That is why I hope this helps some. I am leaving you everything I own. Which isn’t much, but I have contacted an attorney. I had everything drawn up legally. I will enclose his card in the envelope.
Gabi since I sold the cabins, I know you don’t have a house, so I hope with the money I am leaving you that you will buy yourself a house. No more hitchhiking. Stay in one place and call it home.
Gabi I want you to know that momma and I, we both loved you very much. I left enough to pay for my funeral in a separate account. The attorney will take care of it. Please don’t cry.
My dear, stay in one place and find the man of your dreams. May you find your soul mate like momma and I did. May your life be as happy as ours was. Happier even. Good Luck to you my lovely daughter.
Jim Lewis
I could feel the tears pouring down my cheeks. I had no words for how I felt after reading that letter. I wanted to be angry, yet I understood how much they meant to one another. I can only hope that someday I will love someone as much as they did each other.
The funeral came and went. Again, two hundred or more people showed up. I still hadn’t gone to the attorney’s office. I had spoken to him on the phone, but I wasn’t ready to know what Mr. Lewis had left me. It felt like if I went to see I was saying goodbye to my father. I wasn’t ready.
Finally, I had to go find out what Mr. Lewis had done for me. I was running out of money. The hotel was eating up my savings. I still hadn’t gone out and looked for another job.
It was Friday morning when I stepped into the attorney’s office. The older woman behind the desk, ask if she could help me. I told her who I was and what I was there for. She told me I would have to wait a little bit since I hadn’t made an appointment, that the attorney had gone to lunch.
The thoughts kept racing through my head. It had nothing to do with the Will. I kept wondering where I should go, what I should do. Should I start wandering down the road again? At least this time I had a truck.
Should I stay and buy a house like Mr. Lewis had suggested? I did like it here. I loved being so close to nature. I spent lots of time in the woods.
I hadn’t met the new owner of the cabins. I wondered if he would be opening them back up. Would he be willing to hire me since I already knew my way around?
I would have to go out and see if he was there yet. I didn’t know if he had moved here from out of state or where he was from. I didn’t know if he would be staying if he did come. I knew nothing about the person or persons who had bought the land and the cabins.
Then my thoughts wandered back to when I was younger. To one of the foster homes I had stayed in. I was about thirteen, I think. Time has gotten away from me. I had been forced to stay with a couple who already had five other girls in the home. That should have been the first clue for the people in charge of putting us there.
The father had said they only wanted to adopt girls or foster girls. Said his wife would be home with them all the time. That she wanted daughters.
Lies, all lies. She wasn’t home most of the time. He was. He drank most of the time and got drunk nearly every day. As long as he was getting money to help with each of the girls, he had booze money.
One night shortly after I had been placed there, he snuck into my room. I was asleep. That is till I felt his hands on me. He had pulled all the covers off my body and pulled up my shirt. My boobs we already a good size. More than a handful he had said.
I remember waking up with his hands on me and screaming for help. I knew he wasn’t supposed to touch me. The only problem was the only ones to be close enough to hear my cries was the other girls in the house. They weren’t about to help me they knew what would happen to them. I decked him hard that night.
Needless to say, I wasn’t there for long. He had been in my room that night. He would regret coming near me again because the next time I was ready for him. I slept with a knife under my pillow. Yes, I stabbed him. I tried to cut off his hands too.
That was my first brush with the law. I had told people over and over why I had stabbed him. Why I had tried to cut off his hands. It wasn’t till they interviewed the other girls that someone believed me. His wife sure hadn’t gone along with things. She told everyone her husband wouldn’t touch one of her girls.
I shivered just thinking about that stinky sick bastard. If I closed my eyes, I could still smell his alcoholic breath. It made me sick.
The next foster home, I had wasn’t much different. I mean as far as foster homes went. I was the new kid, and no one liked me.
The Michal’s had two boys and two girls. Then I came into the house. The oldest boy Darin liked to think he could put his hands where they weren’t welcome.
One day when it was just him and I at the house he caught me off guard. I was in the shower when I heard the bathroom door being unlocked. I shut off the water and told him he had better stay the hell out of the bathroom. It was too late when I threw back the shower curtain, he was standing there butt naked.
I grabbed for my towel I knew I had hooked on the wall beside the shower only to find it was gone. He grinned at me, then stepped closer. He was going to push me back into the shower stall and who knows what.
I fixed him. I waited till he was close enough, then I threw shampoo in his eyes and kneed him where it counts. Once he was down on the ground, groaning like a little baby, I kicked him in the head.
Unfortunately, when the parents came home, they wouldn’t hear my side of things. All they knew was that he had been taking to the hospital. Yes, he had woken up with a slight concussion, but he was all right.
The first thing Mr. Michael’s did was call the police, then the lady who had placed me in their home. I was hauled off in cuffs. Later I was released to my case worker.
