Too Far Under

by Lynn Osterkamp

  Desperation had me by the throat. I had to do something to stop this fraud right now. Legal channels are fine when you have the time, but time wasn’t on my side here. I began to wonder if there wouldn’t be some way to use under-the-table tactics to catch Gramma’s scammer. Of course Pablo couldn’t do that, but I felt justified in doing whatever I could, given the circumstances.

  Suddenly I thought of Shane. I remembered that conversation I had overheard between Faye and Tim about Shane running an ID theft and forgery scam, buying electronics and gift cards with stolen credit card numbers and selling them on eBay. He sounded like someone who knew his way around eBay and wasn’t bothered by ethical or legal issues. Of course I couldn’t tell him I knew about that, but I could appeal to him as someone who knows the internet better than most of us. Maybe he could help me find a way to unmask the scammer.

  It was nearly noon by then, which didn’t seem too early to call him, so I did. He wasn’t exactly excited to hear from me. “I don’t even have time to get my own work done,” Shane said after I’d asked him if he could help me with an urgent internet problem regarding my Gramma’s art sales. “If it’s about art, why don’t you ask Faye to help?”

  “Look Shane, I’m desperate and I really need your help,” I said. “I know you’re busy, but I need an internet expert, not an art expert. If I could stop by for a few minutes and show you what’s going on, you’d be doing me a huge favor.” I probably wouldn’t have pushed him that way if it hadn’t been for Gramma, but I didn’t feel even a little bit guilty when he reluctantly agreed that I could come over.

  I had to knock so long and hard before he answered his door that I was about to open it and let myself in. But suddenly there he was, barefoot, wearing baggy shorts and a wrinkled tee shirt, and blinking as if he’d emerged from a dark cave. He beckoned me in and I followed, gagging slightly at the rotten smell that came from inside. The place didn’t look like he’d done any cleaning or thrown anything out since Lacey and I had been there on Wednesday. His blinds were closed and I struggled to avoid tripping over trash in the dim light, which came from his laptop and extra monitor glowing on the coffee table.

  “Hey, Cleo,” he said half-heartedly. He had a spacey look, like he might be hung-over or high. I began to doubt my judgment. Good grief, what was I thinking coming to a spoiled, slacker kid who lived in a virtual world, when I needed help with a serious real-life problem? But there I was and there was no denying he’s way savvier about the internet than I’ll ever be. After he brushed papers off his futon couch, we sat and I explained about Gramma’s need for money and the eBay fraud. Then I directed him to the eBay pages Pablo and I had found the night before.

  “I can see why you’re upset,” Shane said, “but from what I know about eBay the sellers can describe the items they’re selling any way they want and there’s essentially no oversight as to authenticity. EBay takes pretty much a hands-off approach to fakes or stolen property or whatever. The way they see it, they’re a marketplace, not a retailer, so what’s sold is the seller’s responsibility.”

  Ouch. This didn’t sound good. “How do I find out who the seller really is and how to get in touch with whoever it is so I can stop this fraud?”

  Shane rolled his eyes. “EBay isn’t going to tell you who the seller is. If you want to know, you’ll have to be your own detective. You’ll probably have to spend way longer than you have to find out who it is.”

  I drooped in despair. “What else can I do? Are you saying it’s hopeless?”

  “I’m saying that it doesn’t sound like trying to stop the internet art fraud is the way to go right now. If I were you, I’d forget the eBay thing and work on selling your grandmother’s real paintings for now.”

  I took a moment to think about his advice. “But Faye isn’t getting good prices for Gramma's paintings.”

  “Or at least that’s what she’s telling you,” he said, skeptically.

  Did he know something compromising about Faye? And if he did, would he tell me? “What do you mean? Do you think she’s lying to me?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I told you before that the gallery isn’t doing well financially. Her situation is pretty desperate. You might want to be careful how much you trust her. Maybe she’s selling the paintings for more than she’s telling you and keeping the extra for herself. Or—how do you know that she still has all your grandmother’s paintings that she says she hasn’t sold?”

