Take Me Back (Paradise, Idaho Book 4)

by Rosalind James

  Everything was on hold right now, and it felt lousy. Her job. Her living situation. Her future. All because somebody wanted more money.

  Once, she might have walked away and let them have it. Once.

  On Monday, it took everything she had to remember that resolve.

  “Are you sure?” she asked Bob Jenkins. She’d walked to his office for her appointment, had refused Jim and Anthea’s offers to go with her. She wasn’t eighteen. She was a professional woman with good judgment, concussion or no. She had to be able to stand on her own two feet. She had all kinds of decisions to make here. She had to know she was making them independently.

  Now, though, she wished she had somebody else with her, because this wasn’t going the way she’d hoped.

  “I’m sorry,” Bob said. “Despite what happened to you, the will is perfectly clear. You have to live in the house to inherit. The house is habitable, or at least it will be after today. You’re already a day past your three-day-a-month limit.”

  “No,” Hallie said. “I’m not. The will said three days a month. It’s December first.”

  He smiled faintly. “You should have been a lawyer. You’re right. I’d forgotten that. I concede your point.”

  “And there’s water damage. Smoke damage.”

  “It’s habitable,” Bob repeated. “You have two more days, and then you have to go back there. If you want to inherit, that is.” He leaned across the desk, his tone softening. “The alternative is, you can take the forty thousand dollars you’ve already received, sell the house as is—most of the value is in the land anyway—take the insurance payment, and go back to Seattle a million dollars richer.”

  “I’d think that there could be leeway with the will, since somebody tried to kill me in the house.”

  “It’s terrible, but ‘leeway’ isn’t a legal concept. It is, or it isn’t.”

  “Well, thanks.” She got up, grabbed for her purse, and headed for the door.

  “Hallie,” Bob said. “I’m sorry. I wish the answer could be different. Think about what you want to do and let me know. Nobody would blame you.”

  She turned and faced him. “My father would blame me. Or he’d be laughing. I don’t even know which. This was a test, and I don’t care about his tests anymore, but I’m tired of him winning.” She shook her head and wished she hadn’t. “That makes no sense. But I’m not letting him win.”

  She didn’t wait for Bob to answer. She just left.

  She set out to walk through the cold back to Vicki’s house. She’d be there two more days, and then she’d be stuck out at the house. Without even being able to drive, which was going to be ridiculously inconvenient.

  The thoughts whirled as she made her way up the hill past the courthouse, then turned right at the Presbyterian church. And past “her” house again, the one with the peaked roof, looking shabbier than ever with its dingy paint contrasted against fresh white snow.

  She could do what Bob had said. Sell the house and buy something like this one. There were some neighborhoods like this in Seattle, homey places with kids playing in the neighbors’ yards, places where you could ride your bike to work, where you could have a dog and didn’t have to lock your door.

  Well, maybe she wouldn’t go that far. Seattle wasn’t Paradise. And when somebody might be trying to kill you, you locked your door, wherever you lived.

  She was always a slow reactor, and she was even slower now. Her footsteps dragged as she reached the corner beyond the white house, and then she turned and walked past it again, stood staring at it without really seeing it.

  Bob had said that there was no choice. The will was clear.

  But was it? Who said? Who decided? Didn’t it say something about “exceptional circumstances?” She thought she remembered that.

  If somebody had told her she had a rare disease, and she wasn’t convinced, what would she do? She’d get a second opinion.

  She started walking again, turned left at the Presbyterian church this time, and headed back down the hill.

  NEW POSSIBILITIES

  When she got back to the office, she didn’t ask to see Bob. She walked into the waiting room and told Pam Garrett, the receptionist, “I’d like to see Anthea.”

  “I’ll check and see if she’s available,” Pam said.

  For once, Hallie didn’t go along. “Tell her it’s urgent. If she’s sitting back there, unless she’s got somebody in her office, I need to see her.”

  Pam spoke into the phone, and thirty seconds later, Anthea came out from the back. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Weren’t you here to talk to Bob?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go to your office.”

  Anthea studied her. “Your head OK?”

