Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
“Mom!” Lorissa yelled as she jumped from her chair and lunged toward the bed. “You’re awake,” she said as she laid her head on her mother’s chest and burst into tears.
Laurie did the only thing she could think of, she laid her hand on her daughter’s back and soothed her crying child. When Lorissa raised her head, she wiped her tears, and smiled sadly at her mother. “I was starting to get worried.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Peter attacked you on Friday, and today is Thursday.”
“Oh, wow, I’m sorry for worrying you.” They looked up when the door opened, and several people entered. The last to enter just after her mother was the cop she’d seen earlier. After the nurses did what they had to. Laurie was able to sit up, and looked at her daughter, her mother, and the police officer.
“First, thank you for telling us about the Nanny cameras you had installed in your home. They helped catch the attack on tape. I don’t think a police sting could have set it up better. Not only did you get it at the level it happened, but there were several angles. There are also clear images of Mr. Stanton’s face in the frames. There will be no disputing the allegations against him.”
“Is he arrested?”
“Unfortunately, no. We were able to trace his where abouts and it seems like after he attacked you, he headed directly to the airport where he got on a pre-arranged flight for the Bahamas. He isn’t due to return until this coming Saturday.”
“Did he go with his mother?” Laurie asked tiredly as she took a sip of the drink her daughter held to her lips. “Look into Beatrice Stanton. See if she had a flight to the same destination.”
“Do you have any idea why your ex-husband might have wanted you dead?”
“Money.”
“Excuse me?”
“Did I tell you I just went through a divorce, was that a dream?”
“You told me.”
“Okay, then I’m sure you looked into it, and that Lor and Mom were a help in answering questions?”
“Yes, they said you received a substantial amount in the divorce. Did you also receive the house?”
“No, that was mine before we married. All the money Peter had to pay to me was from a pre-nuptial agreement that his mother forced me to sign before she would allow me to marry her son.”
“You’re saying it came back to bite her in the ass?” The cop smirked and when the three women didn’t return it, he swallowed hard. “Can you elaborate in a nutshell?”
“One, if I stayed married for twenty-five years, then divorced, I was entitled to three million. Two, if I cheated the three million would become null and void. Three, if he cheated, then he had to pay me one thousand dollars for every time it happened. Not per woman, per act.” Laurie sighed heavily as she leaned back on her pillows just as heavily. “I don’t like to air my dirty laundry, but he stopped having sex with me when I got pregnant with Lorissa two years into our marriage. He flat out said that he didn’t fuck mothers, and not only looked for it elsewhere, but he acted on it. I suspected something and hired Powers and Associates. My sex life with my husband ended two years into the marriage. I refused to give him a divorce because I wanted to stick it to both Peter and Beatrice.”
She sipped her water again, shook her head, then gave an evil little grin to the officer, causing him to swallow hard.
“I stuck it out for another twenty-three years. My settlement from him was to the tune of five million dollars.”
“Wow, that’s a lot of pennies to be pissed about losing.”
“That’s not all,” Lois spoke from the other side of her daughter. She looked at the officer proudly. “My late husband’s grandfather started an investment company decades ago. When Laurie was in college, my husband brought her on as a partner, on paper only. As soon as she had her degree in her hand, she became an active employee. Since Beatrice Stanton shoved the pre-nuptial at them, my late husband countered with a contract of his own.”
“Which was?”
“As long as Laurie was married to Peter, Gibson Associates would give Stanton Enterprises one hundred thousand dollars a month to keep their doors opened. It is my understanding that as soon as the check Peter wrote cleared the bank, Laurie sent the proper paperwork that said she was cutting them off.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, I had Jason Shyster, my lawyer, draw up the paperwork when I went to him for the divorce. However, I had him wait until after the check cleared. I had like an eighty percent fear that it would bounce.”
The four of them stood there not knowing what to say next when Lorissa turned to her mother in shock. “Oh my god, Mom.”
“What?”
“What if Peter did this because he had a life insurance policy out on you? What if it was for the money he had to pay you in the divorce. Did you change any of your life insurance policies, and what about your will? Does it all go to him if you’re no longer on this earth?”
