by Cari Noga
“Does Jane know?” Jared says as a minivan pulls away, headed to the lighthouse, giving us a break.
“Not yet.” Not till I’m there. Carefully I slide the two-dollar change the lady told me to keep into my pocket. “I haven’t got it all figured out, exactly. So don’t, like, tell your mom or dad or anything.”
“I won’t.” He looks kind of insulted.
“Good.”
It’s quiet for a second. I finger the money in my pocket. I have more than last week, maybe even thirty dollars in there. And if Aunt Jane gives me another five dollars, that’s almost sixty dollars—
“How are you going to get there?”
“On a plane. Duh.”
“Do you get an allowance?”
I shake my head. “But Aunt Jane paid me to do this last week.”
“She did? That’s not fair! I helped.”
“But you’re the work-share people, remember? It’s your job.”
“Still. It’s not fair. How much?”
“Five dollars.”
“Five dollars?” He laughs. “It’s going to take you forever. A plane ticket to Mexico is, like, a thousand dollars.”
“You’re lying.” I haven’t looked online yet.
“Uh-huh.” He shakes his head. “It’s super expensive to fly from Traverse City.”
“How do you know?”
“My dad is always complaining about it. When he has to travel for work, he goes to Grand Rapids. He always calls the airlines pirates. So never mind. Keep the five dollars.” He laughs. “You’ll need it.”
Chapter 36
JANE
We’re on our way to Paul’s office. Rebecca said we should talk in person about finding a lawyer, but other things, too, apparently. I gave her the envelope from Langley last week, when Jared and Lucy ran the stand again. “Paul’s done the due diligence” is how she put it when she called.
The bag of jewelry, however, is still missing. I scoured Matt’s room, but it’s simply vanished. I feel awful. I must have moved it later in the spring and just forgotten where. It’ll turn up. It has to. At least Lucy is unaware. How could I explain misplacing all she has left of Gloria?
Paul’s office is at the Grand Traverse Commons, just like Sarah Fischer’s. Conveniently, he was available before our long-awaited appointment with her, so Lucy’s coming, too. I told her she could hang out with Jared. I didn’t say anything about Sarah or her plan for exposure therapy, but I’ve thought about it plenty. Coast Guard orientation aside, does that mean all throughout Matt’s childhood, what I considered going through the motions—tricycle follower, Cub Scout den mom, baseball-game watcher—was actually the right thing to do?
I pass a cement mixer for the third time. The Commons redevelopment is well underway, except for signage. I’ve seen two backhoes, a cement mixer, a couple of dump trucks, and at least two dozen pallets of the signature pale-yellow bricks used in all the buildings, but I can’t find any street signs.
“What’s the address?” Lucy pulls her earbuds out.
“It’s 500 Red Drive. Maybe I should call.”
“Nah.” She’s pushing buttons on her phone. She looks up and out the window. “Turn right here.”
“We already went that way once.”
“Google Maps knows everything. Just turn.”
She navigates me expertly to a small parking lot, where I recognize the Livingstons’ Prius, and jumps onto the asphalt without hesitation. It can be so easy. Are we figuring this out?
Jared’s in the reception room, playing with his iPad. “You brought yours, right? Dad’s in there,” he tells me, flicking his thumb toward another door.
“Good to see you, Jane.” Paul stands up to shake hands. He doesn’t look as different as I expected. The TBAYS T-shirt and shorts have been replaced with a button-up and khakis, but it’s still several degrees of formality away from the pinstripes and tie I envisioned. “Have a seat. Rebecca got held up, but she’ll be here any minute.”
I sit down on a couch underneath a framed diploma. He’s got an MBA from Northwestern. Across the room I see a membership in the association of Certified Financial Planners and another from the local chamber of commerce.
“All the bona fides on display, I see.”
He smiles. “My decorator will be glad you noticed.”
“Rebecca?”
“The one and only. They’re supposed to foster an atmosphere of trust.”
