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Who knew who I might be by the time this was over—and whether the rest of them would still want to stand by my side then?
Chapter Nineteen
Rose
Ihefted another box to the side and sneezed at the puff of dust that rose up. Naomi’s laugh carried from my phone I’d left on top of one of the trunks, on speaker mode.
“Sounds like that attic really needs to be cleaned more often.”
“No kidding,” I said. “I don’t think anyone’s been up here since before we moved, and that was almost twelve years ago now.”
“But you think you’ll find something useful up there?”
“If I’m going to rattle my dad and get him to rattle Frankford, I’ll be better off with old projects where they might not remember all the details.” I opened the next box, found it stuffed with suits, and pushed it to the side too. “We know they’ve been skirting the rules in a lot of ways, so chances are they’ve done some shady stuff here and there along the way. I just need to make them think I might have uncovered something incriminating. With the arrests Kyler has been prompting, they’ll already be on their toes.”
“And then you hope Frankford will set up a meeting with the Assembly people who are above board.”
“Exactly. I’ve already found some notes from a real estate deal they worked on together twenty years ago, one that involved negotiating with some unsparked company heads. That would be under the domain of Unsparked Relations. Now I just need a good one to get them worried about International Affairs investigating.” Justin Brimsey and Gwen Remington, the heads of those two divisions, were two of the Assembly officials both Thalia and my aunt Ginny had felt confident were no friends of the Frankfords.
“You know if I hear anything useful on this end, I’ll get in touch ASAP. I wish I could stay down there and really pitch in.” Naomi sighed.
“It’s good just being able to bounce ideas off you,” I said.
My hand stilled on the flap of the box I’d just opened. This one was full of fancy dresses: silk and satin with ornate embroidery in rich jewel tones. My mother’s old dresses. Even as I thought that, a smell I couldn’t attach to any conscious memory but that struck a chord in me all the same wafted from them over me. She must have used to wear that perfume, a mix of peach and amber notes. It closed around my heart.
“Rose?” my cousin said, and I realized she’d started talking again without me even hearing her.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just— I found a box with some of my mother’s stuff. It’s still hard to think about her, with everything I know now.”
“Oh, Spark help me, I can only imagine.” Naomi paused. I ran my hand over the delicate fabric, listening to the soft hiss of its movement. I didn’t quite dare to pull one of those dresses out. I wasn’t here for that, and I was already distracted enough just looking at them.
“Do you think it really was cancer that killed your mom?” Naomi went on in a low voice. “I mean, it does seem strange that she died so soon after she was getting suspicious of your dad.”
I’d wondered that so many times since I’d talked to my aunts and heard their side of my mother’s story. The whirlwind courtship and romance with my father, the way he’d isolated her, the letter she’d sent while she was sick claiming he was trying to steal her power.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Your mom said mine was already sick when she wrote that letter. There’s no way to know what she’d found out. Dad always seemed to really care about her.” But then, I’d thought I’d been able to tell that he cared about me too. “I’m not sure there’s any way to find out at this point. Any evidence ofthatwould be long gone.”
“Yeah. And it’s not like you can expect your dad to tell you the truth about it.”
I forced myself to close the box of Mom’s dresses and moved to another. This one was full of file folders. “Oh, I might have something useful here,” I said. “This looks like work stuff.”
Naomi was silent for a moment as I started flipping through each of the folders. Then she said, “You’re hanging in okay, right? With Gabriel… and everything…? If you want to talk about any ofthatstuff with someone who’s not one of the guys, you know you’ve got me.”
My mouth twisted with a bittersweet smile. “I know,” I said. “I— Mostly I’m trying not to think about it. It still hurts a lot. And obviously if he was going to come back, he would have by now.” I just had to show him he hadn’t really lost me. That I could tackle the Frankfords without stooping to anywhere near their level.
I’d rather take them on that way anyway.
I hesitated over the folder I’d just opened. “Hey, I think I’ve got something useable here. My father and the Frankfords did some project together in Brazil in the late ‘80s.” Just a year or two before Dad would have met my mother.
“Sounds promising,” Naomi said. “Does that mean you’ve got everything you need?”
“I think so.” I paged farther through the documents. It’d been a big business endeavor, taking six months to complete. One of the first deals they must have worked on together. My father would have been in his early twenties, the Frankfords about ten years older. Taking him under their wing like a sort of apprentice. My hackles rose at the thought.
Had the Hallowells already been tied to the Frankfords and their schemes before that? Or was that when Charles Frankford had roped Dad into this horrible conspiracy? If there were files that went back before Dad’s time, they hadn’t been on that hard drive, so I could only speculate.
I couldn’t put all the guilt on the Frankfords, not when my father had made his own decisions, but that didn’t stop me from gritting my teeth when I pictured them cajoling him into going along with their schemes. Just promise your first-born daughter to tame a few demons. No big deal.
Oh, I was still furious with Dad too, no doubt about that.
