Cat didn’t even bother to wipe her mouth before she was running away from the studio. She threw the studio doors open and found Jack. The former army ranger saw her sorry state and went to aid her. Catherine was whimpering nonsensically and crying in her head.
“Catherine! Is something wrong? Did you vomit?”
Her dress was ruined. “Get me out of here,” she implored the man. Jack took her into a dressing room and found a towel. Cat wiped her face, then fumbled for the dress zipper.
“Help me out of this,” she cried.
“Do you have other clothes?”
“No!” Catherine protested, not at her bodyguard but at the situation. “He’s here!”
“Who? Sit down. Do you want your anxiety meds?”
“The de… Roger Marthan. Keep him away from me at all costs,” Cat begged. “And no. I can handle things without the pills. Oh, god, he got my mom.”
Jack brought his hand to one of his concealed weapons, “Is Mrs. Wallenstein in danger?”
“No. Yes. No. I mean, she’s in not direct physical danger. Jack, I have a change of clothes in our dressing room.”
“Let’s go get it. I won’t leave you alone in here. Can you walk?”
“Yes,” she stood up but her legs wobbled for balance. “Damn heels.”
He picked her up in a bridal carry and went out of the room. A TV crew was filming them and he went back. Getting another towel, he covered Cat’s face and stained dress and went back out.
“Hey!” A TV station security staff hailed him. “Where are you taking the girl?”
Jack glared at the man. “Grendel Security! I’m her bodyguard. Step out of the way now.”
“Mister, this is our guest,” the guard said after mumbling on his radio. “Put her down or we’ll call the cops.”
“You can use my phone. Step aside or I’ll consider you a threat to my client,” the former ranger barked like a boot camp sergeant. He triggered his own radio. “All units, code yellow. Move to my position and secure the VIPs. We have due cause to believe we’re being entrapped in the TV station. Call law enforcement now.”
He grinned at the security guard. “There, sir. I’ve called the cops as you requested. Now step the fuck out of my way and let me help my client, or suffer the consequences.”
The security guard’s radio buzzed with unintelligible gibberish. “I cannot, sir. Please understand. Let me verify the guest’s state. Is she wounded?”
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HIS WAY, YOU DUMBASS!” Cat screamed from behind the towel. “He’s my bodyguard for crying it loud and i feel threatened by you.”
All of that caught on camera.
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” the guard apologized, clearly regretting his situation. He was probably under orders to keep the conflict going by the TV people.
Another commotion came from the end of the corridor. Sounds of a fight and soon the team from Grendel Security showed up at the end of the corridor. One of them tackled the security guard to the ground while the others went past Jack and seized the TV camera.
“It’s not broadcasting anymore, sir!” One of them reported to Jack. “Perimeter clear. Prepare for extraction. Rothman & Sullivan were already alerted. Should we go get the missus?”
“Catherine?” Jack asked.
Feeling betrayed, she still worried about her mother. “Go and ask her if she wants to come. Don’t force it and come back with or without her.”
She didn’t. When the agents that tried to retrieve Mrs. Wallenstein came up with empty hands, Cat’s head had already cleared up. She was angry at the station and decided to fight back with the weapons she had. Cat took her phone and called her bank. She tapped into a credit line backed by the securities in her portfolio at ridiculously low-interest rates. She might not be in control of the dynasty trust, but Catherine’s personal finances were her own.
“Leverage the next order ten times,” she told her broker. “Two million dollars, short their stock, to repurchase when the market opens tomorrow morning [2].”
Dumping twenty million worth of their stock would already signal the market something was going on. She was in a special position where she could tell what was going to happen before the rest of the market. It wasn’t insider trading, given that she was caught vomiting on national television.
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Agatha and two other lawyers from Rothman & Sullivan arrived in a helicopter, along with another team from Grendel Security and the NYPD. The station was secretly filming Cat and broadcast her entire outburst including the confrontation between the security officer and Jack.
Outside the studio in a parked ambulance, Cat was at the same time being checked by the EMTs and giving her statement to the cops. Meanwhile, the lawyers and Jack’s team brought the proverbial hammer on the TV station. Both were already filing several lawsuits for unlawful imprisonment and invasion of privacy. Cat wasn’t expected to show up on camera and Grendel Security recorded the radio conversation between the security guard and the station, proving they wanted to keep the situation going to broadcast the footage. Since it affected her mental state, they also added harassment to the list of lawsuits.
