The problem could not wait.
Her half brother was bankrupt and had run the family business into the ground. Ann’s family, the Talbots, had once been among the richest and most influential on Lime Island. Now the Talbot company, a computer software supplier called ScriptSoft, was on the ropes, filing for Chapter Eleven. Her half brother Tim owed money to casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, and Monte Carlo. He could no longer borrow from company funds to pay his debts, since there was nothing left. In desperation, the filing attorney had tracked Ann down in Italy, where she was doing research for a new book, to tell her what was happening.
And now she was in Florida to deal with the crisis.
Ann had wanted nothing to do with the family business. She had not spoken to her father since she’d left, and so when he’d died he had transferred the company to Tim. But Ann still held a large portion of the stock, even though it was now it was almost worthless, and as Tim’s sole sibling she had been consulted on the resolution of the problem.
Ann’s half brother had just been arrested in Miami on federal charges of stock manipulation. He was being prosecuted for misrepresenting the financial status of ScriptSoft by issuing falsified quarterly reports in previous years. As a result of these reports the company stock went up temporarily, allowing Tim to cash in his personal shares at a large profit. But when the company’s true status was later revealed, the reconciliation by the accounting team brought in by the board of directors drove the company into bankruptcy.
Ann knew that Tim had lost the money gambling; he had a long standing habit for which he had gone through rehabilitation several times to no avail. Now, apparently, there wasn’t even enough money left to pay his bail.
Ann put her comb back into her purse and sighed. She loved Tim for their shared childhood, for the memories she had of the shy, lonely little boy who would visit Florida from his mother’s home in New England for the summers. But since his college days she’d known he’d had a gambling habit. She had closed her eyes to his problem, never questioned him about the company or his handling of it, all to obliterate from her mind the painful connection with her father. Now both her parents were dead, Tim was in serious trouble, and she could not ignore the situation any longer.
Ann zipped her purse closed and went out into the busy corridor to claim her car.
* * * *
The breeze coming in through the car window was heavy with salt, sticky against her skin, but Ann left the window open, enjoying the change from November in New York. There the post-Thanksgiving shoppers had thronged the blustery streets and the roads were clogged, as usual, with noisy traffic. Here the streets were empty except for a few pedestrians, senior citizens walking dogs or younger people jogging lazily past the bursting shrubbery. The change in pace was jarring, especially since Ann had not experienced it for so long. But it brought back memories of still, lazy days and breathless starry nights, the endless summers on Lime Island when she was a girl.
But Ann had promised herself she wouldn’t think about that. She turned purposefully down a side street, away from the business district, heading toward the water.
She had some time before her business appointment and she wanted to see her old house again. It had been sold five years earlier when her mother had died, and at the time she had let Tim handle everything and never questioned what he’d done with the money. She hadn’t cared. Now she assumed that the profit from the house had gone into his gambling. She probably should have paid more attention to his dealings, but her grief had been such that she’d wanted nothing to do with the house, the company, or anything else that had issued from her father’s life. Perhaps she had been foolish because she’d always known that Tim was weak, but her emotional survival had dictated that she cut herself off from everything in the past and start fresh. After college she had carved out a career writing historical fiction. She had been content to support herself by living in the fictional past, until the summons from Tim’s lawyer had brought her rudely back to the present.
Ann glided to a stop at the curb and stared up at the house, a white stucco Colonial with dark blue shutters set back from a wide expanse of green lawn, no mean feat to maintain through the blistering heat of a south Florida summer. Her father had installed automatic sprinklers to keep his property a verdant emerald, and one of her most vivid memories was of being awakened in the simmering summer dawns by the hiss and rush of the sprinklers outside her window. Now they were silent. She studied the expertly cultivated lush foliage, the neat brick path leading to the front door, the clapboard boathouse to the left of the main dwelling, the blue waters of the canal running behind the rear patio and leading to the intracoastal waterway. A Miami millionaire owned the Talbot place now and used it only occasionally for a getaway.
Except for the ancient gardener snipping desultorily at a kudzu vine growing along the edge of the crushed stone driveway, it looked like nobody was home.
Ann put her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. She had met Heath in that boathouse, and that meeting had changed her life forever.
She gave the car gas and drove away, recalling how she had lived in that mansion with her father, Henry Talbot, and his second wife, her mother.
Ann had been the daughter of privilege, sent to the best private schools, coming home to the Keys to spend the summers with her half brother Tim, the child of her father’s brief first marriage. She had never given a thought to the servants, the nannies, the summer home in Maine, the condo in the Bahamas, until she had turned her back on it all when she was seventeen. Her life since then had been very different, but she hadn’t missed any of the niceties associated with her father’s success just as she hadn’t missed the man himself. When he’d died, she had attended his funeral in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, but had left without speaking to anybody. When her mother had died a few years later, Ann had brought the body north to bury her in New Jersey with the rest of her family. And except for occasional phone calls and visits from Tim, she had buried the past along with her mother.
If Tim had managed ScriptSoft profitably, she would never have come back home again.
Ann turned a corner and headed back to the business district, crossing the railroad tracks that bisected the island. To the south of them lay Hispaniola, the Cuban-Indian shanty town where Heath had lived when she’d first met him.
She had no idea where he lived now.
Downtown Port Lisbon had changed; there were new high-rises along the main street and a traffic light at the corner by Burdine’s department store. Ann parked in the lot behind the refurbished Acadian-style building that housed the law firm handling Tim’s bankruptcy. She glanced in the rearview mirror to tidy her hair, got out of the car and straightened the tailored jacket of the lightweight wool suit she was wearing.
She felt like she was about to face a firing squad. As she walked toward the entrance, she concentrated on the lunch she was to have with her old friend Amy later that day and forced herself through the lobby and into the elevator that led up to the lawyer’s office.
Harold Caldwell’s secretary ushered Ann right inside as soon as she announced her name. From Caldwell’s grave expression she knew that the situation had not improved since she’d last spoken to him.
“Mr. Caldwell,” Ann said, extending her hand.
“Miss Talbot. Have a seat.”
Ann sat in the leather chair in his comfortable office, glancing out the picture window at the bay below and around the room at the tasteful paintings, standing plants, inlaid oak desk and Oriental rug. Caldwell shuffled a stack of papers and cleared his throat. Ann met the eyes of the lawyer, a well groomed, graying man in his fifties wearing the traditional pin-striped suit and conservative tie.