Windfall, page 1
Dedication
For Bryce Berg,
who is kindness and positive energy, love and light.
And, as always, for Brody, Morgan, and Mark, with love.
With gratitude to Lucia Macro, Liate Stehlik, Asanté Simons, Amy Halperin, Gina Macedo, and the rest of the team at HarperCollins/William Morrow; to Laura Blake Peterson, James T. Farrell, and Holly Frederick and the team at Curtis Brown, Ltd.; to Alison Gaylin for the early read and vote of confidence; to my Petty Pals, Friday Night Girls, and Sunrise Sisters for lending an ear and shoulder; to the Californians, Tony Gatto, and Laurie Corsi; to my family, especially Morgan Staub, who so patiently listened, read multiple drafts, and helped me work out many a plot point.
Epigraph
Money often costs too much.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Transcript from Disappearing Acts Podcast
Wednesday Shea
Leila
J.J.
Molly
Transcript from Disappearing Acts Podcast
Thursday Leila
Shea
J.J.
Leila
Transcript from Disappearing Acts Podcast
Friday Shea
Molly
J.J.
Leila
Molly
Shea
J.J.
Leila
Transcript from Disappearing Acts Podcast
Saturday Morning Molly
Shea
J.J.
Shea
Molly
J.J.
Shea
Molly
Shea
J.J.
Molly
Shea
J.J.
Molly
Shea
J.J.
Shea
Molly
J.J.
Shea
Molly
J.J.
Transcript from Disappearing Acts Podcast
Saturday Evening Molly
Shea
J.J.
Shea
Molly
J.J.
Shea
Molly
J.J.
Molly
J.J.
Molly
J.J.
Shea
J.J.
Shea
J.J.
Molly
Transcript from Disappearing Acts Podcast
Monday Morning Shea
Molly
Eight Months Later Transcript from Disappearing Acts Podcast
About the Author
Praise for Windfall
Also by Wendy Corsi Staub
Copyright
About the Publisher
Transcript from Disappearing Acts Podcast
Hello, and welcome to a brand-new season of Disappearing Acts. I’m host Riley Robertson, former investigative reporter, current podcaster, and perennial snoop!
This season, we’re going to explore Hollywood’s most intriguing mystery: Whatever Happened to Chantal Charbonneau?
The beautiful brunette was an A-list movie star with two Oscar nominations and fans all over the globe.
She was aloof and enigmatic, not one of those celebrities who relished fame, though she tolerated it and had even cultivated it when she was building a career.
Though she starred in some of the biggest box office hits of the 1990s, she became increasingly reclusive, which in turn fanned the flames of public interest in her personal life. By the time she disappeared in 2001, she was living in isolation at Windfall, her seaside estate north of Los Angeles.
The general consensus is that she’s dead—that she either jumped, fell, or was pushed to her death and her body was swallowed by the sea. That makes sense, right?
Sure it does. And we’re going to examine that theory.
We’re also going to consider a far more intriguing one. What if she staged her disappearance in order to escape the spotlight and live out her days in obscurity?
Wednesday
Shea
New York City
May the dreams you hold dearest be those that come true.
Every night, for as long as Shea Daniels can remember, those are the last words she’s heard before falling asleep.
Corey used to whisper them to her after they’d knelt for prayers, tucking in her quilt at the foot of the bed so that nothing scary could creep in with her while she was deep in slumber.
Now Shea whispers the words aloud to herself.
Corey, who’d loved and protected her and believed in dreams coming true, is long gone.
Corey, her parents, classmates, roommates, neighbors . . . so many others who were a part of her former life, have disappeared.
She’s alone in the world now, has been alone for years; alone even when she’s with a friend or colleague or her dogs. Alone even—no, especially—when a man shares her bed, creating a solitude more profound than being on her own in the dark.
There hasn’t been a man in months now. Not since December. But when there was, she’d wait until he’d drifted off before she got up to tuck in the quilt so that nothing could creep in. Then she’d slip back between the sheets, turn toward the wall, and whisper, May the dreams you hold dearest be those that come true.
It doesn’t work if she doesn’t say it aloud.
Sometimes it doesn’t work even when she does.
Without Corey, scary things can creep in no matter how snugly she tucks the bedding; no matter how tired she is when her head hits the pillow.
She’d learned long ago to cram every waking minute with work, books, exercise, errands, socializing . . . anything to keep busy. When you’re idle, there’s room in your brain for memories. That leaves her utterly exhausted most nights—including this one, three hours from her own time zone with city sounds and sirens, thunder and rain beyond the window.
Before crawling into her side, she seals the sheets and blankets on the opposite side all the way from the vacant pillow adjacent to her own to the foot of the bed where her dogs are curled up, already asleep.
“May the dreams you hold dearest be those that come true,” she whispers into the dark, and closes her eyes.
