Hidden Riches

by Felicia Mason

  She’d clearly made the leap, but they’d left their younger sister behind—as usual.

  “What?” JoJo asked. “He’s right about what?”

  Clayton and Delcine exchanged a glance, then Clayton outlined his theory.

  “You saw that garage of his. He makes all kinds of things. What if he made something and sold it to this Zorin company, made a lot of money, and split it with Ana Mae?”

  Delcine’s lip curled. “Why?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why would he split the money with Ana Mae?”

  “I don’t know,” Clayton said. “It’s a theory. Maybe the thing he made was Ana Mae’s idea. He said she invested in his company.”

  Liking the hypothesis, Delcine nodded. “That would explain why Ana Mae had so much money.”

  JoJo didn’t look convinced. “Or maybe she hit the lottery again. That’s happened, you know. People winning a big jackpot and then winning another one. I’ve seen it happen at the casinos too. Somebody hits for a really big jackpot on the slots and then . . .”

  “Well,” Clayton said contemplating the theory, “we won’t have to speculate much longer.” He used his mobile phone to place the call. They reached a receptionist, who said Mr. Bell was unavailable.

  “May I have your name and number for a message, sir,” the polite woman said.

  Clayton gave his number and then said, “My name is Clayton Futrell. I’m in North Carolina at the moment.”

  “Futrell? Futrell! Oh, Dr. Futrell, I am so sorry for your loss,” the receptionist said, her voice changing from cool but professional brush-off mode to warmth-infused sympathy.

  Clayton frowned.

  “What?” JoJo said. “What’s he saying?”

  Clayton waved her away. He punched a few buttons, putting the phone on speaker and then set it in the middle of the table so JoJo and Delcine could hear the conversation.

  “We all just loved Miss Ana Mae. Her death is such a loss,” the Zorin Corporation receptionist said.

  Identical dumbfounded expressions marred the faces of the three surviving Futrells. It was clearly one thing to have David Bell crying like a baby at a funeral, but even the receptionist was choked up.

  “Mr. Bell is in Virginia on business at the moment, but I know he would want to speak with you. I’ll get your message to him right away,” she promised. “And again, you have my deepest sympathy.”

  “Thank you,” Clayton said, before punching the phone off.

  “What the hell?”

  Delcine got up. “I’m going to get some more of that Zorin Corporation mail. Ana Mae sure had a ton of it.”

  Clayton’s phone rang a moment later.

  “That was fast,” JoJo said.

  She got up to cut herself another large piece of the remaining pound cake, pour coffee, and start brewing Clayton’s tea.

  “Hello?” Clayton said, answering the phone.

  A second later he was waving for his sisters to join him.

  “Yes, Mr. Bell. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.”

  Delcine raised a brow. “Wow. That was fast.”

  He listened for a moment, and then said, “My sisters are right here. Do you mind if I put you on speaker phone?”

  “Not at all,” David Bell said.

  JoJo sat down with her coffee and cake, and Delcine returned with a stack of the large white envelopes from the box of Ana Mae’s mail that was in the living room.

  “Quarterly reports,” she mouthed to Clayton, who nodded.

  “Her passing just leaves a huge void in our company and in my heart,” Bell was saying, his voice again breaking as it had at the funeral.

  “Thank you,” Delcine said. “This is Marguerite Futrell Foster, and we were wondering about your relationship with Ana Mae.”

  JoJo hit Delcine’s arm. “Just be blunt,” she hissed.

  “Shh,” Delcine said.

  “Being blunt is just fine,” Bell said with a chuckle.

  JoJo’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry. I was talking to my sister,” she said. “This is Josephine.”

  “Yes, JoJo,” Bell said. “Ana Mae always spoke so fondly of you. I could never get her to join me in Las Vegas, though. She wouldn’t get on a plane, neither my private jet nor a commercial one.”

  This admission earned him another speculative glance from the three at the table.

