by Dale Mayer
“Good enough.” He ended the call, put down his phone, picked up the first file, and fed it through the scanner. He wasn’t exactly sure where he would send it, so he coordinated the scanner to send to his email.
With that one done, which took about ten minutes, he went through the rest slowly and methodically. He repeated the process for each drawer. By the time he was on the third drawer, the last ten files, Bonaparte walked in, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Zack looked at him. “Feel better?”
“Yeah, I do. I needed that.”
“You can grab four more if you need to,” Zack said.
Bonaparte shook his head. He looked at what Zack was doing. “Are you scanning all that in?”
“Yes, I found another safe.” He pointed to the cupboard that was still open. “Levi is contacting the Turkish government on some of these materials.”
“Wow,” he said. “I gather Levi decided they needed all this?”
“And we’re afraid an attack will come from some of the other cohorts in crime. Also, no one has found her father’s body yet.”
“It may not show up,” Bonaparte admitted. “A lot of places to get rid of something like that.”
“But the house was transferred to Zadie’s mother four years ago,” Zack said, “so this place is hers free and clear, given her parents’ wills.”
“Yeah, sure. Mom had something on dad, and dad was toeing the line.”
“Sounds like he needed to,” he said. “And good for her because now it all belongs to Zadie.”
“Good,” Bonaparte said.
Zack scanned the last folder. “I’ve got this in an email which I’m forwarding to Levi,” he said.
“Just to make sure we are not left high and dry if you end up getting killed.”
“Nice thought,” Zack said, but he pulled up his phone, checked his email, and quickly forwarded everything to Levi. He smiled as he put away his phone. “Now my turn to crash. See you in four hours.”
Chapter 13
Something startled her awake. Zadie bolted from bed, dashing to the door to hide behind it, before she could brush the sleep out of her eyes. Then the pain in her leg hit her from her sudden movements. She huddled in the corner of her bedroom, taking long, slow, deep breaths, trying to figure out what had sent her running. Her dreams had been filled with nightmares of her childhood, hearing her father yelling and screaming at her mother, her mother forever crying. To think Zadie was back in this house, her mother and father supposedly both dead, breaking her heart and stirring up things she’d thought were done with.
And yet it was all mixed up with guilt, anger, and frustration at the same time. No way to work her way through it all this fast. As she looked around, she realized long shadows were in the room.
Nighttime. Likely an hour or two or more before dawn. She let out a heavy sigh, straightened up slowly, and walked back to her bed. Detouring, she headed to the bathroom, used the facilities, and washed her hands.
As she walked out, she slipped over to the window and stared outside. The world looked peaceful. But this house held so many memories that were anything but. If it was hers, she was selling it. That was an instinctive decision that she knew she wouldn’t move away from. Nothing for her was here. She wanted to keep things from her mother as mementos. But even now, she was wondering just how much she really understood and knew her mother. Had she been complicit in her father’s dealings? Zadie didn’t know. She hoped not, but she was learning a lot more about her mother’s involvement.
She slipped back over to the bed and laid down. It was hard to go back to sleep, and her stomach grumbled. It was looking for food, which was ridiculous because she had had sandwiches earlier. But she’d gone days without very much to eat at all.
As her tummy continued to grumble, she sighed, wondering if she could make her way downstairs and get something without waking the men. Deciding to take a chance, still dressed because she never actually undressed, she went out of her room and slipped down the stairs. When she hit the kitchen, she stopped, surprised to see Zack sitting there with a cup of coffee.
He looked up and smiled. “I heard you coming down. Can’t sleep?”
“Honestly, it’s my stomach,” she admitted. “Sounds like I need more food.”
He raised his eyebrows at that but got to his feet. “It’s five o’clock.”
“Oh,” she said in surprise. “Then I actually slept a long time. I thought it was only maybe three or four.”
“No, it’s five,” he said. “We’ve already switched guard assignments again. There is a fresh pot of coffee.”
She nodded, headed toward the coffee, and poured herself a cup. “But I need food.” She walked back to the fridge and pulled out bread and cheese, making toast.
He stood up and asked, “How about some eggs to go with that?”
“I was wondering about that myself.”
He turned on a frying pan, and she passed him the eggs. They quickly whipped up a batch of fluffy bright scrambled eggs for the two of them. As they sat down with a hot meal, he said, “I should have thought that maybe your stomach would wake you up.”
“We ate a lot of sandwiches earlier,” she admitted, “but it wasn’t enough to hold me all that time.”
“When you’re deprived for days,” he said, “it takes time.”
“Maybe now time is something I’ve got a lot of,” she admitted.
“I left a pile of stuff for you to go through from your mother’s room on your bedroom floor,” he said.
She shook her head. “I didn’t even see it.”
“I took another look at your father’s office and found a second safe. I sent some paperwork to Levi. It’s fairly damning indictments against other politicians.”
“Good,” she said stoutly. “Send it to the government. Maybe they can clean up all this corruption.”
