Excerpt from OLD MONEY by Kelsey Miller:
Briar’s Green was always a destination of sorts. Renowned as both idyllic and elite, the village has long been considered the archetypical Hudson Valley enclave: lush, bucolic and laden with early American history—and just dazzling in the fall. It’s been the subject of countless short stories and rhapsodical poems, and a whole school of nineteenth-century painters, who came to perch along its stony shore and capture the almost unimaginable grandeur of its vistas. It’s also the place where, twenty years ago, my cousin, Caitlin Dale, was beaten to death by her boyfriend and left floating in a pool.
Almost twenty years ago—it’ll be twenty years next month on July Fourth, 2019. Everyone seems to know that now. For the last decade, I’ve been the oddball who goes somber as July Fourth approaches, showing up to the barbecue with supermarket potato salad and a forced smile that makes everyone ask if I’m feeling okay. I’ve been hurrying home to my apartment at dusk, while the rest of Manhattan floods outward toward the waterfront, angling for a decent view of the fireworks. Nobody remembered that July Fourth was also the day of a once-infamous murder. Or they kind of did, yeah, but—what was her name again? Did that guy ever go to jail?
This year, though, everyone’s an expert on the death of sixteen-year-old Caitlin M. Dale, honor-roll student, and captain of the JV swim team, found face down in the pool of the Horseman Club, where she and her family had been attending the annual party, on the night of July Fourth, 1999. Everyone suddenly “remembered” that Patrick Yates III (son of Senator Whitney Yates, great-grandson of the former vice president) had been accused of murder, and all but allowed to get away with it—not merely cleared of the crime, but never even formally investigated. There was hardly any investigation, period, before police declared Caitlin’s death an accidental drowning, and left it at that. This, despite an eyewitness report of how Patrick Yates had hit and kicked and flung her to the ground until her skull cracked and she stopped moving. Everyone remembers that part now.
It started back in January, when the podcast came out. The Club Kid was nothing new—just a rehash of the same story reported, and recounted, and adapted for a miniseries in the first few years after Caitlin’s death. After that it evolved from a scandal into a sad story from the ’90s. There was a brief flurry of lurid memorial coverage around the ten-year anniversary, but for much of the last decade, Caitlin was just another vaguely tragic white girl, and Patrick was just that trust-fund Yates kid who’d once done something really bad and gotten away with it—awful, sure, but it wasn’t news.
Now, apparently, it’s true crime. That’s how the podcast sold it, repackaging the story into a tailor-made hit for Gen Z cool kids like this girl—too young to remember the actual crime, but old enough to be outraged that it happened in their lifetime. And outraged they were—outraged but infatuated too. Suddenly, the story was everywhere again. Caitlin’s school photo started popping up in the corners of tabloids, and Instagram too. Vloggers and message-board detectives argued theories about Patrick’s motive, and how he got away with it. The old Vanity Fair article resurfaced (“A Blue-Blooded Killing in Briar’s Green”) and spread across social media as though it were breaking news instead of a twenty-year-old magazine article. Everyone was suddenly “obsessed” with my hometown—which, by the way, has never been called “the Briar.”
“Wait,” says the girl, seizing back my attention, her face suddenly lit up like a halogen bulb. “Okay, I actually read this in middle school.”
She lifts an urgent finger, turning to rummage in her backpack, then whips back around, clutching the book. She holds it up beside her face, flashing me the cover with a confessional smirk.
I look at it, because I have to, because the only way out of this conversation is through. But of course, I know exactly what it is: A Death on the Hudson, by Gordon Fairchild—the book that turned Caitlin’s death into the juiciest beach read of 2002. This too is having a revival, thanks to all these new—what? Fans of Caitlin’s murder?
She’s got the new edition, with its sharp, artful cover: a moonlit close-up of bare feet walking through a swath of wet, jewel-green grass. The title runs below, in spare black text, so discreet it almost disappears into the background. The original cover was glossy white, with a massive, scarlet typeface that oozed down the front. It was hideous, but at least it looked like the exploitative garbage it was. This cover makes it look like fucking Nabokov.
“I know, right? Not exactly appropriate for a twelve-year-old,” the girl says, rolling her eyes. “What a little creep I was.”
I look up from the book at her shining, grinning, almost-giggling face.
“You should probably keep that in your bag,” I tell her.
My voice is even and completely polite—very close to friendly. But she blanches and tilts backward as though I’ve spit at her.
“People there don’t talk about it the way they do on that podcast and . . .”
I gesture at the book. She drops it to her lap.
“And online, and all that,” I finish meagerly. “It’s not really like that, in the village. It’s . . .”
“No, I know,” the girl says, mouselike. “It’s different.”
No, I think. You don’t know. If you did, you’d never have gotten on the train.
We sit, rocking in silence. In the corner of my eye, I see her nibble the edge of her thumbnail, tilting her head so that her hair falls in a curtain of curls. It reminds me of Susannah, and the reminder throbs like a headache.
