Kiki Lowenstein Books 1-3 & Cara Mia Delgatto Books 1-3: The Perfect Series for Crafters, Pet Lovers, and Readers Who Like Upbeat Books!

by Joanna Campbell Slan

  He obviously couldn't care less about me.

  Cooper and my grandfather continued to talk about the weather, or fishing, or whatever men talk about when women aren't around. Men have an amazing ability to compartmentalize. I'd seen it in my father a million times.

  Just because Cooper and Poppy weren't at each other's throats, it didn't mean they weren't at odds. Perhaps Poppy was better at hiding his emotions than I was.

  I paused to wipe my sleeve across my forehead, sopping up the sweat that threatened to roll into my eyes. Then I tackled the floor again with a vengeance.

  Cooper and I were going our separate ways. Again.

  He was getting married. I meant nothing to him. He meant nothing to me. I was going to buy Essie's building. He would have to do without. Tough luck, buddy!

  Oh, and because his lamebrain real estate agent had bumbled the deal, I was a suspect in a murder case.

  This was all Cooper's fault.

  My mother had been right. Cooper Rivers was nothing but trouble.

  26

  Cooper gave my grandfather a friendly clap on the shoulder as a gesture of goodbye. I craned my neck to watch as he crossed the street and climbed into a shiny black Escalade. What a phony. Growing up, he'd claimed to care about the environment. Now he was driving an Escalade? Really?

  "Right," I muttered to myself, imagining the poor gas mileage he was getting. Cooper obviously thought he was all that and a bag of chips (as Tommy and his friends like to say), but I was not impressed. I was tired of being pushed around. Ever since I'd arrived in Stuart, I'd been out of control, which was a feeling I hated. In that way, I was absolutely my mother's daughter. Mom used to say, "Better to take action and be wrong than to sit like a dummy in the middle of the street and become roadkill."

  Of course, sometimes that action backfired, but nevertheless, when it did, she'd shrug and say, "I'd rather be wrong than to be a victim. Victims never win. They are too busy feeling sorry for themselves and blaming other people."

  How many years had I wasted mourning my lost relationship with Cooper and feeling like I'd been victimized by my parents?

  I was over it now.

  Time to take action.

  I called Humberger Real Estate, and sure enough, although they were closed today (which I figured), the cheerful voice on the answering machine said they'd be open tomorrow, regular business hours. I planned to be there first thing in the morning when they unlocked their front door.

  Next, I called Ed Wilson's office. When his secretary tried to fob me off, I laid down the law.

  "Look, Ed Wilson has been on my family's payroll for thirty years. Either he finds the time to talk with me, or my next call will be to the Missouri Bar Association." I left my number and hung up.

  Five minutes later, a very nervous sounding Ed Wilson called me back. He gave me the name and number of Dell White, supposedly the finest criminal defense attorney in all of south Florida, and Brad Houston, a civil attorney in West Palm Beach who specialized in commercial real estate transactions.

  "I've told both men to expect a call or visit from you, Cara." Not surprisingly, Wilson's tone was completely conciliatory. He added, "Here's their fax and phone numbers. A good start would be to share any paperwork you have."

  Borrowing Poppy's truck, I drove to an office supply store. First I faxed a note to Dell White, along with the photocopy of my police statement. I took Detective Murray's card out of my purse and shared those details, too. Next I faxed the contract for The Treasure Chest to Brad Houston's office. On the cover sheets, I requested that both attorneys call me ASAP.

  Brad Houston called me back almost immediately. I quickly explained what had happened and why I bought the building. Because I wanted independent verification that I'd gotten a good deal, I asked him to work up a set of comps, comparative prices. His office was in nearby Port Salerno, so we agreed on a time to meet.

  Although I had done my best to sound professional, I knew my voice was shaking over the phone. My adrenaline had surged when Cooper and I were arguing. Now it was fading fast. I had gone from fight to flight in less than fifteen minutes. Tears prickled at the back of my eyes.

