A Wonder Springs Cozy Mystery Omnibus: Books 1, 2 & 3

by B. T. Alive

  “It hasn’t come up,” I said. But my gut was prickling with a strange dread.

  “So that’s what this is about,” Tina said. “You wanted that spot yourself!”

  “Yes, I did,” Harriet said. “And I’d been saving up the down payment from a crap waitress job for years. Years. And then right at the last minute, when I was literally putting together the paperwork for my offer, Natisha swoops in and gets some kind of grant from Grandma Meredith. A grant for a small business owner minority woman.”

  I cringed a little.

  Harriet noticed. “Don’t go there,” she said. “I’m glad we’ve got lots of diversity here. I am perfectly fine with equal opportunity. But that was almost twenty years ago, and for twenty years Natisha’s had a prime, perfect spot. And now she’s busting her butt to expand, while I’m still fighting to keep the lights on.”

  “At least you’re not bitter,” I said.

  Harriet laughed. “Look, I’m just saying: money is power. You think Natisha’s ever going to disagree with your grandmother in public? Or anyone else that your grandmother’s ‘invested’ in? Sure, on the outside, everything’s pretty, it’s a small-town paradise. But look at how your grandmother reacted about that orchard. The first one to speak, making her pronouncement: Thou shalt not have a hospital in my domain.”

  “That’s not fair!” Tina said.

  Harriet shrugged. “We’ll see whether she gets her way.”

  At the podium, Grandma was arguing with a waitress, a young new hire whose long hair swished in frustration. I couldn’t make out the words over the crowd, but finally the waitress rolled her eyes, dug out a hair thing, and bound up her hair in a tight bun.

  Grandma nodded with satisfaction.

  Chapter 22

  “Maybe she has a point,” I told Tina, as we left Harriet to finish her meal and we weaved across the dining room.

  “What? No!” Tina said. “I told you. She’s a jerk.”

  “I’ve still got to talk to Grandma,” I said.

  “Are you serious? About that?”

  “About a few things,” I said.

  At the podium, I asked Grandma when she’d have a few minutes, and she eyed me carefully, then told me to wait up in her office. Tina walked up the stairs with me, arguing all the way.

  “Like that hair thing, there’s a good reason for that,” Tina said, as she pulled out a ring of keys and unlocked the thick door to Grandma’s office. “It’s a new policy. People were getting hairs in their food.”

  “Lots of restaurants survive without mandated buns,” I said. “Are you seriously going to say that Grandma doesn’t micromanage? Ever?”

  Tina frowned. “She’s a leader,” she said, but with a slight falter that she hadn’t had with Harriet.

  The office seemed vacant and bereft without its commander. True, the view was gorgeous; her room faced south, and you could see the whole town sparkling down to the bridge and the river. But inside the room itself, the wide bank of windows cast racked squares of light that stretched across the quiet space in the afternoon sun. The light gleamed on the massive old roll-top desk, and one bright corner of light in particular illuminated the neatly printed caption on a cubby hole.

  INCOME.

  “Summer?” Tina said. She tried to follow my gaze, but the desk had lots of cubby holes and slots.

  “Aren’t you at least curious?” I said. “How much Grandma has?”

  “What? No!” she said. “That’s none of our business.”

  “No, it literally is your business,” I said. “You work here. And why does she need to be so secret, even with her own family?” I came close to her desk, and reached for the cubby hole. There were folded papers… a small stack.

  “Summer, don’t!” Tina said. “Not her desk.”

  But I plucked off the first sheet and shook it open.

  At first it just looked like a bank statement. But on a careful reread, I saw that it was an investment account. A single line named some kind of stock fund, “S&P 500” something, and the balance on hand was… oh my gosh… how many zeroes was that?

  I counted them up, and counted them again. The paper trembled in my hand.

  “Summer!” barked Grandma, who of course was standing in her doorway, arms akimbo, furious. “Put that down.”

  “You play the stock market?” I said. “That’s how you pay for all this? You use your dream prophecy powers to play the stock market?”

  “I didn’t say anything!” Tina said, backing away toward the windows.

  “Quiet!” Grandma snapped. She shut the door, locked it, and strode toward the paper and snatched it out of my hand. “When did you decide it was appropriate to spy on my personal affairs?”

  “You’re gambling,” I said. “Oh my gosh. You’ve built this whole empire on gambling. You’re like that woman who was using her telekinesis to cheat the casinos—”

  “Not in the slightest,” Grandma barked. She jammed the paper back into its hole and managed to make even sitting in her desk chair an act of controlled rage. “Do you even understand the concept of an index fund?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s where some finance whiz who thinks he knows what he’s doing picks a bunch of stocks—”

  “No!” she snapped. “That’s a mutual fund, and I avoid those like the plague. An index fund is tied directly to an index, a list of what stocks the market is buying. If the market as a whole is buying more stock in Tribesy, the index fund buys more stock in Tribesy as well.”

  “You know about Tribesy?” I said. (In case you’ve been living under a rock: Tribesy is this app that’s basically the worst parts of all the other social media apps, but ten times as addictive. Come to think of it, I thought I’d get withdrawal cramps without it, but it’s been weeks since I’ve even had a phone. Huh.)