  Whoa—panic time! I was definitely losing my cool. I would have gotten up and walked around the room to relieve some tension, but the floor was too cluttered. So I stayed put on the futon couch as I pushed on with more questions. “What are you thinking about Faye?”

  “Have you seen the paintings lately? How do you know she hasn’t sold them and not told you so she could keep all the money?” He lounged back with a sphinxlike look that reminded me of Angelica.

  I squirmed. “You’re making some serious allegations here, Shane. Why would Faye cheat my grandmother? Her gallery has been representing Gramma for years.”

  “Like I said, Faye’s been under some serious financial pressure lately.” His tone was downright cocky.

  I decided to confront him. “How do you know so much about her finances? Did your mother tell you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So how then? I can’t believe you if I don’t know the source.”

  He paused, staring off into the back of the dark room. Then he turned to me. “Okay. Here it is. But I don’t want Lacey to know about this. If you tell her, I’ll deny every word of it.”

  “Okay,” I said inquiringly.

  He straightened up and looked me in the eyes as he explained. “Last spring I was looking for something on my mom’s desk and I ran across a list of her passwords. She was on my back about some stuff so I decided to check out her emails and see what she was saying about me. I read a lot of her emails for months—both the ones she sent and the ones she got.”

  “Wasn’t it risky that she’d find out?”

  “Not really. I only went on her account in the middle of the night when I knew she wouldn’t be on it. And I was very careful to mark all her emails unopened after I read them.”

  “What does all this have to do with Faye’s finances?”

  He held up his hand to silence me. “Just listen,” he said. “I’m getting to that. In about March I read an email from Mom to Faye about creative bookkeeping Mom had uncovered. Apparently the gallery had some big losses, which Faye had covered up, and she ran through the reserves by continuing to take a big salary even when the gallery wasn’t bringing in enough to cover it. That got me interested so whenever I saw an email to or from Faye, I read it. Mom was asking Faye a bunch of questions about the gallery’s bills, pressuring her to be more accountable, and threatening to come in and go over the books. For months Faye kept blowing her off, making excuses. By summer Mom was questioning Faye’s ability to run the gallery. Mom gave her an ultimatum—get the gallery financially stable or Mom would dissolve the partnership and take it over. Then Mom died and Faye inherited the gallery, so I guess she gets to keep running it.” He sat back and waited for my reaction.

  “I agree, that sounds serious,” I said. “Did you tell your dad about it after your mom died?”

  “Of course not,” he said exasperatedly. “Then I’d have to tell him I’d been reading Mom’s email. I did give him some strong suggestions to check out whether Faye owed Mom money for gallery expenses, but he said that was a small deal and he had more important things to do.”

  “Why don’t you want Lacey to know about this?”

  He scowled. “Lacey already doesn’t trust me. I don’t want her to know I was reading Mom’s emails.”

  “But maybe Faye is the one who murdered your mother,” I objected. “Don’t you think Lacey should know what you found out about the conflict between them?”

  “Like I said, I can’t tell Lacey about that without telling her I was reading Mom’s email. But
one of the reasons I came up with the plan to say Lacey found out that Mom made a new will was to try to smoke Faye out. I wanted to see how Faye would react because she would probably be afraid Mom wrote her out of this new will, which would cancel out the old one.”

  We sat silently for a minute—at which point I realized that it was time for me to go. I wasn’t going to get any more help here. I thanked Shane and headed for the door.

  He didn’t bother to get up, but fired off one parting shot. “I did some online research about the art gallery business,” he said. “Owning a gallery is the second-worst business to be in, after restaurants. They go bankrupt all the time. Faye has a big advantage not having to pay rent.”

  I sighed as I closed the door behind me. Of course I knew that galleries are financially risky. But I was hoping Shane was wrong about Faye’s gallery. If it folded, what would happen to Gramma?