  “And to answer your question, Delcine,” he said, adopting the familiar nickname for Marguerite, “my relationship with Ana Mae was one of the few true joys in my life. I was so hoping to be there for the wake so I could speak with all of you in private. I am so glad you called. I am up in Richmond, Virginia, for a meeting.”

  “Mr. Bell . . .”

  “Please, call me David,” he interjected.

  “. . . This is going to be another blunt question,” Delcine said.

  JoJo was shaking her head, but Delcine ignored her, and Clayton clasped her hand. JoJo sighed.

  “You may have noticed in Ana Mae’s obituary that she had a son. His name is Howard. We’re looking for him and thought you might know where we could find him.”

  She gave a “so there” huff in JoJo’s direction.

  She’d skirted the direct question, apparently deciding it was too blunt for a conference call on a cell phone.

  “Well, actually . . .” Bell began.

  15

  New Interpretation for Old Realities

  About ten minutes later, the three Futrells sat in stunned silence at Ana Mae’s kitchen table.

  Clayton opened his mouth. No words fell out.

  JoJo still stared at Clayton’s mobile phone in the middle of the table.

  Delcine recaptured speech first, but it was unsteady, like all of their heartbeats. “Do, do you know what this means?”

  But Clayton had a question now too. “Do you think Rollings knew?”

  “He had to have known,” Delcine said. “He’s like the Wizard of Oz, controlling everything from behind his little curtain.”

  “I don’t understand,” JoJo confessed. “Does what David Bell just said mean Ana Mae had even more money than the three point eight million?”

  Clayton nodded. “A whole lot more.”

  “But what are the options he kept talking about?” JoJo wanted to know. “Choices to what?”

  For a moment, Clayton just looked at her. Then he shook his head. “Not options like choices,” he said. “Bell was referring to stock options.”

  “I’m glad you figured out what she was talking about,” Delcine muttered.

  “There’s no need to be so damn condescending, Delcine.”

  JoJo sniffed. “Thank you, Clay.”

  Delcine folded her arms and sat back in her chair while Clayton explained. “Jeremy Fisher took stock options as well as a cash deal when he sold his company to the Zorin Corporation. Since Ana Mae invested in his company, she profited from that sale. And a stock option means if you get a share of stock for five dollars and the stock price rises to, say, one hundred dollars, you can exercise your options and you’ve suddenly made ninety-five dollars.”

  “But we’re not talking about a five-dollar stock value, are we?” JoJo asked.

  “Far from it.”

  “And the beneficiary of those options is this damn Howard.”

  JoJo narrowed her eyes. “Did you all notice how he just tap-danced all around that question about Howard?”

  Delcine nodded. “That’s because he’s Howard’s father. And I bet he’s figured out not only where this elusive Howard is but a way for their son to transfer the money back to the company.”

  “Well, at least we found out what the plate of chicken on Ana Mae’s quilt means,” JoJo said.

  Delcine raised an arched eyebrow, but Clayton voiced the question. “What are you talking about?”

  The “now” was left unsaid but implicit in his half-irritated tone.

  “The fried chicken,” JoJo said, as if that explained it all. She pushed her chair back and he
aded into the living room, talking all the while. “Ana Mae always took David Bell a basket of her fried chicken. He said he was really going to miss it.”

  JoJo returned with her copy of the quilt booklet. She flipped to the page with the block featuring the plate of fried chicken. “See.”

  “JoJo, there was no mention of chicken, fried or otherwise, in that conversation with Bell.”

  “Yes, there was,” JoJo insisted. She turned to her brother for support. “Tell her, Clay.”

  But Clayton’s face was scrunched up as if he were trying to draw on a distant memory. “JoJo, I don’t know . . .”

  “He did,” she insisted. “It was right when . . .”

  “Dammit,” Delcine said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Rollings told us this back at the reading of the will.”

  “About the chicken?” JoJo asked.

  That earned her one of Delcine’s smile-snarls, this one clearly conveying that JoJo was clearly the “slow” Futrell who needed things spelled out in large block capital letters for her to understand.

  “The stock options,” Delcine snapped.

  “How do you figure?” Clayton asked.

