Hidden Riches

by Felicia Mason

  The rest of her complaint mercifully faded away as Christopher led her into the adjoining showroom—not that Everett Rollings allowed any of his employees to call it such. The only reason Trey had been stuck with the old biddy in the first place was to allow another grieving family time to complete making their casket choices and be ushered into one of the client lounges.

  It was the end of his workday at the funeral home, and Trey couldn’t wait to get out of the suit. He had a date in Virginia Beach that night and had no plans to keep the lovely lady, a woman he’d met while doing his other job, waiting a moment longer than necessary.

  In his room at the bed-and-breakfast, Archer Futrell-Dahlgren considered his options. As a lawyer, he knew how to obstruct and/or obviate the truth without breaking either the law or client confidentiality. And for the last eight months, he’d been doing just that. Clayton would be furious. But, Archer wondered, would his longtime partner consider the sin of omission enough to convict him?

  Yes.

  Did Archer care?

  Hmm. Therein lay his moral dilemma.

  Clayton was a wonderful man, and Archer did indeed love him. Was it, however, enough?

  For the last dozen years he and Clayton had been devoted to each other, for ten years as domestic partners. They owned a spectacular home together as well as a weekend pied-à-terre in Monterey. Of all their friends and acquaintances, gay and straight, their relationship was viewed as the most solid. But it had all changed eight months ago when his sister-in-law Ana Mae Futrell contacted him.

  She wanted him to do some legal work for her.

  At first, he’d been flattered that she’d sought him out. Although they had not been successful in getting her to come to California to visit, she kept in regular touch via the occasional telephone call, and she always remembered their birthdays and their anniversary.

  When she’d explained to him what she wanted him to do, Archer had had his doubts. Taking Ana Mae on as a client meant one hell of a conflict of interest.

  “Why are you telling me this?” he’d asked her.

  Ana Mae’s answer had been as simple as it was profound. “Because you love him as much as I do,” she’d said.

  Recalling the conversation now, Archer sighed.

  She had not expected any of this to matter for a long, long time. How could she have known that an aneurysm would take her at such a relatively young age?

  Archer sighed again. What he knew could change everything.

  Everything.

  The question eating at him was a simple one: Was he willing to trade all they had now for a chance to get more?

  He zipped open the hidden compartment on his carry-on bag, extracted the damning evidence, and carried it to the bathroom of their suite at the bed-and-breakfast.

  Before ethics kicked in, before he changed his mind, and before he could conjure the hurt sure to be in Clayton’s eyes, he lit a match to destroy the evidence.

  But it was already too late. He couldn’t do it. Not even for a client. The match burned down and licked at his finger. Archer dropped it in the toilet and shook his hand, rubbing the area that had been singed by the small flame.

  The document, embossed with the seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia, was still in his other hand. It should have been incinerated, with the other charred bits of paper now floating on the surface of the water. But he couldn’t do it. Not this.

  He expected guilt to assail him.

  It was the first time in his career that he’d ever betrayed a client. He thought he might feel a stab or at least a twinge of guilt.

  None ever came.

  For the first time in her life, Rosalee Jenkins was alone. Really and truly alone. Ana Mae had always been like a sister to her; the two were closer than if they’d been birthed by the same mother, closer than Ana Mae was with either Delcine or JoJo.

  Now, with Ana Mae gone, Rosalee didn’t know how she would survive. At least five times a day, she’d reach for her phone to tell Ana Mae something funny she’d seen on TV or overheard at the post office.

  There had been no secrets between them—at least that’s what Rosalee always believed. Until the obituary appeared in the Times & Review.

  Ana Mae had a son.

  Who the hell was Howard?

  In all the years the two had been road dogs, Ana Mae had never, ever, not even once, so much as hinted that she’d had a child.

  “Why’d you leave that part out, sister?”

  Rosalee stared up at the ceiling as if expecting Ana Mae’s voice or visage to come from above.

  She sighed, knowing better, but still missing her friend.