  Chapter 34

  Vernon Evers’ funeral was set for late Monday morning. Should I go? He was my grandparents’ lawyer, but it’s not as though I knew him well. On the other hand, Lacey and Angelica might expect to see me there. Right. Probably I should be there to support them. Of course Glenna wouldn’t want to see me there, but I knew the funeral would be huge, so she probably wouldn’t even notice me. So, okay. I re-scheduled my clients, put on my black dress and headed off to the service.

  It was a dreary day—cold and rainy—just like the weather for funerals in the movies. As I drove across town to the imposing Baptist church east of Boulder where the ceremony was to be held, I thought about Vernon and Glenna. Would she inherit in a big way from his estate? They weren’t married, so she wasn’t automatically entitled to anything by law. From what Tim had said about her, it was highly likely that she had manipulated him into putting her into his will for a big chunk. Did she push him down the stairs to hasten that inheritance along? A horrible thought, but Shane and Lacey seemed to think it was possible.

  I was so angry at that point that I almost missed the turn to get to the church parking lot. I hate the idea of someone taking advantage of an elderly person and I hate even more the idea that she might get away with it. If Glenna had been ripping Vernon off, we needed to find a way to show her up for the manipulative fraud that she was.

  The parking lot was already two-thirds full when I pulled in. I followed the crowd to the front of the building, where we filed in to the solemn strains of an organ playing “Shall We Gather at the River.” The music calmed my mood and pulled me into the moment. I chose a seat in a back pew and looked around. The church was nearly full, lots of grey-haired men in suits and older women in dark dresses. At the front of the church, slightly to the left of the aisle, sat a substantial copper casket topped with a colorful flower spray of roses, carnations, delphinium, daisies and freesia. On the right of the aisle a lectern was flanked by two large standing baskets of white mums and lilies.

  Funerals remind me that life is a short ride. As I sat there waiting for the service to begin, I thought about the way we move through life pretending to ourselves that we have all the time we need. And then it’s over. There’s so much I haven’t done—never been married, never had children, never been to Europe, never took piano lessons, never hiked Colorado’s highest peaks. The list could go on and on. I resolved to take some time soon to re-evaluate my priorities.

  I looked down at the printed program an usher had handed me on my way in. The cover had a picture of Vernon and his dates of birth and death. By my quick subtraction, he was seventy-eight when he died. In his obituary inside, I read that he was a graduate of Harvard Law School and had been a practicing attorney in Boulder for fifty years, as well as a city commissioner, community activist and a major player in local citizen environmental groups.

  He was predeceased by his wife Ruth and only child Mirabel. I remembered that Elisa had told me Ruth was from a very wealthy cattle-ranching family. That’s where Mirabel’s money came from. According to Boulder gossip—and Elisa—Mirabel’s grandparents had set up trust funds in their wills for both their daughter Ruth and their granddaughter Mirabel. The grandparents died when Mirabel was young, so she started getting trust fund income when she was eighteen. When Mirabel’s mother Ruth died suddenly of a heart attack two years ago, the principal remaining in her trust was divided equally between Vernon and Mirabel. I didn’t know how much that was, but I knew Mirabel had millions and I assumed Vernon did as well.

  And now maybe Glenna would be a millionaire. Thinking of Glenna, there she was wearing a smashing black suit with jeweled cuffs and leading the family processional down the aisle. She walked alone, weeping copiously and wiping her eyes with a lacey black handkerchief. Either she was truly grieving or she was an excellent actress.

  Behind her were Derrick and Judith, followed by Shane, and then a middle-aged couple I’d never seen before. But Lacey and Angelica weren’t part of the group. Alarm bells rang in my head as I scanned the crowd. Could something have happened to them on their trip to the mountains? I couldn’t imagine Derrick walking calmly down the church aisle if Lacey and Angelica were in trouble. Maybe they didn’t want to be in the public eye with their grief and were watching from some secluded spot in the church.