“Already in progress,” he smiled. “I’ve also been scanning in other materials from the office to send onward as well. Most of it in Turkish. Levi will have a translator read through all of it. A fair bit of stuff was here.”
“Good.”
He took a deep breath. “We found some stuff in your mother’s room upstairs.”
“What was it?” she asked with curiosity. “I’m half prepared to believe she was in cahoots with my father anyway.”
“I don’t know about that as much as I think your mother was blackmailing your father.”
She slumped back in her chair and stared at him. After a moment, she gave a broken laugh. “Seriously?”
“She had an envelope taped behind her night table with photos of him with other women,” he said. “And then we have other documents. We also got into her phone, but we haven’t tracked all the information on it yet.”
“And that means?”
“It means,” he said with a half smile, “I think she was using him to line her own bank accounts, presumably to leave for you.”
“And maybe to get away? We did talk about her leaving,” she murmured. “But then I was persuaded that maybe she would never leave him. But I guess maybe she was planning to after all.”
“I think she was. Bottom line is, it’s very confusing, and we don’t have enough information to know yet.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But it is encouraging. I actually prefer the idea of her blackmailing him.”
“Do you know when he stopped beating her? If he ever stopped. Maybe some of that information is in the stuff we’ve got upstairs for you.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’ve also got to search to find out if she left me any messages online. I was gonna do that on a laptop earlier, but then the cops came.” She pulled out her phone. “I can do some of that right now.”
“Only if you are ready to do it,” he said. “It’s pretty stressful.”
“That it is,” she said with a broken laugh. “But I feel much better now.” She pushed her empty plate off to the side and pulled her cup closer to her. “I still need to get the laptop, don’
t I?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll go upstairs and get the stuff from your mom. You go grab the laptops.”
With that, they both dashed to get the stuff they wanted. They came back and spread everything out on the table. When she lifted the lid of the hatbox, she stared at it in shock.
“Did you know your mom stockpiled that kind of money?”
She shook her head. “No. I had no idea. I didn’t know she had any money.”
“It could be her blackmail money,” he said. “You know the money that she was taking from him or that she’d forced him to give her so she wouldn’t turn him in.”
She nodded slowly. “And, if that’s the case, I mean, as much as I’m confused about everything, I am more emboldened by her behavior then. It makes me feel better to think maybe she was fighting back and doing what she could to make a life for herself.”
He smiled in understanding, then tapped the laptop. “Then let’s see if we can understand more of this.”
She quickly searched to get what she was trying to get to and then said, “I’m in the cloud storage that we use. All kinds of stuff is here that wasn’t here before.” She stopped, her voice breaking slightly. “A note is in here from her.” She quickly double tapped the document on the screen to open it up. She could feel the tears immediately gathering at the back of her throat. “Well,” she said, “this will be tough enough.”
“Why is that?” he asked.
“Because …” And then she stopped, taking several deep breaths, and continued, “Dear Zadie. I know this is too little, too late, but you are right. I should have left him a long time ago. The thing you don’t understand is how I loved him. But even now, after all this time, I realize that love isn’t enough. I can no longer respect or even like the man and what he is doing. When I realized how unfaithful he was, I turned my anger into something useful to get him to stop hurting me. Once he realized I had all the blackmail materials I needed to go public, he immediately stepped back and started treating me better. But I kept turning the screw and getting money to do various things. Every time I moved money, I moved half into my account and half into his. After thirty-five years of marriage, half of it is mine anyway. But, as we were getting deeper and deeper into trouble, and I knew that there could be no good end to this, I moved the bulk of his money into mine anyway. It’s got your name on it, so there are no questions who the money ends up with at the end of the day. I would like to think that there is a better world for me at the end of this, but I suspect that I’m too heavily involved for it to even be possible at this point. Still, I want you to know that I did eventually grab some control and tried to make a life for myself. It may not be the life that I had thought I would have, and it may not be the life that I had hoped for, but it is what it is. Know that I love you very much. I trust you to make better choices than I did. The accounts that you need to access are down below. Enjoy.”
Zadie sobbed quietly. When a box of tissue was pushed into her hands, she smiled. “It’s really hard to see how this all comes from my mother,” she said. “It’s not the same woman who I last saw when I lived in this house.”
“Well,” he said, “apparently she had learned this for herself.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “It’s lovely to know that she finally came to a different place.” She looked at the bank accounts. “I’ve never seen these bank accounts before.” She pivoted the laptop and showed him.
“Do you have a bank account that you want all the money dumped into?” he asked. “We can move it to that one.”
“We will have to,” she said. “I don’t want money all over the place like that.”
“No,” he said, “I wouldn’t either.”
She looked at it, shrugged, and said, “But it’s not today’s issue.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But depending on how many people know what your mother did, it’s probably best to do something about it as soon as possible.”
