with violets, whites, and purples so dark they were black.

  Nobody does gardens like Charleston.

  I’m in good shape, and the hike from the hotel had been short. But I don’t care if you’re Charles Atlas himself. Sweat was already drenching my white oxford shirt. On the way over, I had draped my tan jacket across my shoulder. I pulled it back on, both to hide the dampness and to afford Palmer the proper respect.

  Ferrell opened an arched mahogany door, nearly eight feet high. He was seventy-something, stiff and gray in an ageless kind of way, his manner genteel and distinguished. He had been working for Palmer as long as I could remember. Driver. Butler. Whatever. I didn’t know his exact title, only that he was Palmer’s go-to guy for everything.