CHAPTER NINE
Going to visit Agatha Hannigan was not a task that Grace had been looking forward to.
She could not deny how valuable a witness Miss Hannigan could be for the case she and Oliver hoped to make to the mayor and governor about the need for child welfare reforms in New York. She also knew that continuing their investigation would largely fall to her because Oliver simply didn't have the time to do it himself.
All the same, as she and Punjab sped north out of the city, she was not convinced she would have the self-control to keep her emotions in check when she saw that woman again.
Annie had insisted that Miss Hannigan had tried to save her life that horrible night. When Miss Hannigan had realized that her brother was serious about hurting or even killing Annie, she had fought with him and held him back for a few crucial seconds that allowed Annie to evade his grasp until she reached the very top of the bridge. It was on that basis, and that basis alone, that Oliver had reluctantly agreed to request a one-night reprieve from jail so that Miss Hannigan could attend Annie's adoption party at the mansion on the Fourth of July.
"After all," Annie had said sagely, displaying a wisdom and compassion far beyond her years, "she's gonna spend a long time in jail for what she did, right? One night of freedom isn't askin' too much, if ya think about it like that."
But Grace was finding it much harder to let go of her own ill will toward Miss Hannigan. In spite of the short but critical role the former orphanage supervisor had played in Annie's survival that night, she was also the woman who had made the entire kidnapping plot possible in the first place. The woman who had stolen the other half of the locket that Annie had yearned to see for her entire life and given it to two criminals to use in their cruel charade. The woman who had abused and neglected Annie, Molly, and the rest of those sweet girls for years. And, on a much pettier personal level, she was also the woman who had ham-handedly attempted to seduce Grace's now-fiancé when he had gone to the orphanage with Annie's adoption papers.
Grace had just about hit the roof when she heard that story.
Although she had never before been one to hold grudges, she found herself feeling vindicated as she stepped out of the car in front of the Bedford Hills Correctional Institution. This was exactly where a person like Miss Hannigan belonged: far away from the opportunity to hurt any children ever again.
Punjab flatly refused to allow her to go into the prison alone—"Sahib would never forgive me if anything happened to his bride"—so the two of them walked together into the visitor's entryway. Grace had chosen an understated light blue suit and modest hat for the visit, but there was no hope of preempting the attention and stares that Punjab, dressed as resplendently as ever, immediately attracted as soon as they walked inside the austere reception room.
"Good afternoon," Grace said as she approached the front desk. "I'm here to see Agatha Hannigan."
The woman behind the desk glanced up from the book she was reading. "Hannigan? Is she expecting you?"
"I don't believe so."
"Your name?"
"Grace Farrell. She'll know who I am."
The receptionist logged her information in the ledger, then picked up the phone on the desk beside her. "We've got a visitor here for Hannigan. Bring her down." She rose to stand. "Follow me."
She led the two of them through a door behind the reception desk and down a long hallway lined with visitation rooms, finally depositing them in the last room at the end of the hall with instructions to wait there. A half-height wooden barrier stood between the two halves of the room, which was furnished with nothing but two hard wooden chairs in front of them and a single chair on the other side. Grace pulled a small notepad and pencil out of her bag and sat, tapping the pencil anxiously against her knee. Punjab remained standing as usual, a silent but intimidating presence in the corner of the room.
A few minutes passed before the door on the other side of the divided room creaked open and a female warden stepped through, leading Agatha Hannigan behind her.
Grace almost gaped at her. The transformation she saw in front of her was drastic, a total shift from the woman she had first encountered at the orphanage earlier that summer. On the day Grace had gone to the orphanage to fetch an orphan to spend a week in the Warbucks mansion, Miss Hannigan had been an absolute train wreck—makeup wild, hair askew, the unmistakable smell of alcohol on her breath even at ten o'clock in the morning, and a crazed look in her eyes when she mistakenly thought Grace was a representative from the New York City Board of Orphans.
The woman she saw in front of her now looked almost entirely transformed, and not—Grace was shocked to see—in a bad way at all. Although clad in a nondescript and unflattering gray inmate's dress, Miss Hannigan's face looked fuller, her hair was neatly combed, and the bags under her eyes were less dark and puffy.
Perhaps not being solely responsible for the daily rearing of dozens of children, even if it came at the cost of her personal freedom, was proving to be a more pleasant existence for her.
Miss Hannigan cast a surprised look at Punjab in the corner of the room before her eyes fell on Grace, and she smirked as she lowered herself into the chair on the other side of the room.
"Ha! Wasn't sure I'd ever see you again, Miss Scissors Legs," she drawled. Her eyes darted to the engagement ring on Grace's left hand. "Although I guess I should call you Your Royal Highness or something like that now, huh? Since you're marrying the big bald billionaire."
Grace huffed silently. If Miss Hannigan was aiming to get a rise out of her, she just might succeed.
"Miss Hannigan," she began coldly, "it appears you're doing well."
