“Not now!” he shouted, slamming a hand on the ink blotter.

The door closed quickly.

Don McAfee had confirmed that Isabelle had never married and her name was still Jacobs, although she had moved from Syracuse to Lackawanna, just outside of Buffalo. She had worked at the public library there. She had always loved to read.

There was a part of J. Ellis that felt genuine pride in Gilbert and Flora. Clever, respectable, and clearly possessing a better work ethic than even his top executives. And he marveled at the sheer ingenuity with which the embezzlement had been executed. He couldn’t believe they had pulled something like that off. In his most obtuse moments, he even took credit for how they had turned out as people, as though he’d had something to do with their upbringing.

Betty and Johnston had their trust funds. At the end of the day, he considered the money Gilbert and Flora stole as money that was probably rightfully theirs, in light of all the years he should have been sending funds to their mother but hadn’t. His fear of the paper trail leading back to him and to his wealthy, well-respected family was too strong. Allowing them to get away made J. Ellis Reed feel like his debt had been repaid, and that he’d finally done the right thing. He was almost sorry he couldn’t tell anyone of his unmitigated, covert benevolence, if only to have Betty revisit the idea of a J. Ellis Reed statue, or at least to have his grandchildren make him another sash.

He groaned and growled in frustration over the newspaper, beating his fists on the ink blotter and wiping the sweat from his face, sick over his imminent demise, or Gilbert’s death, or both.

Chapter 43

In every person’s life there comes a moment; an opportunity for redemption, a chance at genuine personal growth, to become a better human being. Sometimes this moment is preceded by a jolt of clarity or some startling occurrence or disaster; it often involves an unflinching, hard look at oneself and one’s actions, an enormous, and likely painful, gulp of pride, and a Herculean effort at apology.

It would have been nice if Betty Miller had recognized that moment, if she had been a big enough person to apologize to Vivian Dalton. She had intentionally leaked a very personal, deeply humiliating bit of information, and then attempted to publicly embarrass and shame Vivian about it at every opportunity. But, in order to apologize, Betty would have had to acknowledge, not to mention believe, that she had done something wrong, something that begged forgiveness. That what she’d done wasn’t a lesson that had needed to be taught, a score that had necessitated evening. But Betty Miller was almost blithely oblivious to her own behavior. How could she have been expected to find fault with herself, when she was so busy finding fault with everyone else? It was quite time-consuming, you understand. Everyone had to atone for something. Everyone except her and her father.