Hidden Riches (14 page)

R
osalee wasn't the only one thinking about what Ana Mae left behind. It didn't take Ana Mae's neighbors, friends, and fellow church members long to figure out that something pretty extraordinary was going on with the Futrells. And the next thing everyone knew, a story in the Drapersville Times & Review told about the big-city visitors who'd returned to their hometown and had to stick around for a while because of something Ana Mae did from the grave. Then an “anonymous source”—which everyone who was anyone knew was Rosalee Jenkins—was quoted in the paper saying Ana Mae had left a significant monetary inheritance to the heir who deciphered the clues left in a quilt.

Odds at Junior Cantrell's and the barbershop ran three to one that the snooty Marguerite would get the money. “She's the one don't need none,” one sage said.

“But that boy got a good head on his shoulders, even if he is that way. I think he's gonna get it,” another handicapper declared, laying down twenty bucks on the ten-to-one odds of Clayton claiming the money.

Thanks to Eddie Spencer's explanation of how she'd tossed out the valuable quilt as trash, JoJo, the Vegas show girl, was universally viewed as a flake and about as likely to figure out how to win the cash as she was to fit into her old high school majorette uniform.

Debate raged about just what the Reverend Toussaint le Baptiste had to do with it all. Since Ana Mae was known to be a devout churchgoer, half the folks making wagers decided his presence was about Ana Mae giving the church even more money than she already had. The other half was split down the middle, some saying Ana Mae and the preacher had a side thing going on and the others just as vehemently strident that it wasn't nice to say such bad things about the dead, especially seeing as how holy Ana Mae was.

Then someone would say: “Well, what about that Howard son of hers? Apparently, she wasn't always holy. Didn't she used to talk to one of them Jenkins boys before they moved over to Greensboro?”

And the debate would relaunch all over again while more money exchanged hands and the odds shifted.

“For such a small house, Ana Mae sure had a lot of stuff. What is all this crap?”

Delcine and JoJo were at Ana Mae's house, still going through her belongings. More careful now that millions of dollars were on the line, they maintained a diligence that would have been unwarranted a few days ago when they unceremoniously tossed out papers, knickknacks, and other seemingly worthless trash.

Now they meticulously reviewed every piece of stray paper, opened envelopes, and shook out magazines lest a critical clue be overlooked or thrown out the way the treasure quilt had been.

They'd decided to work in their older sister's bedroom today, JoJo handling the closet and Delcine focusing on the dresser drawers and the overflowing bureau top. The gilded frame of the mirror on the bureau dresser was barely visible under snapshots and ticket stubs from movies and sporting events.

“The good thing is at least it's halfway organized,” Delcine said. “Just think if she'd been one of those hoarders like on television.”

“What's a hoarder?”

Delcine paused in sorting scarves and gloves from one of the drawers. “You mean you haven't seen any of those hoarder shows? People have so much stuff that only a path is clear in their house and junk is piled up to the ceilings. Frankly it's pretty sickening. And sad.”

“We don't watch a lot of TV,” JoJo said.

Delcine rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah. That's right. Lester's too busy working the Strip with his fake psychic bit while you're putting in eighty-hour weeks at the casino to keep a roof over your heads.”

“My work weeks aren't that long,” JoJo said, a note of defensiveness in her voice. “I do get some overtime every month, though, and that helps a lot.”

The last thing she wanted to have with her wealthy and successful sister was a conversation about money. JoJo paused and looked at her hands. They were no longer the soft and pampered hands of a woman who regularly indulged in manicures and spa treatments, and her nails, kept short by necessity, were those of a woman who labored. In addition, her hands were bare. No rings adorned them. And she'd be buried in Antioch Cemetery right next to Ana Mae before she ever let Delcine know that she'd had to hock her wedding rings just to afford a one-way ticket to North Carolina for the funeral. She planned to discreetly ask Clayton to pay her fare to get back home.

