Next to Heaven E-Book

James Frey

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 432

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Privilege, sex, scandal, and murder. The new novel from Sunday Times-bestselling author James Frey. 'Will be the novel on every beach towel this summer, all summer, everywhere' Esquire 'A deliriously over-the-top portrait of decadence on the brink' Bustle 'A Connecticut sex romp-cum-murder mystery' Vanity Fair Behind every great fortune, lies a great crime - Honoré de Balzac New Bethlehem, Connecticut. Picture-perfect lawns, manicured hedges, multi-million dollar homes. But beneath the designer yoga gear and country club memberships lies a darker reality. In this world of excess, Devon and Belle have it all – beauty, money, status. But they want something more. Something dangerous. Something that makes them feel alive. Their solution? A party – a meticulously curated gathering of New Bethlehem's elite, from a desperate ex-NFL quarterback to a hockey coach with a penchant for married women, and a ruthless Wall Street 'closer' who wields his wealth like a weapon. One night. Multiple betrayals. And a murder that will shatter New Bethlehem's carefully constructed facade. Fans of The White Lotus and Big Little Lies will be drawn into the dark underbelly of the American Dream – a world where money can buy anything, until it ruins everything. READERS ARE THRILLED, UNSETTLED AND SEDUCED 'Sharp, provocative … Captivates with its blend of dark humour and social commentary' 'Dark, disturbing and funny' 'Transcends simple categorization - part thriller, part social satire, part moral fable - and the result is both entertaining and deeply unsettling' 'A mix of wit, mystery and dark undertone … I couldn't put it down … Perfect pool side reading' 'I deeply loved this book … the ending slaps' 'Super fun and sexy summer read! Rich people behaving badly'

Leseprobe

Also by James Frey

A Million Little PiecesMy Friend LeonardBright Shiny MorningThe Final Testament of the Holy BibleKaterina

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

– Honoré de Balzac

The Beautiful and the Rich

Devon often dreamed of punching her husband in the face. She didn’t necessarily want to hurt him. And he often didn’t do anything to deserve it. She was just tired of him. Of his voice, of his smell, the way he breathed, how he chewed, the way he sniffed, the way it sounded when he swallowed, that he picked his fingernails and sometimes dropped them on the bathroom floor instead of the trash can, that he both snored and farted while he slept. None of it was done to deliberately annoy her, and he didn’t know that any of it did. It didn’t matter. She wanted to punch him. Right in his rotten fucking face.

Like so many marriages among the one percent, and even more so among the one percent of the one percent, their marriage was one of convenience, a business relationship. They met when she was twenty-eight and he was thirty. At an art opening in Chelsea, New York City. The show was of highly sexual, abstract expressionist paintings made by a beautiful young French woman. It was called Nympho, and the paintings were believed, though the painter neither confirmed nor denied it, to be portraits of her and a series of wealthy older men with whom she had had affairs, one of whom was the richest man in Paris, another whose brother had been the President of France.

Devon had been working at the gallery for six years. It was the largest and most prestigious art gallery in the world, with three spaces in New York, and outposts in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Rome, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Each of them had three or four directors, essentially high-paid salespeople with fancy titles. At twenty-five, Devon had become its youngest director. Yes, she had an art history degree from Princeton, and yes she had grown up around art and the art world, and yes she was smart and capable and knew her shit, but none of those things really mattered. What mattered was that she was young and beautiful, and she had young and beautiful friends who would come to the shows, and she could sell extraordinarily expensive art to rich men who wanted to sleep with her. And occasionally she did sleep with one of them. Never to close a deal, but for the fun of it, the thrill, the feeling of power and agency it gave her, so she had a good story the next time she went out with her girlfriends. And she always made the stories better, made them what she wished had happened, instead of what usually did, which was five minutes of foreplay (if she was lucky), two minutes of sex (if she was lucky), thirty seconds of cuddling (far too long after the aforementioned performance metrics), and a quick exit.

As happened before every opening, Devon and the other directors studied the guest list. As with every guest list, it was heavy with bankers, hedge fund managers, private equity partners, their wives and girlfriends, the art advisors who helped them build their collections and make them feel important, other artists, friends and family of the artist. The directors only cared about The Money, as they called the various men who worked in finance. The Money bought paintings from them, and they only got paid when they sold paintings. All fourteen of the paintings in Nympho had already been sold. The waiting list for future paintings by the artist had 220 names on it. So in many ways the list for this particular show was irrelevant, but you could always sell The Money something else, and it was always interesting to see if any new names had become rich enough to be added to the list.

