Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
A chilly March turned into a blustery April, and then the full heat and sun of Florida welcomed a glorious May.
Jenny used the two months to plant three thousand orange saplings. A hired crew did most of the manual labor, but she and Hemingway worked alongside them for ten hours a day to get the job done. The state of Florida had paid for the saplings and provided a low-interest loan to pay the workers, and soon the grove had saplings in tidy rows stretching as far as her eye could see.
Almost everything was going well. The saplings were shoulder-high and her grove was alive again. She’d been allowed to have every-other-weekend visitation with her nephew. The McAllisters still hovered nearby during the entire visit, but they were beginning to thaw and she had formed a real bond with Sam.
And most thrilling, there had yet to be a credible claimant for the Fabergé egg. Raymond Wakefield’s claim had collapsed when the arbitration judge looked into it. The judge was able to subpoena the bank’s records about the mysterious trust Karl Wakefield set up and funded at the same time he had the egg appraised. The judge learned the identity of the trust’s anonymous beneficiary and ruled there was no connection between the trust and the Fabergé egg. He dismissed Raymond’s claim with prejudice . That meant it couldn’t be reopened, and no other credible claimant had emerged.
They were now seventy-five days into the ninety-day waiting period. She and Hemingway tracked the countdown on a calendar taped to the refrigerator. They gleefully celebrated each time they crossed another day off the calendar. It was amazing, but they were only fifteen days away from being able to claim ownership of that astounding treasure.
Life was back to normal.
Well, mostly normal. She hadn’t seen Wyatt in all that time, and she’d adopted the embarrassing habit of talking to him in her mind. As she went about her day, she silently explained her chores to him, such as her struggles with the irrigation system or how she’d stopped an outbreak of aphids. In her mind, Wyatt always answered. They could carry on friendly conversations for hours. Even friendly arguments, such as when she confessed to getting mad at Hemingway when he went AWOL during the week she set aside for mulching.
Careful, Jenny , imaginary-Wyatt cautioned. Hemingway has been fired from every job he’s ever had.
Typical Wyatt. She explained that Hemingway only slacked off when he really loathed a task, and that he’d held amazing jobs all over the world and what was she? Someone who knew how to grow citrus and nothing else. Then imaginary-Wyatt told her to quit beating herself up and get back to work, but he always chuckled as he said it.
Her daily mental chats with Wyatt were ridiculous, but she missed him and had no intention of stopping their lovely conversations. It could be lonely out on the grove. Loneliness was something she was accustomed to, though she still didn’t like it.
Maybe that was why she’d been so eager to host a group of college students studying agriculture. The eight students from Purdue University arrived on the first of May along with their professor to spend the afternoon learning about the orange business. These future farmers were participating in an immersion class traveling the state of Florida to learn about citrus groves, cattle ranches, and greenhouse farms.
She started at the pumping station to explain her irrigation system, then she led them to the front acres to show them something far more interesting. She hunkered down before a Valencia orange sapling and pointed to a knobby joint a few inches above the soil.
“This is the bud union,” she explained. “I grow for the juice industry, so all my orange saplings are grafted onto lemon rootstock. Lemon trees are the thirstiest of all citrus plants. I want my oranges to be as juicy as possible, so almost all the orange trees you see in Florida are grown on the roots of lemon trees. Orange growers from California laugh at us. They say if you want to eat a Florida orange, you’d better get into a bathtub first because you’ll get drenched when you cut into it.”
“That’s right,” a good-looking student from California said. He had the blond hair and tanned skin of a typical surfer dude, and he’d grown up on a California orange grove. Jenny was already impressed by his keen insight into the differences in their groves.
“Our oranges aren’t as juicy, but they’re a lot prettier,” he said.
“Maybe,” Jenny admitted as she stood, brushing the grit from her hands.
“ Maybe? ” the California kid challenged.
“Yeah, maybe,” she said, barely able to contain her laughter. She’d never confess that California oranges were both prettier and more flavorful, too. Even in Florida everyone ate California oranges. The arid valleys of central California grew oranges with a smooth, sweet interior and beautifully colored orange skin, which was what grocery store shoppers wanted. Florida oranges were small, thin-skinned, and splotchy, but appearance didn’t matter since they went straight to the juicing factory. Nobody could top Florida for great-tasting and inexpensive orange juice.