  “My head’s fine.” It wasn’t, but oh, well.

  When she was seated in Anthea’s office, she said, “I need legal advice.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “I need to know if I can go to court and tell a judge that somebody tried to burn down my house and tried to kill me, so living in it isn’t reasonable, because it’s putting my life in danger. I need to see if I can get a . . . dispensation, I guess.”

  “It’d be worth a try,” Anthea said. “But surely you can’t live in it anyway until the damage is repaired.”

  “Bob says I have to. As long as it’s not . . . red tagged or whatever. So I want to hire you to go to court and argue that. I’ve got almost eighty thousand dollars,” Hallie tried to joke when she saw Anthea looking thoughtful. “That’s probably enough.”

  “That’s not it,” Anthea said. “It’s that I represent Cole. That could be seen as a conflict of interest if I asked for a change that would benefit you at Cole’s expense. But Bob could do it.”

  “Ah,” Hallie said. “But he’s got a conflict of interest, too, doesn’t he?”

  “How?”

  “Isn’t he Cole’s trustee? And my aunt and uncle’s lawyer? And—wait.”

  Anthea said, “Yes, but—”

  Hallie put up a hand to stop her. “I think I want to talk to Jim about this, too. And I want to do it somewhere else.” She stood up. “Come on. We’re going to the coffee shop. I’ll call Jim along the way.”

  Anthea raised her hands, then dropped them again. “Where’s the Hallie Cavanaugh I know and love?”

  “Taking up my space in the world, that’s where. Standing my ground.”

  She and Anthea sat in Brewster’s for half an hour. Hallie had had two cups of coffee, and her head was buzzing with more than just concussion and caffeine. She’d refused to explain to Anthea, saying, “I want to wait. I want to talk it out all together.”

  Finally, she saw Jim. Coming through the door, his stride purposeful and quick. He looked around, saw her, and headed straight over, then sat down beside her and said, “What happened?”

  Hallie said, “Hi,” and smiled. “I’m so glad to see you.” Because she was.

  His eyes softened. “Me too, baby. You OK? You about gave me a heart attack when you called. I was all the way out at the edge of the county. Had to put the siren and lights on.”

  Anthea said, “I do not need to know this. Don’t call her ‘baby’ in front of me.”

  Hallie said, “Unless we actually have sex in front of you, or I tell you we are, or Jim tells you, you don’t know. So back off.”

  Anthea’s mouth opened, then shut. “What did that knock do? Transplant your personality?”

  “You can get grumpy,” Hallie said, “when somebody’s trying to kill you. But never mind. OK. Here’s what I wanted to say. I met with Bob Jenkins this morning about the house, you know, Jim, and he seemed . . . pretty unreasonable about it to me.” She explained in a few quick sentences. “And I started thinking about getting a second opinion. So I asked Anthea, and she said she couldn’t represent me, because she represented Cole. And that made me think about conflicts of interest.”

  “Explain,” Jim said.

  “Bob is the executor of my father’s will. But he’s also
Cole’s trustee. And he’s not the only one.”

  “Aldon Cranfield,” Anthea said.

  “Didn’t you say something,” Hallie asked Jim, “about that meeting in Bob’s office, when your mom hired Anthea?”

  “My mom said Aldon Cranfield had a drinking problem,” Jim said. “Which he does. Misses a few days every few months, and more than that at other times. When he’s ‘on vacation.’ But he’s been there forever, and sharp as a tack anyway. Shrewd. That’s why he’s still got the job.”

  “He was one of my dad’s big pals,” Hallie said. “A hunting buddy of my dad’s, at least when I was still talking to my dad. I’m betting he knew my dad’s gun collection. And if he’s been talking to Bob—I’d told Bob I was selling the guns.”

  “And Bob said something about looking after Cole’s money,” Anthea said. “That he’d be checking the statements, which made it sound like Aldon was handling the investments.”

  “You think Cranfield could be cooking the books?” Jim said. “Could be. It’d be tempting, especially once Cole gets the rest of the money.”