"To be honest, I should've committed myself years ago," Miss Hannigan chuckled. "The chow's worse than what I had to serve at the orphanage, but havin' no kids around is a dream. I've slept more in the last month than I did in the last decade. And it's quiet. It's so blissfully quiet. I'm not sayin' I want to stay here forever, but it hasn't been all bad."
Grace raised an eyebrow and made a mental note of that. Good heavens, even if Miss Hannigan was being somewhat sarcastic, the notion that a paid employee of the State of New York would prefer a prison to the living conditions in a state-run orphanage … well, that was certainly enough to give one pause.
"Miss Hannigan, I've come here to ask you some questions."
Miss Hannigan looked at her skeptically. "What kind of questions? I'm not supposed to say anything unless there's a lawyer here."
"These questions have nothing to do with the kidnapping charges pending against you, Miss Hannigan," Grace said. "I want to ask you about your time as the Hudson Street Orphanage supervisor."
The smirk returned to Miss Hannigan's face almost instantly. "Oh, yeah. I read about that in the paper, too. You and Big Bucks are trying to smoke Mr. Donatelli and the Board of Orphans out of their hidey-holes, huh?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes," Grace said. "It would be very helpful, Miss Hannigan, if you were willing to share some insights with us about your daily life and work as the supervisor at Hudson Street. Mr. Warbucks and I are quite intent on forcing the decisionmakers in New York City and Albany to investigate the current state of the orphanage system. Firsthand testimony from someone in your position would help us understand the way things are currently operating."
"I'm sure it would," Miss Hannigan mused.
She was silent for a long moment, studying Grace through her heavily lidded eyes. Grace merely looked back at her, waiting.
Finally Miss Hannigan spoke again. "I've got plenty of stories I could share, believe me—things that would make Mr. Donatelli's skin crawl if he knew I was saying 'em out loud, especially to you. But before I start spillin' my guts to you, sweetie, I gotta ask: what's in it for me?" She leaned back in her seat with a guarded, calculating expression on her face. "The way I see it, I've got no incentive to sing like a canary to help you and Big Bucks. As soon as I say anything, he'll make sure they throw another couple charges my way for violating child welfare laws. I ain't falling for it."
"Miss Hannigan," Grace said smoothly, "Mr. Warbucks is willing to use his influence with the state prosecutor's office to begin a discussion about the case against you. He feels confident that we could reach a mutually agreeable solution, if you were willing to cooperate with us in providing the information we are seeking."
Miss Hannigan's eyebrows rose so high that they nearly disappeared into her bangs of dark auburn curls. "Holy Mary, Mother of God. Am I really hearin' you right? Warbucks is offering to get me outta jail, after everything I did?"
"Not out of jail. That is beyond our ability. But it is not uncommon in our justice system, Miss Hannigan, for defendants to receive reduced sentences in exchange for good cooperation." Grace paused for a moment for effect. "Especially if their information helps build a case that other individuals are guilty of illegal activity."
The staring match between them resumed for a long time. Grace could practically see the gears turning in Miss Hannigan's head as she turned over the words the younger woman had spoken.
And then Miss Hannigan began to speak.
It was a full two hours later before Grace and Punjab stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine and walked toward the town car for the drive back to Manhattan.
Grace's head was spinning. She had filled one entire notepad and more than half of a second one as Miss Hannigan had talked, and she felt anxious to get back to the mansion as quickly as possible to transcribe her shorthand into a fuller transcript of the interview and discuss her findings with Oliver.
Faced with the prospect of a reduced prison sentence, Miss Hannigan had spoken so openly and freely about the daily challenges of running a large orphanage in New York City that Grace had barely needed to steer the conversation at all. With only a handful of specific questions thrown in here or there to guide her, Miss Hannigan had practically bared her soul, releasing years of pent-up frustration, misery, and anger in the process.
"Good heavens," Grace couldn't help but muse to herself, flipping through the pages of her notes as the car wound its way through the Hudson Valley back toward the city. "Punjab, I think we've really stumbled into something."
The bodyguard was silent for a long moment and glanced at her through the rearview mirror. Her gray eyes met his dark brown, and she knew he was equally troubled by what they had heard in that visitation room.
"Buddha says that there must be evil in the world so that good can prove its purity above it," he intoned quietly. "But when such evil is engrained so deeply in the system, what chance is there for good to triumph over it?"
Upon her return to the mansion, Grace slipped quietly into the second floor boardroom where Oliver and the Thompsons could usually be found sequestered and working hard. In this instance, he and Edward were standing arguing over a large map of the United States upon which pins in different colors had been stuck, representing various factories, warehouses, and headquarters of the Warbucks and Thompson business empires.
"I'll be damned if I'm going to shutter that factory, Oliver!"
"Edward, be realistic here. There wouldn't be any point in your factory in Indianapolis remaining open, not when I've got twice that plant's production capacity in Cleveland!"
Oliver glanced up when he heard the door open and spotted her immediately. After muttering his excuses to Edward, he stepped away from the gaggle of men at the head of the table as the argument about Indianapolis versus Cleveland raged in full force. With a nod of his head he motioned at the door, and the two of them stepped back out of the boardroom into the hall.
