A Fortune to Die For (White Oak - Mafia Series Book 1)

by O'Connor, Liza

  Thirty-something letters remained on the floor. After locating a new box, she gathered them up and dumped them inside. He’d probably want the envelopes matched to the letters. Sighing heavily, she sorted through and attempted to match them by their handwriting or the name on the envelope. Most of the letters began with God told me you would help me or something similar. God was a very talkative fellow except to her.

  The letters were all basically the same. They needed money to get out of trouble. And somehow it had become her job to pay their overextended credit card bills, their past due mortgage before foreclosure took their homes, send their kids to college, or buy the classic car they’d always wanted.

  But Helen’s letter was different. First, she actually knew something about Megan, so she’d done her homework. Second, she was offering to sell her something of value and even claimed she’d do it for a price below market value. Third, God was not mentioned once.

  Having no desire to watch the policeman read her death threats, Megan escaped to her office and researched Helen to determine if the woman truly did own the forest or if this was the modern day version of con artist George C. Parker’s selling people the Brooklyn Bridge.

  An hour later, with a few calls to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Helen Campbell proved to be the owner of two hundred thousand acres of flood lands and woods.

  “Flood lands… So it can’t be built on?” Megan asked the Iowa clerk on the phone.

  “Not back when Helen’s grandparents bought it all for a hundred dollars. But now…sure. Take down the trees—they’re worth a good penny—then use the timber money to pay someone to cart in gravel and dirt. It will take a few years, but you could build a whole city there. But before you get too excited over the prospect, I should warn you. If the old gal gets a whiff of your intentions, she won’t sell the property to you. All the local builders have tried and failed.”

  “And why are you telling me this?” Megan asked. To say she’d become a cynic since winning the lottery was like saying the traffic in New Jersey was slightly challenging.

  “Honestly? Because we need the jobs such a project would bring to the state.”

  “Well, thanks for the information.” Without waiting for a response, Megan hung up. Rudeness was another trait she had acquired in the last four years…along with getting a different unlisted phone number every month.

  “Miss Clarke,” a male voice called out from the kitchen.

  For a moment, a lightning rod of fear and panic surged through her. She’d forgotten all about the policeman. Opening the door to her office assured her she had forgotten more than the officer. The stench of burned meat struck her forcibly.

  “Damn it, I burnt your burger.” She pushed him aside, grabbed the skillet, and threw it into the sink. It continued to fill the room with smoke, causing the fire alarm to scream. She flipped the cold water on, hoping it would contain the situation. Instead, an explosion of angry grease rewarded her efforts. As she lifted her arms to protect her face, a strong and masculine arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her away from the volcanic display.

  Once safely out of the spewing water and oil, he disconnected the screaming fire alarm and faced her. “Are you okay?” His fingers frisked her face for injuries. His scent of sandalwood and musk along with his touch caused her libido to wake up. When he examined her neck, which seemed oddly more intimate to her, she stepped back. “I’m fine. Sorry I burnt your burger.”

  His lips tugged into the most adorable grin. “I never asked for a burger.”

  God, he was sexy, which only made him more dangerous to her heart.

  “Well, you didn’t like my chili, so I went for meat. Can’t go wrong with a burger, right?” A burst of laughter escaped her upon realizing how wrong she could and did go with the burger.

  “Were you able to find the other letters?”

  She pointed to the box on the counter. “Those are the Beg-a-thons for today. If you want me to start keeping them, then I’ll need to purchase a dumpster.”

  He grabbed the letters and led her back into her safe room.

  His refusal to laugh at her attempt at humor annoyed her. Instead, he escorted her to the couch and then sat down beside her at an angle. His stern face had lecture written all over it.

  “I promise you, I normally stay in the kitchen when I’m cooking.”

  He lifted a thick pile of death threats from the floor. “I’m not worried about your cooking skills, although I’m glad I was here to prevent a fire. My concern is with this group of letters. I can’t believe Sergeant Adams knew about any of these.”