So when Everett Rollings said Ana Mae had left her ten grand, JoJo thought for sure that she had won the lottery. She knew Lester was already calculating how much he'd “invest” in his latest get-rich-quick scheme. But when they'd found out there was so much more than ten thousand up for grabs, Lester had been furious, claiming they'd been tricked out of their portion. He didn't see the irony in what he did to tourists in Las Vegas every day. That was trickery at its finest. But she knew he wouldn't see it that way.

“You okay in there?” Delcine asked.

JoJo wiped at a stray tear that somehow had sprung to her eyes.

“I'm fine,” she lied.

She had no idea if the sudden tears were for Ana Mae, for her own lost hopes and dreams, or because Delcine was being such a bitch.

JoJo pulled out a large wooden box from one of the two shelves in the closet. Carved on the top was a scene of a hunter in a duck blind; pussy willows and lily pads surrounded the banks of a knoll overlooking a pond. “Ana Mae didn't hunt. I wonder where she got this.”

“What is it?” Delcine said from the doorway.

“Some kind of hunting box.”

JoJo put the box on Ana Mae's bed, the double mattress covered with a lightweight but colorful, scrappy quilt, likely made by Ana Mae herself, although there was no label on it.

The sisters looked at the eight-by-twelve-inch box, then at each other.

“Diamonds?” Delcine guessed.

“A week ago I'd have laughed at that,” JoJo said. “Now, who knows?” She lifted the lid to reveal a layer of white tissue paper protecting the contents.

“What is it?”

Peeling back the tissue, JoJo uncovered a bundle of letters tied with a pink satin ribbon, a small Bible, a couple of dried flowers, and other mementos, including a handful of photographs.

She placed each item on the bed, pausing a moment to glance at the old snapshots, including one with a couple of smiling teenagers waving a flag. She smiled at one from an Easter Sunday years ago. Clayton was a little kid, maybe four. Delcine was pouting and JoJo grinning, and Ana Mae looked like the boss of them all.

“Remember this?” JoJo said, handing the photo to her sister.

Delcine looked at it and nodded. “I was mad because you got to wear the bonnet I wanted.”

“It was too small for your head!”

“Hmph,” Delcine grunted, before displaying a pout much like the one in the long-ago captured moment.

Delcine reached for the ribbon-bundled packet. “Love letters? To Ana Mae?”

“I don't know,” JoJo said. The photographs put aside, her attention was back on the remaining items in the wooden box. Her own handwriting was on one of them. “Well, I'll be.”

“What is it?”

“She kept them,” JoJo said, wonder in her voice.

“Kept what, Jo? Is it something to do with the money?”

JoJo bit her lip in a vain attempt to staunch the tears that again sprang to her eyes. “No,” she said. “They're Christmas cards.”

“Christmas cards?”

“Uh huh,” JoJo said sniffling.

She flipped through and pulled out three envelopes, two with the postmarks identifying when they were sent and the third made of a rough paper that JoJo now remembered.

A brown paper bag.

She couldn't find envelopes anywhere in the house, so she'd made them for her Christmas cards that year from a Piggly Wiggly grocery bag she'd claimed before Mama folded it up to use for trash later on. She needed envelopes to go with the cards she'd crafted for her mother and her sister.

That's the envelope JoJo opened now, by far the oldest one in the box. As she lifted the flap and pulled out the card, the years fell away, and she found herself remembering the moments she'd enjoyed the most as a kid. On the floor, with her back against the twin bed and her feet almost touching the yellow wall of the bedroom she shared with Delcine. Her craft supplies she kept in an old cigar box that Mama gave her for her treasures. In the box, kept under her bed until she needed it, were her crayons, glue, the sparkly glitter, a pair of childproof scissors with rounded ends, and a couple of markers, the tools required to create masterpieces from scrap pieces of paper.

Tears welled in JoJo's eyes at the sight of that first handmade card. She'd painstakingly made it from construction paper and cutouts from Christmas dream catalogs.