  Hallie nodded, then wished she hadn’t. “It’s in trust until he’s twenty-five. Ten years. All along, we’ve been thinking about who has a financial motive, and the answers are, obviously—Cole and my uncle and, once removed, my aunt and your mom. It isn’t Cole, and it isn’t your mom, at least whoever burned my house and hit me on the head, which has to be the same person. And the same person who planted those devices on our cars.”

  “Right,” Jim said.

  “But there are two other people with a vested interest. I’ve never heard exactly how much money is in the estate. We won’t really know until the six months are up. But say it’s—six million, maybe eight million, after the million to Cole and the half million to Dale.”

  “Say it is,” Anthea said. “So?”

  “So what if Cole’s share isn’t forty-five percent? Say it’s seventy-five percent? Trustees get paid, right? How much?”

  “One percent annually is typical,” Anthea said.

  Hallie tried to do the math in her head and failed. “Stupid concussion. So what kind of difference would that be?”

  Anthea cocked her head and said after a minute, “Maybe thirty to fifty thousand more a year. That’s nice money, but it’s not hit-you-over-the-head money.”

  “But if somebody was skimming,” Jim said, “it could be great money. Almost twice as much to play with? That could be an honest-to-God motive for anything. And thirty thousand a year? Hate to tell you, but some people will kill for a hundred dollars in somebody’s pocket.”

  “Not lawyers,” Anthea said. “Not bankers.”

  “Depends on their habits,” Jim said. “Depends what they’re trying to hide from their wives, or their boss. Thirty thousand could cover up a gambling problem, for example. But we’re not talking about that anyway. We’re talking about big money. That one of them could be going after, or even both of them. That’d be easiest, if it were both of them, and if they kept it small. Five percent skimmed off the top, say? How would you even know?”

  Anthea said, “I just got the first statement for Cole’s trust today, because it’s quarterly. I only glanced at it. It’s complicated—a big portfolio—and I’d say to really know, I’d have to run it by a forensic accountant. It could take some digging, though. Some time, too, for me to find the right person and get it done. Could get expensive. Normally, I’d take it out of the trust itself, but—”

  “But if Bob’s the trustee,” Jim finished for her, “that’s a problem. In case it is him, or if it’s Cranfield, or both of them, we wouldn’t want them to know we were checking. Especially if we widen the investigation on the fire to include them.”

  “I’ll pay for it,” Hallie said. “It’s my money, too, right?”

  “Not my preference,” Anthea said. “Gets murky, with that conflict of interest and all, but—all right. It’s your safety, and Cole’s, ultimately. Who says where they’d stop? Who knows when the milk wouldn’t be enough, and they’d want the whole cow? Especially if it’s Faye or Dale. Say they chase you out of town, Hallie. Then Cole’s sitting there, the only thing between them and eight million dollars.”

  They all stopped to think about that. It wasn’t a happy thought. Then Anthea went on. “But I want to address a point you made,” she told her brother. “Could isn’t is. Suspicion, possibility—that isn’t anything like proof. Bob’s my law partner. He’s never been accused of mishandling client funds. Aldon—I don’t know. He’s sketchier. But still.”

  Jim sighed. “I know that could isn’t is. That’s why we try to make damn sure, before we arrest somebody, that the charge will stick. And how much of the time doesn’t it anyway? But an investigation isn’t a court of law. An investigation is all about could.” He told Hallie, “I’ll share this with DeMarco. We’ll widen the scope.”

  “He’ll widen the scope, you mean,” Anthea said.

  “Yes. He’ll widen the scope. It’s not clean. It’s still a lot of risk, considering that the person could just sit back, wait for Cole to inherit, and skim the money.”

  “But it could explain,” Hallie said, “why the things that have happened so far have been low risk. What did you call them? Wussy. Sending letters. Putting tracking devices on our cars to see if we both went to the No-Tell Motel. You’d better take yours off, by the way. No point anymore. And even that fire, except for hitting me—it was small.”

