Hidden Riches

by Felicia Mason

  “Oh, my God,” Clayton mumbled again.

  Archer lifted their joined hands and pressed a kiss on Clayton’s palms.

  “Oh, for the love of God,” Rosalee said. “Get a room.”

  “Rosalee.”

  The admonition came from Rollings, who no one noticed had left his seat.

  He had apparently pressed another one of his unseen buttons that summoned bodyguards and electronics. A five foot by five foot white screen now took the place of honor at the head of the table. Rollings or his in-and-out assistant had pushed the quilt stand to the side.

  Delcine groaned. “Not Ana Mae from the grave again.”

  “Oh, she was very much alive when she recorded these messages for you,” Rollings said.

  Clayton looked up at Reverend Toussaint. “I don’t get it,” he said. “How can you be my father?”

  “Hey, everybody!”

  The room went dark just as Ana Mae’s face popped up on the screen. She was smiling and waving from her porch again. Since she had on the same dress as the previous viewing, this message had obviously been recorded on the same day as the other.

  “I have a headache,” Delcine said.

  “You’re not the only one, sis,” Clayton replied. Then he turned to look at Delcine, realizing belatedly that maybe she wasn’t his sister, but his . . . aunt?

  “If you’re watching this part,” Ana Mae said, “it’s because somebody there has figured it all out. If I were a betting woman—and I’m not . . . ,” she added, lifting the King James Version of the Holy Bible that rested on the round table near the glass pitcher of lemonade with fresh-cut lemons floating around inside. “. . . But if I were a betting woman, I’d say it was either Too Sweet or JoJo who figured it all out.”

  “I love you, Ana Mae,” Reverend Toussaint murmured softly.

  Only Clayton heard the declaration.

  “Me?” JoJo exclaimed. “She thought I was smart enough to figure it out? Wow! Ana Mae had more faith in me than I have in myself.”

  “Shhh,” Delcine demanded.

  “. . . so that’s why I’m first gonna speak to Too Sweet.”

  The preacher rose, approaching the screen and Ana Mae’s image on it as if she were right there in the law firm’s conference room with them.

  “Yes, Ana Mae?”

  She leaned forward in the rocking chair and smiled.

  “I never meant to deceive you, Toussaint,” she said. “We had that one magical, magical night together. And we were both so young. When I found out I was pregnant, I was scared to death. Scared to tell you, scared to tell my Mama. But she figured it out when she didn’t see any evidence of my cycle coming around.”

  Ana Mae paused, refilled her glass of lemonade, and took a sip. With a lace-edged handkerchief, she dabbed at her mouth, replaced the glass on the table, and then continued with her story.

  “You were gonna be heading off to that camp soon. Remember?”

  “Yes, I was just about to turn seventeen,” Toussaint said, more to Ana Mae than to the people in the room with him, who were intently listening and watching. “It was a pre-college camp at Fayetteville State University.”

  “You were gonna go be somebody. Go to college. Do good things in the world. The last thing you needed to drag you down was a fourteen-year-old pregnant girlfriend.”

  “Holy shit,” JoJo exclaimed. “Fourteen?”

  She too had moved closer and, like Reverend Toussaint, remained standing while the video played.

  “Daddy had been through on one of his little pop-in trips, and that’s when Mama got the idea,” Ana Mae said. “Everybody knew Daddy came home whenever he felt like it, and usually left Mama pregnant with another baby. And just about the time I started to show, we went away. All of us.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  This time it was Delcine making the exclamation.

  “I remember that,” she said. “We moved up to Portsmouth or Suffolk or somewhere.”

  “Mama packed us all up and told the neighbors we were gonna stay a little closer to where Daddy was working for a while in Virginia. But Daddy wasn’t there. Ever. It was just me and Mama, Delcine, and JoJo, who was practically just a baby herself.”

  On the screen, Ana Mae reached down to the table and picked up a heavy cardstock fan from the Holy Ghost Church of the Good Redeemer and started fanning herself a bit with it. It had clearly been warm the day she’d recorded her message to them. Condensation formed and dripped from not only the pitcher, but the glass at its side.