Agatha deftly posted some inflammatory statements on social media, including a picture of a distraught Catherine receiving aid at the back of an ambulance, citing how the TV station triggered a panic attack on a victim of terrorism just to get a story out of it. Media ethics groups and journalists jumped on the bandwagon and condemned the station just to keep the situation contained, citing how they were better than that.
In the age of the Cancel Culture on social media, it was a shoot-first-ask-questions-never situation. Whoever gathered more pity won, and Agatha had a prize horse for this race.
Then the main network joined the fray. What did they do? At first, they expressed sympathy for Catherine, going along on the bandwagon but that Tweet was deleted minutes later and replaced by a boilerplate statement that it will be investigated. As if it mattered for the internet. On the WWW tribunal, that first Tweet was as good as a confession for the jury of the public opinion. Surely an intern or two took the unjust brunt of the blame and found themselves out of a job.
After the immediate shitstorm died down and moved online, Jack drove Cat back home. The next day, she woke up refreshed, vindicated, and five and a half million dollars richer, before taxes. The network stock had plummeted twenty-seven and a half percent, cementing the profits of her short position.
The money would take two days to process but her short-term loan was already paid off, with a day of interest at some of the lowest rates William had ever seen. She had the money in the trust fund company but if she took the cash, it was taxable income. A loan was debt and the government had yet to come up with a way to tax that. Catherine, like most of the 1%, rarely saw hard cash in their accounts, less the government wanted some for them. They operated almost exclusively on credit.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Stonks,” Cat replied with a victorious grin.
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Of Mrs. Wallenstein and Roger Marthan, she had no news for several days. Her mother didn’t return home but the whole disaster had a very positive result.
The neighbors had enough with the reporter and the drone swarm around the Wallenstein mansion and rose in defense of their “princess”. The internet trolls found where she lived and attached her image to the borough of Englewood Cliffs. With one of the two largest populations of Jewish Americans in New Jersey, the residents of Bergen County rallied for one of their own and told the reporters enough was enough. The other media companies, fearing the backlash the TV network suffered, pulled back their personnel.
The mansion was no longer under surveillance by the reporters but Cat found herself alone in the vast household. Even a week after the dread visit to the TV station, she was basically MIA [1]. They reduced the security staff presence but Jack and the features they installed remained, along with an electronics warfare specialist. Autumn had fully rolled in and the trees were already showing the tones of brown, red, and orange characteristic of the season.
“I feel trapped in here,” Cat confessed one day. “I want to go outside, Jack.”
The bodyguard replied with a wry smile. “What do you want to do?”
Cat ignored the ghost, “I want to see Oliver. He left the ICU, didn’t he?”
“Sure,” he said and drove her to the Presbyterian.
Oliver was in an apartment not unlike the one Cat occupied for the best part of the year. The lawyer was still unconscious but the doctors had an optimistic prognostic.
“Some of your luck must’ve rubbed on him,” the physician in charge of Mr. McNamara said. “He’ll make a full recovery, don’t worry, Miss.”
Cat smiled, relieved at the good news. “He’s a hero,” she said looking at the lawyer quietly sleeping. “Please take good care of him.”
The doctor smiled back, “We are doing our best, Miss Wallenstein.”
Leaving the hospital, Catherine broke the silence,
[Was not,] Cat grumbled back. [Your concept of flirting is too skewed, ghost girl.]
Cat rolled her eyes. [Picnic? You’re seriously insisting on that?]
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Early morning of the next day, Cat followed the ghost’s instructions. She asked Esmeralda for a picnic basket and Jake to take the bicycles out of the shed. After loading them in the car, they went to park next to the police station.
Catherine was beyond excited with the outing as she directed them,
The restaurant was called, maybe not ironically, Giovanni’s Bicycle Club and the shop occupied the same building. Given that the park entrance was right on the other side of the nearby interstate, it made sense. Probably back in the day, there was an actual bicycle club there, where the community gathered for a weekend at the park. Nowadays the actual bicycle shop was almost empty. They had the bicycle chains greased, the brakes and gears checked and the tires calibrated in less than half an hour. The shop even cleaned the bikes as a service.
