Drizzled with Death(78)
Which was exactly what I decided to do.
• • •
I caught up with Felicia just outside the post office. Her arms were full of parcels and I caught one on its way to the pavement. As I helped her load them into the car, I noticed they all were marked with the return address Grow Right Garden Supply Company. What was she doing with something like that at this time of year? The ground had frozen up enough that there was no way she was planting perennials or bulbs outside, and it was a bit early for most people to have placed their seed orders. Besides, there would have been enough seeds in the boxes to plant a good-sized Midwestern commercial farm. Roland and Felicia were enthusiastic gardeners, but they only had just so much room around their place and it was mostly planted with low-maintenance trees, shrubs, and flowering groundcovers. Rather than question her about that, though, I decided my priorities lay elsewhere so I took advantage of her gratitude and started in asking about Lewis Bett’s trust fund.
“He did ask me. It’s been a while, though.”
“Did you say yes?”
“I thought about it long and hard. Lewis was a distant relative and a nice old man. But in the end, I turned him down.”
“Why?”
“We had just bought the bed-and-breakfast, and as Roland put it, if we weren’t close enough family to leave the place to, then why were we close enough to be responsible for it? In the end, I agreed with Roland that it was more responsibility than I wanted to take on.”
“Do you know who did?”
“I suggested Connie. She is related in some sort of shirttail way to the Bett family and she used to do a great job with our books so I knew she had more experience with that sort of thing than I did. I suggested she might be an ideal candidate for the job.” Felicia slammed her lid down on her trunk.
“Do you know if she accepted?”
“She did. When Alanza first got to town, Connie introduced me as another member of the family, and when I asked how they had met, Alanza told me Connie was a trustee of the trust fund.”
“Do you think Lewis Bett is rolling over in his grave after what Alanza did to his property?”
“I wondered about that. When all the trouble with Alanza started, I went to Connie and asked her about what the trust covered and if she could stop Alanza.”
“And?”
“She said if I had wanted to be the one to deal with the trust, I should have said yes when Lewis asked me. She told me her hands were tied and she wasn’t about to discuss the terms of something so private with me.”
“I noticed some coolness between the two of you at the pancake breakfast.”
“I told her after Alanza announced her plans to put in the storage facility that I regretted suggesting her to Lewis, and if that was the way she was going to handle things, I would get someone else to do our books.” That couldn’t have been good news for Connie. Roland’s position as the president of the Chamber of Commerce might cause others to reconsider keeping Connie on as their bookkeeper if he fired her. Roland and Felicia were well liked and well respected. I felt like every time I got one question answered, it brought another three or four to mind. Finding out more about trusts seemed like the next step. Fortunately, I knew just who to ask.
• • •
Whenever Loden wasn’t taking long rambles through the sugar bush or visiting the local library, he could be found in his train room. With a house as large as ours, with as many different people in charge of remodeling over the years, there were always unfortunate outcroppings of bad taste. Loden’s train room took up what the rest of the family considered to be a home unimprovement. Verdant Greene, arguably the looniest of us all, had stuck a leaking little wart of a thing onto the back of the house in 1923. He built the pyramid-shaped structure as a tribute to the discovery of King Tut’s tomb and had covered the entire thing with galvanized tin. It overheated in summer and encouraged frostbite in winter, as he hadn’t wanted anything as utilitarian as windows or a heat source to mar the effect of his creation.
Loden claimed the space as his own almost as soon as he could walk, and rare was the day he was not found in it for at least an hour or two. Personally, I think that might go a long way in explaining why he’s still not married either. I knocked, and upon hearing permission to enter, I tugged open the door and began wriggling through the opening. What met me on the other side of the birth canal of a hallway was not the golden splendor of Tut’s hoard but a wonderment of another sort.
Loden is a model train enthusiast whose dedication to his hobby borders on obsession. What most of the family does with Christmas, he does with trains. He’s handcrafted most of the buildings and the land formations, too. No one can make tiny trees look as realistic as Loden can, and his miniature stone walls are so convincing, I always expect a rock adder to slide out from one of the cracks and hiss at me. In a rare moment of self-revelation, Loden once confided that the hardest part of law school for him was being too busy to work on his models. But for my purposes that day, his law school experience was exactly what I needed. Unfortunately Loden also has a fine set of principles so getting the information from him was going to take a bit of blackmail.