And there was a new name, Billy McCallister. Though she did not know Billy, his reputation preceded him. He was the son of a plumber from New Hyde Park, Long Island. He had gone to Exeter on a full ride and graduated at sixteen. From there he went to the Wharton joint undergrad/MBA program on a full ride and graduated at twenty. He immediately went to work at Goldman, who had started recruiting him when he was seventeen, and became the second-youngest partner in the bank’s history at twenty-four. At twenty-five, he was making twenty million dollars a year. He left Goldman at twenty-eight and started his own hedge fund. It was a spectacular success and his twenty million a year jumped to fifty million a year. And though he had not made any major art purchases yet, it was known that he was looking, and every gallery in the world wanted to land him as a client. He was thick, gruff, unpolished, rude, arrogant, aggressive, ruthless, and brilliant. His father, a physically imposing man known all over Long Island for his short temper, meaty hands, and wrench skills, never understood him. Until he died, when Billy was twelve, after mistaking a bottle of rat poison for Gatorade while he was drunk, he called Billy Little Mister Softie, and he routinely told Billy that math was for pussies, that real men did real work, with their hands, and with their wrenches.

Billy didn’t mourn his father. He didn’t cry when he heard the news, and he has never visited his grave, but the torment never left him. And he was determined to prove his father wrong. Billy understood that math was the governing language of the universe. That whatever you wanted in life could be provided by math, and that whatever you wanted to understand could be explained by math. And he vowed he would never be a pussy, as his father so lovingly branded him. He would be an AFL, an Asskicker for Life. A Great White Shark. A Silverback. An Alpha among Alphas. Nobody would ever fuck with him or demean him again, and if they did, he would respond in ways he never could with his father. He would use mathematics and his gifts in understanding and manipulating it, to build an empire, to become a King, or as close to a King as you could in America, which is a Billionaire.

He was well on his way when he and Devon met. The hours leading up to an opening can be frantic and stressful, so she had forgotten about him when the gallery doors opened. There was a huge crowd, a line that wrapped down 24th Street and on to 11th Avenue. The exhibition space, a huge open white room with thirty-foot ceilings, was teeming with people, all either rich or cool, and almost never both. Despite their advantages, rich people were rarely ever cool, though they spent huge amounts of money trying to achieve it. And cool people were rarely rich because they were lazy, and part of being cool is not giving a fuck. But rich people and cool people often interact because each has what the other wants. Whatever they were, rich or cool, very few of them were looking at the paintings. If you want to actually look or contemplate art, you don’t go see the paintings on opening night. Openings are some combination of cocktail party, fashion show, and peacock’s parade. Everyone’s currency, whether it is cash or cache, is on full display, and most people spend their time at openings checking each other out, judging each other, and gossiping about each other. And that was the case at the Nympho show. Except for one man, standing motionless in front of a painting, staring intently at a swirl of pink and orange and beige and brown bodies, all of them engaged in sinful activities with each other, a painting called A Night at the Office, believed to be the depiction of an orgy the artist attended with one of the Princes of Monaco. Devon saw him, and she was curious, and she made her way through the crowd, and stood next to him, staring at the painting without speaking. She knew if she stayed silent, at some point he would speak. So she did, she stood silently next to him and stared as the crowd drifted around them, and so he did, after two or three minutes, in a deep voice that sounded like a mixture of gravel, dirt, and menace.

I want it.

It’s already sold.

I don’t care. I want it.

I can’t help you.

Yes, you can.

I can’t.

Go tell your boss I’ll pay him five times more than whatever he sold it for.

It’s not about the money.

Yes, it is.

We try to place paintings in collections where they will be loved and protected and kept off the secondary market.

It’s about the money. Everything is about money. You of all people should know that, Miss FancyPants. Now please go deliver my message.

Neither looked away from the painting during the conversation. And unwilling to leave after his order, Devon stood and stared at the painting until he walked away, moving on to the next one. Part of her was enraged. Part of her was intrigued. Part of her was turned on. Nobody had ever called her anything like Miss FancyPants before. If people knew about her background, and she assumed most did, they never brought it up. It was an unspoken rule. One of manners, of discretion. He clearly didn’t give a fuck. And she kind of liked it.

And indeed it would be fair to call Devon Lodge Kensington a Miss FancyPants. She had grown up in Greenwich on an estate called Willowvale, with a very large ivy-covered stone house that was laughingly called a cottage on a very large piece of perfectly manicured land in the Greenwich Back Country, where homes stood behind gates and hedges and on lawns large enough for polo fields, which were not uncommon. Devon’s ancestors had come to America on the Mayflower. They founded a bank in New York, built a railroad empire, opened copper, silver, and gold mines. If there were such a thing as royalty in America, her family was royal. Not Kings or Queens, but close enough, similar to powerful Dukes or Duchesses. They didn’t run the country, but when a member of her family expressed an opinion to the people who did, which was rare, the opinion was heard. She had gone to Greenwich Academy, one of the best girls’ schools in the country, for nursery, elementary, and middle school. After GA, she went to boarding school at Miss Porter’s, whose notable alumnae include Laura Rockefeller, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lilly Pulitzer, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Agnes Gund. After Porter’s, she went to Princeton and was a member of The Ivy, its most prestigious dining club. She graduated with an honors degree in art history and job offers from eight galleries and three auction houses. She took the job that paid her the most and offered the most opportunity for her to make money. Although no one but her, her parents, and their bankers knew she needed it.