I LOVE YOU ANA MAE FROM YOUR LITTLE SISTER JOSEPINE

JoJo smiled at the misspelling of her name. She always used to forget the H, one of the reasons she quickly adopted the much easier to spell nickname of JoJo. But the message, scrawled in the big block letters of her five- or six-year-old self, brought back the memory of the moment when Ana Mae opened and read the card.

“Do you really love me, Jo?”

She'd nodded, sure of the unfailing devotion and love that only a much older sister could engender.

“How much?” Ana Mae had asked.

“This much,” the young JoJo said, spreading her arms wide.

“And I love you, this much,” Ana Mae said repeating the gesture with her longer arms and then wrapping them around her baby sister in a big hug.

Ana Mae must have been about nineteen or twenty then, but she always had time for JoJo.

“What's that junk?” Delcine asked.

“It's not junk,” JoJo said, clutching the card to her breast. “I made it and gave it to Ana Mae. I've made a Christmas card for her every year since I was little. This is one of the early ones. She saved them all, every single one.”

“You make cards? How . . . crafty of you.”

JoJo was sure Delcine was going to say something else, but quickly substituted crafty for whatever derogatory thing had initially crossed her mind. As it was, she made the word crafty sound provincial and lowbrow.

Delcine didn't know that JoJo's greeting cards now supplemented her income. She'd picked up rubber-stamping as a hobby, and her talent had quickly turned it into a part-time job. She made her own cards and took orders from other people, but the holiday greeting sent to Delcine, Winslow, and their kids each year was always carefully selected from the Hallmark store, the sort of thing that Delcine would consider tasteful and proper. JoJo knew not to waste any of her original Christmas cards and designs on snooty Delcine. All she would do was what she'd just done—make a not-so-subtle dig designed to belittle and degrade.

JoJo considered her sister, wondering if Delcine's attitude came as an unintentional or a deliberate part of her personality. How Winslow stood it, JoJo couldn't figure out. He was a nice enough guy.

I guess it takes all kinds
, JoJo thought.

While Delcine went back to the drawers, JoJo sat on the bed and walked through the years of Christmases she'd been apart from Ana Mae. Las Vegas was a long way from Drapersville, North Carolina. And like her other siblings, once she got out of Carolina, there was little to compel her to come back. Except Ana Mae.

She studied the cards she'd made for her sister. There was the year she'd experimented with non-traditional Christmas colors, making cards that were neon orange and honeydew yellow, and the year she was obsessed with the iris folding technique of manipulating paper. Ana Mae had kept them all.

Now that it was too late, she wished she'd spent more time with or just talking to her older sister. Two cards a year, at Christmas and for her birthday—if JoJo even remembered that one—and a brief call every now and then was no way to treat family. Her chance to do right by Ana Mae was gone, just like her chance for her own hopes and dreams.

But her older sister loved her, and that was a gift she could always treasure.

T
he offices of the
Drapersville Times & Review
were on the second floor of a bank building downtown. The Greek Revival architecture of the First National Bank of Drapersville stood out like the proverbial sore thumb it was. Milton Draper's visions of grandeur for the town he'd founded couldn't be contained in just the six-bedroom mansion he'd built for his bride. With money some said he'd stolen from a gold coach out west, Milton settled in North Carolina, opened a mill, a bank, and a mercantile. In other words, he owned the town.

By the 1940s, hard times had come, and his grandchildren had little of their former wealth. Between the Great Depression and the war, the Drapers hadn't fared very well. Milton would have been enraged over the way they'd squandered his legacy. But his bank building remained, and the grandchildren let out the two unused floors to maintain a steady income. That plan, like most hatched in the town, didn't last. And it took until 1958, when a Draper great-grandson returned home from up North, that things began to look up for both the family and the town.

He kick-started life into the newspaper and converted the third floor of the bank building into offices and two apartments. He kept one for himself rather than move into the mansion on the bluff with his bigoted and bitter cousins. He leased the other to what the townspeople called a never-ending stream of liberal hippies, artists, and musicians.