I was placed in another home only to have similar things happen. Well, sort of. This time it was the foster parent’s real daughter. We didn’t get along from day one. She was a year older than me, but not as filled out as I was.
She came home a time or two to find her boyfriend’s sitting in the living room with me. I didn’t ask them to meet me at the house, she did. However, I wasn’t going to let them sit in the living room alone while they waited to see when she would get there.
I couldn’t help that they liked what they saw. I never came on to one of them. That doesn’t mean they didn’t try things with me.
The last straw was when she came in and found one of her boyfriends had backed me against the wall and was holding my arms down while he kissed me. I was just about to knee him when she walked in.
The moment she walked in he backed away from me saying I made him kiss him. Really? Seriously, how could I have made him do anything he was twice my size. He was a football player.
She told her mom and her mom told her dad and they called my caseworker and told her things weren’t working out. They told her, she had less than an hour to find me a new place to stay or come get me herself.
My life was like that a lot, till I ran away.
Finally, the attorney found his way to the office. I watched him as he stepped over to his secretary to see if he had any messages. He did. He told her he was going to make some calls, then he would see me.
An hour later he beeped his secretary to let her know he had to step out for a minute. I overheard them. She said nothing to me.
A half hour later I was getting restless. I stood up and walked over to her and ask when he was going to be back. She said she didn’t know. I knew she didn’t, he hadn’t said.
I paced the floor for another two and a half hours before finally he came back. I was more than pissed. I walked up to her desk while he was asking again if he had any more messages.
“Excuse me, but I have been waiting almost all day to see you. I am here about Mr. Lewis. I spoke to you on the phone about this before.”
“Yes, I remember. Let me take care of these messages and I will get back to you.”
Oh no he wasn’t. If I had to jump over the secretary’s
desk, he was going to see me and now! I stood tall and tried not to scream at him when I said…
“You will see me now! As I have waited long enough. If you think those calls are more important than you go ahead and try to make them. But I am here to tell you I have lost my temper more than once and did damage to a place. You seem to have a lot of antiques sitting around in here. I bet some of them cost a mint. Would you like to see what I can do to them?”
He stepped back and looked at me as if he was about to say something. He reached for the phone as if he was going to call the sheriff. I told him to go ahead, but by the time the Sheriff could get there it would be too late to save his precious antiques.
It wouldn’t have made me so mad sitting there if he had gone on an important errand. But when he slipped in the back door, I had seen him carrying his golf clubs. That was just enough to send me into a mad rage.
“Now, Miss Cross, I don’t take well to being threatened. If I were you, I would calm down. I don’t want to have to call the police.”
“Then you will sit down with me right now and go over whatever it is that Mr. Lewis left with you. Or shall I let your clients know that you went golfing while you had a client in your office waiting to see you. Don’t think that will be good for business. If that isn’t enough, I will explain to your wife that you rented one of the Lewis’s cabins not too long ago with a blonde.”
I hadn’t remembered till that moment who he was. I knew I had seen him before, but I couldn’t place where. Then it hit me, the cabins a couple of months ago.
“Miss Cross, I assure you I have never rented a cabin with anyone but my wife.”
“Really, what color is your wife’s hair? She isn’t the redhead in the pictures on the wall behind you?”
His secretary looked angry at him. I got the feeling she didn’t know about the blonde either. I also got the impression she had been seeing him on the side too.
“Why you son of a bitch, who was the blonde? Richard you had better start talking, or your father is going to hear about what you have been doing with his money behind his back.”
I have never seen anyone turn so red in my life. Needless to say, he calmed her telling her they would talk once he got rid of me. Then he escorted me into his office and pulled out the information he had from Mr. Lewis.
“Here is what he gave me. It is his Will. He left you everything. Which consists of his truck and his car. There is the matter of bank accounts. He had both a checking and a savings. You’re sitting pretty for a while. All I need is for you to sign showing that I showed you his Will. I will give you a copy to take with you to the bank, so they can release his funds to you. The vehicles mentioned will have to have their titles switched over to your name. There is also an old house listed. He said it wasn’t livable, but that you could always sell the land it sits on. There are five acres with it.”
Once I was through with the attorney I went to the bank and took care of things there.
Chapter 3
The bank president saw me. “Miss Cross I hope you know Mr. Lewis was a good guy. He would do anything for anyone in town. He also saved every penny. In one account there is a little over a hundred thousand dollars. (I gasp). In his checking account there is sixty-one thousand and five hundred dollars and some cents.”
“Oh my gosh. I had no idea he had that kind of money. I guess that is from selling the cabins. And yes, I know he was a great guy. He treated me like a daughter. He and Mrs. Lewis. They took me in and cared for me like I was family. I loved them both.”
I couldn’t help it, I started crying again. I thought I had it all out of my system. But it seemed every little thing made me think of them, then I was crying again.