For as with most great and wealthy families, after a few generations, its descendants had grown lazy. Though highly and very expensively educated, her parents had never worked. They played tennis and golf. They read books and tanned by the pool. They went to parties and got drunk and took recreational drugs, most often cocaine. They traveled. They bought art and cars and expensive clothing. They had affairs. And gradually their part of the family fortune dwindled away. By the time Devon was finishing college, most of it was gone. There were assets, the house, some paintings, a smaller house in Rhode Island, but nobody wanted to suffer the humiliation of having to sell them. So right before she graduated, her parents took her out to dinner and apprized her of their situation. When she recovered from the shock, they told her they expected her to help them, to support them, to save them. She either needed to make a fortune, or marry one. It was the least she could do, considering how much they loved her, and how much money they had spent on her childhood.

And it was entirely possible for Devon. Aside from carrying a famous family name, she was legitimately and stunningly gorgeous, the latest in a line of classic, elegant Kensington beauties. She was tall, thin, she had deep blue eyes like a warm calm sea, naturally streaked dirty blonde hair to the middle of her back, sometimes loose, sometimes braided. Clothing hung on her body as if it were made for her. Her skin glowed, a tone of the lightest olive, as if there were a distant descendant that might not have been white or Christian, though that was certainly never acknowledged or discussed. Her beauty was such that men rarely hit on her, or even spoke to her, so dumbstruck and intimidated were they by simply being near her. When the shock of the revelation faded, she agreed to do what she could, which meant doing what her parents had asked and what they expected, which meant saving face, saving the family name, saving them.

She dated a movie star. The son of a billionaire. A tech founder. She dated the scion of another famous family, though they quickly discovered they were in exactly the same situation and amicably parted ways. She dated a famous writer a few years older, and though he was funny and weird and cool and great in bed, he was broke, and that just wouldn’t do. She often appeared on Page Six, in Women’s Wear Daily, in the society pages of the New York Times. She was alternately called an It Girl, and the most eligible single woman in New York. There was no shortage of suitors for Devon, though none was ever both rich enough and interesting enough for her to stay, much less marry. When she had agreed to the arrangement with her parents, she had promised to be married by the time she was thirty, which was around the time they would be out of money. When she met Billy, she knew her time, and their time, was running short.

At the dinner and party after the opening, where the already exclusive guest list was trimmed by 80 percent, she ignored him. She could feel him watching her, staring at her, trying to get close to her, and every time he did, she moved away. She could feel his lust and desire for her filling the room like cigarette smoke, drifting everywhere, filling everyone’s lungs, including her own, she could taste it and smell it, it was aggressive and passionate and primal, and she didn’t mind it, she breathed it in and held it, she breathed it in and let it fill her. She knew she could have him if she so chose. And she knew that avoiding him and ignoring him would make him want her more. When she left before the party was over, he tried to follow her outside. She had called a car and it was waiting for her. She watched him watch her drive away. He waved to try to get her attention and she looked away. And as the car took her back to her apartment in Nolita, as she stared out the window and watched the lights of Lower Manhattan pass, some part of her knew. Now it was just details. How it would happen and how long it would take. She knew.

She spoke to her boss, the great man, the King of the Art World, the slickest motherfucker to ever hawk art in the history of the world, the next day. She told him about Billy’s offer. He was fucking thrilled. As happy as she had ever seen him. It took enormous amounts of capital to keep an operation as large as his running, and he knew Billy had enormous amounts of capital. Though the painting had been committed to longtime friends of his, loyal patrons of his gallery, he was willing to take the painting away and sell it to someone else, if it benefited him. They were rich, but not as rich as Billy, and nowhere near as rich as Billy would someday be if he stayed on his current trajectory. He told Devon to close the deal immediately, sell Billy the painting, get the cash as soon as possible, let him know when the wire cleared. He was trying to buy a thirty-million-dollar painting in LA that he knew he could flip to a Russian for three times what he was going to pay for it, and he needed Billy’s cash to close the deal. Devon smiled and nodded, but she had other plans. She was going to make Billy wait. She was going to make him sweat. She knew everyone in his life jumped whenever he said he needed something done, and she wasn’t going to do it. Especially given what she was feeling and what she believed was in their future. She was going to make him understand that she was not his, even though, like the painting, he was buying her with his fast-expanding riches.

He called the gallery twice that day, twice more the next, three times the day after. He sent her multiple emails. She didn’t return the calls or respond to the emails. He got her cell and left two messages. She did not respond. Her boss was calling her every hour to check on the money, and she stopped picking up the phone when she saw it was him. Midway through day four, after she decided exactly how she was going to handle the call, and what she was going to try to learn, which was how much she was worth to him, she called him. He picked up after the first ring.

Why’d it take so long for you to get back to me?

Both the gallery and I were doing some checking.

Checking? Checking on what?

To see if you have the money you are soon going to owe us.

Seriously?

I don’t know you, Mr. McCallister.

