The Debra Dilemma (The Lone Stars Book 4) (22 page)

She sighed long and hard, like the weight of feminism was on her shoulders. “I don’t need you or anyone to take care of me.”

“I understand that, but it still doesn’t change the fact that I plan on doing it forever.” And okay, maybe already started. Checking with Ben at Safe Place to make sure that she’d arrived safely wasn’t so much taking care of her as keeping himself sane. Plus, Ben had agreed to keep it on the DL so what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her or him.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what I say, you’re still going to try and take care of me.”

She thought about it for a second. “Don’t tell anyone, but that’s really cool.”

“It’s just one of the many services I provide.” He put his hand over his heart and bowed his head. It seemed like so little and she deserved so much.

“I want to believe that my father did this out of love, but I’m not buying it.” She picked the medical file up and moved it over to the side. She flipped the cover of the next file. She sat up. “This is my mother’s will.”

As she read, he could all but see her claws coming out. She ground out a breath. “Just when I think that he’s gone and done something loving, he goes and does something like this.”

She slammed her hand down on the handwritten document.

“What happened?” He picked up her hand and gently pulled the file out from under it. He scanned the document. “I don’t understand. Wait, your mother owned five percent of Apple and gave it back to Steve Jobs when she died?”

Damn, he’d have loved to have met Debra’s mother. The woman appeared to have been quite the businesswoman.

“Yeah, I don’t think so…I mean, yes, she owned the stock, but I don’t think it was ever given back to Uncle Steve.” She pointed to the file he was holding. “Or that the ten million that was supposed to go to my Aunt June was ever given to her.”

“Hold on. You called Steve Jobs “Uncle Steve”? I don’t even know what to say to that.” Every time he turned around more of her unreal life smacked him in the face. “Uncle Steve…you have to tell me that story.”

She shook her head and rolled her eyes. He was missing something here. Oh yes, her Aunt June.

“So you think that your father didn’t honor your mother’s will?” He nodded to the file. “But it would have been out of his hands. Her attorney would have taken care of it.”

“Notice how it’s handwritten and everything. He was the executor—she trusted my father, which bit her in the butt on more than one occasion. I know that Aunt June didn’t get that money. She’d have mentioned it.” She rolled her eyes again. “It would have made her life so much better.”

“From what you’ve told me of Aunt June, I don’t think so. She sounds like someone whose life it wouldn’t have changed at all.” It had taken him a long time to realize that some people weren’t motivated by money and didn’t really care for the things it could buy. Debra certainly didn’t care about money. Neither did Grace or Summer. Come to think of it, Sweet Louise and Laney fell into that category too. No wonder they loved Debra so much. They all had similar belief systems. None of them cared about money or status.

Slowly her head turned and she looked up at him. “You’re right. She really didn’t care about money. In fact, she would have probably donated it and never spent a dime for herself.”

“What did she do for a living…before she got sick?” He would have loved to have met Aunt June. He wished that he could do something for her as a thank you for taking care of Debra. “Does she have any family?”

Maybe he could give them the ten million she should have inherited.

“No, I wish.” She smiled to herself. “She worked for Goodwill in job training. You’re right. She would have given away whatever money my mother left her. Still, it should have been her decision.”

He would give the money to Goodwill in her honor and he wasn’t about to tell Debra. This was between him and June…and Goodwill.

“When Aunt June died she left her little house on the East Side to me. After AJ, I couldn’t stand to live there and I couldn’t afford the utilities. I rented it to a nice family. On Christmas Eve, a year into their lease, I gave it to them. Come to think of it, that was the last Christmas present I’ve given to anyone in a decade.” Her eyes screwed up. “That’s really sad.”

“It’s not sad. It’s fantastic. I bet that family was so grateful.” Okay, it was a little sad that she hadn’t had anyone for which to buy a gift, but she was missing the point of the story. “I would have loved to see the looks on their faces when you handed them the title.”

Confusion muddled her face. “I don’t know. I was living on a boat in the Caribbean. I guess I should have done it in person.”

