But there will be plenty of time for all that.
It’s time I told you about Adrienne Richards.
Adrienne Richards was not the kind of person who frequented Copper Falls, and Copper Falls was not the kind of place that would’ve appealed to her. The town itself was un-lovely, all those falling-down houses and boarded-up storefronts, dust gathering in the plateglass display windows that lined our little main street. Some of the towns farther south had cute little rows of shops for the summer people and enough seasonal business to sustain them; we only had one, the dairy bar, run by a lemon-faced woman named Maggie whose right forearm was forever bigger than her left from years of working the ice-cream scoop. Besides Strangler’s—and lord help the out-of-towner who tried to set foot in that shithole—there was nothing to attract tourists except the lake itself, which was beautiful but remote. Fifteen miles outside the un-lovely town, down a series of winding gravel roads that were tiresome to drive at the best of times, treacherous at night, and well out of reach of the nearest cell tower, which freaked a lot of city people out. The ones who did come usually wanted the place for a weekend, a week at most, and the only question they ever seemed to ask was whether it had Wi-Fi. （It didn’t.） It’s why I thought Adrienne’s message was a prank at first, some local jackass trying to have a little fun. It was like a parody, the way she pretzeled herself to make clear without saying it outright that she and Ethan were a Big Dang Deal. She wanted to book a full month （“money is no object”）， she wanted to confirm that the lake and the house were as isolated as they looked on Google Earth, and she wanted to confirm that our “staff” （I laughed at that one） were discreet, because she and her husband took their privacy very seriously.
Later, I realized why she chose Copper Falls, and my house, when everyone with that kind of money was vacationing in fancy places, the Hamptons or the Cape: she needed to be where they weren’t. She wanted the anonymity of Copper Falls, where nobody was sophisticated or interested enough to know her backstory. She wanted to escape her reputation, if only for the summer.
We had that in common. I think that’s why, eventually, she chose me, too.
For most people in Copper Falls, Adrienne and Ethan were irritating but uninteresting, just another rich couple who weren’t from around here and weren’t to be trusted, but whose money they’d grudgingly accept as long as they insisted on hanging around. The details of their lives, and the extent of their wealth, were irrelevant; when poverty has always been right next door, in your neighbor’s house if not your own, the difference between a millionaire and billionaire is just an abstraction. It’s like trying to calculate the travel distance to Mars, as compared with Jupiter. What’s another hundred light-years, when what really matters is that it’s totally out of reach and you’re never fucking getting there? Even when I realized that the Richardses weren’t just your average upper-middle-class couple, I couldn’t wrap my head around what it meant to have that kind of money.
But the way the world felt about them—that, I understood. When I did an internet search for Adrienne’s name, right after I received her prepayment in full for the month, it was suddenly clear why “discretion” was so important to her. She and her husband were famous for all the wrong reasons.
Ethan Richards was a criminal. The soft kind, one of those fancy, white-collar bad guys who floats away on a golden parachute and lands gently in a pile of cash while the company he looted burns to the ground. The scandal was old news by then, but stories like this always ring the same bells. Shady dealings, hidden losses, men with corner offices tiptoeing along the finest of lines between unethical and illegal in order to line their already-overstuffed pockets, and stepping all over the little guy on their way to wealth. When the shit finally hit the fan, hundreds of people lost their jobs, and even more lost their life savings. The scope of the whole thing was hard to grasp, but the impact was plain enough. Somewhere, someone’s grandma is going to spend her retirement eating Fancy Feast in an unheated apartment because of what Ethan Richards and his friends did—and of all the men involved, Ethan got away without a slap on the wrist.
That night, I stayed up for hours reading all the stories about his arrest and subsequent release, and all the outraged op-eds that came later, about why the laws needed changing so that people like Ethan Richards would pay for their crimes down the road. He was never charged, but it almost didn’t matter. As far as the press and the public were concerned, he was guilty on all counts, with Adrienne as his codefendant. It was funny how that worked out. People were angry at him, but, lord, they really hated her. You could see why: she made the perfect villain, a gorgeous picture of shallow privilege with her little vanity projects, her Instagram sponsorships, her totally unearned life in the lap of luxury. And then there was the callousness; she seemed either ignorant or indifferent when it came to the havoc her husband had wrought, and some of the articles even slyly suggested that she might have had a hand in it herself, a flawlessly highlighted, fashion-forward Lady Macbeth urging on her man from behind the scenes. Later, after I got to know her better, I would decide that they were probably wrong about that. Adrienne just wasn’t ambitious or imaginative enough to mastermind a billion-dollar accounting scandal. But the more I read that night, the more I couldn’t help admiring Adrienne Richards. The corporate drama, the news stories, the possibility that her husband might be indicted for fraud and go to prison, leaving her with nothing—a lot of women would have lost their minds, but not Adrienne. More than anything, it all seemed to bore her.