Toronto Collection Volume 3 (Toronto Series #10-13)

by Heather Wardell

  Shortly he did, a letter from the friend of a cancer sufferer who wrote that her friend would never ask for money but was considering suicide because of the financial burden her condition was inflicting on her family since she had been the primary breadwinner before she got sick.

  When I'd read it and made a sad sound, he shook his head. "Kind of breaks your heart. They'd rather have her even with all the debt."

  "A million times over, I bet. Yup, this one's worth doing too." I laid it with the shelter letter, then sighed.

  "Problem?"

  I gestured at the boxes still awaiting our attention. "All these requests are just sitting here." Though the mere thought made my stomach twist, I said, "I could wipe them out if I used the principal. I could change so many lives."

  He tipped his head from side to side. "True, but then there'd be no more interest. This way you can help for ever. Interest builds up." A sudden harsh laugh. "At least yours is building up in a good way."

  I blinked, realizing that his original fifty-grand gambling debt had probably incurred a lot of interest over the years, and he flushed. "Never mind. Sorry. Just thinking about a credit card bill, and no, you can't help me with it."

  I gave him my best innocent smile. "Did I offer?"

  "Not yet," he muttered, but he smiled back.

  We kept going through the letters but my head was spinning. Was his debt really on a credit card? They charged twenty percent or more per year. How would he ever get it paid off? But Tiff had made it clear she didn't think I should help him. And if I did and he just gambled it away....

  John cleared his throat. My heart skipped a beat, because I wasn't sure what if anything I wanted him to say about his debt, but he held out a letter to me and said, "I like this one too."

  It was from a schoolgirl in Toronto who'd read a book about being good to people and wanted to have the author come to her school to talk to everyone about it. The author's fee was apparently a thousand dollars and the girl had asked her parents for it but they had said they couldn't afford it and suggested she ask me. She had adorably childish printing but she had laid out a thorough case for why this would help the school at first but eventually the world at large because "having more people being good to each other is a good thing". I had to agree, even though I'd needed John to shame me into being good.

  I smiled at my friend. "You know how to pick 'em." I glanced at my watch and realized it was a few minutes past twelve. "Where's that pizza?"

  Before he could answer, someone knocked loudly at my apartment door.

  "Wonder if the building owner will ever fix the intercom," John said as I got up to get the pizza.

  "Maybe he wrote me a letter asking for the money."

  I opened the door still laughing with John, but stopped at once when I saw who was there.

  "Are you Angela Hollingsford?"

  I blinked up at the taller of the two police officers, both of whom were showing me their badges. "I am. Why?"

  "Have you attempted to drive your car this morning?"

  "I haven't left the building since yesterday afternoon," I said, bewildered. "Why?"

  "Ma'am, may we come in?"

  "I... of course." I stepped out of the doorway, and turned back to John, who looked as confused as I felt.

  I rushed to pull kitchen chairs into the living room because the couch was covered with letters, but the shorter officer said, "Don't worry, ma'am. We're fine. But you should probably sit down."

  Had anything good ever come after such a suggestion from a cop? I did sit, and so did John, and the officers both looked to him.

  "This is my friend John," I said. "From upstairs."

  The taller officer gave a single nod then turned his attention to me. "Ma'am, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but..." He cleared his throat. "One of your relatives is trying to have you murdered."

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Monday afternoon I sat in Tyler's office while he grumpily put the finishing touches on the document he hadn't wanted to draw up, wrapping up my tenth phone call with my parents since the cops had left on Saturday and I'd told the shocked John, "I have to call my folks."

  "She's definitely not apologetic, even now," Dad said, sounding embarrassed since he'd insisted on Saturday that Sydney must have had a momentary lapse of reason in trying to hire a hitman to rig my car to explode. Being about as good a criminal mastermind as one of my trees, she'd picked, in her words, "the shadiest looking guy outside the biker bar Friday night", who turned out to be an off-duty cop. He'd strung her along until she gave him the deposit money to do the job and then arrested her.

