Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 02 - Rekindling Motives (13 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I WASN’T REALLY IN THE MOOD for food pantry work, but having Scoobie around was a reminder that more people depend on the pantry than I would have thought. I had asked Lance Wilson if he would meet me to go over the books for a few minutes and he’d asked that I come to his house. I had a second goal, which was to show him a couple of the ledgers to see what he thought about them, and I pushed them deep into my purse, so Aunt Madge would not glare at me about minding police business.

Lance’s tiny house two blocks from the ocean had often caught my eye, though I didn’t know it was his until now.
Heck, I didn’t know him. I figured it likely to be the smallest single family home in Ocean Alley, maybe no more than 600 square feet. The appraiser in my head took in its neat lot – part sand and part grass, all of it neatly landscaped – and the newer vinyl siding and roof. Given that he looked close to ninety and could have had the house paid for long ago, Lance could be sitting on the beach real estate version of a gold mine.

Lance let me in with a brief nod, not saying anything, and I walked down the hall to the tiny living room.
However, instead of the older person’s sitting room I had been expecting it was outfitted with a large screen TV and a couple of leather recliners, with a large collection of DVDs on a set of shelves along one wall. The hardwood floors were polished to a high sheen and there was a deep burgundy area rug in the middle of the room. There was barely room to turn around, but it was modern and functional.

As he came up behind me I turned to face Lance and took in his impish grin.
“Not what you were expecting is it?”

I shook my head.

“People think I’ll have shag carpet and easy chairs with doilies, but you don’t have to be twenty-five to enjoy a good New York Giants game.”

I grinned at him and nodded to the DVDs.
“Or watch a good movie.”

“Yep.” He gestured to a small table and chairs near the doorway, and I noticed a couple
of file folders and a small ledger not unlike the ones from the Fisher-Tillotson attic. “Let’s get started.”

Lance had records going bac
k fourteen years, when he became treasurer. “Don’t know anything about before that. The minister at the time kind of ran the pantry out of his hip pocket and on a wing and a prayer. More power to him,” he added.

He flipped to the back of a ledger.
“I don’t record the value of all the food items that come in. Meagan gives me a summary of each week’s donations, and she notes where they come from. What I pay most attention to are the cash donations and how we spend that. And I do a list of who gives cash or major food donations so we can do a thank-you letter. Aretha does those once a month, which is swell.”

Swell.
That’s a word you don’t hear a lot these days.
I smiled to myself as I glanced at the last few pages of the ledger. “It looks as if we get anywhere from $300 to more than $1,000 in cash each month.” I could see the pattern; more came in around the holidays.

He nodded.
“We use the cash especially for stuff kids like. The Food Bank in Lakewood is never going to send us enough jelly, chicken noodle soup, mac and cheese, or sandwich cookies. Not,” he glanced up at me, “that we buy a lot of junk food, but kids can’t eat just green beans. And twice a month Mr. Markle orders about 30 pounds of apples for us and we give those out the same week. Don’t have a place to store them.”

“Scoobie took me in to meet him a couple
of weeks ago.”

“He can be abrupt, but he’s really good about letting us order in bulk and charging us hardly more than he pays for the stuff.”
Lance shut the ledger. “You have any ideas for raising more money?”

I took a deeper breath.
“I liked a few of Scoobie’s ideas.” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t mean we should all go in the dunk tank,” I said quickly, “but maybe a bunch of kids from the high school would do it.”

He nodded, seemingly relieved.
“I know the churches do special collections for us every month, but do we go to the service clubs, like Lions or Rotary?”

“Hmmm.
Hadn’t thought about going to them. Kiwanis send us a check for fifty dollars every December.”

“I wondered, I mean we don’t have a huge volunteer base,” I said, not wanting to seem to be criticizing someone who had given a lot of time to the pantry.

Lance chuckled, “And it’s not too spry.”

“True, nor am I now,” I said, gesturing to the donut I was sitting on.
“I thought maybe some of the groups would do some kind of fundraiser for us. You know, fun stuff that would raise some money and get people to know us better.”

“You mean, like a bake sale?” he asked.

“Well…more like a silent auction or pancake breakfast. I don’t know.” The idea of asking service clubs for help seemed good, but maybe it was lame.

He surprised me by slapping his palm on the table.
“By golly, you’re right. I didn’t think of either of those things. They can be in charge of thinking of what to do. Now let’s see,” his smile faded a bit. “Course, everyone I knew in Lions is either dead or up at the nursing home.”

