Graveland: A Novel (40 page)

He’s also refusing to see visitors, even though they’re apparently lining up outside.

Who are these people, anyway, but ghosts? Some of them,
most
of them, not even born when he was in his prime.

He looks out over the room, the machines beeping, the BP values fluctuating.

That doesn’t make
them
ghosts, though, does it? Isn’t
he
the ghost?

Whatever.

He’s made sure—as much as these things are possible—that this outrage, this so-called book, will never see the light of day.

Containment.

He’s set it in train. It’s a respectable policy and has a long and fairly rich tradition behind it. It’s been shown to work in the past, it’ll work again.

He comes to the last few pages of the file and tries really hard to focus.

…
but instead, Charles Vaughan’s decision to short-sell his Union Pacific stocks only served to further provoke Gilbert Morley
 …

A pain throbs behind his eyes, and he has to look away from the screen for a moment. There’s a Pissarro out there, on the wall opposite, it’s usually a soothing presence, comforting, but he can’t see it right now. Everything’s a bit of a blur.

He reads on.

…
in addition to which Vaughan’s attentions to Arabella Stringham, Morley’s fiancée, were to prove intolerable to the fusty and straitlaced Wall Street speculator
.
Undeterred, Vaughan pressed his advantage with the beautiful young dry-goods heiress
 …

This is the one and only Charles A. Vaughan he’s reading about, his grandfather, whom he vaguely remembers from when he was a kid—the mid-1930s it would have been, all those visits to the cottage in Newport, the stiff formality of the man, his gray beard, his tortoiseshell cane with the carved ivory handle.

He was the architect, the great begetter, the patriarch.

But
this
version of him? The brash young nobody on the make … the schemer, the conniver, the hustler?

It’s a travesty.

Vaughan clicks on to the last page.

…
and then early one Thursday afternoon in August of 1878, as he made his way along Broad Street, Vaughan spotted Morley emerging from a tavern
 …

And farther down.

…
but witnesses then report the conversation taking a somewhat violent turn, with Vaughan grabbing the other man by his lapels and shoving him backward
 …

Vaughan simply cannot believe what he is reading, but he pushes on, increasingly horrified, knowing that if this material ever
were
to be made public, the humiliation, the exposure, would kill him, and outright—much faster, in fact, than the multiple, advanced, late-stage cancers riddling his body that he has been reliably informed over the last two days are killing him now.

*   *   *

On Utica Avenue, outside the Seventy-seventh Precinct, Ellen wants to scream. Is this how Jimmy ends up? Is this what he’s reduced to? A half hour of inconvenient paperwork on the desk of some stressed-out, overworked cop?

That’s how it seems.

But contrasted with this is an image in her head now that she can’t shake. Jimmy slumped on his couch, gun in one hand, arm twisted back, brains daubed on the wall behind him.

Alone.

But not alone.

A spectral figure, maybe two, gliding around his apartment, placing items, removing items, subtly determining in advance the shape and direction of what will appear in Detective Rayburn’s paperwork.

What makes her sick, and a little dizzy, is the apparent ease with which this can be done. So it’s not something she can let lie. She’s going to have to pursue it, extract more information from Rayburn, dig deeper—maybe get Val Brady to look into it.

But then something occurs to Ellen, a thought that grows—mushrooms, in fact—as she walks the six blocks to the Crown Heights–Utica Avenue subway stop.

If she is right, and this has happened because of Jimmy’s book, it would be logical to assume that Jimmy was under surveillance. Wouldn’t it also then be logical to assume that
she
is too, given her history with Jimmy, and their recent meeting at the Black Lamps?

Is that a stretch?

To remove any trace of Jimmy’s work, they took his computer. Presumably, they’ve also hacked into his accounts to delete whatever material he might have had stored remotely on iCloud or on Dropbox.

But do they know that
she
has a copy?

They must realize that publishers have seen it, that a digital file, pretty hard to eliminate completely, is
out there
. But they would also know, or suspect, that Ellen is the one person most likely to want to use it.

Or would they? And, for that matter, who
are
they?

Standing on the platform now, waiting for a 4 train, she looks around, a little uneasily.

Who are they?

The Oberon Capital Group owns Gideon Global, a private security and intelligence company with massive resources. What more do you need to know? This isn’t a stretch at all.

The train arrives, and she takes it to Fulton Street, where she gets a 2 train uptown.

All the way home, Ellen feels nervous, and increasingly so as she approaches her building. She’s been the subject of surveillance in the past, while working on stories. She’s been hacked, and she’s been subtly intimidated. But she’s never feared for her actual safety before. She’s never felt that she had to scan the other passengers on a subway car, or look over her shoulder walking down the street.

She looks over her shoulder now.

But there’s no one there.

Weirdly, that makes her feel more nervous.

As she walks up the stoop to her building and goes inside, she thinks she might throw up. She also becomes convinced that she’s going to find something unpleasant when she gets into her apartment.

But what?

She gets to the fourth floor and stands there, with her key in her hand, not
quite
hyperventilating.

Fuck this.

She unlocks the door, pushes it open, and looks inside.

Nothing. It’s just as she left it.

She goes in and locks the door behind her. She goes over to the window and looks down onto Ninety-third Street.

After a while her breathing returns to normal. But she also realizes something. This isn’t just paranoia on her part. It’s real. And it isn’t going away, either.

Standing there, she takes out her phone.

“Yep?”

“Max, are you at the office?”

“Hi, Ellen, yeah. Where else would I be?”

“Stay there.”

She gets ready, gathers a few things, and goes. Approaching Columbus Avenue, she finds herself almost breaking into a run.