  In the parking lot of the office supply store, I tried to call Kiki, but her cell phone went to voice mail. In her honor, I drove to a 7-Eleven and bought a Diet Dr Pepper. A few sips later, I felt more like myself. I was the "old" Cara, the woman who took charge.

  Not surprisingly, I felt better. Marginally so, but better. Certainly, I felt energized.

  I would not let Cooper Rivers get the better of me or of my grandfather. I would not be hassled by the local police. I would either rent out The Treasure Chest or find someone to buy it from me. I would not lose money on the deal. Once I off-loaded the building, I would get the heck out of Stuart. I'd had it with this town.

  After making a call to my son, who also didn't answer, I drove back to Dick's Gas E Bait.

  I'd no sooner pulled into the parking space around back, than Dell White's office called and offered a Skype meeting with me. I knew I didn't look my best after scrubbing Poppy’s store. But then, no one looks really good on Skype, and I wanted legal counsel without driving all the way to Miami, so I agreed. I didn't want Poppy listening in, so I borrowed his truck again. This time I drove to a Starbucks on Federal Highway, found a seat in the back, and opened Skype on my iPhone.

  For once, things worked in my favor. My pungent body odor kept the other coffee drinkers a good distance from me. In fact, the lone businessman seated in a nearby chair sniffed the air, picked up his things, and left immediately. Fine by me. I didn't really want anyone to overhear my business, but I was flat out of options.

  Almost as soon as I had my cup of coffee, Dell White rang me by Skype video call. He looked more like an aging hippy than an attorney. White listened to my story with his fingers steepled in thought, interrupting when he needed me to elaborate. He'd read the statement I'd faxed over, so his questions were pretty perfunctory. Mainly, he wanted me to expand upon three points. First, what specifically did Detective Murray ask me? Second, what did I say? And third, did I have an air-tight alibi?

  "When it comes to the alibi, that depends," I said honestly. "I don't know when Mr. Humberger died."

  I told Mr. White where I was and at what times, relying on the best of my memory.

  "As you might guess, I wish that you hadn't said anything to the authorities. From now on, everything goes through me, agreed? I'll call over and get my own copy of the police report. That’s a precaution in case it’s been amended. Then I'll compare it to your statement, and what you've told me. Until then, don't sweat it. I've never lost a case when my client is innocent."

  That made me feel marginally better.

  Brad Houston's office was a few miles away. After doing my best to wash up in the Starbucks' bathroom, I hit the road. His receptionist wrinkled her nose when I arrived. I think she was eager to move me away from her desk because she buzzed him as I stood there. She also offered me a drink. I was already on a caffeine high, so I figured I'd keep it going with a Diet Coke.

  When Houston and I shook hands, I apologized for my urgency and my body odor.

  "No problem. I've got a cold actually," he said.

  Houston's white shirt and navy blue pinstripe suit suggested he was very conservative, but his gold surfboard cufflinks and his tan added a preppy vibe. A photo of him with a perky blonde and two towheaded children suggested I'd pegged him right.

  "The papers are all in order. Looks like you've got a bona fide contract," he said, as he slid a stapled set of papers my way once we were seated at a conference table. "Here are the comps on the building."

  I looked them over.

  "As you can see," said Houston, "Mr. Humberger was right. I'd say that you bought the building for somewhere about half its market value. The inspection papers are right here. I paid the guy to expedite them. Figured that this couldn't wait."

  He pushed a packet my way. I opened it.


  "The structure itself is in fair shape. Needs extensive interior renovation, but the electrical system is okay. The plumbing works. The A/C is newish. The roof is under warranty."

  I'd obviously gotten a very good deal. Or so it seemed on paper.

  "Did you realize that you also own the contents?"

  I shook my head. "Really?" I had assumed the contents would be part of Essie's estate.

  "The trust allowed an auctioneer to sell off anything he deemed of value, so I'm not certain what was left. Whatever it is, it's yours."

  "From what little I saw, the place had been trashed."

  "I'd heard that," Houston said with a nod of agreement. “Anything else he said to you? Take a minute and think.”

  I did. That’s when I remembered, "Mr. Humberger said something about being allowed to go through the building one more time before the wrecking ball claimed it. I wonder why."