“I bet, even now, they would love to tell you how much it means to them.” He couldn’t imagine anyone not being grateful.

“Maybe, I know they still live there, because I drive by every once and a while and see them out working in the yard. They have two children—a boy and a girl. The boy, Taylor, was born a couple of months before AJ. I don’t remember the girl’s name, but she’s two years older.” By the look on her face, her mind was so far away.

Was she thinking about their child?

“I think I’ll stop and say hello the next time I drive by.” She nodded to herself.

“I’d love to go with you, if you’d let me.” He checked his watch. “We could go this afternoon.”

“That would be so much fun. I can’t wait.” She took the folder with the will in it. “Okay, let’s see who else my father screwed out of their rightful inheritance.” A half smile hooked the left corner of her mouth. “I think I’ll double whatever my mother wanted to give away and use only money from my father’s private account to pay for it. He might have cared about me, but he sure as hell didn’t care about anyone else.”

“I’d hang on to that Apple stock. It’s not like Steve Jobs can use the money now anyway.” He loved the way the new Debra thought. She was willing to accept that her father had her medical records because he cared, but she was going to make him pay for his past deeds.

Whether he liked it or not, Debra had a strong sense of justice and she loved to dole it out with a heavy hand. As long as he stayed on the right side of things, he was okay with it.

Debra took a deep breath and leaned back in her father’s old trophy room chair. She twisted and untwisted the glass bead necklace around her neck.

“What do you think?” Warren gestured grandly toward the great black bear who’d they’d discovered was on castors and was now standing in the middle of the room with a stuffed toucan on his shoulder, a gold clip-on earring she’d found in her father’s top desk drawer clipped to his left ear, and an eye patch made out of a sticky-note covering his right eye. “His name is Black Jack Beary Pirate of the Care-Bear-ribbean.”

“You have way too much free time on your hands.” She glanced at the metal lockbox, the only thing left from her father’s safe that she hadn’t sorted through. “What do you suppose a man puts in a metal lockbox inside a secret safe?”

“Either something he really, really wants to keep safe or something that he hopes no one will ever find.” He patted Black Jack Beary on the chest. “We should keep him. Think of all of the Halloween possibilities.”

She chose to ignore the last sentence.

“I can’t think of anything more important to my father than the gold, money, and stocks we found.” She’d found the key that she thought fit the box in the same desk drawer where she’d found the lone gold hoop earring. Shoving the key in the lock, she was about to turn it when a terrible idea popped into her head. “You don’t suppose that he was a serial killer and this is his trophy box.”

Warren stopped dead in his tracks.

“This is a trophy room.” He looked around. “The man sure did love him some trophies.”

“What if it’s full of human ears that my father cut off of his victims?” Unfortunately she couldn’t rule that out.

“Or maybe it’s your dad’s Unabomber sunglasses and hoody. Now we can prove that Ted Kaczynski was nothing but a patsy.” He shook his head. “I’ve been to the Newseum and seen the shack that man supposedly lived in. He had to be bat-shit crazy because no sane person pees in a bucket by choice. Years without a real shower.…” he gagged, “Crazy is the only explanation.”

For a second there she wondered if the lockbox was booby-trapped and then rolled her eyes. She was being overly melodramatic. Even if her father could have figured out how to booby-trap it, he’d have blown his thumb off opening the box.

Warren came to stand behind her. “I’m like eighty-percent sure that your father wasn’t a serial killer.”

“That’s comforting.” She turned the key and the lock clicked. She pushed the small lever to the left and the top sprang open.

She’d expected bars of platinum or cakes of uranium, but not photos. She picked up a stack. Family photos. On the top was a candid shot of her mother and father kissing. Judging by the white gown, veil, and tuxedo, she could tell it was their wedding day, but this picture wasn’t in the family wedding album. This was two people with excited eyes sharing a quick kiss. She flipped to the next picture. It was her mother in a hospital bed holding a newborn Debra. Her mother’s face held exhausted awe. Debra knew that feeling.

