On the Road [again] (The Girls Series Book 3)

by Sheila Horgan

  Instantly Carolyn sounded defeated. “You don’t think Gwendolyn is Pickles?”

  “Oh, no, I think we’re right on the money with that part of it. It was the building and finding her current address that gave me more of a problem.”

  Carolyn instantly perked up. “Oh, okay. Why don’t you fill in the blanks, and we’ll go from there?”

  Anna spent the next half hour explaining to the girls how she’d obtained all the different pieces of information she’d gathered and how she’d fit all those pieces together. She was thoughtful, organized, and logical in her approach, and try as they might, neither Adeline nor Carolyn could poke a hole in either the process or the conclusion.

  From tracking multiple layers of corporations that were in place for the purchase of the building, to the way she found Pickles in Houston, Texas, everything made sense and seemed right.

  Carolyn’s eyes filled. “If I live to be a hundred, and I just might, I’ll never figure out how you did this, Anna. I must say, I am impressed. And more grateful than I will ever be able to enumerate for you.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “Please, don’t do that. You have put in so much work to help my Suzi. I will never be able to repay you. Please don’t discredit acknowledgement of my understanding that you have done so much.”

  “Sorry. That wasn’t very gracious of me. We all can’t be Adeline.” Anna broke into a huge smile and winked.

  Deflecting praise seemed to be a habit so well ensconced that Anna didn’t notice.

  Carolyn and Adeline had noticed and were working together to subtly break that habit.

  Anna got back to the subject at hand. “So you really think that’s her? The girl in Houston? I haven’t been able to get a good picture of all of it in my mind. What I’ve found is all public documents. If she’s doing anything on social media from that area, I haven’t found it.”

  “That may be our biggest clue.”

  “In what way?”

  “If whatever happened between Pickles and Barry was so dramatic that it convinced Barry to acquiesce to a very long jail term, then would it not make Pickles prone to hiding? And it would appear that is indeed what she is doing at present.”

  “Good point, but Barry’s in prison.”

  “Perhaps she doesn’t know that yet. If she is in Houston and she has cut ties with everyone who might want to track her there, perhaps she is unaware. Perhaps she has buried herself so deep she is unable to change her backstory now.” Adeline shook her head. “That is frightening. To think someone would have to, in essence, create one’s own witness protection plan.”

  Carolyn was not shy about allowing her confusion to show. “Why did you want to turn this over to Roland’s people? It seems pretty conclusive to me.”

  “I guess the distance. I figured they could probably call someone local and have them take a look at this girl. Maybe get us a picture. If she turns out to be a six-foot-tall blonde woman, we know it isn’t our Pickles. You can change hair color, even eyes if you stick in contacts, but height is more difficult to fake.”

  “I have a camera.” Carolyn let her enthusiasm show.

  “As do I. I would suggest that it is time for a visit.”

  Anna was quick to take on the change in plan. “A road trip?”

  “Most definitely.”

  “But, what if I’m wrong? That would be a lot of time and energy, not to mention expense, if we show up and she’s the wrong woman.”

  “Then we will make it a pleasure trip, and if we happen to track down Pickles, it will be an added bonus.”

  Carolyn tried to be realistic or, at the very least, honest. “Pleasure trip? To Houston? Adeline, I don’t think that is quite your cup of tea.”

  “Nonsense. What will be our mode of transport? Shall we fly? Train? Drive? Is there a cruise across the bay?”

  Anna, always prepared, already had the answer. “That would be a long drive. I looked it up last night. It’s more than thirteen hours if you drive the speed limit and never stop.”

  “That sounds lovely. We can drive from morning until late afternoon, stop when the mood strikes us, find an interesting little town along the way, and stay there. Stop and see the sights when we choose. It sounds like a great adventure.”

  Before allowing herself to get excited, Carolyn felt it her responsibility to check in with Adeline about her health. “Won’t that be a problem for you, Adeline? Your daughter? When is she coming home?”

  “Not for some time.”

  “What about all the legal issues you’re dealing with?” Anna asked.

  “I can’t imagine that we will be in an area without modern communication.”

  Carolyn looked at Anna. “What about your cold?”

  “All but gone.”

  “Suzi is moved into the apartment across the hall from her brother. There is no reason for me to stay at home. Are you girls sure?”

  Agreement was obvious.

  “I’d like to cover our travel expenses. This is for my Suze. You girls would have no reason to go to Houston were it not for your support of me.”

  Anna shook her head. “Don’t be silly. This is an adventure. We promised from the start that if an adventure presented itself, we would pounce on it. I didn’t offer to pay your way on the trip with Jordan.”

  “True, but those circumstances are quite different. Pure pleasure.”

  Anna reached out. “You have to take pleasure where you can find it. You can’t plan pleasure. Surely each of us is at an age where we have learned at least that much.”

  “I had a husband say that to me once.” Adeline delivered her line so flat it broke the tension and got the girls laughing.