  Then there was the business of that quilt. It was all pretty ordinary, a simple telling of Ana Mae’s life in stitches and fabric. Ana Mae had made far prettier ones, and instead of selling them, she’d simply given them away as gifts.

  Rosalee smiled. Except for the one the Futrells paid five hundred dollars to get back.

  It was wrong what she’d done. Purely out of spite toward that hateful Delcine. Rosalee had hoped that Miss High and Mighty would have to pay for the quilt over at Eddie Spencer’s place, but Clayton had ended up doing it. She wasn’t too happy about that, especially since she’d always liked Clay.

  There sure wasn’t anything special about that quilt, except for all the appliqué. And if anyone would know, it was Rosalee, since she’d seen Ana Mae working on the thing and had given it no more thought than any of the other projects in Ana Mae’s sewing baskets. It had taken a long time for her to make that quilt. It was Ana Mae’s never-ending project.

  “Just a little something for me,” she would tell Rosalee.

  Ana Mae called it a legacy.

  Little did Rosalee know or realize just how much of a legacy that quilt would be.

  “Are you playing some kind of game with your kin, Ana Mae?”

  The question, like all her queries to her dead friend, was directed heavenward.

  That seemed the only logical explanation Rosalee had come up with since the day Everett Rollings dropped that bomb of a will.

  She couldn’t fault Ana Mae for leaving her money to her family. She’d gifted Rosalee with a more than generous amount that was now sitting in the First Trust and Union Bank. What hurt, what Rosalee took as a personal insult, was the secret of Ana Mae’s son, Howard.

  Heaving a sigh, she pushed herself up out of the chair in her living room. “Come on, Rosalee. You can sit here feeling sorry for yourself, or you can go find some answers.”

  The self-directed pep talk spurred her into action.

  Clayton, Delcine, and JoJo could run around town figuring out quilt clues and stuff that made no natural sense at all, since it was clear as day what the quilt meant. Rosalee would solve the real mystery. And she knew just where to start.

  10

  Sweet Memories

  Rosalee wasn’t the only one thinking about what Ana Mae left behind. It didn’t take Ana Mae’s neighbors, friends, and fellow church members long to figure out that something pretty extraordinary was going on with the Futrells. And the next thing everyone knew, a story in the Drapersville Times & Review told about the big-city visitors who’d returned to their hometown and had to stick around for a while because of something Ana Mae did from the grave. Then an “anonymous source”—which everyone who was anyone knew was Rosalee Jenkins—was quoted in the paper saying Ana Mae had left a significant monetary inheritance to the heir who deciphered the clues left in a quilt.

  Odds at Junior Cantrell’s and the barbershop ran three to one that the snooty Marguerite would get the money. “She’s the one don’t need none,” one sage said.

  “But that boy got a good head on his shoulders, even if he is that way. I think he’s gonna get it,” another handicapper declared, laying down twenty bucks on the ten-to-one odds of Clayton claiming the money.

  Thanks to Eddie Spencer’s explanation of how she’d tossed out the valuable quilt as trash, JoJo, the Vegas show girl, was universally
viewed as a flake and about as likely to figure out how to win the cash as she was to fit into her old high school majorette uniform.

  Debate raged about just what the Reverend Toussaint le Baptiste had to do with it all. Since Ana Mae was known to be a devout churchgoer, half the folks making wagers decided his presence was about Ana Mae giving the church even more money than she already had. The other half was split down the middle, some saying Ana Mae and the preacher had a side thing going on and the others just as vehemently strident that it wasn’t nice to say such bad things about the dead, especially seeing as how holy Ana Mae was.

  Then someone would say: “Well, what about that Howard son of hers? Apparently, she wasn’t always holy. Didn’t she used to talk to one of them Jenkins boys before they moved over to Greensboro?”

  And the debate would relaunch all over again while more money exchanged hands and the odds shifted.

  “For such a small house, Ana Mae sure had a lot of stuff. What is all this crap?”