“You don’t need to know them, just ask if you can come to a meeting to make a presentation.
People came to my Rotary Club in Lakewood all the time to ask for money for their charities.”

Lance thought about this.
“I’ll talk to Doctor Welby and Sylvia about it.”

My instinct was to say we didn’t need their permission, but I remembered my goal to make this a participative committee.
“Great, thanks.”

There was a short pause and he added, almost gruffly, “We’ll be coming into a little money, of course.”

I’m sure my expression was blank, because he continued, “From Mary Doris Milner.”

“Oh!”
Memories of her death came flooding back, and I felt my eyes prickle with tears.

“Good friend of mine she was.”
He cleared his throat. “She was several years older than me. When you’re kids that seems like half a lifetime, but we got close as we got older. Got so we were the only two from our generation at those annual high school alumni dinners. When she went in the home I quit going.”

Sensing he was close to tears and might not want to cry in front of me, I said, “It was very generous of her to leave us something.”
Us, I’m calling the food pantry group us
. “Do you, uh, know about how much it is?”

He cleared his throat more loudly and pulled one of the manila folders toward him and opened it.
“The initial donation is $40,000, to let us heavy up the electric and add some refrigeration cases so we can get milk and eggs. That was her specific intent.” He looked down at the legal-looking forms. “Then she’s set up an endowment of $200,000, but it can only spend the interest each year.”

I sat back in my chair, thunderstruck, as Uncle Gordon would have said.
I had not fully grasped the positive aspects of that term, having most recently associated it with learning of Robby’s gambling debts. “Kept that little secret, did you?”

He looked up at me sharply, and then seemed to relax as he didn’t see sarcasm or anger on my face.
“I only just learned of it yesterday. When you called to see about getting together I figured you’d seen the lawyer’s letter, too.” He pointed to my name as one of the three people getting the letter, the others being Reverend Jamison and him.

I shook my head slowly.
“Maybe they sent it to the church.” I was silent for what seemed like quite awhile to me. “This is great, but,” I didn’t want to sound ungrateful, “it really doesn’t change our financial picture much, does it?”

He nodded.
“She was smart, Mary Doris. Getting those refrigerators is really important, but my guess is she didn’t want to just give us a lot of money we’d spend and then have to put our hands out again.”

“Yes, but her gift will call a lot of attention to us.
Maybe someone else will think of us for their will.”

“Preferably earlier,” he said, dryly.

I laughed. “Right. Goodness,” my thoughts were swirling and my laugh died. “We’ll have to do a press release. We should do a brochure so other people can have something to look at if they’re thinking of giving. And, and…”

He was grinning broadly.
“You’re really going to tackle this. I figured Reverend Jamison must know you better than that guy at the newspaper.”

WHEN I WOKE UP the next day I lay still and watched Jazz’s breathing as she slept on my stomach.
I’d given up trying to convince her to sleep on a towel at the foot of the bed and finally went to sleep each night with an empty pillow case on my stomach so she didn’t get the comforter dirty.

I was so astonished at Mary Doris’ gift to the food pantry that I had forgotten to show Lance the small ledgers.
This thought morphed into a fast mental list of what I needed to do at the food pantry.
What did you get yourself into?
My unspoken question issued in the form of an internal yell.

I shifted to my side and Jazz slid off onto the comforter and gave me a sleepy look.
Then she walked over and put a paw on my nose to see if I was going to get up to feed her. When that did not look promising she settled into a ball near the crook of my neck.

I stared at the small bookshelf I had recently bought to store notebooks and files in addition to a few books.
I had drafted a brief press release sitting in Aunt Madge’s kitchen and she had added a paragraph on the food pantry’s history. Who could I get to take charge of “heavying up” the electric, as Lance had referred to it, and buying refrigerated cases? Doctor Welby’s face floated through my mind.

I sat straight up in bed and Jazz swatted me.
“Wait a minute.” How could I have not thought of this? Lance Wilson said he had known Mary Doris Milner well.
I could ask Lance about Mary Doris and Richard Tillotson.
Smiling I slid my legs out of the bed and reached for the packet of cat treats on the bedside table.

WHEN ANNIE MILNER CALLED later that morning her frosty tone caught me off guard.
I was in Harry’s office going over a couple of appraisal prospects to see which ones were one-story homes. “Aunt Mary Doris’ attorney just sent me the information on her bequests. It looks as if you’ll be handling the donation to the food pantry.”

“Yes, we’re really grate…” I began.

“It was one of her last bequests,” she said. “I wasn’t aware of it until this morning.”