But tonight, there are no dreams.
Tonight, only nightmares.
Leila
Los Angeles
When her phone vibrates late Wednesday evening, Leila Randolph is curled up with the cats on the gray sectional, binge-watching Real Housewives.
Her first thought—hope—is that it’s a text from Stef. But no, she’d broken off communication with him weeks ago.
It definitely isn’t Gib, asleep upstairs, his snores occasionally audible over the television.
Maybe it’s one of her daughters. Ellie and Kate are in Anaheim with their dad, courtesy of a joint custody arrangement between Leila and her ex.
More likely, it’s yet another credit card company or bank reminding her that another payment is overdue.
Leila nudges the cats from her lap, finds her phone between the cushions, and sees not a text, but a reminder from herself: Check numbers. It’s one of the many calendar alerts that pop up daily, courtesy of an electronically organized life with too many moving parts.
“Well, you know what you are?” one Botoxed brunette shrieks at another on TV.
Check numbers.
What does that even mean?
Stumped, Leila swaps the phone for her glass of cabernet and settles back to watch the tequila-fueled Housewives bicker over who gets to sit where on the private plane to the Caribbean and who gets which of several master suites in their rented seaside villa.
Must be nice. For her own girls’ getaway last weekend, she’d scrimped for a back row middle airline seat and shared a no-frills Las Vegas hotel room with her friends J.J. and Molly, two fellow real housewives.
The Labor Day weekend trip marked exactly twenty-two years since they’d met as college freshmen at Northwestern University and established an instant bond upon discovering they all had birthdays the following week—Leila on the twelfth, J.J. on the sixteenth, Molly on the eighteenth.
They called themselves the September Girls, after the song—which was actually titled “September Gurls,” but J.J., an English lit major, wasn’t big on alternative spelling.
“We have to celebrate together every year, just like this, y’all, promise?” Molly had drawled the weekend before their eighteenth birthdays, as they took turns swigging from a bottle of bubbly swill.
“Maybe not just like this,” Leila said. “We’ll have real champagne. The good stuff. Or at least, better stuff.”
“Yeah, and we won’t need fake IDs to buy it,” J.J. added.
“Okay, but same time next year! And every year. Promise?”
They promised.
They kept it throughout their college years. When they turned twenty-one, they bought three gold necklaces with small sapphire pendants, their shared birthstone—September Girls forever together in spirit no matter where life landed them.
After graduation, dispersed across the country, they’d settled on celebrating only milestone birthdays in person. They managed to reconnect for their twenty-fifth, missed their thirtieth, and decided thirty-five wasn’t necessarily a milestone. Everyone was either broke, or busy with their own lives, or both.
We need to do something amazing when we hit the big 4-0, Molly had written last spring in their group text.
I’ll start planning! Leila replied.
Vegas was her idea. The others had never been there and had some reservations.
“Guys, it’s perfect for us,” Leila had assured them in a group Zoom meeting. “The weather’s nice, it’s easy for us all to get to, there are plenty of hotel bargains, and there’s a lot to do.”
“Like slot machines?” J.J. asked.
“We don’t have to gamble. There are shows, great restaurants, the hotel pool . . .”
“So we’re going to Vegas and we’re not going to any casinos? What’s the point in that?” Molly asked.
“We can go to casinos. We’ll each designate a certain amount of money we can spend on gambling and when it’s gone, it’s gone. They give you free drinks while you’re at the tables, and if you win enough, you get a lot more than that.”
J.J. snorted. “Yeah, like a fraction of our money back.”
“Or all of it. Or if you hit it really big, they might give you a dinner voucher or even comp the room.”
“Has that ever happened to you?” Molly asked.
“Not yet,” Leila said, as if she were an old Vegas pro. In truth, she’d only been there twice.
Once when she and Warren eloped, and again more recently on a stolen weekend with Stef. The first time, she and Warren lost the entire nest egg they’d saved up to buy furniture. The second time, she’d told Gib and the girls she had a training seminar for her joke of a job, and had been plagued by guilt before, during, after, and even now.
Not because she was cheating on Gib, because he isn’t her husband and they’re in an open relationship—his preference, not hers. Not even because she’d lied to him and the girls, because that was less messy, less complicated than the truth. It was for everyone’s benefit.
No, she feels guilty on behalf of herself. Guilty because she deserves so much better, and having learned long ago that this world never bestows the things you deserve, she’d promised herself that she’d never settle. Yet she does, over and over.
So, Vegas. Again. Hoping the third time might be the charm.
“Wow. Free drinks, free dinner, and a comped room? I really hope one of us gets lucky,” Molly said.
They hadn’t, collectively losing every predesignated gambling dollar in the first casino on the first day. That didn’t deter them from imagining how they could have spent a make-believe jackpot, and not just on luxuries. For all of them, a windfall would alleviate the burdens of debt, failed marriages, curtailed careers, and a pervasive feeling of powerlessness.