Call me Billy.

I don’t know you, Mr. McCallister, and the gallery doesn’t know you, and we do our due diligence with new clients before we do deals with them.

I think you, and everyone at your gallery, and your boss, all know I have the fucking money.

We shall soon see.

That mean we have a deal?

There are some additional terms.

You want me to pay more than fiveX what the painting is worth?

We want you to make a commitment.

What kind of commitment?

To purchase ten million dollars more of art from us. Art to be chosen for you by me. We want A Night at the Office to be surrounded by other works of art that are worthy of it. Art with which it can converse.

Ten million more.

Yes.

Why don’t we make it twenty. So that it’s a really good fucking conversation.

She laughed.

Twenty million it is, Mr. McCallister.

Call me Mr. McCallister again and the deal is off. My name is Billy.

I’m sure we will be able to inspire some exceptional conversation with twenty million, Billy.

Any more new terms?

The initial ten million for A Night at the Office needs to be wired by the end of the day.

Cool. Any more?

No, that’s all.

Now I have one.

I can’t promise you we’ll accept it.

You’re not going to blow a thirty-million-dollar deal.

We’ll see.

I want you to have dinner with me.

She pauses, makes him wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Until he says

Still there?

She takes a deep breath so he knows she’s still there.

Makes him wait longer.

Until she says

I don’t fuck men that buy art from me.

He chuckles.

You mean you haven’t yet fucked a man that buys art from you.

She smiles.

I mean don’t expect anything from me, except lively conservation and a polite thank you at the end of the evening.

I wouldn’t expect anything more, Miss Kensington.

Call me Devon.

I wouldn’t expect anything more, Devon.

I’ll send the invoice over now. Check your email. We’ll expect funds by the end of the day. Let me know when you want to have dinner.

I’ll pick you up at six tonight, when the gallery closes.

You move fast, Billy.

Yes, Devon, I do. See you in a few hours.

He hung up and Devon sent the invoice and the money arrived five minutes later. Devon went to tell her boss, and also told him about the additional twenty million, and he stood up and cheered and asked if he could give her a hug, and she said no, and she left. It was already three and she didn’t think she’d have time to go home and change, so she waited. She called a couple friends. She looked at online auction catalogs for the upcoming contemporary art sales. She read some book reviews. She bought a new handbag and pair of heels, rewarding herself for the giant commission she just earned from the deal with Billy. At 6:15 she left the gallery and stepped outside. Billy was waiting for her, standing next to a vintage red Ferrari from the late ’60s, a dozen roses in his hand. He smiled, and despite trying not to, Devon smiled.

Hi, Devon.

Hi, Billy.

You ready to go for a ride?

I’m not sure I have a choice.

You always have a choice, you just have to be willing to deal with the consequences if you make the wrong one.

She motioned toward the flowers.

Those for me?

Yes.

He handed them to her.

Thank you.

May I get the door for you?

That would be nice, thank you.

She walked to the passenger door. He opened it. She got into the car. The leather was soft, supple, worn, but worn in a way that made it more comfortable, more luxurious, so that it wrapped itself around her like an old blanket. He closed the door and walked to the driver’s door and got behind the wheel and started the engine and the engine growled, low and strong, with the promise of pleasure and power if pushed properly. He turned and smiled at her.

Ready to go?

You going to tell me where we’re going?

I think you already know.

Yeah?

Yeah.

Tell me.

We’re going all the way, Devon. You and me. All the way.

The Beautiful and the Rich, Part 2

They did indeed go all the way.

And rather quickly.

She moved into his Tribeca penthouse after three months.

They were engaged after six.

The wedding was a year later, at Christ Church in Greenwich.

They honeymooned for a month.

Lamu for a week, the Seychelles for a week, Florence for a week, Paris for a week.

She was pregnant three months later.

They sold the penthouse in Tribeca and bought a townhouse in the West Village.

She furnished it, decorated it, filled it with beautiful paintings.

She gave birth to their daughter, Charlotte Kensington McCallister.

He doted on Charlotte, loved to give her the bottle, changed her diapers, sang her nursery rhymes when she couldn’t sleep.

His fund grew to three billion four billion six eight ten fourteen.

Their fortune grew five hundred million one point five billion three.

They were great friends.

They respected each other.

They fucked wildly and often, with great passion and enthusiasm.

They were happy.

She had saved her family and had fallen truly and deeply in love.

He had married into a famous family and made his name and his fortune and had fallen truly and deeply in love.

She trusted him and believed in him and supported him, and she let herself be vulnerable with him, showed him what lived beneath her looks and her name and her upbringing, a strong smart woman who was scared of the future, even though she had no reason, and was often insecure about herself, even though she always exuded what appeared to be unshakable poise, grace, and confidence.

He trusted her in a way that he never trusted anyone and was vulnerable in ways that he never was with anyone else. As brutal and gruff and demanding and harsh as he could be at work and in the world, at home he was kind and generous and helpful and supportive.

