Why now? What did he want? How had he found out Chloé was sick? Known which hospital to go to? What if he waited for her to leave for the night so he could come back to Chloé’s room and . . . Evie began to run. The guard shouted after her, “Qu’est ce qu’il se passe?” Evie had no time to translate her dread into French.
Darting through the electric doors, ignoring security’s request for photo ID, she cursed the elevator for stopping at every floor. Evie ran through the oncology ward at a sprint. The night nurse looked up from her desk.
Evie threw open the door to her daughter’s room but found only a painfully thin teenage girl dewy with night sweat, who would be dead in a few months if her mother didn’t find a way to keep her alive. The worst is always relative.
Evie spent that night on two chairs pushed together in the corner. As moonlight fell through the curtains and shadows danced across the wall, she kept herself awake watching Chloé breathe. The next morning Evie said nothing about Scout. Chloé had enough to worry about without knowing cancer wasn’t the only monster knocking on their door.
Slipping out of the room, Evie hurried downstairs and checked the hospital’s visitors’ log. She had assumed Scout had snuck into the building, or given a false name. That he had signed in as himself was more frightening. Providing both his NYC address and his Paris hotel, it was almost as if he dared her to make contact. In the box marked “relationship to patient,” Scout had written “old family friend.”
It all made a sick kind of sense. Like a magician that distracts you with a flourish of a handkerchief, Scout had always hidden his malevolence with calculated gestures. His visit was both a threat and a reminder that she and her daughter were at his mercy—but why now?
When Chloé was first diagnosed, Evie googled everything having to do with acute lymphatic leukemia. Now she typed Scout’s name into her search box. This was a malignancy that walked on its hind legs. Ninety-three pages of items appeared, and she scrolled through the minutiae. Parents’ names, the educational institutions he attended, jobs he had held, and the many awards he’d been granted. Of course, the life on the computer screen bore no resemblance to what she knew him to be. Most of the items were drawn from the financial pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal; magazines, blogs, and servers related to the world of money, acquisitions, and the liquidation of assets. There were more references to involvement in philanthropic organizations and worthy charitable causes than Evie would have expected, but nothing that gave a clue to why he had stepped back into her life.
For Evie to understand why Scout had suddenly felt the urge to remind her of his existence, she would have had to know about events that happened before she was even born. One in particular that was not listed on Scout’s résumé.
CHAPTER 3
Scout landed in New York City in the summer of ’82, lean, neat, and twenty-one years old. Erect and watchful as a hungry egret, he belonged to what was then the almost exclusively white male subspecies of American go-getter that flocked to Wall Street every June to apprentice in the dark arts of turning others’ losses into personal gain.
At White Stone Trust they were called “summer analysts”—which meant Scout was one of twenty glorified interns, all of whom were overachieving rising seniors from the most selective universities in the country. White Stone was an institution that had a reputation on the Street for only being interested in “the best of the best.” At the end of their eight-week summer audition, nineteen of the twenty would be told, “Thanks, but no thanks,” and one very lucky bastard would be informed he had a six-figure job and a golden future awaiting him when he graduated.
On his first day, Scout passed through the revolving brass door of the White Stone Trust building on the corner of Wall Street and Broad an hour before the candidates were instructed to arrive. Sporting a seersucker suit as crisp, clean, and unwrinkled as a freshly made bed in a five-star hotel, he introduced himself by asking, “What can I do to be useful?” He was only five foot ten, but seemed taller. He had hair the color of butterscotch, and the rosiness of his cheeks made him appear more boyish and wholesome than he was. More than a few of his fellow summer analysts teased him about his nickname, and several younger members of the all-female secretarial pool made flirtatious inquiries as to its origin. But he saved that tale for Alice, the Brit expat office manager with a caustic, matronly manner. It was a curious choice of confidant given that Alice had greeted the summer analysts by announcing, “I am not your friend. Any attempts to ingratiate yourself or curry favor with me will be reported to my superiors.” But that was just the point—for how he came to be called Scout was the kind of story you wanted repeated behind your back.
As he told it to Alice while staying late to fix the Xerox machine for her, he was raised in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula by a single mom who was both a Lutheran minister and legally blind. The winter he turned seven, while walking home after ice-skating on a frozen pond in the forest, they disagreed over which trail to take. Dutifully listening to his mother, he let her lead him down the wrong path. By the time it was dark they were hopelessly lost. Then Mother tripped and fell. Ankle broken, she could walk no further.
When it began to snow, he was forced to choose between staying with her in the hope that their prayers would be answered and setting off into the darkness by himself. He made sure Alice understood that leaving his mother behind was the hardest decision he ever had to make. When he finally led the state police back to her four and a half hours later, he was dubbed “Scout.”
Alice didn’t believe the story, but having worked at White Stone Trust for nearly twenty years, she recognized that someone capable of such shameless self-promotion just might be her boss in a year. She passed Scout’s sad story on to the senior male executives of the firm as if it were gospel. It was part of the truth about Scout, it just wasn’t the whole story.
The first months of Scout’s life were remarkably normal considering that his father, a doctoral candidate at a large midwestern university writing his dissertation on Foucault, had abandoned his mother in the eighth month of her pregnancy and run off to Brazil with a visiting poetry professor named Inês shortly after emptying his wife’s bank account.
It was around the time of his first birthday that his mother made the decision that would alter Scout’s life. In search of a higher purpose, she enrolled in the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary in Mequon five hours downstate. Monday through Friday, her son was cared for by his maternal grandmother in the Upper Peninsula town of Marquette. If Scout hadn’t had the same eyes as his father, pale and watery gray like something that lives in a shell, it might have gone differently for the child. As it was, every time his grandmother looked at him, she saw the bastard who had left her daughter pregnant, penniless, and brokenhearted. She kept the boy clean and fed but avoided touching him more than was absolutely necessary. When he cried, she closed the door to the spare room and turned up the TV. Scout’s mother had no idea Granny was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
When his mother came home on weekends, she tried to make up for the lost time with her “little man.” Suddenly there was so much pampering, hugging, and tickling he felt like the mice that lived under the stove had crawled up into his clothes.