Silver Girl by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online Page A

vending machines.”
    “For the vending machines,” Meredith repeated. She thought about Freddy selecting a bag of Doritos or a package of Twinkies from a vending machine, and a part of her died. But what did she think he was eating in there? Salad caprese?
    She decided not to go. The only way she could ever hope to save herself was to do what her children had done: denounce Freddy and the life they’d led together. When Leo and Carver found out about Freddy’s crimes, they had roared in anger, and Freddy sat impassively, offering them nothing to combat the fact that they were the sons of a thief and a pathological liar. They had stormed out of the apartment, and Meredith understood now, though she hadn’t at the time, that the boys had expected her to go with them. But she had stayed by Freddy’s side, because that was where her rut had been dug for the past thirty years. She couldn’t leave Freddy until this was figured out. Leo had said,
What precisely do you need to figure out, Mom? Dad is a thief. He’s a criminal! He has committed financial genocide!
Carver said,
We’re changing our name. You should, too.
    Meredith knew she should make a statement, do an interview with Barbara Walters, if Barbara would have her. Explain the truth as she understood it, even though nobody on God’s green earth would believe her.
    Weeks passed, then months. Meredith stuck to her resolve. Don’t think about Freddy. Pretend Freddy is dead. But as the evidence materialized against her, and then against Leo, Meredith realized her best hope lay in going to see him. She needed answers. There was the matter of the money: The money the Feds knew about, and the money they didn’t. He had to give it back—all of it. He understood this, right? How long had the Ponzi scheme been going on? Since the beginning? Had Delinn Enterprises
ever
been fully legitimate? Wasn’t there some way to prove that Leo was innocent, that Deacon Rapp was lying about Leo? Couldn’t Freddy give up the names of the people who had conspired with him in order to save his son? Meredith started scribbling out a list of questions. She had eighty-four. Eighty-four questions that required answers, including a question about why Freddy had been touching Samantha’s back that day.

    To the jail, Meredith had worn jeans and a white button-down shirt and suede flats and her trench coat, and she carried a clutch purse with two rolls of quarters inside. Her hair hadn’t been colored in months, and there had been no trips to Palm Beach, so she was graying and her skin was the color of paste. She wore no makeup—she couldn’t insult the American public by bothering with mascara—although she knew that by not prettying herself, she would invite the press to comment on how worn-out she looked. Well, she
was
worn-out. The mob of photographers and reporters was waiting for her, snapping pictures, sticking microphones in her face, but Burt and Dev were there to fend them off and hail her a cab.
    Later, she would wish she’d stayed in the relative safety of her apartment.
    There had been a terrific wait to get in to see Freddy, during which Meredith experienced thirty-one flavors of anxiety. Burt and Dev were with her—together, they were costing her nine hundred dollars an hour, though how she would ever pay them, she had no idea. Burt checked his BlackBerry with a compulsivity that unsettled Meredith. Dev paged restlessly through an outdated
National Geographic
from the sad, wobbly lounge table that was scarred with other people’s initials. He then set the magazine down and studied the other denizens of the waiting room—the men and women who looked even more hopeless and lost than Meredith felt—as though he were going to put them in a novel. They didn’t speak until Meredith was called to go through security, when both Burt and Dev wished her luck. They weren’t going in with her. Security was another long and arduous process where Meredith and her clutch and