  "She... um..." Dad paused and I could picture him and Mom exchanging 'do we tell her or not?' looks. They must have decided yes because he said, "Well, honey, this morning she said she thinks you deserve it. Because you didn't give them more money."

  Them. I wanted to ask again what Cody thought of all this but I couldn't bring myself to say the words. Sydney had been adamant from the start that he knew nothing about it, and my parents seemed to believe that, but I wasn't quite sure and I hated it. "How much was I supposed to give her?"

  "If it had been her," Mom said, her tone sarcastic, "she would have immediately split it evenly among her family and her closest friends. Not kept even a nickel for herself."

  "Edith, we don't know she wouldn't have--"

  "Oh, of course we do. Why would anyone give away every last cent? Why should they? What Angela's doing is the best plan. Hold on to the principal until you see people's true colors. And Sydney's are whatever color 'I'd keep it all for myself and brag about it' would be."

  I had to agree, but I didn't want to make them fight any further. "I guess that's how it would have been split if she had killed me. That's what my will says, anyhow." Which of course she knew, since the ever-practical Tuesday had asked me about it the day I'd announced my win to them.

  Mom sighed. "I'm so sorry, Angela. Your money should have been nothing but fun for you. But instead..."

  "Yeah," I said softly. Instead, I'd been lying to my best friend and making John uncomfortable and driving Sydney into a life of crime.

  We all sat silent for a moment, then I glanced at the ornate clock on Tyler's wall and realized I'd need to be off the phone soon. "So anyhow, she stays in jail until her court date?"

  "They set her bail at two million dollars, since she made it clear she would try again if she got out."

  That, I doubted she'd meant to do, but when she'd realized she'd attempted to hire a cop she had lost control and screamed out exactly how much she hated me and how much she thought I deserved to die, and the bailiff hadn't been impressed with the cop's report.

  "And the court date's not set yet?" Tyler had said I should not go see Sydney in jail, not that I'd had any inclination to do so, but that I would probably be called to testify in her trial.

  "Actually, they figured it out this morning. March 19th."

  My parents would still be out of the country. Unless they decided to-- No. I wanted them to go. I cleared my throat and said, "I'll email you guys on the cruise and let you know what happens."

  Mom said, "I... if you want us to... we don't have to go," and I couldn't hold back my first smile since the cops had knocked at my door. It was sweet of her, but she so obviously wanted me to say they should go.

  I wanted to say that. Their cruise had been the first significant thing I'd done with my winnings, and cancelling it because of Sydney somehow felt like she'd have won. "You DO have to go, because I want my postcards. Are you all packed?"

  "We are," Mom said, her tone so full of happy relief that I smiled again. "And we'll send a postcard every chance we get."

  "Excellent."

  Tyler waved at me and tapped his watch.

  "Sorry, I'd better go. My meeting's about to start."

  Dad began, "Are you sure you want to--" but I cut him off. "I am. And I need to go answer the same question for my lawyer. Have a great trip!"

  Mom said, "W
e will," and Dad said, "Watch out for off-duty cops."

  I said, "Dad!" and Mom said, "Duncan!" at the same moment and in the same tone.

  He said, "Sorry, couldn't resist." He cleared his throat. "Sorry. I shouldn't have-- Look, take care, okay? And know none of the rest of us feel the same as she does. It's your money. You owe us nothing."

  "Thanks, Dad," I said, touched by the unusual seriousness in his voice.

  We ended the call and I reluctantly looked at Tyler. He had the document I'd asked for under his hand, but he showed no signs of pushing it toward me. "Angela, your parents clearly don't think this is a good idea, and neither do I. So you do have to answer the question for me. Why are you suddenly so insistent on giving Shane five million dollars?"

  That wasn't actually the question Dad had started to ask but it was a better one, or at least one even more difficult to answer. I'd called Tyler at home Saturday night, after the flurry of cops and talking to my parents and my horrified siblings, and told him that I needed this done. He had pushed me for a reason then but I hadn't been able to articulate it.