Her days were spent raising their daughter and looking at art and seeing old friends and running their home.

His days were spent accumulating information and making trades and tracking returns and demanding more, more, more.

They spent some weekends in Connecticut with her parents, some weekends in Cold Spring Harbor, where he had bought his mother a house, some weekends at their place in Sagaponack, some weekends they stayed home.

They traveled often and always on their own plane, Capri and Beaulieu, London and Paris, Barcelona and Marrakesh, St. Barts, Turks, Angra dos Reis.

She got pregnant again when Charlotte was two.

As easy as her first pregnancy, the second was as difficult. She gained three times the weight, she was depressed, rashes came and went, she had abdominal pains, migraines, there were days she couldn’t get out of bed, it all compounded, each issue made the other worse, she was scared, so scared, she was so so very scared.

After a long run of sustained success, his fund was struggling. The markets were volatile, he was overleveraged, time at home had taken away from time at the office, he lost his focus and he lost his edge, returns were down if there were any at all and investors were withdrawing, he was depressed, angry, and despite having accumulated vast wealth, he was scared it would all go away, he was scared, so scared, so so very scared.

He spent more time at the office ten twelve sixteen hours a day when she needed him most at home, needed his love, needed his strength, needed his support.

Her depression became worse she became quiet and withdrawn when he needed her most, needed her love, needed her strength, needed her support.

She gave birth to their son, Nicholas Kensington McCallister.

Nicholas was born on a Thursday, Billy was back in the office on Monday, there were signs of a recession, he stayed there until Wednesday.

He needed his focus, he needed his edge.

She needed him.

There were night nurses and nannies, a chef and a driver, a trainer and a yoga instructor, none of it mattered her depression got worse.

They drifted.

Into their own minds, their own hearts, their own fear, their own pain.

They drifted.

Apart.

Something had to change but they were both too lost to find each other, something had to change they couldn’t keep going as it was, they both knew.

He couldn’t leave her because if he did the prenup was invalidated.

She couldn’t leave him because of the prenup.

Staring out the window at the concrete street, at the trash lining it, at the rats in the trash, at the cars moving past, at the people quickly walking, at the other buildings one on top of the other on top of the other, at the streetlights and storefronts, at piles of dogshit on the sidewalk, her heart spoke to her, her heart said go.

Go.

Go.

Go to the trees and grass and birds, to an open sky, the stars at night, room to wander and room to dream, space for their children to run wild and free, maybe a horse, maybe horses, a long driveway lined with flowers, a happy dog always there when they got home, neighbors they knew, a country club, their own garage, somewhere she could breathe again, somewhere that offered peace, somewhere that offered them a new life, and a new chance.

She wanted to go home.

For the first time in months they sat and had a long dinner together, they were open and vulnerable again, spoke of their fears and their sadness, and it felt like they had a chance at rekindling the old, and finding something new.

They agreed it was time.

They went.

A Kind of Holy Land

The town was founded in 1690 by a man named Amos Mudge. Amos was a farmer who needed somewhere to sell his carrots and potatoes, his apples and corn. So he started a small market that grew into a larger market that grew into a small village that grew into a town. The town needed a name. Amos loved Jesus, and he prayed to Jesus every night and every morning and before every meal. He believed Jesus would soon return to Earth to save humanity, and he wanted the new town to be the kind of place where Jesus might choose to live and preach and do his Godly work. He wanted the town to be, next to Heaven, the most beautiful place in existence, the most peaceful, the most moral, the most Christian. He called the town New Bethlehem.

The land around the town was soon bought up by other farmers, attracted by the local market. As they plowed the land, they discovered it was filled with stones, some small, some large, all bad for farming. Needing a place to put the stones, they built low stone walls along the roads and their property lines, both of which were winding and irregular. Two rivers ran through the town, and the farmers started creating small ponds around the rivers and all over the town in order to irrigate their crops. Jesus didn’t come, but the town prospered, and the farmers built lovely saltbox, cape, and colonial homes along the roads. The more successful the farmer, the larger the house, and many of the farmers were quite successful. In 1715, the Legislature of Colonial Connecticut officially recognized New Bethlehem as a Colonial Parish and Village.

When the American Revolutionary War started in 1775, the farmers were almost unanimously on the side of the rebels. They could help feed and shelter the soldiers, but many wanted to learn a new trade and expand beyond farming. Several sons of prominent farmers learned the skill of cobbling, making shoes and boots, and opened shops in the town in order to provide the new American soldiers with shoes and boots that would keep their feet warm in winter. As the war dragged on and eventually ended in the birth of a new nation, the cobblers’ success drew in more cobblers, and soon the town was one of the cobbling centers of the new United States. It remained so for almost one hundred years and also supplied the boots for many of the Union soldiers during the Civil War.