  Since he seemed to be waiting for her response, she took the pile from him and flipped through the sheets of colorful letters cut from magazines and pasted to paper, giving a carnival vibe to their assembled death threats. “These started showing up the second year of Mega Misery. They were so childish I never showed them to him.”

  Detective Williams released an audible and long breath, then met her gaze. “Miss Clarke, these are serious threats. Serious enough to bring in the FBI. Serious enough for you to take drastic moves to protect yourself.”

  Did he think her an idiot? “I replaced all the windows with bulletproof glass, and this is a safe room.”

  He stared at the wall. “A real safe room?”

  The doubt in his voice bothered her. Not just because it indicated he truly believed her gullible enough to accept anything people told her, but now she questioned if the vendor had provided what he promised. She’d been gone when the contractor had built the safe room.

  “There’s supposed to be three inches of steel behind the drywall.”

  He rose and knocked on the wall. Even to her ear, it sounded hollow. “Did you watch them build this?” The doubt in his voice remained.

  And hers was growing by the second. “No, I didn’t. I was out of town. Hold on.” She stormed to the basement, found a small sledgehammer, and returned to the room. With one angry blow, the hammer went all the way through to her mud room. “Son of a bitch!” Megan stormed to her phone and speed-dialed her lawyer. He wasn’t available, so she left a message for him to call her and returned to the detective.

  “Sorry for the outburst, but I paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a safe room with three-inch thick steel walls, and this really pisses me off. My life may be mostly horrible now, but it’s the only one I’ve got, and I would like to keep it going.”

  He nodded in agreement. “We need to call in the FBI.”

  In an attempt to reduce her stress, she rotated her neck around in half circles, which made it sing like a bowl of Rice Krispies. “You can try, but since I’m not dead…yet, I doubt they can afford to throw manpower my way.”

  His brow furrowed. “Let me see what can be done. Mind if I borrow these letters?”

  “Take ’em. They just depress the hell out of me.”

  Once Detective Williams left, Megan called the lowlife cheats who’d built her safe room. Unable to get beyond the damn phone bank, her stance turned litigious. “Unless you connect me to the president of your company now, I’m going to sue you guys.” Her threat got her to a supervisor, who, when he heard her story, connected her to his manager who passed her off to the district manager.

  Her lawyer returned her call as she waited for a higher district manager. Noting the time she’d already spent attempting to contact the company, Megan hung up and answered her lawyer.

  “David, I need to sue a company for breach of contract.”

  He listened to her latest fiasco and groaned. “You know, before you won the lottery, I never heard from you except the occasional tweaking of your Will, but now, you’ve become one of my best clients.”

  “Hey, it’s not my fault everyone thinks it’s okay to cheat a person who didn’t earn her money. I’m faxing you a copy of my contract. I just slammed a sledgehammer through the wall, and guess what? It went straight through. Now, unless I’ve developed super-human strength, there should’ve been a three-inch steel plate
in the wall to stop my mighty feat.”

  “Why are you yelling at me?”

  She rubbed her temple. “Sorry. I wasn’t yelling at you. I’m yelling because I’m pissed off at the builders who did this. The room was supposed to be my place of safety.”

  Tears tickled her cheeks. Rubbing her shoulders against her cheeks to dry them, she fed the fax machine her contract. Unfortunately, her nose betrayed her with a sniffle.

  “Are you crying?” David asked with surprise in his voice.

  “No. I suddenly developed a cold.”

  Finally, the last page went through. “When you read the document, you’ll notice I was promised three-inch steel plate walls. I’ll need an expert to come in and determine what else the bastards failed to provide.”

  “I’ll find one. But you know, this could easily cost you more than the room cost.”

  “I don’t care. They put my life in danger.” She then told him about the detective who had come and proven the dangerous package was just a bunch of pictures, but freaked out over her two-foot box of death threats. “He’s planning to bring the FBI in.”

