by Lois Winston
“By that reasoning you might as well blame Ira for her death.”
“Ira? How?”
“He introduced Flora to Lawrence. Hell, why not blame Lucille? Ira wouldn’t even exist if she hadn’t ended her relationship with his father.”
“Now you’re really being ridiculous.”
“Am I? The point is, we have no way of knowing that Carmen wouldn’t have died anyway.”
“That makes no sense, Zack. She wouldn’t have been murdered if I—”
“I didn’t say murdered. We all die at some point. If Carmen died of a heart attack that day—”
“But she didn’t!”
“You don’t know that she wouldn’t have. Or suffered a stroke. Or been attacked by a rabid raccoon.”
“A rabid raccoon? Really, Zack? How likely is that?”
“The point is that no matter when Carmen died or how, Lupe still would have eventually found the suitcase and asked you to create albums for her kids. Maybe not this week or the next or next month or next year, but at some point in the future someone—you or me or Lupe—would have found that letter.”
His reasoning smacked of grasping at straws, but I conceded his point. “Even so, I would have much preferred to deal with this in the distant future. Preferably without a murder and when my life contained far less chaos.”
“Agreed. But at least we talked Lupe out of confronting her entire family over Thanksgiving.”
“A small victory.” I laughed in spite of myself. “Can you imagine the can of worms she would have let loose?”
“Forget the worms,” said Zack. “Think more along the lines of an exploding twenty-gallon drum of vipers.”
Which was why I wanted nothing to do with unearthing the truth behind the long-buried Cordova family secret. Yet here I was, now firmly entrenched in the muck, thanks to my inability to say no to Lupe Cordova Betancourt.
~*~
I’d completely forgotten Wednesday was the day before Thanksgiving. Typical New Jersey drive-time gridlock is bad enough but the day before a major holiday? Fuhgeddaboudit! After sitting bumper-to-bumper with travelers getting an early morning jump on holiday traffic (ha!), shoppers rushing to pick up their turkeys, and those of us just trying to get to work, I finally arrived at the office forty minutes late.
Luckily, no one noticed because no one was around. Most of my coworkers had taken a vacation day to spend cooking, baking, or traveling. I used to enjoy days like this, when I was one of only a handful of people not off on assignment, vacation, or taking a sick day. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish when your day is free of distractions and interruptions. But that all changed one evening last year when after returning to the office to catch up on some work, I discovered a dead body glued to my desk chair. Now the sound of only my heels clicking along the empty halls sets off a massive case of the heebie-jeebies in me.
I regretted not taking the day off. I was all caught up on my work. I didn’t have to cook for Thanksgiving. Anyone else would have jumped at the chance for a mental health day, but in truth, my mental health fared far better alone at work than stuck at home with Lucille and the Daughters of the October Revolution, heebie-jeebies notwithstanding.
I dumped my purse and coat in my cubicle and headed for the break room to start a pot of coffee, only to find I wasn’t quite alone. Cloris stood at the counter, measuring coffee grounds into the pot.
“I thought I was the only one who showed up today,” I said, zeroing in on the plastic container next to the coffee pot. I lifted the lid to find ten pumpkin muffins.
“I’ve been here since six this morning,” she said.
I suppose that accounted for the muffins being two shy of a dozen. I grabbed one as I settled into a chair. “Why?”
Cloris poured a carafe of cold water into the coffee maker and flipped the switch before joining me at the table. “I couldn’t sleep, and since I’ve gotten next to no work done all week, thanks to that lawsuit, I still have to proof copy for the issue in production and finish up my presentation for Monday’s editorial meeting.”
Given the muffins, I suspected Cloris had again spent at least part of the night stress baking. I took a bite of muffin and along with pumpkin, tasted chunks of apple. If only I could harness my own stress in such a productive manner. Then again, the added pounds I’d pack on from stress eating after stress baking would only increase my stress levels, not alleviate them.
“Any news?” I asked.
“We hired a lawyer last night. He agreed with Gregg about filing a countersuit.”
“For what?”