"Thank God you're back," he said, clasping her hands in his and pulling her into a brief kiss. "You were gone so long I was beginning to worry that something had happened. You know I didn't like the idea of you going to that jail in the first place."
"Oh, Oliver," she said, touched at his concern. "There was no need to worry. Punjab was with me the entire time. And as I told you, it's a women's prison."
"Still, you never know. Some of those women are probably in there for crimes worse than kidnapping."
He led her down the hall toward the library. Finding it empty, they stepped inside.
"So, how did it go?"
Grace took a deep breath. She had reminded herself on the way back to the mansion she would need to be brief, knowing what a busy afternoon lay ahead of her fiancé. But once she started talking, Miss Hannigan's story just spilled out of her.
She told him about how, upon taking over the orphanage more than a decade ago, Miss Hannigan had inherited a building that hadn't met legal codes in years and had multiple rat, roach, and flea infestations. The Board of Orphans had consistently ignored her pleas for repairs to broken water pipes, splintered wooden floors, shattered glass windows, and nests of invasive pests. The number of orphans living there before the depression had nearly doubled in the years since the stock market crash, to a number significantly higher than the building was zoned to accommodate.
With the passage of time, Miss Hannigan had realized there was little consequence to be meted out by the state for pocketing a portion of the funds that the city disbursed to her as the orphanage matron. Funds for the purposes of buying food and bedding, paying the launderer, and buying school books and supplies for the orphans—these funds came with little to no oversight whatsoever. She could freely spend a healthy portion of the money on herself, making her existence slightly more tolerable even as she deprived the charges in her care of basic necessities. In the frigid cold of winter the orphans shivered under thin cotton blankets, while in the stifling hot summer months they lacked even paper fans to cool themselves.
And Grace had been gravely shocked to learn that, upon surprise in-person inspections of the orphanage by members of Mr. Donatelli's staff or even the man himself, Miss Hannigan would often be quietly pressed to turn over portions of that cash to obtain passing inspection marks, thereby safeguarding her own job and a roof over her head.
Oliver was seething by this point, and his fists were clenched in fury.
"No wonder the weasel won't bring forward even the most basic of proposals for reforms," he practically spat out. "The man must be swimming in cash bribes! He is profiting from very system of corruption and poverty he is perpetuating for those children, all the while bleeding the taxpayer dry!"
"If Miss Hannigan is to be believed," Grace cautioned him. "Some of what she told me could have been a fabrication. The possibility of a reduced prison sentence was quite attractive to her."
He raised an eyebrow. "Do you think she was lying?"
"No," Grace had to admit. "She was noticeably frustrated and angry throughout the entire conversation. I don't believe she could have made up the whole narrative so convincingly on the spot. And our own observations of the orphanage, along with the testimony from Annie and her friends, certainly corroborate her description of the overcrowding and poor conditions."
Oliver was silent, mulling over her words with a grim expression on his face.
"So where does this leave us?" Grace asked quietly.
"Well, I certainly think we are finished pressing Donatelli to take action," Oliver growled. "Knowing what we know now, any further engagement with him would be a complete waste of time."
"I agree," Grace said. "If anything, this validates what we have been asking the Board for all along: a credible independent investigation that would make recommendations for tangible improvements."
"Oliver?"
It was Cornelia Thompson, poking her head through the ajar library door with a firm knock. "I'm sorry to interrupt. My father wanted to remind you that we have the call with the Attorney General and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division in about ten minutes."
"Blast it," Oliver grumbled. He looked at Grace pointedly as he began to follow Cornelia out of the library. "Forget Donatelli, Grace—he isn't worth anything to us anymore. We need to get those notes of yours typed up, get in touch with the state prosecutor's office about Miss Hannigan's case, and set up a meeting with the mayor and governor. This needs to escalate beyond Donatelli to men who can actually be persuaded to take action."
"After the shareholders vote, I presume."
"Unfortunately, yes—it'll have to wait until after the shareholders vote," he called back as he and Cornelia disappeared out of the room.
Grace felt a renewed sense of determination as she thumbed through her notes again.
No doubt the road in front of them would be long. Attempting to root out wrongdoing in the entire bureaucratic structure of the state-run orphanage system would cause quite a stir. As much political clout as Oliver Warbucks could wield in the state, it would be naïve to hope that their campaign would not churn up unexpected pockets of resistance. Who else beyond Mr. Donatelli was benefitting from the lackluster enforcement of any standards of governmental integrity? Who knew how high the ladder of profiteering on shoddy recordkeeping rose, especially in this desperate era when people were willing to do anything to make ends meet?
Picturing Annie and Molly's sweet faces in her mind's eye, however, she could think of no mission more worth pursuing. And, she thought with a smile, there was no man better suited to lead the charge than Oliver Warbucks. He was certainly no social justice warrior. Conservatism was too deeply engrained in his political philosophy for her to ever imagine him out in the street with a picket sign protesting in favor of broader societal reforms.
But governmental waste and abuse, corruption that was affecting the lives of children he had come to know and love? That he would take on in a heartbeat.