  "My guess is that Hal wanted one last chance to look for the lost Highwaymen paintings," said Houston.

  "The lost what?" I thought I'd misheard him.

  "The Highwaymen paintings. Hadn't you heard? Eighty-five of them went missing from Essie's store twelve years ago. They'd be worth a small fortune."

  27

  Brad Houston leaned back in his chair and got comfortable, a signaling we were approaching a favorite subject. "You need to get caught up on your Florida history. Back in the late 1950s, a group of young blacks decided they'd rather sell paintings than work in the citrus industry picking and packing fruit. Working out of the trunks of their cars, they sold paintings all up and down Highway 95. That's how they came to be known as the Highwaymen, even though one of their number is a woman."

  "What did they paint?" I asked, sipping the cola that his secretary had brought me.

  "Idealized images of Florida. Old Florida. The St. Lucie River. Poinciana trees in bloom. Think about motel art or old postcards of the era, and you'll have it nearly right."

  "How many did they sell?"

  "One estimate is 100,000. Another is 200,000."

  I choked on my cola. "Beg pardon?"

  "Usually they would paint three days a week, frame their work on another day, and spend the weekend trying to sell what they'd done. The painters were all from Ft. Pierce originally. My mother remembers seeing one or another of them outside the bank where she worked. Some landscapes sold for as little as $25. To keep the prices down, the Highwaymen painted on Upson board, a roofing product. The frames were constructed of molding and 'antiqued' with gold paint. If you recall, 'antiquing things' was the rage back then."

  "They were successful?" I asked.

  "They made enough to live on. Not a lot more. They painted their world, the one they saw around them, and at that time, Florida was going through a housing boom, so their scenes were both familiar and exotic. And, they painted fast, because they realized that the more they painted, the more they could sell. As Al Hair once said, 'Paint slow when you get old.'"

  "Who was Al Hair?" I asked.

  "An extraordinarily gifted young man who died at age twenty-nine at a juke joint in Ft. Pierce. One of Essie Feldman's favorite painters, or so I'm told."

  "Was he killed because he was famous?" I thought about how Gianni Versace had been gunned down on the steps of his home in South Beach.

  "No. Not exactly famous. Al was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But by then he'd earned enough to buy himself a Cadillac, one of his lifelong dreams."

  "Are Al Hair's paintings the ones that are missing? Were they stolen from The Treasure Chest?" I tried to put all the pieces together, but like often happens with puzzles, they didn't quite fit. At least not yet.

  "You're getting ahead of yourself. You have to understand that a lot of people laughed at the Highwaymen's efforts. To be honest, when you buy a piece of art out of the back of someone's trunk, you don't expect much. Of course, there was a lot of racial prejudice, too. But a handful of these guys were good. Really good. Even early collectors could see that. For example, Essie Feldman recognized their worth right away. She had an eye for talent. She snapped up as many paintings as she could, concentrating on the better examples of their work."

  "Essie's stash has gone missing?"

  "That's right. Twelve years ago, when she had her first stroke, they all disappeared. Vanished. Poof! Into thin air. They've never been recovered."

  "These would be worth a considerable amount of money?"

  "A conservative estimate would put them at two million dollars. Maybe even three."

  I nearly fell out of my chair.

  "Whoa! You're telling me that the reason The Treasure Chest is in shambles is because someone tore the place apart looking for these paintings?" I asked. "The stolen ones?"

  "That's certainly possible."

  "How on earth could that have happened? How could someone swipe so many paintings without Essie knowing? It's not like The Treasure Chest is off the beaten path. It’s in the middle of downtown Stuart!"

  "That's a good question. Mrs. Feldman kept all her paintings locked in a storage room right off the main sales floor. She had one employee at the time, a Mary Jayne Austin. Right before the paintings disappeared, Mrs. Feldman suffered her first stroke. After the stroke, she needed several months of physical therapy, so her son, Irving, told Mrs. Austin to close the store and take a vacation. It was during that hiatus that the paintings disappeared."