  Delcine and JoJo were at Ana Mae’s house, still going through her belongings. More careful now that millions of dollars were on the line, they maintained a diligence that would have been unwarranted a few days ago when they unceremoniously tossed out papers, knickknacks, and other seemingly worthless trash.

  Now they meticulously reviewed every piece of stray paper, opened envelopes, and shook out magazines lest a critical clue be overlooked or thrown out the way the treasure quilt had been.

  They’d decided to work in their older sister’s bedroom today, JoJo handling the closet and Delcine focusing on the dresser drawers and the overflowing bureau top. The gilded frame of the mirror on the bureau dresser was barely visible under snapshots and ticket stubs from movies and sporting events.

  “The good thing is at least it’s halfway organized,” Delcine said. “Just think if she’d been one of those hoarders like on television.”

  “What’s a hoarder?”

  Delcine paused in sorting scarves and gloves from one of the drawers. “You mean you haven’t seen any of those hoarder shows? People have so much stuff that only a path is clear in their house and junk is piled up to the ceilings. Frankly it’s pretty sickening. And sad.”

  “We don’t watch a lot of TV,” JoJo said.

  Delcine rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah. That’s right. Lester’s too busy working the Strip with his fake psychic bit while you’re putting in eighty-hour weeks at the casino to keep a roof over your heads.”

  “My work weeks aren’t that long,” JoJo said, a note of defensiveness in her voice. “I do get some overtime every month, though, and that helps a lot.”

  The last thing she wanted to have with her wealthy and successful sister was a conversation about money. JoJo paused and looked at her hands. They were no longer the soft and pampered hands of a woman who regularly indulged in manicures and spa treatments, and her nails, kept short by necessity, were those of a woman who labored. In addition, her hands were bare. No rings adorned them. And she’d be buried in Antioch Cemetery right next to Ana Mae before she ever let Delcine know that she’d had to hock her wedding rings just to afford a one-way ticket to North Carolina for the funeral. She planned to discreetly ask Clayton to pay her fare to get back home.

  So when Everett Rollings said Ana Mae had left her ten grand, JoJo thought for sure that she had won the lottery. She knew Lester was already calculating how much he’d “invest” in his latest get-rich-quick scheme. But when they’d found out there was so much more than ten thousand up for grabs, Lester had been furious, claiming they’d been tricked out of their portion. He didn’t see the irony in what he did to tourists in Las Vegas every day. That was trickery at its finest. But she knew he wouldn’t see it that way.

  “You okay in there?” Delcine asked.

  JoJo wiped at a stray tear that somehow had sprung to her eyes.

  “I’m fine,” she lied.

  She had no idea if the sudden tears were for Ana Mae, for her own lost hopes and dreams, or because Delcine was being such a bitch.

  JoJo pulled out a large wooden box from one of the two shelves in the closet. Carved on the top was a scene of a hunter in a duck blind; pussy willows and lily pads surrounded the banks of a knoll overlooking a pond. “Ana Mae didn’t hunt. I wonder where she got this.”

  “What is it?” Delcine said from the doorway.

  “Some kind of hunting box.”

  JoJo put the box on Ana Mae’s bed, the double mattress covered with a lightweight but colorful, scrappy quilt, likely made by Ana Mae herself, although there was no label on it.

  The sisters looked at the eight-by-twelve-inch box, then at each other.

  “Diamonds?” Delcine guessed.

  “A week ago I’d have laughed at that,” JoJo said. “Now, who knows?” She lifted the lid to reveal a layer of white tissue paper protecting the contents.

  “What is it?”

  Peeling back the tissue, JoJo uncovered a bundle of letters tied with a pink satin ribbon, a small Bible, a couple of dried flowers, and other mementos, including a handful of photographs.

  She placed each item on the bed, pausing a moment to glance at the old snapshots, including one with a couple of smiling teenagers waving a flag. She smiled at one from an Easter Sunday years ago. Clayton was a little kid, maybe four. Delcine was pouting and JoJo grinning, and Ana Mae looked like the boss of them all.

  “Remember this?” JoJo said, handing the photo to her sister.