Laurie smirked at the way her daughter said if she had died. She reached out and gently took her daughter’s hand in hers. “Rest assured, Peter will get nothing. The week I found out he started cheating on me, I canceled the life insurance policy I had on him. I don’t know whether he knew it or not, but I did. The one I had on myself, I changed the beneficiary to you with Nana to oversee it if you weren’t of legal age. I couldn’t cancel the one Peter had on me, but I stopped paying the premiums on them. I’ll have to look, but I think I have a letter in the file at home that it was canceled due to lack of payment.”
“Would Peter know this?” the officer asked.
“No, he left all the bill paying to me. He might have thought that he still had a five-million-dollar life insurance policy on me, with him being the beneficiary. As far as I know, but again, I’ll have to check my files in my home office, I am about ninety-nine percent sure it was canceled almost twenty-two or three years ago.” She shook her head sadly. “As I said, Peter left all the household bills for me to pay, and since we were never behind on anything, I’m assuming he thought I kept up the premiums on his life insurance policy he had against me. I didn’t.”
“Is this guy really that clueless?” The officer looked at the expressions of the three women and sighed heavily. “Tell me.”
“Peter Stanton is selfish, but in the same sentence, you could say he’s a pushover. Early in my marriage when he listened to his mother and tried to put his foot down that I had to be a stay-at-home-wife after we got married, I laughed in his face. I told him if he wanted me to do that, then he had to actually go into the office and earn a paycheck. He worked for his father’s company. He was also so far up his mother’s ass, that I don’t think he knew how to breathe properly. Whatever Beatrice Stanton said he should do, he did it. I don’t think she told him to cheat on me, but I knew that she knew, but she didn’t do anything about it.
“I inherited the house, and told them both that I wouldn’t put up with her shit in my own home. She tried to move in with us, I put my foot down. Mom raised me to be independent and speak my mind. I refuse to let someone else tell me what to do in my own home. She would spout off all the time that it was, and I quote, ‘good for the family’. I told her repeatedly the only person that would benefit from her demands was her, and since she was only the mother-in-law, she wasn’t as important as she thought.”
The cop looked at them in shock, and saw they were telling the truth, he whipped his head around to Lorissa at her statement.
“Don’t forget what they tried to do to me.” She didn’t wait for him to ask his question. “Since we’re talking about the character of Peter and Beatrice Stanton, let me tell you what they tried to pull on me.”
“I hate to ask, but this is such a train wreck right now, I can’t look away. What did they try to do?”
“When I was around sixteen, I was talking to Mom about colleges. Peter was there. He must have said something to Beatrice, because a couple of days later Peter took me out to lunch, he never, and I mean never talked to me if he didn’t have to. We never interacted. Oh, and I know this is going off on a tangent, but when Mom got her divorce from Peter, I was given paperwork that I divorced him also. In the last couple of weeks, since I got the papers from the court, I’ve been going around and changing my name to Lorissa Gibson. I have no ties with Peter or any Stanton.” She looked at her mother with a grin. “I’m working with Jason to see if I can’t get my birth certificate changed. I don’t think I can, but we’re looking into it.”
“Wow, okay, what did they try to do with you?”
“Beatrice was already at the restaurant waiting for us. Stiff conversations were spoken, food ordered, then eaten. They didn’t gang up on me until after the meal was over. They bluntly told me that Mom had squandered all of Peter’s money and was starting on my college fund. They told me the only way I had any chance of attending college was if I took out student loans and made them the beneficiary of them.”
“I hope you talked to you mother about that?”
“I did, it took a couple of days, because I couldn’t wrap my head around the difference of what they said to how I knew my mother handled the finances. At that time, for all I knew Mom never lied to me. When I couldn’t handle the mental pressure I was giving myself, I went to Nana to tell her what they said. Boy, was she pissed.” She grinned at Lois and the three women shared a chuckle.