Hmm. “Well, if I didn’t already trust you, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Right. Well, let’s get to it, then.” He holds up the envelope with all the documents. “Rebecca can tell you more about your legal options going forward. I checked into the financial transactions and did a little digging on Lucy’s parents. Luis especially turned out to have some interesting history.” He taps a stack of papers.
“Good news or bad news?”
“Let’s start with the good,” he says. “By and large, everything appears aboveboard.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“No tax evasions, no shell accounts in other names. Nothing bogus or fishy about the transactions themselves.”
“Then there is nothing left? Langley was telling the truth?” My stomach feels like an empty pit. If that’s the good news, what’s the bad?
There’s a knock. “Sorry I’m late,” Rebecca says. Through the open door I glimpse Lucy and Jared, huddled over their iPads, before it clicks closed again.
“Let’s back up.” Paul puts on a pair of glasses and reads from a sheet on the top of the stack. “The financial hole started in 2009. Luis made a large withdrawal from his 401(k) that year. In”—he shuffles some more papers—“August.”
Almost two years ago. “How large?”
“Fifty thousand.” Paul looks at me over the top of his glasses. “But by taking it before retirement age, he would have been subject to both taxes and early withdrawal penalties. That could have increased the eventual cost to more than sixty thousand dollars.”
“OK, but that’s still a lot less than four million.”
“Right. Like I said, this was the start of the hole.” Paul clears his throat. “Shortly after that withdrawal, Luis started regularly transferring money to an account in Mexico.”
Mexico? “I thought you said there was nothing fishy.”
“It’s perfectly legal to transfer funds internationally,” Rebecca says. “The money was deposited in a bank account belonging to Bonita Ortiz, Luis’s younger sister.”
Be nice to have a brother like that. Or a sister. Not that I’d have taken money from Gloria.
Paul continues. “The electronic deposits started at the rate of five thousand dollars per month in August and continued through January 2010. Then in February it jumped up to six thousand, and then to eighty-five hundred in March.”
“And then it was gone,” I say, doing the math. What could Luis’s sister have spent fifty thousand dollars on, give or take, in eight months?
“Correct. Luis then withdrew the balance of his 401(k), another twenty-five thousand. That, too, went to Bonita Ortiz in Mexico, minus fees and penalties. Two ten thousand-dollar deposits were made in May and July 2010.”
“Good grief.” I stare at them. “Did Gloria know about this?”
“We don’t know,” Paul says. “It was an individual account. He wouldn’t have had to reveal anything.”
“But what comes next would have been a joint decision,” Rebecca says.
“The second mortgage?”
“Right.” Paul nods. “Taken in September of last year, against the equity in their Fifty-Sixth Street apartment. For five hundred thousand dollars.”
“Half a million dollars?” I echo.
“Manhattan real estate,” Rebecca says.
“Did that go to Mexico, too?”
“About half of it did.” Paul flips through the papers again. “Between September and their deaths this past April, Luis sent two hundred fifty thousand dollars to his sister’s account
in Mexico.”
“So is there two hundred fifty thousand somewhere for Lucy?” A swell of hope inflates me.
“Unfortunately, no.” Paul looks directly at me again. “The apartment assessment seems to have been inflated. It didn’t sell for nearly enough to pay off the second and original mortgages. They had some credit card debt, too.”
“An inflated assessment is aboveboard?”
“Well, not exactly, but unfortunately, it’s all too typical.” Paul takes off his glasses. “Inflated values basically caused the housing crisis. And living on credit cards is practically the American way.”
“So that’s where the life insurance payouts went.”
“Yes, and Gloria’s 401(k), which wasn’t much to speak of. In fact it looks like some of the creditors are still waiting in line.”
Good Lord. Could an eleven-year-old wind up holding her parents’ IOU? I try to digest it all. “Is that everything?”
“Not quite.” Rebecca holds up a form that wasn’t copied straight. The words “State of California” tilt toward the top of the paper. “The driver of the other vehicle in the car crash sued the limo company and the driver.”