  David sighed. “Without a dead body, I doubt they’ll come. But I might need the detective’s testimony on the two feet of death threats. Is it really two feet?”

  “I never actually measured the box. It’s what computer paper comes in.”

  “Ahhh. Probably fifteen inches…but still a frightening quantity. Why didn’t you mention these before?”

  “Because they don’t sign their name or provide their address, so I can’t tell you who to sue for harassment.”

  “Megan, you can talk to me about things other than lawsuits, you know.”

  “Yeah…” The truth was she couldn’t. She thought him a very good lawyer, but she couldn’t trust him on a personal level. Long ago, she’d fallen in love with him, and after three happy years, he’d just upped and dumped her for another woman. To this day, she couldn’t understand why. Weren’t couples supposed to argue and fight before they broke up?

  “I have to go.” She hung up, grateful for her ability to be rude now.

  Knowing no room in her house was safe, sleep eluded her. If the contractor for her safe room had lied about his work, what about the guy who installed her alarm system? And the bulletproof windows? Were they really bulletproof?

  How would she know?

  Maybe Detective Williams could shoot her window to test it. Her hand reached to the phone, but then sanity took hold. He’d probably not appreciate being woken in the middle of the night. So she did nothing, unless tossing and turning counted. If so, she did a great deal.

  Normally, Megan woke up early, but not today. The clock chimed ten before she rolled from her bed and stumbled downstairs to fix breakfast. Feeling exposed and in danger by the excessive windows, she rushed about the house pulling curtains and shades.

  As a reward for her diligence, her oatmeal boiled over.

  While cursing her inability to cook, the doorbell rang. She screamed and dropped the pan of oatmeal onto the floor where it splattered onto her legs. Desperately wiping the scalding oatmeal from her legs, Megan limped through her not-so-safe room to the mudroom and turned on the video monitor.

  Upon seeing the way too gorgeous Detective Williams, she opened the door and let him in.

  “Are you sick?” He reached over and felt her forehead.

  Why would he even ask such a thing? A glance in the hall mirror provided the answer. She’d yet to brush her hair, which had evidently spent the night teasing itself. “I just got up. Let me find a brush so I don’t give you nightmares.”

  Instead of staying in the not-so-safe room, he followed her to the kitchen. “Whoa!”

  “Cooking disaster…someone knocked on my door, and the pot jumped out of my hand.” Leaving him in the kitchen, she went to her bathroom and softly cursed at the frightening creature staring back at her.

  Dark circles hung beneath her eyes. Her nose was red and blotchy, and her cheeks were flushed. But the masterpiece of disaster was her hair. Honest to God, if she had taken a comb and deliberately teased it into a matted rat’s nest, the results couldn’t be more of a horror than it was now.

  Upon washing her face and applying her skin medicine to calm her Rosacea flare up, she attempted to hide the bags and redness with ancient makeup bought long ago when she had a job. Finally, she focused on her rat’s nest.

  A knock on the door caused her to scream, resulting in the detective bursting in a second later with his gun drawn.

  She dropped her brush and held up her hands. “It’s just me in here.”

  With a quick check behind the shower curtain, he re-holstered his gun. “Why’d you scream?”

  She grimaced. “I didn’t sleep well last night, and everything is making me jumpy today.”

  He nodded as if her answer was perfectly reasonable. “Can you come out so I can talk to you for a moment?”

  She smiled at his reluctance to have a conversation with a screaming woman in her bathroom. Where would they sit? On the toilet and rim of the bathtub? Seriously, even the not-so-safe room sounded better.

  She picked up her brush and led him back to the soon-to-be-featured-in-a-lawsuit room. On the way, they skirted around the brown mess splattered all over the kitchen floor. “I’ll clean the mess up once you’re gone.”

  “Have you ever considered hiring a cook?”