Leila had told them about losing her business, a high-end clothing boutique she’d envisioned as the next Fred Segal, and about the subsequent fruitless search for an adequate job and moving in with Gib because she had few other options. No other option.
J.J. shared that she and John had always dreamed of buying a house of their own with a home office where she could finally write her novel, and of sending their son to college and keeping him close by. Instead, they’re stuck in the same urban apartment in a decaying neighborhood, with Brian enlisted and deployed in a distant land.
Theater major Molly had given up on Hollywood stardom years ago, but found a measure of contentment in marriage and success in regional theater, only to have the pandemic curtail her career and unplanned pregnancy do the same to her marriage.
Three lives riddled with bad choices early on that hadn’t allowed them additional choices. Or perhaps, just riddled with bad luck.
Ah, now she remembers what Check numbers is about.
In the next commercial break, she looks around for her carry-on from the trip and finds it right where she’d dropped it after a delayed flight home Monday night.
Maybe some part of her subconscious couldn’t bear to empty the bag and return it to the closet shelf. Maybe, packed and waiting by the door, it’s a reminder that it is possible to escape this life.
She’d been desperate to get away from her daughters after a flurry of back-to-school preparations. She loves them in the innate, visceral way that a mother loves her children, but in adolescence, they’ve grown difficult to like.
And yes, she also needed to get away from Gib. He may not be a churlish adolescent, but he’s kicked off a new semester at the community college where he teaches philosophy and assumes that she’s as fascinated by his revised syllabus as he is.
She even needed to get away from the cats, who claw the couch instead of their scratch post and throw up hairballs on the rug; away from rearranging pillows to hide the thread pulls, and cleaning barf stains morning, noon, night.
Away from endless household tasks and cooking meals for people whose dietary needs change without warning for no apparent reason—one daughter gone gluten-free one day, the other on a Paleo diet the next, Gib prone to juice cleanses, fasts, and occasional veganism.
Away from the claustrophobic condo she’d once found welcoming and the mundane job she’d been forced to take after her dream business failed and the dry heat and smoke that cloak Southern California at this time of year like an ugly wool sweater on a supermodel.
Away from endless days filled with far too many obligations and not nearly enough choices.
Away, away, away . . .
Leila rifles through the bag and finds a copy of People magazine she’d read on the plane home. Tucked between the pages is a makeshift bookmark: a lottery ticket for the unprecedented billion dollar Dealin’ Dice jackpot.
She and her friends had chipped in to buy it on the way to the airport.
“It’ll give us something fun to think about,” Leila told them. “Maybe we’ll win enough to cover a nice dinner for our next birthday trip.”
“Or the trip itself,” J.J. said. “We can go to the Caribbean. Hell, we can buy a Caribbean island, if we get the billion. What should we name it?”
“September Girls’ Island, of course,” Leila said.
“That doesn’t sound like a real island.”
“Sure it does. Like Gilligan’s Island.”
“That’s a real island?” J.J. asked.
“September is hurricane season, y’all,” Molly pointed out. “Maybe that’s not the best name for a tropical island.”
“Well, we’ll make sure it’s not in the hurricane zone. And it should have a volcano, like Gilligan’s. But no quicksand.”
“Definitely no quicksand,” J.J. agreed. “I feel like I’ve been stuck in quicksand my whole life.”
“Same here. What do y’all think the odds are of winning the jackpot?”
“Probably better for Lucky Leila than other people.”
“You know I hate that nickname, J.J.”
“I thought you just hated your brothers for giving it to you.”
“If I were truly lucky, I’d have been born a man. Or at least, born into a family that wanted me.”
“You were wanted,” Molly reminded her just as she had in the old days, whenever Leila felt sorry for herself.
“Not by my brothers. Or my birth parents.”
J.J. patted her hand. “You don’t know that. Maybe they were forced to give you up.”
“If they were forced, why would they insist on a closed adoption? Wouldn’t they want to know where I am and that I’m okay? Or maybe have a chance to meet me someday?”
Back then, that would have been Molly’s cue to tell Leila to look at the bright side, pointing out how blessed she was to have been adopted by a pair of wealthy Chicago surgeons, who after having three biological sons believed a daughter would complete their family.
That was before her adoptive parents cut her off from their money and out of their lives because she’d chosen to pursue her own dream instead of the goals they’d laid out for her.
Now bright-side Molly said instead, “If we win the lottery, you can hire a detective and find your roots. Come on, it’s only a dollar each.”
It was a dollar more than they’d budgeted for gambling, but they bought the ticket anyway.
As Leila tosses the magazine into the recycling bin, another paper rectangle flutters from the pages. It looks almost like another ticket, but no, they’d only bought one. This is a photo strip from one of those old-fashioned booths.