“Police are investigating,” I remember reading online the morning after the crash. “Was he drunk?”
Rebecca nods. “Langley opted to join the suit on Lucy’s behalf. For the time being. But as guardian, you could bring your own claim, too.”
A conversation fragment surfaces. Grounds for you to make a claim. International bank transfers, underwater mortgage, credit card debt. Now a lawsuit. I rub my temples. Not even big-stakes decisions, these are megastakes. Mega Millions, that state lottery game. With odds probably as bad as the lottery’s. “With creditors still waiting in line, if I sued, would Lucy get the money?”
Paul and Rebecca exchange a look. “There’s a lot of factors—” Rebecca says.
“I think we’re done,” I say, standing up. File a lawsuit for Visa and Mastercard’s sake? Try to keep up with legal minutia from two thousand miles away? No thanks. Our appointment with Sarah is in ten minutes, anyway. Rebecca jumps up, her hand on the door.
“You should look through the documents yourself. Think about it. You’ve got time. Paul, do you have everything back together?”
“Almost.” He taps the stack of papers he was reading from against the desk, squaring it up and securing it with a binder clip. As he slides it into Langley’s original envelope, something flutters from the stack. Rebecca and I both stoop to catch it, but she plucks what turns out to be an envelope from the floor.
“UCLA Medical Center,” she says, reading the imprinted return address. “I don’t remember seeing this before.”
“Neither do I,” Paul says.
“That’s where Gloria was taken after the accident. Probably a bill.” Get in line, UCLA. I jam it in the larger envelope with everything else.
Chapter 37
LUCY
“Look,” Jared says, tipping his iPad toward me as soon as the door closes on the grown-ups.
He’s on an airline reservation website. Departure airport, TVC, that’s Traverse City, I remember from my luggage tags coming here. Arrival airport, MEX. Round-trip cost, $849. My stomach elevator drops.
“Told you.”
He doesn’t sound mean, but it still hurts. How could it cost that much? Wait.
“Let me see that again.” I look at the screen. “That’s round trip. I only want to go one way.”
“Oh, right!” Jared clicks a couple of times, and the figures change: $789.
“That’s it?” I cross my arms and flop back on the couch, staring at the ceiling. I’m screwed. And stuck.
“My dad has miles with Delta.” Jared’s voice is below me now. He’s sitting on the floor with the iPad. “Look.”
Sitting up I look over his shoulder. He’s logged in to his dad’s Delta account. One hundred eighty thousand miles of credit.
“You could use that.”
“Thanks.” It is nice of him to offer. “But, um, then your dad would know.”
“He never uses them up. Mom’s always saying he wastes them.”
“Jared.” He doesn’t get it. I try to speak patiently. “It’s not that he would know we used the miles. He would know where I’m going.”
“Wait. You’re still not telling Jane?”
“Uh-uh.” I shake my head.
“How come?”
“Just because.” The thing is, I don’t really know why. Part of me thinks Aunt Jane would be glad, but another part thinks she would try to stop me, since me living here was part of the will. Once, with Andrea, two au pairs before Deirdre, I wanted to stay longer at the zoo and hid from her when it was time to leave. The security people found me in the underground room, watching the penguins in their tank. Daddy was super mad, even though they found me in, like, an hour. What would he and Mom think about me running away from Aunt Jane? But I hate it. Well, running the farm stand was kind of cool, and with the stepping stumps I can leave the house now. Still. They’d never even visited before they decided to stick me here. They didn’t know what a farm was like. Plus in Mexico I have a cousin my own age. Familia.
“But when you, like, go, she’ll figure it out.”
“By then I’ll be in Mexico, with my other aunt and my cousin. It’ll be too late.” I say it more confidently than I feel. Graciela still hasn’t said whether Aunt Bonita will let me live there. What if she says I can’t?
Jared shakes his head. “How are you going to fly? They won’t let a kid on alone.”