It was a joy having her grove back. Each day she awoke to gaze at her fields blanketed with healthy orange saplings and thanked God she had the faith to weather the crisis. There would be more challenges in the years ahead, and success wasn’t guaranteed, but farmers had always been the original entrepreneurs. Who else would look at a field of dirt and plan, work, and pray that a marketable crop would show up at the end of the season? These few hours with the rising generation of new farmers invigorated her hope for the future.
At two o’clock, the bus arrived to take the students to the next stop on their tour of the state.
“On our way to Tampa, we’re going to drive past the Wakefield ranch,” the professor said. “Who remembers what the Wakefields are famous for?”
Most people in America would probably point to Senator Wakefield and his thirty-six years in the U.S. Senate, but these were students majoring in Agriculture. A girl with long red braids in the front row supplied the right answer.
“Didn’t one of them start the World Famine Commission?”
“Correct,” the professor said. “Karl Wakefield founded the commission in 1924. Back then they mostly shipped fertilizer and equipment around the world to ease hunger, but now the commission is doing their best to diversify agriculture all over the world.”
The kid from California had plenty to say. “My dad said Karl Wakefield was a communist. That his son probably is, too.”
The professor bristled at the California kid’s tone of mild contempt. “The communists were the good guys during the early part of the twentieth century,” the professor insisted. “The communists cared about the starving peasants in Russia, while our capitalist system let the Dust Bowl and the Depression happen.”
Jenny didn’t necessarily agree with the professor, but she appreciated his vocal defense of the Wakefields.
The professor continued bemoaning the injustice done to Karl Wakefield because of his communist sympathies, although most of the students no longer listened. The Cold War was ancient history for them, about as relevant to their lives as a horse and buggy. They were about halfway through the grove when the girl with red braids noticed a detail Jenny hadn’t discussed.
“Is that part of your irrigation system?” she asked with a nod toward a small concrete pad with pipes and a metal door on it. The remnant of her grandfather’s Cold War paranoia wasn’t something Jenny was proud about.
“No, that’s something else,” she replied dismissively, walking toward the bus and hoping the girl would leave it alone.
Jenny had considered getting rid of the fallout shelter when she replanted the grove, but in the end, she hadn’t had the heart for it. Maybe it was respect for tradition, or a lingering hint of her grandfather’s prepper paranoia, but she’d decided to keep it.
That didn’t mean she wanted to brag about it. She accompanied the group to the bus and waved goodbye as the ag students set off for Tampa to tour a strawberry farm.
It had been a good day.
Strike that . . . it had been a wonderful day. The weather was perfect, her saplings were thriving, and she got to spend a few hours with a bunch of young future farmers. God had provided her with an abundance of blessings if she would only recognize them rather than bemoaning her troubles.
She savored the loamy scent of the soil as she strolled back to the farmhouse, where Hemingway read the newspaper on the porch.
He set the paper aside as she approached. “Kristen from Christie’s called,” he said, and Jenny’s breath froze. If Kristen had good news, Hemingway wouldn’t look so grim.
“And?”
“She left a message on both our phones, asking us to call her back. I could tell by her voice it isn’t good news. We need to call her back.”
Her legs suddenly felt like leaden weights as she trudged up the porch steps. There were only fifteen days left on the ninety-day waiting period to claim the egg, but it didn’t matter how close they came to the expiration of the deadline. The moment a credible claimant came forward, a judge would swoop in and start an arbitration process to determine true ownership.
“Let’s go inside and call her back,” Jenny said.
Jenny set her cell phone on the kitchen counter with the speaker turned on so Hemingway could listen in. It didn’t take long for Kristen to answer.
“Hey, Jenny.” The tone of Kristen’s voice said it all. It was regretful and apologetic, as though she dreaded this phone call, too.
“What’s up?” Jenny asked, her heart thumping against her ribcage. She stared at the ninety-day calendar taped to the refrigerator. The hopeful checkmarks ticking off the days seemed to mock her now.
“I’m afraid someone has come forward with a strong claim on the Fabergé egg,” Kristen said. “All the supporting paperwork he submitted is starting to check out. It’s from a guy in Texas named Clement Cooper. His grandfather started a small-town museum of curiosities in the 1950s and was looking for interesting things to display. Someone approached him with what he thought was a real Fabergé egg. The grandfather paid five hundred dollars for it, but the seller disappeared with his money.”
