He nodded.
“A good friend.” I emphasized.
Her mother did not waste any time. She rolled out of the back of the Oldsmobile and scurried into the house as fast as her high heels would allow.
“No rush babe, they’re already dead.” Jack, as grey and grizzled as Lizzie, followed her inside. Sarah waited for about ten seconds. She could hear the sound of the door to her grandparents’ apartment rattling from her relatively safe position inside the car.
“Fuck! Who locked the door?”
Sarah smiled. Her mother was no match for the members of the Brotherhood of Cornish Men. Yesterday, despite the power failure and treacherous road conditions, three Brotherhood members had arrived at that same door minutes after Suzanne Chatterhill made her calls. They spirited away the remaining silver, three books they deemed “rare”, all the jewelry and two original watercolors by local artists. Suzanne made a list and handed it to Sarah.
“After the it’s all over, here’s where you can pick up your things.”
The list was in Sarah’s purse.
She slowly exited the car and took her time walking over the ice and sludge covering the driveway.
“I locked it of course.” Sarah said coolly. “The whole town knew about the funeral. You wouldn’t want to risk someone stealing grandma and grandpa’s stuff would you?” Sarah handed her mother the key and opened her blue eyes as wide as she could. She played an orphan in Annie a number of years ago.
“Wow, we don’t even have locks on the Ridge.” Jack reached to rub his nose. It was bulbous, pockmarked and looked too fragile for such rough handling. Jack rubbed and then thought better of it. He saluted her with a smile that was blackened by years of home cooked smack. Lovely, her mother certainly knew how to pick them. This Jack made Scott Lewis look like a god, but that comparison wasn’t fair to Scott.
Her mother grabbed the key and jammed it into the lock. She stalked in.
“We need the TV.” She announced immediately.
“Sweet.” Echoed Jack.
“I’m sure you do.” Sarah trailed behind as her mother weebled and wobbled through the tiny apartment.
“So, what about the money?” Lizzie paused in the kitchen just long enough to reject the stacks of Blue Willow plates and bowls.
“What money?” Sarah had an unexpected advantage; she didn’t know what her mother was talking about.
“You don’t know? Who has been taking care of the money all this time?”
“We get a check from Social Security every month and I make that last.” That should be pretty obvious. The TV was small, the house was small. They had lost the tenant downstairs last year and never replaced the rental income. They got by, that was all.
“Well, then who gets the benefits?” Her mother kicked off her shoes. One made a dent in the wall. Barefoot she trolled through the house again, opening drawers and testing the cushions on the loveseat and matching rocking chair.
“What happened to their chairs?”
“I threw them out.” Sarah explained.
“Why? We could have sold them!”
“No.” Sarah pointed out, keeping her voice low and moderate, Suzanne Chatterhill would be proud. “No, they died in those chairs.”
Her mother paused a moment. “Oh, I guess that wouldn’t have worked.”
She lurched towards the back door. “What did they keep in the basement?”
The house Sarah grew up in, the house her mother grew up in, was three stories, and like all the homes on the right side of Grove Street, built on a hill that sloped down to the creek. The basement was actually a full apartment. But the tenant complained about the old-person smell and the TV noise all day, and moved.
Sarah could hear the banging and clanking as her mother prowled through the empty lower apartment with the focus of a women determined to find gold bullion stashed somewhere obscure.
“There is nothing here, they had nothing!” Lizzie finally emerged and stalked back through the kitchen.
“They had me.” Sarah said quietly. But her mother didn’t hear.
I knew what the members of the Brotherhood of Cornish Men were capable of, but on days like today, they always exceed my expectations and assumptions.
We returned from the funeral and found Carrie alone.
“Bad?”
She shook her head. “Not bad, better. We’re working on it.”
“Good, you two can now concentrate on Sarah. Here.” Prue thrust a safety deposit box key at me. “This is for the Miller’s box, Sarah is on the signature card. Take her down on some excuse before her mother gets wind of it.”
I glanced down at the key.
“It was my turn to keep the key.” Prue said innocently as if it was her turn to bring the deviled eggs, oh yes, she did that too.
“In other words, before the IRS gets wind of it?”
“The electricity has been out.” Prue expression was guileless. She should try out for the theater’s next production.
I glanced at my watch. I called Scott and gave him instructions. “We’ll walk, it will be less obvious.” Carrie nodded and pulled on her boots.
Sarah left her mother as soon as she got the text from Scott.
“Mom, I’m going to pick up some of the food from the reception we forgot.” She searched her mind for a plausible food. “The deviled eggs.”
Her Jack and her mother had dived back down to the basement and the crawl space unconvinced that it was full of little more than cast off furniture and an ancient electric stove. Sarah shook her head and quickly walked down the street to the massive brick Bank of America building on the corner of Main and Kentucky.
Scott, Allison and another woman greeted Sarah as she entered the bank.
“Mom and Jack are probably loading the TV into the Oldsmobile as we speak.” Sarah announced. “There really wasn’t anything more valuable than that in the house.”
I gestured to the bank teller who offered Sarah the signing card. Sarah scribbled her name and we headed to the vault.
