Miz Scarlet and the Vanishing Visitor (A Scarlet Wilson Mystery) (8 page)

For some reason, she took a liking to Bur. Maybe it
was that he teased her. Maybe it was because he reminded her of
someone. Maybe it was because she didn’t have a sibling and thought
it was hilarious that we still went at it, even at our advanced
ages. The truth came out the day we finally got a new mattress for
the bed we found at a yard sale. Bur was helping us move the
furniture around in her new room.

“What time you want to hit the road today,
squirt?”

“Can we do it in an hour?”

“Sure. Fine with me.”

“Hit the road?” I looked at the pair of them,
surprised. “Where are you two going?”

“Practice time,” my brother announced.

“Bur takes me driving,” she explained. No wonder she
tolerated him. She wanted that license.

“How did that happen?” I asked. It’s not like my
brother is known for being kind to children or animals, at least
not normally.

“Lacey offered,” said Bur, “and I told her that she
didn’t have the right car insurance for that. She wanted to know
what it would take to get the girl behind the wheel and I said I’d
take her in the Focus.”

“Where was I when all this was going on?”

“Teaching.” Of course. Wouldn’t you
know that my brother would take
my
car and let a teenager wreak havoc on the road
while I was otherwise engaged? This is why we shortened his
nickname from Colonel Grey Poupon to just Poup. Sometimes he was
just a royal stinker.

“Very clever, colonel. When did you intend to tell
me?”

One look at Jen and I could see she was nervous.
“It’s my fault, Scarlet. I asked him to keep it a secret. I wanted
to surprise you by getting my license.”

“Really?”

“Really.” No one had ever thought to do something
like that before. Made me think there was more to it than that.
“Did you fail the first time around?”

“How did you know?”

“Tell you what. You and Bur keep doing what you’re
doing. And when you do get your license, we’ll all celebrate. How
does that sound?”

“Aw, great.” There was that big grin. It broke the
tight tension around her eyes and made her look like a kid
again.

Of course, in the meantime, it meant she had to be
driven everywhere, or rather escorted. We were headed out to the
grocery store one morning, in my Ford Focus mind you, and on
impulse I tossed her the keys.

“Oh, I couldn’t!”

“Because....”

“Um, ah...well, I guess I could.”

After that, she took it for granted that I would let
her drive everywhere we went, and for the first time in my life, I
had to trust a teenager not to get me killed. Was this what every
parent went through? Lucky for me she was a pretty good driver,
once she let go of all that anxiety.

The last days of July turned into August, and Kenny
suggested we take another trip, this time with Jenny in tow.

“Where?” I asked.

“New Hampshire. We have a court date.”

“We do?”

“Oh, yeah. It turns out that at the time Stevie took
over the house from Jenny’s mother, he had already had her declared
non compos mentis, because the cancer had spread to her brain. In
fact, when he married her, she was barely able to communicate, let
alone make rational decisions.”

“You’re saying the guy stole the house out from under
Jenny and her mother?”

“I’m saying Stevie is a cheese weasel who took
advantage of a dying woman and robbed the daughter. John Vignone,
the lawyer up in Salem, has decided to challenge the probate claim
and file a lawsuit against Stevie to recover the house, the car,
and even a savings account that was supposed to help pay for
Jenny’s college expenses.”

“Captain Peacock, you’re the best!”

“I am. And you can kiss me now, fair lady!”

We stayed at a Holiday Inn near Salem. Jenny, Kenny,
and I showed up in court with the New Hampshire attorney hired for
the hearing by Gayle Fulsom, Bur’s legal friend at the Hartford
office of Winnow, Smith, Quinlan. Within an hour’s time, John
Vignone had presented the medical records of Vivian Lorraine
Mulroney. Any sensible person could see Vivian was in no shape to
make decisions about her own future when Steve was transferring all
of her property into his own name.

