Excerpt from The Cold Millions by Jess Walter, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

15

It seemed funny, as they walked the grounds, that Rye had imagined Lem Brand would hire someone to brag for him—he would have been just as likely to hire someone to draw his breaths. He gushed with pride over every aspect of his estate: here, a two-story carriage house with room for four premier autos and an apartment for his mechanic; there, Spanish stables for two of the finest breeding horses in the western United States; up there, a sledding hill and archery course. He described everything with such care ("a footbridge made from Amazon rosewood assembled with no nails or screws"), it was as if he'd built it with his own hands.

Ursula stayed a few steps behind as they walked; clearly, she'd had this tour before. They were also trailed by several members of the house staff, led by a thick man with bushy eyebrows who introduced himself simply as Willard and who had a pistol strapped beneath his long coat. He eyed Rye suspiciously as they walked.

They looped back into the house, where Rye was shown one treasure after another: a stained-glass window twice his height, silk curtains from Java, crystal lamps from Paris, a thirty-person dining table cut from the Bavarian forests of a "lesser duke," a Patagonia cherrywood grandfather clock that cost twenty thousand dollars. When Rye stopped to stare at a forest of tall orchids in vases, Lem Brand put a hand on his shoulder. "You have a good eye, Ryan," he said, "Anyone can buy a clock, but find fresh orchids in winter? That's the true test of a man's means."

The estate was overwhelming, and Rye felt a kind of dazzled panic—like a hungry man trying not to eat too fast. Finally, they settled into what Lem Brand called the main library, which, like the landing, was two stories tall, but felt to Rye as cozy as a pair of new socks. The walls were floor-to- twenty- foot- ceiling with books, and books disappeared into the sky, leather-bound volumes climbing and climbing, a sliding ladder to reach them all. A fire burned in the onyx fireplace. It was the warmest room Rye had ever been in—he felt sleep come on the moment he sat down, and he covered a yawn.

"Happens to me every time," Lem Brand said, the enveloping warmth coming from heated water that ran through pipes in the floor as well as the radiators, and just then a servant arrived with a tray of French cookies and gold-lined snifters of a warm, sweet drink—Rye looked up and the servant said, almost apologetically, "Brandy, sir"—which they sipped in the soft chairs.

Rye sat in this warm cookie-brandy- Ursula goodness, looked up at the walls of books, and suddenly began to weep.

Seated in the chair next to his, Ursula leaned forward and touched his arm. "Ryan. Are you okay?"

He nodded. He cleared his throat and asked Brand, "I don't suppose you have War and Peace by Count Tolstoy?"

Brand looked around at his books as if he'd never seen them before. Then he looked at Willard, who had been standing by the door. Willard nodded.

"All five of them?"

Willard shrugged and nodded again.

It was too much. All of it, too much, and Rye cried at the too-muchness of it. This incredible room of books—how he wished Gig could spend a single day in such a room, two stories of leather and gilt volumes and a heated floor and brandy so sweet and rich it coated your insides. The thought of his bookish brother in that stone jail while he was here—it was all just too much.

The unfairness hit Rye not like sweet brandy but like a side ache—a physical pain from the warmth of that heated floor and the softness of that chair and Gig not knowing any of it—and Lace and Danny and Ma and Da, too—Rye never could have imagined it, either. But now he knew, and he would know the next time he was curled up in a cold boxcar, that men lived like this, that there was such a difference between Lem Brand and him that Brand should live here and Rye nowhere.

Excerpted from The Cold Millions by Jess Walter. Copyright © 2020 by Jess Walter. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.