“Only five hundred dollars?” Jenny asked skeptically.
“Yeah,” Kristen said. “That’s around five thousand in today’s money, but still insanely cheap for a real Fabergé. The guy lost his money and ended up collecting rare cereal boxes for his museum. You know, the original Corn Flakes box, a complete run of Wheaties boxes, that sort of thing. They’ve got a really cute website.”
Jenny met Hemingway’s skeptical gaze. Who would sell a Fabergé egg to a small-town collector of cereal boxes? It didn’t sound credible at all.
“Any insight on the person who tried to sell the egg?”
“Some Russian lady,” Kristen replied. “He thinks she was using a fake name. She claimed she was desperate for money, and that’s why she was willing to sell it so cheap. I know the story sounds strange, but the guy from Texas has a ton of paperwork to back it up. He’s got a handwritten receipt for the egg. After the lady absconded with the egg, the grandfather filed a police report in Bryan, Texas. I’ve looked at the police report. It’s from 1952 and includes a sketch of the egg, and it looks just like the Firebird Egg. One of our lawyers called the Bryan Police Department, and they’ve authenticated the report.”
Jenny bowed her head. If there was a police report from 1952, it was starting to sound real. Bizarre and ridiculous, but not something that could be easily dismissed.
“You think he has a good case?” Jenny asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Kristen said. “Our legal team says it looks like a slam dunk in favor of the Texas guy. They’re going to turn it over to a judge to start the arbitration process.”
She felt so ill she couldn’t even speak, but Hemingway leaned forward. “Hey, Kristen, can you send us a copy of those old police documents?”
“Sure,” Kristen chirped. “I’ll send them over right away. And Jenny . . . I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah, me too,” she said on a shaky breath.
Twenty minutes later, Kristen’s email with several attachments arrived and Jenny printed them out. The police report was photocopied from a reel of microfilm in the police archives of Bryan, Texas. It included the “receipt” for the egg, which was handwritten on a piece of notebook paper. The museum owner wrote the terms of the agreement, then it was signed in a spindly, feminine hand.
The seller’s name was Svetlana Jones, and it was dated February 10, 1952.
Then came the police report where Mr. Cooper handwrote his side of the story:
I put an ad in the newspaper looking to buy interesting artifacts for my history museum. A Russian lady came to my house and offered to sell a jeweled egg of blue enamel with sapphires and diamonds all over it. She said it was a real Fabergé egg and worth a lot. She was scared and nervous. She said she wanted to defect to America and needed the money quick. I felt sorry for her and made the deal so she wouldn’t have to go back to the Soviet Union. I gave her $150 on the spot but needed to wait for the bank to open on Monday to get the rest. We met there and I paid her the rest of the money. She was supposed to go get the egg and promised to bring it to my house, but she never showed up. I don’t know if she snookered me or if she got in trouble with the commies. I’m worried about her.
Mr. Cooper’s complaint concluded with a crude sketch of an egg that looked like the one from her cypress tree.
There was also a clipping from a local newspaper announcing the pending acquisition of a Fabergé egg to appear at the Bryan Cereal Museum. It included a photograph of Clement Cooper, a grinning old man wearing overalls and a plaid shirt.
Hemingway rubbed his hands together while Jenny stared at the documents, every dream of restoring the grove with a huge infusion of cash beginning to crumble. There was no way all these old microfilmed files could have been faked. The old man from the cereal box museum really did buy the egg. He had a receipt, and now his grandson was going to claim it.
The police thought “Svetlana Jones” was either a fake name or she was a con artist. Could using a fake name make this sales agreement invalid? It seemed such a piddly detail, but forty million dollars was riding on the authenticity of this deal.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
Hemingway opened the refrigerator and poured them both a tall glass of iced tea, then sighed as he took a seat beside her. “I think we should get a lawyer,” he said.
“I can’t afford a lawyer.” She couldn’t afford to pay her mortgage, let alone hire a lawyer to gamble on a long-shot hope of overturning the Texas claimant. Why even bother trying? Lawyers didn’t give away advice for free.
But Wyatt might.
She and Wyatt had parted on friendly terms. Would he be willing to help her?
A slow smile curved her mouth. She was about to find out!