Fool Me Once

by Fern Michaels

  “Wow, this is gorgeous! Just how rich was your mother?”

  “She’s not my mother. Well, she did give birth to me, but she’s not what I would call a mother. I would appreciate it if you don’t refer to Adrian Ames as my mother. I guess she was pretty rich. Bear in mind how she got rich.”

  Jeff stopped in his tracks. “Point taken. Sorry. Do you know if she lived here alone? My mother would positively drool at the idea of having all this room. Look at that house! I bet it has at least twenty rooms. Maybe ten bathrooms, and probably six or seven fireplaces. Want to bet?”

  Olivia shivered and snapped, “No.” Looking around, she said, “I wonder if there’s an alarm system. Maybe this was a foolish mistake. I don’t have a key to get in. I can’t imagine the woman leaving a key outside after she went to the trouble to install all this fencing.”

  “Well, you own the place, so you can break a window.”

  They heard the noise before they saw the monster dog barreling straight for them. Both Jeff and Olivia froze in their tracks, their jaws dropping when the huge dog ground to a halt and showed his massive teeth.

  “Down, Brutus. Hold!” barked a voice from the side of the house.

  Neither Olivia nor Jeff moved a muscle until a grizzled old man carrying a shotgun came into view. “We don’t hold with trespassers around here, folks. You best be turning around and leaving the same way you got here.”

  The dog held his stance, his teeth as white as the snow at their feet. Deep, guttural growls could be heard coming from his mouth.

  Jeff found his voice first. “I’m Jeff Bannerman. I’m a lawyer. This is Olivia Lowell, Adrian Ames’s daughter. She inherited this property. We have a right to be here. We climbed the fence because we couldn’t figure out how to work the gates.”

  “Power’s off on the gates. I’ll need to see some identification.” The shotgun didn’t move an inch.

  Jeff reached into the back pocket of his jeans and withdrew his wallet. Olivia took hers out of her shoulder bag and handed it over. The old man studied both driver’s licenses carefully. He handed them back. “What is it you want?”

  “To go into the house. And any information you care to give us,” Olivia said. “I never knew Adrian Ames. She abandoned me the day I was born and divorced my father at the same time.”

  “I know about you. She talked to me about you. There’s no heat on in the house. I’ll take care of that and make you both some hot chocolate. You look frozen.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Olivia said. “What about the dog?”

  “Brutus listens real good. He won’t hurt you as long as you don’t do anything you ain’t supposed to be doing.”

  “Are you the only one working here?” Jeff asked.

  The shotgun lowered as the man moved away. “Name’s Cyrus Somers. It’s just me now. I have a job here for another year, then I’m pensioned off. All the others left after the funeral. Furniture is covered up, utilities are still on. There was no need to keep anyone on, the lawyers said. Miz Ames left generous bequests to all her loyal employees. I’m the oldest, and I been with her from the day she moved in here twenty-five years ago.”

  They arrived at the back door. A key ring jangled in the old man’s hands. He fiddled with it until he found the right key and fit it into the lock. The door squeaked open.

  Olivia thought it was colder inside the house than it was outdoors. The man moved to a small hallway off the kitchen to turn up the thermostat. Brutus stood by the door, his ears flat against his head, his long tail tucked between his legs. “Be warm in a few minutes,” the old man growled.

  They stood around like three boxers warily eyeing each other, hoping to spot a weakness. “I’m not happy having you here without a lawyer present. I suppose you’re who you say you are, but I think I need more information before I let you touch things.”

  “Why don’t you call Ms. Ames’s attorney if that will make you feel better? I can let you use my cell phone if the phones here in the house aren’t connected. Or, if you want to go somewhere else, you can leave your dog to guard us,” Jeff said, pulling out a small cell phone from his pocket and offering it to the caretaker.

  Cyrus waved away the use of the phone. He looked at the dog, and said, “Hold, Brutus.” He left by the back door and returned thirty minutes later, a box of tea bags in hand. He must have changed his mind about the hot chocolate, Olivia surmised.