The railroad arrived after the Civil War, and because everyone needed shoes, a special spur was built off the New Haven line, which runs from New York City to New Haven, Connecticut. New Bethlehem was the only town with its own spur off the main line, and the smallest town with its own station. The train brought new merchants, and the expanding upper-middle class of lawyers, bankers, and doctors, who wanted to get out of the dirty, smoggy, and dangerous New York of the Industrial Revolution, and provide better and quieter lives for their families. The two streets of the town, Main Street and Maple Street, which were lined with one and two-story buildings that housed cobblers and small shoe factories, expanded and new buildings were built. The new merchants opened dry goods stores, general stores, butcher shops, doctor’s offices, lawyer’s offices, groceries, tailor shops, confectioneries, apothecaries, bookstores, and a host of taverns and saloons. Many of the cobblers sold their buildings and moved away. The population grew from one thousand to four thousand in a decade.

Around this new class of New Bethlehemians grew the institutions to serve them, a town government, a fire department, a police force, public and private schools, and churches. On one intersection just outside of the main area of town, churches were built on three of the four corners, all facing each other, and the intersection became known as God’s Corner. Within half a mile of town was a Catholic church, a Presbyterian church, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Congregational, and Baptist churches. New Bethlehem became known as a safe and prosperous town, one where a man could earn a good wage and raise a family. And with that reputation came more visitors, members of New York’s upper class, America’s first wave of Robber Barons and Industrial Titans, and their closest associates. Many of them owned summer homes in places like Newport, Saratoga Springs, Bar Harbor, Cape Cod, and Lake George. None of those places was, at the time, particularly quick or easy to get to, so they began looking for areas where they could purchase large plots of land to build country estates. The farmers were happy to oblige, and from the late 1880s until the Stock Market Crash of 1929, almost all of the farms in New Bethlehem were purchased and converted into large homes on big plots of land, or estates, the largest of which had eight hundred acres and a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot Tudor mansion modeled after Montacute House, Somerset, England. The estates started getting broken up during the Great Depression by formerly wealthy estate owners who needed cash. To prevent overcrowding, the town government instituted zoning laws requiring ownership of certain amounts of land in order to build a house. Directly in and around town was designated the Half Zone, requiring a half acre of land. In a tight ring around the town was Zone One, requiring one acre. In a tight ring around Zone One was Zone Two, requiring two acres. The remaining 80 percent of land within the town’s borders was designated Zone Four, requiring a minimum of four acres of land to build a house. These laws remain in place today, though a plot within the Half Zone can be reduced to a quarter acre with the approval of the Town Zoning Authority, which rarely happens.

After World War II, the town boomed, as did the rest of the country. The wealth lost during the Great Depression was rebuilt, often by the same families who lost it, and by many new families, though almost all of them were white. As the suburbs expanded and more people could afford to leave cities, particularly New York City, the richest and most successful of them moved to Connecticut, which at the time did not make its residents pay income tax. Towns like Greenwich, Darien, Westport, and New Bethlehem became the wealthiest towns in the country. Each of them had their own characteristics and types of residents. Greenwich was where you moved if you were wealthy and wanted people to know it and is both the largest and the closest to New York. Westport was primarily Jewish, and most of the town was on Long Island Sound, its coast lined with beaches and parks and homes on the water, and is the farthest from the city. Darien was the new money, the loud money, half of the town on Long Island Sound, and half of the town more rural. New Bethlehem was where you moved if you were rich, but never wanted to discuss money, and is the smallest of the towns, the most discreet, the most rural, and the most artistic. All four towns were almost entirely white and continue to be, though they have all become slightly more diverse.

In the ’50s and ’60s New Bethlehem also underwent an architectural revolution. Architect Philip Johnson and his partner David Whitney bought a forty-nine-acre parcel of land on Ponus Ridge Road and built a complex of mid-century modern buildings on it, the most famous of which is the Glass House, the most famous mid-century building in the world. Johnson’s presence brought in a number of other architects, including John Johansen, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, and Eliot Noyes, who became known as the Harvard Five, and who built over two hundred houses in the town, making it the most architecturally significant small town in the world, and the global center of mid-century modern architecture.

Today, New Bethlehem remains what it has long been, and will likely remain for as long as it exists, a place where wealthy people, who value privacy and discretion, and who make achievement, both educational and athletic, a priority, live quietly and raise their families. Until the tech boom in Silicon Valley, the town had long reigned as the wealthiest town in the United States. It has one of the best public school systems in the country, three elite private prep schools. Its athletic programs are among the best in the country, with the best facilities and the best coaches money can buy, and it currently has players competing in every major professional sports league in the United States, on the pro golf and tennis tours, and had eleven athletes representing the United States in the last Olympics. The houses are large and the lawns are beautiful, and much of the town is still wild, heavily wooded, filled with wildlife. The town protects the land and limits what can be done with it and on it, and bobcats, bears, packs of coyotes and coywolves, herds of deer, wild turkeys, hawks eagles ducks geese and owls are regularly seen going about their business. As they mostly do with each other, the residents of the town leave them alone, and let them go about their business in peace.