“I didn’t have access to the account on the computer, but I knew Lorissa had a college fund with my name as one of the beneficiaries. After hearing what Lor told me, I literally demanded my daughter come to my house so we could discuss it.”
“What happened?”
“Mom told me what Lorissa said, then she told me what Peter and Beatrice tried to do. I didn’t think an almost sixteen-year-old needed to know how much money she had in the bank, but when I stressed that the funds were to be used for college and expenses, and she agreed, only then did I show her the account.” She sighed and shook her head sadly.
“I received the house and some money from my maternal grandparents. When my paternal grandparents passed, I was left with a chunk of money. Since I’m in investments, I put half of it into an account to draw interest, and invested the other half. Whenever I made a profit, I put that into the account, and reinvested the initial amount.”
“Okay, I understood that. It’s like putting the interest in the account and starting over with the initial principal.”
“Correct, anyway, I was pregnant with Lorissa when Grandpa Gibson passed. Because Peter was a selfish bastard, he never went to the funeral, nor the reading of the will. Since I knew he’d already checked out of the marriage, I didn’t bother telling him about the inheritance. I knew I was having a girl, and I knew what her name would be, so before she was even born, I started the account for her. When I showed it to her, let’s just say that she could have attended Harvard for six years without making a dent in the account.”
The officer looked at her in shock. “Do you take on individual customers, or do you only invest for big businesses?”
“Big businesses mainly, but I could give you a pointer or two along the way.”
“I’ll look you up,” he handed her a business card. “Okay, to sum it up, with what you just told me, Peter Stanton had to pay you five-million-dollars as a divorce settlement, then he showed up at your home under the ruse that he’d left something there, and then attacked you. The video shows the two of you talking, then he grabbed a baseball bat leaning against the wall. As soon as you went to take a step, it looked like he was aiming for your head, but at the last minute he swung lower, taking out your knee, then pushing you. You fell down the stairs, hitting your head, and thankfully the Nanny cameras also had sound. We heard him making a call saying it was done.”
“Probably called Beatrice,” Laurie said, and the other two women agreed with them.
“Okay, I only have one more question, then I’ll get out of your hair. You said that the pre-nuptial agreement stated that if you stayed in the marriage for twenty-five years, you would receive three million. Then there was a price you’d receive if he cheated. What if he had left the marriage or if you had cheated?”
“One, I never would have cheated on him. Two, the cheating clause was put in because Beatrice didn’t think her perfect little boy, and that’s what he is, a little boy, would ever break something as sacred as marriage vows. No, she openly admitted that I would be the cheater in the relationship.”
“Understood, and if he initiated the divorce, what would he get?”
“Nothing, and the second he initiated it, the contract between Gibson and Stanton, where we paid them would be null and void immediately. We wouldn’t have had to wait until I had the final divorce decree in my hand to stop making payments. Then they would have to pay back everything Gibson Associates had given them. With me asking for the divorce, it just stopped being paid once the final judgement was received.”
“Was your father a lawyer?”
“Nope, he ran my investment firm. However, as much as he told me he didn’t trust Beatrice, I was foolish enough to stick to my guns that I was in love with the loser. I was just petty enough to stay in the marriage to make them pay in the end.”
The cop smirked and chuckled. “One more question? Where was Mr. Stanton? I mean Peter’s father, and Beatrice’s husband?”
“Oh, he was around. About ten years into my marriage, Peter Sr. died, but I later found out he embezzled money from the company for his weekend getaways with his latest conquest. When Beatrice confronted him about it all, the cheating, the embezzling, all of it, he took the easy way out and ended his own life. Beatrice has been running Stanton Enterprises ever since. I don’t know if they have been able to recoup all of what Senior embezzled, but I had heard in the business world they struggled, but Beatrice was turning it around. It adds up, I cut off their money, then I was attacked.”
“Thank you for being so open and honest with me, Ms. Gibson. I’ll report back to the team looking into this. I know the answer, but I have to ask officially. Will you be pressing charges.”
“Of course.” She stated it so matter-of-factly, that the officer shivered.
“I’ll see myself out.”