  “Baby girl, I think you may have been going on two about then,” Ana Mae said.

  “Yeah,” JoJo said. “There’s about eighteen months between me and Clay. But I don’t remember any of this.”

  “You were too little,” Delcine said. “But I remember. After a little while up there, Mama said we, Ana Mae and I, were getting a little pudgy, and she told us we needed to diet a bit. But you weren’t pudgy, Ana Mae. You were pregnant with a baby. It all makes sense now.”

  “Shh, we’re missing what she’s saying,” JoJo said.

  “. . . so I hope you bear me no ill will after all these years,” Ana Mae was saying, still addressing her long-ago lover. “Mama said it was for the best, and . . . well, it seemed like the right thing at the time.”

  “Oh, Ana Mae.”

  “Clayton, honey, I hope you don’t hate me for the way we deceived you.”

  Ana Mae paused for a moment, using her hankie to dab at her eyes. “It was . . . it was a deception that kept you close. I could be your sister-mama. Teaching you and loving you while we both grew up together. It was an easy lie for Mama. Folks here in town were used to Daddy’s comings and goings. I think half of ’em thought he had another family somewhere else. And he probably did, for all I know.”

  “Oh, dear God.” That was Delcine.

  “But why not just tell me. Sometime. Anytime along the way. Even when Mama, er”—Clayton looked around—“even when my grandmother died, why still keep up the lies?”

  “It was easier,” Reverend Toussaint said.

  And as if she’d anticipated the question, on the screen the Ana Mae they all knew answered the same question. “By that time, by the time Mama died, I mean, it was habit. Delcine was gone, JoJo was gone, and Clayton, honey, you were so miserable in North Carolina that by then I knew telling you would just be pointless. For all that it mattered to the world, I was just your big sister. That’s the way it needed to be.”

  She paused for a moment, wiped at her eyes again, and said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  “She was always there for you, Clay,” Archer said quietly.

  “There as my sister, not my mother.”

  “Did it really make a difference?” Archer asked. “You were well and truly loved. And she helped you in every way she could. Didn’t you tell me she sent you money the whole time you were in college?”

  Clayton nodded. “Envelopes with little notes. Ten dollars here, and ‘I’m so proud of you,’ scrawled on a piece of paper. A twenty there with a little clipped comic from the newspaper or a flower pressed from her garden.”

  It was Clayton who was crying now.

  A box of tissues appeared on the table. Archer thanked Rollings and then plucked a couple out of the box to press them into Clayton’s hands.

  “Oh, my God,” he said.

  “What?”

  Clayton looked around for Rollings. “Did she pay for my medical school?”

  Rollings nodded. “Part of it.”

  “I got these ‘scholarships’ from some North Carolina group that I’d never even heard of. I figured it was something I’d applied for and forgot about. I wasn’t about to turn down any money with all the loans I had.”

  “The Granam Foundation,” Rollings supplied.

  “Yes,” Clayton said. “That’s it. I could never find any information about it, though. No address or phone number. No one to thank.”

  “The what?”

  “Granna Mae,” JoJo said o
n an almost whisper. “It was all right there. Right in front of us.”

  “What is a granamay?” Delcine demanded. She did not at all like being kept in the dark, and there were so many secrets being revealed right here and now that were making her plenty angry.

  “Ana Mae,” JoJo said. “The kids at the church school called her Granna Mae. She was their adopted grandmother. All of them.”

  “And after the lottery ticket thing happened, she set up a foundation to supply scholarship aid for students at the Good Redeemer Academy,” Reverend Toussaint said. “She felt guilty about buying the ticket in the first place and wanted to make sure its proceeds went to worthy causes.”

  “Like The Haven and the kids and Jeremy Fisher,” JoJo said.

  Rosalee and Reverend Toussaint glanced at each other, but neither said anything.

  “Granam,” Archer deduced, “is an acronym of sorts, a combination of Good Redeemer, maybe even Good Redeemer Academy and part of her name, Ana Mae.”

  “. . . so that’s my story,” Ana Mae was saying on the screen.