And the residents, there are seventeen thousand of them, which has been the approximate population for the last fifty years. They are 95 percent white, 1 percent black, 3 percent Asian, 1 percent other. They are 84 percent Christian, 12 percent Jewish, 3 percent other. Like most of the wealthiest towns in the country, New Bethlehem is not a diverse place, though it is vastly more diverse than it was fifty years ago, thirty years ago, fifteen years ago. Almost all of its residents, regardless of their ethnicity or religion, are rich. Some of them are beautiful. Many of them are famous, a few are infamous. There are movie stars, rock stars, athletes, the hosts of all three major network news shows, famous comedians and famous artists, a notorious writer, a beloved writer, too many CEOs to count, being a partner at a private equity firm or hedge bank or bank in New Bethlehem is like being a teacher or an accountant or a corporate middle manager in more middle-class towns. The residents generally leave each other alone and protect each other. The rich and the famous are never bothered. They can go to the local coffee shop or grocery store or their kid’s soccer game without being hassled or being treated any differently than anyone else. In New Bethlehem the cool kids are the ones who get grades, play sports, and are good people. They are expected to go to excellent colleges and universities, and they are expected to have long lucrative careers when they reach adulthood, and almost all of them do. Achievement and success and security is the goal for everyone. Being great and not having to advertise it is the common goal. The town has a fifty-million-dollar library. A sixty-million-dollar YMCA that costs ninety-nine dollars a month to use. On its two main streets, and in the entire town, there are no fast-food restaurants of any kind or chain stores of any kind. It has twelve public parks spread over two thousand acres of land with public pools, tennis courts, a dog park, a public theater, spaces for art exhibitions, hiking trails, paddle tennis courts, an outdoor ice rink. It has a nature center with walking trails and a large bird rescue. It has a ten-acre field specifically planted with flowers that attract fireflies that light up on summer nights like a sky filled with a billion dancing stars. It has one of the most heavily funded per-capita police forces in the country and one of the lowest crime rates. It has its own living facility for its elderly residents, with its own medical facilities. It has one of the oldest and most respected addiction and mental health hospitals in the world. It’s housed in several century-old mansions that were purchased over twenty years and sit on fifteen acres of land. Though it’s not specifically for the town’s residents, plenty of them end up spending time there.

New Bethlehem is as beautiful and safe and perfect a town as exists in the United States, as beautiful and safe and perfect a town as exists anywhere in the world. But no beauty exists without flaws, however hidden. Absolute safety is but an illusion. No matter what we think or see or believe or feel, perfection isn’t real. And beneath the beauty and safety and perfection of New Bethlehem, there are secrets and there are lies, and there is sadness and there is rage, there is failure and there is desperation, betrayal and heartbreak, hate and violence.

And once or twice a century, there is murder.

The Perfect Wife

She didn’t like to admit it, because in today’s world women were supposed to be ambitious and want careers, to be feminists, and to want to be strong and independent, but all she ever wanted, her life’s great dream, was to be a wife and to be a mother.

To be a great wife.

To be a great mother.

To live a long and beautiful life with a man she loved in a safe, quiet town where they could raise at least two children, but hopefully four, and if she was really lucky, at least one boy and one girl.

Her dream came true.

Kind of.

Grace Hunter grew up in Chicago, on the North Side of the city in Lincoln Park. Her dad, Peter, was a Political Science Professor at DePaul, and her mother, Jen, was a nurse. She was an only child. Her parents had wanted more children, but complications during her birth prevented her mother from bearing any more children. They didn’t mourn the loss. They dedicated themselves to being the best parents they could be for Grace. As her father said—you can’t mourn losing something you never had, and you should always be happy with whatever God decides to give you.

Her father was not a religious man. But he did believe in God. He believed very deeply in a God of his own choosing. A kind God. A loving God. A God that wanted the best for him, and for his family, and for the world, but also sometimes had other plans. Her father found his God when he quit drinking. He had just finished his master’s degree and had just started dating Grace’s mother, Jen, his future wife. He had grown up in Cleveland in a family of hard-drinking men, almost all of them steelworkers, or unemployed steelworkers. Though he had chosen a different occupational path, he carried on the family tradition of getting drunk. He was not a daily drinker, but when he did drink, he got fucking drunk. And when he got fucking drunk, he liked to fight. On their fourth date, after a lovely and very promising first three, they went to a Christmas Party for his political science department. One of his colleagues was dressed up as Santa. He asked Jen if she wanted to sit on his lap. She politely declined. He asked again, and reached for her in an attempt to pull her on to his lap. Peter, who had had nine whiskey sours, and was almost done with number ten, saw what was happening and rushed across the room, dove through the air, knocked Santa off his chair and on his ass, and pummeled him, his fake beard turning the same red as the suit from a broken nose and a split lip. While Jen appreciated the chivalry involved, she was embarrassed and scared. She immediately got him out of the party and safely home to bed, but the next morning, she called him and told him if anything like it ever happened again, she would leave him. He knew if he kept drinking, it would happen again, so he quit. And while he didn’t need a full recovery program, he looked into them, and he liked AA’s approach to God, and each person believing in a God of their choosing. And his God was good to him, even if his God didn’t grant him all of his wishes. He had a sweet beautiful daughter. Grace would be their only child. He and Jen would be absolutely the best parents they could be to her, and for her.