“Is your mom keeping the car?” I asked.
Sarah nodded. “And she still wants to sell the house. She says we’ll split the money.”
I did not say anything. The teller tried to keep me out of the tiny room for viewing the safe deposit box contents, but I brushed her aside the same time Sarah said,
“Oh for heaven’s sake Suzie, she’s with me.”
Suzie stepped aside and I wedged myself into the private viewing closet to privately view whatever it was that the Millers wanted to keep private.
Carrie waited in the lobby with Scott.
The safe deposit box was crammed with stock certificates, two insurance policies and cash. Cash. Jesus. Or maybe the cash was for Jesus. I had no way of knowing. I immediately took the cash and stuffed it into my purse. Sarah nodded and shuffled through the colorful papers.
“It’s all Lucky’s company.” She fanned out the stock certificates.
“You have a lot there.” I looked at the certificates in her hand and started mental calculations but I didn’t know any current valuations.
“Grandpa must have bought them when he worked for Lucky. That was before I was born.”
I pulled out my phone and called Ben, who quickly called his stockbroker. Ben has his stockbroker in favorites because he is in constant contact. Ben doesn’t just fix plumbing, he just likes to make people believe that’s all he does.
“Rough estimate?” Ben called me back within minutes.
I tried to get comfortable in the tiny room. “Rough is fine.”
“All in all the stock is worth about $500,000, a lot really, considering Lucky’s recent setbacks, but he probably had more going on that any of us know or want to know.”
I clicked off the phone and considered Sarah’s options.
Thanks to the quick and, I suspected, practiced efforts of the Brotherhood of Cornish Men, Poor Sarah was no longer poor.
“Your mother wants to sell the house an
d split the proceeds.” I tapped the certificates and considered the options.
“Yes, mom thinks it’s worth $500,000 at least.”
I shook my head. “Not anymore, what has she been smoking?”
“Everything.” Sarah said glumly. “She’s determined to get a quarter million, that’s how she says it, a quick quarter million. Jack is all over it. The quicker the better.”
“Your grandparents left you the house?”
“Yes.” She ran her hand over the colorful stock certificates.
“Okay, listen to me, my grandmother is a member of the Brotherhood so you can trust me. Do you trust me?” I lifted the girl’s chin so she could meet my eyes.
She nodded.
“He could turn it into a spa.” Carrie suggested. “He could sell those lavender infused soaps and sachets, like that adorable store down the street that sells only white things. He could sell all purple things.”
“No.”
Carrie twisted her ring. “Patrick said he’d take care of my parents. But how? They’ll just want more money, there’s no paying them off.”
“I know.”
“I know, you know, but I’m not sure Patrick knows. I don’t think he’s a match for the way they work. He lives in a beautiful home, and has a great job and doesn’t have people coming at him all the time, you know, savage, mean people.”
“Maybe he’ll surprise you.” Although I was not really convinced myself. Sometimes street smarts can outwit education. I’ve seen it before; our business is loaded with street savvy survivors. Natural sales people take on real estate with no formal educational background save for the training their own offices cram down their throats. And yet they are not only successful but magnificently and astonishingly wealthy. Sometimes success is a triumph of experience over education.
In Patrick’s case, I hoped I was wrong.
“What do you think happened to that Lucky person?” Carrie asked.
I sagged down in my seat. I had calls to make on Gold Way for Scott, Penny wanted to talk to me about lowering the price of her dad’s house and she wanted to sell off his rentals, which was idiotic but I wasn’t ready to tell her so just yet.
“I’ve been too distracted to consider Lucky’s murderer.”
She nodded. “Understandable. You did a good thing for that Sarah Miller.”
“Thanks. I think I convinced her to not sell her own house. Where would she live?”
Scott walked Sarah back up to her house. They took their time, Sarah was in no hurry to confront her mother again, Scott understood.
“I feel so alone.” She finally said out loud.
“Are you kidding, the whole Brotherhood has your back.”
She gave him a pained looked.
“Maybe that’s a mixed blessing.” He reviewed the cast of supporters from the theater. She had twice as many people as Dorothy, any number of scarecrows, tin men and cowardly lions. She had a whole village at her disposal. But that’s not what she meant. He knew that.
“When my dad died.” He watched where he stepped on the slippery uneven sidewalk. “I thought my life line, my whole life, was over. I was officially an orphan.”
She sniffed loudly and wiped her hand over her mouth and nose. “Did you get over it?” The safe deposit key weighed heavily in her pocket. If she didn’t have enough to worry about, she had to pull off this plan.
“It’s only been six months.” Scott said.
“So no.” She kicked away a ball of snow and it shattered in the street.
“The Shah sent me a plaque, an acknowledgment of Dad, he said he would do anything he could for me.”
“Well that’s nice, is he rich?”
“Owns the whole damn country.”
She nodded, but wasn’t all that impressed because she had no point of reference. He liked that about her.
“We’re both orphans. We really are alone.”
“I still have my mother.” From her tone, it was clear the woman didn’t really count.