  “Mr. Rollings, could you rewind please? We missed a lot of that.”

  “Well, I’ll be god-damned,” Rosalee said. She’d apparently finally managed to get herself together. “Eddie Spencer called it.”

  “Rosalee!”

  “Will y’all stop saying my name like y’all all ain’t never heard a swear word? This is all just too much for me to take. Ana Mae had and kept more secrets than the CIA.”

  “Still waters run deep,” Reverend Toussaint said.

  “What did Eddie Spencer call?” Mr. Rollings said.

  Rosalee flushed, clearly guilty of something. “Well, there were, uh, some wagers going on over at Junior’s. This whole Ana Mae treasure hunt thing, it’s all a lot of people are talking about. There hasn’t been this much excitement in Drapersville since those hippies accidentally set fire to the general store that Eddie Spencer’s mama used to run back in the day.”

  When she said hippies, she cast her gaze in Rollings’s direction again.

  “I still don’t get it,” Clayton said.

  “Neither do I,” Delcine chimed in.

  “What was the point of the deception?”

  “I believe I can answer that,” Mr. Rollings said.

  “Me too,” Rosalee said. “I found it in the old newspaper files over at the Times & Review. They got all the papers from way back to the very first one.”

  “Sister Rosalee,” Reverend Toussaint said, with a note of caution in his voice that no one in the room missed.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with that,” Rosalee said, with an unguarded nod toward the funeral director-cum-lawyer.

  “I beg your pardon,” Rollings said.

  Rosalee waved a hand, dismissing that exchange as an aside. “There was a county prosecutor back in the day . . .”

  “Are we going to spend the entire afternoon talking about ‘back in the day’?” Delcine groused.

  “Those who don’t know their history are destined to repeat it,” Archer murmured.

  Delcine cut her eyes at her brother-in-law but didn’t say anything.

  “It was in the early 1970s,” Mr. Rollings said. “The fallout from the Summer of Love and all that it ushered in was more than Prosecutor Grayson could handle. With all of the hippies still running through town, turning the stately and historic Draper Building into what he accounted as a commune with around-the-clock orgies, Grayson dusted off a little-used North Carolina state statute and put the kibosh on fornication. He prosecuted at least three people.”

  “On what charges?” Archer asked. “And how were the charges enforced?”

  “The bedroom police,” Rosalee said.

  “The bedroom police,” Reverend Toussaint murmured. “Lord, have mercy, I haven’t heard that in years.”

  The lawyer in Archer had to know. “What was it?”

  “A merry band of Bible-toting deputies, handpicked by Grayson.”

  “The stories were all over the papers,” Rosalee said. “I saw some of them over at the newspaper building.”

  “That’s because the law, at least as interpreted by Prosecutor Grayson and old Judge Harper painted a broad stroke,” Rollings said. “The charge was ‘lewd and indecent behavior that threatened the moral fiber of the community.’ ”

  “Oh, for goodness sakes,” Archer said.

  “Now you see why I had to get the hell up out of Drapersville, North Carolina?” Clayton said. “Even though by the time I was coming along, and coming out, that law had been shoved back in a closet where it belonged, there was still a pervasive atmosphere here that frowned upon anything deemed outside the norm.”

  “And a fourteen-year-old pregnant black girl was definitely something outside the norm.”

  JoJo, who had been picking at a chip in her long, painted nails, said, “I have to give her credit, though.”

  “Who?” Clayton wanted to know.

  “Mama. That she even thought about that law and what was going on in town. How it might affect her child and her unborn grandchild.”

  Reverend Toussaint started to nod. “And along come me and Ana Mae, two teenagers who have nothing to do with the hippies, but surely fit the definition of what the judge and the prosecutor were gunning for. Miss Georgette must have panicked.”

  “She did,” Rollings said. “And so she loaded up her car with her toddler, her young daughter, and her pregnant fourteen-year-old and moved them across the state border to Suffolk, which at the time was another small country town a world away from here. Ana Mae could have the baby, and when the Futrells finally got back to Drapersville, with Georgette toting a newborn, no one would be the wiser since everyone knew about her on-again, off-again relationship with her husband.”