  “So, here is what I’ve found. If we go ahead and rent a car, we will save the wear and tear on any of our cars and might be a little more comfortable. I was thinking maybe a small crossover or a small minivan. Or we can fly there, rent a vehicle there, and then either fly home or drive it home. Or we can take the train, but that kind of confused me when I looked it up. We’d need to leave from Orlando, then head all the way to Washington, DC, then on to Chicago, and from there to Longview, Texas.”

  Adeline pulled a face. “That seems a bit circuitous.”

  “I think we could ride a bicycle faster than all of that.”

  Anna tapped keys. “If my calculations are correct, and God only knows if they are, if we took the train, the travel time while on board, either the train or the bus, would be about sixty-one hours. I don’t think that includes any waiting time between trains and busses.”

  “Busses?”

  “There are no direct trains, so we would, theoretically, take a bus from Tampa to Orlando and then again from Longview to Houston. But now that I look at it, they have numbers in parentheses, so maybe that’s actually the wait time, so add on another fourteen and a half hours. Our trip would be more like seventy-five or seventy-six hours, by train.”

  Carolyn shook her head. “Holy Moses.”

  “I know. I think I vote for something other than a train. Oh, it’s also more expensive. A lot more expensive. According to Google, it would take us about thirteen and a half or fourteen hours to drive, but that doesn’t include stops for gas, food, or whatever. Oh my goodness, if we did choose to ride a bike, and never stopped, it wouldn’t take us much longer than that train ride, about eighty-four hours, and we would get to take a ferry.” Anna laughed.

  With a deep breath, Carolyn shared, “That’s just too much information to deal with. The Internet is a good thing, but it is also a bit overwhelming at times. Just how much information you can get at the push of a button, knowing full well that much of it is probably incorrect. Amazing how much information is out there.”

  Anna smiled. “Better too much than too little.”

  The girls both looked at Adeline, expecting her to quote one of her husbands, but she said nothing.

  Carolyn raised her hand, as if back in school. “I vote for a rental car. We drive from morning until
evening, or until we see something interesting or want to stop, then try it again the next day. And it will be good practice for our trip with Jordan.”

  “Good point,” Anna agreed. “Do you want me to make the reservation? What size car do we want?”

  Adeline’s phone rang. “I’m sorry girls. I need to take this.” For the first couple of minutes Adeline did little more than listen. Her face took on the impervious façade she always got when she was listening to anything unpleasant. Suddenly she raised one finger, the international sign for ‘give me a minute,’ and left the table.

  Carolyn and Anna busied themselves with maps and brochures, but mostly they worried and said a quick prayer for their friend. Whatever was being said in the other room could not be good.

  When Adeline came back, she seemed perfectly composed. The girls knew that wasn’t necessarily a good sign.

  “That was Roland. It is about my grandson. I have taken the liberty of interfering in his life, and I would like your opinion. It is not too late to cancel the plan. We have approximately one hour before the plan is put into effect. If you will give me just a moment to organize my thoughts.”

  Anna rose and put the kettle on.

  Carolyn went into the office and grabbed some paper and a pen. She was best when she took notes. It helped her think, organize, and remember.

  By the time the tea was on the table, Adeline was ready to share the latest.

  “Roland has found that my grandson, Christophe, has taken it upon himself to move our plans forward faster than we had anticipated. We had hoped that we could have a bit of time to reorganize several important areas to make sure that he and his interests were protected, but unfortunately something that his parents did — and we aren’t sure exactly what — has put him in direct conflict with them.”

  Carolyn and Anna kept quiet and let Adeline reveal everything at her own pace.

  “Let me start again. As you know, my older children, the two of them, have been a problem for me most of their lives. Their relationships and belief structure is formed on and around money. I’m sorry to say that these are people without conscience or empathy. They feel that they are entitled to, well, to anything and everything they desire. In their circles, they are seen as normal. There was a time I would have dismissed most of what is being done now as little more than a well-funded temper tantrum, but I have learned so much about myself and about life since my near-death experience. Now I understand just what a cancer they have fallen victim to. No, they are not victims. They are willing participants.” Adeline took a deep breath. “Oh my, I am not doing this at all well.”

  Anna said, “You have told Carolyn and me that it is wrong to take responsibility for what is not ours to be responsible for. Why don’t you just put it all out there and stop trying to protect idiots or to take responsibility for dolts?”

  Adeline seemed to draw strength from Anna’s words. “You are right. Let me start at the very beginning.”

  Carolyn poured Adeline tea. “You take all the time you need.”

  “My older children are the product of a very indulgent father and a mother — that would be me — that was unable or unwilling to enforce proper boundaries. By the time they were young adults, their mindset was that they were entitled to anything they wanted, and God help anyone who got in the way. My youngest daughter, her father a much different man, has never been like that, and I must admit that I take comfort that the monster who resides inside my older children might be genetic and passed from their father, not me. At any rate, suffice it to say that my two older children are most comfortable doing whatever it takes to maintain their place in the world, a place purchased with money they did not earn and do not deserve.”

  With shaky hands, Adeline brought the cup to her lips but put it down without taking a sip. “It would seem that my older daughter is the instigator in the majority of this current imbroglio.”

  Anna spoke up. “I’m sorry. Imbroglio?”