Did she expect me to feel guilty?
I kept silent, no longer sure what direction the conversation would take.

“I suppose you’ll want to know when the funds will go to
the pantry?” she asked, in an I’m-an-attorney-and-I-know-what-I’m-talking-about tone.

“Ultimately, yes, but I don’t want you to have to deal with this now.
It must be…”

She interrupted again.
“I’m just looking down the road. I’d like to get all the estate stuff as wrapped up as possible before I begin my campaign in earnest.”

Stress can do funny things to people, I acknowledged to myself, and Annie had seemed very close to her great aunt.
Still, I didn’t like her attitude. “I know the others on the board would say we want to make this as easy for you as possible.”
Bitch
. “Lance Wilson said he’d known your aunt nearly all his life.”

It was as if a wave had washed over her and Annie had come out of the roil as a different person.
“You must think I’m uncaring,” she said. “I just want to stop thinking of Aunt Mary Doris in terms of an estate to be settled and get back to my memories of her.”

How could I have called this woman a bitch?
“Makes perfect sense to me. I can contact her lawyer directly to make the arrangements.” I could, or maybe Doctor Welby would do it for me.

There was a brief silence, and I broached the topic that was serving as the elephant in the room.
“I’m truly sorry your aunt’s death was, well, that it does not seem to have been a natural one.”

She seemed to brush that off as easily as if I’d said ‘please accept my sympathy.’
“I don’t believe the police,” she said, frost in her voice again. “They must have read some report wrong.”

Even I, a master at ‘ignore-it-and- it-will-go-away’ thought her logic was as likely to hold true as a crab surviving long on a hot beach.
“I hope you’re right,” was all I said. I wasn’t about to ask her who she thought would kill her aunt.

As I hung up the phone Harry looked at me questioningly.
He spent a lot of time in Ocean Alley as a kid, this house he was remodeling having been his grandparents’. But he didn’t live here full-time until after he retired, so he had not known Mary Doris or her background. I talked to him a bit after we found the photo albums in the attic, but he had apparently had a longer conversation with Aunt Madge more recently. “She’s not taking her aunt’s death well, I take it?” he asked.

“I guess not.
I mean, who would?” I paused. “She’s just a lot more focused on her work and her aunt’s estate than I would be a couple of days after Aunt Madge died.”

“May that be a long time away,” he said lightly, turning on his computer.
I keep waiting for Harry and Aunt Madge to become an item, as she would say, but they don’t give any indication that they are more than good friends.
Too bad.

“I’m heading out to check out that bungalow on
F Street,” I said, picking up the folder of information and heading for the door.

“Look out for
George Winters if you go to the courthouse.” He smiled as he caught my eye. “He calls here almost every day. Maybe he’s getting sweet on you.”

I almost snorted at Harry.

DUCKING GEORGE WINTERS IS never easy, and I can’t avoid the courthouse, since that’s where I look up the information on prior home sales that I use to reach an opinion on the value of whatever house I’m appraising. I was in the Register of Deeds Office looking at some older sales records for bungalows near the one I was appraising when he came in with a pleased-as-punch expression on his face. He nodded at one of the women at a desk near the door and as I glanced at her she blushed.
He’s got her tipping him off when I’m in here.

He sidled up next to me at the counter and I finally looked to the right and saw his wide grin.
George Winters is not much older than I am, but he dresses like a high school kid, except he wears khakis instead of cut-offs. I eyed his long shirt for a second – an expensive pullover that was a cross between a dark green t-shirt and a sports jersey – and then went back to the home sale information in front of me.

“C’mon Jolie.
If you don’t see me for a couple of days you miss me.”

“As much as I miss stepping on sand crabs on the beach,” I said, not looking up.

He drummed his fingers on the counter for a second. “Did you get a look at any of those old ledgers Scoobie has? Do they have information about Peter Fisher’s business?”

I turned to face him.
“There is nothing up there that relates to the skeleton. I told you before, the attic has some antiques and old furniture, and…”

“What about those photo albums you were taking to Mary Doris Milner the day she died?”
The look on George’s face had gone from that of a person bantering with a buddy to that of reporter on the prowl – very intense.

I sat my pencil on the counter.
“How old do you think Mary Doris is…was?”

“Ninety-four, I wrote her obit.
Outlived almost everyone she knew.”

“Right.
So of all the Fisher and Tillotson friends who were in those old albums, how many do you think are alive?” I was thinking fast here.

“Could be zip.
What’s your point?”