  “I loathe Tribesy,” said Grandma. “The point is, an index fund doesn’t try to beat the market, with fallible managers gambling on their favorite stocks, then bilking you for fees whether they win or lose. A good index fund simply matches the market, trusting the aggregated wisdom of millions of investors and keeping the fees low. Over time, with new businesses and more people working, the stock market as a whole grows in value. And so does my index fund.”

  “But what if there’s another recession? Or a depression?” I said. “If the entire stock market crashes, your index fund still tanks.”

  “That could happen,” Grandma said. Then, though she still looked stern, a smile twitched at the corners of her lips. “But not if you sell first.”

  “Whoa.” I felt slightly dizzy. Make that significantly dizzy. “You can predict when the market’s going to crash?”

  “So far,” she said.

  “But… oh man…”

  “Not to the day, of course,” she said. “And certainly not for any particular company. But when there’s a storm brewing…” She nodded. “I err on the side of selling.”

  “And then, what, after the crash, you buy it all back? At a tiny fraction of what you sold it for?”

  Her eyes twinkled. “It does add up.”

  “Grandma, this is insane,” I said. I was pacing now. “Isn’t it cheating? Shouldn’t you warn everyone?”

  “Oh, certainly,” she said, “I’m sure investors all over the world would slap their foreheads and cry, ‘Someone, somewhere is predicting a crash! Hark! I must listen!’”

  “You could at least try,” I said. “It’s crazy unfair!”

  “No, it is not,” she snapped. “No one castigates Warren Buffet for leveraging his unique skills. I don’t have a phone line to God, child; one of these years I could still be very wrong. Investors are free to play or not. I play by the rules and I win.”

  She spoke with such crisp asperity that I wondered if I were the only one she was struggling to reassure.

  “Besides, she uses it all to help people,” Tina put in. “She’s reinvested millions into Wonder Springs. Have you seen the pictures of how it was before she came? Wonder Spri
ngs was a rotted out mining town!”

  “A mining town? Here?” I said. Curiosity slowed my pacing to a stop.

  Grandma nodded. “We still find an old tunnel once in awhile. And the old-timers whisper about buried gold.” She flicked me a sharp look. “Yes, we do have folks here older than I am.”

  “I didn’t say anything!”

  “I was younger than you when we first moved here,” Grandma said. She toyed with a figurine on her desk, a ballerina balancing atop a bear. “Nothing had gone right here since the 19th century. The spring was blocked up. The state highway had come through, blazed right by us and killed Main Street dead. Everyone who’d had a chance had already left.”

  “So why’d you come here?” I said. “Why’d you save it?”

  “The site had certain… advantages,” she said. “But I also felt strongly that a small town provided the best scale for real change. I have never been excited by huge, sweeping reforms; I don’t say we don’t need them, but they rarely seem to endure. Lasting change requires relationships, which require time, which requires being able to put food on the table. But every new business requires capital. And that, sweet pea, was a service I could provide.”

  “For every new business?” I said.

  Grandma frowned. “So that’s what Harriet was all in a froth about. I’m surprised she waited this long to bend your ear.”

  “I don’t know the whole story,” I said. “But it might be kind of painful to miss out just because you weren’t a minority.”

  “Excuse me?” Grandma said. She looked so fierce that I startled back. “What exactly did she say to you?”

  I glanced at Tina, but she just shook her head in a you-brought-this-up move. Thanks, I thought. I turned back to Grandma.

  “Harriet said that she’d saved up for a really long time to get that storefront,” I said. “But then you came in with some grant, and Natisha got it, and now it’s been twenty years and basically, Harriet’s business never recovered.”

  “Because Natisha got special treatment?” Grandma said.

  “I mean, kind of, yeah,” I said.

  “I see,” Grandma said. She twirled the little ballerina. “And what do you think of all that?”

  “I think I’m sorry I brought it up,” I said. “I know it’s really complicated, especially in the South.” Grandma grunted with indignation, but I plowed on. “We were only trying to talk to her about Una Graves.”

  “This has everything to do with Una,” Grandma said.

  “What?” I said. “How?”

  “Sit down, Summer,” she said. “I want to tell you a story.”

  Chapter 23

  I hesitated, then took a seat in one of the ornate upholstered chairs. Despite its high back and august presence, the chair was surprisingly comfortable.

  “You grew up in a city up north,” she said. “Correct?”

  “Yeah,” I said, utterly mystified. “Technically, the suburbs.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Just you and your father in a big, comfortable house.”

  I tensed. Was she going to talk about Mom? Finally?

  “How much do you think that house would sell for today?” Grandma went on.

  “Um… I have no idea,” I said, even more confused. “It was super boring, just a cookie cutter development. Dad only bought it because it was five minutes from the highway.”

  “So, a prime location, near a major urban center,” Grandma said. “Today that house would be worth at least three hundred thousand dollars. Probably more.”

  “Maybe—”

  “And of all your neighbors, how many weren’t white?”

  “Um,” I said. I felt squirmy and exposed, and my mind went blank.