With the picnic basket affixed to Jack’s bike and the camera in the front basket of hers, they rode down the avenue and under the interstate overpass, finally entering Hudson Park. Cat could see Upper Manhattan on the other side of the river. The park road snaked down the forested cliffs. At Jack’s request, they went slowly, using the brakes to keep the bikes from accelerating downhill.
“How are you feeling?” He asked, concerned about her stamina.
“So far, I’m okay. The picnic area is just downhill. I’ll be fine,” she replied.
Cat stopped next to a sign by a fork on the road. To the left, it pointed to “Englewood Boat Basin” and “Englewood Picnic Area”. To the right, it just said “Green Brook”. She thought it weird to get the bicycles if the distance from the entrance to the boat marina was less than a mile even with the road going back and forth.
“I’m not sure, but I remember it’s to the north,” she tried to mask her confusion.
“If you say so. Let’s ride,” Jack either didn’t notice or had just dismissed her confusion.
They went north on the park road, which was aptly called “Henry Hudson drive”. Cat was sure there was another road on the Manhattan side of the river with almost the same name.
She heard the history lesson as they rode two miles to the north when Catherine called for her attention.
A sign read “Undercliff Picnic Area”.
“Here we are. Damn, I’ve almost forgotten how beautiful this place was,” said the girl who’d never actually set foot (after taking ownership of said foot) in that place.
Jack closed his eyes. Underneath the bird calls and the wind rustling the yellowed leaves, they could hear the cars roaring on the nearby interstate.
“Yes, it’s gorgeous,” he sighed and checked his phone. “And we’re right next to your home too. It is amazing how these places are out here, basically next door but forgotten by the community.”
[https://i.imgur.com/6OMjcPQ.jpg]
“Well, let’s make good use of our tax money then,” she joked and rode to the deserted picnic area.
Cat chuckled, [Three, you mean? And it’s you who’s on a date, not me.]
[You’re impossible,] she groaned.
They rested the bicycles against the entrance booth and set their picnic on one of the many rustic tables available. Jack pointed at a blue box hidden at a corner of the parking lot, “At least we won’t have to worry if a toilet emergency happens,” he said.
Cat took a while to process what those blue things were. “Oh.”
The specter persistent fawning over her bodyguard made Cat avoid looking at him during most of the meal, which only made Catherine whine louder.
Cat posted the selfies, but without the bodyguard.
“I want to bring Alice and her wolves here,” Cat declared. “I bet they would love to run freely in these woods.”
“Well, they won’t scare anyone,” Jack commented. “Did you notice we haven’t crossed with anyone on our way here?”
She nodded. “If it weren’t for the background noise of the interstate, it would feel as if we were out in the wild.”
“I want to go to the riverbank,” Cat said, giving in to the ghost demands.
“Sure. I don’t think anyone will steal our bicycles or the picnic basket. And cars are allowed in here so we can call a pickup even if someone does steal them.”
Following Catherine’s directions, they followed the trail climbing down the cliffs, getting closer to the Hudson. She reached a sand beach at the river margin, overlooking the Bronx on the other side.
Cat found the ruins of a stone building next to the shore. “Whoa.”
[https://i.imgur.com/YQlx0KZ.jpg]
“It’s an old bathhouse,” Jack explained with a smirk, looking at his cell phone. “Here it says it was popular in the 1930s. People from Manhattan took a ferry to come here and bathe.”
Cat looked at the river and scrunched her nose. It smelled a bit. “I can see why the bathhouse crumbled into ruins.”
[No, they’re not. I’m pretty sure it belongs to the park. And you’re dead.]
They climbed over the wall and entered the ruined bathhouse. Nature was already taking over with stubborn trees and bushes breaking the stone and growing to cover the ruins. However, mankind refused to let the heritage site alone. Everywhere on the exposed stone, they found graffiti and depredation. Broken glass and aluminum cans.
“Okay, let’s go back. The smell of the ocean brine with sewage from the river is making me queasy,” she decided, ending their park visit.
[Nope. Not happening, princess.]
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[1] Missing In Action.
[2]: Shorting a stock is the act of borrowing shares to sell high and then repurchase low. It is a risky maneuver (See the Gamestop & Wall Street Bets case) but one that can yield profits when a stock price goes down.