Chapter 25
Therese had gone down to the inn’s reception desk and begged the loan of a cell phone adapter from the chilly-faced clerk, who threatened to add a surcharge to their room if it wasn’t returned the next day. She bought a pint of Guinness in the lounge and took it back to the room.
She spent the rest of the evening alternating between trying to do online research on her phone, and sorting and reading Kathleen’s letters to Tommy Connor. At some point she dozed off, only awakening to the soft ping of an incoming text message on her cell phone.
Startled, she scrabbled around on the bed until she found the phone under a stack of the old letters. She peered at the incoming text. It was from an unfamiliar number with a Savannah area code.
Hey Therese. Scott Childress here. Not sure what time it is there in Ireland but love to talk when it’s convenient.
Her fingers raced over the keyboard.
I can talk now.
Her phone rang a minute later.
“That was fast,” she said.
“Hope I’m not interrupting your vacation,” he said.
“Hi, Scotty. Not at all. I’m just doing some family research.”
“That’s great. I tried reaching Maeve first, but didn’t get a response.”
“Believe it or not, my little sister is out on a d-a-t-e tonight.”
“Good for her,” he said.
Huh, Therese thought. She’d always believed Scott Childress had a crush on her little sister, but the news that Maeve had a date didn’t seem to faze him.
“How’s the research going?” he asked. “Find out anything about your mysterious family portrait?”
“We managed to track down a cousin—her dad was my great-grandmother’s only surviving brother.
She’d saved all the letters our great-grandmother Kathleen wrote to her father after she left Ireland for the US.
And she actually gave them to us. I’ve been sitting in our room all night, reading them.
It’s unbelievable, the stuff she went through. ”
“I’ll bet,” Scotty said.
“Do you have any news for us?” Therese asked. “About Mom’s house stuff?”
“I’ve got some news, but it’s kinda mixed.”
Therese sighed. “Hit me.”
“Your aunt Bernie called. She did as Maeve asked and dug through the boxes of files in the storage room at the house. She found a folder with dozens and dozens of solicitation letters from Brother Jerome at Showers of Blessings. He was quite the communicator. It looks like they were all form letters with your mom’s name filled in, though, so I’m not sure we could make a case that this guy knew Mary Helen was elderly and vulnerable. So that’s a problem.”
“Fuck,” Therese said, flopping backward on the narrow bed. “Whoops. Sorry for the salty language, Scotty.”
“Don’t apologize. I had the same reaction.”
“How about the bank? Can we go after them for failing to stop an obviously impaired old lady from draining her savings account?”
“Truthfully? It’s not looking good,” he said. “Thanks to your uncle Keith I did get a printout of all Mary Helen’s bank transactions over the past two years, and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy.”
“Why not? Keith is executor of her estate, and I know he’s always banked at Southern States.
Hell, our whole family has always banked there.
Mama marched me in there when I turned fourteen to open my first savings account with my summer babysitting money.
Every soul in that bank knows us. Well, maybe not me, since I moved away, but they all certainly knew Mama. ”
“Times are changing,” Scotty said. “Word around Savannah is that Southern States might be acquired by one of those big regional banks that have swallowed up all the rest of the locals. Right now they’re the last real community bank in town.”
“Is Hoot Wooten still president of the bank? I think his daughter was in Maeve’s class at St. Mary’s.”
Howard “Hoot” Wooten IV was the latest of a long line of Wootens to run Southern States Savings and Loan, which his grandfather had helped found in the 1950s.
“For now. I’ve emailed him and left some phone messages, but haven’t heard back. Anyway, I’ve got Mary Helen’s transaction records. One good thing about your mom, she was a creature of habit. Every Friday, around two, she was at that bank, even after she retired.”
“Payday at Dunagin’s Pharmacy,” Therese said. “I remember.”
“She apparently didn’t trust ATMs,” Scotty went on. “Almost always went to the same teller, a woman named Arletha Carter.”
“Letha. They were buddies. Mama took her tomatoes from the garden, knitted a baby blanket when she had her first grandchild.”
“Eighteen months ago, your mom started withdrawing money from her savings account. Before that, she rarely touched that account, with the exception of a withdrawal two years earlier of fifty-eight hundred dollars.”
Therese’s stomach knotted, and her cheeks burned at the memory, because she knew all too well where that money had gone.
“At first she was only withdrawing a hundred dollars a week. But it was every week,” Scotty said.
“And then, by December, it was five hundred dollars a week, and by January, it was a thousand a week. This went on until she’d almost drained the account.
I matched up the withdrawals to the solicitation letters from Brother Jerome.