  Grandma sighed. “I’m not accusing you of anything, sweet pea. Not at all. I’m just asking.”

  “We really didn’t see our neighbors much,” I said.

  “But of the ones you did?”

  “I don’t know!” I said. “There was at least one… I was just a kid, I can’t remember! Look, I’ve worked in lots of offices with lots of people with lots of different colors of skin! I’m sorry if it’s still all messed up down here, but I think the rest of the country’s moved on and it’s just, I don’t know why we’re talking about this!”

  Grandma nodded. “I can see why you would feel that way,” she said, and for once she actually sounded like a milk-and-cookies kind of grandmother, a soothing presence for whom you could do no wrong. Not on purpose.

  But then she said, “Have you ever heard of the G.I. Bill?”

  “I… think so?” I said. “Was that after World War II?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And once upon a time, many young men and women came home from that fight to a fantastic promise. If you had served, the government would cover your two most massive expenses. They would give you a full college scholarship, and they would offer you a low-interest mortgage to buy a home.”

  “Wow, really?” I said. “That is massive.”

  “It transformed the economy,” said Grandma. “The suburbs exploded in a building frenzy. The job market was flooded with skilled college graduates.” She paused. “I happen to know that both Harriet and Natisha had grandfathers who served and came home. Harriet’s grandfather got his degree and bought a lovely new home. Natisha’s grandfather got neither.”

  “What?” I said. “Why?”

  “Because almost none of those benefits went to veteran blacks.”

  “What?” I said. I looked to Tina, but her grim face showed that she’d heard this story before. “How is that possible?”

  “Sweet pea,” Grandma said. “This was a country that still had segregated water fountains.”

  “But wasn’t it illegal?”

  “On the contrary,” Grandma said. “The home insurance companies could state explicitly in their policies that they would refuse to insure a new development if any of the homes were sold to blacks.”

  “They said that? In writing?”

  “Yes,” Grandma said. “And many banks also refused to grant mortgages to blacks. For any house. They claimed that a non-white family would hurt the property values for the whole neighborhood.”

  “Oh my gosh.”

  “And this was all over the United States,” Grandma said, “not just in the South. New York, Chicago, all over. And the story was the same with the college scholarships, and to a large extent even with the medical care at the veterans’ hospitals. Blacks were denied.”

  I felt sick.

  “You know how compound interest works, don’t you?” Grandma said. “What do you think the compounding value would be, today, for a family that had a college education and owned their own home going back to the 1940s? Those two assets alone have accrued tremendous wealth for millions of Americans and their children. Compare that to a family that was denied both—they not only lost their pile of free money, they were locked out of trying to catch up and earn those assets on their own. Three generations ago.

  “Of course, those two families wouldn’t quite have been starting in the same place to begin with. The mind boggles trying to calculate the compounding generational costs of slavery, and lynching, and segregation, and now, today, mass incarceration. Blacks are more than five times as likely to get incarcerated in this country as whites.

  “I can’t quite wrap my mind around all that, Summer. I can’t imagine having to worry that my grandson had a one in three chance of going to prison. I truly cannot.

  “But a house and a college education… those are realities in my world. I can at least try to imagine what it would feel like to lose them, while watching as others got them cheap and free.”

  Grandma pushed away from her desk and rose. She walked to the wide windows that overlooked the town.

  “I think I’m going to need some time to process this,” I said.

  “I took a few years myself,” she said, looking out at Main Street. “It’s hard to see your landscape with new eyes. And I’m still mostly bli
nd.”

  We all stayed silent for a bit. The dust motes danced in the late sun.

  Then I said, “One thing I don’t get, though. How does all this connect to Una?”

  “Greed,” said Grandma. “Greed always looks the same.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Do you know who killed her?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “I didn’t get any dreams worth noting, and Helen was focused… elsewhere last night.” She frowned, troubled. “I don’t understand how this murder could happen so close without either of us feeling a thing.”

  “It’s all right, Grandma,” Tina said. “We’ll solve this.”

  “Are you sure it’s greed?” I said. “Harriet was saying that Ambrose James—”

  “Oh, Ambrose?” Grandma scoffed. “I’ve known that man for thirty years. He’s a gentle soul.”

  “And Cade’s not?” I said.

  Grandma scrunched her perfectly trimmed eyebrows. “He certainly did get himself into a pickle.”

  “But you don’t think he did it?” I said.

  “I think Una kept that huge piece all to herself for far too long,” Grandma said. She turned back again toward the shops below. “Look at that land, it’s like a green wall hemming in that whole side of the street. And now that she’s gone… well, you saw for yourself down there. Things could get ugly.”

  “Like, how ugly?” I said. “Someone already committed murder.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I have a feeling that they’re just getting started.”

  Chapter 24

  I’m sure all grandmothers get vague premonitions of doom. But when your particular grandmother can also reliably predict a stock market crash, you feel a certain incentive to probe for more details.

  So I was just about to interrogate Grandma regarding that last zinger, when I happened to note the time on her grandfather clock.

  “Oh, crud!” I said. “Is that four-eighteen? I was supposed to meet Elaine at four! Crud.”