  "Is it possible that he took them? Her son? I think I only met him once," I said. "A long, long time ago."

  "Why would he steal them?" asked Houston. "They were going to be his someday anyhow."

  "How do you know he didn't? He could have taken them and turned in a claim for the insurance."

  "And gotten diddly."

  "Excuse me?"

  "At the time they were stolen, the paintings weren't worth much. No, if he'd had them, Irving Feldman would have held onto them and sold them one by one as they accrued value over the years. I am certain that he didn't. He doesn’t have any money. It's public knowledge that Mr. Feldman's house was recently foreclosed upon."

  "Isn't it possible that the woman took them? That employee you mentioned? Mary Jayne somebody? Or that she helped someone steal them?"

  "Highly doubtful. The police investigated her thoroughly. Mrs. Austin was visiting her sick mother up in Michigan at the time of the theft. She's the one who discovered the works were missing when she came back to work at the store. It hardly seems logical that she would have returned to the scene of the crime, as it were, and reported a theft that she had engineered. If she had stolen the works, there'd be a money trail back to her and there isn't. She's broke, too."

  "How else could they have vanished?" I asked.

  "That's a very good question."

  28

  After fattening the wallets of two attorneys, I headed back to Dick's Gas E Bait, keeping my fingers crossed that my grandfather would have Black Beauty up and running. And she was. I thanked Poppy for his hard work.

  "You need a place to bunk up for the night?" He wiped his hands on a red rag. Then he turned off the Camry's engine and passed the keys to me. His voice sounded wistful. Lonely even. "I gave her an oil change while I was under the hood."

  I realized then that I didn't know my grandfather. Not really. We'd stayed in communication over the years, but we'd never really spent much time together. Not after that summer when my mother insisted that it was better to kidnap me than to let me continue a romance with "that Indian boy."

  No, my dad had been the primary link between Poppy and our family. You'd think my mother would have kept her father a part of our lives, and she did sort of. They weren't totally estranged. She talked to her father, sent him greeting cards, made his flight arrangements for the holidays, and so on, but they weren't really close. I had long suspected that she'd had a falling out with Poppy. On the other hand, maybe she was simply content to let her husband do the hard work of maintaining ties with the irksome old man.

  Marriages are built
on a silent contract between two people. Rarely does the couple discuss their expectations. They slide into patterns, and with those come expectations. Instinctively, I understood my parents' agreed upon division of labor: Mom was in charge of raising me, and Dad kept tabs on Poppy. My mother was an organizer, a cleaner, a systems analyst, a drill sergeant whose authority was unquestionable. Our home functioned like a well-oiled machine under her stern watch. So did the restaurant.

  My father was the heart of our home. He was the parent who cried over old movies. Who said, "Yes," when I wanted a dog. Dad was the one who glued people together, who turned strangers into teams of co-workers. While Mom remembered birthdays because they were on her calendar, Dad remembered birthdays because he cared about people.

  Whose child was I? My mother's or my father's?

  "Yes, I do need a place to sleep tonight. Actually, I could do with a long hot shower. People have been avoiding me all day.”

  "Come on back to my house." Poppy leaned against a dirty wall, his shoulder half-covering a torn calendar of the Ozarks. "After you get cleaned up, we'll go out to eat."

  "Sounds like a plan." I wasn't sure I could manage sleeping there. Not in its current state, but a shower would be lovely.

  I climbed into Black Beauty and gave her a scolding, as I followed my grandfather to his house. "You were a bad, bad girl, Black Beauty. Don't you ever, ever act up like that again. You're a bad car. Bad!"

  Although the shower in Poppy's guest bathroom was a bit dingy, it was clean. There was a rust stain here and there, and a thick rope of dust on the ceiling fan, but otherwise, that particular room was presentable, almost as if my grandfather had kept it pristine just in case someone dropped by.

  I nearly moaned with joy as hot water sluiced over my hair and skin, washing away the stink of dead fish. With a bar of Lifebuoy soap in my hand, I scrubbed myself repeatedly. It took forever to convince myself I smelled okay. Why couldn't I have been presentable when I met Cooper?