“Basically the kitchen sink. Defamation of character. Slander. Libel. Fraud. You name it. We’d better win. You have any idea what lawyers charge by the hour?”
“A bundle.”
“I’ll see your bundle and raise you tenfold. And we’ll have to pay it if we don’t win the counter-suit.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.” She reached for a muffin. “We also spoke with the police. They’re initiating an investigation.”
“Didn’t the new owners call the police when they first received the letters?”
Cloris bit into the muffin and shook her head. “The police said they have no record of a report.”
“That in itself sounds suspicious.”
“Probably because the letters don’t exist. They didn’t include copies in the lawsuit, just summaries and some quoted text. The lawyer is demanding to see the actual letters.”
I knew this from the Internet search Zack and I had done. What I didn’t know, since I’d never found myself on the receiving end of a lawsuit—thank goodness— was whether including copies of the evidence was standard procedure or not. I scanned my memory for episodes of all the legal TV shows I’d watched over the years that included scenes where one character slapped an envelope into the hand of another character and said, “You’ve been served.” I came up empty. Not that it would have helped since I knew Hollywood took massive liberties for dramatic effect.
Still, had someone sent me threatening letters, my first instinct would be to call the police, not a litigator. Couple that with the new owners waiting until they’d spent tens of thousands of dollars on renovations before deciding the letters prevented them from moving into the house, and it all smacked of a scam. “What do you know about the new owners?” I asked.
Cloris got up to pour us both cups of coffee. “Not much other than they came from somewhere in the Midwest.” She thought for a moment as she carried the cups back to the table. “Wisconsin, maybe? Or Minnesota?” She shrugged. “They qualified for a mortgage. That was all we cared about at the time. We didn’t meet them until settlement.”
“Did you have any conversation with them?”
“Not much. They weren’t chatty. We said we hoped they loved the house as much as we had. They said it was perfect, exactly what they wanted, which is kind of odd, given that they proceeded to do a massive renovation. Anyway, once we finished up the paperwork, they handed over a check, we handed over the keys, and that was that. We went our separate ways.”
Although the law firm would certainly look into the buyers’ background during the course of preparing the counter-lawsuit, perhaps I could save Cloris and Gregg some of those “bundle times ten” billable hours with a bit of Googling. I suspected the police would also investigate the buyers, given that one plus one definitely wasn’t adding up to two, but it couldn’t hurt to have ten additional digits tripping across the keyboard and clicking on whatever links turned up in a search.
Between that and working on Lupe’s scrapbook, I’d filled my to-do list for the day. But not wanting to raise Cloris’s hopes, only to dash them should my cyber-detecting fail, I kept my plan to myself. I’d present my search results only if I uncovered something useful.
I decided to tackle Cloris’s problem first. In all the online articles Zack and I had discovered about The Sentinel and the lawsuit, none had gone into any depth about the new owners. Most seemed
more interested in the sensationalism of what had been dubbed The Sentinel House than the people involved in the lawsuit. Several articles mentioned both the new owners and the former owners had declined requests for interviews, referring reporters to their respective attorneys.
Cloris hadn’t mentioned hearing from any reporters, but maybe she and Gregg weren’t answering their phone. If I were in her shoes, I’d certainly let all calls go to voicemail the way I did any unfamiliar number. As far as I was concerned, the person who had invented Caller ID deserved a Nobel Prize.
However, after two hours of online searching, my knowledge of the new owners hadn’t increased one iota, but my frustration level had grown considerably.
I suppose I should have expected not to find anything definitive, given their extremely common names. I first scoured social media, but if the John and Susan Jones I searched for had Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts, they had enabled ultra-strict privacy settings, or shut down their accounts when they filed the lawsuit. None of the accounts that popped up pointed to the people who bought Cloris’s house, only a myriad of other people by the same name.
When I ran a Google search, tens of thousands of hits appeared. With no other information about the couple besides their names and the contents of the lawsuit, narrowing down the search parameters proved futile. Plodding through the massive number of links from my initial search would take days, if not weeks. As much as I wanted to help Cloris, I didn’t have that kind of time.