  “Our bitter little family war.”

  Anna nodded.

  Adeline continued. “It would seem that months ago, when I was quite ill, my older children were well aware. Instead of investigating and — like Cara — taking it upon themselves to identify the problem and find a solution, or at the very least to see to it that I was made comfortable, they chose to take advantage of my situation. It is a very long and tangled story, the crux of which is that my children, the people I gave birth to, found that I was ill and used their influence and doubtlessly an enormous sum of money, and went about plotting and planning my demise. And if they were unable to hasten my journey, they also put in place articles that would allow them to take over my financial dealings while I languished somewhere between this world and the next.”

  The hurt in Adeline’s eyes was almost matched by the hurt in the eyes of each of her friends. Their hearts broke for her. Neither of them wanted to make her pain more difficult to bear by having to deal with meaningless words, so they remained silent, but each reached out and took one of her hands.

  “Remember when we were in Las Vegas and that silly little woman was following us? That woman was not hired by my children, but by my grandson, Christophe. His inexperience and unwillingness to ask for guidance is most evident in retrospect.”

  The horror in Carolyn’s voice couldn’t be covered. “Your grandson was having you followed?”

  Adeline smiled for the first time since she got off the phone. “Yes, and I’m actually quite pleased. He was trying, however ineptly, to protect me.”

  Anna nodded. “I like this kid.”

  “He was trying to make sure that his own parents did not do damage to me, or to us, while we were on our trip. As we now know, my children, planning to overtake my assets, had been conspiring for such a long time, they began to get careless about their conversations. They were so busy cogitating, as Christophe described to Roland, that they were unaware the table at which they sat was directly underneath the room he favored to escape from them. It had been a lovely spring day, and the staff opened the windows. He heard their plans and was unable to fathom their loathsome mindset. To his way of thinking, the generation one above his own owed their lifestyle to me, and in turn, their loyalty.”

  Anna nodded again. “Thank the good Lord that their foolishness skipped a generation and that your grandson has a good head on his shoulders.”

  Adeline continued. “Agreed, but that leaves him in a very tenuous position. If he stands up for me, his parents will disown him. That will create a legal battle the likes of which this town has not seen in a very long time. My team against theirs, with family business, both personal and professional, brought out into the public for scrutiny. That will not only unveil me to the world, something I’ve been quite successful avoiding, but also cause those dependent on me to suffer the most. I’ve taken pride in having companies that run smoothly. When all of this is played out in — and equally important, distorted by — the media, both domestic and international, the stock in any number of interests will careen uncontrollably. In today’s markets, where people make decisions in their living room at a laptop and tend to do so with emotion, not logic, everything is so volatile. I can’t even imagine the repercussions.”

  Carolyn whispered, “I’m glad I don’t have to think about things like that.”

  “With privilege comes responsibility. My children have forgotten that, but wisely, my grandson seems to have learned it on his own.”

  “You have faith that he is not just setting you up?”

  “I do.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I have asked Roland to contact him, discreetly, and ask him if he would like to come to — ”

  Anna stopped her friend. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I didn’t even tell you what it is we plan to do.”

  “I know, but if you have Roland contact him, sooner or later the family is going to wonder where he went and why, and sooner or later they are going to find out that he is worki
ng with you or around you behind their backs, and it’s gonna get ugly.”

  Carolyn asked, “Has he been to school? Maybe you could provide an education for him while things cool off, and it would give you some time to plan.”

  “Yes, his education, at least in academia, is complete, and he has no interest in furthering it. I think Anna makes a valid point, but I am not sure how we can avoid it.”

  “Call your kids, and demand that they assist you. Make the placement their idea. Tell them that you have reconsidered. That you had a close call. Do they know that you know that they did what they did?”

  “If they were aware, their campaign against me would already be on the front page of every important paper in the country.”

  Anna continued, “Good. Tell them that you recently had a close call and that it has caused you to take a look at life. Paint the old lady stuff on thick, but not too thick. All young people think we are gonna have some kind of epiphany when we get older and figure out how perfect the younger ones are. Use it to your advantage. Tell them that you want to familiarize the family with the workings of the financial stuff. Tell them it will be hard work. Long hours. Working with your people before working with you. Are they lazy enough to send their kid instead of coming themselves? Is there another kid that they would send?”

  “They wouldn’t send the girls. One is actually quite brilliant and doing good work with a charity. The other is little more than a bobblehead. A caricature of everything wrong with our class system in this country.”

  “And what about their cousins, your other grandchildren?”

  “I’m sure you have seen the rubbish on the television about rich children and their propensity for farcical behavior. Neither is on a show, but both would qualify. They spend their time shopping, socializing, and generally being ne’er-do-wells.”

  “Okay, then this might work. If you can get Christophe here under the guise of working for them, like a spy, then they won’t question anything he says.”

  “That might just work. Thank you, Anna. Let me call Roland.”

  “Roland thought your idea had merit. It is enough like me, or at least the old me, not to be questioned, and we can work with it.” Adeline gave each of the girls a hug. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. I’m sorry I was absent so long, but now we can get back to the business at hand.”