They decided on the bar at the Algonquin Hotel, which was a slightly shopworn, pretzels-and-peanuts kind of place with leather banquettes and sketches of Broadway shows on its wood-paneled walls. Nick said he had agreed to meet up with Phoebe after the reading of the will, and he texted her their location. The bar was open for lunch, and they pretended that they were there to eat, but neither Patch nor Nick expressed much interest in food. Nick ordered some fries for the table and three Cokes.
Phoebe arrived a moment later. She looked at Nick, then at Patch. “What’s going on here?”
“We’ll explain in a second,” Nick said.
“I might need something stronger,” Patch said, only half-joking as he motioned to his Coke. He was still in shock from the news and wasn’t really sure how to process it. “Can I get a dirty martini?” he mock called to the waitress.
“Hold on there, Lost Weekend, let’s keep our heads on, okay?” Nick said.
Nick explained to Phoebe, as quickly as he could, what had been revealed. Phoebe nodded in amazement.
“I should call Genie,” Patch said, interrupting Nick’s story. “I don’t know if I can reach her, though.” Genie was in the Catskills with a friend for a few days, at an old mountain retreat where she could curl up by the fireplace, play backgammon, and read paperback mysteries. She had decided she needed to get out of town after all the excitement of Palmer’s death and the necklace heist. The problem was that this made her annoyingly unreachable. “She never has her phone turned on, unless it’s in the charger,” Patch said. “It has somehow escaped her that the purpose of a cell phone is to keep it with you.”
He tried her, but it went directly to voice mail. She wouldn’t be returning home until the weekend.
Patch decided he would call the next best person who might be able to explain it to him. His mother’s number at the hospital was programmed into his phone, and he dialed it. It was a snap decision to call her, and as he heard the line ringing, he started to think better of it. What would he say to her? Was this really a conversation he wanted to have in front of Nick and Phoebe? A nurse answered the main line at the Stoney River Psychiatric Hospital in Ossining, and he asked for his mom. After a moment, the nurse said she was unavailable, but they would give her the message. He was almost relieved she hadn’t been there.
Nick and Phoebe looked at him plaintively. He felt like someone they had to feel sorry for.
“What’s up, you guys?” Patch asked.
“It’s so odd,” Nick said. “Like, I feel like we should be celebrating about the trust funds, but that doesn’t feel right. My grandfather could be an ass, but clearly he was looking out for you-for us-in some way.”
“Except that now he’s left us with an even bigger mystery to solve,” Phoebe said.
“God, where is my grandmother when we need her?” Patch said.
Nick took a sip of his Coke. “Okay, let’s figure this out. I’m going to speak openly here. Your mother and my father clearly had something going on. Our fathers were friends, so that can’t have sat well between them.”
“Unless my father-well, who I thought was my father-unless he didn’t know.”
“He had to have found out,” Phoebe said. “How could he not?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “It’s possible he never knew about it. What I don’t get is, if my grandfather-our grandfather-was going to include you in his will, why did he have such strong feelings about you being in the Society? Why were they so upset when you taped the Night of Rebirth?”
The three of them were silent for a moment. “I have an idea,” Phoebe said. “Just from what I know about your grandmother, Patch.”
“What’s that?” Nick said.
“Forgive me if I’m out of line here.” She stirred her soda with a straw.
“Go on,” Patch said.
“I think that if Palmer and Genie were once engaged, then Patch was a symbol of everything that he couldn’t have, of something forbidden. He couldn’t marry Genie because of family pressures to marry someone who approved of the Society. But Parker could have your mother in his life, Patch, at least by having an affair with her.”
“I’ve been pretty sure, since the fall, that both of my parents were Society members,” Patch said. “So how does that make my mother something forbidden?”
Phoebe spoke up. “What was forbidden about her was that she wasn’t his wife.” She looked sheepishly at the two boys.
“I think Phoebe’s right,” Patch said. “Palmer resented me because I reminded him of what his son had done.”
“But then he came around in the end,” Nick said, shaking his head in amazement. “Phoebe, do you remember what he told us in his hospital room? He said something about how he didn’t want us to live the life set up for us by our families. How destructive that could be.”
“So maybe this is your ticket out?” Phoebe asked. “Is this his own way of helping you out of the Society?”
“We’re not out yet,” Nick said. “But this certainly doesn’t hurt.”
“No, I’d say thirty million dollars doesn’t hurt,” Patch said sarcastically. “Except that we still have no idea what the real story is.” He still couldn’t wrap his head around the trust. It seemed imaginary, like Monopoly money.
“I think we should take it from the beginning,” Phoebe said. “Don’t you think that figuring out Palmer’s whole mystery, whatever he was trying to tell you in his room at the hospital, is the first step to all this?” She finished her Coke and nervously stabbed at the ice with a straw. “You’ve tried the key everywhere. But what about those numbers you mentioned? What were they again?”
“1603,” Nick said.
“And you’ve tried addresses already, right? Give me your phone for a sec.”
Nick handed over his iPhone, and Phoebe punched in the numbers. She scrolled through a few entries on Google and frowned.
“Have you ever thought it might be a year?” she asked.
Patch and Nick shrugged. “How would a year help us? Usually these things are an address. Like the chess tables last semester.”
“Right, but maybe it’s a year that leads us to an address.”
“What are you showing up?” Nick asked.
“Nothing significant. Except that 1603 is mentioned in several entries as the last year of the Tudor dynasty.”
“Oh, great, so we have to go to England,” Patch said. “I said no to Denmark, and I say no to England, too.”
“We don’t have to go to England,” Phoebe said. “We just have to go to a place that looks like England.”