  I wasn't sure I could now either, but I tried. "My sister-in-law wants me dead. That makes me think I'm handling the money all wrong."

  He raised an eyebrow. "It makes me think your sister-in-law's a bitch, but carry on."

  "She wasn't before," I said. "She was always so sweet. But now everything's changed, and it's because I only gave them a few thousand dollars. I have so much and that's all I gave them."

  Frowning, he said, "I thought you gave your family hundreds of thousands. No?"

  "Not yet. I intended to. Intend to. But without touching the principal, I have to wait a few months for the interest to build up." I sighed. "I figured that would be better than once a month giving one of them some money and making the others wait. Maybe I was wrong."

  "So... you feel guilty?"

  It went deeper than that. I'd always been into giving as generously as I could, buying coffees for people in line behind me even if it meant I didn't have much money left over, and when I'd thought about how I'd spend a win I'd assumed I would give just about everything away. Instead, though, John had had to convince me to do anything charity-related at all and I'd done the coffee thing that morning but it had felt stupid and pointless to give away five bucks with all I had.

  But at least I had given away that little bit. My other spending had been on vital things like my new car and my trip to China and my hair extensions. It had been all about me. I'd become something I'd never wanted to be: cheap.

  But 'guilty' was close enough, so I nodded.

  Tyler shook his head. "Okay, then maybe split a month's interest among your siblings. Even two months. But this..." He tapped the document. "You can't go back. And giving him anything implies that you believe his claim, which means he will almost certainly fight for half instead of taking ten percent."

  He'd told me that on the weekend, but I knew he was wrong. Shane wasn't like that. "I did tell him we'd share winnings."

  "Years and years ago. It's irrelevant now."

  Not to me.

  Tyler's receptionist gave a light knock at the door and called in, "Mr. and Mrs. Thomson are here."

  "Ms. Jones-Thomson and Mr. Thomson, actually," said a deep voice, not Shane's.

  Tyler shook the document at me. "You sure?"

  I gave a single decisive nod. I was. I would do the right thing.

  As I realized that 'the right thing' was probably giving Shane the half I'd long-ago promised him, Liz and Blair the lawyer walked in followed by Shane. Tyler and I got to our feet, and we all settled in at his conference table. Shane immediately pulled out a sheet of paper and began doodling on it. He'd always been into drawing, and now that I thought about it I was surprised he hadn't done it at our first meeting. Liz gave him a disgusted look but said nothing, instead focusing her attention on Blair.

  "I understand you have some sort of proposal for us," the lawyer said to Tyler. "I would have preferred to be notified of this last week so I could consider it more carefully."

  "Ms. Hollingsford only came to this decision on Saturday, and I doubted your clients would want to wait to hear it."

  Liz turned to me. "You're giving us half?"

  Shane snapped his head up from his page, although his pencil kept moving.

  Liz's brown eyes were intense on my face, and it made me uncomfortable, so I looked at Tyler.

  He shook his head. "Ms. Hollingsford does not believe Mr. Thomson deserves such a huge share of her winnings," he said, his eyes warning me not to say that in fact I sort of did. "However, as a token of appreciation for their past relationship, she has decided to gift him with five million dollars, ten percent of the original win."

  Since I still had interest payments coming in, I was worth more than fifty million now, and Tyler of course knew it so he'd worded the offer carefully.

  Liz and Blair looked at each other for a long moment without speaking, then the corner of his mouth flickered into the tiniest of smiles. Before he turned to Shane, I already knew what was coming, and Blair didn't surprise me. "I recommend you accept. There's no guarantee that a lawsuit would--"

  Shane smashed his pencil down on the table, making us all jump. Then he picked up his sheet of paper and began crumpling it into a tight ball. "No way. Not a chance. You told us we could get half, and I am holding out for that." He threw the paper into the corner of the room, his action shocking me even more than his words because he'd never treated one of his doodling sheets like that when we were together. "Not a chance," he said again, then got up and stalked out of the room.