  “He kept asking if we wanted an attorney. Someone to set up the agreements. He knew there was going to be this issue. God damn that man.”

  “Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain like that,” JoJo chastised.

  “Who are you, the Sunday school teacher now?”

  “Girls,” Clayton said, again trying to avert an all-out brawl between the sisters.

  JoJo took a deep breath.

  “I don’t understand why she continued to live like this,” Delcine said. “Look at this place. It’s practically falling down. And for God’s sake, Ana Mae was still cleaning toilets. She was a multimillionaire, and she had her hands stuck down somebody’s toilet when she died. She could afford a mansion and an entire staff to wait on her hand and foot.”

  Clayton finally reached for and pocketed his mobile phone. “She wasn’t one to live an ostentatious life.”

  Delcine cut her eyes at him.

  JoJo bit back a smile.

  Clayton—apparently not even realizing he had insulted Delcine, or knowing and not caring—missed the byplay between the sisters. His mind was on the implications of all they had discovered thus far.

  Ana Mae lived a simple life by choice. Who did that in this day and age? And who helped her navigate the world of high finance?

  Even JoJo, as world-weary and wise as she was living and working in Las Vegas, didn’t know what a stock option was.

  “How did Ana Mae know how to do any of this?” Clayton wondered aloud.

  “Rollings.”

  The word came out as a curse and almost simultaneously from Clayton and from Delcine, who had been doing her own deductive reasoning.

  Clayton reached in his pocket for his phone, but Delcine was already up and reaching for Ana Mae’s wall telephone receiver.

  Only JoJo sat at the table, wondering how her siblings had completely missed David Bell’s reference to the fried chicken.

  They demanded a face-to-face meeting with the “funeral director slash charlatan”—Delcine’s phrase.

  Even so, he kept them waiting in his law office for ten minutes before entering the conference room.

  “Good afternoon,” Everett Rollings said.

  Today’s pinstripe suit was a charcoal gray, matched with a gray shirt and a darker gray tie. He looked ready to be laid out in one of his caskets in the funeral parlor. “What can I do for you?”

  “Sit down, Mr. Rollings.” The order came from Delcine.

  He braced his large hands on the back of one of the chairs. “What can I do for you this afternoon, Dr. Futrell and Mrs. Coston?”

  “You can ignore me all you want, Rollings,” Delcine declared, “but we are on to your little game and the North Carolina State Bar and the funeral directors’ association is going to hear about this.”

  A fleeting smile curved his mouth for a nanosecond. “And what, exactly, is the nature of your complaint, Mrs. Foster?”

  “Your dereliction of fiduciary duties.”

  Rollings made a deliberate gesture of checking his watch. “I have an appointment in a few minutes,” he said. “If one of you would kindly be specific, I will attempt to address your concerns.”

  “You didn’t tell us about the stock options in the Zorin Corporation,” Clayton said.

  Rollings gave a full smile now and took a seat at the table across from them. “Ahh, so you have completed the interpretation of all nine quilt blocks. Excellent. I will have my assistant contact the other . . .”

  “We don’t have all nine blocks figured out,” JoJo supplied.

  “Is that so?” Rollings asked, moving to rise again. “Well, there is nothing further to discuss until . . .”

  “Mr. Rollings,” Delcine said, standing and stalking to his side of the table, “do not trifle with me. We know that Ana Mae had unexercised stock options worth about five times the money in her so-called will. When she died, those options reverted to this phantom Howard. I believe there is no Howard. You just cooked all of this up to make a grab for the money. That’s why I’m going to the state bar to report your sorry ass.”

  JoJo’s eyes widened. The North Carolina was coming out of Delcine now.

  Rollings rose, gave a tug on the sleeve of his suit jacket as if it were more important than his former client’s relatives.

  “Mrs. Foster,” he began, enunciating each word, and with a glance toward the still seated Clayton and JoJo, “Mrs. Coston, and Dr. Futrell, your sister was explicit in her wishes. My duty as her attorney was to see that those wishes were carried out according to her desires.”