Although, as I stared at the computer screen, my mind raced with other possibilities. What if John and Susan Jones were aliases? But why? Several possibilities sprang to mind—celebrities who wanted to maintain a certain level of privacy, people in Witness Protection, or grifters running a scam.
I immediately discounted the celebrity theory. If either John or Susan Jones were a celebrity, Cloris would have recognized them. And if not Cloris, certainly someone at the attorney’s office during closing, or one of the news services that had run with the story would have ferreted out such explosive information.
As for Witness Protection, I knew something about the program. Our former fashion editor had been placed in WitSec when she agreed to testify against her mobster father and boyfriend. Not only did people in WitSec have to keep a low profile, they had to remain squeaky clean to stay in the program. If the new owners were in Witness Protection, wouldn’t the U.S. Marshals prevent them from filing a lawsuit that would open them up to all sorts of scrutiny?
I also knew a bit about grifters. An elderly neighbor had fallen victim to one not too long ago. Of the three choices, in my non-professional opinion, the grifter option appeared the most likely.
I wondered if their lawyer was in on it.
Then again, from what I’d learned about grifters, they usually had a take-the-money-and-run M.O. Lawsuits take years to wind their way through the courts. The longer the con lasts, the more likely the risk of exposure. These people hadn’t approached Cloris and Gregg to demand any sort of restitution. There was no attempt at a shakedown. They’d skipped Go and gone directly to Lawsuit. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that pegging the new buyers as grifters also made no sense.
So who were these people, and what was their motive? Could there really be a Sentinel?
SEVEN
Lupe picked me up at ten o’clock Friday morning. “How was your Thanksgiving?” she asked after I settled myself in her car.
“Relaxing.”
She raised both eyebrows. “Is that sarcasm?”
“No. Zack took us out to dinner. No shopping, no cooking, no cleanup. And no Lucille.” I never expected my mother-in-law to pass up a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant, but that’s exactly what she did, going off on a rant about bourgeoisie excess and children starving in Africa. Zack told her he’d make a contribution to the Red Cross to help with the famine epidemic, but she still refused to join us, opting instead to dine alone on leftover meatloaf. “Best Thanksgiving ever.”
“Lucky you. With Mami gone, hosting fell to me. We had over two-dozen relatives descend on us. We split up the cooking, and I had lots of help with the dishes, but as you can imagine, I wasn’t in the best of moods. I kept staring at various relatives, wondering which ones knew about my sister.”
I patted her hand. “Maybe we’ll get some answers from your aunt.”
Lupe’s great-aunt lived with her widowed daughter Elena in a two-bedroom apartment complex for active seniors in Cranford, one town over from Westfield. Renata hardly qualified as active at this point in her life, spending much of her day confined to a wheelchair, but according to Lupe, she was too stubborn to move into an assisted living facility.
“Elena cares for her mother by herself?” I asked, dreading the day when Mama would no longer be self-sufficient. What would I do? I couldn’t give up my job to care for her, but neither one of us had the financial resources to move her into a quality assisted living facility. So I continually implored the Goddess of Older Parents to keep Mama healthy in both body and mind.
I also pleaded on behalf of Lucille. As much as I hated having her under my roof, I wasn’t nasty enough to wish her into a Medicaid nursing home.
Not that she appreciated the sacrifices I’ve made for her. The communist pain in my patootie continues to insist I’m responsible for her son’s death and its financially disastrous aftermath. If she only knew the truth…But knowing she’d never believe me, I’ve remained mum to spare myself the aggravation.
“At some point Elena will have to make some hard decisions about her mother,” said Lupe. “After all, she’s not exactly young, either.”
“How old is she?”
“The same age as Mami.”
“Were they close?”
Lupe slowed for a red light, turning toward me once the car came to a stop. “They’re…were…first cousins. Renata was my grandmother’s older sister. Mami and Elena were always on good terms, but as for hanging out together as teens?” She shrugged. “No one ever mentioned anything.”