“That’s good, she’s like a barrier, between you and death.” Scott moved a wet branch out of the way. “She will probably go first. It’s like she represents time. She stands between you and eternity.” He stopped climbing. She paused to rest with him.
“Maybe we have each other?” She suggested tentatively.
He held her hand and gave it a tug. “Come on, let’s review the damage.”
The apartment where Ben and I camped was an after thought. Grandpa converted the space above the already-converted dance studio to a handy apartment where the dance instructor could live. A dance studio is not terribly practical, but he and grandma wanted to give their friend, Rachael, a chance to turn her life around and Rachael had once danced in the Sacramento Ballet and so, a dance studio. They paid her to give me lessons, which validated the program and they encouraged other mothers to follow. A good dozen families offered up their daughters on the altar of good intentions.
It didn’t last long, but grandma and grandpa never found another use for the space. The large dancing space, the practice bars, a full wall of mirrors were all still there, with a fine layer of dust on the walls adding to the nostalgia. Nostalgia is always dusty or sepia colored.
I moved around the floor remembering the ballet, tap and modern dance classes grandma enrolled me in. Was I good? No, but I was busy I think Prue convinced Mom that I could dance my way to a more beautiful, slender body. But even at a rate of a class a day, the workout made no dent in my solid figure. I was better at playing the rock in a modern dance number than I was dancing any number of snowflake positions.
I raised my arms, took a few running steps and executed a perfect tour jete landing so heavily the whole barn shook.
“Tell me again why your ballet career was cut short. Shin splints? Tragic love affair?” Ben lounged against the doorframe, arms crossed.
“More tragic that I was encouraged all those years.” I retorted.
The last of the spring sunset illuminated Ben. The windows, dirty and opaque, filtered the light so it was rose and gold, beautiful.
“You ran away again.” Ben looked calm, sounded calm, but I knew he was agitated. If he were a king in the Middle Ages, his name would be Big Ben the Agitated.
And who was responsible for his bulging eyes, wild hair and heart palpitations? Me, and I wasn’t even in trouble yet.
“You have to stop running away.” He raked his hands through his hair.
“I’m not running away, I’m helping my grandmother.” I held my hands before me in a pious position.
He ignored me and slipped off his shoes, took a quick couple of steps and slid across the wood floor. Two even tracks in the dust followed his progress. “This is what wood floors are for.”
“There is usually furniture in the way.” I agreed.
“Yes, there are often many things in the way when all you want to do is slide freely across the floor, unfettered, alive.”
“Is that a metaphor?”
He circled the dust with his toe - his own crop circle. “I’m staying until we fix this.”
“You know, you are wonderful.” Why don’t I just acknowledge that Ben is the best thing that ever happened to me?
“Yes I am. Which means you should just marry me and get it over with.”
“What?” I stopped admiring my lifted arms in the mirror and let out all the air I was sucking in to be thinner with a big whoosh.
“We will. You know you love me, and God help me, I love you. Let’s just get married, after Carrie and Patrick of course, let them be first. I’m tired of introducing you as my serious girlfriend who I will probably marry someday but not right now because she can’t make up her mind over a fucking house!”
“You have a point.” I said breathlessly. “But I’ll be more trouble as your wife than as your girlfriend.”
“Keep your name. In case of an emergency I’ll pretend I don’t know you.”
Was that the answer? First comes love, then comes marriage,
then comes Allison pushing a baby carriage? No.
“We’d have to choose a place to live together, that’s what married people do, live together.” He pressed his advantage.
I paused; I couldn’t see my reflection in the fading light.
“But where?” I finally blurted out.
He gave me an astonished look. “Oh my god, that’s your problem? It’s not me!” His relief was palpable.
I considered that for a minute or two, he may be right.
“Would you like to live here?” He finally suggested.
“But what about your business?”
“Rock Solid guys can live anywhere. And you already have business here, right now, which is impressive.”
“I don’t know.” I admitted.
“Let’s sleep on it,” he suggested.
“When do you need an answer?”
“After you find Lucky’s killer of course.”
“Look what I found!” Raul dashed into the kitchen clutching his laptop.
The screen came up to reveal Lucky and Summer standing by the theater stage. The quality was not as good as the video of the actual production.
“Years ago,” Raul muttered as if reading my mind. “Equipment is so much better now. I replace those cameras twice, you know, upgrades.”
“What do you care?” We watched a jerky Lucky Masters as he tore down a colorful quilt off the stage. “I’ll pay top dollar for it, and you get the money.”
“But it’s so beautiful, it’s art. You don’t destroy art.” Summer protested. Her hair was blond in this video, I wasn’t sure if it was a better look for her or not.
Lucky bundled the purple, red and black colored quilt into a large awkward bundle, he staggered a bit under the weight but didn’t let go.
“It’s stupid, it’s like those isolated Amish women with nothing to do but to make stuff people don’t need.”
“I’m surprised you even know that. It’s a respected art form, some end up in museums.”
“The Amish? I bet they never made a dime. My daughter is an idiot for wasting her time on something that doesn’t matter.”
“Art always matters.” Summer said quietly.
Catharine Bramkamp - Real Estate Diva 05 - A 380 Degree View Page 18
