Money To Burn (42 page)

Winslow, the butler, had made the move to the new house. I found him out back in the stables, trying to subdue one of Lydia’s thoroughbred horses—her new hobby. He looked resplendent in his formal riding wear.

“To the hounds, Winslow?” I asked him.

“Miss Jones,” he replied with a formal bow. Some habits are hard to break. “I am instructing Master Talbot in the art of dressage these days. It is a little-known talent of mine that has had the opportunity to flourish here.”

“You look happy,” I said. “Tell me it’s true.”

“It’s true, Miss Jones,” he admitted. “I am happy. Master Talbot is very happy. I venture to say that even Miss Talbot may be happy again one day.”

Just then, three shrieking brown-skinned children raced past us, throwing bunches of hay at each other. I looked at Winslow.

“Mariela’s children,” he explained, fighting hard to keep his composure. “There are two more in addition to those three. She works as the housekeeper now and her husband looks after the stables.”

“One big happy family?” I asked.

He nodded his acknowledgment. “The first family that Master Talbot has ever known, I venture to say.”

It was good news about Haydon, his shining face told it all, but I found that Lydia had not been so resilient. She was in her new study, surrounded by books and artifacts and very little that had to do with real life.

I kept my visit brief, our words were cordial, the thanks to me quite sincere. But when I left, I still had the same feeling about her—she had been hurt too much and no longer trusted life enough to open herself up to living it.

And that was what made her so special. I had fallen in love with Lydia Talbot a little bit, I think, during the course of my investigation. Like so many people before me, and probably like many more in the future, I wanted to protect her, to shield her, to prove to her that not all of life is about loss and sadness.

But in the end, none of us can live for anyone else nor can we find life by hiding from it. We just have to wade through it. Until she decides to do just that, I’m afraid Lydia Talbot is going to remain an unattainable heart locked in the body of a woman who hates, but cannot live without, a very great deal of money. No one, not me, not Jack, not any of her peers, will be able to break through her caution.

I suspect Lydia will continue to live in the middle of nowhere, spearheading her charity events, taking occasional forays into the society that knows her. But it’s going to be a long, long time before she ever pokes her head out into the real world again and she may even, like her grandmother, simply build a smaller world composed of expensive walls, fawning friends and endless distractions as a barricade against the outside.

Especially if or when Lydia ever hears the news about her stepmother. God knows, I’m not going to be the one to tell her.

A month after Jake Talbot flew to Vienna and freedom, Susan Johnson Talbot did the very same thing. I know because Winslow told me. No one is really sure if her leaving to join her stepson proves that she had maternal instincts after all, or if it is evidence of a darker theory, one proposed to me by Marie Talbot, the grande dame of that all-too-rich family, one July night when she tried to hire me to investigate her daughter-in-law’s fidelity. My money is on the darker theory.

Regardless, I found a sort of justice in the news. I often imagine Jake Talbot, jetting from one European capital to another, endlessly pursued by a drunken woman who persists in sitting beside him wherever he goes, her champagne glass constantly toppling over to spill across the first class cabin carpet as her slurred voice asks, “Where are we going next?” Bon voyage.

The events of that summer killed Marie Talbot. Or, at least, pushed her over the edge. She had been battling liver cancer, as it turns out, so perhaps she came by her bile honestly. She was a marvelous old lady, but a ruthless one as well. I’m surprised she didn’t manage to cut a deal with Mr. Death before she left.

When she died, she left behind instructions stipulating that she be buried in a $75,000 bright red Viper sports car. It was an appropriate choice, I do believe, for one so filled with venom. But a sad day, indeed, for sports car enthusiasts. It’s said that, at the funeral service, grown men burst into tears when the first, clods of dirt hit the fiberglass roof, and that they were still sobbing about it three days later. No matter. Both Marie Talbot and her Viper had run out of gas.