I close my eyes, although I can feel the train beginning to slow. I picture the girl wandering the village, befuddled to find there’s nothing actually there for her. Certainly she’ll find no trace of Caitlin. No memorial benches on the village green or framed snapshots by the register at Giordano’s, where Caitlin used to get pizza with her teammates after Thursday practice—her slice always doused in red pepper flakes. They don’t even have signs up at the old Roosevelt barn, or Dutch Tavern, with its mottled windows, still flecked with Revolutionary musket balls, and those are things they’re proud of. That’s just one harmless, minuscule way the village is “different”—a word that doesn’t begin to describe the icy unreality of Briar’s Green.
It’s a place that tourists only think they’ve visited. That’s the best way I can put it. This girl might spend all day there, but she’ll never see the real Briar’s Green, because that place exists on private property—none more private than the club. She may walk the tiny village square, but beyond that she’ll find nothing but pretty stone walls and iron gates. She probably knows they’re all unlocked (it’s part of “the Briar’s” lore) but that doesn’t mean she’ll get past them. You know when you’re unwelcome in Briar’s Green. She could walk right up to the club’s own gates—which aren’t merely unlocked but wide-open, always—and no one would stop her. But she’d stop herself.
The train judders, and there’s a deafening screech as we come to a halt. Then silence. Then the doors sigh open.
“We’re here,” the girl murmurs.
I turn and see her hesitant smile, nothing like the high-beam grin she had before. I clear my throat, but don’t say anything. (There I go, slipping into local parlance again.)
I stand and turn, reaching for my bags, grateful to be overburdened with luggage. The bell is ringing by the time I get to the vestibule, and I shove through the closing doors and stumble onto the platform, relieved to be alone at least.
But I’m not. I turn toward the overpass, and there she is, squinting in the sunlight, thumbs looped around the straps of her backpack.
“I’m sorry,” says the girl, in that same uncertain tone. “I feel like maybe—did I offend you?”
My mouth makes a vague O shape, but again, no sounds emerge.
The girl shifts her weight from one leg to the other. When she speaks again, it’s almost inaudible.
“Did you, like, know her?”
I almost tell her, right then—everything, from the beginning right up until today: who I am and what I did, and what I’m going to do next. I almost even tell her why. The truth roils up inside of me, and I clench my teeth against it, quietly.
I shake my head.
“Only a little. She was older.”
It’s the truth and also bullshit. But that’s how people talk here—in decorous lies and discreet omissions, every ugly truth cottoned in five layers of courtesy. It’s true that Caitlin was a few years older than me, and thus I only knew her a little—as much as any eleven-year-old girl can know a sixteen-year-old young woman. But it’s also true that one night, not quite twenty years ago, I saw Patrick Yates hit and kick and throw her down, cracking her skull against the concrete edge of the club’s swimming pool. I’m the one who first saw her lifeless body in the water, and ran screaming to tell everyone—two hundred party guests, the paramedics and the police. I don’t think anyone actually believes that Caitlin drowned, but I’m the one who knows.
Patrick Yates got away with murder that night, and he remains a free and happy man. And I’ve come home to remedy that.
Excerpted from Old Money by Kelsey Miller, Copyright © 2025 by Kelsey Miller, LLC Published by Hanover Square Press.
On the Fourth of July, a teenager dies at an exclusive country club. Twenty years later, her cousin returns to her hometown, seeking answers behind closed gates in this rich, atmospheric thriller for fans of Lucy Foley, Liz Moore and Ruth Ware.
Twenty years ago, sixteen-year-old Caitlin Dale died unexpectedly on the Fourth of July. Like other affluent families of Briar’s Green, Caitlin joined hers at the country’s club’s annual party. They say she slipped by the pool. A tragic accident.
But her cousin Alice knows the truth.
Caitlin was murdered. And Alice saw who did it.
Twenty years later, Alice returns to her childhood hometown of Briar’s Green, seeking answers. The club where Caitlin died has barely changed. But its secrets, Alice soon discovers, are carefully hidden—and there are powerful people in Briar’s Green who would like them to stay that way.
In her deliciously dark debut novel, Kelsey Miller transports readers to a brooding enclave reminiscent of Sleepy Hollow, one with a long history, a short fuse and narrator determined to seek justice, at all costs.
Audiobook Narrator- Helen Laser.
Women's Fiction Psychological [Hanover Square Press, On Sale: September 30, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9781335000378 / eISBN: 9780369746986]
Kelsey Miller is a culture writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of international bestseller, I'll Be There For You (Hanover Square Press, 2018), a pop-culture history of Friends, and the memoir Big Girl (Grand Central Publishing, 2016). Her work has been featured in New York Magazine, Glamour, Medium, Women's Health, Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, Literary Hub, Refinery29, A Cup of Jo, and more.
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