  Olivia thought the old man looked like he was sucking on a lemon when he growled, “Mr. O’Brien said you can do whatever you want. He said it’s your house now. I’ll be leaving you alone. When you’re ready to leave, press triple X, and the gate will open.” He dropped the box of Lipton tea bags on the counter. The dog followed him out of the house.

  “Jolly fellow, isn’t he?” Jeff said. “I wonder if he had shells in that shotgun?”

  Olivia whirled around to be sure the dog was gone. “Who needs shotgun shells with Brutus?” she quipped. “Ah, it is getting warm in here. Tea?” she said playfully as she pointed to the box of tea bags.

  “I’ll pass. Let’s get to it. Where do you want to go first?”

  Olivia looked around at the ugly, cold, stainless-steel kitchen. “Upstairs, or wherever she slept, so we can open the safe. I hope the rest of the house doesn’t look like this institution-style kitchen.”

  “My mother wouldn’t like this kitchen. There aren’t any plants or homemade rugs on the floor. No color. No curtains. No cookie jar. No, Mom wouldn’t like this kitchen at all,” Jeff said.

  “My dad wouldn’t like it, either,” Olivia said.

  “Well, let’s go.”

  Jeff flicked light switches on as he led the way through rooms with furniture shrouded in white sheets. White sheets also hung over the heavy draperies, blocking all light from outside. Some kind of heavy brown paper secured at the edges with blue painter’s tape covered all the floors. It felt like there was thick carpeting underneath the heavy brown paper.

  The staircase, when they found it, was of beautiful mahogany and curved. The same brown paper they’d walked on covered the steps. They crunched and crackled their way up to the second floor.

  “This reminds me of one of those spook houses my dad used to take me to on Halloween when I was a kid,” Olivia said, looking around.

  Jeff flicked on light switches at the top of the steps. A hallway that appeared to run the length of the house, as well as the doors to many alcoves, sprang to light. More furniture, more brown paper, more sheets.

  They opened doors. Olivia counted seven bedrooms by the time they reached the last room at the end of the hall. It wasn’t just a bedroom. It was a suite of rooms—what looked like a bedroom, a sitting room, a dressing room, an oversize bath with its own dressing room, and a huge linen closet. A tiny room off the sitting room held a computer, a fax, and a telephone console. Everything was covered in clear plastic. The sheets must have run out, Olivia thought.

  She stood still as a statue in the middle of the suite. So this was where the woman who had given birth to her slept. Then nervousness suddenly overwhelmed her. “The combination to the safe is under the blotter on the desk. The safe is behind one of these pictures. She must have liked seascapes. Angry-looking seascapes.” She began to pull at the corners of the pictures so she could see behind them. Finally the right one was located in the sitting room. Jeff removed it and leaned it against the wall. “Turn it to the right for three turns to sixty-seven, then to the left for two turns to forty-four, and then right again for three turns to fifty-one, and then one turn to the left to three, then back to fifty-one right, and it should open.”

  Olivia turned the handle of the safe. She was surprised when it actually opened. This was no dream. If it had been a dream, she would have awoken before she could open the safe. “There’s lots of stuff in here. There’s even some money. It says five thousand dollars on the envelope. I guess it’s emergency money.”

  “Bring everything over here. The light on the desk is the brighte
st,” Jeff said.

  Olivia dumped the contents of the safe on the desk, shed her heavy jacket, and threw it on top of Jeff’s jacket on the plastic-wrapped bed. “You go through a pile, and I’ll go through a pile. I’m not interested in her investments or her bank accounts. I want anything that pertains to the bank robbery and anything you find about Jill and Gwen.”

  Jeff sifted through a pile of packets. “Then this is probably what you’re looking for. Looks like a diary. Why is it you women like to write down your lives in a diary? The stuff you put in them comes back to haunt you at some point. I’ve seen too many of them in my end of the business.”

  “In this case, that little book just might explain everything. We’ll take it with us. Keep digging. Anything on Jill and Gwen? Wait a minute. Didn’t I see a file cabinet when we came in here? Maybe they’re in a file folder. If Adrian was sick for a year or so, maybe she worked out of this suite of rooms. It stands to reason she would have wanted everything close to her. I’ll check while you keep going through this stuff.”