“Right. Well, all the information is there for log-ins.” She opened up one of the bank accounts that her mother had used and gasped at the amount. “Over half a million dollars is here,” she said in surprise. And, sure enough, her name was on it too. “Well, maybe I’ll leave it here,” she said, “as I have access.” But she went to the next bank account number and opened it, and the next one and opened it, and each one had a balance greater than the other. When she finally got to one stationed in the US, she was shocked to find several million dollars sitting there. “I hadn’t considered how rich they were,” she murmured. “But apparently rich means different things to different people.”
“And apparently you are wealthy,” he said with a laugh.
“Yes,” she said with a shocking surprise. “Apparently. And I’m thrilled.” She closed it all.
And just as she did so, he said, “Stop. Make sure you forward all that information to multiple sources so you can access it whenever you need to.”
“You mean, in case I can’t get into the cloud storage? In case my phone has no bars?”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
She smiled. “Okay, will do.” And she quickly moved a bunch over into her own email and cloud storage. After getting all that locked down, and, just to be sure, she took a photograph of all the logins. “Now,” she said, “what do I do with the money that is in this hatbox?”
“Did she say anything about it?”
She shook her head and pulled it toward her, picking up each of the rolls, looking at them in surprise. Underneath was a piece of paper.
“Whenever there was a holiday I couldn’t take, a birthday present I couldn’t buy, a gift I couldn’t get you, I squirreled away the money equal to the item. I figured at one point, one day, I would have a chance to take you on a holiday that you and I deserved to go on. If that day hasn’t come, please do something for yourself instead.”
She looked at the big box of money and shook her head. “So many times we were supposed to do something, it was planned, and then my father would stop it. Sometimes he would agree to let us do something, then changed his mind. How long has she been collecting this?” she murmured in wonder.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “but likely your lifetime.” He put the lid back on the box and added, “We’ve got to get this, and the rest we found, into a bank and somewhere safe.”
“Not to mention what I already have in the car,” she said.
“It’s all yours,” he said. “It’s a matter of making sure it’s secure, until you decide what to do with it all.”
“We can go to the bank today,” she said. “Can you just walk into a bank with cash money like this?”
“Particularly after your mother has died,” he said. “We also have to get the wills so that we can make sure we can get all the paperwork transferred.” He explained about the house being in her mother’s name and how it passed down to her legally through her mom’s will.
“Good,” she said. “Then it’s a matter of cleaning it out. I want to take some stuff from my mom’s room. Other than that, I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Where will you end up at the end of the day?” he asked curiously.
“I have a place in California,” she said. “It’s just a small apartment, but I thought I would like something with a little more land, a little more bush, a little more country. And it looks like now I can buy that.”
“Oh, I think so,” he said with a bright smile. “I would definitely think so.”
She looked over at him, smiled, and said, “Thank you.”
“We did nothing,” he said, “but you are welcome.”
“Well, it feels like you’ve done a lot,” she said. “And you did rescue me. That alone could have ended up very badly.”
“The question is, where are you going from here?” he asked.
She pulled the laptop back to her, opened up a document, and said, “Well, I have a lot of things to deal with. My mother’s funeral. I need to contact a Realtor. I need to get the house cleane
d out, well, at least the personal stuff cleaned out. Transfer of title. And then what?”
“Bank accounts,” he said. “And if you have a place in California, do you want any of the furniture here?”
She immediately shook her head. “No, I’d rather sell the house as-is.”
“And honestly, you might be able to do that,” he said.
They sat, discussing things, until she realized it was after seven already. “The banks don’t open ’til nine, and I can’t get to the lawyer until probably nine either.” She checked her emails. She had sent a message previously. “I don’t know what to do about my father.”
“Until his body shows up, there isn’t a whole lot you can do,” he said.
“I can deal with the house first,” she said.
“Your mother’s note, do you know when it was sent?”
She looked up at him in surprise, went back to the cloud storage, and said, “Yesterday morning.” She shook her head. “So she did this while she was still captive?”
“And she might have cleaned out your father’s accounts too.”
“The information should be on her phone.”
He handed her the phone.
She quickly swiped it and said, “My mom has always been partial to swipe passcodes.” She brought up her history and went to the banks and automatically logged in. “She did, indeed, transfer all my father’s bank accounts to hers. Or at least the ones listed here are empty.”
“So it depends if he has any others.”
“That would be in his ledgers,” she said with a sigh. “It’s a sad end.”
“But an easier one for you,” he said.
“Yes, definitely. But, at the same time, after a lifetime, what does he have to show for it? His reputation was a disaster. Many hated him. Some revered him, only because of his corrupt ways of life,” she said. “It’s just sad.”
“What’s sad?” Bonaparte asked from the doorway and added, “Man, I’m starting to feel really good again.” But then he looked at the empty plates beside them. “You guys ate without me?”
Such outrage was in his voice that she immediately hopped to her feet. “I’m sorry. I came down so hungry that I had to eat right away.” He looked at her and his face gentled. “Because it’s you, that’s fine,” he said, “but not again.”