She still had a surprise left in store for me, however. A week after her death, a messenger arrived at my office with an envelope from one of Raleigh’s biggest law firms. Inside was a check for $5,000 and a hand-written note from the old lady, to be delivered to me after her death: “I once said to you that all you had was your honor. Congratulations on keeping it, despite my son’s best efforts. I envy you. You have more than all of us combined. How I wish that we could trade places and I could have your youth and you, well, you could have all of this. It means nothing in the end. Enclosed is a check for your fees and expenses. This is to give you a choice. I hope you will forgive me for my role in the flight to Vienna. He is, after all, my grandson and family is all I have left to care about. Sincerely, Amelia Marie Ball Talbot”

I was touched she had remembered me and I understood what she meant about a choice. Later, I made the right one.

As for Randolph Talbot, he now lives alone in one of the big houses on the top of the hill, surrounded by his wrought-iron fence. I can’t decide if he’s trying to keep memories in or bad news out. Sometimes I wonder what he thinks about, late at night, after the servants are gone, when his obedient executives are home with their families,

when even his lawyers have taken their leave. Does he sit there in his huge library, dwarfed by acres of books and costly possessions, and realize that he is now completely alone? Does he wonder if the choices he has made are worth it? Does he even care?

Or, does he contemplate the fact that he inadvertently turned in his own son? Because I am convinced that Randolph Talbot had no idea that his son was guilty of rape. I think he only knew that Jake was behaving erratically and may have had something to do with Nash’s death. And knowing that, he {win my gr had chosen to protect his son instead of choosing to help his daughter find justice. As a result, he tried to buy me and failed. He succeeded only in putting me on his son’s trail.

I wonder if he realizes this? I think so. I sent him a coded message soon after the case ended. I spoke eloquently in his language. I suspect he understood.

Turning over the Talbot rock was a lot like rolling a boulder over the side of a cliff into a lake. The splash the Talbots made that summer in Durham and the ripples that radiated outward for months affected the lives of almost everyone who had come in contact with them.

The young redhead I saved from Jake Talbot wrote me a thank-you note, being a proper young southern lady. She thanked me for rescuing her and told me she was switching her major to medicine. She’d fallen in love with hospital life while there. But that was not all. She’d also fallen in love with the hunky Cherokee emergency room attendant, and now they were dating. He’d given her a bear-claw necklace of her own for strength. Some people have all the luck.

About a month after they received their settlement from T&T, Horace Hargett and his son both died from lung cancer on the very same day. I imagine it was God’s way of telling old Mrs. Hargett that she had done her part and it was time to lay down her burden. Two million dollars isn’t the most money in the world, but it was the start of a new one for the surviving Hargetts. Burly keeps up with them in memory of his brother. All those little Hargetts will get to go to college now, at least many years down the road and, in the meantime, they’ll be able to enjoy running water and something besides grits for dinner. They won’t have to grow up like I did. It was an unexpected legacy that the dying Hargetts were able to leave behind for their families. Thanks, in large part, to Tom Nash, who had given up what was his due in order for them to gain justice.

Donald Teasdale was reinstated as head of T&T’s marketing department after Cosgrove decamped for L.A. But he got fired again after the disastrous debut of a new company ad campaign that cost T&T forty-two million dollars and ten percent of their total market share. They should have asked me. I could have told them that no one wanted to buy cigarettes from a dancing pink pussycat. They’d gotten their subliminal signals crossed, for godsakes.

Bobby’s investment banker client eventually lost his cheating boyfriend to an aerobics instructor, but found true love— all thanks to Bobby D. and me. We were sitting in the office one boring afternoon when two of our cases collided. We’d finally been able to prove that a client’s husband was two-timing her with a man, and we’d taken the pictures to prove it. It was going to be a costly divorce for the hubby, and he was not pleased. He burst in the front door, intending to demonstrate to Bobby that being gay didn’t mean you couldn’t pound the crap out of another human being. Fortunately for us all, kismet struck.