Every time she sent a donation, the church would send a cute little thank-you card, and then right after that, the next letter would tell her how great the church’s need was to be able to continue their ‘ministry.’ They needed a new bus to transport children to Sunday school, or a new roof for the sanctuary, or money to send missionaries to spread the good word in Central America. ”
“More like a new Mercedes for Brother Jerome,” Therese quipped.
“Nah. He’s got a Bentley, and a Jag,” Scotty said. “The urgency of the needs escalated, and so did your mom’s donations. They’d send her cheap little trinkets, a keychain, a vinyl sticker with a Bible verse, a coffee mug…”
“‘Jesus loves you and so do we!’” Therese said. “I found it in her dishwasher first night I came home. The handle was broken off and the rim was chipped all to hell. I threw it out.”
“That coffee mug probably cost Mary Helen about forty-two grand by the look of the bank transaction records,” Scotty said. “Anyway, after her savings were tapped out, Jerome kept up the pressure. And it looks like that’s when your mom decided to take out a new mortgage on the house.”
“Over three hundred thousand,” Therese said bitterly. “It’s still unbelievable to me. I wonder what she and my daddy paid for that house when they bought it back in the ’70s?”
“I checked the county records. They paid thirty-eight thousand, eight hundred dollars,” Scotty said.
“Why, in the name of God, did that bank approve a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage for a woman her age?” Therese asked. “Why?”
“From the bank’s perspective, it was a no-brainer. Your mom’s credit rating was solid gold. They did an appraisal, and the house appraised above that.”
Therese stood up and paced around the tiny room. For lack of anything better to do, she began folding the letters and placing them back in the faded cardboard carton in which Isabel Woods had so tenderly saved them for so many decades.
“Scotty, is there any good news? At all?”
He let out an extended sigh. “I’m not giving up. I went to the bank, to try to talk to Arletha Carter, but it seems like she’s no longer employed there, and nobody was willing to tell me where she’s gone.”
“Wait. Letha left? She was at that bank forever. And I know she doesn’t have a husband to support her. That’s one of the things Mama admired about her, that she was a single mom raising two kids, just like her.”
“You don’t happen to know her contact info, do you?”
“I don’t, but maybe you could get Bernie to check the house. Mama used to have this little notebook she used as an address book. Ironically, it was a freebie from the bank. Bernie will remember it. Ask her to check the junk drawer in the kitchen.”
“I’ll do that. And maybe you can ask Maeve if she has Letha’s contact info?”
“For sure,” Therese said. She glanced down at her phone. It was getting late, nearly midnight. Should she be getting worried about her little sister? She walked to the window and stared out at the darkened parking lot.
Worrying about Maeve was an entirely new and unexpected experience for her.
“Hey, Therese,” Scotty said. “What’s Ireland like? I’ve always wanted to go. Dad and I did a golf trip to Scotland a few years ago, but we didn’t make it to Ireland.” His voice sounded wistful.
“It’s green,” she said, laughing at her own inadequate description.
“But not just one shade of green. All the colors in the Crayola box, you know, the big one that the rich kids had. Jade and emerald and celery and seafoam … and the light, it’s sort of soft, like right after a late-afternoon rain in Savannah.
It rains a lot here, but nobody pays much attention to it.
And there are these rolling hills, and meadows, with sheep.
Like, you’re driving down this country road, and this, like, herd of sheep is just standing there, hanging out in the middle of the road. ”
“Don’t sheep travel in flocks?”
“You know what I mean. The flowers, I don’t know the names of most of them, but the roses are amazing, pale pink, and they clamber over fences. Did I just use the word ‘clamber’?”
“I believe so. Maeve the writer must be rubbing off on you.”
Therese peered out at the parking lot. A stray cat slinked through the shadows left by the single light pole.
Where the hell was her sister? Who was the guy she was with?
She tried to remember his name. Something Irish sounding.
Shaun? Declan? Ian? Some rando she’d met at a distillery.
She thumbed over to her text history. Nothing from Maeve.
“I hear the people over there are super friendly,” Scotty was saying.
“Mostly, yeah, except for the sourpuss woman who I think knows more than she’s saying about our portrait of Geraldine,” Therese said.
Just then a Jeep-type vehicle pulled into the parking lot. It was filthy, spattered with mud, and looked like it had been put together from a box of mismatched old car parts.
The driver’s side door opened, and a guy got out. She couldn’t see his face, but he crossed around and opened the passenger door and Maeve hopped out. He put an arm around her shoulder, and they began to walk toward the inn’s entrance.
Therese felt herself exhale slowly.
“Hey, Therese? You still there?” Scotty asked.
“Still here. Gotta go. Let me know if you manage to track down that bank teller. Bye, Scotty.”