Chapter 56
Therese walked Arletha Carter out to her car. When she got back to the house, Scotty was packing up his briefcase.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Can you make the bank accept responsibility for letting Mama be bilked out of all her money?”
Scotty Childress was a cautious man. “I think it’s good that Letha has all those emails with her bosses, and that she’s willing to share them with us. Without reading them, I can’t say whether we’d have a case to go after the bank for negligence.”
“Oh.” Therese slumped down into the nearest chair.
“Hey, I’m not saying we give up,” he said.
“I do think our best course of action is for us to have a sit-down with Hoot Wooten. Show him those emails, and point out that your family members have been loyal, lifetime customers at the bank. And then we point out that if we had to go to court, the publicity for the bank would be terrible, especially when they’re looking to get acquired by an out-of-town entity.
Hometown loyalty is always a plus on a balance sheet and three hundred-twenty-five grand is not that big a write-off for them. ”
“I hope you’re right,” Therese said.
Scotty gazed up at the portrait hanging over the fireplace, as though he was noticing it for the first time.
“So this is Lady Geraldine? And you think she’s worth more than a million dollars?”
“That other portrait, which was only a preliminary study, sold for one point two million. But Maeve says there’s no guarantee a second one will sell for that, plus the auction house will charge us a commission.
And I’ve been doing some reading, and we’ll probably have to get the painting cleaned and reframed.
My friend Wyllona, who’s an expert on this stuff, says this frame is definitely not original. ”
“Still, that would be a nice windfall for you and your sister,” he pointed out. “I guess as soon as all this house and painting stuff is settled, you’ll be hitting the road again?”
Therese noted the wistful tone in his voice.
“I don’t exactly know what my plan is,” Therese admitted.
“Call me crazy, but I’ve kind of started thinking of maybe hanging around Savannah.
I’ve been a nomad since I was eighteen years old, always chasing auditions and acting gigs.
Do you know, I’m almost forty years old, and I’ve never owned my own home?
All this talk about my mom, and how proud she was that she paid off this house, all by herself, has me thinking. ”
“About?”
“Don’t laugh,” she warned him. “I want to pick out my own paint colors, go to the hardware store, then put up a ladder and paint. I want to have a cookout in my backyard, maybe even plant a little garden and grow my own tomatoes.”
She looked up again at the portrait of Lady Geraldine.
“You know how I told you about meeting Esme, who is the last of the Rossington line? Well, almost, except for her ne’er-do-well brother.
She lives in what I’d call splendid squalor, in the gardener’s cottage on the family estate—which her father donated to the National Trust, or whatever they call it over there.
She had this little dog, an English cocker, which is somehow different from a regular cocker spaniel.
You never saw a dog with so much personality. And her name—Sinead.”
“Sinead?”
“Duh! Sinead O’Cocker?”
“Okay, that’s funny,” he admitted with a chuckle.
“I think I want a dog! It doesn’t have to be some fancy pedigreed pooch.
I’ll get myself a bike with a basket on the front, and I’ll ride all over town with my dog in the basket, just like in The Wizard of Oz, and people will say, ‘There goes that nutty Dunagin sister.’ And I won’t give a flying fuck what they think. ”
She squeezed his hand.
“Do you like dogs, Scotty? Please tell me you do.”
“Who doesn’t? My family had golden retrievers my whole life. I don’t think one of them would fit in your bike basket, at least not a full-grown one. Hamish, our last golden, died last year, and I haven’t had the heart, or the time, really, to go looking for a new one.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I do remember back in the day, seeing your dad driving around town in that old convertible of his, with the top down and the dog sitting in the passenger seat.”
“The ’68 Mustang,” he said. “Mom wouldn’t ride in it because she said it messed up her hair. It’s mine now.”
“Really? Does it still run?”
“Hell yeah,” he said. “I just rebuilt the engine and put a 390-V8 in. It’s barely street legal.”
Therese did a delighted double take. “I have no idea what any of that means, but it sounds super cool. I didn’t know you were a car guy.”
“Total motor head,” Scotty said. “Dad never got into golf and neither did I. This is our father-son bonding thing.”
“Take me for a spin in it sometime?” she asked.
His face lit up. “How about Sunday? If the weather’s decent we could ride over to Bluffton and get lunch somewhere.”
“It’s a date,” she said.
He glanced at his watch and reached for his briefcase. “I better get back to the office. I’ve got a deposition to take this afternoon, and a conference call after that.”
“I told Letha I would call her tomorrow to arrange to pick up her folder of emails from the bank,” Therese said. “Anything else I can do for our cause?”
“Nope. Once I’ve got those, I’ll email Wooten and formally request a sit-down with him.”
“What if he says no?”
“He won’t,” Scotty said. “I can be very persuasive when I need to be.”
“I believe it. You just talked me into a date.”