“That’s just plain mean. This isn’t rocket science. We can figure it out.” Reuben whacked at the celery.
“You should wash the celery and cut off the ends and the bad spots first.” Evie waved her knife. “You want to go through the spice drawer and figure out which ones go with tuna?” She handed an onion to Roark. “Know how to peel and chop one of these?”
“Hey ya, I can do dat. Mama made hot sauce, y’know?” He settled on a counter stool and started peeling.
“Did you send off that package of Jax’s documents? I don’t know if Orbis Junior can learn anything from touching paper, but we should try.”
“Fed Ex. You paying us back?” Reuben painstakingly scrubbed his celery and picked at bits that looked brown.
“The allowance I get from Loretta’s trust will cover it. So, the old contracts from Jax’s father—have you figured out their importance?” Evie broke eggs and started on her homemade mayonnaise.
“Nah, that’s for Jax. What we’ve got is more fun.” Reuben took his celery to a cutting board she shoved at him. “That old PCB you found was made by Sovereign Machinery. Shareholders included Ives and Jackson, plus the original Stockton from Jax’s law firm. They hung with some mighty fine fellas.”
“Hoo yah, baby.” Roark cut professionally at his onion. “The big money for Sovereign came from back here, which is probably how Stockton got involved. Ever heard of the Swensons?”
“Swenson Fisheries?” Evie held up her can of tuna. “Used to can tuna. I think they made cat food and maybe canned soup and things? They were pretty big when I was a kid.”
“Ça c’est bon. Dey had a big plant down in Luziana.” Roark laid on the accent.
Evie had learned that Roark’s parents were from Louisiana, but they’d split up when he was a kid. He’d spent a lot of time with different families and earned a scholarship to MIT. So the accent was his childhood speaking. How he came by a Scots name and survived Boston accents was a story for another time.
“Canning and fishing have been a dying industry for a long time.” Reuben meticulously cut up the celery as he spoke. “The family started putting their fortune into up-and-coming industries, like electronics.”
“So Swenson Canneries helped finance Sovereign Machinery?” Evie tried to speed up the storytelling.
“Right on, sister.” Reuben handed over his precisely chopped celery. Evie handed him another stalk. He stoically took it to the sink. “Better yet, Gustav Swenson had a son who wanted into politics. And said son had a handful of California friends with deep pockets—”
“NotAugustusSwenson?” Evie asked in incredulity. “We are not talking the California senator? How did we get from east coast fisheries to California?”
“By way of Granny Marilyn Swenson, Gustav’s wife. She’s from a family of California real estate moguls. Did the Hollywood thang when she was young, met Gustav at some society benefit in the sixties, decided wealthy east coast influential family better thannouveau richeHollywood, and they formed a power couple on both coasts.”
Reuben’s middle-class professional origins peeked out when he got wound up, Evie noticed. “That was w-a-a-ay back before my time. Is Gustav even alive now?”
“Nope. He was an old man when he married Marilyn, the Hollywood not-a-star. But she’s still going strong. Between Gustav’s tuna fish fortune and her family’s real estate contacts, she had tons of connections to help her son get ahead in California.”
“And they still own the fisheriesandthe voting machine company?” Evie raised her eyebrows. “So, Augustus, the senator, is what, pushing sixty these days? And thirty-some years ago, when Sovereign was forming, he was in his late twenties?”
Roark added the onions to the bowl with the tuna. “He was working with his mother’s family in California real estate back then. With all that money and mama’s contacts, he ran for some local office, and invested in the new machines that were supposed to handle the elections of the future.”
“Except the machines cost too much.” Reuben added his celery to the bowl.
“And nobody wanted to spend a lot of money on new-fangled machines, and voters hate change.” Evie mixed in her mayonnaise and some pickles and stirred the bowl. “So they should have all lost their shirts.”
“But they didn’t. Sovereign’s original owners may have been young up-and-comers, like Jax’s dad and partner, but they all had powerful, wealthy families.”
“Exceptfor Ives and Jackson,” Evie reminded them. “They appeared to be essentially orphaned.”
“But Ives owned a valuable silica mine and Jackson owned a powerful law office in the district young Augustus was running for at the time. Jackson and Ives weren’t small change. They had what it took to set up the mining businessandthe machinery business and the locals knew them. They were the front office. The VIPs just provided funds and stayed out of the picture.” Reuben inspected Evie’s bowl, nodded approval, and took his usual seat next to Loretta in the breakfast nook.
Evie’s people radar spun with all this input. “So, Jax’s father and partner were appointed to talk towns into buying their fancy new voting machines?”
“Yup. Cutting edge equipment. If they could have lowered the cost, they would have been on the brink of big time.”
“Would they have known their microchip was going into a circuit board that didn’t work right?” Evie had been fretting around that. Someone had left that crooked board under the memorial for a reason.
Rube thought about it. “In early days, probably not. It would have taken a lot of use before the error was noticeable.”
“Where’s the fun part?” Evie spread out the salad on the toast and pointed Roark at the tomatoes.