“Yes, he did mention that he thought of you as his daughter when he came in the last time. He had come in to let me know if anything happened to him that he was leaving everything to you. He also had a separate account for the money he got from selling the cabins. You have a lot more than you think.”
He went on to tell me about the account set up in my name already. It had a balance like none I had ever had before. All in all, I had close to a million dollars. I couldn’t believe it.
Once I was through at the bank, I got the directions to the house he had left me. It took me about fifteen minutes to find. As I pulled up in front of the old house I had to wonder if this was the Lewis’s first home. It looked like it was made of sticks and that the big bad wolf wouldn’t have any trouble blowing it down.
In its day I could see where it might have had some charm. There was a porch across the front. The house itself, seemed to be built on stilts. I knew it wasn’t. It was just built off the ground. There were two windows on the front of the house, one on each side of the door.
I couldn’t help myself, I had to take a look inside. I only hoped I wouldn’t fall through the floorboards. I had to pry the door open. It seemed that over time the door frame had warped.
I walked into what I would guess might have been a living room. It wasn’t small. For a couple it would have been more than enough room. To the right was an open arched doorway that led to a kitchen. As it still had a couple of cabinets, hanging lopsided on the wall. The sink was still there, but it was rusted.
I noticed another door in the kitchen on the back wall. I went over to it and opened it. I nearly had a heart attack as I opened the door a raccoon ran over my foot.
After my heart stopped trying to pound its way out of my chest, I entered a small hallway. It led to three more doors. One would have been a bathroom. Two were bedrooms. The bathroom was at the end of the hall. It looked like it had been added on to the house after the occupants had lived there for a few years. The fixtures in the bathroom weren’t as rusted as the ones in the kitchen had been.
The house wasn’t as bad inside as I first thought it would be. I wondered if it could be redone back to its original charm. I had to wonder if there were any pictures of it in Mr. Lewis’s stuff. Which I also had to go through yet. I didn’t look forward to that.
In the Will everything was left to me, including a storage shed that Mr. Lewis had stored his belongs in after selling the cabins.
I stood in the middle of the living room thinking about what I could do with what there was to work with. I could almost picture it.
The living room could be painted blue. Or maybe I could put a mural on one wall to make it look like I was outside. The kitchen I could see it made up in either red apples or yellow sunflowers. Yes, I could do this.
I would see if I could find someone to help me stabilize the house and make sure it wasn’t going to fall in. Then I would work on restoring it. I had a home!
It wasn’t far from town and I now owned two vehicles. Driving back and forth to town, if I could find a new job wouldn’t be a problem. Yes, this was turning out to be a good deal. I had to stop several times and thank Mr. Lewis.
By the time I got back to town I was all set on what I was going to do. I would get a paper and go through it. If I could find a handyman, then I would call him and see if he would go out to the old house and look at it. I am sure there are things that would have to be done that I wasn’t thinking of. I have never owned a house before.
I pulled up to the Smokey Burger restaurant. I could see there was a paper out front. I got out and put my quarters into the machine and grabbed a paper before I went inside and found a table. I ordered a burger and fries, then spread out the paper to see what I could find. I found the section that advertised all kinds of businesses.
I had brought a notebook with me and a pen in case I needed to write down information.
It didn’t take too long to find three handyman ads. I wrote all three numbers down, then started trying to figure out how to use the new phone I had just bought on my way to the restaurant.
Chapter 4
I wrote all three numbers down and started calling them. The first man I called told me he really didn’t have the time to go out and look at the house. I thanked him for his tim
e and hung up.
The next man I called, said he would be happy to go out and take a look next week. I told him I wanted to get started right away. I said I would call him back if I couldn’t find someone with the time now.
The third number I called, the man said he had just moved into the area and sure could use the job. He said he would give me a good price for being his first customer if I would promise to let people around town know about his work. That is if I liked what he did.
I really liked him. We set up a time to meet and I gave him directions out to the house. We were supposed to meet the next morning at nine. I was so excited.
Mr. Blackwood was kind sounding. I got the feeling he was young, maybe my age. He said he had just moved here, but I didn’t think to ask him where from. I would tomorrow.
I ate while I looked through the rest of the paper. I found a paint store listed and wrote down the address. I would have to figure out the streets. Even though I had lived there for over a year now with the Lewis’s, I really hadn’t gone into town often enough to know what was where.
After I found the paint store ad, I looked at the ads from furniture stores. I realized I didn’t own anything. My cabin had been furnished. I had a bed and dresser there and a small table and chairs. It was all I needed.
Now I had a house to furnish. I couldn’t wait to get started on the house. I could picture how it could look. I would go shopping for just the right things to put inside my little house in the woods.
Since Mr. Lewis had left me more than enough money to survive on, I decided I would also like to redo the fence around the property. I looked back through the business ads to see who did fencing. With a little work the place could be cleaned up and I would have a little pasture. I always wanted a horse.
The Trouble With Two Alpha's Page 2