By the Summer of Love in 1967, Drapersville, North Carolina, was the hidden gem and getaway of the Beat Generation. But by the late 1970s, all the hippies were gone, and the town once again settled into sleepy oblivion reminiscent of its undistinguished existence in the 1950s, and it remained that way through the turn of the new century.

When Rosalee Jenkins got off the elevator on the second floor, the glory days of the
Drapersville Times & Review
greeted her.

Yellowed and faded front pages of the newspaper hung in frames along the wall along with clippings from more recent editions of the now weekly publication that was “Your source for Hertford County News.” It didn't seem to matter that its sister paper, the
Ahoskie Times & Union Report,
claimed the same thing.

Rosalee made her way to the front counter, where Matilde Adams had manned the receptionist's desk since Jimmy Carter was president. The blue and pink polyester pants suit she sported came from the same era and had probably been purchased on sale at Zayre's back when that was the place to shop.

Matilde's pop-bottle lenses of her eyeglasses made her look blind, but she had a razor-sharp memory and knew more about the village of Drapersville and the city of Ahoskie than most people.

“Rosalee Jenkins, I declare. I haven't seen you since you and Ana Mae Futrell took out that ad looking for . . .” She abruptly stopped mid-sentence and reached out a hand to Rosalee. “Oh, Rosalee, I'm so sorry about Ana Mae. I know the two of you were close.”

“Thank you, Matilde,” Rosalee said, placing her pocketbook on the counter. “But that's actually why I'm here.”

Matilde pushed her glasses up as she rose and straightened, a professional ready to provide the best customer service to a longtime subscriber. “What can I do to help?”

Rosalee explained what she had in mind, and Matilde Adams led her back to the newspaper's morgue, where all of the back issues of the paper were stored.

Toussaint le Baptiste didn't quite know what to make of everything that had transpired over the last couple of days. Ana Mae Futrell's death and funeral had knocked him for something of a loop. And the meetings with Attorney Rollings and the family sent him down for the count.

He and Ana Mae had a history, a very personal one. But it reminded him of the poem by Robert Frost that he'd learned in school. He and Ana Mae had traveled different roads. Looking back now, he wondered what might have become of them had they walked the same path. He'd chosen college and seminary and the single life of an ascetic devoted to ministry and service. Ana Mae Futrell had her pick of boys back in the day. But after she found the Lord, she sent them all packing. She eventually followed in her mother's footsteps. She worked hard and lived a Christian life.

He knew Ana Mae won some money playing the lottery. She'd come to him to confess the sin.

“Reverend, I swear, on my Mama's grave and in Jesus' name, that I've never gambled before. I never even went to the bingo games at the Catholic church even though I cleaned up after them. I just saw all the people in the Day-Ree Mart talking about a new scratch ticket, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to spend a dollar on one.”

Toussaint smiled at the memory. Her one-dollar ticket ended up being a big winner. Embarrassed, she gave the church her tithe and more just as soon as she cashed the check from the lottery office.

Had she gotten hooked on playing the lottery and won another big payday?

Where else would she have gotten close to four million dollars to give away?

He closed the Bible on his desk and flipped forward a couple of pages on the yellow legal pad. Reverend Leonard yielded the pulpit to the associate pastor one Sunday a month, and it was Toussaint's Sunday to preach. So he was supposed to be writing his Sunday sermon, but his mind kept straying to Ana Mae and the Futrells. Instead of jotting notes on the Scripture text he planned to preach from, Toussaint did some ciphering.

If memory served correctly, Ana Mae won a hundred twenty five thousand in the lottery. She paid her tithe, handed out a couple of scholarships to church kids headed to the local community college, and bought some books for the library and the recreation center. Even if she'd invested wisely, he still couldn't figure out how she had so much.

Every year she took a little trip, but nowhere exotic. He knew that because she took the bus and was always back in time for the next Sunday service.

“You were a mystery to me in life, Ana Mae, and you're keeping it up in death. God rest your soul, sister. God rest your sweet, sweet soul.”

Lester sluiced water over his head, then shook himself like a dog.