It also turned out that Vivian’s boyfriend, Dr. Jason
Smith, was back in New Hampshire, and he was a great witness,
telling the judge about the lengthy discussions he had had with
Vivian about Jenny’s future. It turned out that he was the one who
advised her to put more money each month into the college fund. The
reunion between teen and mother’s lover was bittersweet. They had
both loved Vivian and both lost her. Jason was now married, with a
child on the way. He seemed at a loss as to what to do about the
young woman he had once considered adopting.

Three of Jenny’s high school teachers provided
testimony on Vivian’s conversations during parent-teacher
conferences, her interest in sending Jenny to college, and even
Jenny’s consistently good schoolwork. Kenny had first contacted
them when he ran a background check on Jenny, and he was impressed
with what they had to say about her. The judge was equally
impressed.

Kenny also managed to track down Vivian’s relatives,
who had, it seems, been told that she moved without leaving a
forwarding address, right after Steve transferred the property into
his own name following the marriage. They testified their cards and
letters had been returned to them as undeliverable, and their phone
calls rebuffed, all part of Steve’s plan to make Vivian and her
daughter disappear from public view. Before the distant cousins
left the judge’s chambers, they made sure Jenny knew of their
desire to remain in touch and even invited her to visit whenever
she felt inclined.

But best of all? With medical charts and scans in
hand, the oncologist detailed Vivian’s illness for the probate
judge. Jenny looked stricken as the doctor pointed out the
locations of each of the tumors and explained the erratic behavior
of his patient over the last few months of her life. Listening, my
heart ached for the teen. She had been the one at her mother’s
bedside during those long months, not Steve.

The final nail in the wicked stepfather’s legal
coffin was hammered in by the three visiting nurses, who had
provided the hospice care to Vivian. They swore that Jenny was the
one who changed her mother’s adult diapers, tended to her personal
hygiene, and even spoon-fed her when she was too weak to feed
herself.

“I’ll make my ruling after I have reviewed all of the
material,” said the probate judge. “But first I would like to
consult with the district attorney and the Pelham Police Department
about criminal charges in this matter.”

Chapter Eight --

Steve bristled at that, his bitterness clear. It
seems he had already put the house on the market, planning to move
to Florida, but the probate judge put a stop to that. “You will, in
the meantime, vacate the property until this case is decided. I
will have a sheriff accompany you now to retrieve your belongings.
And if Jennifer would like to go to the house and also collect her
belongings, she can do so.”

“What?” Steve seemed rather baffled by how things
were turning out. His attorney was more than a little stunned. It
seemed that his client had been less than truthful with him. “She
can’t go there!”

“Why not?” the judge demanded.

“It’s not her house!”

“I’ll decide whose house it is. Make arrangements
with the sheriff’s office to go into the home and take what is
yours, Jennifer. I’ll determine ownership of your mother’s
belongings when I’ve had a chance to go through all the
records.”

“You can’t do that!” Steve screamed at the probate
judge, even as his own lawyer admonished him. Turns out Steve had
moved his long-time girlfriend in the day after Jenny moved out.
That was the game he played on an unwitting, vulnerable
teenager.

Kenny and I drove Jenny to her mother’s house,
accompanied by a sheriff and three deputies, who were expecting
trouble from Steve’s girlfriend. It turned out that she worked at
the hospital and had tipped him off to Vivian’s deteriorating
health. It was a deliberate con from the start.

Kathy answered the doorbell, and when she saw all the
uniforms standing there, she had a meltdown. All of Jenny and
Vivian’s possessions had been moved to the one-car garage at the
back of the property, at least that’s what she claimed. No one was
buying that. There were boxes in the basement, a few in the
attic.

The trip to that one-car garage yielded a treasure
trove for the teenager, including family albums, framed photos, and
even her mother’s costume jewelry. The sheriff informed Kathy that
she would have to surrender Vivian’s jewelry, so that the judge
could decide ownership. The items included Jenny’s grandmother’s
pearls.

When someone asked Steve’s girlfriend why the couple
held onto everything, she told him Steve was worried Jenny would
come back and challenge his right to the house. As soon as the
happy couple were packed up and the house was sold, Steve planned
to hire a company to take Jenny and Vivian’s belongings to the
dump. That was supposed to be the end of it.