They lived in a small townhouse. They bought it in the ’70s when most people were leaving cities for the suburbs and prices were low. It was on a street of other townhouses, some large, some small, none of which they could dream of affording today. Grace went to local public schools, Abraham Lincoln Elementary and Lincoln Park Middle and High Schools. She loved and was exceptionally good at playing tennis, practicing on rotating days with each of her parents. She was tall and athletic, brownish/reddish/auburnish hair and bright hazel eyes, freckles that came out in the sun, which if you loved playing tennis, meant most of the time. She wasn’t good enough to go pro, but she was good enough for tennis to pay for her college. Tired of the long brutal Chicago winters, she went south to Vanderbilt, where she played #2 singles for all four years of her time there. After school, which she loved with all her heart, she moved to New York and worked in fashion PR, managing guest lists and press releases and seating charts for big designers at Fashion Week. She lived on the Upper East Side with two friends from Vanderbilt, spent summer weekends in the Hamptons, Bay Head, and Central Park.

She met her husband, Alex Hunter, on a steaming-hot late-August afternoon at Sunset Beach on Nantucket. She had been day drinking, a great American tradition practiced often and with great enthusiasm on Nantucket, and she was a bit tipsy. She was leaping and skipping and frolicking in the waves, freckles on full display, when she frolicked herself right into the chest of a tall, buff, black-haired blue-eyed steaming hunk of Connecticut Beefcake. She hit him mid-skip and ended up flat on her ass in the water, and as she looked up to see what had happened, and saw the aforementioned Beefcake, she got hit by a wave, filling her eyes, nose, and mouth with water, causing her to cough, and spit, and snort like the snortiest snortface the world had ever seen. Beefcake, and everyone else who saw and heard it, laughed, but because he could sometimes be a gentleman, he offered her his hand, and helped her up, and made sure she was okay. And when she had regained her composure, which she tried to do and was successful in doing very quickly (she did, after all, make her living dealing with fashion designers, fashion magazine editors, and fashionistas), he offered his hand for a formal shake and said

I’m Alex Hunter.

She smiled and took his hand.

I’m Grace.

He was beautiful, and she was entranced.

Cool to meet you, Grace.

And he felt the same, she was beautiful, and he was entranced.

You as well, Alex Hunter.

You have a last name, Grace?

All you need to know is that someday it’s going to be Hunter.

He smiled, and what a Beefcake kinda smile he had, and she smiled back, a classic Midwestern girl next door.

You drink beer, Grace Someday Hunter?

Fuck yeah I do.

You wanna have a beer with me?

How about we have a few?

That sounds great.

Let’s go.

And they went. Back to where he had a large towel on the sand, and a cooler full of beer next to it, and they sat on his towel, and drank his beer, and after a few beers, lay down on the towel and started making out, and they made out for the rest of the afternoon, in front of and in full view of everyone on the beach, until each of the friend groups they had come with were ready to leave. On the drive back to the house where they were staying, Grace’s friends rather excitedly told her about her day-drunk make-out partner and future husband, Alex Hunter.

Alexander Hunter was from New Bethlehem, the youngest of three brothers, son of a JPMorgan investment banker. An athletic prodigy from a young age, he had been All-State in football, hockey, and lacrosse for three years in high school, and in his senior year, won state titles in all three, the first and only time anyone had achieved such a feat, which led to his local nickname, Alexander the Great. He went to Notre Dame and played football, started at QB for two years, was in the NFL for three years. Though he was good enough to make it, he knew he would never be a star, or even a starter, and believed he could use his athletic success to achieve financial success in banking, so he had recently quit and moved to Manhattan to work at Citibank. He lived in a loft in Union Square, he had been going to Nantucket all of his life and his family had a house there, half the girls on the East Coast wanted to date him, and the half that didn’t only didn’t because they had never seen him or heard of him, and if they had it would have been every girl on the East Coast.

Grace was smitten. She loved his eyes and his hands and his voice and the taste of his lips and taste of his tongue and the way he smelled and the way his skin felt when it was pressed against her own. She thought the sports stuff was cool, but it was really only a bonus for her. She would have been into him if he had been working in the shoe department at Walmart, or stocking shelves at Trader Joe’s.

They met later at the Sandbar. They spent the night at his parents’ house. And the next night. And the next. When they got back to NY, they spent every spare minute they had together, almost always at his place, where they could be alone, and make all the noise they wanted, and they made noise, for as late they wanted to make it. He went to Chicago for Thanksgiving, and she went to New Bethlehem for Christmas, and both sets of parents came to New York for Easter. Everyone got along and everyone approved and a year to the day that they met, on the beach where they met, Alex got down on one knee and fulfilled Grace’s prophecy by asking for her hand in marriage.