“Hey,” JoJo squealed. “Watch it.”

They were both squeezed into Ana Mae's small bathroom trying to get dressed for the day. The space, though tight, was actually a little bigger than the bathroom in their trailer back in Las Vegas.

JoJo looked at her husband, who finger-combed his hair in the mirror. “What are you supposed to be today, a Mafia boss?”

Lester snorted as he smoothed an errant tuft behind his ear.

JoJo grinned in the mirror.

“What?” he asked.

She paused in the process of putting on her fake eyelashes. “You're trying to copy Archer's hairstyle.”

“I am not,” Lester declared, indignant.

But the red crawling up his neck called him a liar.

Lester, who was actually biracial, looked more like his Irish father than his Jamaican mother.

“He did look good at the funeral,” JoJo said, again picking up her eyelash implements.

“Hmph.”

Lester wiped his hands on one of Ana Mae's pale blue bath towels, then patted his wife's plump butt.

“Stop,” she said. But she was smiling when she said it.

“Is there a Walmart around here?”

“What do you need a Walmart for?”

He shrugged. “I just need to pick up some things. Maybe they'll help with the search.”

Suspicious now, JoJo turned to look him in the eye. “Things like what?”

“A map, to start with,” he said. “I've never been here, and it's been what, more than ten years, almost twenty or so, since you were here. If we have to stay around, I wanna know how to get around.”

“Lester, we don't have to stay. I do. You can head home anytime. Don't you have a couple of shows booked?”

He grinned, then leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. “I don't want to leave you in your time of need. I'm gonna take Ana Mae's car. I'll be back in a flash. Since you all decided to start the hunt together—something I disagree with, by the way—I wanna make sure we have everything we need.”

“Everything like what?”

“Just stuff,” he said evasively.

JoJo didn't like the idea that he was already claiming Ana Mae's belongings as “theirs.” And she sure as hell knew he was up to something besides picking up a map at Walmart. Lester's steady gig doing a psychic show at an off-Strip local casino brought in a little cash. It was his Vegas street work that brought in the most money. He and a partner, a sleight-of-hand magician, scammed tourists on a regular basis. She had no doubt that he was up to something. Drapersville and Ahoskie were too small for him to pull a big con, and without Mickey Davenport, his partner in crime, or as he put it, his business partner, Lester was limited and at a disadvantage. Which, as far as JoJo was concerned, was itself a blessing.

She did, however, know that the lure of Ana Mae's millions would keep him on the straight and narrow for a while at least.

What JoJo had not yet figured out was how to claim all the money before Delcine, Clayton, or that preacher did—and permanently get rid of her husband. Back home she knew how to find people who, for the right price, incentive, or chip to cash in later, could make problems disappear. Here in North Carolina, though, she had to play a different set of cards.

She heard the screen door slam as Lester left the house. A moment later she heard Ana Mae's old Bonneville reluctantly kick over. And then she remembered the offer from Eddie Spencer.

Imagining Eddie in the role of an old-time Vegas gangster, she grinned. The offer he'd made to her for “anything you need” was just the sort of thing one of those guys from Las Vegas's organized crime days would say. Back when she looked like she did in her dancing days, it was easy to picture the way it would all go down. She'd put on something clingy, making sure to show off the girls to their best advantage. Then, knowing full well she'd have to pay up one day, she'd ask one of the boys for a favor—to arrange an accident for her husband.

Once Lester's car blew up or he was escorted out to the desert for a one-way trip, she'd be free to live her life the way she wanted to.

A Lester-free life. The very notion lifted her spirits.

But reality set in a moment later as she stared in the mirror. She could no more kill Lester than she could fly. A girl could dream, though.

At one point in her life, JoJo thought she needed a man, someone to take care of her, to make her complete. Time, marriage to Lester, and being here in North Carolina had changed her perspective.

She would give Eddie Spencer a call, though. Maybe he could give her some suggestions on the job outlook in the county.

Once it arrived in JoJo's head, the notion of staying here appealed to her . . . a lot.