Glass Lane

Chapter 4: Charlie

Tap. Tap. Tap. Charlie's nails rapped over the table like the hollow echo of autumn shells falling to the forest floor. She could hardly stand the man's rambling. A few more minutes of this and she was sure to be bored to death.

"And so you'll see, Ms. Cross...for us to resolve the accounts, we'll need to make contact with our distributors in Amsterdam. Your father left quite a debt with them, it seems, and without their consent, we can't go forward with the liquidation."

Charlie reached her limit.

"I'll run the figures past my mother, John, but really...what do you think our chances are?"

John Regarzian, the long-suffering Cross family attorney shrugged and shook his head. He wouldn't meet Charlie's gaze. 

"I'm not sure," he said. Charlie was surprised by his honesty. "These things can be tricky. There's ego tied into their maneuvers as much as there is law, finances, or anything else." 

Charlie was still having a hard time putting it all together.

While she had been in the middle of planning her father's funeral, John had shown up with a briefcase full of bills, business files, and IOUs.

"It's everything your father owes. What's left of his estate's debts."

The reality was overwhelming.

Hampton Cross was far from the esteemed businessman and property tycoon he appeared to be. Years of unpaid taxes, supply orders, and interest payments revealed themselves. Borrowing from one investor to pay for the next, Charlie's father, it was discovered, had been at the head of a complicated web of borrowing and cheating, scheming and swindling, from the men that ran his businesses.

Charlie's mother was devastated by the news.

After learning that Hampton Crosses' financial failures were enough to wreck them all, she had taken to her bed and barely risen at all. It had taken everything in Charlie's power to get her out of bed for the funeral.

"How could he do this to us?" Barbara Cross whispered to herself. She cried the most when the house was quiet and she and Charlie were on their own.

As her daughter, Charlie did what she could to assure her mother, but it wasn't enough. The Cross family was on the precipice of ruin, as John reminded Charlie now amid the penthouse's sweeping lounge.

"I can't stress enough how important it is to settle these debts. We won't be able to sit on them for much longer."

Regarzian had been doing his best to pay off the journalists and business partners who knew about Hampton Cross's business dealings, but it couldn't last forever.

"Eventually the story is going to break, and it's going to break big."

Charlie hated the world at that moment. She hated her father for leaving them with the mess. She hated her mother for being weak and leaving her to deal with it. Charlie even hated the reporters at the paper, scratching like rats at the barely-cooled corpse of her father's legacy before she even had time to accept that he was gone.

The lawyer broke her anger. His words cut through the malice with a last slice of hope.

"I'll go back to the distributing partners and see what they're willing to do."

Charlie flashed a smile of relief, but it only cloaked the anxiety bubbling in her chest. 

If we make it through this it will be a miracle, Charlie whispered to herself in secret as she thanked John and showed him to the door. Her head was pounding. Arranging her father's funeral had taken its toll. Charlie wondered if managing this disaster would kill her.