  “All of it planned out ahead of time, too,” Jim said. “Except the hitting. If they’d wanted to smoke you out and kill you, they could’ve done it easy. Instead, what did they do? Hit you with an empty gas can. Almost a knee-jerk reaction. This isn’t somebody who solves things by violence. This is somebody who sits behind a desk.”

  “Somebody who’s getting desperate,” Anthea pointed out. “Because they thought it would be easy money, and because Hallie’s alerted, and the police are asking questions.”

  “It’s what you said,” Hallie told Jim. “It’s the money in their jacket pocket. If it was either of them—they had to know the terms of my father’s will. Well, Bob, obviously, but I’ll bet Aldon, too, or he wouldn’t have agreed to be a trustee for Cole. They probably thought I wouldn’t do it. Heck, I didn’t think I’d do it. So when my father died, they thought they had that money in their pocket. And now, it feels like theirs, and they don’t want to give it up.”

  “Especially,” Jim said, “if they helped your father out of the world in the first place, then saw that money coming to them. Maybe needing it. And something Bob said, about the guns, after that little incident we had. He mentioned a gun safe sitting in the bed of a pickup. Now, of course he could have figured out that I’d have taken the whole safe, and that it would’ve been in the bed of my truck. But it struck me kinda funny all the same at the time.”

  He stood up. “Anyway—good to check. It’s a thought. But your aunt and uncle are still a better thought. If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not for zebras. You go for the obvious answer, not the least likely answer. Six million, eight million in his estate? I already did the math on that. Ten percent of it is six hundred thousand, eight hundred thousand. Twenty-five percent is two-point-five times that much. And if people will kill for a hundred dollars—what will they do for a couple million?” He looked at Hallie. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll get there. Good job thinking it through. And probably enough hard thinking for one day, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah.” She rubbed a hand over the unbandaged part of her forehead. “I would.”

  “Mac and I are coming over tonight,” he said. “We’ll have dinner, and I’ll let you know what DeMarco says. What we find out. And, yes, I’ve already taken the GPS off my truck. No point in trying to keep whoever it is from escalating at this point. Unfortunately. They’ve already done it.”

  He looked like he wanted to kiss her good-bye, but instead, he just left, and Hallie watched him go.

  Anthea said, “He’s right. You look b
eat. Come on, walk me back to the office.”

  “No,” Hallie said. “I’m going to sit here awhile.” She felt shaky, suddenly. Lousy. “But first—give me an honest-lawyer name. Whatever Jim does or doesn’t find out, he’s right. Bob or Aldon—they’re both unlikely compared to my aunt and uncle. But meanwhile, I want that second opinion.”

  She moved back into her house two days later. No choice. But she didn’t move in alone.

  “Phew,” Cole said when he walked through the front door behind Hallie and his mother, after eyeing the plastic-wrapped outer wall with some awe. “Stinks in here.”

  Cletus, who was running around the kitchen, sniffing his way, seemed to agree.

  “We’ll open the windows,” Hallie said. “Air it out. And it isn’t as bad as it was. It was way worse yesterday, before the carpet and drapery cleaning people came.”

  “It’s freezing outside,” Cole pointed out helpfully. “If we open the windows, it’ll be freezing inside.”

  “So we’ll turn on the heat, too,” Hallie said.

  “Expensive,” Vicki commented.

  “Luckily,” Hallie said, “I’m rich.”

  Cole laughed. “Wicked.”

  “Go check out my family room, Cole,” Hallie said. “Downstairs. Big-screen TV, couch, pool table. There’s a bedroom down there, too. You may never move out.”

  He took off down the stairs with Cletus following him, the two of them sounding like a herd of elephants, an extremely comforting reminder that Hallie wasn’t alone. Vicki said, “Show me where I’ll be sleeping, and then let’s get the car unloaded.”

  Cole had been the first to volunteer to move in with Hallie. “Since I’m her brother,” he’d said at dinner two nights earlier, “it should be me. Somebody has to, and it can’t be Jim. She needs a man out there.”

  “You’re not a man,” Mac had said.

  “Who says?” Cole had answered.

  “You’re fifteen.”

  “So? In lots of places, fifteen-year-olds are considered adults.”