A few minutes later Lupe pulled into a parking space in front of a modern brick apartment complex. The building, landscaped with hibernating azaleas and rhododendrons, formed a horseshoe around a grassy expanse dotted with skeletal oaks and maples and a few pine trees. Wrought iron and wood benches sat randomly grouped under many of the trees.
A shopping complex that housed a supermarket, bank, pharmacy, and coffee shop was situated directly across the street, next to a two-story office building that contained an urgent care center on the ground floor and doctors’ offices on the second floor. The gothic spire of the local Catholic Church rose up from a block behind the shops. A street sign at the corner indicated the location of the public library around the block. With so many of life’s necessities within a short walk, the neighborhood was ideal for seniors—or anyone else who hated driving everywhere.
Lupe led me along a path that cut through the center of the horseshoe. A stinging wind sent the occasional burst of snowflakes from steel gray clouds dancing around us as we scurried to the main entrance of the complex.
Once inside the lobby, Lupe approached a security guard seated behind a wood and granite counter positioned halfway between the entrance and a bank of three elevators. A name plaque on the counter identified him as Officer Brummer. The badge pinned to his blue shirt read Garden State Security. “Lupe Betancourt to see Elena Telasco. She’s expecting me.”
He extended a pudgy hand. “I’ll need to see ID.” Lupe pulled out her license and placed it in his palm. “You, too,” he said, indicating me with a sideways thrust of his salt and pepper stubbly chin.
I removed my license from my wallet and placed it on top of Lupe’s in his still outstretched hand. He consulted his computer screen, then scanned our IDs. After returning the licenses, he called to alert Elena of our arrival. As he hung up the phone, he nodded toward the elevators behind him. “Second floor. Make a left out of the elevator. It’s the third apartment on your right. Two-twen
ty-four.”
Elena greeted us at her door. As soon as I saw her, I remembered her from Carmen’s funeral. She had sung a moving tribute to her cousin. Given the circumstances, the coward in me had voted for skipping the service, but my conscience, spurred on by Zack’s urging, had won out. However, the moment Elena’s soaring soprano filled the church, I lost the battle to ward off my tears. I wasn’t alone. By the time Elena finished singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the entire congregation was dabbing at their eyes and blowing their noses.
After ushering us into the apartment, Elena took our coats and hung them in a closet near the front door. “I didn’t realize you were bringing anyone with you, Lupe. I thought you wanted to speak with my mother.”
“I do. This is Mami’s neighbor Anastasia Pollack. She’s helping me solve a mystery we’ve uncovered.” Lupe then addressed me. “Anastasia, meet Mami’s cousin Elena Telasco.”
I held out my hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“And you,” said Elena as she shook my hand, then turned back to Lupe. “What sort of mystery?”
“One that your mother might have answers to.”
“Or at least be able to fill in some blanks,” I added.
Elena shrugged. “I can’t imagine how Mami could assist you in anything, but she’s in the kitchen. I’ve made a fresh pot of coffee.”
We followed Elena down the hall into a bright white and stainless steel kitchen so immaculate only the tantalizing scent of freshly baked tres leches cake filling the apartment proved someone made use of more than the microwave. The entire kitchen sparkled like a showroom display with not a stray crumb in sight or a single dirty dish left in the sink. If I’d just baked a cake, my kitchen would look like the aftermath of a food fight. Come to think of it, thanks to Mama, Lucille, and two teenage boys, my kitchen usually looked like the aftermath of a food fight, whether or not any baking had occurred.
The cake, along with plates, forks, and napkins, filled the middle of a polished oak table in the breakfast nook. Renata sat at the table, nearly swallowed up by her wheelchair. Although the temperature in the room hovered only a degree or two below sweltering, she wore a heavy black crocheted shawl draped around her shoulders. The severe white bun secured tightly at the nape of her neck did little to reduce the deep roadmap of wrinkles crisscrossing her face, but behind those ravages of age I discerned hints of a once elegant woman, an older version of the daughter who now cared for her.