  He strode around the table and reached for the quilt block booklet in front of JoJo. “May I?”

  She nodded.

  Rollings picked it up and turned to the page with the photograph of the entire quilt. “This quilt, The Legacy of Ana Mae Futrell, tells a story,” he said tapping the full-color image of Ana Mae’s stitching. “She wanted you to figure out that story. If you know about the stock options, then you know the story behind one of the quilt blocks. You still have eight to go. Call me when you have done all of your sleuthing.”

  With that, he placed the booklet on the table, bade them “Good day,” and walked out of the conference room.

  “That son of a bitch,” Delcine said.

  Clayton held his hand up to halt the tirade. “But he’s right, Del.”

  “What do you mean he’s right? Look, I need . . . I mean, we need to get all of this sorted out so we can get the money and get back to our lives.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s what Ana Mae wanted,” JoJo said quietly. “We’ve learned a lot about Ana Mae that we didn’t know before. That has to count for something.”

  Clayton reached for the booklet. “By my estimate,” he said, “we have a long way to go.”

  “Please don’t say that, Clay,” Delcine said looking weary and pained. “I just don’t have the time.”

  “What’s going on with you and Win?” he asked.

  But Delcine just shook her head.

  Clayton gave her a pointed look, then turned his attention to the images. “We figured out the lottery ticket by talking to those folks at the store. Jeremy Fisher and David Bell represent the mop and the bucket, the cleaning supplies. That still leaves seven blocks.”

  “Don’t forget Lester digging up the yard,” JoJo said. “That was an interpretation of the middle block in the quilt.”

  “An interpretation all right,” Delcine intoned, “but clearly an incorrect one.”

  “Be that as it may,” Clayton said. “The faster we get this thing worked out, the faster we can go our separate ways. I suggest we spend the rest of the day chasing down some of these other clues. We didn’t get much done yesterday.”

  “Thanks to Lester,” JoJo said glumly.

  A world-weary sigh came from Delcine
. She opened her Gucci handbag and pulled out her mobile. She sent a text, then placed the phone on the table. In an uncharacteristic move, she placed both of her elbows on the table and dropped her head in her hands.

  “What’s wrong, sis?” Clayton asked again.

  She shook her head and sighed again. “It’s too complicated to get into right now.”

  Her phone pinged. She snatched it up, read the message, and sighed again. She furiously typed out another text and dropped the phone into her purse.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  JoJo remained silent on the ride back to the house. She sat in the backseat with no complaint. She knew Clayton and Delcine figured she was sulking because they—well, Delcine really—had put her down. But JoJo’s mind was awhirl on more important matters than Delcine and her attitudes.

  The lottery ticket quilt block and the bucket and mop quilt blocks weren’t the only clues that had already been solved. JoJo knew for sure the answers to at least two other clues from Ana Mae’s legacy quilt, and maybe another—the chicken.

  On the phone, David Bell said he loved Ana Mae’s home cooking and that she always brought him a bit of North Carolina when she visited. JoJo interpreted that to mean Ana Mae’s chicken and probably some of the other food she specialized in. If there hadn’t been so much food in the house from Ana Mae’s neighbors, church members, and friends, JoJo would have enjoyed trying out a few of the recipes she’d flipped through in Ana Mae’s little yellow recipe box. As it was, she planned to try out Ana Mae’s secret ingredient the next time she made fried chicken.

  Delcine thought she was trailer trash without a brain. But Mary Josephine knew more than either of them credited her with. Her mama didn’t raise no fool.

  So while Miss Hoity Toity Delcine was running around like a chicken with her head cut off, trying to figure out seven more of Ana Mae’s messages from the grave, JoJo had only four, and maybe just three, to solve before she could claim the three point eight million.

  If she got it, she’d gladly share with Clayton and Delcine. But Lester. Well, he posed a problem.

  The image of gangland Vegas mobsters came to mind again, which made her think of Eddie Spencer. Maybe it was time to see what Spence could tell her about settling down here.