“You can pay to go by yourself.” Like the flight attendant who walked me to the Traverse City flight, carrying Lexie’s cage. An unaccompanied-minor fee, I think it was called. Wait, could I take Lexie with me?
“So you need even more money, then.”
Ugh. He’s right.
“And how are you even going to get to the airport without Jane—”
“I don’t know! I told you I haven’t figured it all out yet.”
“Haven’t figured hardly anything, seems like.”
“And I didn’t ask you to, like, be my travel agent or anything.” I wave my hand at the iPad.
“Jeez. Excuse me for living.” He looks hurt.
The door handle turns, and the voices on the other side get louder. I think I hear my name.
“Close those websites,” I hiss at Jared. It was nice of him to want to help. “Sorry. Look. I’ll tell you more next time you’re at my house.”
He shuts down the sites just as the three grown-ups come through the door.
“Ready, Lucy?” Aunt Jane says in the fake-positive Let’s go! kind of voice she uses when she wants me to do something. Out of the parking lot, she turns the wrong way.
“You were supposed to go left,” I say.
“We’ve got one other stop to make.”
“Where?”
She hesitates for a second. “To see someone.”
“Who?”
“A—a therapist.”
“A what?”
“A therapist. A social worker.”
“Why?”
“To help you get over your grass phobia.”
“I don’t need any help!” I feel like the turtle again, just as he was picked up, his legs flailing before he pulled them into his shell. “The stepping stumps are fine.”
“They’ve helped, yes. Now it’s time for you to take the next step.” She turns into a driveway. She doesn’t seem to have any problem finding her way around now.
“Says who?”
“Come on, Lucy. You have to admit life’s going to be a little confining if you won’t walk on grass.”
I cross my arms. The rhymes are running through my head. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on the grass, make her car crash. I would have been fine if we’d stayed in New York. Or if I go to Mexico. Much of Mexico, especially the northern regions, has a dry climate with infrequent rainfall. I mean, when I go to Mexico.
She parks and t
urns off the engine. “Just try it once. Please.”
I hesitate. She went after Lexie. Twice. But that was different—Lexie was really gone. She tricked me into coming here! I’ll bet this trip wasn’t about financial stuff at all.
“Uh-uh.” I shake my head. “You just wasted your time,” I add, the ultimate Aunt Jane sin, and put my earbuds in.
Still, I can hear her sigh. “Fine. I’m going in anyway, to cancel the appointment.”
Her door opens, then bangs shut. I stare out the window, thinking about the $789 ticket and Graciela’s school in the country. In the north, in the dry climate. I’ll bet it’s on Facebook. Maybe I can find some pictures. I lift the cover on my iPad. They probably have Wi-Fi all through here. Aunt Jane’s door opens again.
“Hello, Lucy.”
It’s not Aunt Jane’s voice. My head jerks up, and an earbud falls out. A lady with gray hair like a grandma is standing in the open door, looking at me across the seat, but I never saw a grandma who looked like this. She’s got glasses hanging around her neck on a beaded chain and this long, flowy purple dress on.
“I’m Sarah Fischer,” she says, putting on her glasses and peering in the car at me. “Your aunt tells me you don’t want to come to my office. I came to see if I could help you reconsider.”
I shake my head, putting my earbud back in. I’m not saying a word.
“It’s an asphalt parking lot.” She taps her foot on it. “And the sidewalk goes straight to the door.” She cocks her head in a question.
I shake my head again. I’m staring straight out the front window, but I can see her from the corner of my eye. Aunt Jane’s standing there, too, holding a white plastic bag that she didn’t have before.
Sarah waits for longer than I expect. “All right, then, not today. Maybe we can try another time.”
“I’m not coming back here again,” I say.
Aunt Jane sighs. “Sorry to have bothered you.”
“Not at all.” Sarah takes off her glasses. “Call if I can be of help in the future.”
She walks down the sidewalk while Aunt Jane opens the back door and puts the white bag in the back seat. Usually she just throws stuff over the front seat into the back. Why’s she being careful with this? What’s inside?