The trip back to Cheswick was subdued. No doubt Jenny
was thinking things over. She hadn’t realized that her relatives
had been misled. The big question at the probate hearing had been
how did Steve pull off such a scam? Sadly, we learned the answer
while we were sitting with the lawyer over lunch. It turned out to
be fairly easy for him. Chasing relatives and friends away from the
home meant Steve could manipulate her finances and property. The
papers, signed in a tentative hand, were dubious at best. In two
instances, John Vignone uncovered misspellings of Vivian’s own
name, suggesting she was mentally challenged by the cancer that was
consuming her body, and therefore not in her right mind, or Steve
forged the paperwork.

The Googins girls were horrified to learn the details
upon our return. They went out of their way to nurture Jenny,
fussing over her like she was a twelve-year-old. I thought about
stepping in, but when I saw how hungry the teen was for that
attention, I decided to let the ladies have their way. After all,
Jenny had found out some shocking information in the course of the
probate hearing, and she needed time to adjust.

Kenny took off right after dinner, claiming he had to
be at work early in the morning. As I walked him to his car, Jenny
hurried out after us.

“Wait!” Her face was tense as we turned toward her.
“I just...I just wanted to thank you for...everything.”

She was clutching the framed photo of her mother, the
one we found in the bottom of a box of clothes at the back of the
garage. Kenny scooped her up in a bear hug.

“Not every guy’s a bastard. Just remember that.”

“I will, Captain Peacock,” she smiled up at the man.
I had to laugh at her use of Kenny’s nickname. Jenny was becoming
part of the Four Acorns family.

When Bur found out what had happened up in New
Hampshire, he speculated on the possible outcome. He was full of
advice for the teen and even wanted to discuss how she should
invest her inheritance and manage her money portfolio.

“You have enough to get you through school if you
conserve it,” he insisted. “Always remember money doesn’t grow on
trees, so spend it wisely and make it work for you.”

“How about we cross that bridge when the probate
judge makes his decision?” I suggested. “We can’t actually count
those chickens quite yet. You never know what will happen between
now and when the judge issues his final decision.”

I was feeling very confident that Jenny’s life was
back on track, and it would be smooth sailing from that point on,
but secrets have a way of biting you in the ass or kissing you on
the cheek. It’s hard to know the kind of greeting you’ll get from
them until they’re standing right in front of you.

The first clue that things were going south came when
Kenny called me on Wednesday, just after breakfast. We normally
spoke after dinner.

“Hey,” he said, his voice sounding tight. “Got a
minute?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Is Jenny there?”

“No, she’s upstairs, making beds. Let me
call....”

“Don’t. I need to tell you something and I don’t want
her to know about it till we get it straightened out.”

“Oh, okay.” I was cleaning the dining room, hanging
around while Laurel was out on the porch, getting a workout with
her physical therapist, just in case they needed me. I stepped into
the kitchen for a little privacy, sat myself at the counter, and
waited for that other shoe to drop. “I’m all ears.”

“Jenny is not Vivian’s daughter.”

“Excuse me?”

“Jenny’s mother was Vivian’s younger sister.”

“No!”

“That’s not the least of it, Scar. A copy of Jenny’s
birth certificate was found in a box recovered by the sheriff’s
department.”

“
Why do I think there’s more
news?”

“Because there
is
more. On that birth certificate is
the name of Jenny’s father.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Let’s hope so. I’m calling you now, Scarlet, because
I want you to start thinking about how we’re going to break the
news to Jenny. She can’t get her driver’s license without a birth
certificate and she’s just about ready to take the test.”

“We’ll handle it,” I decided. “Do you think you can
find her real mother?”

“Already have. Remember how Jenny said she was born
in Boston? She was. Her mother died when she was two weeks old.
Vivian collected her after her mother took an overdose and brought
her up to Maine.”

“Crap. That stinks. Why did she do it?”

“There were a few more papers in that box. As best I
can tell, Jenny’s father went out to California to see his family.
Maybe he was planning to tell them he had a wife and child. I don’t
think he had the chance. The bus he was on flipped over and he was
one of three people who died.”