The next one was of her at—she couldn’t have been more than two-years-old— straddled on her father’s shoulders and reaching up to pick a peach off one of the trees in the backyard. They both looked so happy. It seemed that things had gone downhill from there.

The next picture was of her sitting in bed with her mother as they read
Hush Little Baby
. Debra had to have been four or five. Once her mother had told her that her father read it to her every night when she was a baby. She’d forgotten that. She’d called the book Hush A Baby and she remembered loving it so much.

That book must be around here somewhere. After she finished here, she’d go find it.

She flipped to the next picture. She knew it was her first day of kindergarten. There she was with her first backpack and lunchbox leaning over the hospital bed where her mother reclined, to give her a kiss. Debra had been six. She’d forgotten that was the year that her mother started sleeping in a hospital bed in a separate room.

The next photo was of Debra age ten holding the soccer trophy she’d won and standing next to her mother, who looked pale and weak, sitting in a wheelchair. Had that been right before or after her mother’s kidney transplant?

“That’s your mother?” Warren pulled one of the wingchairs from the other side of the desk over and sat down.

“Yes.” She traced her mother’s hollow cheekbones and her sunken eyes. Unfortunately, she only remembered her mother with hollow cheekbones and sunken eyes.

“She was sick even then?” He studied the picture.

“She was sick her whole life. Most cases of type one diabetes aren’t as severe as hers.” Grief over the loss of her mother reared its ugly head and threatened to swallow her. It had been over fifteen years since her mother’s death, but sometimes it felt like yesterday. What she wouldn’t give for just five more minutes with her mother. Just one more hug. Another kiss. To smell that blend of orange and vanilla that was the perfume she had especially made for her in Paris. No matter how old Debra got, she would still miss her mother. “Once, when my father was particularly mad at me, he told me that her having me is what made her sicker and eventually killed her. Having me put too much stress on her kidneys and they finally gave out.” It had hurt then and it still hurt now. As an adult, she understood that the words had been said in anger, but the child inside of her never got over that.

“Are you sure your father’s really dead? I think we should dig up his body and kill him again just to make sure.” Warren gritted out the words.

She laughed through the tears burning her eyes. That was the right thing to say no matter how awful it was. Warren always knew what she needed to hear.

“Trust me, if he were alive, I wouldn’t be sitting here going through his stuff. He never let me anywhere near this safe.” Or anything he loved. She hadn’t been allowed within ten feet of the Jackson Pollock hanging in his office or his collection of Remington bronzes.

She cocked her head and picked up the picture of her parents’ wedding. “They looked so in love. What happened?”

Warren studied the picture. “Wow, they really do look like they’re in love. Clearly your father hadn’t acquired his asshole face yet.”

Her father had looked so young and carefree. “What had happened to turn him so mean? Was it me?”

That was the only thing that made sense. Her father had hated her because her mother had gotten sicker after having her.

“My first inclination is to say that your father was just a garden variety asshole, but on second thought, I’d say his assholery was anything but average.” Warren gently covered her hand with his. “Your father was a very unhappy person who didn’t understand how others could be happy so he worked at making people just as unhappy. You aren’t to blame for your mother’s death. No child should ever feel that way.” He thought about it for a second. “If you could have, would you have traded places with AJ and taken his illness on yourself?”

“In a heartbeat.” She couldn’t imagine any mother not wanting to trade places with their dying child.

“Don’t you think your mother felt the same?” He caught her gaze and held it.

“Not the same thing. I wasn’t a sick baby.” Most of her life, she’d just felt like she wasn’t wanted.

“If you’d had type one diabetes and wanted a child, knowing that it could have made you sicker, would you have done it?” His eyes stayed on her.

“Yes.” No hesitation or even thought.

“Looks like your mother felt the same way.” He sighed. “It sounds like your father needed to blame someone for your mother’s illness and since he couldn’t blame her, he chose you.” He grinned. “Just think of how your mother is probably raking him over the coals right now for the way he treated you.”

“That is some comfort.” Her mother might have turned a blind eye to the affairs, but she wouldn’t have let him get away with treating Debra the way that he had.