Bobby’s investment banking client had stopped by a few minutes before with a check for services rendered, and the two men met {e t got coming and going. They looked at one another, birds burst out in song, a fight was averted, coffee was offered and, several months later, the two men moved in together. They make a nice couple. Even Bobby’s female client was happy. She got her fat settlement without any trouble. What did her soon-to-be ex-husband care? He was living with an investment banker and they were loaded.

Maynard Pope, Durham’s arson investigator, retired shortly after the resolution of the Nash case. His new hobby is making barbecue sauce. He experiments with secret recipes, and participates regularly in competitions around the state. How that man can stand there—after all he saw in his long career—chowing down one charred rib after another, will forever be beyond my comprehension.

Even Dudley, the supposedly blind newsstand smooth operator managed to be caught up in the Talbot tornado that fall. He slipped on a wet spot in the lobby while coming to work one day, pitched headlong in front of the coffee vendor’s booth, caught his foot on the cord of an electric percolator and plunged headfirst into the waterfall pool. By the time they fished him out from his electrifying experience, all of his hair had fallen out, he couldn’t speak, his right leg was numb and he’d broken his left arm in two places. He recovered his speech a week later, just in time to negotiate a tidy settlement from Randolph Talbot in lieu of bringing a personal injury case against T&T. Dudley went home $600,000 richer and, I am sure, now has more than one younger girlfriend to depend on.

People had paired up all around me during that long, hot summer. By winter, we had all met with varying degrees of success at our attempts at couplehood.

Doodle got married to his new girlfriend and they had a big wedding. I was not invited. I guess his mama thought I might clash with the color scheme. I feel sorry for Doodle’s wife, however. No matter what color she is, she’s going to have her hands full with that mama-in-law.

Marcus got married, too. This time I was a bridesmaid. Marcus took pity on me and let me pick out my own gown. It had shoulders this time, and no cabbage-patch hips and was a deep blue to highlight my once-again bottled blond hair. My only concession to fashion was a modest bustle on my butt, which I wore only because my gluteus maximus is so flat that I and I alone could pull it off.

Marcus and his engineer stood before us, resplendent in their matching tuxedos, as they pledged to love one another forever. The church was filled with sobs of joy from his sisters and hallelujahs from his devoted mother. I think she’d figured out that an engineer’s salary can go a long way indeed when you’re putting your new siblings-in-law through college.

Burly was my date. He looked hot, hot, hot. We danced the night away at the reception. Marcus had gone whole hog and sprung for one of the large banquet rooms at the Governor’s Inn. We took over the center of the dance floor and Burly was smokin’. He wheeled his chair around and around in circles while the crowd urged him on and I did an impromptu hoochie-koochie dance beside him. The fe {e hnd hair. stivities were brought to a halt briefly when my bustle got caught in one of his wheels during a down-slither and ripped from the back of my dress, exposing my control-tops. But Marcus’s mama pinned her hat over the hole and we continued the party until the wee hours of the morning.

I like to think I haven’t lost a friend with Marcus getting married. I’ve just gained someone who can fix my toilet when it overflows.

Lydia broke Jack’s heart in record time and I’m not even sure that they ever even slept together. If not, it was a first—and probably a last—for Mr. Jack McNeill. I wasn’t surprised. She was looking for distraction, he was searching for true love. A recipe for disaster. Jack took the heartbreak in stride, since it gives him a good story to tell on those slow nights when not much is going on at the bar and he’s in the mood to reminisce pathetically about lost love.

Bobby eventually found out that Fanny had more money than God. I’m sad to report it made a difference. Suddenly, all the wonderful, silly little things they loved to do together seemed cheap and childish to Bobby. He felt she deserved more. I tried to get it through his thick head that if Fanny didn’t care about the difference in their incomes, why the hell should he? He was inconsolable—and insecure—for weeks until Fanny hit on a solution.

She moved to Florida. Smart woman. Now she flies Bobby D. down every month for a week and lavishes money on him while he is there. They wine, they dine, they play with his underwater, super-sonar pinging and singing devices to their hearts’ content. Then, when he starts to get uptight about his self-respect, she puts him on a plane and sends him back to me.