The Girl in the Mirror(6)

Dad grew up with no family of his own. His childhood was passed in foster care and a state home. All he seemed to know of his background was that some ancestor had been transported for stealing a beer glass from an English pub.

Perhaps that’s why Dad was so dynastic. By the time he was twenty-two, he had found out that he had a younger brother and gained custody of Colton, who was twelve. Dad sent Colton to the best boarding school in Wakefield. Colton became his protégé, and then his business partner.

Dad put off having kids until he’d made his millions, and by that time his first wife, Margaret, was too old. After he divorced Margaret, Dad didn’t repeat his mistake; Summer and I were conceived on our parents’ honeymoon. When Annabeth called it quits after she produced our younger brother, Dad ran off with Francine, who was fresh out of Catholic school. But I still didn’t realize the extent of his obsession with populating the world.

These are the facts of his life, but they don’t capture what Dad was like. Perhaps all I need to say to describe my father is this: he didn’t like nice people. I found this out the last time I saw him alive.



Our family was gathered at the dinner table in the big house on Beach Parade in early December, shortly after Summer and I had turned fourteen. Annabeth was telling a story about an encounter with a beggar. Earlier that day, she had taken Summer and me to Billabong to choose new beachwear for Christmas; numerous store-wrapped boxes were now sitting under our Christmas tree. On her way into the mall, Annabeth wished the beggar merry Christmas and held out a twenty. He, smelling like a rubbish bin, took the bill clean out of her hand and marched straight into a bottle shop.

“Right in front of me!” Annabeth exclaimed, smashing a generous portion of turkey cannelloni onto Dad’s plate. He tilted the china, inspecting it for damage from the big silver serving spoon.

“So you were outside the bottle shop when you gave this bozo the cash?” Dad asked.

“I’m trying to raise our kids to be nice people, Ridge,” Annabeth said.

“Nice is dumb,” said Dad, and he turned to me and winked.

I lapped it up. Summer was the beauty in our family—even then I knew it—and Ben was the only boy, the heir. But I was the one Dad included in his special joke.

I surveyed my mother, my brother, my sister. Annabeth gave cash to a beggar outside a bottle shop. Ben, ten years old and small for his age, was so gentle that Dad had given up ever teaching him to hunt, even though he had great aim when firing at a tin can. And Summer, well, Summer was Summer.

But I was Iris, the unexpected twin, the surplus twin, and with that wink, Dad gave me a new place in our family. Not nice. Not dumb.

This is why I thought I would at least get my share of the family money—not that I expected Dad to die anytime soon. Your average father might not have seen much in me, not compared with my angelic sister, but Dad always seemed to appreciate my cynical streak. Ridge hated the idea of his money being lost, and you have to have a fair amount of street smarts not to be bamboozled out of your fortune. It seemed that Dad thought I would be up to the task.

Annabeth and Dad were already divorced by then, which perhaps partly excuses his dinnertime pronouncements about her brainpower. Perhaps it’s weird that he still came for dinner sometimes, four years after leaving my mother, but he still owned the house on Beach Parade. Later, when I went to law school, I wondered how the hell Dad had managed to keep his property intact through two divorces. Maybe Annabeth was too nice for her own good. Or maybe the judges were afraid of Ridge Carmichael, the man who owned half of Wakefield. Whichever it was, when he died, Dad left his three wives and seven children not much more than comfortable. The bulk of his fortune . . . that’s where it gets interesting.

For the first few years after the divorce, we stayed in the beach house. Dad moved in with his girlfriend, Francine, who lived in a penthouse in inner-city Wakefield. Francine had a two-year-old named Virginia. We assumed she was Francine’s daughter from a previous relationship.

When Dad married Francine, they changed Virginia’s surname to Carmichael. I still didn’t question who her father might be, although my mother must have had her suspicions. But Annabeth wouldn’t say a word against her ex-husband. She acted as if she had been lucky to be married to him in the first place, even though she was a very pretty, sweet-tempered woman—utterly wifely, a perfect match for a man like Ridge. The only way you could tell when something upset our mother was that she would do the housework with even more vigor than usual, slamming the vacuum cleaner into furniture, thumping pillows into place.

By the time Summer and I were fourteen, Francine had popped out three more babies: Vicky, Valerie, and Vera Carmichael. Like Francine, the girls were all too blond to be called blond; their hair was white. The birth of Francine’s fourth daughter tipped the balance of power. Now there were more of them than there were of us, and Francine started making noises about a house swap. It turned out that Ridge owned both properties. Nobody wants to live in an apartment with four kids, even if it is a multilevel penthouse with a rooftop garden and swimming pool, but I don’t know whether Francine would have succeeded if Dad hadn’t died.

After dinner that night, when I kissed Dad goodbye, I begged him to take me with him on his upcoming sailing holiday. Since the divorce, Dad had flown Summer and me and Ben up to Thailand every summer, but this year, he was taking Francine and their kids.