  Blair and Liz stared at each other again, but this time Blair didn't smile. Then he turned to Tyler. "I will speak to him," he said, and I shivered at the cold fury in his voice. "Make him see reason."

  Tyler nodded. "You have until tomorrow at midnight. Then the offer's off the table."

  "Of course," Blair said, even more frostily, then he and Liz swept from the room.

  Once the door closed behind them Tyler began to speak but I wasn't listening. I'd gone after Shane's sheet of paper lying forgotten on the thick beige carpet.

  Forgotten by Liz and Blair and Tyler, but not by me and I felt sure not by Shane. He'd thrown it there on purpose.

  I opened it up and smoothed it out enough that I could see the usual sorts of Shane doodles, fantastic skyscrapers and exotic plants and detailed birds, but in the middle an unusual thing.

  I don't want this. Email me. shane.thomson@tempmail.com

  *****

  I didn't show Tyler the paper. Instead I stuffed it into my purse as casually as I could and rebuffed his offer to get rid of it for me by saying, "It's already in there, and my purse needs cleaning out anyhow. I'll throw it and the other junk out at home."

  I didn't, though. I emailed Shane on my phone from outside Tyler's office, and two days later I sat nervously awaiting his arrival in the off-the-beaten-path coffee shop he'd suggested. After answering my email and arranging the meeting, he'd told me he'd be deleting the email account for reasons he'd explain when we met, and I wanted to know those reasons and also even more the reasons why he'd wanted us to meet in the first place.

  When he finally arrived, though, all I wanted to do was hug him. I knew I couldn't, and shouldn't even want to, but I couldn't believe how badly I craved his arms around me again. He was a six-foot-tall symbol of everything I didn't have in my life.

  He bought himself a coffee, after checking if I needed another drink, and I sat struggling with my feelings for him until he returned and took his seat across from me.

  Then I just sat staring at him.

  He did the same, and we didn't do anything but look at each other for several long seconds until he said, "You look great, Angela."

  "Thanks," I managed. "So do you."

  He rolled his eyes and smiled. "Liar. I've fattened up and balded out. But thanks for being polite."

  "You do look good, though," I said before I could stop m
yself.

  His smile vanished as though it had never existed, replaced with a look of fierce intensity. "So do you. God, so do you. I..." He leaned back, away from me, and shook his head. "Look, I can't stay too long in case she figures out I'm out of the office. I don't know, but she might be having me watched or snooping in my email. That's why I set up that temporary address. I had to talk to you about this lawsuit."

  Knowing Tyler would flip his well-groomed lid if he knew I was discussing the situation without him, I said, "What about it?"

  "Keep fighting."

  I blinked, having expected anything but that. "Why?"

  "Because..." Shane heaved a huge sigh. "Because Liz is about to leave me and take half of my money, what there is of it, and she'd very much like to take half of a half of yours too."

  "Oh." I couldn't think of anything else to say.

  "Yeah." He sighed again. "Can I tell you the whole thing? Nobody else knows and I hate carrying it around by myself."

  I nodded, though I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the tale of his trouble with the woman he'd married instead of me.

  "We got married a little less than nine years ago, and it was bad almost from the start," he said, with no hint in his voice that he realized punching me in the face would have hurt less. He must have married her almost immediately after we broke up.

  "Okay," I mumbled through the pain.

  He didn't seem to recognize that I was having trouble speaking. "She was a big traveler, bigger even than me, and I thought she'd always be one. But right after the wedding, like the next day, she said that we should stay home and start getting ready to have a family. She's a few years older than me and--"

  "Do you have one?"

  He tipped his head to the side at my interruption. "One what?"

  I cleared my throat. "A family. Do you have kids?"

  He shook his head. "She's forty-six now, and even back then we knew it might not work. She wanted to try right away, and..." He finally looked uncomfortable. "I didn't at that time, you know that, but when I thought about it I knew it made sense not to wait. But I didn't think we'd stop traveling to do it. I wanted my life to be the same, just with her in it. She said that's what she wanted too. But what she really wanted was for me to change into someone I wasn't."