Читать книгу Bad Dad - Alice Shane - Страница 6

Marrying Lester was a transformational experience for Margo. He had plucked her out of a $65,000 a year job as a financial reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer to becoming his wife only five months after they met at an investment conference she was covering for the newspaper’s Sunday financial supplement.

Barely able to afford a studio apartment in a high-rise on Rittenhouse Square back then, it never failed to amaze Margo that this fabulously wealthy man who was living in an historic 16-room townhouse on Delancey Place would become so enamored of her, introducing her to a lifestyle that far surpassed her wildest dreams. They lived in this Delancey Place residence only briefly after their marriage, until Lester sold it to a Saudi businessman for $10-million.

“Too many bad memories from my life with Gloria, ” he told Margo, wanting her to understand why he put the home on the market so soon after their marriage. It was a decision she welcomed. She wasn’t keen on living in a house that had been decorated and lived in by his former wife.

***

No longer subjected to the crushing deadlines of a full-time newspaper job, Margo now luxuriated in her new role of being the pampered wife of a wealthy man, with time to write a novel. It was something she always wanted to do. She attended creative writing classes at NYU, commuting to New York once a week. She also wrote for publications she now had more time to read – Vogue, Travel & Leisure, Harper’s Bazaar. Her articles focused on food, art, fashion – subject matter she had explored as a lifestyle reporter before transitioning to financial writing.

There’s so much to enjoy, Margo reflected, her anxiety lifting as memories of Lester’s amorous pursuit of her flooded her consciousness. The expensive gifts, the fabulous dinners at Philadelphia’s poshest restaurants, their trip on Lester’s yacht to the Caribbean where they snorkeled and lazily soaked up the sun, the weekend flights on his Learjet to Lester’s “log cabin in the sky” near Jackson Hole for skiing.

In addition to their rustic log home in Jackson, their Heron Cove waterfront residence, their 62-ft. Oyster sailing yacht moored in Annapolis near the Naval Academy, there was Lester’s 2000 acre game preserve abutting Yellowstone Park where he hunted for antelope, elk and moose. Margo accompanied him on these hunts, becoming a competent marksman in her own right, despite a skittishness about killing animals.

“They’re so adorable,” she told Lester when he urged her to take aim and shoot. “I can’t bear to kill them, especially the babies!”

He would laugh, try to convince her that hunting animals was environmentally sound. “It’s ok. If you don’t kill some of them off, they overpopulate and have a tough time finding enough food to eat,” he told her, an explanation that did not change Margo’s feelings about slaughtering defenseless small animals.

During ski season, they relaxed in the Jackson Hole retreat where they entertained Lester’s business acquaintances in the gas and oil industries. The location was only a short flight on the Learjet to the company’s headquarters in Pinedale, an area known for its gas and oil wells and population of hard-living rig operators notorious for their abuse of cheap wine and methamphetamine.

True, she didn’t own any of this yet, but once their prenup kicked in, half of Lester’s assets would be hers. Funny. She had no idea what that would be. Several hundred million, maybe. An unimaginable sum – cash, investments, real estate, shares in Fuller Energy. The very thought of this windfall evoked the most uncomfortable emotions – smugness and grandiosity on the one-hand, unexplainable fear and uncertainty that it might disappear if she wasn’t cautious, watchful.

A lot could happen in that time, Margo thought. The telephone call from Mary Lou Fuller had made her feel vulnerable, insecure, as if almost anything could happen to shatter her carefully orchestrated future.

She would have see to it that Lester’s son and daughter-in-law couldn’t get their grubby, greedy little hands on his assets. She had no idea what she would have to do to protect her interests, other than to take any and all precautions necessary to safeguard what was rightfully hers.