  The minister came out from a side door and motioned to Glenna who started the service by reading the twenty-third psalm. She stopped crying before she stepped up to the lectern and her voice was clear and still as she began, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

  I listened and tried to keep thoughts of Lacey and Angelica out of my mind. Following the scripture reading a soloist sang “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling.” Next a local attorney who had served with Vernon on the city commission delivered the eulogy. He spoke of “Vern,” his long-time friend and colleague as a good noble man who lived for bettering the community. He praised Vern’s high moral and ethical standards and reminisced about his many passions and successes.

  Derrick told an amusing family story about Vernon teaching the grandchildren to ski, and Shane told one about how he taught his grandfather to use the internet. They both thanked him for all he had done for their family. Friends and colleagues who had worked with Vernon over the years talked about how he had attended countless community meetings negotiating and debating long into the night, how he possessed unique skills to organize people with broad viewpoints, and how he often served as the cool head to heated opinions.

  It was good to hear these fond remembrances of Vernon with no mention of his recent memory problems or heavy drinking. He truly had been a distinguished attorney, held in high esteem for his contributions to the community.

  Glenna came back to the lectern to invite us all to stay for refreshments, and take time to mingle and share our remembrances of Vern. The pallbearers escorted the casket up the aisle; family members followed and then the rest of us began to exit, row by row. Since I was at the back, I was one of the last to move out into the lobby.

  I followed the crowd down the hall into a large airy room where long tables held fruit and cheese trays, coffee, tea and juice. Shane was standing alone on the far side of the room, Blackberry in hand, typing madly with both thumbs. I made my way over and stood in front of him until he looked up. “I didn’t see Lacey or Angelica,” I said. “Are they here?”

  “No,” he said, looking back at his Blackberry to check an email message.

  “I’m surprised they would miss the funeral,” I said. “Has something happened to them?”

  He continued typing. “No, they’re fine.”

  “So where are they? I need to talk to Lacey.”

  “They’re stuck in the mountains somewhere. You can call Lacey on her cell.”

  I was getting sick of his aloof attitude. Was he deliberately withholding information to annoy me? I had no patience for his passive-aggressive behavior, so I walked away—back across the room out to the hall, took a quick trip to the ladies room and then walked down the hall a ways to a small quiet Sunday School room. I took out my cell phone, whi
ch I had turned off during the service. As soon as I turned it on, I saw that I had a missed call from Lacey. She’d left a voice mail, but all it said was, “Call me. It’s important.”

  I was just about to call her back when I heard raised voices coming from slightly further down the hall. I peeked out the door and saw Derrick, Shane and Glenna facing each other in what looked like a stormy exchange. They seemed too involved in their confrontation to notice me, so I stayed just inside the doorway and listened.

  “That’s not acceptable, Glenna,” Derrick said angrily. “We have a right to look through Vernon’s office to see whether he made a new will for Mirabel.”

  “No you don’t,” Glenna said. “Vernon left me his house and all its contents. If you want an inventory of what’s in the house, you can call the attorney who is handling Vern’s estate. Here’s his card.”

  “You bitch,” Shane said bitterly. “You may have fooled Grandad but we know what you are. You took advantage of an old man’s weakness to get him to write you into his will and then you pushed him down the stairs so you could get the money faster.”

  Wow, that was getting right to the point. Apparently Shane didn’t feel constrained to wait for evidence, a coroner’s report or a police investigation.

  “That’s enough, Shane,” Derrick said, putting his hand on Shane’s shoulder. “Making accusations won’t get you anywhere. Let’s talk to the lawyer.”

  Glenna ignored Derrick’s attempt to tamp down the fire. “I’m sick of your bullshit, Shane,” she said vehemently. “You’re way more desperate for money than I am. Vern always said you can be a very pushy kid when you want something. Maybe you pushed your mother under the water in her hot tub so you could inherit and maybe you got so angry you pushed Vern down the stairs when he didn’t come up with her new will like you wanted him to.”