Elin Hilderbrand - Here's to Us

“His agent,” Buck said. And then, sighing, he added, “And yes, his best friend. Is he in jail?” Deacon had never gotten into any kind of trouble while on Nantucket, not in all these years-but as far as Deacon was concerned, there was a first time for everything.

“No, Mr. Buckley,” the chief said. “He’s not in jail.”

Buck had walked out of the Colonel’s half-shaven.

His best friend of thirty years was dead.

“Massive coronary,” the chief said. “An island man named JP Clarke found him early this morning and phoned it in. But the M.E. put the time of death about twelve hours earlier-so maybe seven or eight o’clock last night.”

“Had he been drinking?” Buck asked. “Doing drugs?”

“He was slumped over at the table on the back deck with a Diet Coke,” the chief said. “And there were four cigarette butts in the ashtray. No drugs that we found, although the M.E. is going to issue a tox report. You have my condolences. My wife was a big fan of the show. She made that clam dip for every Patriots game.”

Condolences, Buck had thought. That belonged on Deacon’s Stupid Word List. What did it even mean?

“I’ll leave it to you, then, to contact the family?” the chief asked.

Buck closed his eyes and thought: Laurel, Hayes, Belinda, Angie, Scarlett, Ellery.

“Yes,” Buck said.

“And you’ll handle the remains?”

“I’ll handle… yes, I’ll handle everything,” Buck said.

Massive coronary, Buck thought. Diet Coke and four cigarettes. It was the cigarettes that had done it in the end, Buck guessed. He had told Deacon… but now was no time to indulge his inner surgeon general. Deacon was gone. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

“Thank you, Chief,” Buck said. “For letting me know.”

“Well,” the chief said, “unfortunately, that’s my job. My thoughts to the family.”

Buck hung up and watched his arm shoot into the air. A taxi put on its blinker and pulled over. Everything was the same in the world, but then again it was different. Deacon Thorpe was dead.

The death had been devastating enough, but as the executor of Deacon’s estate, Buck was then required to delve into the paperwork that inevitably followed. He started with the obvious: Deacon’s will. He had left the restaurant to his daughter Angie, which made sense, although Harv would continue to run it for the foreseeable future. And Deacon had left his other major asset-the house on Nantucket-to the three women he had been married to, Laurel Thorpe, Belinda Rowe, and Scarlett Oliver, to be owned in thirds, with time split in a fair and just manner, as determined by the executor.

Great, Buck thought.

As Buck sifted through Deacon’s marriage certificates to Laurel, to Belinda, to Scarlett; the divorce agreements from Laurel and from Belinda; the deed to the Nantucket house, which turned out to be encumbered with three mortgages and two liens; the LLC paperwork for Deacon’s four-star restaurant, the Board Room, in midtown Manhattan; the contracts with ABC (ancient, defunct) and the Food Network; and his bank and brokerage statements, he’d been thrown into a tailspin. All Buck could think was, This has to be wrong. He rummaged through every drawer of Deacon’s desk at the restaurant and meticulously checked the apartment on Hudson Street, a task much more easily accomplished without Scarlett around. Every piece of paper Buck found served to make the situation worse. It was like a game of good news, bad news, except this version was called bad news, worse news.

Deacon hadn’t paid any of the three mortgages on the Nantucket house in six months, and he was three months behind on the rent for his apartment on Hudson Street. Where had all of Deacon’s money gone? Buck found a canceled check for a hundred thousand dollars made out to Skinny4Life. Skinny4Life? Buck thought. A hundred large? This sounded like one of Scarlett’s “projects”; there had been the purses made by the cooperative of women in Gambia and, after that, an organic, vegan cosmetic company that absconded with fifty thousand of Deacon’s dollars before going belly-up. Before Scarlett decided she wanted to go into “business,” she had studied photography. Deacon had spent a small fortune sending her to University College downtown-which, Buck had pointed out numerous times, was neither a university nor a college. Deacon had built Scarlett a state-of-the-art darkroom in the apartment and bought her cameras and computers and scanners and printers, the collective price of which could have paid for a Rolls-Royce with a full-time chauffeur. All of the equipment now sat dormant behind a locked door.

Buck found another canceled check, this one for forty thousand dollars and made out to Ellery’s school, along with a check to the co-op board of Hayes’s building in Soho. Buck had wondered how Hayes had been able to afford such a place, and now he knew: Deacon had paid for it. From the looks of things, Deacon had also been cutting a check to Angie every now and again-three thousand dollars here, twelve hundred dollars there-with a memo line that read Buddy fun money. And there was a canceled check for thirty thousand dollars made out to someone named Lyle Phelan, which also went in the question-mark pile.

Even with all that cash out the door, Buck was puzzled. Deacon took only one dollar in salary from the Board Room in order to keep down operating costs, which were, famously, the most outlandish of any restaurant in the country. But the residuals from Deacon’s two TV shows- Day to Night to Day with Deacon and Pitchfork -should have kept him solvent despite all his expenses.

Then Buck came across the wire transfer, dated January 3. A million dollars from Deacon’s brokerage account with Merrill Lynch to… the Board Room, LLC, the company that owned the restaurant. Buck remembered Deacon telling him at Christmastime that he’d had an investor pull out; it had been Scarlett’s uncle, the judge from Savannah. The judge-Buck had met him ten years earlier at the wedding-had gone to the Board Room for dinner, and apparently something had gone awry. Deacon had never told Buck exactly what happened, but the judge had called the very next day, saying he wanted his money back, pronto. And Deacon hadn’t argued.

Deacon had seemed panicked about the funding, but the following week he’d called Buck and said he’d found a new investor who shared Deacon’s vision. This guy is all in, Deacon had said. Vested.

The guy, Buck now knew, had been Deacon.

Buck discovered a life insurance policy worth a quarter of a million dollars, with Scarlett and Ellery named as the beneficiaries. That would probably pay the rent on the Hudson Street apartment and the tuition at Ellery’s school for a couple more years. But Deacon’s beloved Nantucket house was going into foreclosure; the bank would repossess it at the end of the month unless the estate could come up with $436,292.19, the sum total of the amount overdue on the three mortgages, plus the liens. And then, even if someone paid what was owed in arrears, there was still a $14,335 monthly payment to grapple with.

Buck had never seen such a mess!

He had contacted Laurel and Hayes, and Belinda and Angie-and he’d left a detailed message for Scarlett’s mother, Prue, to pass along to Scarlett, who refused to take Buck’s calls. They would gather on Nantucket to spread Deacon’s ashes in Nantucket Sound, and then it would be Buck’s job to inform Deacon’s family that unless someone stepped forward to save the house, the halcyon days of their island summers were coming to an end.

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