  When she finally located the filing cabinet, Olivia sucked in her breath in anticipation. She felt like a pricked balloon when she closed the drawer. “There’s nothing in the file cabinet except stuff that pertains to her business,” she called out.

  “Here’s a packet of pictures. Someone wrote on the back. It says Gwen, Jill, and Allison.”

  Olivia dropped to her knees at the side of the desk. She stared at the pictures, trying to find the answers she was seeking. Her final conclusion was, “They look like three bookworms, with those dark-rimmed glasses. I wonder if my dad took this picture. Dad said the three young women didn’t have any other friends.” While she continued to riffle through another packet of pictures, Jeff let out a whoop.

  “This is why you couldn’t find Jill. This is a wedding invitation. She married someone named Gill Laramie. Allison, as she still was called then, never returned the RSVP, so that must mean she didn’t attend the wedding. Here’s another one. Gwen married someone named Ted Pascal. Uh oh, what have we here? Another invitation. Gwen got married again, to William John Hendrix. With these names you should be able to find them now. Unless they married again and didn’t send invitations.”

  “Look what I found!” Olivia cried out. “This is a copy of a bank card. The kind you have to fill out when you rent a safe-deposit box. The signatures are Jill Davis and Gwen Nolan. And miracle of miracles, here are their social security numbers. We hit the mother lode with this. For sure we’ll be able to find them now. But why would Adrian Ames have a copy of this bank card? It looks like the original to me.” She threw it into her purse along with the three wedding invitations and the diary.

  Thirty minutes later they’d gone through everything from the safe with the exception of one thick manila envelope. Jeff undid the clasp and picked away at the red sealing wax. He pulled out the thick wad of papers and whistled. “These are photocopies of bearer bonds. Each one is for ten-thousand face value with another ten thousand in coupons. The stack must be an inch and a half thick.”

  Olivia could only gape at what Jeff was holding in his hands.

  Chapter 9

  Jeff fanned out the stack of papers in his hands. His expression rivaled Olivia’s. “This,” he said, “is downright scary. I’ve been thinking about all of this since you told me about it, and I have to admit I thought your…Ms. Matthews…was making all this up out of some kind of belated guilt. Hell, I don’t know exactly what I thought, but seeing this…this…puts it all right up there front and center. Three college girls, and I don’t care how smart they are…were…pulling off a successful bank heist is pretty awesome. And,” he said, slapping at his forehead, “they obviously never got caught.”

  “How…how much is there?” Olivia gasped.

  Jeff walked over to the bed and sat down. The plastic gave off a soft swooshing sound as he struggled not to slide off the bed. He thumbed through the papers he was holding. “An easy half million dollars…. Forty years ago this samebatch of bonds would have been worth three, maybe four times that much in sixties dollars.” He did a double take as he stared at one of the bonds, then checked another. “Wow, I didn’t notice this before. Someone, probably Allison, since she seems to have been the brains of the outfit, wrote all three names on the bonds at the bottom. See? They all have a number. I tend to think she did that to have proof of the other two’s involvement in case they got caught. Equal share, equal blame. No one could lie or weasel out. And,” Jeff said, holding up his hand for Olivia’s attention, “this was also all the proof she would need to get the other two to pony up their share of the money to return to the bank when she decided to do that.”

  Olivia reached for the stack of photocopies. She jammed them back into the yellow envelope any which way, as fast as possible, as though handling them would somehow taint her. The round glob of red sealing wax glared up at her like an evil eye. The envelope went into her canvas purse. “I need to think about this…Why? Why couldn’t she take care of this herself? This is a punishment, Jeff. She did the crime, not me. I don’t want to hear that she was sick, either, and didn’t know what she was doing. She had forty years to make restitution, but did she do it? No, she did not. Neither did the other two. This is not going to be an easy thing to lay to rest.”