  “There was no reason for anyone to think anything except what they saw,” Clayton said. “And I became permanent brother to Ana Mae, Delcine, and JoJo.”

  Rollings aimed the remote to rewind and started the video again at the part they’d missed. Ana Mae, in her own rambling words, recapped the same story they’d just pieced together.

  “. . . So that’s my story,” Ana Mae said. “While I could make a guess, I don’t know which one of you will get it. I hope you’ll do what’s right, though. And you’ll know what’s right when the time comes. But this,” she said reaching forward and pulling something from the front porch railing—the very quilt that was now displayed in the conference room. “This quilt tells the whole story. My story. It took me a long time to make it, but it was a labor of love. I never stopped loving you, Too Sweet. We went our separate ways and had our own lives, but you were always my one and only even though there was a time when there were a lot of stories running around about me for a while there. Yeah, I had a lot of boyfriends, but when I refused to,” she shrugged, “well, you know, when I wouldn’t sleep with ’em, they got mad, called me names, and said ugly things. But you, Toussaint, you were always my one and only.”

  Ana Mae hugged the quilt to her bosom, smiled at the camera, and then the screen went white again.

  The tissue box made the rounds at the table.

  Everyone, including Everett Rollings, was outright crying or sniffling. Everyone except Delcine, who had a bigger loss on her hands.

  She had passed on the ten thousand dollars—a sure thing—for the chance to get her hands on Ana Mae’s millions. And now it was looking like she would be shut out—shut out by a preacher that Ana Mae slept with one time more than thirty years ago. That just was not right.

  “It’s not right,” she said aloud.

  “What’s not right?” JoJo said, fanning her eyes with one hand and with the other trying to either secure or take off one of her false eyelashes that had come unglued.

  “That, that preacher who doesn’t even pastor a church gets all of Ana Mae’s money. It’s not right.”

  “I don’t want it,” Reverend Toussaint said. “That’s why I’m giving anything that may have come to me for figur
ing out the quilt’s story over to Clayton. Ana Mae gave me a precious, precious gift. She gave me a son. She and Miss Georgette could have gotten rid of you with some back-alley abortion or given you up for adoption. But instead, they brought you back here where both of us, me and Ana Mae, could see you grow up. And there’s no dollar amount I can ever, or would if I could, put on that.”

  Archer squeezed Clayton’s hand and gave a little nod.

  Clayton, still a little wary, rose. “When you put it that way, Reverend, I sort of get it.”

  For a moment, the two men stood together awkwardly. Then Clayton, deciding or realizing that the moment and the decision was his to make, tentatively held out a hand to Toussaint le Baptiste. The minister took it and shook it, and before Clayton could back away, Toussaint pulled his son into a hearty embrace.

  JoJo started crying again.

  Mr. Rollings and Archer smiled.

  Rosalee looked heavenward, shaking her head.

  Only Delcine still sat pouting. “This is just so wrong. I don’t get it.”

  22

  All the Pieces Together

  “What don’t you get, Delcine? Even I’ve figured out this whole thing, and I’m the slow one of the bunch.”

  “You’re not slow, JoJo,” Archer said. “Your thinking is contemplative and deliberate.”

  “Thank you, Archer.”

  “But it was Reverend Toussaint who figured out that Ana Mae’s son was Clayton,” Archer added.

  “About that,” Clayton said. “My name isn’t Howard. I have my birth certificate, and there’s no Howard on it anywhere.”

  They all looked toward Mr. Rollings, who nodded.

  “What you have is an official duplicate,” the lawyer told Clayton. “Not necessarily usual, but not unheard of. They are issued when an original document is lost or destroyed—for example, in a fire or hurricane.”

  “So what’s the significance of the name Howard—other than it being mama’s maiden name?”

  “I think I can answer that,” Reverend Toussaint said. “I don’t know why it never occurred to me before. Howard is such a common name here.”

  “He’s right,” Rollings said. “Just as an example, my middle name is Howard.”