  Delcine looked at it and nodded. “I was mad because you got to wear the bonnet I wanted.”

  “It was too small for your head!”

  “Hmph,” Delcine grunted, before displaying a pout much like the one in the long-ago captured moment.

  Delcine reached for the ribbon-bundled packet. “Love letters? To Ana Mae?”

  “I don’t know,” JoJo said. The photographs put aside, her attention was back on the remaining items in the wooden box. Her own handwriting was on one of them. “Well, I’ll be.”

  “What is it?”

  “She kept them,” JoJo said, wonder in her voice.

  “Kept what, Jo? Is it something to do with the money?”

  JoJo bit her lip in a vain attempt to staunch the tears that again sprang to her eyes. “No,” she said. “They’re Christmas cards.”

  “Christmas cards?”

  “Uh huh,” JoJo said sniffling.

  She flipped through and pulled out three envelopes, two with the postmarks identifying when they were sent and the third made of a rough paper that JoJo now remembered.

  A brown paper bag.

  She couldn’t find envelopes anywhere in the house, so she’d made them for her Christmas cards that year from a Piggly Wiggly grocery bag she’d claimed before Mama folded it up to use for trash later on. She needed envelopes to go with the cards she’d crafted for her mother and her sister.

  That’s the envelope JoJo opened now, by far the oldest one in the box. As she lifted the flap and pulled out the card, the years fell away, and she found herself remembering the moments she’d enjoyed the most as a kid. On the floor, with her back against the twin bed and her feet almost touching the yellow wall of the bedroom she shared with Delcine. Her craft supplies she kept in an old cigar box that Mama gave her for her treasures. In the box, kept under her bed until she needed it, were her crayons, glue, the sparkly glitter, a pair of childproof scissors with rounded ends, and a couple of markers, the tools required to create masterpieces from scrap pieces of paper.

  Tears welled in JoJo’s eyes at the sight of that first handmade card. She’d painstakingly made it from construction paper and cutouts from Christmas dream catalogs.

  I LOVE YOU ANA MAE FROM YOUR LITTLE SISTER JOSEPINE

  JoJo smiled at the misspelling of her name. She always used to forget the H, one of the reasons she quickly adopted the much easier to spell nickname of JoJo. But the message, scrawled in the big block letters of her five- or six-year-old self, brought back the memory of the moment when Ana
Mae opened and read the card.

  “Do you really love me, Jo?”

  She’d nodded, sure of the unfailing devotion and love that only a much older sister could engender.

  “How much?” Ana Mae had asked.

  “This much,” the young JoJo said, spreading her arms wide.

  “And I love you, this much,” Ana Mae said repeating the gesture with her longer arms and then wrapping them around her baby sister in a big hug.

  Ana Mae must have been about nineteen or twenty then, but she always had time for JoJo.

  “What’s that junk?” Delcine asked.

  “It’s not junk,” JoJo said, clutching the card to her breast. “I made it and gave it to Ana Mae. I’ve made a Christmas card for her every year since I was little. This is one of the early ones. She saved them all, every single one.”

  “You make cards? How . . . crafty of you.”

  JoJo was sure Delcine was going to say something else, but quickly substituted crafty for whatever derogatory thing had initially crossed her mind. As it was, she made the word crafty sound provincial and lowbrow.

  Delcine didn’t know that JoJo’s greeting cards now supplemented her income. She’d picked up rubber-stamping as a hobby, and her talent had quickly turned it into a part-time job. She made her own cards and took orders from other people, but the holiday greeting sent to Delcine, Winslow, and their kids each year was always carefully selected from the Hallmark store, the sort of thing that Delcine would consider tasteful and proper. JoJo knew not to waste any of her original Christmas cards and designs on snooty Delcine. All she would do was what she’d just done—make a not-so-subtle dig designed to belittle and degrade.

  JoJo considered her sister, wondering if Delcine’s attitude came as an unintentional or a deliberate part of her personality. How Winslow stood it, JoJo couldn’t figure out. He was a nice enough guy.

  I guess it takes all kinds, JoJo thought.