  Jeff handed Olivia her jacket before shrugging into his own. “Olivia, you can walk away from this if you want. You don’t have to do anything. It’s not part of the woman’s will. The letter she left you is a private matter. She didn’t demand you do it, she made a request. Close your eyes and walk away if that’s what will sit well with you. Then you can spend the rest of your life pretending this never happened.” He winked at her and said, “It goes without saying you’ll probably never have a decent night’s sleep again, either.”

  Olivia’s eyes were full of fire when she marched over to the desk to gather up the contents of the safe. Shoving everything back inside, she closed the door and spun the dial. Jeff rehung the picture over the safe.

  The canvas bag, considerably heavier, went over her shoulder. “I’m outta here. I hope I don’t have to come back. Do you think we should turn the heat down or what?”

  “We could do that,” Jeff said agreeably. “I’m sure Cyrus will check the house and lock up after we leave. That’s what caretakers do. He should leave the heat on at least a little so the pipes don’t freeze.”

  Outside in the brisk, cold air, Olivia trudged through the snow to the gate, looking around for some sign of Brutus or the old man, but there was none. Relieved when Jeff opened the car door for her, she hopped in and buckled up. Her teeth chattered with the cold until the heat from the car kicked in.

  Neither of them spoke on the forty-mile trip back to Winchester.

  Jeff slowed the BMW for the turnoff to Winchester. “How about I treat you to lunch, Olivia, before I head back to the city? It’s Sunday—maybe we should do brunch.”

  Olivia shook her head to clear away her thoughts. “I’d like that, Jeff. Not too much open on Sunday, though. How do you feel about Chinese?”

  Jeff threw his head back and laughed. Olivia loved the hearty sound. Clarence’s laugh was more like a titter.

  “Are you kidding! Chinese is a lawyer’s staple. I’m up for it.”

  “I think we should stop by the house to let the dogs out first. Damn, it looks like snow again, doesn’t it?”

  Jeff craned his neck to look upward. Steel gray clouds scudded across the sky. “Yep. The wind is starting to whip up, too. With that in mind, I’m going to head back to the city after lunch. We can make up a schedule over lunch for when you want me to come out here to do my share with Cecil. You’re going to have to cut me some slack and be flexible. I will do my share, though, and that’s a promise. If you don’t mind, there will be some nights when I’ll have to sleep here. Can you handle that?”

  “Okay,” Olivia said agreeably.

  Jeff steered his car into the driveway and parked behind Olivia’s Bronco. T
hey heard the dogs barking as they walked across the snowy lawn to the front door. “Guess they missed us. You more than me,” Jeff said.

  “You have to win a dog’s trust, Jeff. That’s another way of saying you have a lot of sucking up to do where Cecil is concerned.”

  Thirty minutes later, Olivia and Jeff were seated in a black-lacquered booth in the China Jade Restaurant. Hard noodles and sweet-and-sour sauce along with a hot mustard sauce were placed in front of them. They dipped and dug in, asked for a refill, and sipped a lot of green tea.

  “Let’s talk about anything but business and the dogs, okay?” Jeff said.

  “Sure. What would you like to talk about?”

  “You,” Jeff said succinctly.

  “There’s not much to tell. I grew up here, with my dad raising me. I went to college—University of Virginia. I majored in childhood education, but after two years of teaching, sad to say, I couldn’t take it any longer. It wasn’t the kids—I loved them. It was the administration. So Dad took me on, and we became Lowell and Lowell Photography. I love it. I specialize in animal photography, and I’ve done a few baby calendars. Dad did people. I make a very good living, and I’m my own boss.”

  “Are you seeing anyone?”

  Are you seeing anyone? Her heart fluttered. She chomped down on a hard noodle to cover her sudden nervousness. “You mean romantically?” Jeff’s head bobbed up and down. “No. How about you?”

  “No. No time. I’m a male pariah when it comes to women. I make a date and end up canceling because of time pressures. Women seem to want a commitment after a few dates. I’m in no position to make one at this point in time. If you’re wondering about…that night you called me, Melanie is just a colleague. Nothing went on with us.” Jeff blushed then. “The truth is, I fell asleep on the couch. Melanie was dozing off, too. She’s a colleague. On the aggressive side. Not my type. I’m babbling, huh?”