She flags down a cab.

Fifty blocks south, then a few more east.

When she walks through the door of the
Parallax
offices, she feels a distinct release—it’s physical, and could be expressed as a scream or a manic laugh or even fifteen minutes of uncontrollable sobbing. But she holds it in check, and walks the long hallway that leads to Max’s office.

Sitting behind his desk, hair unkempt, eyes out on sticks, Max looks like he’s inches from a caffeine heart attack.

“Hey, Jimmy Dorsey, what’s up?”

It’s a formula he’s used before. She doesn’t know how to tell him that it’s not funny, not anymore. But neither does she want to.

Not now.

And yet. She’s a reporter. She has to report.

She stands in front of his desk. “Those IT geeks you had in here once,” she says, “are they still around?”

“And good morning to you, too. Yeah, of course.” He looks at her, picking up on the tone. He adjusts his position in the chair. “Ellen. You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”

She takes Jimmy Gilroy’s USB flash drive from her pocket and places it gently on the desk.

Max leans forward and studies it. “So. What have we got here?”

She keeps it brief.

Jimmy’s dead. She explains how—or, at least, how it seems. Then there’s his book here, the one about James Vaughan and his family. She explains more or less what’s in it, and how it finishes with a charming tale of Vaughan’s grandfather, who one afternoon as a very young man was witnessed, near the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, getting into an altercation with another man, one Gilbert Morley, pushing this man into an adjacent construction pit, and then bashing his brains in with a lead pipe. Evading prosecution, Charles Vaughan subsequently married his victim’s fiancée, and not long after that effectively inherited his new father-in-law’s substantial fortune, which in turn became the financial basis for his own railroad, steel, and mining empire.

Max listens, first with shock on his face, then alarm.

“So what I think we should do,” Ellen goes on, pointing at the flash drive, “is upload that onto the
Parallax
website.” She pauses.
“Today.”

Max exhales, shaking his head, trying to process what she’s told him. “Jesus, Ellen. This is a lot to take in.”

She remains standing there, impassive, waiting.

Max thinks about it for a minute.

“I don’t…” He’s struggling. He looks at her directly. “I don’t get the point of putting it on the website today. What’s the hurry?”

“Okay,” Ellen says, “let me tell you. One, you want to save this magazine, right? Best way to do that, as we both know, is by ramping up your Web presence. How do you achieve that? Do something spectacular, get everyone’s attention. With James Vaughan not just in the
news
right now, but halfway to being a fucking celebrity, this book is a heat-seeking
missile
. Two, Jimmy deserves it. He did the work, so this means he won’t be forgotten. And you don’t have to worry about making any allegations that won’t stand up, because the context will do it for you. Some straight reporting on how Jimmy died—I’m going to get Val Brady working on it—and
this,
his book, which is fully sourced and referenced, will speak for itself. And three…” She stops and sits down, pulling herself in closer to the desk. She puts her hand over the flash drive. “And
three
. Once this is out there, clocking up hits, I’m safe again.”

“You’re not safe now?”

“Look what happened to Jimmy. These people have to know I was in touch with him.” She leans in even closer. “So let me tell you something for free, Max. I’m not leaving the building until you upload this thing onto the website.”

Max sits back in his chair and swivels. “Okay, let me read it first. Then we’ll get the tech guys in, and legal, too.” He swivels some more. “If we go ahead with this, you’ll have to write something, an introduction.”

“Of course,” Ellen says. “Absolutely. I’d want to.”

Max sighs. He picks up the flash drive and studies it. “It’s going to be a long day.”

Ellen shrugs. “There’s plenty of coffee, isn’t there?”

“Sure.” Max looks at her for a while. “Are you okay, Ellen?”

She gets up from the chair. “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

She takes out her phone and walks over to the window.

Standing there, she makes a few calls, the first one to Val Brady, the second to Jimmy’s cousin in Queens, and a third to her sister, Michelle.

When she can’t talk anymore she finds a free desk and gets down to work. It takes her a couple of hours to write the introduction. After that she goes over her Atherton notes. Then she spends another couple of hours preparing questions for the interview she’s doing later in the week with Frank Bishop.

During all of this, in the background, people come and go, suits, guys in beards, phone calls are made, facts checked, opinions sought.

Ellen even manages to fall asleep for a while.

Sometime late in the afternoon, Val Brady shows up.

He has a piece on Gilroy ready to go. He’s been out to the Seventy-seventh, and has met the cousin. He says that if
Parallax
goes ahead and posts
House of Vaughan
on their website this evening, his piece will make page one of the
Times
tomorrow, which in turn will send a lot of traffic back the magazine’s way.

This revives Max, who’s been flagging somewhat. He then heads off for another round of consultations. Twenty-five minutes later, he reappears and says, “Okay, looks like we’re good to go.”

Ellen isn’t sure she’s heard him right.

“Yeah.” He sinks into his chair. “It’s all been cleared. The guys have set it up. They’ve previewed it. They’re using, I don’t know, WordPress or something. Anyway, one click and we’re done.”

A weary Ellen turns to Val. “I haven’t eaten all day. Are you hungry?”

Val’s eyes widen. He nods and says, “Yeah, sure, but I’m buying.”

Ellen then gets up and walks over to Max’s desk. She goes in behind it, stands next to him, and looks at the screen.

Max drags the cursor over to the
PUBLISH
icon. He withdraws his hand from the mouse, and glances up at her.

“You want to do it?”

Ellen takes a deep breath. She reaches down, clicks on the icon, and waits. “That’s it,” she says, after a couple of moments. “We’re live.”

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