Page 8 of Dearly Departed

“Steak knives are better than nothing.” I try to sound optimistic.

“Far better than nothing,” he agrees.

It’s hard to imagine an encounter with Raymond Harris playing out well anywhere, but especially not where we’re standing. There’s hardly enough room for me and my husband to maneuver around each other. If Raymond decides to shoot us where we’re standing, there’s not much to stop him.

Except the two steak knives, two butter knives, and one kettle of almost-boiling water.

But what does a fight in an annoyingly enclosed space get Raymond Harris?

“Do you know how his wife died? You said—” I remember Jacob in the guest apartment at Mason Hill’s building so vividly. He was so tired, and I would have done anything to turn him back into the magnetic, bright-eyed man I’d been introduced to at his first big society fundraiser after he’d come back to New York. “You said she died because of the consortium.”

“A car accident.” Jacob looks into the middle distance. “They’d saved up to buy a small investment property in Florida. One of my father’s companies held the debt.”

“Okay…”

“A hurricane wiped out the house, but the insurance policy was…” Jacob’s brow furrows, but after a few beats, he shakes his head. “It wasn’t a legitimate policy, or—there was something wrong with it. They wouldn’t pay to rebuild. My father’s company kept collecting the debt.”

“Didn’t you go to his house? Didn’t they have, like, another house?” It’s these moments when I realize I’m missing things. I’m missing a lot. I went to high school and got good grades because I had to, but there wasn’t a class about what happens when your house gets destroyed by a hurricane and you get screwed by the bank.

“Yes.” Jacob meets my eyes. “But they’d put their life savings into the second home. It was meant to be Raymond Harris’s retirement one day, and it ended up costing them everything.”

“And the car accident…”

“From what I gather, his wife was driving to a meeting with a representative from my father’s company when someone ran her off the road.”

My stomach goes cold.

“The police report said she’d been driving under the influence, but it wasn’t true.”

Jacob hasn’t looked well for days. Maybe weeks. Maybe, now that I think of it, he hasn’t looked completely healthy for months. But even in the plane’s gentle mood lighting, I can see what little color he had draining out of his face.

“How do you know it wasn’t true?”

“Because Raymond Harris tried to sue the police department for falsifying the results of the investigation on behalf of my father’s company, which meant that subsidiary and its legal team got access to all the evidence that Harris brought his lawyer, and those documents included his wife’s medical records.”

Jacob tells me all this with an exhausted familiarity, like he actually went through every piece of paper and every computer file that had anything to do with Raymond Harris and his wife and his father’s company.

And if he did all that research for one case…

He’s still patient. Waiting for me.

“What did you find?”

“I found that she had a documented alcohol allergy. The amount she supposedly had to drink would’ve caused a reaction that suffocated her before she left the driveway.”

“That’s, like, pretty damning evidence.”

And…too obvious. If Raymond Harris couldn’t win against Jacob’s father’s company and the police department, it was because they were too powerful.

Jacob nods.

I know it’s the wrong moment to try to convince him, but I can’t help it. “But…you know that wasn’t your fault. You weren’t even here. I mean—in the country. Because you were in London.”

Jacob just watches me.

“Raymond Harris has to know that, too. If he knows enough about you to have gotten himself on this plane, then he has to know you weren’t even in the States when his wife died.”

“He knows I’m my father’s son,” Jacob answers. “He thinks I tried to buy his silence. That’s enough for him.”