  Sitting down in her recliner, gathering her legs up beneath her, the injustice of his question hit home. “I’m not really a bad cook.”

  His right eyebrow rose in challenge, but he remained quiet as he sat on the couch and sobered. “I spoke to the FBI this morning, and while they agree the letters warrant action, they lack the manpower to assign anyone at this time.”

  “Figured as much.” Wanting to hide her arms’ desire to tremble in fear over their most reasonable reply, she hugged her chest. Nothing was different. Death threats had been arriving for years. Nothing had changed.

  Yet, it had. Detective Williams had ripped away her nonchalant attitude toward the letters and had proven her safe room was a farce. Well, technically she’d proven the lack of steel, but he was the one who raised the possibility.

  “Miss Clarke—”

  “Megan. If we are going to discuss my possible demise, I’d rather you call me Megan.”

  A faint smile came to his firm lips. “Megan, while the FBI cannot provide the manpower needed to discover who is sending you these threats, they did suggest some things you can do to increase your safety.”

  “Hire better builders of my safe room?”

  He sighed heavily. “They suggested you get a new identity and move someplace else.”

  A new identity! What a great idea. Escape the curse of her money and start her life over without resentful people everywhere she turned. “Maybe I’ll go to Iowa and buy two-hundred thousand acres of white oaks…live like a hermit.” The idea sounded like heaven. Walking in trees all days, all by herself. No one asking her for money, writing her messages from God…

  Then reality crashed in. “Let’s say I file to have my name changed. Are name changes really kept secret, or will I go through bureaucratic hell for nothing?”

  “Actually, this much the FBI is willing to commit to. They will assist you in obtaining a new identity and moving all your monetary assets to it.”

  “Really?” Then a cloud of hard-earned suspicion settled in. What if Detective Williams was playing his own racket? Tricking her into moving all her assets to a new identity not belonging to her?

  “And how will they do this?”

  He tilted his head at her question. Perhaps she hadn’t kept the sarcasm out of her voice.

  “Honestly,” he said, “I’ve no idea what goes into the whole process. All I know is upon review of the letters I sent them, they agree you are at serious risk and offered this solution, which evidently only uses back-office staff to complete.”

  Megan snorted softly and shook her head. No one ever app
reciated the efforts of the underlings. They could have work up to their eyeballs, and their boss would cheerfully toss them more.

  “I’m having trouble reading you, Megan. Do you not understand you are in danger?”

  “Given my inability to sleep last night, I would say you did manage to convince me I’m in imminent danger. I’ve just become so jaded I don’t trust anyone…although it hasn’t really helped.” She stared at the hole in the “where’s the steel?” wall. “I would really like a new identity of someone who did not win the lottery. Perversely, I would like to keep the money I won to pay myself back for all the hell I’ve gone through…and to buy some land.”

  He smiled and relaxed. “I think that’s a great idea. I did verify all your money can be safely transferred to your new identity. I didn’t know how much you still had, so I threw a ballpark of three-hundred million, and he said they could manage it.”

  Megan glared at him in outrage. “You do realize I won the stupid lottery four years ago.”

  “Well, less won’t be a problem.”

  She cleared her throat, intending to lecture him women could be kick-ass investors.

  He did his cute head tilt again. “I understated the amount?”

  She nodded.

  “Substantially?”

  With reluctance, she nodded. Matters always turned south when someone learned how much she was worth.

  He pulled out his pad and wrote a name and phone number, then tore the sheet out and handed it to her. “This is the agent I talked to. You can verify with him how much of your money he can move.”

  Her face burned. He’d clearly grasped she didn’t want to tell him her net worth. It was bad enough when people believed she had almost half a billion. But in four years, she had managed to turn it into nearly a billion dollars.

  “Detective Williams—”

  “Steve,” he corrected her. “Or I have to stop calling you Megan.”

  The fact he now wanted to be on first name basis bothered her, but since she had asked him to call her Megan, she could hardly refuse the same courtesy in return.